On January 20, shortly after the inauguration of Donald Trump as the new president of the United States, Tesla founder Elon Musk, speaking to a crowd of supporters, made a gesture with his arm that was interpreted by some critics as resembling a Nazi salute.

That incident was the impetus for a 29-minute discussion on Front Burner on January 24, a CBC radio program / podcast entitled: “Elon Musk, Nazi accusations, and the ADL.” But rather than using the topic as a launching pad for a discussion on the state of antisemitism, or, with International Holocaust Remembrance Day approaching on January 27, about the Nazi murder of European Jews, instead the conversation was focused on the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a venerated human rights organization which defended Musk against accusations that he had made a Nazi salute.

Click to listen to the full segment below:

Host Jayme Poisson spoke with guest Mari Cohen, a reporter for the magazine Jewish Currents, a publication which boasts that it covers issues including “antisemitism and its weaponization.” The conversation surrounded criticisms of the ADL from its detractors, with Cohen telling Poisson that the group has been “criticizing people who are opposing Israel’s war as antisemitic,” and that following Hamas’ October 7, 2023 massacres in Israel, the ADL has “started including basically anti-Israel rallies in their reports. So, they’ve actually increased the statistics in that way.”

Cohen rattled off a litany of complaints made against ADL, giving the distinct impression that the group seeks to embellish incidents of antisemitism in order to “put out a press release” and raise funds, using anti-Israel rallies as a basis.

While those complaints may indeed be leveled against ADL, little to no effort was made to offer anything resembling a balanced discussion. Neither Cohen nor Poisson detailed why groups like the ADL would see it as troublesome that anti-Jewish rhetoric emanates in anti-Israel rallies. But had they done so, they might have noted the glorification of terrorism, open calls for violence, and indeed, widespread incidents of actual violence and harassment that have come to characterize anti-Israel demonstrations.

But none of that made it to the conversation; instead, the exclusive theme and narrative was about how one prominent Jewish organization is using its power and influence to seek to suppress pro-Palestinian activism.

Beyond the total lack of any balance offered to listeners, the very framing of allegations about Musk’s alleged Nazi sympathies somehow became a hit piece on a respected Jewish human rights organization, when it could have led to a far more relevant discussion on the explosion of anti-Jewish hatred across North America.

While Poisson did acknowledge in passing a handful of violent anti-Jewish hate crimes in Canada, they were overwhelmed by the detailed, almost forensic discussion of the ADL, depicting the group in largely nefarious terms, and in turn, framing anti-Israel activists as hapless victims of an overarching Jewish organization.

While that theme is hardly exclusive in the Canadian news media, it is particularly troubling to see it given such broad prominence in a discussion that could have easily, and indeed should have been, about something far more important in Canadian society: the explosion of antisemitism in Canada.