Sixteen months into the Gaza holocaust the dominant Canadian media remains deeply complicit. They recently berated a grieving Palestinian, hung up on someone saying Canadians have a right to protest genocide and labelled Palestinians subhuman.
Last week Ben Mulroney hung up on a caller who said Canadians have a right to protest genocide. On the Ben Mulroney Show on Toronto’s 640 News the son of the former prime minister argued that there is no right to protest in Canada and compared accusations of Israeli genocide to the flat earth theory. In the real world, Amnesty International, the United Nations Human Rights Council and a stream of other experts have all concluded Israel is committing genocide.
In a slightly less embarrassing episode, CBC News presenter Natasha Fatah stopped an interview to say “we cannot use that word to describe what is happening” after a Palestinian Canadian woman employed the word “genocide” to describe Israel’s actions in Gaza. Fatah said the word genocide couldn’t be used because the International Criminal Court (she meant International Court of Justice), which found a plausible genocide in its preliminary ruling, had yet to deliver its final verdict on whether Israel is committing genocide.
In response Selma Tobah opined, “Absolutely insane that the anchor took time out of the interview to reprimand the interviewee, someone who has lost family in Gaza, for using the word ‘genocide’. CBC has lost the plot.”
Amidst the backlash against the public broadcaster, Shenaz Kermalli showed a photo of a poster in the Toronto CBC building about an upcoming “antisemitism” training for media workers put on by Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Centre. As CBC itself has reported, FSWC trainings are part of enforcing Zionist thinking.
In the Toronto Star last week longtime writer Martin Regg Cohn wrote an apologia for genocide. The highly contradictory piece admits “Hamas was fenced in from all sides” before breaking out of the cage, but then two lines later claims “that Gaza before Oct. 7 was not under occupation.” In fact, in July the International Court of Justice found that Gaza was occupied. For Cohn, Hamas “gambled with the lives of the Palestinian people — knowing it could not protect them from the inevitable counterattack — and lost.” In other words, don’t blame the perpetrator, it’s Hamas’s fault that Israel killed tens of thousands of women and children and obliterated most everything in Gaza.
Anti-Palestinian thinking pervades official media circles. On X long time senior producer for TV Ontario’s The Agenda Wodek Szemberg said Palestinians weren’t human. In response to Tyler Levithian posting Sunday that “Palestinians aren’t human beings in Trudeau’s eyes. No relief expressed for Palestinian hostages released from Israel’s torture dungeons? No relief for the 2.3 million Palestinians terrorized beyond comprehension for 470 days straight in the world’s first live-streamed genocide?” Szemberg posted, “When they start acting like human beings, they will be treated accordingly.”
The pro-Israel bias is demonstrated by the disinterest in a scandal engulfing a purported media critic. Recently, Samira Mohyeddin confirmed that Honest Reporting Canada’s assistant director, Robert Walker, was charged with 17 counts of mischief for spray-painting anti-Palestinian graffiti in Toronto. Yet all the journalists and media outlets who’ve been targeted by Honest Reporting Canada’s flak campaigns have ignored the story (Imagine the media reaction if an executive at Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East or National Council of Canadian Muslims was caught doing something similar targeting Israelis).
In protest of the media’s complicity in genocide, last Monday activists occupied the Globe and Mail’s offices in Toronto to denounce the paper’s Gaza coverage. They produced a mini-Globe look alike paper with the main headline “The Globe and Mail’s Bloodstained Record”. They also drew attention to the 200 journalists killed in Gaza and launched a petition challenging the paper’s coverage.
In but one example of its role in enabling Israeli crimes, the Globe editorial board published “Canada must stand by Israel” on October 10, 2023. Amidst a bevy of genocidal rhetoric from Israeli officials, the official editorial stated, “Israel has the right to defend itself, even if the exercise of that right results in collateral civilian casualties.”
So far, Israel has killed at least 100,000. We’re waiting for the Globe and Mail editorial congratulating the extreme right wing, Jewish supremacist Netanyahu government for its restraint.
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