In the May 7 episode of the CBC podcast Ideas, the show tackled the topic of “The Long History of Humans as Shields in War.”

Listen to the full episode below:

In this 53-minute episode hosted by CBC journalist Nahlah Ayed, the main interviewee, University of Edinburgh lecturer Nicola Perugini, gave a rundown of the history of the “human shield” — how it was first used, and how it developed alongside the idea of a “civilian,” particularly in the wake of World War II and later on, during the Vietnam War era. The definition of the term, or perhaps its constraints, were not clearly defined, and as Perugini explained it, the accusation of “human shield” can be weaponized to justify the killing of civilians among which non-state actors and enemy forces are embedded.

But Perugini shifted gears when it came to the recent Hamas-Israel war, and what Ayed referred to as one of the “epicentres of this discourse (…) the Gaza Strip.” The conversation turned to the matter of who dominates the conversation and who holds more power; unsurprisingly, in the case of the Gaza Strip, Israel alone took centerstage.

Perugini explained it with a dichotomy: in the Russia-Ukraine war, no one believes Russia when they accuse Ukraine of using human shields and target a medical facility, but with Gaza, because “the victims, the populations which are attacked, often indiscriminately, are brown populations,” nobody believes their cries for help.

Ayed did not probe into this preposterous accusation, though any responsible journalist would have done just that. The first part of this dichotomy is perhaps the most interesting, because it relies on context. Hamas, a terrorist organization intent on destroying the State of Israel, infiltrated Israeli territory and indiscriminately attacked, raped, murdered, and kidnapped the Israeli population. Hamas rockets have continued to do much of the same thing, with help from other Islamic Republic of Iran backed terror proxies in the region. And yes, quite simply, Hamas utilizes its civilian population to maximize casualties and evade targeting, and this is not something that can be downplayed or denied, nor dismissed in the name of Israel being the “power.” Israel is defending its territory and citizens against the terrorist groups that surround it, not launching an abstract “war on terror” abroad in a distant land; simply, it is fighting for its existence.

The second part of the dichotomy is comparing Russia and Israel in its accusations of human shielding by their enemies — that the reason why Israel’s claims are uncritically accepted (they are decidedly not) is because its enemies are “brown” (and Israelis are supposedly not).

Toward the end of the episode, Perugini focused on the war against Hamas in Gaza. His framing starts with the claim that Hamas uses human shields, rather than its unprecedented decision to infiltrate Israeli territory, indiscriminately attack and murder civilians and engage in hostage-taking — simply, that Hamas started the war and Israel was required to respond. Instead, Perugini described Gaza as a helpless, besieged civilian enclave with no real military capacity, and that because of this “context…human shielding becomes the justification for the attackers.” Of course, no acknowledgement was afforded to Hamas’ capabilities or actions, let alone the infrastructure that it intentionally embeds within civilian areas; in fact, Perugini even claimed, “there are no clear spaces in the battlefield which can be used to defend yourself, unless you embedded yourself very deeply with the civilian population,” effectively excusing Hamas’ practices.

Altogether, Palestinians in Gaza, and particularly Hamas, are portrayed as trapped, powerless and therefore absolved of any accountability in an unprecedented “abyss,” and Perugini wrote off any accountability for any actor other than Israel because Palestinians are victims of Israel’s tactic of “mobilizing the human shielding accusation,” rather than actual victims of human shielding at the hands of Hamas. No doubt, all of this makes it really easy to portray Israel as an aggressor that cries “human shields” rather than a country waging a war against a hostile terrorist group that seeks out its demise.

This portrayal is aided by the inclusion of an interview during the episode with Dr. Mimi Syed, an American doctor whose two medical missions to Gaza have been amplified across news networks. Dr. Syed described the “apocalyptic” situation in Gaza, where most of their “patients were children, so over 70 percent are women and children.” So alongside Perugini’s lopsided portrayal of the Israel-Hamas war was a portrayal of the humanitarian situation in a hospital in Gaza, and then nothing else. No other context was provided in the near-hour long episode on human shields, focused on Gaza, not an Israeli voice or perspective, nor expertise that would challenge or complete the full picture of Israel and Gaza. No platform for a former Israeli hostage, for example, that was held in a Gazan hospital.

How did this interview end? Perugini concluded by saying that “what’s going on in Gaza could shape the practices of war and the conduct of war in the next decades…the very category of civilians is abolished when an entire population, an entire group is targeted as a group.” And Ayed, indicating that the story is now complete, the picture is now clear, concluding: “you’ve been listening to an episode about the history of human shielding.”

Is this surprising? Nahlah Ayed, the host of Ideas, has a history of anti-Israel bias, which HonestReporting Canada has long documented. It goes back nearly two decades. The question remains: at what point will the CBC acknowledge that its journalist is providing half-truths, at best, and blatant misinformation about Israel and the Middle East, at worst?