The Ben Mulroney Show - Ben Speaks with Israeli Ambassador to Canada Iddo Moed about False narratives

Episode Date: June 5, 2025

Guests and Topics: Guest: Iddo Moed - the Ambassador of Israel to Canada If you enjoyed the podcast, tell a friend! For more of the Ben Mulroney Show, subscribe to the podcast! https://globalnews.ca/national/program/the-ben-mulroney-show Follow Ben on Twitter/X at https://x.com/BenMulroney Enjoy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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over-deliver. Welcome back to the Ben Mulroney show. Thank you so much for spending a little bit of your Thursday with us in, in the war between Israel and Hamas. There are many fronts and on most of those fronts, Israel is has the upper hand in terms of a military firepower and capacity to prosecute the war on its terms, despite it going on for far too long.

It should have, Hamas should have put down their arms a long, long time ago. That being said, on one particular front, Israel is a decisive disadvantage. And that is on the media PR front, where so many false stories, unverified claims, get parroted out into the ether for all of us to consume. And when those things are, it turns out, that they are lies,

the retraction is quiet. The retraction is timid, but not before the damage has been done. To talk about this, we're joined by Edo Moed, the ambassador of Israel to Canada. Welcome back to the show, Ambassador. Thank you for having me, Ben. It's a pleasure. So you've written, I think, a very concise prosecution of the point I just made in the national post. False narratives about Israel have violent consequences. I remember ambassador at the beginning of this war,

the simple fact that journalists, well, what were at the time to me, established respected sources, were using the Gaza health ministry, which is the propaganda arm of Hamas, to relay how many people were dying in this war. And they were taking those words as gospel. To me, was the height of irresponsibility.

And yet, it just became par for the course. It is astounding that people, not just people, the general public, but also sometimes even government, use this information and act on it. And that's extremely dangerous because right now when we are speaking here, it's the 5th of June, it's a very dangerous time and I'm very, very concerned because we are witnessing something that I call a perfect storm, where so much disinformation and misinformation is brewing around us. And I think it is the responsibility of the government

to come out and say very clearly to the public where things stand in this disinformation and misinformation war that you just mentioned, is dangerous because we saw what happened in Washington. We saw when two Israeli embassy employees were shot gunned down. We saw what happened in Boulder, Colorado, when a terrorist attacked people who were actually calling for the release of the hostages.

So it's a very dangerous and volatile time. And therefore all of us, including the media, including the political level, should really fact check before we do something and say something. Yeah, and some of it is patently false. We had a scenario early on in the war where there was a completely false claim that Israel had bombed a hospital. It turns out it was a faulty Hamas rocket that had hit that hospital. It turns out it was a faulty Hamas rocket that had hit that hospital. And that

information went out not by anonymous trolls online, but you had our, you had Milanizoli of the liberal government parroting that out with no proof that it ever happened. And by the time that lie had gone around the world, the damage was done, even though it was corrected in certain places. I still I still have people referencing it today on my social media feeds. Yeah, absolutely. That's a good example. Because if I haven't checked recently, but that that tweet stood for a very, very long time afterwards, even after our CMP performed their own investigation and came to the conclusion that was a

Palestinian Palestinian Islamic Jihad missile that misfired and landed in a parking place of hospital, Al-Hali Hospital. So it's a great example. Now you've been very careful in this article. You're very careful not to say that those terrorist attacks that happened in the United States, both in Boulder and in Washington were due to the press. But you also say, the press isn't making life safer for Jews.

I mean, all it takes, I don't know what it takes to push somebody to be violent towards another person. But I have to believe if you are of a certain mindset, if you do believe, unlike me, that Israel is the aggressor, Israel is a genocidal colonialist, imperialist power, a warmonger, they don't care about the innocence in Gaza. If you believe all that stuff,

you are going to hear these stories that are misrepresentations of the truth, sometimes flat out lies. And who knows, that could be the straw that breaks your back. That could be the thing that tells you I need to do something. I need to take action. And this is me wearing a white hat coming to the rescue of the people of Gaza. And and it's and the fact that these organizations have been so cavalier with

the truth, it's irresponsible. I agree. I mean, whatever triggers somebody's mind will never know. But people take action and very quickly and people feel emboldened when they don't see any counter reaction around them. So they hear those repeated messages. But I want to highlight one thing, all of us can check it today, this very minute. We heard earlier today of the fact that IDF, the Israeli Defense Forces were able to retrieve the remains of Judy Weinstein Hagi and her husband, Gabi Hagi, from Gaza. And you know, who she was and what she did, I don't think that anybody, she's a Canadian,

she was and what she did. I don't think that anybody, she's a Canadian, she was a Canadian and I'm not sure that many people understand this and not many people really care what happened to her on the 7th of October. Actually she and her husband were the first victims of this attack. Yeah. They were walking outside the kibbutz, outside the boundaries of their kibbutz along the border with Gaza when they were gunned down and they were laying there wounded for hours until they were shot dead and then taken into Gaza. I don't, I so I wonder when we are talking about what people see and understand of the conflict, how much attention is paid to a Canadian that has suffered and her family that has suffered for so long.

Oh Ambassador, that's where I wanted to finish up our conversation. You know, as the ambassador to Canada, you interface with the Canadian government often. As you just said, there was a Canadian citizen who was gunned down by terrorists, her body only now reclaimed, hopefully being able to come home to her family where they can finally have some peace.

And yet, like this should have been an outrage that the, that the leadership of our, of our country should have been spearheading. And yet you see what happens when our prime minister signed some sort of communique with the prime minister of the UK and France, sort of taking the opposite position to the point that they got thanked by Hamas. How do you make sense of this dynamic? I'm very worried. I'm very concerned because it's not only that he was thanked by Hamas, it's the second time that Hamas thanks Canada. And I think that's a that's a very important moment to pause and think for everyone. Where do we stand and what do our actions mean on the ground in Gaza. So there's one thing to

cater for political issues at home, but if you don't make the connection between what you're doing here and what you're doing there, then that's a cause for concern. And of course, I'm raising that concern with the Canadian authorities all the time. The last time your name popped up on my Twitter feed, you were being called, you were being summoned, that was the word, summoned by Anita Anand to her office in Ottawa. And just a few short hours later, we saw the horrific attack on the two innocents in Washington, DC. What was that meeting about? Can you tell me? The meeting was about an incident that took place in Jenin where a group of foreign diplomats including Canadians were walking led by Palestinian authority into somewhere around Jenin. It was and still is an active combat zone because there are Hamas terrorists there that IDF was acting against.

And so the Palestinians led them around. They coordinated the tour with them, but they went off the coordinated path that was coordinated with child. Oh, that's right. Ambassador, I remember all of a sudden I see all of these these fact checking journalists online saying the idea fired on Canadians. Yeah, not none of it, of course, took place. I have shot some shots in the air. You can see the footage that nobody was on the fire, nobody was in any kind of danger situation. They just ended in the wrong place and they were led there by most probably by Palestinians intentionally.

We're still investigating this but we released all the information prior to the meeting with the foreign ministry. So when I was called, actually they already had the information that we released before that, but I was then asked formally to check into this, which is of course always what we do. Yes, of course. Ambassador Moed, thank you so much for spending time with us today. I wish you the very best. You've got a big job and I thank you for your time. All the best to you too John Lishner. Thank you. stay in Los Angeles, a VIP Days of Our Lives set tour, a helicopter ride over LA, and so much more.

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