No surprises from CBC

Editorial

In a piece with veteran CBC radio journalist Michael Enright last Sunday, a Palestinian businessman was given close to half an hour on national radio to emit unqualified, biased and defamatory assertions about Israel. Sam Bahour, an American-Palestinian businessperson who is the largest private employer in Palestine, was granted free air time on Canada's public national broadcaster to reiterate an exhausted mantra of blame.

As is usually the case, every cause and effect, from the security barrier to the emerging Palestinian civil war, was laid at the feet of Israel. As usual, Palestinians and their leadership were attributed with no responsibility for their condition and, as usual, the overriding implication was that Israeli policies are disproportionate, unnecessary and cavalier.

With no qualification or challenge from Enright (or, indeed, any producer, management staff or person of conscience in the organization), Bahour was allowed to declare that Israel's objective is "to force Palestinians out of Palestine," a statement belied by every shred of historical reality or fairness.

Added Bahour: "We have taken a beating from the Israeli authorities while the world community looked on." Looked on? Really? The "Palestine question" has been, arguably, the single most dominant foreign policy issue of our era, eclipsing (through canny PR) far more severe affronts to humanity in Rwanda, Darfur, Iraq (pre- and postwar), Iran and countless other flashpoints.

The atrocious Bahour interview is part of an ongoing pathology within the CBC. For instance, the broadcaster has routinely purveyed the fable that Israel's security barrier is an over-reaction to a violent problem that would evaporate if Israel simply gave in to terror.

Recently, in the obligatory "Christmas in Bethlehem" story that the CBC and other media resurrect each December, the national broadcaster went further. Ignoring the real danger in Bethlehem – armed jihadists and their routinized terror of Christian minorities – the CBC report went so far as to explicitly misrepresent the barrier, deracinating it from history and reality to depict it as a manifestation of perverted Israeli sadism.

"The barrier is meant to keep Palestinians in," said CBC television's Paul Workman in the 2005 version of the story, "but the people of Bethlehem are afraid that it will simply keep tourists out."

Of course, reality is that the barrier exists not to keep Palestinians in, but to keep terrorists out. That a professional journalist, particularly one who represents Canada's public broadcaster, could misrepresent Israel's desperate last-ditch attempt to prevent the killing and maiming of its civilians as an unprovoked and gratuitous imprisonment of Palestinians is disgraceful. That he could get away with it deserves a formal investigation.

Depictions like Workman's represent the racist mythology that Israel's construction of a security apparatus is based on no legitimate need. It is premised on a grievous historical ignorance that assumes Israel has nothing to fear and should let down its guard come what may.

"Israel says it [the security barrier] was built to keep out suicide bombers, but Palestinians say it simply cuts off the city," reported the CBC in 2006. In this case, at least, both statements are true. The barrier does cut off some Palestinian cities and that is one of many tragic realities in this conflict. As a result, Bethlehem may indeed feel like "a big prison for its citizens," as its mayor says in the CBC's 2006 Christmas coverage. However, it is also true that the barrier has reduced successful murder attacks on Israeli civilians by almost 100 per cent – a quantifiable truth the CBC and most other media seem congenitally incapable of acknowledging or reporting.

It sometimes seems petty to parse the nuance of individual news stories to conclude a predetermination against one side or another. But the CBC's distortions are alarming, most especially because they are so easily swallowed by a great number of Canadians.

The reaction, or lack thereof, to reporting like this indicates that a significant proportion of Canadians, fed on distorted "news" and the ferocious rhetoric of the anti-Israel movement, are amenable to accepting as possible a depiction of Israelis as selfish, arbitrarily spiteful, cruel, violent, sadistic and uncaring. And here is where the inevitable line is crossed: anti-Zionism is not perforce anti-Semitism, because it is not hatred of Jews that motivates these criticisms. But it is entwined with anti-Semitism in the sense that the most egregious and outlandish accusations against Israel are accepted unblinkingly by thousands if not millions of Canadians who, for whatever unconscious reasons and to whatever extent, are willing to unquestioningly accept at face value the most atrocious assertions about Israeli motivations. In the CBC versions, unlike medieval anti-Semitism, Jews do not actually have horns, but judging by the broadcaster's coverage, they might as well.

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