B’NAI BRITH CANADA CHALLENGES THE CBC: DEFENDS CANWEST MIDDLE EAST REPORTING

Toronto, January 17, 2002

For Immediate Release

Toronto — B’nai Brith Executive Vice-President Frank Dimant fought back today to defend balance and honest reporting on the Middle East. His comments come on the heels of complaints within the journalism community that CanWest is unjustified in its policy for reporting on the Arab-Israeli conflict.

“When the journalists of the CBC, CTV, the Globe, and the Star complain in lockstep that CanWest unfairly advocates media fairness for Israel, it’s a case of Goliath whining that David has a pebble in his slingshot,” says Frank Dimant, executive vice-president of B’nai Brith Canada.

The new openness towards Israel at CanWest media, says Dimant, is the first breach in “the monopoly held by anti-Israeli media elites in 30 years.” If these journalist complainers were at all true to their principles, adds Dimant, they would lavish praise on CanWest for making possible a debate where there has not been one in decades.

“The only issue is whether these CanWest critics are prepared to engage in honest discussion. The rest is just a red herring,” says the B’nai Brith executive director. By “red herring,” Dimant was referring to those journalists who complain because CanWest is a sizeable company. Canwest’s largest competitors are the far larger, Bell Canada telecommunications giant, which owns the CTV and the Globe and Mail, the hugely powerful Toronto Star, which dominates print media in southern Ontario, and the taxpayer-subsidised CBC.

“I don’t know if the complaints against CanWest are just a case of sour grapes because they’ve lost their monopoly control and don’t want to engage in a real exchange of ideas,” adds B’nai Brith President Rochelle Wilner.

“These intensely biased critics of Israel and CanWest wilfully ignore the terrible things that Arabs are doing to each other. The Arab Middle East is the only part of the world where there is more brutality, more torture, less freedom, less lawfulness, less hope, and more scapegoating of outsiders today than 30 years ago. Without Israel or the CIA or Christian missionaries or Buddhist statues to blame,” adds Ms. Wilner, “these failed regimes would have to look in the mirror and they wouldn’t like what they see.”

B’nai Brith reserved its harshest criticism for the CBC noting that the CBC had whitewashed Arab atrocities and reported uncritically Arab claims for more than 30 years. Dimant cited examples including:

In the period leading up to the Gulf War, the CBC criticized the U.S. president with much more severity than Iraq’s murderous dictator and forecast that the allies would lose hundreds of thousands of soldiers in a war that would last years.
In the period leading up to the post-9/11 Afghan campaign, the CBC warned that the brutal winter would make a military effort unsuccessful, if not entirely impossible.

“With rare exceptions, these critics of CanWest have served Canadians poorly. It’s not just that the media have parroted so many of the anti-Israel fabrications coming from the Arab dictators. It’s also that the media have almost never failed to make a failed prediction in the Middle East, and a real debate is long overdue,” concludes Dimant.

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For further information, please contact Frank Dimant at (416) 802-1057

B’nai Brith has been active in Canada since 1875 as the community’s foremost advocacy and volunteer organization.