In a modern-day reenactment of Hans Christian Anderson’s folktale The Emperor’s New Clothes, a recent CTV News segment features anchor Renée Rodgers practically nodding along as her guest makes spurious and unsubstantiated claims – just like the crowd that marveled at the emperor’s nonexistent clothes.

The guest is United Nations Special Rapporteur, and Hamas apologist, Francesca Albanese. She was hosted on CTV News in a February 6 segment entitled: “UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese on Trump on Gaza.” Albanese has a history of making nonsensical claims and extremist anti-Israel agitation.

Click below to watch the full segment:

In the interview, Albanese stated that there has been “15 months of genocide” in Gaza, where “Israel has tried hard to push the Palestinians into Egypt, into Northern Sinai and the Palestinians have stuck there, you know, in tents, being incinerated in camps and being turned into smithereens, and they have resisted…” Her statements inverted reality and painted Israel as a wanton murderer. Yet Rodgers said nothing in the face of Albanese’s historical revisionism.

It would have been pertinent for Rodgers to clarify that Hamas initiated the war with its invasion of Israel on October 7, 2023, and their heinous massacre and hostage-taking, which was, to their mind, just the beginning of their annihilation of Israel. Israel has been forced into a defensive war of Hamas’ making.

While Albanese provided no proof, and Rodgers asked for none, accusations of genocide typically use casualty figures from a Hamas subsidiary – the Gaza Health Ministry’s – as “proof.” However, these numbers are highly suspect for numerous reasons, including that they fail to distinguish between civilians and combatants, including Hamas fighters killed, who number in the estimated tens of thousands.

This ‘data’ likewise ignores Hamas’s well-documented strategy of hiding behind its most vulnerable to deliberately increase its death toll, to successfully create public sympathy for their well-oiled propaganda in the war for public opinion.

However, in perhaps the first-ever “genocide” of its kind, the population in Gaza has actually risen since the beginning of the Hamas-Israel war 16 months ago.

Once again, Rodgers was silent.

In her statement that Palestinians were “incinerated,” Albanese, in typical warped Hamas fashion, has reappropriated the Gazans as Holocaust victims. Holocaust victims were indeed murdered in gas chambers, and their bodies were then incinerated in crematoria in Nazi death camps. Israel has exercised extreme caution, consistently providing warnings before its precise military actions, even as its operations against Hamas are legal by every metric of international law.

Yet perhaps Albanese’s most shocking statement was her comparison between Palestinian prisoners and Israeli hostages. She said that Palestinian prisoners have been tortured physically and psychologically, and “On the other hand you have the hostages coming out, of course they have suffered, they have been underground most of the time for 456 days…but you also have hostages liberated saying thank you Hamas for the way you treated me.”

The Palestinian prisoners in Israel are treated according to international law. They had access to the Red Cross and were fed normally and received first rate health care. Their families knew they were safe and many Palestinian prisoners have gone on record saying thy prefer to remain in prison than go back to Gaza. Albanese’s allegations of widespread torture are without basis. On the other hand, the Israeli hostages were kidnapped, raped and tortured (physically, sexually and psychologically). They feared death at every moment. Their families usually did not – and do not – know if they were alive or dead. The six hostages murdered by Hamas in 2024, found with multiple bullet wounds, were skeletal. The 3 male hostages recently released were emaciated, and bound and gagged while in captivity. Amit Soussana, released hostage, experienced sexual abuse and was trussed and bound to a stick, and beaten. Equating Hamas’ hell with Israeli prisons is not just mistaken, it is grotesque.

Rodgers, on behalf of CTV News, utterly failed to challenge Albanese throughout. And this is not for the first time, as evinced in Rodgers’ November 9, 2024 interview of Albanese. Alarmingly, it is an egregious breach of journalistic ethics to not only repeatedly host a rabid propagandist for Hamas, but to neglect to challenge her even once.