When the CBC recently backed away from an internal policy that instructed its journalists not to label 9/11 as a terrorist attack, it was a sensible reversal. But it occurred only after the broadcaster first dug in its taxpayer-financed heels.
The entire episode is worth exploring because the back-and-forth over the CBC memo spurred debates over the nature of terrorism, and the broadcaster’s failure to think about the reality of what the word actually means.
It was lawyer and columnist Warren Kinsella who broke the news last week that CBC’s senior director of journalistic standards and public trust, Basem Boshra , recently sent a memo to staff about the upcoming 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.
Boshra instructed CBC staff in the following manner: “Do not refer to the Sept. 11 attacks as terrorist attacks.” Note the imperative: do not!
The reason for these specific instructions about 9/11, as later noted by Boshra in explaining the CBC’s reversal, was a longstanding CBC policy under which non-journalists may be cited as labelling an event or group as terrorist but not CBC staffers themselves.
The argument was articulated in 2023 by another CBC manager: “Because these words are so loaded with meaning, politics and emotion that they can end up being impediments to our journalism.” That earlier policy was defended by others, including retired CBC journalist Keith Boag, who lamented the reversal when it comes to 9/11.
Boag offered up a defence of prior CBC policy when he asked this rhetorical question : “In what way was 9/11 a terrorist attack that does not also apply to other attacks on civilians for political purposes? Take, for instance, recent events in the Middle East.”
Boag later clarified that he thinks 9/11 and October 7 were both terrorist attacks. But he still argued for a consistent CBC approach to civilian casualties, whether they result from terror or war. And therein lies the problem.
Let us move beyond disputes between current and former CBC staffers and consider the larger context. There is a real distinction between the civilian casualties that unavoidably occur during war and are incidental to it, and terror attacks whose first and only purpose is to cause mass civilian deaths.
When this distinction is not made, it reveals a severe gap in one’s ability to reason and even to consider the awful choices that democratic leaders face during war.
All civilian deaths, whether from terrorism or during war, are horrific, but distinctions matter, as does the rationale. In the Second World War, Canada and its allies were not going to sacrifice more of our own soldiers on the beaches and fields of Europe after years of war with Nazi Germany, in order to try to avoid civilian casualties. This would have been an impossible goal because such casualties were inevitable.
Likewise, Americans were not going to sacrifice even more of their own young men to invade the home islands of Japan after suffering their own massive casualties in the battles at Iwo Jima , Okinawa and other battles in the Pacific. That’s why U.S. President Harry Truman chose to use the atomic bomb to force a Japanese surrender in August 1945, knowing it would result in large numbers of civilian casualties.
More recently, the choice Israel had after October 7 was to try to destroy Hamas — which embedded its fighters within hospitals and schools , and which used civilians as shields — or to surrender in the face of an existential threat. That would be akin to asking Great Britain to surrender in 1939, or after the Blitz. Quite rightly, it did not, and eventually Germany suffered large numbers of civilian casualties, as well.
There are no good choices in war. There are always two bad ones and leaders in democracies must decide which is the lesser of two evils: surrender to an existential tyrannical threat, which might end in (more) genocide, or fight back knowing that civilian casualties will occur.
The terrorists behind 9/11 did not have to attack civilians in New York and Washington, D.C. The terrorists in Hamas did not have to attack a music festival in southern Israel. Those were direct attacks on civilians in peacetime, not incidental but still tragic civilian casualties in wartime. The distinction is not that hard to make.
In fact, Palestinian leaders, including those in Hamas, have had decades to try and make a deal with Israel to reach a peace arrangement similar to the one Israel has negotiated with Egypt , Jordan and other Arab countries including the more recent Abraham Accords . But Palestinian leaders, most famously Yasser Arafat , have consistently chosen not to. And Hamas has instead chosen to attack civilians .
Moral reasoning should lead one to blame Hamas for the same reason civilian casualties in Europe and Asia in the Second World War were the responsibility of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. Equating terror attacks and civilian deaths in war as equivalent reveals an inability to reason about the limited choices faced by democracies and the difference between civilian casualties resulting from necessary wars and unnecessary terror attacks.
No one should pretend civilian deaths in war are anything but awful choices, even when justified as necessary in the hellish cauldron of war. Even former British prime minister Winston Churchill wondered aloud if he and his fellow leaders were “beasts” for the choice they made to bomb civilians as part of their effort to win the Second World War.
But the core problem with refusing to make moral distinctions and reason through the awfulness of civilian deaths is that it can lead to a spurious moral equivalence.
This is how the actions of former prime minister Mackenzie King, former U.S. president Franklin Roosevelt, Churchill and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, along with other democratic leaders, come to be portrayed or assumed to be no different than the actions and motivations of former al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden and Hamas terrorists.
When that assumption is in play, we can see CBC’s problem and the problem of the chattering classes more generally. They were unable, or unwilling, to make moral distinctions, and to come to their own conclusions about the difficult choices made by democratic leaders during war and those made by terrorists.
At the end of it all, we see in CBC’s actions either an inability to think critically or a deliberate refusal to do so. Honeyed words from the director of public trust or invoking some spurious notion of moral neutrality does not change that reality.
National Post
Mark Milke is the president and founder of the Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy. Barry Cooper is a professor of political science at the University of Calgary and a senior fellow of the Aristotle Foundation. His book on terrorism was found in Osama bin Laden’s library during the Seal Team Six raid in Abbottabad in May 2011.
