CBC radio host Amanda Pfeffer hosts a program, Ontario Today, featuring discussion on various topics of the day.

In May, she spent hours discussing anti-Israel campus occupations, featuring only anti-Israel guests, a discussion which she prefaced with a “disclosure” that her father is Jewish, implying that would impact her reporting.

On October 8, she was back with another episode entitled: “The Israel-Hamas War: A year on, who are you thinking about?” She welcomed as guests Jon Allen, former Canadian ambassador to Israel, and Raja Khouri, former commissioner with the Ontario Human Rights Commissioner and founding president of the Canadian-Arab Institute. Both men are board members of Rozana, an organization purporting to build barriers between Israelis and Palestinians.

Click below to listen to the full episode:

The overwhelming number of callers (save for one), plus Khouri, expressed hardline anti-Israel views, while Allen was more measured, expressing sympathy both for Palestinians and Israelis, though he did complain during the segment that “the vast majority of Jews are still stuck in October 7… unfortunately, most of them are incapable of holding in their hearts the destruction of life and what’s going on in Gaza.” He has also previously blamed Israel’s non-existent “occupation” of Gaza for Hamas’ genocidal attacks.

In her opening, Pfeffer framed the conflict by saying, “We are talking in Gaza of some 41,000 people who… have died… 91,000 people who have been injured, and about 2.5 million residents of Gaza have been displaced. Of course, for the State of Israel 1,200 people were killed on that day, and we’ve been talking about the hostages as well that were taken on that day, it was the worst massacre in Israel’s history.”

Pfeffer did not include Hamas’s genocidal aims towards Israel in her framing – despite them being clearly stated in their charter. In so doing, she falsely presented an equivalence between Hamas’ mass murders and Israel’s counter-terrorism efforts.

Presenting mostly numerics offers a sympathetic ear for accusations of Israel’s alleged “disproportionality”. She also appeared to take Hamas’s casualty figures as self-evident, not pointing out that they do not differentiate between civilians and combatants.

Indeed, most of the content of her 50-minute-long episode lambasted Israel’s response and pointed the finger at Israel as responsible for civilian devastation of Gaza, real or imagined. Hamas is not blamed, their victim is.

For example, one caller into the program, presumably referring to Israel, referred to “the horrific, heinous murder of civilians that has occurred. Literally, I am just horrified and heartbroken…international law is there for a reason, it is not respected, it is meant to be respected by all, and it is clearly not and this cannot go on as it is.”

The caller then made the outlandish claim that the news media in Canada is “so one-sided” in favour of Israel, despite being on a program hosted by a publicly-funded broadcaster that features vocal anti-Israel activists as journalists. Rather than push back against this claim, Pfeffer says “I hear you…it’s something that we’ve heard a lot, that one voice is being heard more than another.”

It’s unclear who is telling Pfeffer that more Israeli voices are being heard, but her record on Ontario Today shows she is clearly doing the exact opposite.

When Khouri, a anti-Israel activist, is asked to comment he said that “violence begets violence and we like to repeat how Hamas and Hezbollah are terrorist organizations. But both of these groups were borne out of occupation. In Hamas’s case, occupation of West Bank and Gaza, and Hezbollah was the occupation by Israel of south Lebanon for 20 years after the 1982 invasion of Lebanon.”

He blamed Israel’s “occupation” for the terrorism. It seems that to his mind, the Arabs had no choice but to resort to terrorism. He is blaming the victim. Khouri’s approach provided Hamas and Hezbollah terrorists with abusive absolution. Similarly, it went unchecked.

The “occupation” narrative gained traction with another caller, Sharon, a self-described Canadian-Israeli caller, who suggested that Israel is committing a “genocide” on Palestinians, before adding that “we have been oppressing an entire other nation for 75 years… what did we think was going to happen when we are holding our thumbs down…”

What went entirely unsaid during the entire episode is that Israel’s presence in the “West Bank” is legal. International law professor Eugene Kontorovich has pointed out that “under International law, occupation occurs when a country takes over the sovereign territory of another country. But the West Bank was never part of Jordan, which seized it in 1949 and ethnically cleansed its entire Jewish population. Nor was it ever the site of an Arab-Palestinian state.”

There isn’t and never was, an illegal occupation of Judea & Samaria (“West Bank”).

Israel has had to put controls on who comes in and out of the “West Bank” due to the constant threat of violent terrorism from Palestinians there. Conveniently, callers didn’t mention this and Pfeffer didn’t either.

Khouri continued by saying that, “So now by flattening Gaza and flattening the suburbs of Beirut, how is that going to get us anywhere positive, anywhere good?”

His accusation implied indiscriminate attacks, while Israel has been operating with great precision. It has been clear from the start that Israel chose to conduct a ground operation in Gaza as opposed to carpet bombing the whole area from the air. This choice greatly endangered its soldiers. As Douglas Murray, author, says, “Israel uses precision-guided missiles to limit civilian casualties.”

Presenting any forum for discussion of the wars in the Middle East without explaining that Israel has been forced into a fight for its survival by the genocidal Iranian terror proxy Hamas makes for a skewed conversation. Unsurprisingly, that is what Pfeffer, on behalf of the CBC, provided her listeners with, offering a platform for extremist anti-Israel rhetoric with virtually no challenge.