Canadian news media complicit in Israeli genocide cover-up, says veteran journalist [video]

A veteran journalist says that Canadian coverage of Israel’s ongoing assault on the Gaza Strip, a military campaign widely condemned as a genocide, has revealed a crisis in contemporary journalism.

“We have witnessed the deliberate erasure of context, the dehumanization of Palestinian lives, and the wholesale collapse of journalistic standards in the Canadian corporate media landscape,” Samira Mohyeddin said.

She made the remarks during the NB Media Co-op’s 16th annual keynote speech on Tuesday evening. You can watch her full presentation here:

The award-winning journalist was a producer with CBC’s The Current for nearly a decade, among other roles with the public broadcaster. She resigned from the CBC in November 2023 to launch her own digital journalism company, On the Line Media.

She pointed to an interview that attracted condemnation from critics including the group Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East when it aired in January.

“A CBC host was interviewing a Palestinian-Canadian guest who was speaking about trying to get her family out of Gaza and how her brother was killed in just the first weeks of this genocide,” Mohyeddin recalled.

“And while she was talking to the host, she used the word genocide. She spoke for about four minutes about the loss of her brother and the emptiness and helplessness that she was feeling.”

The host responded, in part, by saying that “we cannot use that word to describe what is happening, it’s before the International Criminal Court.” (In fact, the case against Israel is before the International Court of Justice, Mohyeddin noted.)

Mohyeddin said: “What is happening in Gaza is not a conflict. It is not a war. It is a genocide. And journalism in this country has not only failed to name it but has become complicit in covering it up.”

The 1948 United Nations Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines genocide as crimes committed “with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.”

Omer Bartov — an Israeli-American historian who is considered a leading authority on genocide and the Holocaust — has argued that the Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, and he made that case in a recent interview for CBC Radio, Mohyeddin noted.

“He talks about the systemic destruction of civilian infrastructure. He talks about the bombing of every single school, university, the decimation of the healthcare system, the bombing of hospitals, laying out how Israel meets all the criteria in the genocide convention,” she said.

But she expressed bafflement with the host’s questions. At one point in the interview, he asks “Who is perpetuating a genocide in your mind? What group in particular?”

“The State of Israel,” Bartov replies, in a clip that Mohyeddin played for the audience.

“The state, not Israelis, but the state through its military forces?” the host continues. He later asks Bartov: “How are you seen within the Jewish community because you’ve taken that position?” Mohyeddin called the line of questioning “inane.”

Bartov, she said, “is a preeminent scholar of Holocaust and genocide studies in the world. But instead here, he is reduced to a man whose family may not be inviting him over for dinner.”

She said journalists pull punches in part because of pressure from pro-Israel groups including HonestReporting Canada, which carries out smear campaigns online against journalists that it deems biased.

“We are in a crisis of journalism, not because journalists are failing to file stories, but because the craft itself is being hollowed out by fear, complicity and institutional cowardice,” Mohyeddin said.

Last week, a UN commission of inquiry found that Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza, affirming what many critics have stated over the past two years.

At least 65,419 people have been killed in Israeli attacks on Gaza since October 2023 — among them more than 19,000 children — according to figures from the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza cited by Al Jazeera.

UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese has said that the true death toll is likely 10 times higher. The Hamas-led surprise attacks of Oct. 7, 2023 reportedly killed about 1,200 people in Israel.

‘Zoom bombing’ attack

Tuesday’s event, which took place online via Zoom, was met with a bizarre backlash.

The meeting was hijacked twice in a so-called “zoom bombing” attack, as lewd pornographic video clips and a crudely drawn swastika were displayed over the screen by an unknown person or persons.

At one point, a KKK-style white supremacist anthem played in the background against an image of George Floyd, the African-American man murdered by a white police officer in Minneapolis in 2020. Organizers closed the meeting and regrouped, and Mohyeddin was eventually able to deliver her presentation in full.

She took the interruption in stride, explaining that she’d experienced much worse forms of harassment — like other journalists, notably women of colour, she has experienced death threats and other threats of violence.

Last year, an Iranian restaurant in Toronto that Mohyeddin co-owned was vandalized and ransacked after an independent Ontario MPP posted the name of the business online.

David Gordon Koch is a journalist with the NB Media Co-op. This reporting has been made possible in part by the Government of Canada, administered by the Canadian Association of Community Television Stations and Users (CACTUS).