Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, the toast of Davos and a darling of the global media establishment, recently embraced the language of war after trade negotiations with President Trump collapsed. Asked by a reporter why it felt as though Carney was going to war, Carney replied: “We were attacked. You’re at war when you get attacked. We got attacked.”
In less than two weeks, Americans who honor their history will commemorate the 25th anniversary of 9/11. On that evening in 2001, President George W. Bush addressed the nation from the Oval Office, condemning the strikes as “despicable, evil acts of terror.” Days later, before a joint session of Congress, Bush added: “On September the 11th, enemies of freedom committed an act of war against our country.”
Americans overwhelmingly understood 9/11 as an act of terrorism. To suggest that the nearly 3,000 people murdered that morning had it coming would have triggered overwhelming outrage. Over the past decade, however, a growing willingness has emerged to dilute the horror of that day—repackaging mass slaughter as America’s just deserts for its foreign policy.
That shift became impossible to ignore in 2019. Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar, addressing a Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) banquet, trivialized the coordinated attacks by claiming the organization was founded because “some people did something and that all of us were starting to lose access to our civil liberties.”
Never mind that CAIR was established in 1994. A 2006 analysis by Daniel Pipes and Sharon Chadha—Pipes was once described by The Washington Post as “perhaps the most prominent U.S. scholar on radical Islam”—detailed a roster of CAIR employees, board members and associates who had been arrested, convicted, deported or otherwise linked to terrorism-related cases and organizations.
Democratic allies and corporate media outlets rushed to Omar’s defense, insisting her words were taken out of context. Omar’s repeated defenses that her controversial remarks were taken out of context or misunderstood didn’t spare her from receiving the 2019 “Antisemite of the Year” designation from Stop Antisemitism, an organization focused on combating Jew hatred.
Nevertheless, as recently as 2019, diminishing 9/11 still generated a substantial political and public backlash. That barrier has since collapsed.
Popular radical streamer Hasan Piker openly declared that “America deserved 9/11,” yet some political figures proudly embrace him. Piker campaigned publicly with Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, who initially resisted demands that he denounce Piker’s views as a “gotcha game.” El-Sayed later called the 9/11 remark “dumb” and said America did not deserve the attacks but still refused to say he would stop campaigning with Piker and called him “critical” for Democrats to embrace.
The institutional rot has metastasized across the border. A leaked internal memo obtained by Toronto Sun columnist Warren Kinsella revealed that the taxpayer-funded Canadian Broadcasting Corporation instructed its journalists:
Do not refer to the Sept. 11 attacks as terrorist attacks.
The memo was issued by Basem Boshra, CBC’s senior director of journalistic standards and public trust.
First, a shoutout to the person who leaked Basem Boshra’s memo, which triggered immediate outrage across Canadian and American political circles—especially poignant given that 24 Canadians were murdered in the attacks. Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree swiftly issued a statement affirming that Ottawa “has always recognized 9/11 as the deadliest terrorist attack in history, and we unequivocally condemn terrorism in all its forms.” Culture Minister Marc Miller called the directive a “pedantic and foolish guidance that caused legitimate anger.”
Faced with a ferocious backlash, Boshra beat a hasty retreat, publishing a blog post exempting 9/11 from the attribution mandate. The reversal did not end the fallout. Hours later, the Republican National Committee revoked previously approved press credentials for CBC and Radio-Canada journalists covering its Sept. 9-10 midterm convention in Dallas, saying their attendance would be an “insult” to 9/11 victims. The National Post reported that Radio-Canada did not even have CBC’s editorial policy. But the damage was done. The CBC’s ingrained groupthink—and the lengths to which it will go to sanitize facts that challenge its sensibilities—stood fully exposed.
Boshra was merely enforcing an institutional reflex championed by his predecessor, George Achi. On October 7, 2023, Achi issued a directive ordering newsroom staff: “Do not refer to militants, soldiers, or anyone else as ‘terrorists.’” Even with attribution, Achi insisted, “we should add context to ensure the audience understands this is opinion, not fact.” He specifically said the rule applied even to statements from the Canadian government and Canadian politicians.
The semantic gymnastics were obscene. CBC Ombudsman Jack Nagler later reviewed complaints arguing that the policy downplayed the October 7 slaughter. As HonestReporting Canada noted, Nagler conceded that “using almost any credible definition,” the slaughter was terrorism, acknowledging that “if CBC were to describe events of that day as an act of terrorism, it would be an accurate description.”
CBC’s insistence that government terrorism determinations amounted to “opinion, not fact” is especially jarring given Canada’s ties to Iran.
In 2022, Justin Trudeau’s government formally designated Iran as a regime engaged in “terrorism and systematic and gross human rights violations.” A 2023 Global News investigation found that the Canada Border Services Agency had 141 investigations underway under those sanctions. Vancouver immigration lawyer Ram Joubin, who had been collecting public tips about suspected Iranian-regime associates, said he had compiled roughly 700 “names and entities” in Canada—including businesses and family members.
One case made the problem tangible. Roohollah Firooznam, who had served in the IRGC naval branch and later ran a company that installed and operated security cameras for Iranian government agencies and prisons, was granted a Canadian sightseeing visa in 2018. The Immigration and Refugee Board later found him complicit in crimes against humanity; Federal Court records described his company as an “arm of the government” that enabled “arbitrary detention and torture.”
Canada’s problem with terrorism, in other words, has hardly been confined to arguments over newsroom vocabulary.
Six Canadians, or persons with Canadian family ties, were murdered by Hamas. Among them: prominent Israeli-Canadian peace activist Vivian Silver; Canadian-Israeli Galit Goren’s 23-year-old daughter, Tiferet Lapidot, who was murdered at the Nova music festival; and Adi Vital-Kaploun, who was killed defending her children. Vital-Kaploun’s mother, Jacqui Rivers Vital, later told the National Post that the RCMP initially advised her to stay quiet about Adi’s Canadian citizenship over concerns that public disclosure might pressure Ottawa to pay a ransom to secure her release.
The CBC’s track record of sanitizing inconvenient truths reflects a broader Canadian institutional cowardice.
In April 2019, CBC reported that Russia was trying to pass a “fake news story about then-Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland’s grandfather being a Nazi.” The underlying history was not fake.
Freeland’s maternal grandfather, Michael Chomiak, served during World War II as editor-in-chief of Krakivski Visti, an antisemitic Ukrainian-language newspaper published in Nazi-occupied Poland. Sheldon Kirshner documented that the paper operated from offices and printing presses expropriated from a Jewish owner who was later murdered in a Nazi extermination camp, praised Adolf Hitler and Nazi authorities, hailed the formation of the Ukrainian Waffen-SS Galizien division, and wrote after the Babi Yar massacre that Kiev was “beautiful, glorious” without its Jewish population.
When viewers complained, CBC Ombudsman Jack Nagler investigated and found that the network had broadcast inaccurate information without checking the underlying facts:
It is evident nobody confirmed the facts before going to air. This is obviously cause for concern, as well as a breach of journalistic standards.
Kirshner, a former Canadian Jewish News writer and son of Holocaust survivors, noted the real scandal wasn’t what Freeland’s grandfather did, but how the political and media elite reacted:
If [Freeland] had been a person of integrity, a mensch, she would have called a press conference and acknowledged her grandfather’s unsavory relationship with the Nazis… Instead, she obfuscated the issue by insinuating that stories about Chomiak’s past were nothing more than a Russian attempt to undermine the West.
This is the state of Canada’s taxpayer-funded national broadcaster. When a foreign leader levies steel and aluminum tariffs, Ottawa calls it an “act of war.” But when hijacked commercial jetliners level skyscrapers and murder thousands of innocents, the CBC calls for nuance and demands attribution before daring to utter the word terrorism.
For Mark Carney and the CBC, trade disputes are acts of war. Mass murder is just an editorial style debate.