In a May 13 segment on the CBC podcast Front Burner entitled: “Trump sidelines Israel, Gaza expansion looms,” host Jayme Poisson interviewed Haaretz journalist Meron Rappaport, but made several critical errors in their analysis of the latest war developments.

It was a discussion about the current state of the war, including topics like U.S.-Israel relations, regional diplomacy and politics, criticism of the current Israeli government’s policy choices, and claims about the humanitarian situation for civilians in the Gaza Strip.

Listen to the full segment below:

These are all contentious political issues on which it’s fully legitimate and expected for political talk shows and their guests to take a wide variety of positions.

However, problems arose with the way certain aspects were approached.

Right off the bat, listeners were told by Poisson that Israel’s potential evacuation of the Gazan population to a safe zone for aid distribution, away from the combat zones with heavy Hamas presence, “would gravely violate international law, and … amount to the annexation of Gaza” according to “rights groups.”

Despite the guest correctly acknowledging that the Israeli government’s current war strategy “was not published in a detailed way, so we don’t know exactly” what its goals or plans involve — yet that didn’t stop them from spending the majority of this segment analyzing and speculating over hypothetical scenarios, “ultimate goal[s],” and assuming the worst about Israel’s behavior and intentions, without meaningfully presenting the other possibilities or considerations they’d be contending with.

The segment took the common anti-Israel rhetoric about “the whole territory [being] at risk of starvation” at face value without engaging in the specifics and facts to clarify what is in fact happening and what is just political conjecture.

For virtually the entire duration of the war, people have been making extreme claims about the alleged risk of famine in the Gaza Strip — yet none of which have come to fruition thus far. For a very recent example, a UN official earlier in May baselessly claimed that 14,000 Gazan babies would starve to death within 48 hours — which, despite being repeated by many media figures, turned out to be totally false.

So, while some may wish to criticize the political decisions around the transfer of aid from the United Nations and non-governmental organizations to a new organization, or the way the transition was handled, or even the motives of certain extreme politicians, starting from a premise that Israel actively or purposely lets people starve and failing to have any proper discussion about the nature of the issues and circumstances at hand merely perpetuates these inflammatory false narratives and is highly irresponsible for journalists to be contributing to such disinformation.

Rappaport called the humanitarian situation in Gaza “something that we have not seen… since World War Two.” Is this an attempt to compare Israel’s behaviour to Nazi Germany, as it would sound based on Rappaport’s moralistic views on the war? It’s obvious that there have been many major humanitarian catastrophes since World War II and many deadlier wars than this one, so it’s unclear why this comparison would be appropriate as opposed to an ahistorical inversion of Jewish historical pain.

But aside from that, this comparison is worth taking a closer look at. If by Rappaport’s logic World War Two is a comparable situation to the dynamic of this war, as a defensive war in response to the invasion and war crimes of a totalitarian regime, wouldn’t that make Hamas the Nazis in this scenario — and, if so, is Rappaport saying the allies were wrong to aggressively bomb and damage infrastructure in German cities in order to dismantle the Nazi machine and prevent them from enslaving humanity? Unless Rappaport believes that the West’s preservation of basic freedom was somehow wrong, this comparison actually accurately defends Israel’s current actions when applied objectively.

There were various other missteps in the segment, such as the host citing Hamas casualty figures and calling the source “Gazan health authorities” without disclosing the Hamas connection, and matter-of-factly blaming Israel for having “broken” the January ceasefire without any balanced analysis of what took place there.

Finally, in Rappaport’s focusing the discussion solely on extreme right wing politicians in Israel in a conspiratorial fashion, saying things like “the Israeli government states very clearly that the aim of all this, or the operation in Gaza and in the West Bank, is to not just prevent[ing] the establishment of Palestinian state, but to get it off the table… definitively,” the segment failed to adequately present the mainstream Israeli point of view — namely the need to rescue the hostages still being held by Palestinian terrorists, and prevent Hamas from threatening the population’s safety in the future — thereby achieving nothing but reaffirming and spreading negative feelings towards Israel rather than fostering understanding of the situation.

Front Burner and Jayme Poisson must do a better job of presenting varied and dissenting viewpoints without simply amplifying faulty and misleading claims, as the program has repeatedly done over the last 20 months.