Oct 12, 2024 | Socialist Action
Simcoe Park is a small green space situated beside the huge headquarters of the publicly-funded Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Dozens of journalists, taxpayers and pro-Palestinian folks, many who commuted from the Arab community in west-end Mississauga, gathered October 12 at the Front Street West parkette which is sandwiched between towers of glass and steel. They converged adjacent to the media megalith to mourn the more than 178 reporters and correspondents killed by the Israeli Occupation Force in Gaza and the West Bank since October 2023.
Names of fallen journalists (only of those identified, so far) were projected onto a movie screen while speakers, one by one, testified in bitterness, read sombre poetry and spoke in defiance of institutions that ignore or attempt to silence the critics of genocide. Next to the candle-lit vigil, staffed by organizers in black T-shirts bearing the word PRESS, stood the dark, seemingly barren office complex of the ‘national broadcaster’. The CBC sent no scribe, no camera person, not even a junior lanyard-wearing stringer to cover the commemoration of the murder of so many colleagues in beleaguered Palestine and Lebanon. The CBC and other media giants have very far to go even to approach neutrality in the face of a high tide of war crimes daily unfolding.
