Palestinian children hold out pans to receive food. Photo: Anas Deeb/UPI.
By Yves Engler – May 9, 2025
The cowardice in Canadian media is remarkable. Indifference to Israel’s live streamed holocaust is a requirement to make it in the dominant media.
Wednesday evening, I asked prominent right-wing Quebec nationalist intellectual Joseph Facal why he backs Israel as it slaughters and starves Palestinians in Gaza. While he aggressively promotes Zionism in Le Journal de Montréal and on QUB radio, the former Quebec minister and HEC professor simply refused to respond to my question. Even though it was asked during the question period of a public forum, Facal said it wasn’t relevant to his talk and “I won’t respond tonight”.
Facal’s reaction is particularly embarrassing since he co-hosts a radio show with Richard Martineau who had a meltdown ostensibly because I asked him a similar question on the street last month. Claiming I had no right to film, spoke in English and my phone was right in his face, Martineau went to the cops to claim I “harassed” him (in reality, he took my phone and repeatedly lunged at me while I initially spoke in French, never touched him and wasn’t that close to him). A month later Martineau is still writing (deceptively) about our interaction in Le Journal of Montreal and slagging me on social media. Thursday he did a clip with Facal on my questioning the former minister at a public forum headlined “On avait affaire à un emmerdeur” (We were dealing with an annoying person).
Martineau and Facal are but two examples of the racist, power serving, anti-Palestinian character of Quebec media. In February Pivot published an investigation headlined “Comment les grands médias québécois ont favorisé Israël”. It details the systematic bias in Quebec media coverage of Israel’s war on Palestinians in Gaza.
But Quebec’s dominant media is less genocidal than their English Canada counterparts. Recently, CBC host David Common cast doubt on the description of the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza offered by Jon Allen, a former Canadian ambassador to Israel who is also Jewish. Common lead with “You talked a bit about the humanitarian situation inside Gaza Jon but it’s hard to know because there are so few independent voices that exist within Gaza.” Yes. Israel blocks international journalists from entering the coastal strip and has killed over 200 Palestinian journalists. But Common ignores these facts.
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Seeing Samira Mohyeddin’s post about Common’s pro-Israel bias reminded me of his cowardly response to my question three weeks ago. After the French language federal election debate, I saw Common outside the CBC building — I recognized the face but couldn’t remember his name — so I asked if he had any thoughts about Israel’s genocide. He said no, seemed to suggest it wasn’t a subject he dealt with and walked away.
Indifference towards Israeli violence in Gaza, as well as in the West Bank, Syria, Yemen and Lebanon, is a prerequisite for rising in Canada’s dominant media sphere. It seems rot rises in a media scape shaped by imperialism and vast societal inequities.
On Thursday Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East media analyst Jason Toney posted that “not a single Canadian outlet covered” a stunning recent UN Human Rights Office statement headlined “End unfolding genocide or watch it end life in Gaza: UN experts say States face defining choice.” The media has also largely buried Israel’s egregious drone attack against the Freedom Flotilla seeking to break the siege of Gaza. On Tuesday a group organized a rally outside Radio Canada’s office in Montreal to criticize the public broadcaster for failing to cover Israeli drones hitting a humanitarian ship, which was to include prominent environmentalist Greta Thunberg, off the coast of Malta. (Rallies are planned at Maltese and EU offices in Toronto, Montréal and Ottawa on Sunday).
Activists and left media should be doing a great deal more to challenge genocide-enabling media personalities across the country. Their workplaces are identifiable, and they often give public talks.
We need to expose their complicity in unimaginable horrors and ramp up the pressure on Canada’s famine-enabling genocidal media sphere.
Yves Engler
Yves Engler is Montreal-based writer and political activist. In addition to ten published books, Engler's writings have appeared in the alternative press and in mainstream publications such as The Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, Ottawa Citizen, and Ecologist.
