As part of CBC News’ ongoing coverage of local reaction to US President Donald Trump’s peace plan for Gaza, the publicly-funded broadcaster has sunk to a new low, interviewing a Vancouver man whose restaurant has repeatedly glorified Hamas terrorism for his opinion, part of CBC’s incessant platforming local Palestinians for their opinions on the Trump plan, whitewashing their extremist statements and rhetoric.
Sobhi al Zobaidi is the owner of Tamam, a Vancouver restaurant purporting to offer “fine Palestinian cuisine,” and was featured in two separate February 6 broadcasts for CBC: an eight minute audio interview with host Stephen Quinn on his radio program The Early Edition, and a shortened video snippet for CBC News featuring the same interview.
While al Zobaidi was portrayed as a local Palestinian and restaurant owner, no mention was made of how his establishment praised Hamas’ terrorist attack. In the hours after Hamas’ October 7, 2023 massacres in Israel, al Zobaidi’s restaurant shared two images on Facebook glorifying the terrorist attacks, depicting terrorists smashing through the security barrier with Israel on their way to carry out a campaign of rape, torture, murder and kidnapping of Israeli civilians.
That didn’t stop local and even national news media outlets from giving Tamam glowing coverage which entirely ignored its extremist actions, and in early 2024, Quinn hosted al Zobaidi on his program, when he failed to make any acknowledgement of these grotesque posts.
More recently, a CTV News report giving free advertising to Tamam showed the restaurant had on display a poster featuring a Palestinian wearing a keffiyeh and a machine gun slung over their shoulder, alongside the caption “Exist/Resist/Return,” leaving little doubt as to what “resist” entails.
In his February 6 interview, al Zobaidi made full use of his time to demonize Israel and spread overt disinformation. He told Quinn that Israel is working towards “ethnic cleansing Palestinians” and its leaders are “fantasizing about a purely Jewish state,” while Quinn failed to point out that more than 20 percent of Israelis are Arabs, who enjoy full civil and democratic rights.
Throughout the interview, al Zobaidi made multiple outlandish claims, such as that for “76 years, Israel has been trying to evict Palestinians.” Although Quinn allowed this absurd comment to stand unchallenged, even a superficial perusal of the remarkable population growth of the Palestinians demonstrates in no uncertain terms that if Israel truly was trying to “evict” Palestinians, it has literally nothing to show for it.
During his conversation with Quinn, al Zobaidi repeated his tacit endorsement of the Palestinians’ right to “resist by any means possible.”
However, there was also a notable inadvertent admission by al Zobaidi, saying that for many years, he and his family would vacation in Gaza, saying “Gaza was for us, paradise.” Prior to October 7, 2023, anti-Israel activists would frequently call the territory an “open air prison,” and falsely claiming that Israel was suffocating the Palestinians there with an illegal blockade, but once it became politically expedient to do so, Gaza suddenly became paradise. Tamam has repeatedly glorified and praised Hamas’ wanton murder of innocent civilians in Israel, and the news media has responded not with a shrug, but with a year-long barrage of free publicity for the restaurant and its owner, Sobhi al Zobaidi, completely erasing any mention of the reprehensible and extremist messages on display. Stephen Quinn, whose program has been noted for its anti-Israel bias before, is evidently starting 2025 the same way it spent much of 2024.