In a July 22 segment on CBC’s Saskatoon Morning radio show hosted by Stephanie Massicotte entitled: “Saskatchewan-born surgeon working in Gaza speaks with CBC about what she sees happening on the ground,” an interview was conducted with Dierdre Nunan in which she used her airtime to exploit human suffering and sympathy to spread unjustified political propaganda.

Click below to listen to the full segment:

Nunan, a regular guest on CBC who is often given a platform to demonize Israel, and whose political views are well-known after she openly signed onto a petition singling out Israel for attack while ignoring Hamas and the plight of Israeli hostages, discussed her experiences working in hospitals in the Gaza Strip and witnessing the pain and struggles that individuals impacted by the war have gone through.

As tragic as the experiences she reports having witnessed are, she cheapened the process of sharing them with the Canadian public by using them to cynically advance her biased anti-Israel political agenda.

Worse yet, Massicotte allowed Nunan an unfettered platform to spew her talking points, in what has become somewhat of a practice, and the second such instance in less than a month. Pro-Israel voices, in contrast, are strikingly absent at Saskatoon Morning, as they are across CBC, despite attempts by CBC brass to claim otherwise.

Nunan asserted that the people of Gaza have been “put under siege and subjected to relentless attacks,” that Israel is engaged in “forced starvation” and “keeping people captive in an area and raining down bombs upon them that they cannot escape from.” Without any additional details or context, she stated that many people are “shot while waiting for food at a food distribution station” and that Israel commits “hospital attacks in Gaza” and “took out” health facilities such as the surgical and burn units.

She added that “morally, it is on each one of us to do what we can to resist this” and that she “see[s] no more justification for what has been done to [Gaza] than if this were to be done … to Canadians.”

As scary as these claims must sound to the average listener, they are also shockingly misleading.

While no reasonable person wants to see innocent civilians suffer in the crossfire of war — Gazan civilians being no exception — the suggestion that the war and suffering in Gaza are happening for no apparent reason and could just as easily be targeting Canadians is comical.

Thousands of Canadians did not voluntarily choose to invade a sovereign country, sadistically massacre its communities, and take hundreds of its citizens hostage. The government of Canada did not invest billions of dollars into creating a vast network of tunnels, weapons, and rocket launchers under the homes, schools, and hospitals of the Canadian public, and then use that network to launch years of incessant attacks at a neighbouring country’s population centres. The government of Canada does not forcibly prevent Canadians in dangerous circumstances from seeking safety in order to score propaganda victories politically. And Canadians have never paraded the bodies of strangled infants through the streets in vast public celebrations of their murders.

But thousands of Gazans did exactly that.

It’s unclear what part of that comparison should be more offensive to Canadians: the idea that the values of Canadians can in any way be compared to the barbaric behaviour of the Palestinians people who caused the war in Gaza, or the expectation that Canadian listeners cannot see the absurdity of Nunan’s dishonesty.

How can anyone take a person seriously who talks about conflict in hospitals and condemns one side’s operations there without even bothering to mention that these operations happened because the other side chose to build military bases, launch terror attacks for years on end, and hold hostages in those hospitals? As recently as last month, Hamas’ then leader himself was caught hiding out under a hospital. Nunan may of course still choose to disagree with Israel’s conduct in addressing this difficult operational and moral challenge, but to hide the fact that any of this has been going on and to simply lay blame for the situation on Israel is knowingly deceitful. So too is to claim to be motivated by human rights and the suffering of innocent civilians, yet to never find any interest in mentioning the suffering of Israeli hostages at Hamas’ hands or the suffering that Israelis and Palestinians alike have endured at the hands of Hamas and the Iranian regime’s proxy war for years.

If anyone is responsible for preventing Gaza from “grow[ing] to … its fullest capacity,” as Nunan said in the interview, it’s the Hamas regime that has chosen to spend all of its money and resources on a delusional war of annihilation against its neighbour rather than alleviating the struggles of its own citizens and building a functioning state for them. Not Israel, who voluntarily handed over all of Gaza to Palestinian leadership — greenhouses and all — for a chance at peace in 2005, only to have it usurped by those on the other side who preferred violence and a war of genocidal annihilation against the Jewish state and Jewish people.

Nunan stated that there is a “very basic humanity that connects us all around the world.” Maybe she should start showing some, even when it doesn’t suit her political agenda.