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cleansing the news from intent, by killing journalists.....

With Israeli airstrikes on Gaza killing at least twenty Palestinian journalists—and the Biden administration working to muzzle others—Big Tech is quietly coordinating with Tel Aviv to muzzle Palestinian media outfits. 

Israeli strikes on the Gaza Strip killed three Palestinian journalists on October 25 in one of the deadliest days for local reporters since the military’s bombing campaign began nearly three weeks before. As the hours passed, footage appeared showing the moment Ramallah-based journalist Mohammed Farra learned that his wife and children were all killed in an Israeli airstrike in Gaza’s Khan Younes neighborhood. 

Similarly heart-rending scenes would play out more than once over the course of the day. Elsewhere in the besieged coastal enclave, an Israeli airstrike killed the wife, son, daughter and infant grandson of Al Jazeera Arabic’s Gaza bureau chief, Wael Dahdouh.

Israel’s attacks on Palestinian journalists came hours after US Secretary of State Antony Blinken assured “American Jewish community leaders” that he urged Qatar’s government “to tone down Al Jazeera’s rhetoric about the war in Gaza” during a recent trip to Doha. 

Suspicions that Israeli forces deliberately targeted Dahdouh’s family were quickly bolstered by comments from News 13 journalist Zvi Yehezkeli. 

“Generally we know the target,” Yehezkeli told audiences within hours of the strike, adding, “for example, today there was a target: the family of an Al Jazeera reporter.”

“In general, we know,” he concluded.

If true, it wouldn’t be the first time the Dahdouh’s outlet found itself in Israeli crosshairs. In 2021, the Israeli military leveled the Gaza tower that housed the officers of both the Associated Press and Al Jazeera. The following year, Israeli forces assassinated renowned Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu-Akleh, a veteran Jerusalem-based correspondent for Al Jazeera, in a shooting that drew international condemnation but was largely ignored by the US government, which echoes the Israeli government’s position that her killing was “unintentional.” Under Blinken, the State Department has distanced itself from its initial expressions of outrage and no longer calls for either an independent investigation or criminal charges for the perpetrators.

Big Tech censorship targets Palestinian journalists after Israel targets their homes

As the US and Israel rush to censor the voice of Palestinian journalists, Big Tech censorship has proven indispensable to Israel’s propaganda war. In the aftermath of October 7, multiple social media platforms have suspended or deactivated profiles belonging to numerous prominent journalists, human rights advocates, and Palestinian activists. The crackdown follows years of complaints alleging double standards when it comes to anti-Zionist content on social media.

Accounts operated by Eye On Palestine disappeared from Instagram, Facebook, and X on October 25, leaving more than 6 million followers unable to access one of the most popular resources providing firsthand footage of destruction in Gaza. A spokesman for Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook, insisted the suspensions were not politically motivated, asserting “We did not disable these accounts because of any content they were sharing.”

Despite Meta’s denial, it is worth recalling the company’s record of complying with Israeli government censorship requests. Following the approval of a so-called “Facebook Bill” aimed at clamping down on digital “incitement” in 2016, fanatical former Israeli Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked bragged that Facebook, Twitter and Google were complying with 70 percent of their takedown orders.

Tamer Al Mishal, a Palestinian journalist who has served as a crucial Gaza-based news source for many years, put a face to that statistic. In September, Al Mishal made waves when he published an exposé on Al Jazeera illustrating how Meta coordinated with Israeli intelligence to stifle pro-Palestinian content. When he attempted to access his social media profile days later, the reporter made an alarming discovery: his Facebook page had completely ceased to exist.

 

He wasn’t the only one. The week before, Meta suspended the Instagram account of Palestinian influencer and photojournalist Motaz Azaiza after he shared footage of the remnants of his apartment building, where 15 of his family members were killed in an Israeli airstrikes. 

“Palestinian journalists in Gaza are not just facing the Israeli occupation,” Shadi Abdelrahman, a local reporter with years of experience covering events in Gaza from the ground, explained to The Grayzone. “They also have to overcome a lot of censorship by Facebook, YouTube,” he told The Grayzone, adding: “anything on social media, they need to be very careful because they will get their accounts banned.”

“Working as a journalist in Gaza is not an easy job,” he says, not only “because you are being censored by social media, [but] also it can cause problems with Israeli authorities, especially if you’d like to leave through any crossing which is controlled by Israel.”

If you’re outspoken in your coverage, Abdelrahman says, Israeli authorities “will consider you as an enemy.”

During 2021’s Great March of Return, “those journalists who were attending the weekly marches and covering it were targeted deliberately by Israel.”

“Some of them were shot in the knees, some of them were shot in the legs. Some of them got killed,” Abdelrahman recalled.

On Instagram, meanwhile, users noted an apparent ‘glitch’ temporarily translated the Arabic word for “Palestinian” into “Palestinian terrorist.”

During an October 26 raid in Jenin, the Israeli army destroyed the memorial to Shireen Abu Akleh, the renowned Al Jazeera correspondent it killed there a year before.

https://thegrayzone.com/2023/10/27/israeli-assassinates-journalists-big-tech-biden-palestinians/

 

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ethnic cleansing.....

https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israel-palestine-war-white-house-accused-endorsing-displacement

 

“This is justifying ethnic cleansing. They know very well that neither Egypt will accept them, nor Jordan, nor will the Palestinians leave. So this is really encouraging Israel to continue with its genocidal plans and measures.”

Lara Friedman, president of the Washington-based Foundation for Middle East Peace, said the Biden administration has made it clear that there are no red lines for Israel.

“That includes not putting any red lines on where Palestinians end up,” she said. 

“You’re not saying they can’t do it publicly and you’re already pulling together funding to support it if it happens. How can you not see that as a green light?”

'A new Nakba'

Details of the request are laid out in one paragraph on Page 40 of the Office of Budget and Management letter:

Funding would also provide life-saving humanitarian assistance in Israel, and in areas impacted by the situation in Israel. These resources would support displaced and conflict affected civilians, including Palestinian refugees in Gaza and the West Bank, and to address potential needs of Gazans fleeing to neighboring countries. This would include food and non-food items, healthcare, emergency shelter support, water and sanitation assistance, and emergency protection. This would also include potential critical humanitarian infrastructure costs needed for the refugee population to provide access to basic, life-sustaining support. This crisis could well result in displacement across border and higher regional humanitarian needs, and funding may be used to meet evolving programming requirements outside of Gaza. 

It is not immediately clear from the wording whether items like humanitarian infrastructure and water and sanitation would be for Palestinians inside or outside Gaza. 

 

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dehumanisation......

Since October 7, when the Hamas attack on Israeli territory and civilians triggered a destructive bombing campaign against Gaza, Palestinian civilians have been struggling to get the full extent of their plight represented in Western media.

Whether it be British state-media, the BBC, stating that Israelis are “killed,” while Palestinians simply “die”, or CNN, whose reporter had to publicly apologize for “confirming” Israeli reports about babies being beheaded by Hamas, the Western media has displayed shocking bias and double-standards when reporting on the current Gaza-Israel war. Even when a Reuters journalist, Issam Abdallah, was killed along the Lebanese-Israeli border on October 13, the outlet itself wouldn’t even say who committed the strike, instead writing that “missiles fired from the direction of Israel” struck him and six other journalists.

There are few spaces in the Western corporate and state-funded broadcast media where a balanced and neutral approach is taken towards the current war in Gaza. Merely questioning Israel’s right to respond in the way it has chosen, indiscriminately bombing residential areas and openly blocking humanitarian aid into Gaza, is being treated as mutiny, let alone an honest discussion on what led up to the Hamas attack on October 7. Calls for a ceasefire are being labeled as radical and unacceptable. A top State Department official, Josh Paul, amongst others, has resigned from the US government in opposition to this.

One case that highlights the uphill battle Palestinians are having to fight for representation in Western media is that of Gaza-based journalist Wafa al-Udaini.

Al-Udaini was invited to speak on Talk TV, the channel that broadcasts Piers Morgan show, on October 16. Prior to giving the floor to Wafa, host Julia Hartley-Brewer had invited an Israeli military spokesperson, Peter Lerner, on for a discussion, during which he made a number of unsubstantiated allegations. Those went unchallenged by the host, who treated Lerner with respect and allowed him time to finish his points. The tone changes radically when Wafa comes on. Every question is phrased in a way to make her seem non-credible, as Hartley-Brewer challenges her by repeating back Israeli military talking points, even disputing Wafa’s description of civilian deaths as a “massacre” – the same word the host herself makes a point of using to refer to the Hamas attack on Israel.

Hartley-Brewer then asks al-Udaini what she thinks would be “the reasonable response” by Israel to the Hamas attack. That in itself is a complicated question with no easy answer to pack into a few sentences, but when posed to someone on the receiving end of a bombing on the scale of what’s going on in Gaza, it becomes downright loaded. Yet as the Palestinian journalist attempts to provide context or doubt the appropriateness of asking such a question, the host never allows her to make her point, continuously interrupting her and demanding an immediate and direct response. Finally, after giving al-Udaini “one last chance” to answer, Hartley-Brewer cuts her off and ends the interview.

“The anchor killed me,” Wafa told me about the interview as an expression of how insulted she felt. “I feel upset because I didn't get to tell her anything... She interrupted me and then ended the call by saying "'we don't have much time'.” As a reporter on the ground, she was covering events in the English language, and even lost a friend and fellow journalist, Saeed Taweel, who was killed by an Israeli airstrike on October 10. She is not the only one, as multiple journalists have been killed or have lost friends and family members since the war began. “Things really can’t be described,” she told me that day. After having experienced the horrifying bloodshed in Gaza, living under the threat of her entire family being wiped out and having lost a colleague, Wafa fell victim to the double-standards of Western media, having to explain the use of the word “massacre” by someone actually reporting from Gaza.

I also spoke to a Palestinian journalist working as a cameraperson and fixer, who was stationed at the Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis for over a week. The journalist wished to conceal their identity for security reasons and wouldn’t specify where they are currently based, but told me the following:

“As a journalist that is working here in the Gaza Strip, I have covered a number of wars, which you can check the human rights reports about, they will tell you about massacres against civilians. At the Nasser Hospital, we see times where there are non-stop ambulances, cars carrying dead people and we do not see military people killed, it’s all civilians. When you are actually a reporter on the ground, you cannot see what you are seeing and describe it as anything other than a massacre. You tell me, if you see nothing but dead children for an hour, what else are you supposed to say other than it is a massacre? If we were seeing dead fighters, sure, we can have another discussion, but this is the worst war we’ve ever seen and it's almost all dead children that we are witnessing.”

In the interview with al-Udaini, Hartley-Brewer pointed out that the Israeli military has asked people to move from the north of Gaza to south “so that they can tackle the Hamas fighters,” then proceeded to press the Palestinian as to why she hadn’t left her home in Gaza City. When al-Udaini returns the question, asking “why to leave, this is my homeland, if someone asks you to leave are you going to leave your home?” To which the host responds that “if someone said they are going to bomb me and my family to death, like you are saying ‘a massacre’, then I would leave, yeah I would leave.” By insinuating that al-Udaini is putting her family, as well as herself, at risk, Hartley-Brewer stops just short of implying that should her home be bombed, the responsibility does not fully lie on the Israeli army.

Israeli media picked up on the interview, using it as evidence that Palestinian journalists can’t answer the question as to what the Israeli military should do to them. This, al-Udaini says, was followed by calls to her home from agents working for the Israeli state, some of whom were pretending to be part of international organizations and requested information on the number of people living in her home. Wafa is now being cautious with what she says over the phone and wasn’t able to answer many questions I asked her for fear of how the Israeli military could potentially use it.

If any media outlet in the West were to begin an interview with an Israeli who had suffered threats from Hamas, had lost family and friends, or had rockets fall near their home, by asking them “do you condemn the Israeli military” and “what do you think the Palestinian response against your community should be,” the bias in their approach would be clear to see. However, when the same line of questioning is put to Palestinians, it is treated as commonplace. The reality is that this is a clear display of double-standards, but when coupled with a lack of empathy for people who have suffered the horrors of war, it displays something else – dehumanization.

 

https://www.rt.com/news/586043-gaza-journalist-palestine-media/

 

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