Could a supposed expert in international law shamelessly misrepresent a legal document during a radio interview actually be called an expert?

Such a scenario is not a hypothetical, because that’s exactly what happened during the July 30 episode of Mainstreet Nova Scotia, a CBC radio program guest hosted by Preston Mulligan.

The 30-minute interview with longtime anti-Israel agitator Michael Lynk, a former United Nations (UN) Special Rapporteur for the human rights situation in the Palestinian territories, featured the guest making a number of unsubstantiated claims, but arguably one stands alone in showing utter contempt for accuracy.

Listen to the full interview below:

Referring to the provisional judgment by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague in January in a cause brought by South Africa accusing Israel of “genocide” in Gaza, Lynk told his host that the court “said that South Africa had made out at that time a plausible case that Israel has been committing genocide.”

Except the court never said any such thing.

The court, which did not demand that Israel stop its counter-terrorism operations against Hamas in Gaza, never claimed that accusations of genocide were plausible. In fact, in April, Joan Donoghue, the now-retired president of the ICJ when the world court released its decision, told a BBC interviewer that “the court did not decide, and this something where I’m correcting what’s often said by the media, that the claim of genocide was plausible.”

This is truly incredible. Lynk, a professor emeritus of law at Western University and a former United Nations official, either did not read the ICJ judgment or simply misunderstood it, showing him to be either incompetent or dishonest, or at the very least, simply lazily regurgitating the anti-Israel propaganda he heard elsewhere, without bothering to verify it.

This falsified statement, which was not challenged by Mulligan, was not the only such absurd claim from Lynk during the interview.

Lynk presented the scandalous claim that “Israel has been using starvation as a weapon in war,” a demonstrable falsehood.

Prior to October 7, some 70 food trucks a day were entering Gaza, a number that is now averaging around 150 per day, and that is in addition to the large amount of food that is being produced within Gaza. In fact, there is more than enough food entering Gaza to feed the population with sufficient calories every single day.

However, despite Lynk’s inversion of the truth, Mulligan did not challenge him on this point.

But Lynk did more than simply show a callous disinterest for the facts; he also sought to explain, if not rationalize, Hamas’ genocidal massacres of October 7, saying they were a natural consequence to Israel’s non-existent occupation of Gaza, and paraphrasing United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, in saying that “yes, we must condemn October 7, but we cannot understand October 7 in a vacuum. That there is a history…that lead to the atrocities on that day, and the atrocities that are happening since.”

It is true that Hamas’ murders did not happen in a vacuum, but that context is not Israel’s presence (or lack thereof) in Gaza before October 7. The backstory is Hamas’ genocidal ideology, rooted in its extremist Islamic worldview, that sees itself as engaging in holy war against Israel, and against Jews at large.

Consequently, Israel’s presence in territories it acquired in self-defence during the 1967 Six Day war are wholly irrelevant to Hamas’ goals, which will not be satisfied until – at the very least – Israel is violently destroyed.

Lynk, claiming to quote from one of the ICJ judges, then made an eyebrow-raising comment by claiming that “under international law, the population of an occupied territory does not owe any allegiance to the occupying power and is not precluded from using force in accordance with international law on resisting that occupation, and I think that’s what we’re seeing the results of.”

This is beyond egregious. Beyond totally ignoring how Hamas deliberately targeted innocent non-combatants, as well as engaging in torture, rape and kidnapping, which are not in any way protected under international law, Lynk effectively ran interference for Hamas, positing them as people who simply responded to being “occupied.”

Once again, Mulligan did not push back on his guest, even when he attempted to frame Hamas terrorists as somehow reasonable people who evidently felt compelled to massacre innocents because Israel instituted a blockade on Gaza – precisely to keep weapons from Hamas.

Lynk is entitled to his views, as ignorant and hateful as they may be, but in no way does it justify Mulligan’s lack of aggressive challenging of his guest’s fanatical statements.