A recent CBC Saskatchewan program featured 48 minutes of virtually non-stop Israel bashing from a variety of guests, save for one pro-Israel guest heard for less than 90 seconds.

On the January 16 episode of Blue Sky entitled: “Saskatchewan reaction to Israel-Hamas ceasefire talks,” a CBC Saskatchewan radio program, host Leisha Grebinski first spoke with two guests for around 10 minutes each, followed by a more lengthy interview, and interspersed with callers.

Click to watch the full segment below:

The first guest, Eman Almehdawe, a professor at the University of Regina, spoke about the impact of the Hamas-provoked war in Gaza, twice repeating the false and dangerous accusation of “genocide” against Israel, which was never challenged by Grebinski.

Instead, the host told her guest that she was taken with a recent CBC News interview with a Gaza freelancer, gushing about the “challenges that he’s faced as a freelancer trying to report on this horrific story.” That freelancer is Aboubaker Abed, employed by the Iranian regime mouthpiece Press TV, who has praised Palestinian terrorism.

For ostensible balance, Grebinski told listeners that her second guest was Arthur Milner, a “Jewish Polish Canadian playwright,” suggesting that he might offer a varied opinion. He did not. Instead, his remarks were almost entirely focused on blaming Israel for what he termed a long delay in the implementation of the ceasefire.

Milner condemned Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu roughly a dozen times, asserting that he “and his people should be in jail.” But it was not just Israel’s leadership that Milner expressed hostility to, but to the very concept that Israel had a right to defend itself.

Milner even went so far as to claim that “I think it’s way more complicated than the simple notion we have of terrorist Hamas and Israel defending itself.”

For her keynote guest, Grebinski was joined by Jeet Heer, a comics critic and reporter with the hard left magazine The Nation.

In his remarks, Heer repeated the “genocide” slur against Israel, referring to the “exchange of hostages on both sides,” a morally obtuse comparison between hostages kidnapped by Hamas more than 15 months ago, and Palestinian terrorists in Israeli jails.

At no time during his extended pontifications was Jeer ever challenged by Grebinski, who simply allowed him a soapbox without any opposition.

Citing no evidence whatsoever, Heer claimed that “the Israelis wanted to launch a war and inflict damage but without losing a lot of their own people, so they did not want hand to hand combat.” Heer appeared to be wholly unaware of what he was talking about, since hundreds of Israeli soldiers died in close combat in Gaza, precisely because Israel did not rely exclusively on air power, but in an effort both to rescue hostages and to minimize Palestinian civilian casualties, placed large numbers of Israeli troops on the ground, directly in harm’s way.

But for some commentators, it is ideology before facts, and reality will never be able to alter firmly-planted anti-Israel views.

Throughout the broadcast, a few calls were accepted, including one, “Marvin from Carrot River,” who offered the thoughtful insight that “Benjamin has this smirk on his face when they talk about how many people they’ve killed.” Presumably referring to Benjamin Netanyahu, as nonsensical as this comment was, it was largely in line with the intellectual calibre offered throughout.

Another caller made the baseless “genocide” accusation, and that it was a “war on unarmed civilians” in Gaza, while another, in a profound insult to actual genocide victims, called Israel’s counter-terrorism efforts in Gaza a “Holocaust” and in so doing, engaged in antisemitism by comparing Israeli actions to the Nazis, according to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism.

Once again, Grebinski failed to push back against any of these dangerous and indefensible allegations. In fact, in a rare instance where she interrupted a guest, Grebinski did so when one caller dared to suggest that Arab rejectionism of Israel was at the core of the Middle East conflict, a point that Heer dismissed by stating that “if there’s a political settlement, then the issue of hatred will go away,” appearing to be entirely unaware that Hamas rejects Israel’s existence, in its entirety.

The 48 minutes presented on the January 16 episode of CBC’s Blue Sky program was almost entirely filled with anti-Israel disinformation from all three main guests, and most callers, save for one whose comments were interrupted by the host. It offered virtually no balance, no background or context, and certainly no challenge by the host to the manifold extreme comments made by her guests.