An October 23 segment on CBC’s Mainstreet NS with Jeff Douglas program entitled “Palestinian Bazaar to take place in Bedford this Sunday,” saw reporter Alex Guye interview Khalil El Attar regarding a “Palestinian bazaar” event hosted by Canada-Palestine Association Halifax.

The interview’s goal was clearly to discuss the event from a cultural perspective rather than to veer into politics, given that the bazaar was ostensibly marketed to the public as an innocent enough opportunity to “explore a wide range [of] products, services, food, and unique offerings.” And, presumably for this reason, the questions and subject matter chosen for the interview avoided direct discussion about the conflict or the political issues surrounding it. It is understandable that Guye sought to take this approach when covering this type of cultural event.

However, there were two reasons why this approach fell short in this specific case.

Firstly, the guest himself voluntarily chose to use part of his interview to parrot anti-Israel disinformation, which should have necessitated an appropriate response and/or fact checking and context from CBC so as not to let their segment be abused as a platform for misinformation. When El Attar egregiously stated that a “genocide” is taking place, CBC should have pointed out that this characterization does not reflect the facts and is rejected by virtual all mainstream institutions with access to the full data, and of course Israel itself. When El Attar stated that Palestine has a “more than 7,000 years’ heritage,” CBC should have made clear that the ‘Palestine’ in question is not what the public understands the word to mean today, but rather a vague geographic term for the general area, with no Arabic connotation.

Moreover, for the last three thousand years, that land has been home to a contiguous Jewish presence, while the local Muslim cultures that make up ‘Palestinian’ society today are at best a few centuries old (with some exceptions). When he creates the perception that Israel is responsible for the damage caused by the ongoing war, CBC should ensure that listeners are aware that the current war was started by the mass murder spree, hostage taking, and invasion by Hamas, a terrorist organization ruling the Gaza Strip, and that Hamas chose to embed itself amidst the area’s civilian infrastructure and use civilians as human shields — all of which went unmentioned.

When El Attar baselessly claimed that “Hummus and falafel is originally from Palestine,” while this may not be as consequential a point as those involving life and death, it might not have been a bad idea for CBC to mention that this is false and that he is participating in the active and intentional effort to erase the long history of Jewish presence and participation in Middle Eastern regional culture long predating the modern conflict. No one has the right to falsify historical facts or to deny the experiences and rights of other groups and their own histories.

The second issue with CBC’s approach to this story is that scrutiny quickly reveals that this event and its purpose were not as innocent and apolitical as this interview made them seem — and CBC’s team should have put the effort in to realize and acknowledge this in their reporting on the event rather than just providing free advertising for them using the organizer’s preferred official marketing narrative. During the interview, El Attar practically admitted openly that this is not merely an apolitical cultural celebration, but that “the main objective actually for the bazaar is to educate people about the history and heritage of Palestine,” through things like “education about genocide” and “map[s].”

A quick glance at video footage of the event posted to social media by participants (including El Attar himself) shows that the ‘maps’ of ‘Palestine’ on display were actually maps of the entirety of Israel — far from the innocent apolitical tone suggested in the discussion here. Furthermore, the Canada-Palestine Association’s social media group is covered in a wide slew of disturbing posts, including some shared by the group’s own administrator, Fadil Elsheik (who identifies himself online as a Government of Nova Scotia Department of Education employee), peddling everything from support for banned terrorist groups who call openly for ‘death to Canada,’ to baseless ahistorical graphics touting inversions of documented history, to glorification of property destruction, harassment, and murderers, to encouraging disruption of peaceful Jewish community vigil events, to support for BDS and the illegal encampments movement, to denial of Israel’s existence, to Holocaust distortion, to mocking the issue of antisemitism, to antisemitic conspiracy theories about Jewish money and controlofgovernments, to apparent support for the attacks of October 7, 2023.

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Does any of this sound like the behavior of a group who can be trusted to fairly host an “educational” event, or to put together an event without a hidden political agenda? How exactly did CBC determine that this organization’s event was worthy of covering, considering the group’s social media following is minimal and that no mainstream news organization would ever dream of offering coverage to events held by organizations who consistently spoke in a comparably false and incendiary manner about any other issue or ethnic/national group? Why on earth did they decide it was appropriate to interview a man like Khalil El Attar, who spreads verifiably false information and who has repeatedly and publicly glorified dead Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, the architect of one of the largest terrorist attacks in history, as some kind of credible source for an ‘educational’ event? This is the man whose event was offered an uncritical promotional spot on the airwaves of Canada’s national broadcaster?

Hiding an extremist agenda behind a false facade of “culture” and “education” does not automatically grant someone the right to be uncritically viewed as whatever they claim to be. In this case, this event and the undue positive coverage it received from CBC’s Mainstreet Nova Scotia achieved far more towards the goal of perpetuating violence and hatred than towards progress and coexistence.