A reckoning is long past due.

Long guarded by taboo and "progressive" manners, left-wing antisemitism has been incubating in Canada for years. This can't go on.

And, indeed, as he listened to the cries of joy rising from the town, Rieux remembered that such joy is always imperiled. . . that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years. . . and that perhaps the day would come when, for the bane and the enlightening of men, it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city.

-Albert Camus, The Plague.

A shock to the conscience.

Today’s Real Story newsletter is a continuation of my efforts in the National Post, the Ottawa Citizen and The Real Story to help readers and subscribers come to terms with the question: ‘How could this be happening?’

By “this,” I mean: A big black monster truck showing up at a Palestine Solidarity rally in Mississauga, flying two huge Taliban flags. Eggs thrown at a synagogues and swastikas scrawled on the homes of rabbis. Innumerable expressions of delight and exhilaration at the spectacle of dismembered Jewish children among the 1,300 victims of the bloodiest pogrom since the Holocaust.

Everyone reading this knows exactly what I mean, and if you don’t by now, I can’t help you.

I’m not going to waste my subscribers’ time with expressions of my own revulsion with these outbursts or with some full-throated defence of Zionism. I’d rather make use of myself by reporting what I’ve come to know, and that’s what I’ve been up to.

See most recently: In Front Of One’s Nose: A shadowy alliance of Islamist antisemites and Canadian "progressives" goes back two decades, to a founding gathering in Cairo. . . There’s also a trove of links and resources in my newsletter, Everything Has Changed. It's not just about Israel. It's about civilization and its enemies. And its enemies are among us.

The main event today is a guest post by my dear friend Fred Litwin. Its immediate value and relevance is in the answers it provides to the ‘How could this be happening?’ question. In richly investigative detail, the post is drawn from his 2015 book Conservative Confidential, which I was proud to serve as editor. The book sets out why Fred left “the Left.”

The excerpt draws primarily from Fred’s investigations of the role Canada’s mass media played as a petri dish for the bacillus of highbrow antisemitism and its anti-Zionist pathogens. For those of you who still yearn for a healthy and well-funded public broadcaster in Canada - as I do - Fred’s post here will be a rough and sobering read.

But first. . .

The baccilus can lie dormant for years and years

The Left’s toleration of antisemitism, along with a ghoulish solidarity with fascistic death cults and torture states at the Left’s loudest fringes, has been a taboo subject for too damn long.

For the first decade of this century, sometimes inadvertently and sometimes deliberately, the mass media in Canada nurtured a Left-Islamist concordat by presenting it as an “anti-war” phenomenon. Ever since, the sociopathologies attending to those alliances have found a welcome home across the spectrum of avant-garde arts and letters in Canada.

It’s necessary to understand this if you want to get your head around the depravities of the past several days. By depravities I mean the faculty unions and student unions, the tenured professors at some of Canada’s most prestigious universities, the “anti-war” and “pro-Palestine” activists and innumerable cool-kid personalities who have all been delighted, enraptured, enlivened, and positively gleeful about the Hamas atrocities carried out in Southern Israel on October 7.

It’s long past time for the taboo to be smashed. Especially in Canada.

Toronto is the birthplace of Israeli Apartheid Week, a phenomenon that has spread to more than 50 cities around the world. It is no mistake that “Israeli apartheid” derives from the Stalinist Valery Skurlatov’s seminal Politizadat tome, Zionism and Apartheid, with its antisemitic emphasis on the “abominable essence of the God-chosen.”

It is not by accident that the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement so de rigueur in progressive circles derives from the purposely antisemitic Arab League boycott of the Yishuv, the Jewish community in the Holy Land, that was first enforced before the State of Israel was even born. It is old wine in new bottles.

It is no mere coincidence that the Samidoun Network, banned in Germany last Friday owing to its antisemitic agitations and its links with the terrorist-listed Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, is based in Vancouver. It was no coincidence that three days after Samidoun was put on Israel’s terrorist list two years ago Ottawa stupidly registered Samidoun as a federal non-profit corporation, allowing the organization to restore its fund-raising capacity, and issue tax receipts in the bargain.

Full disclosure: Samidoun and its friends do not like me. According to more than 85 organizations from around the world and 125 individuals, including the Jew-hating gargoyle and former Pink Floyd bassist Roger Waters, Samidoun’s recent notoriety is all my fault: “All of this recent hysteria can be traced back to the one article written by Terry Glavin.” By which they mean this investigation, right here: The Curious Case of Khaled Barakat.

In my recent efforts (see the links above when you’re done here) I’ve pointed out the institutional history that entwines Hamas and its founders in the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood with the Third Reich. I’ve drawn attention to the Nazi alliances nurtured by Brotherhood patriarch Hassan al-Banna, and the bloody pogroms incited by the 1930s-era Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin el-Husseini, Adolf Hitler’s principal Arab ally. The current Hamas godfather, Ismael Haniyeh, is Husseini’s direct heir and successor.

For all its pretensions to leftist internationalism, the PFLP, too, was midwifed by European fascism. The PFLP was born a beneficiary of the Swiss financier Francois Genoud, an unrepentant Nazi. Genoud was the manager of Haj Amin el-Husseini’s financial affairs. He covered the trial costs of Adolf Eichmann, the senior Nazi overseer of the Holocaust who was captured by Israeli agents in Argentina in 1960 and tried and hanged in 1962. Genoud also paid the legal bills for the Gestapo officer Klaus Barbie, the “Butcher of Lyon” convicted in France of dozens of crimes against humanity in 1987.

Twenty years ago, when Canada was preparing to place Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the Hezbollah on Canada’s terrorist list, who lobbied against the proposed Criminal Code amendments in the hopes of securing Canada as a safe haven for these monsters? The Canada Palestine Association, International Solidarity Movement-Vancouver, No One Is Illegal-Vancouver, the Palestine Community Centre, Palestine Solidarity Group and the Stop War Coalition.

These same groups had already opposed banning the PFLP and the Palestine Liberation Front in Canada. To merely call the PFLP and PLF “terrorist groups” doesn’t do justice to their barbaric history or their ongoing savagery (the PLF’s best known atrocity was its 1985 hijacking of the cruise ship Achille Lauro, shooting the wheelchair-bound American tourist Leon Klinghoffer in the head and throwing him overboard).

I have yet to come across any evidence anywhere of any individual or institution of the “Left” holding these groups to account. The standpoints of the Canadian “anti-war” groups that stood up for the PFLP and the PLF 20 years ago have not changed. They have only become more commonplace among “progressives” in the years since.

In the case of the PFLP’s Vancouver-based international outreach network, Samidoun - terrorist-listed in Israel, outlawed in Germany, its organizers banned from entering the European Union last year and yet operating openly in Canada - here’s a selection from a list of the organizations currently backing Samidoun in Canada:

The B.C. Civil Liberties Association, the Canadian Foreign Policy Institute, the Canadian Union of Postal Workers, Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East, Hamilton Coalition To Stop The War, Independent Jewish Voices Canada, the Oakville Palestinian Rights Association, Toronto BDS, the U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, and the Vancouver Peace Council.

Some further resources before we get to Fred’s piece today:

Ben Cohen’s Some of My Best Friends: A Journey Through Twenty-First Century Antisemitism (shorter take, my piece in the Ottawa Citizen, nine damn years ago: Backstory: The Pathology of Canada's "Bistro Antisemitism").

Yascha Mounk’s essay in Pursuasion, just yesterday: The Deep Roots of the Left’s Deafening Silence on Hamas: There are serious ideological reasons why parts of the left have gone so badly astray. The implications go far beyond the conflict in the Middle East.

A focus on the UK, but with a reach into Canada: The Left’s Jewish Problem: Jeremy Corbyn, Israel and Anti-Semitism. Alan Johnson, meanwhile, has just put together this handy reference: Progressives’ and the Hamas Pogrom: An A-Z Guide.

Now to Fred’s guest post, which documents the milieu in Canada’s cultural establishment that incubated the plague that has resurfaced so dramatically over the past ten days. Fred’s contribution is a record of everything you are intended to forget about where this past week’s obscenities came from.

Don’t Let Them Airbrush This From Our Memory

By Fred Litwin

Right or wrong, the United States went to war in 2003, and within three weeks Saddam Hussein’s regime fell. It can’t be denied that the majority of Iraqis were quite happy to see him go, and not just the joyous and celebrating Kurds. There were any number of things about the invasion that were worth debating, but instead of a vigorous debate, something like derangement swept through the culture.

The CBC’s current struggle with coherence on the subject of the word “terrorism” goes back 20 years, back to a time when the broadly left-wing community where my own values were nurtured was undergoing something like early-onset dementia. Anti-Israel polemics and antisemitic messaging started to show up at rallies that didn’t even have anything to do with Israel, at least outwardly.

Indymedia, a worldwide activist website that emerged in the run-up to the 1999 anti-globalization riots in Seattle, was like an asylum. The web network became a gathering place for anti-capitalist conspiracy theorists obsessed with Israel and with Jews.

As early as May, 2002, Indymedia’s Hamilton and Windsor editions featured The Hidden Tyranny, a 1976 tract purporting to be an interview with a Harold Rosenthal, “an influential Jew learned in Jewish ways” who was said to be intimately familiar with “the invisible world of Jewry.” The document was an amateurish recapitulation of the Protocols of Zion.

In February 2003 at an “anti-war” rally in Victoria, somebody brought along a sign referring to a “Jewish worldwide conspiracy.” The following month in Toronto, at a combined “anti-poverty” and “anti-war” rally, a demonstrator insisted that Jews participating in the rally should go home.

Not long after Iraq invasion, “anti-war” coalitions and their various (ostensibly) left-wing parties and activist fronts had almost invariably morphed into co-ventures and collaborations with virulently anti-Israel groups, most notably of the far-right, Islamist kind — sometimes Sunni-derived, sometimes Khomeinist.

The foundation of these alliances was solidified in the lead-up to the Iraq war at the first of several annual conferences in Cairo [see this Real Story newsletter, under the subhead The Cairo Declaration] that brought together hundreds of Canadian, American and European activists. Signatories to the first Cairo declaration were not merely marginal and frustrated Marxist college dropouts.

Among them: George Galloway, the “maverick” British MP who would go on to be kicked out of the Labour Party, the prominent playwright and screenwriter Harold Pinter, who would go on to such awards and honours as a Nobel Prize and his investiture as a Commander of the British Empire and the French Legion d'honneur; the popular environmentalist and Guardian columnist George Monbiot; fabulously successful movie maker and film director Ken Loach, recipient of several honorary doctorates; actor Julie Christie; New Left celebrity Tariq Ali.

Among the more prominent Canadians: Ali Mallah, vice president of the Canadian Arab Federation, vice president of the Ontario New Democratic Party and vice-president of the Canadia Labour Congress. Mallah’s Canadian Arab Federation would go on to lose its federal funding over its apparent links to terrorist and antisemitic groups.

About 800 attendees showed up for the 2003 conference, which melded resistance to “capitalist globalization and U.S. hegemony” with the “heroic Palestinian intifada against the Occupation” and “Iraqi resistance to Occupation.” The convention attendees also pledged support for Palestinian militants’ rejection of the Oslo peace accords.

In Canada, the most extreme, far-right Islamists and anti-Israel terrorist groups were embraced by left-wing “pacifists” and “anti-war” activists. Just one prominent figure to emerge as a spokesman of the Toronto Stop the War Coalition, for instance, was the sharia advocate Zafar Bangash from the Institute of Contemporary Islamic Thought (ICIT). Bangash was a 9/11 conspiracy theorist of the “they let it happen” school.

The activists from the Cairo conferences continued their annual work in Canada, and their efforts were by no means confined to speeches delivered in the basements of out-of-the-way labour halls. By November 2005, the West Block of Parliament Hill in Ottawa was the venue for a multi-seminar conference titled “Challenging Canada's Role in Empire.” The conference sponsors included the Canadian Peace Alliance (directly aligned with the “Respect Party” of disgraced British MP George Galloway), Muslim Presence Ottawa, and other groups of the far-left, “anti-imperialist” variety.

The Mass Media and Mass Hysteria

When all hell broke loose during the visit of President Bush to Ottawa in December of 2004, a Globe and Mail article noted ominously that “a coalition of anti-war protesters, left-wing lawyers and anti-capitalists refused yesterday to condemn those who might resort to violence” during his visit.

By then, the avant-garde media was already a lost cause.

Adbusters was a lavishly produced Vancouver-based “anti-capitalist” journal with a worldwide circulation of 40,000. Its stable of contributing writers matched that of any glossy “capitalist” American magazine. The March 2004 issue contained an article listing all the “neoconservatives” in the Bush administration, with the Jewish names highlighted.

The “mainstream” media was going off the deep end, too.

Thomas Walkom of the Toronto Star wrote that Bush “was a perfect candidate for prosecution under Canada’s Crimes against Humanity and War Crimes Act.” Elizabeth May, the executive director of the Sierra Club of Canada (and later the leader of the Green Party), wrote: “Bush represents death. We call on Canadians to greet him by tying black crepe or cloth ribbons to everything in sight.”

Haroon Siddiqui, the Toronto Star’s Editorial Page Editor Emeritus, a reliable interlocutor for the madness, was a leading figure of the Canadian liberal establishment - Order of Canada, Order of Ontario, honorary Doctor of Letters from York University, board member of the Canadian Club, advisory board member of the Ryerson University School of Journalism.

Siddiqui’s columns were a constant stream of anti-American and anti-Israeli invective. In Siddiqui’s view, the Khomeinist regime in Iran was dependably sophisticated and moderate. Just about any crank with an anti-American conspiracy theory, and any Third World strongman obsessed with Israel, would sooner or later appear favourably in a Siddiqui column.

Three months after 9/11, Siddiqui wrote that Osama bin Laden “was trained by the CIA,” a constantly recurring “anti-war” fable. Within a year Siddiqui was back with an Islamist conspiracy-theory falsehood: the civil liberties of American Muslims had been “suspended post-Sept. 11.” In Siddiqui’s columns, Khomeinist Iran had produced “an elected class of moderates who are leading the intellectual debate on democracy in the Muslim world. Americans should not be believed when they talked about the brutal repression Iranians were suffering under the ayatollahs: American opposition to the Khomeinist regime was only because of Tehran’s “history of unapologetic support for those resisting Israeli occupation, in southern Lebanon and now the occupied territories.” Meaning Hezbollah and Hamas.

Another Toronto Star luminary, Linda McQuaig, also appeared regularly in Rabble.ca, a webzine founded in April 2001 by Marxist activist Judy Rebick. Rabble was a widely-read platform for left-wing writers like Rick Salutin, Naomi Klein and Murray Dobbin, and also regularly linked to commentaries from The Guardian, Edward Said, Znet, Noam Chomsky, Robert Fisk, John Pilger, Alexander Cockburn and others of that sort.

After 9/11, Rabble saw its unique visitors rise from 38,000 to 50,000 a month. A judge in a libel case would go on to characterize Rabble as the left-wing version of Free Dominion, a far-right internet discussion forum. Other “progressive sites” also enjoyed huge spikes in readership. In the United States, The Nation went from 65,000 a day to more than 100,000. Zmag, the home of Noam Chomsky, saw its traffic more than triple to 200,000 visitors per week.

But in Canada, you didn't have to go to “alternative” sites for Rabble-type polemics. Rabble columnists routinely showed up in the Toronto Star, the Globe and Mail and the CBC - and vice-versa. Rick Salutin wrote weekly for the Globe and Mail. Linda McQuaig wrote regularly for the Toronto Star. Naomi Klein found an international home in American left-wing standard The Nation and a Canadian home at the Globe and Mail. Rebick wrote occasionally for the Star, and was a regular guest on the CBC. Maude Barlow and Gerald Caplan, who also wrote regularly for Rabble, could also be found in the Toronto Star and the Globe and Mail.

The Rabble writer whose columns seemed to move most seamlessly between the Globe and Mail, the CBC and the Toronto Star was Heather Mallick, who lamented in a September 2003 Globe column that “Iraq’s 23 million people are now enslaved by Texans.” To Mallick, George W. Bush was a war criminal, and when Bush came to Ottawa Mallick argued that Canadian authorities should take the opportunity to arrest him.

Canada was already succumbing to the Bush administration’s domineering, out of fear of incurring American wrath, Mallick wrote. “The only question is how precisely the Bush cult, one of the most violent on Earth led by a self-declared ‘war president’ will try to humiliate us.”

What could have been legitimate protest movement with a focus on the Iraq war had morphed into total incoherence. Americans were now as evil, or more evil, than Al-Qaida. The Iraqi people were now enslaved by a war over oil. Suicide bombing was a legitimate tactic to oppose Israel, and as for Islamist terrorism, we just needed to understand the “root causes.”

At a gay dinner party in Ottawa, I ended up in a nasty argument after being asked a question that was making the rounds a lot in those days: Why should the Palestinians suffer because of the Holocaust? It was a particularly horrible conversation because it was really about whether Israel even had a right to exist. I was told I was “right wing,” which was amusing, since I’d been a critic of Israel’s settlement policy ever since my early lefty days in the 1970s. I’d always supported a Palestinian state. I did then, and I still do.

More email fights ensued. I was losing more friends. I was loathe to go to dinner parties —everybody would be denouncing George Bush and saying stupid things about Americans. And I really didn’t need more people to tell me how Israel was the cause of all evil. It was time to go elsewhere and find new places to hang out. . .

The Top-Down Deconstruction of the CBC

After 9/11, I would listen to the CBC only to get my blood boiling, and boy did it boil. The Current, started in 2002, was politically biased well to the left. Michael Enright on Sunday mornings was embarrassingly shallow and his distaste for Israel was palpable. Dispatches with Rick MacInnes-Rae was completely unserious — in 2002 one of his guests was the 9/11 Truther Michael Springmann. The local Ottawa morning show had me reaching for a shoe on a continual basis.

This was at a time when Canada was fighting in Afghanistan, the Americans were in Iraq and much of the world was confronting the threat of Islamist terrorism. The CBC could have been bringing us major intellectual voices from across Canada and around the world, but its rolodex was so limited and its corporate culture so entrenched that it seemed impossible for CBC producers to think outside their high-tech box on Front Street in Toronto.

Canadians were exposed to an extremely narrow range of “progressive” voices who made sense of the post 9/11 world only in an old and faded anti-American, “anti-imperialist,” Chomskyite context. Then there was the CBC’s embrace of the radical-chic and its preoccupations with pop culture, which only added another layer of frivolousness to CBC programming.

In 2006, Tony Burman, the CBC News Editor in Chief and the corporation’s head of English-language news and current affairs programming (we’ll come again to Burman a bit later) explained to the Toronto Star that in 2004 the CBC had conducted a “sweeping survey” of 1,200 Canadians that found “parts of the operation didn’t appeal to young people.”

A later Star article referring to a CBC study (perhaps it was the same study) quoted Jennifer McGuire, CBC Radio’s Executive Director of Programming: “We went into people’s homes and looked at their record collections. It was a fairly in-depth and exhaustive piece of research.” The Star noted: “Half the CBC radio audience is over 65 and the changes are aimed at attracting younger listeners.”

So, changes were definitely necessary. But here’s what CBC did.

The first change was to hire Avi Lewis and George Stroumboulopoulos.

Lewis, who’d cut his teeth as host of The New Music, a music magazine show on the MuchMusic cable channel and Citytv, was a scion of the Toronto high-society Lewis family. His grandfather was federal NDP leader David Lewis. His father Stephen was an outspoken former leader of the Ontario NDP and CBC broadcaster. His mother Michele Landsberg was a colourful left-wing Toronto Star columnist. His partner was the anti-globalization activist superstar Naomi Klein.

The CBC picked up Avi Lewis to host the hip political-affairs show Counterspin in the late 1990s, and later he hosted the CBC public affairs shows The Big Picture and On the Map.

George Stroumboulopoulos was a rock jock from Kelowna, B.C. who had gone on to work as an entertainment reporter and producer-host of The Punk Show and The New Music program for MuchMusic. Following a brief stint serving as the “advocate” for NDP patriarch Tommy Douglas in the CBC’s Greatest Canadian competition series, Stroumboulopoulos was elevated in 2005, straight into the job as host of The Hour, a CBC Newsworld current affairs television program.

“With its vertigo-inducing graphics, cheeky sensibility, quirky stories, and multi-pierced host, ex-MuchMusic vee-jay George Stroumboulopoulos, The Hour certainly looks like nothing else on Newsworld,” The Toronto Star observed at the time. “Unlike some other CBC hipsters, past and present, ‘Strombo’ is the real deal.” The guests on The Hour give a sense of the sort of show it was to become.

From the Strombo guest list I acquired through an Access to Information request: The noted “anti-imperialist” Robert Fisk (at least twice), the Reverend Jesse Jackson (twice), the Globe and Mail’s former Maoist columnist Jan Wong (three times), NDP leader Jack Layton (six times), Avi Lewis’s dad Stephen (eight times, including two appearances with his wife and Avi’s mother, Michele Landsberg), the later-disgraced CBC hipster icon Jian Ghomeshi (10 times).

It wasn’t all “Canadian content,” by any means. More from the Strombo list: the American counterculture heroes Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Cindy Sheehan, Ralph Nader, Gore Vidal, Chris Hedges, Angela Davis and Jeremy Scahill, failed Democratic Party presidential hopeful and anti-global warming crusader Al Gore (three times), “anti-war” documentary filmmaker Michael Moore (three times), famous American military deserter Jeremy Hinzman (twice). And of course the famous Canadian left-wingers Judy Rebick and Olivia Chow were always on standby.

It wasn’t all one-sided — the conservative journalist and former George Bush speechwriter David Frum was on several times, and several Canadian Conservative politicians appeared on the show. But these appearances were transparently token efforts at balance.

Perhaps the most embarrassing show featured Strombo’s March 30, 2009, conversation by video hookup with the British “anti-war” MP George Galloway, whose celebrity status in Canada had been enhanced by his supporters’ claims that Ottawa had “banned” him from entering the country.

Strombo never challenged Galloway’s version of events, which didn’t hold up against the facts. Immigration officials had merely warned Galloway that if he were to proceed with his intention to visit Toronto for one of his many “anti-war” engagements, he might find himself turned away. A few weeks earlier, Galloway had handed a pile of cash — 25,000 British pounds — to Ismail Haniyeh, leader of the terrorist-listed Hamas organization. In a speech from a podium in Gaza, Galloway had declared: “Here is the money, this is not charity. This is not charity, this is politics.”

Even a court petition by Galloway’s Canadian supporters resulted in a judge concluding that there was no “ban” for him to consider, to either overturn or uphold. But the story somehow stuck: Galloway had been “banned” from Canada, and a year later, Galloway was back on Strombo’s show, in person, denying that he made any political contribution to Hamas. Galloway said the money he provided was for the Hamas “Ministry of Health” and that it was proper that the money go straight to Haniyeh. Stroumboulopoulos pursued no questions of Galloway’s claim. Strombo’s tone during the entire 15-minute interview was one of fawning admiration.

Like Stroumboulopoulos, Avi Lewis came out of Citytv’s MuchMusic, but Lewis had been The New Music show’s “political specialist.” Lewis’s CBC debut was a new show, Counterspin, which he hosted from 1998 to 2001. CBC brought Lewis back in 2006 to host The Big Picture, an audience-participation public affairs show, and the following year he was hosting a daily public affairs program called On the Map, a briefly lived effort that showcased a stream of cool anti-American bias and sneering condescension. In one particularly embarrassing episode, Lewis confronted the renowned Muslim dissident Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

Lewis was aghast that Ali had dismissed his assertions that North American Muslims felt “under siege” and were afraid to contribute to charities or travel by air because they’d “end up on a list somewhere” or find themselves “in detention for years without ever seeing charges against them.”

Ali laughed at him.

For a “counter-narrative” to the situation in Gaza, Lewis turned to former British Intelligence officer Alastair Crooke for a segment called “Debunking Gaza’s Civil War.” Crooke’s organization, Conflicts Forum, argues that the West should politically engage with Hamas and other radical Islamists. On Lewis’s show, Crooke argued that Hamas would bring law and order and tranquility to daily life in Gaza, if left undisturbed. Lewis was impressed.

In a show on women In Afghanistan, Lewis relied on Ann Jones, a regular contributor to The Nation Magazine, who touted the views of the former Afghan MP Malalai Joya, a minor and nearly forgotten figure among Afghan women but a fixture in western “anti-war” circles. Joya had stood beside Jack Layton at the NDP’s 2006 “troops out” convention in Quebec.

Another young hipster the CBC hired was Jian Ghomeshi, the former drummer-singer of the popular rock band Moxy Früvous. Ghomeshi was taken on as the showcase host of a new and cool art, culture and entertainment magazine program called simply Q. An enormous amount of resources were poured into Q, and while it would have been fine enough if it had kept to interviews with rock stars and entertainment personalities, the show doubled down on the formula at work with Strombo and Lewis.

Ghomeshi and Q provided the same welcoming platform to the same counter-culture, left-wing and radical-chic celebrities from the Strombo rolodex: Angela Davis, Michael Moore, Al Gore, David Suzuki, Ralph Nader, Naomi Klein and Olivia Chow. Along with these, Ghomeshi hosted Avi Lewis, Wikileaks founder and rape-charge fugitive Julian Assange, celebrity state-secret paranoid Glenn Greenwald, NDP strategist Brad Lavigne, Vagina Monologues playwright Eve Ensler and feminist conspiracy-theorist Naomi Wolf. As a bonus, Ghomeshi occasionally threw in political commentary from the likes of Canadian rock legend Neil Young and earnest children’s troubadour Raffi.

When Michael Moore was a guest on Q on Sept. 21, 2011, Ghomeshi introduced him by playing his famous speech at the Oscars when he berated George Bush. After the clip, Ghomeshi sighs, “Wow! I still get chills hearing that.” The day before Remembrance Day 2011, Ghomeshi hosted British “anti-war” journalist Robert Fisk, who had also appeared on Strombo’s show, to explain why Canadians should not wear poppies.

Ghomeshi’s weekly media panel usually featured Jonathan Kay, the Toronto Star’s John Cruikshank and Judy Rebick. Kay was the Editorial Page Editor of the National Post at the time, the CBC’s image of a hip conservative they could live with — good-looking, suave and interested in video games and the latest electronic gadgets. Cruikshank took up the centre ground. Rebick represented the “left” as the co-founder of Rabble, the counterculture platform that had taken off after 9/11.

These were the ways the CBC tried to draw in younger listeners of a CBC-type disposition. For a time, it worked. At its zenith, Strombo’s The Hour and Ghomeshi’s Q were enormously popular among the under-65 crowd. For a while, Q was the CBC’s highest-rated show in its mid-morning time slot, ever.

Ultimately, the experiment failed. Ghomeshi left the CBC under a black cloud as a notorious “bad date” and the accused in trials involving six women and several charges of sexual assault. Like a Soviet institution airbrushing its history, the CBC had its staff remove Ghomeshi murals from the walls at head office and busied itself expunging its web archives of his presence.

Stroumboulopoulos ended up exiled to Hockey Night in Canada. Avi Lewis, whose show mysteriously disappeared in 2007, showed up shortly thereafter at Al Jazeera, the Qatari news organization richly funded by Qatar’s ruling emir, where he devoted his talents to criticizing western-style democracy.

The CBC and Jazeera-Style Journalism

The unserious and sometimes toxic political culture behind the Strombo-Lewis-Ghomeshi effort did not begin or end with them, and was not confined to the CBC’s opinion or entertainment features. It would often show up in what CBC News presented as serious analysis, most noticeably in the years immediately following 9/11, when the head of the CBC’s English-language services and current affairs programming was Tony Burman.

Burman was the CBC honcho who had ended up involved in the 2003 controversy about the CBC’s aversion to the term “terrorist.” Like Avi Lewis, Burman would join the Qatari-owned Al Jazeera after his 35-year run with the CBC ended in 2007, around the same time Lewis joined Al Jazeera. Burman was picked up as managing director of Al Jazeera English. In 2010, he became Al Jazeera’s chief strategic advisor for the Americas.

The corporate culture that had provided such easy career paths for Berman, Lewis, Stroumboulopoulos and Ghomeshi was reflected clearly in the CBC News network’s standards for news analysis. These skewed standards carried on long after Burman’s departure, most noticeably in CBC News analysis of American foreign policy and of events in the Middle East, Afghanistan and Israel.

You could see it at work in the expert commentary the corporation provided its viewers and listeners. Two instructive cases in point involve the CBC’s reliance on the “experts” Michael Scheuer and Eric Margolis.

Data from a 2014 Access to Information request I completed indicates that Michael Scheuer appeared on CBC shows a total of 35 times between 2004 and 2013, including eight appearances on The National and five appearances on Power & Politics. In addition, many segments of his interviews were repeated on local shows across the country (he was still showing up on CBC broadcasts when I was writing this book).

As for Eric Margolis, he would sometimes be introduced as “our foreign affairs analyst” or “the CBC’s Eric Margolis” or simply Eric Margolis, “reporting for the CBC.” It’s hard to say just how routinely or how often Margolis has appeared in CBC broadcasts. In 2014, the CBC was calling Margolis “a regular contributor” to CBC News, but for some reason my Access to Information request for the number of his appearances on the network was refused by CBC management.

So, who are Michael Scheuer and Eric Margolis?

The CBC typically presented Scheuer as a former CIA analyst, operative or special adviser, and occasionally as the author of the 2004 book, Imperial Hubris. You’d never know it from watching CBC News, but Scheuer, who worked on the CIA’s Osama bin Laden desk prior to 9/11 — not exactly a testament to his intelligence-gathering skills — was better known in the United States as a notorious far-right extremist whose views were indistinguishable from those of the loony far-left.

After Scheuer came to prominence in 2004 when he was outed as the anonymous CIA analyst who had authored Imperial Hubris, his “expertise” and credentials were routinely employed to conveniently prop up the fashionable and dominant “anti-war” polemics in Canada.  

In an interview on CBC News in January 2005, Scheuer said that “on Israel, no one, certainly not myself is suggesting abandoning the Israelis.” But two years earlier Scheuer was already telling a U.S. House committee that if it were up to him, “I’d dump Israel tomorrow.” But this was not a case of some dramatic conversion of an apparently sober news analyst to the extremes of a far-right ideology.

Scheuer was still appearing as a respectable expert on CBC’s Power and Politics long after he had endorsed the assassination of U.S. President Barack Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron. As far back as 2004, Scheuer was calling Osama bin Laden “the most respected, loved, romantic, charismatic, and perhaps able figure in the last 150 years of Islamic history.”

Scheuer’s “viable” foreign-policy alternative to the challenge of Al-Qaida included “the elimination of the Jewish state” and its replacement with “an Islamic Palestinian state” and “the replacement of U.S.-protected Muslim regimes that do not govern according to Islam by regimes that do.” In 2005, Scheuer told Al Jazeera that “criticizing Israel in the United States is like a martyrdom operation.” In his 2008 book Marching Towards Hell, Scheuer calls both the U.S. Democratic Party and the Republican Party “wholly owned subsidiaries of the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).”

As for Eric Margolis, the expert the CBC often called “our foreign affairs analyst” or “the CBC’s Eric Margolis” or the CBC's “regular contributor,” his credentials may be a bit questionable, but the CBC’s reluctance to disclose just how heavily the network relied on him was downright mysterious.

In 2012, in the course of answering a complaint that Margolis was not a credible expert and was inordinately hostile to Israel, CBC News Executive Editor Esther Enkin called Margolis a regular CBC contributor of several years’ standing who was “widely viewed as a foreign affairs expert, especially in matters concerning the Middle East.”

The complaint was triggered by a segment that featured Margolis analyzing the 2011 elections in Egypt. CBC Ombudsman Kirk Lapointe weighed in, saying that it was fair to call Margolis a foreign affairs analyst and it was “not necessary to review his background.” The CBC’s error was to present him as a correspondent of some kind, although Margolis “certainly had the credentials to appear as a credible guest,” Lapointe wrote, because he had witnessed events in Egypt firsthand.

So, just who was Eric Margolis? Was he really a foreign affairs expert?

Until 2014, Margolis was the longtime owner and chairman of Jamieson Laboratories, Canada’s largest manufacturer of vitamins and supplements. He is an expert, of sorts. He is the author of two books — American Raj, which is more or less a condemnation of American imperialism in the so-called Muslim World, and War at the Top of the World, which covers much of the same ground but in Central Asia.

From his swish Forest Hills mansion in Toronto, Margolis wrote a column for the conservative Sun newspaper chain for nearly 30 years (the chain dumped him unceremoniously in 2010), and also regularly supplied analysis to the far-right webzine LewRockwell.com. Perhaps best known for its conspiracy theories about AIDs and the JFK assassination, LewRockwell.com also regularly published contributors such as Michael Scheuer and 9/11 truther Paul Craig Roberts.

Margolis dabbled in 9/11 conspiracy theory himself. A decade after the Sept. 11 attacks, Margolis was still insisting there was no evidence implicating Osama bin Laden in the atrocity. In 2004, Margolis accused Israel of assassinating PLO chairman Yasser Arafat with poison. Deeply sympathetic to the Pakistani establishment and hostile to Afghan forces opposing the Taliban, Margolis was a key contributor to the far-right Republican Pat Buchanan’s American Conservative magazine.

While I was working on this book, as far as I could tell his last appearance on CBC News was on July 27, 2014, during the Hamas-Israel war. According to Margolis, it was all Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s fault, of course.

Prior to 9/11, Margolis was a respectable journalist who freelanced for a variety of reputable newspapers. Curiously, even while the CBC was claiming him as “our foreign affairs analyst” or “the CBC’s Eric Margolis,” he sometimes appeared on other television networks, like CTV and Ontario’s TVO. But after 9/11, just like Scheuer, Margolis revealed himslef to be a right-wing crank who could be reliably depended upon to provide the CBC with “left-wing” analysis that dovetailed indistinguishably with the crazier elements of the “anti-imperialist” crowd in the liberal-left demographic that the CBC catered to.

By 9/11, all of CBC’s news and current affairs programming was in the hands of Tony Burman, the senior CBC executive who would go on to work for Al Jazeera. By March 2002, Burman was the editor in chief of CBC’s English-language services.

Some of Burman’s column headlines: Charlie Hebdo — The case for not reprinting. Iran steps up, leaving Canada, Israel alone. Time for Canada, Israel to stop living in a fantasy world. Iran’s critics, full of sound and fury. America ripe for a new revolution. Peace in Syria requires Iran, not bombing. Canadian extremism — we’re wrong on Iran. Invading Iran: why resistance is now crucial. Ottawa unwise to echo Netanyahu.

By 2011 Burman had left Al Jazeera and returned to Canada to teach journalism at Ryerson University in Toronto and to write columns for the Toronto Star. In January, 2012, Burman predicted: “There will be a war in the Middle East within the next several months, triggered by an Israeli attack on Iran.” By September, 2012, after Canada closed the Iranian Embassy in Ottawa, he was calling Benjamin Netanyahu Canada’s “new foreign minister,” and accused Stephen Harper’s government of “outsourcing” Canada’s Middle East policy to Jerusalem.

That should give you an idea of the tenor of CBC's news and current affairs broadcasting in the years following 9/11.

The CBC’s systemic anti-Israel obsessions

For a short period during the Burman years, there was some public attention paid to the degeneration of the CBC, but monitoring the CBC’s excesses was a job that fell mainly to Honest Reporting Canada - an NGO with a focus on the news media’s anti-Israel bias. From its founding in 2003, HonestReporting went on to file about 1,000 complaints to the CBC over the following decade. About 70 per cent of its complaints were sustained to HonestReporting’s satisfaction.

After launching in 2011, the Sun News Network filed hundreds of Access to Information requests with the CBC. The loud, conservative gadfly of Canadian journalism fought running battles with the CBC’s gatekeepers, sometimes scoring news from the effort.

One Sun story exposed the $1 million cost of an opera based on the life of Brian Mulroney that was never broadcast. In another scoop, a Sun News reporter found that CBC Hubert Lacroix had been forced to reimburse the corporation for roughly $30,000 in dodgy travel expenses. Sun News could be over the top, but its crusade against the publicly funded CBC hit a nerve.

Because of all this, with my own Free Thinking Film Society in Ottawa, I set out to produce a documentary on the CBC, to examine the structural, cultural and institutional biases of the corporation.

The CBC is a huge organization with almost $2 billion in revenues (roughly 60 per cent coming from the federal treasury) and about 7,000 employees providing radio, television and online services in the two official languages as well as eight aboriginal languages. We could have easily made our film about the CBC’s Toronto-centricity, its anti-Americanism, its obsession with identity politics, its cultural insularity, and so on. We decided to focus on the CBC’s bias against Israel and its bias against small ‘c’ and large ‘C’ conservatives. But it was the CBC’s antipathy to Israel that was most egregious.

I contacted Mike Fegelman of HonestReporting Canada and he sent me a USB stick with 120 clips from a variety of CBC shows. We spent hours searching YouTube, and several bloggers sent us ideas and video. We spent the whole summer watching, downloading and editing videos, adding titles and subtitles and writing commentary. By the time fall had arrived, we had produced a 50-minute documentary, This Hour Could Have 10,000 Minutes: The Biases of the CBC.

What we showed was that Israel would sometimes get dragged into stories that had nothing to do with Israel, that the CBC would run puff pieces in place of serious reports on such stories as the Canadian boat to Gaza, and reports would sometimes include interviews with 9/11 Truthers and other anti-Israel cranks.

The CBC’s anti-Conservative bias would sometimes sneak into weather reports, and even game shows could turn political. Comedy shows often embedded anti-Conservative bias in completely unfunny skits. The CBC even managed to turn Barack Obama’s visit to Canada into a story mocking Stephen Harper. But it was on the subject of Israel that the CBC routinely failed to demonstrate even the slightest degree of journalistic objectivity. Radio-Canada was the worst.

Just one example of Radio-Canada's bias was an April 9, 2010, program titled Canada and the Lobby: How the Pro-Israel Lobby is changing Canadian policy towards the Middle-East. The documentary presented the Conservative government’s efforts to reign in the federally funded agency Rights & Democracy organization as a case of “acquiescing” to the Israel lobby, of a piece with federal cuts to NGOs that supported Israel Apartheid Week and court challenges to Israeli policies. The documentary disputed the view that the UN Relief Works Agency’s textbooks were anti-Israel and claimed that the Canadian government had made a mistake in cutting UNRWA funding.

There was so much evidence of the CBC’s bias against Israel, making our documentary was less an effort in gathering the evidence than in deciding how much to leave out. The CBC’s animus towards Israel was vertical and horizontal, from the top management across its news and public affairs broadcasting.

Just one notable example of the CBC casting Iran as being in need of protection from Israel - rather than the other way around - was the documentary The New Great Game, appearing in instalments on The National in October, 2012. The film was produced in cooperation with Press TV, the Iranian state-owned broadcaster.

At one point, the documentary narrator asserts: “While there is no proof that Iran has even made the decision to start a nuclear arms program, Israel’s nuclear arsenal will largely outgun whatever weapons Iran might acquire. But from the vantage point of Iran, it is the one being threatened, not the one doing the threatening.”

The film then turns to Noam Chomsky who asks: “What country in the world could have a greater need for deterrent?” And then the narrator: “Lacking the ultimate deterrent in nuclear weapons, Iran only has conventional forces to defend itself from an attack.”

The documentary The New Great Game was produced by Alexandre Trudeau, Justin Trudeau’s brother.