Like father, like son.
The anti-Israel bias from CBC reporter Evan Dyer has long been documented by HonestReporting Canada, noting his selective agenda-driven reporting and heavy reliance on anti-Israel activists, but he is not the only Dyer to produce low-calibre journalism to the Canadian public.
His father Gwynne Dyer is a London, UK-based opinion columnist who has spread bizarre anti-Israel conspiracy theories and who regularly fixates on the Jewish State, presenting overt disinformation in the process.
In a series of recent commentaries, the elder Dyer presented meandering, almost rambling, screeds that read less as a thoughtful reflection on the Middle East than a stream-of-consciousness rant.
On September 3, his column “Gaza as a twisted real estate opportunity,” published in The Winnipeg Free Press, the Hamilton Spectator, the St. Catharines, Orangeville Citizen and elsewhere, Dyer lambastes rhetoric from US President Donald Trump where he mused Gaza could be redeveloped into a modern riviera.
While such criticism is entirely valid, Dyer not only complains about the concept without failing to propose any alternative, but he also entirely ignores the disquieting reality about Gaza: that it had been run for nearly two decades by a genocidal Islamic terrorist group, Hamas, that as long as it remains in power, remains solely dedicated to the destruction of Israel.
A week later, Dyer’s September 10 column in The Hill Times, Winnipeg Free Press and The Cape Breton Post, “Qatar strike makes clear Israel has no interest in ceasefire,” claimed that Israel’s strike against Hamas leaders hiding in the Gulf regime of Qatar was simply more evidence that “that Israel can now attack any country in the Middle East with impunity.”
As if Israel was simply striking such countries for no apparent reason, rather than defending itself against a multi-pronged war forced upon it, Dyer claimed that Jerusalem was seeking to “avoid a ceasefire” with Hamas in Gaza.
Here, Dyer ignores that Israel has repeatedly accepted ceasefire proposals over the last two years while Hamas repeatedly obstructed them, a rather pertinent detail overlooked for reasons unclear. And while this couldn’t have been known at the time, Dyer’s words would later become disproven by none other than Trump, who suggested that the Qatar strike was actually an impetus to the subsequent ceasefire detail, rather than trying to derail it.
While Dyer would not have known that at the time, his knee-jerk response to Israel’s actions, seeking it in the worst possible light, effectively blinded him to any alternative perspective.
On September 22, Dyer was back with another column in The Hill Times and The Telegram, “Is it too late for a Palestinian state?” where he called Israel’s counter-terrorism operations in Gaza City, the last remaining hotbed of Hamas, “the new naqba,” using the Arabic term for “catastrophe,” and comparing it to Israel’s independence in 1948, when Arab states invaded the country in an attempt to destroy it, only to be defeated.
Rather than recognize the reality that decades of Arab rejectionism and violence against Israel have led to the Palestinian predicament, Dyer continues to see Israel as the overwhelming, if not sole, obstacle to a cessation of violence.
On October 2, “Three months later: where are Iran’s fabled nukes?,” Dyer pivoted slightly, published in The Hill Times and The Telegram, claiming that the US strikes on Iranian nuclear targets in June were not because Iran posed a threat, but because “Trump hates Barack Obama, the first Black president of the United States.” No mention of Iran’s extensive support for terrorist proxies across the Middle East, nor its huge arsenal of ballistic missiles aimed at Israel (dangerous in their own right). Instead, Dyer claimed that even if Iran was developing nuclear weapons, it would make “the Iranians a bit less crazy than the Iranians and the Americans,” who possess such weapons.
Tellingly, Dyer was unable to recognize that Iran’s fanatical leaders regularly threaten to annihilate Israel, and have devoted huge efforts to doing so. Israel and the United States have not made any such efforts nor threats against Iran.
And on the two-year anniversary of Hamas’ October 7, 2023 massacres, Dyer penned another opinion column, once again in The Hill Times, “Gaza: the 20-point plan,” where he writes that Israel’s leadership is opposed to a Palestinian state, not because of the terrorist threat it would pose to Israel, but instead, spreading an unhinged conspiracy theory, claiming that “a genuine Palestinian state would foreclose the option of building a ‘Greater Israel’ by annexing the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and replacing the existing Arab population with Jews.”
Rather than dealing with the facts as they are, Dyer’s baseless “greater Israel” conspiracy theory represents a descent into delusion, an unsurprising continuation of his recent columns.
