In recent days, the CBC radio program Ottawa Morning featured two segments lambasting Israel: on June 3, host Rebecca Zandbergen spoke with immigration lawyer and Hamas glorifier Aidan Simardone for his thoughts on how Canada should import more Gazans into the country, and on June 5, she spoke with perpetual Israel critic Jon Allen, who called for Ottawa to sanction the Jewish State.

Listen to the full June 3 segment below:

Listen to the full June 5 segment below:

When, just days later, the National Holocaust memorial in Ottawa was vandalized with red paint and the words “feed me,” an apparent reference to the “famine” lie in Gaza, Zandbergen was joined by a member of Ottawa’s Jewish community to discuss the hate crime and its impact on the Jews in the nation’s capital.

But, true to form, Zandbergen did not speak to anyone remotely representative of the Jewish community, but someone whose statements, in our view, placed her squarely in the fringes of Canadian Jews. Elizabeth Bolton, the leader of Or Haneshamah, a small synagogue in Ottawa that operates out of a local church, was the guest on the program.

Zandbergen introduced the segment as being one which would help listeners understand “how this is affecting members of Ottawa’s Jewish community,” but it did not take time to understand why Bolton, the leader of a small congregation, was chosen to be the de facto spokesperson for Ottawa’s Jews.

Before long, Bolton launched into a soliloquy claiming that there was a “mass starvation that is underway that the Gazan population is enduring,” an outlandish statement that was not challenged by the host at any time, an egregious decision given that according to all available evidence, there is no such “mass starvation” taking place.

One day before her interview on Ottawa Morning, an open letter addressed to Prime Minister Mark Carney by a group of anti-Israel activists was published, where it made the dangerous and baseless accusation of “genocide” against Jerusalem. Among the signatories was none other than Elizabeth Bolton.

While it is important that news media outlets report on an anti-Jewish hate crime at a Holocaust memorial in the nation’s capital, and that a member of the city’s Jewish community be interviewed for their thoughts. But it is bizarre and absurd that the chosen interviewee be none other than someone who accuses Israel of starving Gaza, and that the country is guilty of genocide.

Making such a choice is at best an innocent (yet rather egregious mistake) which grossly misrepresents the view of the Canadian Jewish community. But at worst, it was a deliberate choice to platform a radical voice and falsely present them as being far more mainstream than they really are.

While it is impossible to know the motivations of the program’s creators, given the recent anti-Israel fixation of the CBC radio program Ottawa Morning, it would be entirely reasonable to conclude the latter.

CBC’s decision to spotlight a fringe voice as representative of Ottawa’s Jewish community, while uncritically airing inflammatory and false claims, reflects a troubling pattern. This selective coverage not only misleads listeners but risks inflaming tensions and distorting public understanding of both the Jewish community, and the realities in the Hamas-Israel war.