Even as the population of Christians plummets throughout the Middle East, including the Palestinian territories, a recent CBC radio program sought to frame Israel – the only country in the region where Christians are growing in number – as the cause of their misfortune.

The January 29 episode of Information Morning – Moncton saw host Khalil Akhtar interview Steve Berube, a retired United Church Minister in Riverview, New Brunswick, in a friendly 13-minute conversation, “Riverview church leader sees changes firsthand in East Jerusalem and the West Bank.”

Click below to listen to the segment:

Akhtar told listeners that Berube had recently participated in a mission to the Middle East, which Berube stated was organized by Sabeel, a group that he claimed seeks to “bring the major religions together.”

While the host introduced Berube simply as a retired United Church minister, he is actually the vice-chair of Canadian Friends of Sabeel, a registered charity that accuses Israel of “apartheid,” and that lists among its partner groups a number of radical anti-Israel organizations, including Canadians for Justice & Peace in the Middle East, and Independent Jewish Voices (IJV). Instead, he was introduced simply as a retired United Church minister.

The interview went entirely as might be expected, with Berube claiming that the Israel-Palestinian conflict is not a religious dispute, but “one of settler colonialism.” Safe from his perch in New Brunswick, it may be safe for Berube to pontificate that the war against Israel is not religious in nature, but in fact the exact opposite is true.

Throughout the Middle East, from Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) to Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthi movement in Yemen, Islamist terrorist groups see the destruction of Israel as a solemn religious duty, a towering point that was dismissed by Berube, and completely unchallenged by Akhtar.

Not only did Akhtar fail to challenge his guest on his disinformation, his line of questioning made clear that he was an active participant in the hardline narrative being peddled, saying that alleged Israeli persecution of Palestinians “is not a new story, though, right? I mean, this has been happening; east Jerusalem itself was taken in 1967. The story in the West Bank is a continuation.”

Throughout the interview, Israel was characterized as the villain seeking to oppress the victimized Palestinians, and Palestinian terrorism and rejectionism was minimized to the point of erasure.

Berube told listeners that since Hamas’ massacres on October 7, 2023, “there have been about 60 Israelis who have been killed in violence in the West Bank and east Jerusalem, and there have been over a thousand Palestinians.”

Beyond ignoring how casualty ratios do not indicate the righteousness of a side, Berube glossed over any mention of how many of these Palestinians were combatants actively engaged in fighting Israeli soldiers, hardly considered innocent civilians.

Some of these deaths include Palestinians throwing explosives at Israeli soldiers, and perhaps most notable of all, Mohammed Jaber, also known as Abu Shujaa, a leading Palestinian terrorist in the area, who was responsible for murdering an Israeli civilian. Yet Berube made no attempt to distinguish between civilians and terrorists.

The January 29 Information Morning interview between host Khalil Akhtar and Steve Berube was yet another such instalment for CBC, where the taxpayer-funded broadcaster continues to platform anti-Israel activists with sympathetic interviews, and frequently censoring out opposing views.