CBC: Biased Coverage of Israel

Close-Up Footage of Mavi Marmara Passengers Attacking IDF Soldiers

Today, as I listened to CBC Radio coverage of deaths on an aid ship to Gaza boarded by Israelis, I got the impression that Israeli soldiers were senseless murderers whom the world needed to keep in check. I knew there must be a lot not being said. So I looked to see what truepeers at Covenant Zone blog had to say and found the above video.

Coast to Coast radio had fair and balanced coverage of this incident this evening. Host George Noory, who is of Lebanese-Christian heritage, asked a good question: Since Turkey knew that Israel was allowing aids ships to Gaza (after first checking them for weapons), and this ship left from Turkey, why didn't Turkey tell the Israelis that this was an aid ship? It's as if they wanted this incident to happen.

A Thousand Israel Supporters Turn Out to "Battle for Truth" Rally in Vancouver

Roughly a thousand people turned up at the sprawling Schara Tzedeck Synagogue on Oak St. in Vancouver on Thursday evening to a high security – no purse or back pack got through the door unexamined -- “Community Solidarity Gathering for Israel”. Some in the overflow crowd at the rally organized by the Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver were turned away. There was simply no more room. Even the balcony was jam-packed.


“There is a battle for truth,” speaker Dr. James Lunney, Member of Parliament and Chair of the Canada-Israel Interparliamentary Committee, told the crowd.

Loud applause.

“Hamas fired more than 450 rockets into Israel in the week leading up to Israel’s response”, Lunney said. The Canadian government sees the conflict this way: “Hamas is responsible for the current crisis.”

You won’t find the current Conservative Canadian government in the middle of the road on the Israeli-Gaza conflict, Lunney explained. Being the MP for Nanaimo-Alberni on Vancouver Island, he used a forestry industry analogy: If you’re driving along the road and you turn a corner and see a logging truck coming toward you, the last place you want to be is in the middle of the road. Laughter. On the Israeli-Hamas conflict, Lunney said, “The middle of the road is neither a right place or a safe place.”

Yet the middle of the road is exactly where past Canadian governments have been, Lunney said. They have taken a “moral equivalence” approach to the two sides in Israeli-Palestinian tensions, “condemning neither, supporting neither”. That’s over. “The Canadian government sees no moral equivalence between Israel, a vibrant if imperfect democracy, and Hamas…”, Lunney said. He described Hamas as “terrorists who use military aggression…using their neighbors, including women and children as shields.”


Like Lunney, grade 12 student Igal Raich sees the Israel-Hamas conflict as a battle for truth. There was one lie Raich was particularly eager to set the record straight on when he took the podium: “Israel does not intentionally kill women and children but attacks rocket launchers. But they [Hamas] are using women and children as human shields.”

Raich, who announced that he will be joining the Israel Defense Forces when he graduates this year, is a product of the David Project at King David school in Vancouver. “The David project empowers us to confront and respond to anti-Israel bias”, he said. In the Project, students are taught “historical accuracy, moral decision-making, and activism.”

Raich went to the anti-Israel demonstration in downtown Vancouver on Dec. 29th. “I didn’t go to cheer them on”, he said. “I went to protest against the continual bombardment of Southern Israel by Hamas.”

A giant video screen at the front of the room allowed the crowd to see speakers, including Anglican Reverend Dr. Richard Leggett who said they had been told to "keep it short".

Setting the record straight was also a goal of Dr. Michael Elterman, Chair of the Pacific Region Canada Israel Committee. Claims made about Israel in the media, he said, are too often “ill-informed and intellectually lazy”. He saw the claim that Israel is contributing to a “cycle of violence” as a prime example. “It confuses the pyromaniac with the firefighter.”

Another on the long list of claims Elterman challenged was that Israel is using “disproportionate force”. “Israel under reacted for 8 years,” he said, “which only acted to encourage Hamas.”

The dearth of balanced reporting on the Israel-Hamas conflict was a problem that Elterman saw as extending to anti-Israel protesters – including the fifteen or so standing on the sidewalk outside. As Israel supporters entered the rally, protesters had stood on the sidewalk loudly chanting, “Hey, hey, Israel! How many people have you killed today!” Elterman asked the crowd, “Where were the protesters outside tonight when Israeli civilians were being terrorized and rocketed for eight years?” When you leave tonight, he urged, “Ask them.”


The Vancouver rally was one of several held in major cities across Canada on Thursday evening. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud spoke to the rally via a pre-taped video. He explained that in response to Hamas “firing rockets, missiles, and mortar shells directly into population centers”, Israel was pressed to act to ensure the “security and safety” of it’s citizens. “This is what Canada would have done for the people living in Toronto”.


After the rally, which ended with a “Song of Peace”, the anti-Israel protesters were nowhere to be seen outside. But uniformed police were everywhere.

Program

To read the speakers list from the rally, enlarge the photo below by clicking on it.

Will Heather be your pick?

I thought the Wilderness Committee was about saving trees, not cutting down Israel.

But it was on the Wilderness Committee website that I saw an announcement* for Saturday’s launching of a boycott of Chapters-Indigo books. On the Wilderness Committee website, space was turned over to boycott organizers to remind readers that Israel-supporters Heather Reisman and her husband Gerry Schwartz are the primary owners of this bookstore chain. And to warn customers that this couple is up to no good.

“A bookstore that kills?”, was the message scrawled on a piece of beige cardboard held by a twenty-something woman standing by the front door of Chapters in downtown Vancouver yesterday. She was one of 10 people standing in front of the Robson St. store, the one in the new building designed to look like it’s toppling over, the one where you can buy a book or a Starbucks coffee. The protesters stood holding placards or handing out leaflets or asking customers to think twice before buying a book that would put money into the pocket of Heather Reisman. At the bottom of the placard was the web address: www. newsocialist

A man in his early twenties with short brown hair stepped toward me and said politely, “Would you like a flyer?” “Boycott Chapters-Indigo?” he continued as he handed me a white and black flyer. He had a spiel and he said it all in one big mouthful: “We’re boycotting Chapters for their support of Israeli apartheid and Israeli war crimes against Palestinians and their support of the Israeli defense force. So we’re boycotting Chapters because of their funding and their support for that.”

Heather Reisman, being not a new socialist but a smart capitalist, saw these people coming. She tried to sell a book to customers whose attention they were turning to Middle Eastern issues. She put “Heather’s Picks” on prominent display just inside the door of the store. Heather’s Pick: “Infidel” by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, “a great book personally chosen and loved by Indigo CEO Heather Reisman – 20% off, members save 10% more." Heather 's Pick: "In the name of Honor", by Mukhtar Mai. Both Ali and Mai speak out about the pernicious abuse of women by Islamists, the Islamists with whom the leftists on the sidewalk out front had aligned themselves. Heather was making a buck and making a point.

Heather is facing a boycott that is well organized though. There was a long, professionally printed, dark blue and white banner about 10 feet long, with protesters taking turns standing at each end holding it up.

Chapters - Indigo - Israeli Military: Partners in Apartheid

In Victoria “bi-weekly actions” are being held at Chapters on Saturdays. And there is a Canada-wide “day of action” planned for June.

In the black and white flyer – there was a second flyer too, a coloured one – the boycotters went into more detail about what Heather had done to motivate them to spend a Saturday afternoon working the sidewalk crowd:

Heather Reisman and Gerry Schwartz – majority owners of Chapters and Indigo bookstores – are the founders of the ‘Heseg Foundation for Lone Soldiers’, which provides scholarships and other financial support to soldiers in the Israeli Military on the basis of need and military ‘achievement’. At its peak, the foundation will distribute up to $3,000,000 annually to former ‘Lone Soldiers….

Former lone soldiers. The brochure was contradicting the message scrawled on the young woman’s killer bookstore placard: “Up to 3 million a year given to Israeli’s oppressive military.” That sounded like current military personnel, not former.

Accuracy, say critics, is not a strong point of those protesting against support for Israel. That’s why there are Chapters customers who will not stop shopping there for books. Their attitude is closer to, ‘Shop ‘til you drop.’

One critic of the protesters in front of Chapters is Dag Walker, a founder of the Vancouver chapter of the Blue Revolution, a movement which is big in France and budding in Canada and other countries. Blue Revolutionaries take the attitude that the world is better off with Israel and the U.S. and that western leftists aligning themselves with Middle Eastern Islamists are misguided. The Blue Revolution in Vancouver is, like the boycotters who showed up at Chapters, a small but committed group. And like the boycotters, they welcome anyone whose thinking is similar to theirs on this issue; in fact, they wear blue scarves at their public meetings so that they can be easily spotted by newcomers. They’ve been meeting every Thursday evening for the past year and a half at the Vancouver Public Library, rain or shine – mostly rain – in front of the Blenz coffee shop in the lobby.

I know Dag Walker but I’m not involved with the Blue Revolutionaries. I did know that they were pro-Israel; it was the black cap with the small Israeli flag on the front that I saw Walker wearing on his way to one of their meetings that first tipped me off. So I asked Walker how the Blue Revolutionaries would view the group who launched the Chapters-Indigo boycott yesterday. “We call these people Death Hippies,” he told me. “If they protest against Chapters supporting Israel, we’ll protest against them supporting terrorism.”

In fact, there is talk amongst the Blue Revolutionaries of changing the location of a future meeting -- to the Starbucks coffee shop inside Chapters, in the building that appears to be toppling over. They want to make a point, a point similar to the one made with Heather’s Picks.

Clearly, there is more than one perspective on the support for Israel by Chapters-Indigo owners Gerry Schwartz and Heather Reisman. The next time you’re shopping for a book, you can either buy from Heather or boycott her. It’s your pick.

* Since this story was published, the Wilderness Committee has 'disappeared' the announcement for the Chapters boycott from their May calendar -- although they left every other past entry intact on their calendar. The DTES Enquirer had made a copy, though, of the full page of material that the Wilderness Committee ran at their site to encourage people to attend this boycott.