December 31

On the last day of the year CBC.ca reported on the fact that Palestine has joined the International Criminal Court. The article was full of quotes from Israelis and Americans saying how "counter-productive" this was, but still CBC did at least report on the frustration of the Palestinians.

Most of the Israeli quotes were nonsensical, in that they ignored the fact that Israel is stealing Palestinian land every day that negotiations are drawn out. But this one about the "moral army" is simply ludicrous.

Netanyahu called Israel's soldiers "the most moral army in the world" and said the country would take unspecified "retaliatory steps."

Calling the Israeli army "moral" just months after they butchered over 500 children is nonsense, but it is ludicrous to frame this statement with "retaliatory steps". If the Israeli army was so moral, then certainly Netanyahu would welcome the scrutiny of the Court to demonstrate their morality.

Now look at this paragraph:

Abbas has been under heavy domestic pressure to take action against Israel following months of tensions fuelled by the collapse of U.S.-brokered peace talks, a 50 day war between Israel and Palestinian militants in Gaza, a spate of deadly Palestinian attacks on Israeli targets and Israeli restrictions on Palestinian access to a key Muslim holy site in Jerusalem. Tuesday's defeat in the UN Security Council further raised pressure on Abbas to act.

The list of issues above is a bit cock-eyed. It refers to a "war" of 50 days, then separately to a spate of Palestinian rocket attacks, as if these were two unrelated events. This is nonsense. First of all, it was less a war than a massacre, and secondly, the Palestinian rockets were flying during the so-called "war" and much worse was being thrown at Gaza at the same time by Israel. There is no need to list them separately.

CBC - Look up "Suicide" in Dictionary

Here is a shocking headline on December 27th:

Iran suicide drone tested during military exercises

The problem is that it is nonsense. This drone is a kind of a missile, and since there is no life on board, there is nothing suicidal about it.

But the idea of Iranians having "suicide" weapons is scary, and Israel wants us to be scared of Iran, so CBC uses this ridiculous terminology.

CBC, who are you working for?

Jewish Children Have Value; Palestinian Children - not

On Christmas Day, this news item:

Israeli serviceman shoots 5yo Palestinian in the face 

Did CBC.ca think it worthy of reporting? I scanned CBC.ca for the next several days and there is no mention of this.

Let's do a thought experiment: If an Israeli 5-year old had been attacked and harmed like this, would CBC.ca not treat it as headline news?? Probably, it would.

Just as CBC ignored the Israeli car that killed a 5 year old in the West Bank and gave headline coverage to the Jewish child killed by car by a Palestinian in Jerusalem just a week later, it is only news when Jewish children are hurt.

Is it really just a coincidence that all the people responsible for so-called "journalist ethics" at CBC.ca are Jewish, and this kind of imbalanced coverage is happening???

"Israel-Hamas war" - Nonsense

In an article on December 20, 2014, CBC refers to what they call the "Israel-Hamas war" to name the violent conflict in Israel/Palestine in the summer of 2014.

If this is not a propagandist misuse of language, I don't know what is.

First of all, if it had been a conflict between political parties, it could have been named the "Likud-Hamas war". But saying it was a conflict between a state "Israel" on one side, and a political entity "Hamas" on the other, is intentionally misleading. THE FACT is that it was a conflict between the state of Israel and the captive state of Palestine, and in reality, between the people of Israel and the people of Palestine. THE FACT is that Israel attacked and butchered the PEOPLE OF PALESTINE, not Hamas.

Secondly, the use of the word "war" is intentionally misleading, unless it is being used euphemistically like in the "war on drugs", which is not the case here. The situation was far too unbalanced to call it a war. It was a campaign of suppression against an occupied territory. Perhaps it can be called a "war" when you first occupy a place, but afterwards, when you just try to keep the occupied people in their submission, it is not called a war anymore. It can be called a "pacification", or a "repression" or a "subjugation" campaign. It is not a war, especially when the captive people are virtually helpless.

This was a caption to a photograph in the article:

The Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip in the summer left tens of thousands of people homeless. 

Here is a paragraph from the article:

Israel and Hamas, the Palestinian militant group that controls Gaza, fought a 50-day war this summer. In that war, Hamas launched thousands of rockets and mortars toward Israel, which carried out an aerial campaign and a ground invasion.

Note how the whole passage seeks to hide the inequality and brutality of what Israel did in Gaza, by calling the mass bombing of a tiny enclave of captive people "an aerial campaign". How sweet. But the CBC did not fail to mention the "thousands of rockets" (almost 100% ineffective), launched against Israel. Certainly this could have been balanced by noting the "tens of thousands" of effective munitions which were rained on Gaza.

It is simply amazing to me that CBC can be so brazenly and dishonestly protective of Israel and yet, when this is pointed out to the CBC Ombudsman, she cannot see it.

But I have seen this "cognitive dissonance" phenomenon so many times before. Individuals can be liberal, and intelligent, and clear-sighted about dozens of distant issues, but when something comes close to home, they can do a complete back flip and become totally illiberal and blind. If a cherished belief is challenged, they literally cannot see or believe any evidence to the contrary, not matter how conclusive.

This has certainly been the case with the majority of North American Jewish people. Many of them have been in the forefront of battles for human rights, for peace, and against racism. Jewish people were prominent in the Black Liberation movement; in anti-racist struggles; in the Labour Movement for worker's rights; in the Feminist Movement; and in the ant-war movements at the time of Vietnam. However these same liberal, progressive people literally cannot see the injustices done to Palestinians, and the racism, war crimes and human rights violations of Israel. They badly want to believe that Jews are the good guys; that Jews can only be victims, never victimizers, so they see only what they want to see and believe only what they want to believe. This is not unique to Jewish people. I have recently seen this same phenomenon in my Ukrainian friends who have been carried away from their long-held liberal principles by recent events in that country.

When my complaint to the CBC Ombudsman was handled by two individuals only, both of whom were Jewish, I tried to point out that perhaps a more neutral party (ie. someone not subject to this cognitive dissonance phenomenon) should be allowed to examine my complaint. In typical Zionist fashion, I was accused of being an anti-Semite for even suggesting this.

In fact, when I suggested that the CBC Ombudsman's failure to handle my complaint fairly was possibly based on this cognitive dissonance phenomenon, I was actually being very generous. I was suggesting that they were not aware of how unfair they were being.

But actually there could be a more sinister reason for the way they blew off my complaint, and that is that they knew exactly what they were doing. That they were consciously working for Israel, and they intend to mislead Canadians as part of an effort to protect Israel. I did not, and would not, declare that such sinister and unethical motives were behind the unfair handling of my complaint by the Ombudsman, but when I see on a daily and ongoing basis how imbalanced CBC reporting is on the Israel/Palestine issue, I have to keep asking myself:

CBC, who are you working for?

BC Screwy Priorities

Although CBC had no room in its article yesterday on the killing of the Palestinian minister to provide the necessary context to the events that led to his death, today CBC devoted a whole headline article to the possibility that he died from a bad heart, rather than from Israeli brutality:
 
"Doctors disagree on cause of death of Palestinian minister Ziad Abu Ain"
 
Really. considering the proven fact that there was brutality, how relevant is this issue of a possible heart attack. OK, it is worth mentioning, but a whole headline article?? Give me a break. The injustice of the Israeli response to a peaceful action by Palestinian farmers who simply wanted to plant olive tees on their own land, is barely mentioned - but there is all this space to try to exonerate the Israelis by pointing out it was a possible heart attack.
 
CBC's news priorities are not balanced nor are they even remotely honest. It is simply disgraceful.
 

Palestinian Mister killed

Why does CBC fail to provide anything more than the sketchiest of context to this killing? Here are CBC's words:
 
Wednesday's events began with a march by several dozen Palestinians who headed to agricultural land near the West Bank village of Turmus Aya to plant olive tree saplings, participants said. The land is close to an Israeli settlement and mostly off limits to the village's farmers, protesters said.
 
Why does CBC fail to say that the land which the protestors were heading towards was privately owned Palestinian farm land, and that the "settlement" it was near was an illegal Israeli colony? Is it really enough to just say it was "off-limits", and thus implying the protestors were breaking some kind of legitimate directive? 
 
Isreal is constantly stealing more and more land from Palestinians. In this case it has not only stolen the land the so-called settlement is built on, but is denying access to the land around the "settlement" which is legally owned by Palestinians and desperately needed by them to survive.
 
This little bit of context, which CBC will claim they had no room to include, would have shown how criminal the murder of this Palestinian minister really was, and omitting it makes the article incomplete and possibly even misleading. Par for the course for CBC.

My complaint to CBC Ombudsman

Well, I got a reply to my complaint. Both the CBC rep and the Ombudsman agreed that my complaint had no merit; that CBC reporting on the massacre and events in Israel/Palestine in the summer of 2014 was absolutely "fair and balanced". Yeh, like Fox News is fair and balanced.

It seems both Nagler of CBC and Enkin, the Ombudsman, cannot even perceive their own biases. I may be wrong, but both Nagler and Enkin are Jewish names. Jewish people can be very liberal on a million issues, but very often, in my personal experience, on Israel/Palestine they are frequently  incapable of seeing things objectively. This is sometimes simply the result of a lifetime of indoctrination at home, in the synagogue and other Jewish organizations, that makes it impossible to see things any other way but the Zionist way.

Both Nagler and Enkin gave my complaint shoddy and insincere attention - completely ignoring the points that were most difficult for them to refute. This is a sign that they did not want to address a problem, but to cover it up - which is definitely not in the Ombudsman's mandate.

If I were to point out that it is a possible problem that both people charged with handling my complaint have Jewish backgrounds, I would be accused of anti-Semitism. But let's be honest here - Does anyone believe that if both people handling my complaint at CBC had been Palestinian-Canadians or Arab-Canadians, that the analysis would have been the same?

In my complaint I compared the asymmetry of the Jewish military attacking Gaza, to the asymmetry of the Nazi troops attacking the Warsaw Ghetto, and asked why CBC gave such sympathetic treatment to the death of one Israeli soldier, far out of proportion to the treatment given the deaths of thousands of Palestinian civilians.

Both Nagler and Enkin ignored the real intent of my comparison, which was the asymmetry in both situations, and they both declared that they found the comparison "insulting and offensive". Now really, who cares whether they were insulted or offended, why did they not address the issue which was the unbalanced reporting???

And do a thought experiment here - if Nagler and Enkin had been Palestinian-Canadians or Arab-Canadians, would they have found the comparison "insulting and offensive". Not likely. They may have said it was a bit extreme, and perhaps not relevant, but they would never have found it "insulting and offensive". It was "insulting and offensive" to Nagler and Enkin because Jewish people are very sensitive about anything Jewish or Israeli being compared to Nazis. Because of this ethnic sensitivity they chose to ignore my point, not address it at all, and instead just express their disapproval of my example. 

In fact, their entire rejection of my complaint seems to be based quite soundly on a profound Zionist bias, but if I were to say so, that would be considered anti-Semitic. It must be nice to have things both ways for Zionists at CBC. They can act like Zionists, but no one can accuse them of acting like Zionists without being branded racist!!!

If I ask the Ombudsman to let some non-Jewish experts examine my complaint (Heaven forbid that a Palestinian-Canadian should ever be allowed to do so!), I am certain I will be accused of being anti-Semitic just for making the suggestion.

Attention

Dear Friend,

I am MR AHMAD OSMAN, the accountant personal confident to Dr. Ravindra F. Shah who died together with his wife Dr. Mrs. Manjula Parikh-Shah in a plane crash on the 1st Oct. 2003 on their way to attend wedding in Boston. Dr. Ravindra F. Shah, is an American, a physician and industrialist, he died without having any beneficiary to his assets including his account here in Burkina Faso which he opened in one of the Bank in the year 2000 as his personal savings for the purpose of expansion and development of his company before his untimely death in 2003. The amount involved is (USD 10,500,000.00) Ten Million Five Hundred Thousand USD, no other person knows about this account, I am contacting you for us to transfer this funds to your account as the beneficiary,) but I don't know any foreigner, I am only contacting you as a foreigner because this money can not be approved to a local person here. Reply urgently so that I will inform you the next step to take
urgently.

Kindly reply me on my atternative email address (ahmadosman1@voila.fr)

Sincerely,
AHMAD OSMAN

Absence from Canada

I have been traveling in Egypt, Oman and India all of November and have not had good Internet access. IU am certain, based on past performance that CBC.ca has continued to misinform Canadians on Israel/Palestine during this time, and regret I have not been able to comment.

I return to Canada next week and will resume blogging.