"You must show more respect to Palestinian Torontonians amid this pain and hate. Look into the details as credible observers track Israel’s embrace of positively genocidal violence in Gaza, and start to report on these horrors with some basic human respect."
October 17, 2023
To:
Linda Oland, Director of News & Information Programming, CP24
Hannah Alberga, CTV News Toronto Multi-Platform Writer
Dear Linda Oland and Hanna Alberga,
I am writing on behalf of Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East (CJPME, cjpme.org) to insist on immediate correction of your October 11 report, “‘I am broken’: Toronto residents, loved ones in Israel speak about trauma, sadness.”
Still posted to your main page, this story is glaringly insensitive to Palestinian pain.
As of the time that I write this, on October 17, this report remains on your main page as a source of information on the Middle East Crisis, but it is both outdated and false.
It is outdated, in that you claim that “more than 2,200 people have been killed on both sides – a death toll unreached in Israel since the 1973 war with Egypt and Syria.” In fact, while estimates of Israeli fatalities now range between 1,300 and 1,400, the confirmed number of Palestinians in Gaza killed by Israel stands at more than 2,800 – see, for example, the New York Times – with an additional estimated 1,200 Palestinians buried under the rubble.
It is also just false, in that the phrase “killed on both sides” is not worded to indicate the vague (and outdated) cumulative number you give but instead to suggest that this loss was experienced on both sides, i.e., that more than two thousand Israelis have been killed, too.
This inaccuracy is compounded by your unbalanced human interest details, which place exponentially more value on Israeli than on Palestinian life.
Notice, moreover, that your phrase “unreached in Israel” does not adequately correct the false impression you give that this is the largest death toll in the Palestine conflict since 1973. To cite one single massacre, in 1982, under Israeli supervision, a larger number of Palestinian civilians were killed in the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps alone. Meir Kahane, an icon for today’s Israeli government, called that massacre “a great, great day.”
Kahane supporters in Israel’s government and on the streets of Toronto continue to spew this hate. And Sunday, in Illinois, the explosion of hate that has seen Israel kill an estimated one thousand Palestinian children this week in Gaza produced a hate crime in which a six-year-old Palestinian child was stabbed 26 times, killed for being Palestinian.
You must show more respect to Palestinian Torontonians amid this pain and hate.
Look into the details as credible observers track Israel’s embrace of positively genocidal violence in Gaza, and start to report on these horrors with some basic human respect.
Feel free to contact me at 438-380-5410 if you would like to discuss this further.
Sincerely,
Dan Freeman-Maloy