CBC ‘whitewashes’ Hamas terror in article for kids, Canadian watchdog says

The Oct. 30 article, “Looking at history to understand the latest Israel-Hamas war,” on CBC Kids News “failed acknowledge that the current war began with Hamas’s terrorist attack on Oct. 7,” according to HonestReporting Canada, a watchdog.

“Since this conflict began on Oct. 7, more than 8,300 Palestinians have been killed, according to the Hamas-run Health Ministry,” the CBC wrote. “In Israel, about 1,400 people have been killed, mostly civilians, and around 229 hostages are still being held in Gaza, according to the Israeli Defense Forces.”

That phrasing “is true, strictly speaking,” but “it completely whitewashed Hamas’s murderous terrorist attack which slaughtered 1,400 innocent people in southern Israel,” wrote Mike Fegelman, executive director of HonestReporting Canada. “With the current phrasing, a child would assume that on Oct. 7, a conflict simply broke out spontaneously.”

Fegelman allowed that articles for children might avoid mentioning particularly graphic violence, but “there is no justification for completely omitting the catastrophic Hamas attack—the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust—which was the undisputed catalyst of the current war.”

“To describe Hamas as using ‘aggressive or violent actions in support of a cause’ is akin to describing the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks as a series of airplane crashes—true, but exceptionally misleading,” he added.

The CBC article also included a two-year-old video, which did not address the Oct. 7 Hamas terror attacks.

Canada’s national public broadcaster, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, received about $900 million in government funding in 2021-22.