When Israel accused UNRWA, the disgraced United Nations agency, of ties with Palestinian terrorist groups, countless news media outlets gave little credence to such statements, even when a Hamas command post was found directly underneath the group’s Gaza headquarters.
But almost from the moment that the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, an Israeli-backed aid group, was founded, the story changed immediately, with outlets like CBC giving almost nonstop coverage to some extraordinary claims, typically without almost any challenge whatsoever.
That two-faced journalism was on full display on the July 8 segment of Front Burner, a CBC podcast which has shown extreme anti-Israel bias and a near-total aversion to journalistic balance when Israel is involved.
Listen to the full segment below:
In a 29-minute segment, host Jayme Poisson spoke with Meron Rapoport, a former reporter with the far-left Israeli Ha’aretz newspaper who has previously accused Jerusalem of ethnic cleansing on Poisson’s program in December 2024.
The interview offered little in the way of variety from other CBC broadcasts, with Rapoport condemning the aid deliveries and calling the project “monstrous.” But rather than challenging his statements, Poisson joined the pile-on, referring to “reports” of “indiscriminate violence” at aid distribution sites, repeating claims from anti-Israel groups of deaths at those locations, conveniently ignoring that much of the evidence of those allegations come from a single Hamas official, Hamoud Basel.
Elsewhere, Poisson, apparently forgetting that she was the host and not just another anti-Israel guest, spread the highly controversial claim that “Gaza is one of the worst hunger crises in the world,” despite literally millions of meals entering the territory daily. One can only wonder if Poisson is ignorant of such facts, or is simply hostile to any detail that conflicts with her pre-existing narrative. In any case, her comments presented her opinion as a fact.
However, the most odious part of the conversation took place when Rapoport accused the GHF of “preparing them (Palestinians) for some kind of concentration camp,” a point he repeated three times in the program.
Despite using a term that, at least in the ears of many listeners, would certainly hearken back to Nazi Germany’s use of both concentration and death camps during World War Two and the Holocaust, no challenge whatsoever was offered by Poisson in response.
Rapoport defended his use of the term, saying “I don’t have another word for that,” sharing reports that Palestinians would be moved to a safe city close to the Egyptian border. At best, concentration camps were labour and prison camps, where people could not leave. At worst, they were places where innocent people were murdered on an industrial scale. Either way, there is simply no comparison between the actions of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation and claims of a “concentration camp.”
To judge this journalistic failure by Poisson in choosing to allow Rapoport’s extremist statements to stand unchallenged at its most favourable would be to call it gross incompetence and neglect. At worst, it was complicity in spreading hateful disinformation, given that according to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, the most commonly-used definition of its kind, comparing Israel to Nazi Germany would be a textbook example of such Jew hatred.
Rapoport’s claims of a “concentration camp” also conflict with the statements he made just moments earlier alleging Israel was trying to expel Palestinians from Gaza, seemingly unable to decide whether Israel wants to imprison Palestinians or expel them. This bizarre and amateurish inconsistency was also missed by Poisson.
With host Jayme Poisson, the CBC podcast Front Burner has been a non-stop regurgitator of anti-Israel disinformation, all while adamantly refusing to provide anything resembling balance to listeners.
