It’s no surprise that Mount Royal University sociology professor Mark Muhannad Ayyash continues to attack Israel, as HonestReporting Canada has previously called him “one of Canada’s foremost peddlers of anti-Israel disinformation.” What is surprising is that Jefferson Humphreys of CTV News would hail him as “an expert on the region” without revealing just how warped Ayyash’s views actually are.

Humphreys welcomed Ayyash to CTV Morning Live on October 30 to discuss an Israeli decision to ban the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). Ayyash immediately called the potential impact “catastrophic,” predicting a range of disastrous outcomes.

At no point did Ayyash mention why Israel has been forced to enact this ban. The main reason is that UNRWA has been, if not actively promoting terrorism, supporting terrorist members in its ranks and weapons in its facilities.

A number of UNRWA employees actively participated in the Hamas massacre of October 7, 2023 that murdered over 1,200 Israelis and kidnapped over two hundred and fifty more. Many others cheered from the sidelines. UNRWA doesn’t dispute these facts.

UNRWA also acknowledges that Hamas has used its facilities, like schools, to store weapons aimed at Israel. UNRWA says that when it discovers such a breach, it protests to “de facto authorities.” Namely Hamas—who probably won’t mind.

Ayyash didn’t mention any of this. He chalked the UNRWA ban up to Israel’s desire to erase Palestine “from political discourse and from the international agenda.” In fact, Israel has spent over fifty years working with UNRWA despite its growing ties to terrorism.

For years, UNRWA schools have systematically taught anti-Israel and antisemitic hatred. A 2021 EU study found that UNRWA textbooks “contain anti-Semitic narratives and glorifications of violence.”

UNRWA schools have incubated the next generation of terrorists all over Gaza, the West Bank, Jerusalem, Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan. Mosab Hassan Yusuf, son of Hamas co-founder Sheikh Hassan Yusef, has spoken out about teachers in his own UNRWA high school. “Some of them belong to the Hamas movement, others belong to other Palestinian organizations such as the Popular Front, such as the Fatah movement.”

But the biggest problem isn’t the schools, as Yusuf has explained that “the major problem with UNRWA is that it keeps the Palestinians as a victim.” Most refugees worldwide are overseen by the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR). Unlike UNRWA, part of UNHCR’s mandate is to “help find long-term solutions” to help refugees either return home or “build a future in a new country.”

UNRWA, on the other hand, doesn’t care about Palestinians’ future. Instead, it’s grown corpulent and corrupt. UNRWA is now the biggest single employer in Gaza, with 13,000 employees. Fortunately, far from the dire outcomes that Ayyash is predicting with the removal of UNRWA, Israel estimates that only 13 percent of aid to Gaza has been going through UNRWA. That means alternative organizations—hopefully with fewer ties to terror—can pick up the slack.

Ayyash predicted disaster in particular for the current polio vaccination campaign in Gaza. Yet the campaign seems to be proceeding as planned. It’s being overseen by the World Health Organization and UNICEF, which are not affected by the UNRWA ban, together in collaboration with Israel’s COGAT. Ayyash tossed out several other odd claims during the interview. First, he pointed to “unconditional” support for Israel from the U.S. This despite U.S. conditions on aid to Israel, repeated U.S. calls for restraint against Israel, and U.S. sanctions against Israeli organizations and individuals that it opposes.

Second, Ayyash claimed that the U.S. supports Israel to “secure all the critical energy resources for itself.” The U.S. certainly has a vested interest in energy security. But it also recognizes the strategic advantages of Israel’s geographic location, intelligence, and willingness to combat regional Islamic extremism. Ayyash utterly failed to mention Hamas and Palestinians, thus absolving them totally. Instead, he blamed Israel, claiming that in 1948, Israel “expelled about 750,000 Palestinians from their homes and lands,” ignoring how the displacement of Palestinian-Arabs came about due to an Arab-initiated war seeking Israel’s destruction, where Arabs were encouraged by their leadership to flee the war and to return when the Jewish state was destroyed.

More importantly, he doesn’t add that many, if not most, Arabs left voluntarily. The London Weekly Economist reported in 1948 that about 92 percent of Haifa’s Arabs left. They were relying on their leaders’ promises that “upon the final withdrawal of the British, the combined armies of the Arab States would invade Palestine and ‘drive the Jews into the sea.’”

That plan failed with the Arab invasion of 1948. It failed again with Hamas’s invasion in 2023.

All of which leaves Ayyash with an axe to grind. Yet mainstream news channels like CTV still claim he’s an expert, despite his seeming refusal to mention Hamas. Ayyash is a clear and articulate speaker whose narrative leaves no room for uncertainty. Unless one is already familiar with the facts, he makes a very compelling case. Which is exactly why CTV and other news outlets must not air his anti-Israel biases unchecked. At the very least, Humphreys should have fact-checked, countered and brought context to Ayyash’s claims. Even better, he could have chosen an expert who was interested in sharing the facts, and not a skewed anti-Israel platform full of misinformation.