On the February 26 episode of the CBC radio program As It Happens, co-hosts Nil Köksal and Chris Howden featured a segment with Adnan Naghnaghiye, described as “the general manager of the Freedom Theatre, a community-based theatre and cultural centre in the Jenin refugee camp.”

Click below to listen to the full segment:

But the CBC hosts didn’t mention that the Freedom Theatre is not a benign cultural centre. Its co-founder was Zakaria Zubeidi, recently released due to the hostage/prisoner exchange deal between Israel and Hamas. He was formerly the leader of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, a proscribed terrorist group, in charge of deadly attacks against Israel during the Second Intifada.

Its other co-founder, Juliano Mer-Khamis, was quoted on the Freedom Theatre website as saying, “we join, by all means, the Palestinian struggle for liberation, which is our liberation struggle. We are not healers. We are not good Christians. We are freedom fighters.”

The “Palestinian struggle for liberation” is not a fight for rights or equality, but one which seeks the destruction of Israel, as detailed in the Palestinian Liberation Organization’s 1968 Palestinian National Charter, which states that “the partition of Palestine in 1947 and the establishment of the state of Israel are entirely illegal, regardless of the passage of time, because they were contrary to the will of the Palestinian people and to their natural right in their homeland.”

In July, 2023, Mustafa Sheta, another staff member of the Freedom Theater, was interviewed on As It Happens, where he whitewashed Palestinian terrorism to no challenge from his hosts.

During the most recent interview, Köksal asked a leading question about Sheta, allegedly held by Israel under administrative detention, “Why was he detained, what is administrative detention?” Naghnaghiye responded, “Nothing, they are saying all the time is (in a) secret file, they are not giving the excuse why they are doing that.”

What went unsaid is that administrative detention is a legal anti-terror procedure many countries use, including the United Kingdom, the United States, and Australia. The other side of Israel’s borders contains multiple terror organizations that wish to destroy the Jewish state. Israel therefore uses administrative detention to protect itself.

Similarly, Köksal said that Israel’s defense minister, “Minister Katz also oversaw the deployment of Israeli tanks to the West Bank for the first time since 2002, marking a significant escalation.”

Calling it an ‘escalation’ negated Israel’s perspective that the Arab town of Jenin has been a hotbed of terrorist activity against Israel for years. Not only that, but calling Jenin a ‘refugee camp’ paints an incorrect picture.

In the words of Joe Truzman, senior research analyst and editor at Foundation for Defense of Democracy’s Long War Journal, “The residents of Jenin are not refugees but long-term inhabitants of a Palestinian neighborhood.”

Köksal did later mention the three empty buses that “exploded in Tel Aviv on Thursday. The Palestinian militant group the Tulkarm brigade… released a statement saying ‘revenge for the Martyrs will not be forgotten as long as the Occupier sits on our land.’”

This was another opportunity to clarify that when Palestinian terrorists talk about “our land,” they refer to the entirety of Israel. Adding a pro-Israel voice to the interview would add information and credibility to CBC’s reporting.

As It Happens has a history of largely platforming anti-Israel voices, and failing to hold them accountable. Regrettably, their February 26 episode was no different.