CBC’s coverage of the Middle East continues to make a mockery of claims by the broadcaster’s president Marie-Phillippe Bouchard that it values a diversity of voices on its programs.

Instead, interview after interview demonstrate an overt agenda-driven reporting, and in an October 28 segment for The Signal, a CBC radio program based in Newfoundland, featured hardline anti-Israel activist Michael Lynk being treated with kid gloves as he continually downplayed the threat of Palestinian terrorism, and castigated Israel with half-truths.

In the segment, covering a recent advisory opinion from the United Nations’ International Court of Justice (ICJ), the host told listeners that “to look more closely” at the issue, they consulted with Lynk, who the program failed to mention has previously condemned Israel as a “covetous alien power,” and received a medal from the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).

Click below to listen to the segment:

But his anti-Israel activism went unmentioned and was presented as a credible commentator instead.

Lynk downplayed connections between Hamas and UNRWA, the disgraced United Nations agency, citing an internal UN investigation, and said it found “no evidence” of wrongdoing, mentioning only that nine employees were found to have potential ties to Palestinian terrorism.

What he conspicuously failed to mention – to which the host failed to note – real, widespread evidence, including a Hamas command centre found directly underneath UNRWA’s Gaza headquarters, to which the agency implausibly pleaded ignorance.

Lynk ignored that Israel maintained 2,135 UNRWA employees were members with either Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), and Jerusalem provided the names of 100 UNRWA employees who were operatives with Palestinian terrorist groups.

During the interview, Lynk described the population in Gaza as being “desperate” for food, telling the host that “Gaza has been declared in August to be a zone of famine and extreme starvation by the UN.”

Yet again, there is much more to the story that Lynk glossed over. The claims of “famine” and “starvation” cited by Lynk were maintained thanks to a radical redefinition of what constitutes “famine” by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), and when definitions change, so does the outcome.

Even according to the claims of “famine” and “starvation,” there should have been thousands of deaths as a result. But those deaths never actually happened. Instead, there were scenes of bustling markets, grocery stores and restaurants inside Gaza, not exactly images of starvation.

As the interview progressed, Lynk dropped all pretense of subtlety, demanding that elected officials show “political resolve” and punish Israel for its apparent wrongdoing, saying that “what we need now is international will” in order to “see justice.”

But if whitewashing the terrorist connections of a major United Nations agency – funded in part by Canadian tax dollars – counts for “justice,” then the term has lost all meaning.

Michael Lynk is entitled to his views, as hardline anti-Israel as they may be. But he is not entitled to his own facts, and his selective cherry-picking of data represents a fundamental misrepresentation of the truth, and the failure of the CBC host to press him on this matter and the choice to have him on under the guise of being an unbiased observer, is yet more evidence of CBC’s overt bias.