Following Hamas’ unprecedented terrorist attack in southern Israel on October 7, learning the horrific details of what took place can be traumatic not just for survivors of the attack, but to anyone reading about them, or seeing images or videos.
On the October 12 broadcast of the CBC Radio program, “The Early Edition,” host Stephen Quinn produced a segment on “the trauma in the middle east and how we can manage our stress levels,” featuring Hungarian-Canadian physician and author, Dr. Gabor Maté. And while Maté spent the first few minutes of the roughly 11-minute interview discussing the mental pain and anguish of innocent people in Israel and Gaza, he soon devolved into an anti-Israel screed, repeatedly blaming the Jewish State for the current violence taking place.
While Maté did condemn Hamas for their grotesque terrorist attack, labeling them “atrocities” and a “war crime,” he soon made clear that despite those crimes against humanity, it was important to provide background details which would help listeners understand why Hamas carried out its gruesome attacks.
Maté told Quinn, that “the context is, the longest ethnic cleansing operation in the 20th and 21st centuries. The Palestinians have suffered such oppression, such brutality, 10s of thousands of been killed by the Israelis since 1948. Children – hundreds of children – have been massacred by bombs within the last 10 years, last 15 years.”
Ethnic cleansing is “the expulsion, imprisonment, or killing of an ethnic minority by a dominant majority to achieve ethnic homogeneity,” and even a cursory review of Israel’s modern history puts to rest this odious lie.
While anti-Israel detractors often accuse the country of carrying out ethnic cleansing against the Palestinians in 1948, such allegations are entirely without merit. Although hundreds of thousands of Arabs left Israel following the invasion of the newly reborn country by its neighbours in 1948, many did so at the behest of Arab leaders, who actively encouraged them – often by threats – to leave, expecting that they would return once Israel was destroyed, as was expected.
Those Arabs who stayed in Israel were granted full citizenship, and their population has since ballooned to more than two million people. Compare this to the Jews who were ethnically cleansed from the Islamic world in the 1940s and 1950s, due to pogroms, threats and persecution. Decades ago, 850,000 Jews lived in the region stretching from Morocco to Iran. Today, that number is 15,000, or a reduction of more than 98 percent.
Israel, unlike Hamas, does not target innocent civilians for mass murder, torture, rape and kidnapping, and consequently, while many Palestinian civilians have died in Gaza, their deaths are entirely the fault of Hamas, which intentionally blends its fighters into the civilian population, cynically letting their deaths serve as a public relations coup for the terrorist group.
While Maté did not hesitate to condemn Hamas’ terrorism, his constant refrain that Israeli policies caused the mass murder of 1,400 innocent people marked for death is ultimately no different than justifying those policies. There is no policy change Israel can make that would remove Hamas’ blood lust, and change their view that Israel must be destroyed in its entirety, and replaced with an Islamic State-style caliphate.
Short of Israel – and likely the Jewish People as a whole – entirely disappearing from the face of the earth, there is nothing that can make Hamas or other Islamist terrorist groups pause their desire for murder.
As Maté told Quinn, “I just wish that people saw the overall reality. This did not have to happen.” In that respect, he is correct. Neither Hamas’ massacre, nor Israel’s military actions in Gaza, had to happen, but they did because Hamas sought to murder as many Israelis as possible.
Hosting Maté represents a major error in judgement for CBC News, and by not pushing back on Maté’s unfounded anti-Israel claims, Quinn failed to hold his guest to account.
