Even by CBC News’ own admittedly lax editorial standards in reporting on the Hamas-Israel war, a recent report was particularly obscene in how it covered US President Donald Trump’s recent proposal to end the war in the Gaza Strip.

In a February 5 broadcast and accompanying news article entitled: “Trump’s proposal to take over Gaza outrageous, say Palestinians and advocates in Toronto,” by reporter Britnei Bilhete, CBC News interviewed Palestinians and their supporters in Toronto for their reaction to the Trump proposal.

Click below to watch the full segment:

While these individuals are entitled to their views, Bilhete’s coverage was not only lacking in any kind of balance, it platformed extremist individuals with no acknowledgement whatsoever for the public.

Calling the Hamas-Israel war “the war on Gaza,” as if Israel was wantonly attacking Gaza for no discernable reason, Bilhete editorialized, saying Trump’s proposal was “contradicting international law,” citing nothing but apparently her own opinion on the matter.

Bilhete told viewers that: “Local human rights groups say they’re appalled,” before showing a clip from Yara Shoufani of the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM), a group that has publicly celebrated Hamas’ October 7, 2023 massacres of Israeli civilians. How PYM could possibly be characterized as a “human rights” group is absurd, and akin to calling a drug cartel a pharmaceutical company.

The CBC News article did little better, calling PYM a “group that works to keep youth engaged in fighting for freedom and liberation for Palestinian people,” leaving ambiguous that for PYM, “liberation for Palestinian people” means the destruction of Israel.

Predictably for CBC News, not a word was mentioned about Shoufani or PYM’s obscene pro-Hamas rhetoric, instead presenting them as legitimate, mainstream and respected.

Another radical anti-Israel group, Canadians for Justice & Peace in the Middle East (CJPME), an organization with a local Edmonton organizer who is a pro-Hamas Canadian activist, has sanitized Palestinian Islamic terrorism and referred to Israel as “the Zionist entity,” using terminology favoured by Hamas, was given publicity by CBC News. Importantly, a CJPME board member, Dalia El Farra, was recently interviewed on CP24, where she denied Hamas is a terrorist organization and defended Hamas’s so-called “resistance”.

Michael Bueckert, CJPME’s interim president (who is standing in following the resignation of the group’s founding president, who alleged racism against non-Palestinians forced his ouster), was quoted in both the video report saying that “Israeli and US officials are openly plotting genocide,” and in the written article, saying that Trump’s proposal showed “genocidal intent.”

Not only did CBC News once again fail to show the public the extent of CJPME’s radicalism, Bilhete made no effort to share that Trump’s proposal – whether you’re for or against it – encouraged voluntary and temporary relocation of Gazans to more safe locales and does not constitute genocide in any way.

The term genocide, though it has become a favoured term among anti-Israel activists in recent years, does not mean policies that one does not like; it refers specifically to the attempted destruction of a people, and was coined specifically to refer to the Nazi extermination of European Jewry, because no word in the English lexicon could appropriately describe the crime against the Jewish population of Europe.

Today, however, radical anti-Israel activists – often the very ones who downplay and even rationalize Hamas’ murderous killing of Israeli civilians – frequently and falsely accuse Israel of this false “genocide” libel, and CBC News has incessantly given these dangerous accusations, and their disseminators, an extensive, and uncritical, platform.