I don’t understand why everyone is so angry about CTV Toronto’s report about Hannukah. This is no different from when local media outlets’ reports about the start of Ramadan include images of the 9/11 attacks.
You know, all the times that’s happened.
CTV News Toronto issued an on-air apology on Thursday after war scenes were shown during a noon-hour news story highlighting the opening night of Hanukkah at Mel Lastman Square.
The company blamed a “technical glitch” for the footage being aired.
“We mistakenly aired images of the war in the Middle East while reporting on the beginning of Hanukkah,” CTV News’ Zuraidah Alman said in the apology, which was also posted online. “We are deeply sorry that this occurred during our coverage of this important and special event.”
The person who inserted images from Gaza fighting into this report - who’s totally not antisemitic, just anti-Zionist, I assure you - it totally getting fired. Or maybe getting a contract with the federal government to conduct DEI training. Time will tell.
It was likely a disgruntled behind-the-scenes employee who sabotaged that Hannukah story, but sometimes it’s the person in front of the camera, reading from the teleprompter, who’s been radicalized.
Take Mary Kostakidis, formerly of Australia’s SBS. Please.
A few days ago a veteran Australian journalist and former news anchor called Mary Kostakidis retweeted in full and approvingly this paragraph from a website she’d been reading. This is it:
If the Jews being shot and shoveled into ovens could just break through that wall, of course, they would kill anyone they found partying right on the other side of it! And, of course, they would take women and children hostage and drag them back into their hell inside if doing so would give them leverage to free their fellow Jews from torture and death! This thought, of course, set in motion an obvious but taboo moral question in my mind about one of the most pressing matters of our time: Is it understandable why people in Gaza, similarly trapped behind a wall in a concentration camp and experiencing genocide, would kill or take hostage people they found partying on the other side of the wall holding them in?
The question at the end there is a rhetorical device. If these actions by “people in Gaza” weren't “understandable” in the opinion of the author, then he wouldn’t have asked it. His meaning is clear. If Jews were in the position Palestinians in Gaza were in - a position directly comparable to Jews during the Holocaust - then they’d have committed the same crimes on October 7th that Hamas and its allies did. Note the three “of courses”, “of course” these putative Holocaust Jews would kill anyone found “partying” nearby, “ of course” they’d take children hostage, and “of course” this thought had set in motion the “taboo moral question” which the brave author so very nearly answers. How could it not?
Put this way what took place in Southern Israel a month ago - horrible though it may have been but no longer realistically deniable - is not just explicable, it is actually excusable. The rapes, the close-up executions, the face-to-face murder of children, the mutilation of bodies and the glee with which some of it was done, are all to be understood as the inevitable, righteous and even strategic response (“if doing so would give them leverage”) to the situation of the Palestinians of Gaza as of October 6th.
[…]
And this is where the mute and to me most repellent aspect of the above paragraph comes in. Because though Jews were in these camps and ghettoes or being transported, there weren’t any October 7th massacres committed by break-out Jews. A few people escaped from cattle trucks. Rather fewer found themselves at the bottom of a pile of bodies and climbed through their dead friends and relatives to survive the war. There were a couple of camp revolts in which guards’ weapons were seized and a very few of those involved made it out to the forests, where they joined partisans or - far more likely - hid. Not much time for massacring. None for raping. It was just about surviving.
So the mute suggestion here - which even the author couldn't acknowledge - is that the Holocaust Jews lacked the bravery and gumption of the Gazans. Otherwise they would have done what Hamas did and broken through the walls and murdered everyone on the other side - maybe raping and mutilating a few along the way.
Needless to say, the great human-rights activist Kostakidis is an Assad apologist and a Xinjiang genocide denier. More evidence, as if any were needed, that the Venn Diagram for those who insist Israel is carrying out a genocide in Gaza and those who deny China is doing anything wrong to the Uighurs is a near-perfect circle.
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