When does reporting veer into open activism? CBC News appears eager to test those boundaries, with consistent reports over the last two years platforming attempts by some Gazans to come to Canada, which have almost universally ignored the widespread radicalism inside Gaza.

The latest such piece, a January 13 article from Reporter/Editor Aishah Ashraf, offers a blatantly one-sided retelling of the same story told repeatedly by Canada’s publicly-funded broadcaster: how some Gazan students want to come to Canada, but are facing obstacles.

Ashraf’s article, “Palestinian students accepted into Canadian universities remain ‘trapped’ in Gaza by visa delays,” profiles 26-year-old Gazan Meera Falyouna, accepted into the University of Regina, but unable to come because of the difficulty in meeting fingerprint and photograph requirements as a result of the war.

The piece quotes the group ‘Palestinian Students and Scholars at Risk (PSSAR),’ a hardline anti-Israel activist group, as well as Falyouna’s supervisor, Eman Almehdawe.

However, nowhere in the article was there any acknowledgement of the need for such security screenings, required for all such newcomers to Canada. Nor did Ashraf tell readers that Gaza is among the most radicalized places on Earth, where large numbers of people support Islamic terrorism and Hamas’ October 7, 2023 massacres.

Instead, the story was portrayed yet again by CBC News as a simplistic, heart-wrenching narrative, with virtually no context.

Aishah Ashraf is no stranger to spreading anti-Israel disinformation. Prior to her working at CBC News, she was an intern at TVO, where she produced a report in 2024 on the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) and its efforts in “overcoming Palestine’s struggles through faith.” Ashraf was previously a volunteer for ISNA in 2022.

In a LinkedIn post following the TVO broadcast Ashraf made clear that her report was not simply a human-interest story, sharing that she wanted to tell the story of “Palestine and the atrocities they have been enduring,” amidst what she falsely called a “genocide.”

Additionally, as a host for ‘Muslim Network TV,’ in a January 2025 report, Ashraf matter-of-factly referred to the nonexistent “genocide in Gaza,” and referred to Israeli hostages in Gaza as “prisoners,” implying they were prisoners of war, and not innocent people kidnapped by a terrorist group.

It is inconceivable that none of Ashraf’s past anti-Israel activism was ever discovered by CBC News, and yet she has been permitted to write a story on the very topic that she has previously expressed such hardline opinions, with predictable results.

The same day, CBC Radio One in Regina produced a report from Ashraf on the same story, with the reporter telling listeners that “advocates are urging the Canadian government to step in” and offer an exemption for Gazans so they can avoid biometric screening for student visas. No quote or acknowledgement about the potential security threat posed by Gazans was mentioned.

Click below to listen to the segment:

And in a third such broadcast, “26-year-old engineering student stuck in Gaza instead of studying in Regina,” Ashraf reported on Falyouna, but bizarrely didn’t share her last name “for safety concerns,” though she was named in two other reports. The only individuals shown were Falyouna’s supervisor and Nada El-Falou of the radical group PSSAR, who claimed that two Gazan students waiting to come to Canada had been killed in an Israeli airstrike. She was presumably referring to Sally and Dalia Ghazi Ibaid, whose family claimed she was killed by Israel, but to which there has been no evidence offered.

Click below to watch the segment:

Aishah Ashraf’s January 13 reports for CBC News were one-sided erasures of the extreme Islamic radicalism that exists in much of Gaza, and instead presented readers, listeners and viewers with a sanitized picture that bears little resemblance to the actual reality facing Canada. Such content represents a complete failure to adhere to CBC’s own stated journalistic principles.

Given the broadcaster’s repeated ideological anti-Israel agenda over the last two years, and Aishah Ashraf’s documented history of hardline anti-Israel positions, her reports are deeply problematic, but hardly surprising.