The Media Accountability Project  

On June 5, 2025, CJPME media analyst Lynn Naji was published in the Sherbrooke Record in response to Bryan Laprise’s article, “Moved in yet kept out.”

Lynn praised the piece for spotlighting the hardships Palestinian refugees Jehan and Nasser El-Sayed continue to experience in exile, having been forced to evacuate Israeli bombardment in Gaza only to face new forms of exclusion in Canada.

But she sharply criticized the article’s failure to explicitly name Israel as the perpetrator of Gaza’s destruction. Quoting Palestinian writer Mohammed El-Kurd, who writes:

“correspondents

kill us with passive voice...

they never mention the culprit, let alone

condemn the culprit.”

She condemned the use of passive language that erases the culprit—Israel, the occupying power committing the crime of genocide against Palestinians.

Lynn argued that this is not simply about assigning blame. It is about offering readers essential context and ensuring that Israel is not absolved of accountability. Without this clarity, Palestinian suffering is at risk of being portrayed as self-inflicted or occurring in a vacuum, rather than as the result of decades of Israeli genocide, occupation, blockade, and apartheid.

You can read the full letter here.

That said, I’d like to raise a concern that echoes a point made by Palestinian writer Mohammed El-Kurd, from occupied Jerusalem, in Perfect Victims and the Politics of Appeal. He writes, “correspondents kill us with passive voice… they never mention the culprit, let alone condemn the culprit.”