The presence of Jews living in their historic lands continues to serve as a source of immense fixation in many corners of the Canadian news media, and a new Toronto Star article continues to demonstrate that obsession.

In an August 16 special report in The Toronto Star, writer Fin de Pencier – whose social media feed in our estimation is replete with posts framing Israeli “settlers” as dangerous radicals – devoted some 2,300 words over a 3 page spread to these “settlers,” beginning by profiling Mor Maisel, a Canadian-Israeli woman who, he writes, protects Palestinian-Arabs in the area from alleged confrontations with nearby Israelis.

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When Political Activism Is Framed as Humanitarianism

Maisel is framed as something of a humanitarian by de Pencier, writing that she joins a group of other Israelis “in protective presence work” while living in what de Pencier refers to as “occupied territory.”

But as becomes clear, such activism is not necessarily a benign apolitical act. She is quoted as tacitly comparing Israel to the Nazis, lamenting that “nobody came” to protect us (notably, unlike the Nazis, Israel is not seeking to murder all Palestinians).

While de Pencier does include such outlandish and incendiary comments in his article, the clear framing is of individuals like Maisel as humanitarians, not hardline political activists.

Jews Living in Their Historic Homeland Are Cast as Extremists

Israelis who live in their historic lands, called “settlers” in the article, receive no such sympathetic treatment, and are repeatedly characterized them from our perspective as radicals and extremists for having the temerity to live in the hills where Jews have had a continual presence for some three millennia.

‘Settler Violence’ Gets the Spotlight, Palestinian Terrorism Does Not

The article extensively chronicles alleged instances of “settler” violence against Palestinians, while failing to address studies that have found such claims wildly overstated, and offers virtually no detailed exploration into the scourge of Palestinian terrorism against Israelis.

While de Pencier does acknowledge Israel’s legal rights to the lands, noting both its ancient history and the lack of any Arab state there beforehand, he soon dismisses it, and claims that “the overwhelming majority of international legal scholars” reject this, though he offers no evidence for his claim.

A Legal Standard That Apparently Applies Only to Israel

Curiously, that same practice is adopted without question elsewhere, such as Spain, which holds the territories of Ceuta and Melilla in northern Africa abutting Morocco, using the same legal argument (that it possessed those lands before Morocco was a state), though it appears there is no such concern about the legality of those territories in The Toronto Star, which has referred to them as unambiguously Spanish, and not “occupied” territory.

The supposedly credible expert voices cited in the article include Amnesty International, which de Pencier quotes without noting the organization’s long history of anti-Israel activism, including its recent accusations of “genocide,” where the group went so far as to effectively redefine the term in order to tarnish Jerusalem with that charge.

From our vantage point, the sum total of the article frames Israelis who live in their ancestral lands as radicals oppressing the victimized Palestinians, whose presence in the land is never questioned, despite the undisputed reality that Jews lived in those territories millennia before any Palestinians. Meanwhile, Palestinian violence is seemingly minimized and Israeli “settler” violence is treated as de facto truthful.

Yet again, the Canadian news media is using Israeli “settlers” to pursue salacious headlines over sober journalism in our view.