CBC and Its Normalization of Genocide
Dear Brodie Fenlon and CBC journalists,
We have been told that Israel has killed more than 15,000 children in Gaza. But that figure does not square with reality. Jonathan Cook reports that “the death toll has been stuck at the same figure for weeks because most official institutions are wrecked … Save the Children says another 21,000 children are missing: dead under rubble, lost to their families, buried in unmarked graves, or kidnapped by Israeli troops and held in torture centres…” The Lancet’s recent study puts the death count at 186,000 – a dizzying figure, to put it mildly. And judging by Israel’s recent massacres, the death toll continues to rise at a precipitous rate.
Jonathan Cook describes Israel’s mass slaughter in Gaza as monumental savagery. But even this descriptor (and I am confident that Cook would agree) fails to capture the enormity of Israel’s genocidal cruelty, because that cruelty is sui generis, unprecedented in its depravity, aberrant in the extreme. We have no vocabulary or nomenclature with which to label it, with which to delimit its unbridled irrationality.
Doubtless, the US has played its crucial part in enabling Israel’s abhorrent deeds, in allowing Gallant’s vitriolic outbursts and Netanyahu’s genocidal rhetoric to go unchallenged. The US has collaborated in Israel’s every effort to thwart a ceasefire. With its own geopolitical interests and huge profits accruing through the military industrial complex, the US has openly abetted the genocide. It has bequeathed a cornucopia of lethal gifts, causing the Zionist machine to spin out of control and run amok for nine bloody months.
With this support, the West, or the Global North, if you prefer, has allowed this “monumental savagery” to become entirely normalized. And the consequence of this normalization is the death of empathy. As Michael Harris has it in the Hill Times, citing the famous Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt, “when empathy dies, barbarity is never far behind.” Normalization deadens empathy and lack of empathy spells barbarism.
Normalizing Savagery
One could be forgiven for concluding that CBC management and CBC reporters have become immune to the human savagery that Israel brazenly commits in Gaza; one could be forgiven for concluding that the CBC is even content to justify or turn a blind eye to Israel’s “biblical vengeance.” For many, like myself, it is difficult not to draw these conclusions. Being on the receiving end, we can readily discern CBC’s partisan stance, its close relationship with, and support of, the pro-Israel community and its exclusive preoccupation with Jewish “feelings of unsafety” – never mind that thousands of innocent Palestinians are being bludgeoned and slaughtered daily by Israel’s killing machine. Somehow, the CBC remains impervious to Palestinian pain.
Tell-Tale Signs of Bias
Those of us who are versed in media studies and political rhetoric listen carefully to CBC sound bites and we can hear the biases that streak through CBC’s messaging. We are conscious of tone and framing; we discern the formulaic ways in which news stories start and end. We understand the semiotics of sound effects, of pacing, and verbal inflection, as well as the resonances of CBC diction that shape the politics of each news item.
Take for example the repeated association of Hamas with words such as “atrocity,” “terrorist organization” and “condemnation.” Through such language, the CBC echoes mainstream media assumptions that Hamas is beyond the pale, utterly diabolical. By contrast, when Israel perpetrates the most heinous and hair-raising crimes in Gaza, no derogatory or judgmental adjective is invoked. For nine months, Palestinian lives have been decimated relentlessly; children have been starved, dismembered and burnt alive, thanks to Israel’s vicious military campaign. Yet the CBC has done little to expose these abominations. If there are massacres to report, the coverage is virtually phlegmatic in tone.
Meanwhile, intense outrage is reserved for discussions of October 7th or local incidents of anti-Semitism – the substance of which remains utterly opaque. If there has been a significant rise in anti-Semitic incidents over the past months, these episodes pale beside the unceasing horrors in Palestine. Yet, the CBC prefers to change the channel, look away from the genocide, and amplify instead the dangers of anti-Semitism and feelings of Zionist “insecurity.” Note, however, that not one Jew in Canada has been tortured, starved, or killed by agents of the Canadian state. At the same time, state-sanctioned anti-Palestinian racism is everywhere in our country, but rarely (if ever) does the CBC comment on it. Palestinians and their feelings are treated as collateral damage, detritus to be swept aside into the rubbish heap of oblivion.
Disavowal and De-contextualization
CBC listeners do not require a degree in journalism to know that what you say and how you say it are indices of your pro-Israel position. The evidence is clear: Over the past months, your news reporters and commentators have consistently refused to situate Israel’s dark deeds within a historical context. That the study of history is essential to the analysis of current events is a platitude; it requires no explanation. Yet the CBC has kept the backstory of October 7th largely under wraps – as if it were blasphemous to acknowledge Israel’s 76 years of anti-Palestinian racism. On the contrary, the truth is inconvenient, but it must be told.
October 7th cannot be understood without reference to the Nakba of 1948, and without reference to the ideological foundations of Zionism, where key political actors such as David Ben-Gurion (first head of state) and Yossi Weitz (the first head of the Jewish National Fund) spoke openly about coercive “transfer” – a euphemism for ethnic cleansing. Zionism (like all other settler colonialisms) purported to be a quest for salvation and self-determination; but from its inception, it rested on an impulse of elimination – an elimination that would eventually translate into genocide. “Transfer” would give room (some might say, Lebensraum) for a dominant Jewish demographic, for de-Arabizing Palestine in myriad ways – both brutally and insidiously. See Israel’s efforts to erase Arabic place names; see its racist education (Nurit Peled El-Hanan); see its countless massacres (from Deir Yassin to the current genocide in Gaza), its mass incarceration of innocent civilians, its torture of children, its unceasing demolition of Palestinian homes, and much more. October 7th may have caught Israel by surprise (and there are umpteen theories about whether it actually did), but the fact is that for Netanyahu and his political cronies, it was an opportunity to be exploited for further ethnic cleansing, for reinforcing the Zionist project.
Calling a Spade a Spade
If the CBC has refused to confront Israel’s sordid history, it has also failed to portray Israel for what it is today: a genocidal state, run by a modern-day Macbeth, whose narcissism drives him to scheme one massacre after another (in Rafah, Khan Younis, Al-Mawasi…) in order to keep his career intact. Each massacre, each war crime that he orders outstrips the previous one in depravity. But while his dastardly crimes have intensified over nine long months, the CBC remains tight-lipped, refusing to describe the gory catastrophe on the ground, taking its journalistic cues from the Israeli military’s double-speak or from other Israeli or pro-Israeli sources. If there are some fleeting mentions of massacres, the CBC suppresses the specifics of Israel’s sadistic brutality while allowing some lone reporters to cite numbers of dead against half-discernible cries of anguish – voices of bereaved Palestinians wailing in the wake of the latest air strike.
By contrast, the undeterred Palestinian press on the ground has shown the world some of Israel’s most chilling atrocities, and “atrocities” is the fitting term here. These horrors are beyond the most lurid scenes of horror that cinema has ever conjured: e.g., people crushed and buried alive by Israeli bulldozers, thousands of children with multiple amputated limbs, survivors carrying human remains of their beloved in shopping bags, military assaults on starving people (see the flour massacre), fire bombing of refugees in Rafah’s camps, and so much more. The CBC has remained taciturn, never disclosing even a fraction of what the world needs to know: a barbarism more repugnant than the workings of a psychopathic imagination, the kind that inspired Israel’s atrocity propaganda of October 8th and beyond.
Debunking the Myths
When will the CBC start dismantling those sensationalist falsehoods that it spread (along with the entire Western press) early on in the war? Even Israeli journalism (Haaretz) is now, belatedly, bringing the truth to light. Meanwhile, the true and undaunted pioneers of this vital disclosure have been the alternative media outlets and channels that risked being slandered as anti-Semitic. These media channels brought us meticulous investigative journalism, dispelling many of Israel’s nefarious myths – and, this, as early as November 2023. The CBC needs to catch up. It needs to correct the West’s misinformation campaign, a propaganda machine to which it has fallen prey. Indeed, it behooves the CBC to show the following:
- That while we may never know the exact figures, it has become clear that Israel was responsible for many civilian deaths on October 7th given the Hannibal Directive, an Israeli military policy that says: “Kill your own people rather than allow them to become hostages to be used as bargaining power for the adversary.” See the Electronic Intifada and the Grayzone for a deconstruction of the atrocity propaganda that began on October 8th.
- That every sensationalist accusation against Hamas is a Zionist confession (or a Freudian projection). Canadians need to know that no Israeli babies were beheaded on October 7th. See Al Jazeera’s documentary about that fateful day. By contrast, countless Palestinian children have been beheaded by Israel’s air strikes. Many more are now handicapped, with multiple limbs amputated. And because of Israel’s siege on Gaza, these children have had their limbs cut off without anaesthetic. Take that in for a minute.
- That no pregnant Israeli woman had her fetus brutally removed with a knife. But this did happen to a Palestinian woman during the Sabra and Shatilla massacre of 1982, a horror show instigated and abetted by Ariel Sharon. Fabrications about October 7th draw inspiration from Israel’s history of outrages.
- That there is no evidence that Hamas committed systematic rapes: on this, see once more Al Jazeera’s documentary. Occasional rapes may have occurred, but they were not part of official Hamas policy. By contrast, Israel practices systematic raping of its Palestinian prisoners (many of whom are effectively just innocent hostages, held under administrative detention: i.e., without charge.) The New York Times recently reported on the most horrific instances of hideous sodomy where prisoners died as a result of their agony.
- That Hamas is neither ISIS, nor Al Qaeda. Nor is it a death cult, as Pierre Poilievre has called it. Rather it is a political movement with a military wing. (21:48-25:07) Hamas has used terror (just as its occupier has), but its attacks do not extend beyond Israel and they are not intended against Jews per se but against Israel’s 76-year occupation. Hamas is not a terrorist organization as such (9:52 – 10:07). There is a difference between deploying terror in an anti-colonial struggle and being an inherently terrorist organization. Considered squarely and objectively, the expression “death cult” is a more appropriate descriptor of the Israeli state given its 9-month genocidal campaign against Palestinians. It has killed almost 200,000 persons in less than a year.
Tolerating a Genocidal Regime
The CBC’s reporting displays a troubling tolerance of Israel’s atrocities, a normalization of crimes committed daily, mercilessly, and with impunity, against all Palestinians. (Such tolerance, it should be understood, betrays a deep-seated anti-Palestinian racism.) Meanwhile, when Palestinians resist, Israel cries out to the world that it is the Ur victim of a most apocalyptic genocide. Those who dare to take arms against Israel’s brutal occupation are denounced as “bloody terrorists” and CBC joins in the strident chorus of condemnation. Never mind that Israel brazenly commits a genocide under the aegis of a leader who is determined to extend the war on Palestinians forever, and scuttle every peace negotiation on the table.
Facts on the ground often speak for themselves, and, this, contrary to the contrivances of Western narratives: e.g., Hamas’s recent acceptance of an Israeli-US-made peace deal looks politically astute and morally superior beside the Israeli prime minister’s ceaseless warmongering. The CBC ought to concede that this leader is dragging his own country down a doom-filled vortex and key figures within his military establishment have even said as much. If anyone is threatening Jewish Israelis, it is this unhinged autocrat.
The Media’s Influence
CBC management and journalists: You realize that your words, narratives, and persistent pro-Israel stance play a part in facilitating and normalizing the worst crime against humanity: the holocaust of an indigenous people. Does this complicity not irk you? Should listeners conclude that you are indifferent to the agony of innocent Palestinians, since you have done little to contest Israel’s narrative, and little, if anything, to dispel its falsehoods?
On the domestic front, it is obvious to any thoughtful listener that, over the past two years (if not more), the CBC has framed its journalism to actively favour a Conservative victory in the next election. It is equally obvious that with the ascendancy of Pierre Poilievre, an even more pro-Israel leadership will prevail. Canada’s support for Israel’s crimes will become manifestly unapologetic. Indifference to the suffering of innocent Palestinians will become ever normalized and barbarism will accrue.
Many are scratching their heads and wondering why you are abetting the return of right-wing extremism, led by a figure who has fraternized with Neo-Nazi convoy elements while threatening to defund the CBC. Shades of Stephen Harper’s odious regime come to mind. Are you not fazed by this prospect?
It is a mistake to believe that you can appease this far-right-element (one embodied by the pro-Israel lobby, with Poilievre at the helm) and still come out unscathed. I am no fan of Sir Winston Churchill, but he made a good point when he said: “An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last.”
Do yourselves a favour: stop feeding the crocodile and save your souls. •
Sincerely,
Michelle Weinroth
