For nearly 14 months, anti-Israel rallies have descended into orgies of violence and explicit hate speech against Jews. Demonstrations have invaded predominantly Jewish neighbourhoods and outside synagogues, blocked roads, attacked an historically Jewish hospital – all tolerated by law enforcement and various levels of government.
For just as long, countless news media reports have ignored those incidents, and have breathlessly reported on every tiny pro-Palestinian protest, no matter how marginal – all while incomprehensibly ignoring far larger (and peaceful) pro-Israel events.
On Friday, November 22, another such demonstration took place in downtown Montreal, and scenes were reminiscent of a war zone, preceded by a violent student protest the day before.
But readers of a November 21 article for CBC News entitled: “Students hold pro-Palestinian strikes and protest across Quebec,” by Montreal-based reporter Verity Stevenson, would have been shielded from all that information.
Stevenson’s article told readers that “student protesters held a rally calling for Quebec post-secondary institutions to divest from companies with ties to Israel,” and that the group, numbering some “couple hundred student protesters,” were “holding a rally…”
Stevenson also quoted their rhymes, reporting that “They sang, “One: We are the students! Two: We won’t be silenced! Three: Stop the bombing now, now, now!” and “In our millions, in our millions, we are all Palestinians!’”
But for all the play-by-play reporting on the rally, Stevenson failed to mention that the mob of demonstrators went from campus to campus in Montreal, smashing, breaking and forcing their way onto university property. Security guards were assaulted and a door was heavily damaged by the mob, trying to force their way into a lecture hall.
In one particularly chilling instance, a pro-Palestinian protester was captured on film screaming “the final solution is coming your way, the final solution. You know what the final solution is?” The final solution refers to the Nazi Holocaust of European Jewry.
It is incredulous that Stevenson’s report failed to offer even the most basic picture of what really happened at the November 21 demonstration in Montreal, and instead presented it as simply a public show of support for the Palestinians, when it was in fact a violent hate mob.
The CBC News article quoted three anti-Israel student activists, as well as one of the organizations behind the protests, yet zero Jewish or Israeli voices were offered anywhere in the article, effectively erasing them.
Even in a city which has seen an endless array of hateful pro-Palestinian demonstrations since October 7, 2023, the November 21 campus protests in Montreal are particularly grotesque. But for some inexplicable reason, Stevenson decided not only to ignore all Jewish voices entirely from her report, but also to give an indefensibly whitewashed revisionist history to readers. Her article is so unrepresentative of reality that it may as well have been fiction, and not an actual news report.
For any news media outlet, that would be considered substandard reporting, but for CBC News, Canada’s publicly-funded broadcaster, that has simply become the de rigueur practicesince October 7, 2023.
