In the latest example of the anti-Israel movement coming up with never-endingly odd, absurd, and just plain bizarre accusations for which to point angry fingers at the Jewish State, comes Matthew Hanick’s opinion column entitled: “The Not-So-Subtle Price of Passive Voice” in the Spring 2025 edition of the TMU (Toronto Metropolitan University) Review of Journalism. In addition to authoring the commentary, Hanick is listed as a member of the Spring Edition’s editorial team.
Hanick’s piece lambasted Western media at large for an alleged pattern of using the passive voice writing style when talking about Israeli military actions, suggesting that their grammatical choices somehow morally absolve wrongdoings or even contribute to their continuation. Hanick claimed that “Western media’s use of passive voice allows outlets to sidestep the truth, casting doubt on Israeli war crimes” and directly “dehumaniz[es] Palestinian suffering.” He also stated that this “choice of words can…mislead readers” to wrongly perceive war events as something other than “Israeli crimes,” thereby “obscur[ing]” the truth and granting cover for Israel to continue doing these miscellaneous bad things unchecked. Sarcastically and condescendingly, he mocked the supposed perception that “in Gaza, people seem to die violently out of nowhere” and “homes crumble on their own.”
Ultimately, Hanick’s basic argument failed at every single level.
Firstly, he never provided any shred of evidence or even a clear argument to establish his claim that there is a general media trend of using passive voice when it comes to describing Israeli actions. All he did is repeatedly make this broad-sweeping assertion, offer three random, cherrypicked, anecdotal examples of passive voice being used in statements about various Israeli actions, and shared some general observations by TMU Professor Rob Goodman about the nature of active versus passive voice in communication and writing. Without much effort at all, one can easily find a seemingly endless supply of examples of mainstream Western outlets using active voice to describe Israeli military actions, as well as numerous examples of passive voice being applied to Palestinian violence – including in Israeli media itself.
Hanick offered nothing to demonstrate the validity of this alleged “phenomenon” on which his entire article is based, let alone the meaning he chooses to ascribe to it. An article based on one’s own conjectural assumptions rather than evidence and argumentation is not a story, but a conspiracy theory. And one must wonder how unserious the editorial process at the TMU Review of Journalism must have been to allow this standards-devoid piece to be published seemingly without any basic scrutiny.
But the basic failure of the author to coherently justify his point isn’t even the worst of this article – that honour goes to Hanick’s blatant and shameless bias and hypocrisy, which he somehow has the gall to spew with a straight face while claiming to be advocating for quality journalism.
He repeatedly matter-of-factly called the ongoing Gaza war the “Palestinian genocide” despite this not being an established fact nor the view of mainstream Western governments. While Hanick called Israel’s defensive war “extensive airstrikes on Gaza” and the Gazan humanitarian crisis “deliberat[e],” yet he calls the barbaric mass murders, unprovoked violent invasion, and mass civilian hostage-taking of October 7th merely “Hamas’ surprise attack.”
He called Hamas’ indiscriminate rocket attacks targeting civilian homes and cities merely “militants’ strike[s] on Israel.” He openly lamented his observation that “descriptions of Israel often…signa[l] to Western readers that Israel’s cause is understandable—even defensible,” as if it should rightfully be a given that readers shouldn’t come away supporting efforts to rescue hostages or secure a terrorist-free future for the region. He failed to even attempt to provide background or alternate viewpoints about any of the incidents or issues mentioned, such as the ongoing and ever-evolving challenge of humanitarian aid distribution, Israel’s efforts to provide warnings and limit avoidable civilian casualties despite Gaza’s uniquely deadly dense, tunnel-laden, purposely volatile terrain, and/or the legalities of Israel’s war conduct.
With a track record this bad, and a consistent pattern of obvious double standards in his own language choices on full display, perhaps Hanick’s thoughts about how “a journalist’s choice of words can reinforce implicit biases in readers” are more of an accidental admission of his own mindset than an indictment of Western media at large.
It’s also noteworthy that this publication featured another anti-Israel article immediately to the left of this one in the print edition. Namely, an interview by Reema Najjar with rabidly anti-Israel YouTuber Samira Mohyeddin – who has in our view implied that antisemitic attacks are staged by Jews to gain sympathy – in which she casually repeated the “genocide” lie and accused Western media of “push[ing] a Zionist narrative,” letting Israeli spokespeople “lie to [their] audience,” and forcing people to “pretend there’s no such thing as apartheid.” Interestingly, Mohyeddin also has a history of peddling this bizarre passive voice accusation against Canadian media.
This raises serious questions about the intentions behind this edition of the TMU Review of Journalism and how its journalistic decisions were made. Was this a serious effort to engage in scrutinizing shortcomings in Canadian media practices, or are ideologically-motivated actors now using the platform to elevate the legitimacy of unreliable social media activists at the expense of our cherished institutions of credible, standard-following serious media organizations (as both articles directly imply at certain points)? Even when described in a passive voice, the dangers of the latter should be obvious.
