The Electronic Intifada 27 January 2025
Justin Trudeau has refused to hold Israel accountable for genocide.
Euc / RopiAs a former reporter at the government-funded Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and a current master’s student, I have heard from both academics and journalists that the situation in Gaza does not merit the word “genocide.” Instead, the catastrophe Israelis have inflicted on Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank is deflected, portraying Palestinians as the perpetrators, rather than the victims, of violence.
The media’s power to obscure Israel’s crimes against humanity and shift the blame onto Palestinians sets a dangerous precedent over the reality of the Gaza genocide. When the media conceal injustices, they erode urgency for accountability from government institutions.
In May 2024, an article by Molly Schumann (a pseudonym) for The Breach website exposed CBC’s double standards on Palestine.
The article describes how when Schumann worked for CBC, an unnamed colleague went to management with accusations of anti-Semitism against her. Schumann had acknowledged the influence pro-Israel lobby groups like HonestReporting Canada have on the coverage of Gaza through the targeted harassment of journalists.
This creates fear particularly among young, Arab and Muslim reporters, keen on keeping their jobs.
HonestReporting is known for monitoring and filing complaints against journalists advocating for anti-Zionist voices in the newsroom. In fact, the organization filed at least 50,000 letters since 7 October 2023 to news outlets across Canada to ensure Israel’s supporters could “control the narrative” and bragged about orchestrating the dismissal of Canadian Palestinian journalists Zahraa Al-Akhrass from Global News and Yara Jamal from CTV Atlantic.
In the section titled “Glossary of Problematic Mideast Terms” on its website, HonestReporting urges that media avoid using terms associated with settler-colonialism.
Much of the pro-Israel language recommended by HonestReporting also appears in CBC broadcasts.
The corporation, for instance, has a policy of not referring to Palestine as a country. That closely resembles “advice” from HonestReporting.
HonestReporting has labeled Palestinian civilians, including journalists, killed by Israel as supporters of terrorism.
The dehumanization of Palestinians is, again, reiterated by CBC. It has used terms like “murderous” and “slaughter” to describe resistance activities by Hamas but does not apply such language to Israel’s violence.
In fact, the CBC’s Corrections and Clarifications page is a testimony to its own editorial biases. One recent entry concerns how a CBC News Network presenter told a guest who spoke of the genocide in Gaza that “we cannot use that word to describe what is happening.”
While CBC claims that it “does not prohibit certain words in our reporting,” there is a pattern of how it echoes Israel’s talking points. That pattern was evident before the genocidal war against Gaza began.In July 2023, for example, the CBC program Canada Tonight with Dwight Drummond reported on the funerals of “militants” killed by Israel. Only after receiving a complaint, did CBC issue a clarification that the three people buried in the West Bank city of Jenin were actually children.
Denial, deflection and doublethink
The denial and deflection of CBC mirrors the policies of other Canadian institutions.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called Canada a “tremendous supporter of the international rules-based order” in January 2024. Yet he refused to support the case brought against Israel by South Africa in the International Court of Justice (ICJ).
That case was brought precisely because Israel was violating the Genocide Convention and thereby making a mockery of the international rules-based order.
Then, in September, Canada abstained from a UN resolution on an ICJ ruling from a few months earlier which found that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza is unlawful.
Canada acknowledged the “catastrophic humanitarian situation in Gaza” but then opposed Israel being held responsible.
Canada’s expectations of peace for Palestinians embodies doublethink, what George Orwell described in 1984 as the act of holding two contradictory beliefs simultaneously while accepting both as true, in order to avoid the reality of the Gaza genocide.
Perhaps Canada cowers away from labeling the Gaza genocide as a genocide because it would force Canadians to acknowledge their own ugly history of settler-colonialism.
In 2008, the Canadian government issued an apology to Indigenous peoples for the abuse suffered by Indigenous children and their families in settler-run residential schools. Stephen Harper, then Canada’s prime minister, admitted that the objective of residential schools was to “kill the Indian in the child,” based on the idea that Indigenous culture and beliefs were “inferior” and “unequal.”
Despite how the Truth and Reconciliation Commission labeled Canada’s dark history as cultural genocide, the government still does not officially recognize the residential schools system as genocidal.
If Canadian institutions are too cowardly to recognize their own colonial history, how can they ever acknowledge the situation in Gaza?
Malcolm X, a Black revolutionary in America’s civil rights movement, said, “If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.”
Prolonged injustices are no coincidence. Colonial atrocities are neutralized, justified, even encouraged by institutions until resistance overpowers the fabricated lies of the oppressors and both truth and justice prevail.
One day, the Gaza genocide will be remembered as one of the bloodiest chapters of human suffering – an enduring indictment of media complicity, the failure of international institutions, and, above all, the collusion of the privileged in power, silently egging on Palestinian suffering.
Arfa Rana is an independent journalist and a master’s student of international public policy at Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada.
