Despite the popular saying that history is written by the victors, when it comes to the Middle East, precisely the opposite appears to be taking place.

In 1948, when newly-reborn Israel declared its independence, it was subsequently attacked on all sides by Arab neighbours, who unsuccessfully sought to annihilate the tiny country.

Yet remarkably, in the decades since, the narrative – uncritically repeated in universities and by news media outlets across much of Canada – has attempted to flip history on its head.

Scandalously, Broadview, the official newspaper of the United Church of Canada, has embraced that ahistorical disinformation in an April 17 article, “There’s a Jewish community in Iran?”

Author Arfa Rana, a “Pakistani-Canadian journalist based in Kitchener-Waterloo, Ont.,” according to her biography,  relied on a single interviewee in her article: Yakov Rabkin, a retired professor from the Université de Montréal with a history of false and incendiary comments.

Rana, paraphrasing Rabkin, wrote that “many Jews in Muslim majority countries did not initially see themselves as separate from their non-Jewish neighbours,” then quoting him as saying that “there was very little participation of Jews from elsewhere… because they didn’t feel that they were different from other Moroccans, Iraqis or Iranians.”

For a former history professor, it is inconceivable that Rabkin could articulate a perspective so detached from reality, depicting Jews in Muslim-majority countries as living happily without problems.

In truth, Jews across the Islamic world suffered widespread persecution, ranging from state laws ensuring that Jewish communities never forgot that they were to be treated as second-class citizens, to open demonstrations of murderous violence.

From Morocco to Libya, Tunisia to Iraq, as well as inside the Arab city of Hebron, there were multiple instances of massacres against Jews by their former neighbours, all while officials largely stepped aside. This persecution helps shed light as to why virtually all Jews living in Muslim countries fled to Israel following its declaration of independence.

Their stories were not just erased by Broadview Magazine’s Arfa Rana and her cherry-picked ‘expert,’ Yakov Rabkin – their stories were rewritten completely in a thinly-veiled attempt to portray Muslim countries as havens for Jews, and presumably also as progressive and tolerant.

But that’s not all. Rabkin, an ardent anti-Zionist activist, is also quoted as saying that “Zionism is a European nationalist movement.”

This is extraordinarily misleading almost to the point of being false. While Zionism as a modern-day movement began in Europe, it is simply a manifestation of an ancient Jewish desire – that the Jewish People should have a right to self-determination in their ancestral and historic home, the land of Israel. The Hebrew Bible is replete with references to Jerusalem and observant Jews pray towards Jerusalem, and pray for the land three times daily.

Yet to have Broadview Magazine – an outlet supposedly grounded by religious faith – rely on a marginal voice as the sole interviewee, purportedly offering a Jewish perspective all while twisting Jewish history and belief, no less, is egregious and downright absurd.

Unfortunately, this is far from the first time that Broadview has advertised its anti-Israel, facts-optional coverage of the Middle East, funded in part thanks to receiving more than $360,000 in federal taxpayer grants in 2025 alone.