On the August 8 episode of CBC Radio program The Current, guest host Susan Bonner anchored a segment entitled: “Helping traumatized children in Gaza” in which she spoke to multiple guests about the mental and physical health struggles of Palestinian children impacted by the ongoing war.

Listen to the full segment:

While this is a legitimate story that deserves to be told, it is unfortunate that the segment chose to entirely ignore the similar traumas impacting Israeli children on the other side of this same situation — as well as to allow this sensitive topic to be framed in a manner which implicitly demonized Israel, while erasing the role of Hamas and the Iranian regime in causing and perpetuating these horrific conditions.

The issue is as expressed in the description which describes: “Israel’s continued bombardment of Gaza…[leaving] children facing disease, malnutrition and the hidden wounds of psychological trauma.”

Framing “Israel’s continued bombardment” as the cause of all the horrific suffering and stories of personal tragedy which follow may not be intended as anything political or editorializing, however, its implicit implications do unfairly bias the listeners’ perspective on the underlying political questions nevertheless.

Taking even just a few sentences somewhere in the program to offer a bit more context to explain what is happening and why these children have tragically wound up in this disastrous situation would have gone a long way in preventing this shortcoming. Instead, listeners were given a throwaway line that simplistically reduced the whole situation to an Israeli “bombardment”.

What The Current and host Bonner should have zeroed in on is the extremist Islamist fundamentalist terrorist group Hamas, which has ruled the Gaza Strip for 18 years and turned the heavily-populated territory into a massive infrastructure for its weapons and terrorist operations, building hundreds of terror-attack tunnels under the residences of civilians and turning places like schools, mosques, hospitals, and refugee camps into storage facilities for its thousands of weapons, frequently shooting them at Israel’s population centres.

The Islamic Republic of Iran funds these operations as part of an ideological proxy war against the Jewish State’s existence, and the terrorists intentionally use their civilian population as human shields — placing them directly in the line of fire in order to garner propaganda victories against the Israeli military.

Meanwhile, Israel is a liberal democracy that protects the rights of all its citizens — including Arabs and Muslims — and has a long track record of going above and beyond the norms of international law in order to minimize civilian casualties when fighting back against its attackers. Even in this current conflict, Israel has repeatedly warned entire regions and given ample time for evacuation before beginning operations — even at risk of endangering its strategic goals by eliminating the element of surprise.

The only reason Israel is currently attacking terrorist targets in the Gaza Strip is because Hamas chose on October 7 to top off decades of constant attacks against the Israeli people with a full-scale invasion and sadistic mass murder of 1,200 people and kidnapping 250 more.

In context, it’s clear that the suffering of the children discussed in this segment is not due to some cruel Israeli “bombardment,” but due to Hamas and Iran’s ongoing exploitation of their community and their unprovoked genocidal war against the Jewish people.

But there is also a second issue with the way this segment was conducted.

This segment was yet another example of the shocking disparity in how suffering and victimhood is covered when it’s taking place on the Palestinian side versus on the Israeli side. Two guests were interviewed back to back to speak about the suffering of Palestinian children — yet there was never so much as even a passing allusion to the Israeli children being held hostage in Gaza tunnels, the burnings, mutilations, and abuses of Israeli children during the attacks on October 7, the hundreds of thousands of residents of both the Gaza Envelope and northern Israel whose homes have been bombarded by rocket fire nonstop for 20 years, leading to shockingly widespread levels of childhood post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and creating many horrific stories just as tragic as the ones discussed in Gaza.

Back in October, before the bodies of the Israeli victims were even cold yet, media outlets including CBC spent weeks entertaining and nitpicking conspiratorial questions like whether the number of babies decapitated in the Hamas attacks were precisely 40 or not based on nothing but the baseless speculation of angry antisemitic internet trolls.

This bizarre double standard and erasure of one side’s entire experience and perspective from coverage of the conflict is inexplicable and unforgivable — and it does listeners and readers a massive disservice.

No matter their background, no innocent child deserves to suffer and no innocent civilian should ever be targeted for violence. But suffering must be reported and condemned equally regardless of who the victim is, and blame must be laid appropriately with those responsible — not with whoever simply offers an easier political narrative to construct.