The Breach is an independent media outlet that over the past year, received tens of thousands of dollars in federal government funding, wage subsidies from the Quebec provincial government, and major support from Inspirit Foundation, whose CEO, Sadia Zaman, has expressed extremist anti-Israel rhetoric.

Moreover, donations of $500 or more are also tax-deductible, meaning that they are effectively subsidized by the federal government, meaning the public at large.

So, what exactly is the Canadian taxpayer getting for its investment in The Breach?

In one article on October 25th, 2023 by Jeremy Appel, the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA) was targeted as a “Lobby group pushes Canada to conflate anti-Zionism with antisemitism.” The article juxtaposed a conference hosted by CIJA, “Antisemitism: Face It, Fight It” with “Israeli bombs [raining] down on the impoverished and densely populated Gaza Strip.”

Appel characterized the event as racist toward Palestinians and a denial of Israel’s supposed occupation of the Gaza Strip and Judea & Samaria (“West Bank”). The article also quoted Independent Jewish Voices (IJV), a group that defended Hamas’ right to murder Israelis which protested the event, taking particular issue with Kate Dalgleish, CIJA’s director of public affairs, describing one of the conference’s priorities as defining anti-Zionism as antisemitism.

The denial of Zionism, the movement whereby Jews could exercise self-determination in their historic homeland, is considered anti-Jewish discrimination according to the IHRA definition of antisemitism, widely accepted among Jewish communities.

The article described CIJA’s proposal for the conference as lacking evidence and examples, and utilized IJV’s open letter against the conference to explain to readers how “it is wrong to conflate anti-Zionism with antisemitism.” The letter claimed that Zionism as “a political doctrine” supposedly calls for the creation of a Jewish state that “privileges the rights of Jews over non-Jews, in historic Palestine.”

The vast majority of Canadian Jews are self-described Zionists. It is not a political doctrine, and in attempting to misrepresent Zionism, Appel is playing fast and loose with the truth.

Appel took issue with the characterization by CIJA of antisemitism on the far-right of the political spectrum being as much of a threat as antisemitism on the far-left.

This attempt to conflate antisemitism with the far-right is a clear attempt to downplay the violent, pro-terrorism and often pan-Arab antisemitism of the far-left.

In another video report by The Breach, Martin Lukacs prodded at former Prime Minister Paul Martin’s claim that “Israel’s values are Canada’s values” with what has now become a familiar, tired response: “They are indeed—the values of settler colonial states. Both cleared the land of Indigenous peoples to make room for settlers.”

In the video, “Why Canada is one of Israel’s most extreme defenders,” Lukacs criticized Canada for supposedly working in partnership with the United States since Israel’s founding to control oil in the Middle East “and keep Arab nationalism in check.”

The attack on the Jewish People’s right to self-determination, which has become a staple of The Breach’s publications, is clearly not derived from a desire to critique nationalism as a whole, as it remains incredibly silent on the Islamic Republic of Iran’s overtly colonialist machinations throughout the Middle East, for example.

But The Breach is not really self-aware. In one article by Emma Paling on the CBC’s reporting of deaths related to the Israel-Hamas war, “CBC says killing of Palestinians doesn’t merit terms ‘murderous,’ ‘brutal’,” she complained that reporting by CBC News was skewed toward Israel because the murders by Hamas were referred to as “vicious” & “brutal” “massacres” and “slaughter,” but the deaths of Gazans were “intensive” and “punishing.”

Paling reported that CBC News posited that this is because the deaths of Gazans are done “remotely,” which is an admittedly crass way of saying that Israel is not a terrorist entity that intentionally tortures and murders (and kidnaps!) innocent civilians for no reason other than to cause death and destruction. But alas, Paling took issue with anything less than equating the terrorist group (not that Hamas is described as a terrorist group in any capacity) to Israel.

But in other articles published in The Breach, the outlet conveyed its own bias with diction. One could reasonably see that this choice of language serves to dehumanize Israelis and Jews and downplay the atrocities committed by Hamas. The repeated referral to October 7 as “Israel’s assault on Gaza in October” (of course, “genocidal” is often sprinkled in) or just simply an elusive “October 7” committed by “militants” that has led to an “invasion of Gaza (…) turned into a one-sided blood bath” paints a particular picture of not just the events of October 7, 2023 and onward, but of who is allowed to be a victim and who is not: Gazans are victims, Israel is the evil perpetrator.

Tokenization should also not be surprising. The same “Israeli Holocaust scholar,” Raz Segal, is referenced to “prove” the war against Hamas is genocide. IJV, which has explicitly supported the right of Hamas to kill Israelis, and Jews Say No To Genocide are the singular type of Jewish voice given any platform on The Breach, as they conform with the worldview that paints Jews and Israelis as settler colonialist in a genocidal apartheid state. And of course, it wouldn’t be true tokenization without Naomi Klein, whose speech at a Jews Say No to Genocide event simply had to be published by The Breach for its audience to read.

These are just a few of The Breach’s radical anti-Israel reports over the last year, part of a much larger trend. Given the outlet’s radical fixation on demonizing the Jewish People’s right to self-determination, it is unclear how The Breach could possibly be eligible for both provincial and federal financial support and a matter we have relayed to relevant stakeholders with the Province of Quebec and Government of Canada.