A pair of CTV News reports – a news article and an accompanying broadcast – covered a recent anti-Israel rally on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, drastically exaggerating the crowd’s size and sanitizing the extremist elements at the centre of it.

The April 12 article entitled: “Massive national pro-Palestinian march took place in Ottawa head of federal election,” written by reporter Toula Mazloum, and video report entitled: “Massive Pro-Palestinian rally in Ottawa,” by Dylan Dyson, both referred to the protest as “massive.”

Watch full segment below:

Yet aerial footage shown in Dyson’s report shows that the protest was far from “massive,” occupying just a small corner of Parliament Hill, and reflecting nothing close to the groundswell of support that was suggested.

This misleading reporting helps contribute to portraying the increasingly marginal anti-Israel movement in Canada as a major force, falsely suggesting – with a federal election imminent – that this cause attracts more support than it really does.

But it was not the gross exaggeration of the decidedly non-massive demonstration which was the worst part of the reports. Both the broadcast and the article quoted Yara Shoufani from the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM), one of the protest organizers, offering no background on either Shoufani or the organization she represented.

Despite the article referring to the protesters seeking “an end to the war on Gaza,” the PYM is far from a pacifist organization. In fact, in the hours after Hamas’ bloodthirsty massacres in southern Israel on October 7, 2023, the group was organizing a public celebration offering “honour” to the terrorists who helped carry out the biggest mass killing of Jews since the Holocaust.

As for Shoufani, she has been equally unapologetic in her vocal support for Palestinian terrorists. Just one day after Hamas’ mass murders, she took to social media to heap praise on the terrorist group, writing that “Palestinians have a right not only to resist, but to liberate our land from zionist colonization,” among many other posts glorifying Palestinian mass murderers.

Despite Shoufani’s stated pro-Hamas rhetoric, she has been uncritically quoted by scores of news media outlets, who have uniformly failed to honestly report to the Canadian public about her extremist statements in support of a banned terrorist organization.

In the CTV News article, Mazloum sought to provide broader context about the Hamas-Israel war, writing that “the United Nations estimates 70 per cent of the people who died in Gaza are women and children,” before adding that “Israel says 20,000 were militants, but it does not provide evidence, according to the AP.”

This sentence alone exemplifies much of what is wrong in the Canadian news media reporting of the Hamas-Israel conflict. Mazloum states that Israel has “not provide(d) evidence,” but as for United Nations allegations that 70 percent of those killed being women and children is treated with far more credibility, despite the fact that these figures are not independently-sourced, but come from none other than Hamas, via its so-called “Gaza Ministry of Health.”

Furthermore, even according to Hamas’ ever-changing casualty figures, the oft-cited claim that 70 percent of deaths in Gaza are women and children is manifestly untrue.

CTV News’ coverage of this Ottawa protest not only grossly inflated the demonstration’s significance, but also whitewashed its extremist organizers. Such reporting does a disservice to the public by amplifying fringe voices and misleading Canadians about the true scope of support for anti-Israel activism.