Your donations helped us secure the services of one of Michigan’s top intellectual property attorneys, who also teaches at the University of Michigan Law School.

Our preference is to impress upon the potential plaintiff the frivolous character of the action, and have them back off. If we have to go to court, we will, and we now have the resources to defend IC, because of your generosity.

Longer term, I’d like to see Congress tweak the Digital Millennium Copyright Law to make it impossible for copyright trolls to try to shake down little web sites. I respect copyright and as an author, I benefit from it myself. But allowing predatory law firms to threaten people with massive penalties when they haven’t done anything wrong is just not right.

For anybody who was planning to give but didn’t get around to it, it is not too late:

Click here to donate via PayPal.

Personal checks should be made out to Juan Cole and sent to me at:

Juan Cole
P. O. Box 4218,
Ann Arbor, MI 48104-2548
USA
(Remember, make the checks out to “Juan Cole” or they can’t be cashed)

More than three quarters of the 99 journalists killed worldwide in 2023 were killed in Gaza

( Globalvoices.org ) – On July 31, Al Jazeera journalists Ismail al-Ghoul and Rami al-Rifi were killed by Israel in the Shati refugee camp in the north of Gaza while reporting on the assassination of Hamas political bureau chief Ismail Haniyya in Iran.

The Israeli army admitted to killing al-Ghoul and al-Rifi, accusing them of being members of Al Qassam, the military wing of Hamas, and of participating in the October 7 attack. This dangerous accusation — thoroughly refuted by the channel — has been used repeatedly by the Israeli side to justify killing journalists, which risks normalizing the targeting of journalists with unfounded accusations.

Al Jazeera said that Al Ghoul, who had previously reported on the Israeli raids of Al-Shifa Hospital in northern Gaza, was detained by Israeli forces in March and released 12 hours later, disproving the claims of his affiliation with Hamas or other organizations.

Nicola Perugini, associate professor of politics and international relations at the University of Edinburgh, warned on X about using such accusations against journalists:

A disturbing pattern

According to preliminary figures from the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), at least 113 journalists and media workers have been killed since the war began on October 7, 2023, with three confirmed to have been targeted and 10 more under investigation. The Gaza government media office put the number at 165 Palestinian journalists and media workers killed. 

According to Reporters without Borders (RSF), “29 of [the 120 journalists reported killed by [RSF] have been killed in circumstances that point to intentional targeting, in violation of international law.” Three complaints have been filed with the International Criminal Court (ICC) by the press freedom organization urging independent investigations of these war crimes.

The Al Jazeera Network — banned by Israel since May 2023 — has been heavily targeted, with five of its journalists killed in Gaza since the war began. Hamza al-Dahdouh, son of Gaza bureau chief Wael al-Dahdouh, and Moustafa Thuraya were killed in a January airstrike. The Israeli army also alleged the two men were “members of Gaza-based terrorist organizations,” which was equally refuted by the channel and others.

In February, a drone strike injured Wael al-Dahdouh and killed cameraman Samer Abu Daqqa. Wael’s wife, seven-year-old daughter, and 15-year-old son were also killed in an Israeli airstrike on October 28, 2023.

“These deadly attacks on Al Jazeera personnel coincided with a defamation campaign by Israeli authorities,” according to RSF, warning that “conflating journalism with ‘terrorism’ endangers reporters and threatens the right to information.”

“The killing of al-Ghoul and al-Rifi is the latest example of the risks of documenting the war in Gaza, the deadliest conflict for journalists the organization has documented in 30 years,” Jodie Ginsberg, CPJ’s CEO told Al Jazeera, emphasizing that the killing of journalists by Israel has been a disturbing pattern over the past 20 years. “This appears to be part of a broader [Israeli] strategy to stifle the information coming out of Gaza,” she explained, adding that the ban on Al Jazeera from reporting in Israel is part of this trend.

Trauma and exhaustion

Since October 7, Israel has not allowed any foreign journalists to enter the Gaza strip to report on the ongoing war except if embedded with the Israeli army. This complete ban has meant that local journalists are the ones to bear the brunt of coverage at great personal risk.

The immense trauma and exhaustion experienced by these local journalists, who remain vulnerable despite taking all possible safety measures, was best expressed in a poignant quote from Al Jazeera English journalist Hind Khoudary that went viral after the killing of her colleagues.

Another colleague,  Al Jazeera’s correspondent in Jerusalem, Najwan Simri wrote in a tribute to her colleague Ismail:

It was enough to look into his eyes, and contemplate his features, to feel the depth of Gaza’s sadness and reproach towards us. I always felt that he reproached us with excessive politeness.. and great hope, as if he had not lost hope in us for a moment.

– Najwan Simri (@SimriNajwan) 31 July, 2024

Meanwhile, local journalists in Gaza protested and held a vigil in response to al-Ghoul’s killing expressing their outrage at the perilous conditions they navigate daily and the lack of accountability and protection. Al Jazeera Arabic staff held a silent protest live in their studio.

An emotional video of the moment Al Jazeera Arabic presenter received and shared the news of the killing of Ismail Al Ghoul and Rami Al Rifi, went viral.

Bayan Abusultan, a feminist Palestinian journalist in Gaza tweeted:

They want to silence us.
They threaten all journalists who are still in Gaza city, and the north.

Covering the news here = Being targeted by the israeli forces.

Remember to keep talking about #Gaza even if they got every last one of us.

A history of impunity

Israel has a history of targeting journalists with impunity, as evidenced by the case of Shireen Abu Akleh, killed by the Israeli army while reporting in Jennin in the West Bank on May 11, 2022. Abu Akleh’s killing highlights the dangers faced by Palestinian media professionals due to a lack of accountability.

Carlos Martínez de la Serna of thr CPJ criticized Israel for refusing to cooperate with the FBI and blocking potential ICC investigations into her killing, calling for an end to Israel’s impunity in journalist killings, which have only increased during the ongoing Gaza war.

In 2022, Abu Akleh’s family and Al Jazeera requested the ICC to investigate her killing, but Israel’s leaders, including former prime minister Yair Lapid, resisted any interrogation of IDF soldiers and declined to open a criminal investigation into the killing.

The scale of journalist killing by Israel during this war is best seen when comparing it to the global number. More than three quarters of the 99 journalists killed worldwide in 2023 were killed in the Gaza war according to the CPJ. This alarming number emphasizes the urgent need for accountability and the enhancement of protection measures for journalists everywhere, ensuring the safety and protection of all the journalists who courageously report from the front lines of conflicts.

This post is part of Advox, a Global Voices project dedicated to protecting freedom of expression online. All Posts

 

Written byWalid El Houri

Via Globalvoices.org

——
Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

AJ+ “Journalist Ismail Al-Ghoul wrote about bearing witness in #Gaza before his killing”

Even if the decision to name Gaza’s journalists as laureates of its prestigious award was partly motivated by the courage of these journalists, the truth is that no one in the world deserved such recognition as those covering the genocidal war in Gaza.

“As humanity, we have a huge debt to their courage and commitment to freedom of expression,” Mauricio Weibel, Chair of the International Jury of Media Professionals, which made the recommendation for the award, truthfully described the courage of Gaza’s journalists.

Courage is an admirable quality, especially when many journalists in Gaza knew that Israel was seeking to kill them, often along with their families, to ensure that the horror of the war remains hidden from view, at worst, or contested as if a matter of opinion, at best.

Between 7 October, 2023, and 11 May, 2024, 143 Palestinian journalists in Gaza were killed by Israel. It is higher than the total number of journalists killed in World War II and the Vietnam wars combined.

This number does not include many bloggers, intellectuals and writers who did not have professional media credentials, and also excludes the many family members who were often killed along with the targeted journalists.

But there is more to Gaza’s journalists than bravery.

Whenever Israel launches a war on Gaza, it almost always denies access to international media professionals from entering the Strip. This go-to strategy is meant to ensure the story of the crimes that the Israeli army is about to commit goes unreported.

The strategy paid dividends in the so-called Cast Lead Operation in 2008-9. The true degree of the atrocities carried out in Gaza during that war, which resulted in the killing of over 1,400 Palestinians, was largely known when the war was over. By then, Israel had concluded its major military operation, and corporate mainstream western media had done a splendid job in ensuring the dominance of the Israeli political discourse regarding the war.

Israel’s behaviour since that war remained unchanged: barring international journalists, placing a gag order on Israeli journalists and killing Palestinian journalists who dared cover the story.

The August 2014 war on Gaza was one of the bloodiest for journalists. It lasted for 18 days and cost the lives of 17 journalists. Palestinian journalists, however, remained committed to their story. When one fell, ten seemed to take his place.

Occupied Palestine has always been one of the most dangerous places to be a journalist. The Palestinian Journalists’ Union reported that between 2000 – the start of the Second Palestinian Uprising – and 11 May, 2022 – the day of the Israeli murder of the iconic Palestinian journalist, Shireen Abu Akleh, 55 journalists were killed at the hands of the Israeli army.

The number might not seem too high if compared to the latest onslaught in Gaza, but, per international standards, it was a terrifying figure, based on an equally disturbing logic: killing the storyteller as the quickest way of killing the story itself.

For decades, Israel, an occupying power, has managed to depict itself as a victim in a state of self-defence. Without any critical voices in mainstream media, many around the world believed Israel’s deceiving discourse on terrorism, security and self-defence.

The only obstacle that stood between the actual truth and Israel’s engineered version of the truth are honest journalists – thus, the ongoing war on the media.

What Israel did not anticipate, however, is that by blocking international media access to Gaza, it would inadvertently empower Palestinian journalists to take charge of their own narrative.

“Interpretations depend very much on who the interpreter is, who he or she is addressing, what his or her purpose is, at what historical moment the interpretation takes place,” late Palestinian intellectual, Edward Said, wrote in ‘Covering Islam’.

Like any other form of intellectual interpretation, journalism becomes subjected to the same rule of positionality in academia, as in the relationship between the identity of the researcher and the social or political context of the subject matter.

Journalist deaths in Gaza: A ‘reckoning’ to come when war is over • FRANCE 24 English Video

Palestinian journalists in Gaza are themselves the story and the storytellers. Their success or failure to convey the story with all its factual and emotional details could make the difference between the continuation or the end of the Israeli genocide.

Though the war is yet to end, the Gaza journalists have already proven to be deserving of all the honours and accolades, not only because of their courage, but because of what we actually know about the war, despite the numerous and seemingly insurmountable obstacles created by Israel and its allies.

Most people all over the world want the war to end. But how did they acquire the needed information that made them realise the extent of horror in Gaza? Certainly not through Israel’s cheerleaders in mainstream media, but through Palestinian journalists on the ground who are using every means and every channel available to them to tell the story.

These journalists include self-taught youngsters, like 9-year-old Lama Jamous, who wore a press vest and conveyed the details of life in displacement camps in southern Gaza, reporting from Nasser Hospital and many other places with poise and elegance.

As for the accuracy of information provided by these journalists, they were certainly professional enough to be verified by numerous human rights groups, medical and legal associations and millions of people around the world who used them to build a case against the Israeli war. Indeed, all we know about the war – the death toll, the degree of destruction, the daily human suffering, the mass graves, the famine and much more – is possible because of these Gaza-based reporters.

The success, and the sacrifices of Gaza journalists should serve as a model for journalists and journalism around the world, as an example of how news about war crimes, sieges and human suffering in all its forms should be conveyed.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor or Informed Comment.

Via Middle East Monitor .

This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

( Tomdispatch.com When wildfires began erupting in the Texas Panhandle in February, Laurie Ezzell Brown, the editor and publisher of the Canadian Record, was in Houston on a panel discussing ways in which losing local newspapers represents a danger to democracy. Running the once-a-week Record from the Panhandle town of Canadian, she certainly knew something about the rise of “news deserts” in this country. While she was meeting with other journalists concerned about disappearing local newspapers, Brown kept an eye on reports about ignitions sparking wildfires west of her town and posted updates from afar so that her readers would remain informed.

“Those fires never stay in the next county,” Brown said grimly. And indeed, as the flames galloped through fallow fields and approached her hometown, she began a desperate drive back to Canadian with a friend. In and out of cell coverage, traveling through black-ash smoke, she saw distinctly apocalyptic scenes of torched trees and powerlines dangling from still-burning poles. As she went, she posted every scrap of information she could get for the scattered and distraught readers of her paper. How else would they know about the houses that were being torched ever closer to their own homes?

In the days that followed, as that historic nightmare of a blaze just grew and grew, finally burning through more than a million acres of the Texas Panhandle, Brown continued to keep Canadian Record readers informed about crucial matters like how to apply for financial assistance, where to take fire debris, and when the next embattled town meeting would be held. It was part of what she’s been doing since 1993: keeping an eye on Canadian’s Hemphill County commissioners, investigating economic salvation schemes, and posting high school sports scores as well as local obituaries.

“There’s no one else to do this and people need to know what’s happening. It’s what I do. It’s what I’ve always done,” she told me.

It’s what I do, too. Like Canadian, my adopted hometown of Greenville in Plumas County, California, was hit by a climate-driven wildfire in 2021 that devastated 800 homes and left the downtown smoldering on its Gold Rush-era dirt foundations. Two years into rebuilding, the only local online publication announced that it was shuttering. So, I set aside my freelance journalism career, joined a team of like-minded citizens, and launched The Plumas Sun.

Like Brown and hundreds of journalists across the country, we’re reporting from the intersection of news deserts and climate disasters. As floods, fires, and tornadoes surge, and daily as well as weekly publications collapse, local journalism maintains an all-too-slender lifeline in devastated rural communities like mine. Local journalists remain after the Klieg lights go dark and the national media flee our mud-strewn, burned-out Main Streets. We continue to report as our friends and neighbors face the challenge of rebuilding (or not).

Somehow, along with flattened towns and shattered lives, disaster sometimes even breeds innovation. Among the ruins left by walls of water and towering flames, bootstrapped publications like mine do their best to keep the news alive in communities now struggling just to survive.

Nowhere Will Be Spared

If there’s one overarching message from the Fifth National Climate Assessment, released in November 2023, it’s that, in this era of climate change, nowhere will be spared disaster. As the burning of fossil fuels warms the world ever more radically, conditions are created that only exacerbate a Pandora’s box of extreme weather events. Scientists predict more intense hurricanes and the storm surges they generate, more frequent and intense wildfires throughout the calendar year, an elevated risk for flooding, and so much else in the new era of global warming.

Still, as the climate scientists report, the impacts of such disasters aren’t landing equitably. Blacks, Indigenous Americans, and other people of color are bearing the brunt of them along with the rural poor. They are “disproportionately exposed to environmental risks and have fewer resources to address them,” as the assessment puts it.

For Laurie Ezzell Brown and her newspaper, that bureaucratese translates all too simply into hardship. The town of Canadian, perched on the high plains near the Oklahoma border, had suffered an economic hit to both its ranching and its oil and gas industries even before the panhandle fires. The Canadian Record was struggling. Launched in 1893, the weekly newspaper that Brown now owns spent half its life in her family’s hands. Ben and Nancy Ezzell, her parents, became its publishers in 1947. Brown took over in 1993. In March 2023, 30 years later, unable to find a buyer for it, she suspended publication of the Canadian Record.

Buy the Book

It didn’t go well. Brown, who has lived in Canadian most of her life, got an earful. And she took it personally. “I had to see all these people who I’d let down every day. And hear them tell me how much they missed the paper, how much they needed it, how they didn’t know what was going on. I guess it just got to me.” She and a skeleton staff are, however, maintaining an online version of the paper while she continues to hunt for a buyer.

It’s a tough sell. After all, most disaster-struck rural towns are already on the economic edge. Lacking the resources that might shield them from some of the impacts, they now face the Herculean task of rebuilding from scratch with scratch. After a town is demolished, said Mary Henkel Judson, editor of the Port Aransas South Jetty, people leave and many simply never come back.

Judson faced disaster in 2017 when Hurricane Harvey blew the roofs off homes and tore businesses from their foundations in that island community off the Texas coast near Corpus Christi. Compared to Canadian, Port Aransas is affluent. The South Jetty enjoys the support of second-home owners and tourists, many of them birders visiting the island’s five sites on the Great Texas Birding Trail. So Port Aransas did rebuild.

It’s a simple fact that the majority of the newspapers that have folded nationwide are in economically disadvantaged areas. In Texas, they are also in the least populous areas, Judson said. Canadian is among them. When businesses are struggling to make ends meet, paying for advertising is an expense that can be postponed. That makes it rough on publications like the Canadian Record.

“Laurie Brown is one of the best journalists in the world as far as I’m concerned. And one of the hardest-working. That community knows what she does for them and supports her as best they can, but it’s tough,” Judson told me.

She knows what can happen without a newspaper — and not just in times of disaster. City councils, school boards, and special government districts meet regularly. Most elected officials are honorable, she adds, “but you’re looking at the opportunity for corruption to raise its ugly head. You put a kid in a candy store when nobody’s watching and things happen.”

Teaching Disaster Communities to Do Journalism

Local reporters and paper owners like Brown and Judson are now an increasingly vanishing breed. Since 2005, in fact, 2,900 American newspapers, mainly smaller weeklies and local dailies, have ceased publication, according to the State of Local News Project 2023 (produced by researchers at Northwestern University’s Medill School). One-third of them were in small counties. Today 195 of those mostly rural counties have no local newspaper at all or any other source of local news. An additional 1,387 counties have only one local news source.

As in so many other economic sectors, the trend is toward consolidation. Fewer and fewer corporations now own more and more publications. Brown describes it as “gobbling up all the newspapers, spitting them out, and firing the real writers.” The result leaves nearly 200 communities without a reliable source of information for everything from political scams to cribbage tournaments. And there’s more bad news ahead. Based on the higher-than-average poverty rates and the population size of those mostly rural counties, the 2023 report determined that an additional 33 communities are at elevated risk of losing their sole remaining source of news.

When Lyndsey Gilpin started Southerly in 2016, her goal was to fill a growing gap in reporting in Southern states. She was particularly interested in providing a regional outlet to cover environmental justice and climate issues. The decline in newspapers in the rural South is worse than anywhere else in the country. After all, 108 counties were already without a local newspaper in 2020. Yes, reporters from the national media sometimes “parachute” in to cover special events like fierce storms or raging tornadoes, but they tend to leave as quickly as they come.

Gilpin wanted to cover climate and energy issues in a more consistent way. Local news institutions are trusted sources of information in a community, often the only source. “We wanted to build deeper relationships with local news outlets, residents and community members who were living this day to day and doing the work to get information out,” she told me.

Southerly’s inaugural year coincided with a startling series of natural disasters. The United States suffered 15 devastating weather and climate events, each causing at least a billion dollars in damage, the second-highest number ever recorded. The South, in particular, was hit with tornadoes, wildfires, hurricanes, and three different major floods. Over the next five years, Southerly became increasingly focused on just such climate disasters.

Gilpin soon discovered personally what the assessment scientists asserted in their 2023 document: Disasters do not inflict damage equally. And adding insult to literal injury, the most ill-equipped communities when it comes to climate disasters are almost always ones without newspapers. “Folks were already struggling and now they don’t know where to turn, who to talk to,” she said. “That leaves a huge, huge hole for industries or politicians or other players to feed them misinformation or accidentally give inaccurate information.”

In response to the growing prevalence of climate-driven disasters, Southerly began developing tools that would help communities do their own disaster coverage. Gilpin built templates that outlined how to apply for aid and navigate paperwork, processes that are nearly the same for hurricanes, floods, or fires. “We morphed into a place that could train people to learn how to do journalism — to do storytelling in more creative ways,” she told me.

As those journalists began to focus on recovery efforts in places repeatedly hit by hurricanes like southern Louisiana, they reported on the effects of such disasters ranging from the disabling of the voting process to damaging disruptions in education. They also tracked disparities in disaster funding by neighborhood, economic class, and race.

As Gilpin put it to me: “The way journalism can do the most good is by making sure people are equipped to do that work. By understanding the process, they can feel confident about knowing what’s happening around them.”

Sadly, however, Southerly ended operations in May 2023, thanks to a lack of funding and fundraising exhaustion. As Gilpin summarized the situation: “The nicest way I can put it is the nonprofit journalism world is difficult. It’s not fair that all the money goes to a few places and not to other places.”

Covering Recovery

Even as the larger newspaper world is suffering blow after blow, the situation could be changing if ever so slightly for local papers. Growing public attention to America’s news deserts has, in recent years, been attracting at least some philanthropic funding. Press Forward and the American Journalism Project are among the efforts to rebuild local news platforms. The State of Local News Report celebrates 17 new local outlets at least five years old and identifies 164 others that are just getting started. All are providing their communities with reporting essential to democracy while searching for stable, sustainable business models.

It was certainly not the lure of foundation funding that gave life to The Plumas Sun. The driver was utter fear of living without a newspaper in a community in the throes of disaster recovery. The local century-old newspaper in my area, The Feather River Bulletin, had folded early in the Covid pandemic, even though it continued to maintain an online presence until July 2023. When it announced it was shutting down, shock reverberated through the small mountain towns in California’s northern Sierra Nevada where I live.

We had already lost so much: Our timber-dependent economy was declining and the spread of Covid had only exacerbated our isolation. But the most profound blow was the devastating 2021 Dixie fire, a climate-change-induced nightmare that scorched an area of the West the size of Rhode Island. It quite literally incinerated most of my town of Greenville and three other local communities. Nearly a million acres of the conifer forests that had once drawn so many of us to this rural outpost were reduced to charred specters. Now, we were losing the only source of local news that had kept us from feeling utterly disconnected from the rest of America and one another during such traumatic times.

The Plumas Sun was conceived in that hapless moment. One urgent phone call led to another until we had mustered a core team of seven with the skills to mount an online news publication. Just days before we launched it, we still didn’t have a name for it.

The two-year mark after a disaster event is a pivotal moment for community recovery, says Sue Weber, an ex-nun who served as coordinator of the Dixie Fire Collaborative, formed after that fire as a voice for the community. State and federal money starts to disappear. Victims begin to move on. That’s when local newspapers play a critical role in keeping places like Greenville invigorated and part of the rebuilding process. “For communities,” Weber told me, “it’s all about where we go from here. Nobody else is paying attention.”

Disaster trauma often shows up in ways that seem unrelated to the torching of entire towns. In the first months of covering county government, The Plumas Sun reported on a sheriff’s dispatcher charged with embezzling from a needy children’s Christmas fund and a county official filing a hostile work environment complaint against the district attorney. It has also posted news on local community suppers and library book giveaways, while offering kudos to people around the county doing extraordinary work. And, of course, obituaries.

“Connecting people is healing,” Weber points out. “Newspapers do that, too.”

Laurie Brown and Canadian are still in the early trauma stage in the scorched Texas Panhandle. Whether her Canadian Record or The Plumas Sun or any of the startups nurtured by Southerly survive depends not just on the whims of funding but on the grit and guts of local reporters. Brown, who is living on Social Security, shows no signs of quitting, despite all too many misgivings about the future.

“I’ve seen good things that didn’t happen because they weren’t encouraged. I’ve seen bad things that didn’t happen because they were exposed,” she says. “And I just keep thinking, you know, you can make a difference. And that still seems worth doing to me.”

Copyright 2024 Jane Braxton Little

By Julia Conley

( Commondreams.org ) – A discussion between U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Sen. Mitt Romney over the weekend included what one critic called an “incredible mask-off moment,” with the two officials speaking openly about the U.S. government’s long-term attempts to provide public relations work for Israel in defense of its policies in the occupied Palestinian territories—and its push to ban TikTok in order to shut down Americans’ access to unfiltered news about the Israeli assault on Gaza.

At the Sedona Forum in Sedona, Arizona on Friday, the Utah Republican asked Blinken at the McCain Institute event’s keynote conversation why Israel’s “PR been so awful” as it’s bombarded Gaza since October in retaliation for a Hamas-led attack, killing at least 34,735 Palestinians—the majority women and children—and pushing parts of the enclave into a famine that is expected to spread due to Israel’s blockade.

“The world is screaming about Israel, why aren’t they screaming about Hamas?” asked Romney. “‘Accept a cease-fire, bring home the hostages.’ Instead it’s the other way around, I mean, typically the Israelis are good at PR. What’s happened here? How have they, and we, been so ineffective at communicating the realities there?”

Blinken replied that Americans, two-thirds of whom want the Biden administration to push for a permanent cease-fire and 57% of whom disapprove of President Joe Biden’s approach to the war, are “on an intravenous feed of information with new impulses, inputs every millisecond.”

“And of course the way this has played out on social media has dominated the narrative,” said the secretary of state. “We can’t discount that, but I think it also has a very, very challenging effect on the narrative.”

Romney suggested that banning TikTok would quiet the growing outrage over Israeli atrocities in the United States.

“Some wonder why there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down, potentially, TikTok or other entities of that nature,” said Romney. “If you look at the postings on TikTok and the number of mentions of Palestinians relative to other social media sites, it’s overwhelmingly so among TikTok broadcasts.”

The interview took place amid a growing anti-war movement on college campuses across the U.S. and around the world, with American police forces responding aggressively to protests at which students have demanded higher education institutions divest from companies that contract with Israel and that the U.S. stop funding the Israel Defense Forces.

Right-wing lawmakers and commentators have suggested students have been indoctrinated by content shared on social media platforms including TikTok and Instagram, and wouldn’t be protesting otherwise.

Rep. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.), who co-sponsored a recent bill to ban TikTok—included in a foreign aid package that Biden signed late last month—said last week that “there has been a coordinated effort off these college campuses, and that you have outside paid agitators and activists.”

“It also highlights exactly why we included the TikTok bill in the foreign supplemental aid package because you’re seeing how these kids are being manipulated by certain groups or entities or countries to foment hate on their behalf and really create a hostile environment here in the U.S.,” said Lawler.

Social media has provided the public with an unvarnished look at the scale of Israel’s attack, with users learning the stories of Gaza residents including six-year-old Hind Rajab, 10-year-old Yazan Kafarneh, and victims who have been found in mass graves and seeing the destruction of hospitals, universities, and other civilian infrastructure.

U.S. college students, however, are far from the only people who have expressed strong opposition to Israel’s slaughter of Palestinian civilians and large-scale destruction of Gaza as it claims to be targeting Hamas.

Human rights groups across the globe have demanded an end to the Biden administration’s support for Israel’s military and called on the U.S. president to use his leverage to end the war. Josep Borrell, the European Union’s high representative for foreign affairs and security policy, in February lambasted Biden and other Western leaders for claiming concern about the safety of Palestinians while continuing to arm Israel, and leaders in Spain and Ireland have led calls for an arms embargo on the country. The United Nations’ top expert on human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories said in March that there are “reasonable grounds” to conclude Israel has committed genocidal acts, two months after the International Court of Justice made a similar statement in an interim ruling.

US Department of State Video: “Secretary Blinken participates in a keynote conversation at the McCain Institute”

Romney and Blinken didn’t mention in their talk whether they believe social media and bad “PR” have pushed international leaders and experts to make similar demands to those of college students.

The conversation, said Intercept journalist Ryan Grim, was an “incredible historical document” showing how the U.S. government views its role in the Middle East—as a government that should “mediate” between Israel and the public to keep people from having “a direct look at what’s happening.”

“Romney’s comments betray a general bipartisan disinterest in engaging Israel’s conduct in Gaza on its own terms, preferring instead to complain about protesters, interrogate university presidents, and, apparently, muse about social media’s role in boosting pro-Palestinian activism,” wrote Ben Metzner at The New Republic. “As Israel moves closer to a catastrophic invasion of Rafah, having already banned Al Jazeera in the country, Romney and Blinken would be wise to consider whether TikTok is the real problem.”

Enterpreneur James Rosen-Birch added that “Mitt Romney flat-out asking Antony Blinken, in public, why the United States is not doing a better job manufacturing consent, is wild.”

On April 1, the Israeli parliament, dominated by the country’s far right parties, passed a law permitting the government to halt the broadcast of foreign channels in Israel “if the content is deemed to be a threat to the country’s security during the ongoing war.” Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi called Al Jazeera an “incitement channel” and a “mouthpiece of Hamas.” It was a ridiculous charge for anyone who actually watches the live stream of Al Jazeera English.

Carlos Martinez de la Serna, the New York-based director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, said, “CPJ condemns the closure of Al-Jazeera’s office in Israel and the blocking of the channel’s websites. This move sets an extremely alarming precedent for restricting international media outlets working in Israel. The Israeli cabinet must allow Al-Jazeera and all international media outlets to operate freely in Israel, especially during wartime.”

The Israeli military has killed some 140 journalists in Gaza. Since it has sophisticated drone surveillance and facial recognition programs and other forms of electronic surveillance, Al Jazeera reports that some of the surviving journalists are convinced that their vehicles and convoys were deliberately targeted despite being clearly identified as “press.”

One of the corruption cases being pursued in Israeli courts against Netanyahu has to do with his pressuring an Israeli newspaper to give him favorable coverage by threatening that otherwise the late casino mogul Sheldon Adelson would flood the market with free newspapers, hurting the profits of Yedioth Ahronoth.

The following video clip won’t be seen by my readers in Israel because their government departed from democratic principles.

Al Jazeera English Video: “Israeli police raids Al Jazeera office after shutdown order, seizes equipment”

Banning foreign news channels and reporters is not a new thing in the Middle East, or the wider world, but it has usually been done by governments that the US denounces as autocratic. Israel has now joined their ranks as a censorship regime.

For instance, the US State Department says in a report critical of press censorship in Syria, “On July 8, the Ministry of Information canceled the accreditation of the BBC in areas under its control following the outlet’s June 27 investigative report into the regime’s involvement in the captagon drug trade, according to local media.” The report adds, “citizens widely used satellite dishes, although the regime jammed some foreign Arabic-language networks.”

The cancellation of Al Jazeera’s accreditation by the Netanyahu regime and its jamming of Al Jazeera in Israel would be hard to distinguish from the press policies of Bashar al-Assad in Syria.

As for Iran, the State Department says, “The government jammed satellite broadcasts, a continuous practice since at least 2003.” It adds, “The Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance severely limited and controlled foreign media organizations’ ability to work in the country. The ministry required foreign correspondents to provide detailed travel plans and topics of proposed stories before granting visas, limited their ability to travel within the country, and forced them to work with a local ‘minder.'”

State slams Iran, saying, “Authorities routinely cited laws on protecting national security to arrest or punish critics of the government and human rights defenders or to deter criticism of government policies or officials.”

Yet the April 1 law passed by the Israeli Knesset appeals to exactly the same grounds, “protecting national security,” to permit expulsion and banning of foreign correspondents and channels.

That is, there may be a difference in degree between Iran’s press censorship and Israel’s but there is not a difference in kind.

The grounds cited by Israel for closing down foreign news operations in the country are not different from those used by Vladimir Putin’s Russia. The State Department notes, “Expanding the definition of sensitive data, the FSB published in 2021 a list of topics that could be ‘used against the security’ of Russia, including information and assessments of the country’s military, security sector, and space agency, Roscosmos. Individuals who collected information in the specified categories could be subject to designation as ‘foreign agents.'”

Just as the government headed by Netanyhau, which had directed funding to Hamas for years before the October 7 attack, snarkily implied that Al Jazeera was overly friendly with Hamas, so the Russians use xenophobic grounds to censor, according to the State Department: “During the year authorities used a law banning cooperation with ‘undesirable foreign organizations’ to restrict free expression. For example, in January, the independent Russian news outlet Meduza was added to the list of ‘undesirable organizations.'”

Russia has forced many journalists to register as “foreign agents:” “The law allowed authorities to label individuals (both Russian and foreign citizens) as ‘foreign agents’ if they disseminated foreign media to an unspecified number of persons, receive funding from abroad, or, after a 2020 amendment, ‘carry out the interests of a foreign state.’ The amendment specified that a foreign journalist ‘performing the functions of a foreign agent, incompatible with his professional activities as a journalist’ could be declared an individual ‘foreign agent.’ They had to register and mark their content as produced by a ‘foreign agent.'”

This is clearly how Netanyahu views Al Jazeera journalists.

This fear of international journalism also afflicts the government of Kim Jong Un in North Korea, of which State observes, “The government prohibited ordinary citizens from listening to foreign media broadcasts and subjected violators to severe punishment. Radios and television sets, unless altered, received only domestic programming . . .The government attempted to jam all foreign radio broadcasts.”

The perilous reality for West Bank journalists under Israeli occupation

More than 100 journalists in Gaza have been killed by Israel since it launched its deadly war on the strip, following Hamas’s incursion into Israeli soil on October 7, 2023. Reporters Without Borders has filed multiple complaints with the International Criminal Court to investigate “intentional homicides” of several Gazan journalists.

But with all eyes on Gaza, violations against journalists in the West Bank have multiplied. Israel now ranks sixth among the top countries for jailed journalists, tied with Iran. Over the past seven months, 52 journalists have been detained, all but two in the West Bank, the Palestinian Center for Development and Media Freedoms (MADA) told Global Voices. Nearly all are being held without trial or charge under Israeli military law.

Women journalists are among those detained. “Israeli forces don’t differentiate between women and men as journalists in the field,” Aziza Nofal, a Palestinian journalist based in Ramallah, told Global Voices. A freelance journalist with Al Jazeera English, she also works with Reporters Without Borders to document violations against Palestinian journalists. Women journalists in detention are routinely threatened with rape by the Israeli security forces, she said. 

One journalist who spoke to Global Voices, Sojoud Aasi, was detained in October. Two months pregnant at the time, she was manhandled and strip searched multiple times “in a very humiliating manner,” she said. “I was denied the right to change my clothes, get my medications, or even go to the bathroom.”

Israeli forces also threatened to hurt her seven-year old daughter and kill her husband. Her husband, also a journalist, is currently in detention. “He is subjected to severe torture, while being deprived of his most basic rights, like other detainees in Israeli prisons,” she said.

Rights organizations have decried the use of torture and other forms of inhuman treatment in Israeli prisons, while UN experts have “expressed alarm over credible allegations of egregious human rights violations” against Palestinian women and girls, including sexual assault.

Another journalist, Bushra al-Tawil, has been arrested five times for her work, which is focused on Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, Nofal said. Most recently, al-Tawil was arrested in March, and remains under administrative detention to date. According to eyewitnesses, she was beaten by the Israeli intelligence forces in her home as she was being detained. 

A third journalist, Asmaa Harish, has been under house arrest for the last six months. “The Israeli forces have banned her from using social media or even making calls,” Nofal added.   

A mural on the separation wall in Bethlehem in tribute to Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, who was shot dead by the Israeli army in the West Bank city of Jenin. Photo by Dan Palraz via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

In addition to detentions, West Bank journalists also face restrictions on freedom of movement and outright violence by the Israeli army and armed settlers. 

Mohammed Samir Abed, a correspondent for Al Quds News Network, and his six colleagues experienced this violence first hand when they came under direct fire from the Israeli army on January 4. They had been documenting clashes between the Israeli army and Palestinian factions in Sir, a town south of Jenin. 

After the clashes concluded, “we wanted to leave and all of a sudden there were gunshots…we were shot at directly,” despite wearing their press jackets, Abed told Global Voices. Footage he captured during the incident shows him and his colleagues sheltering from gunfire fired from Israeli military vehicles nearby. 

Jihad Barakat, a Ramallah-based reporter for Al-Araby Al-Jadeed, has also been shot at multiple times while reporting. “At any moment a soldier might forbid you from photographing…or fire tear gas or rubber bullets,” he told Global Voices. At other times they are live bullets, as in the case of the 2022 killing of Al Jazeera correspondent Shireen Abu Aqleh by the Israeli army in Jenin.

Every day, journalists in the West Bank risk their lives and experience a myriad of violations to document and expose the Israeli occupation — with a significant psychological toll. 

Restrictions on freedom of movement

In addition to violence at the hands of the Israeli army, West Bank journalists are confronted with settler violence. “There are a lot of settler attacks all across the West Bank. We have difficulties moving from one place to another, it’s very dangerous,” Nofal said.

Since the war started, there have been over 600 settler attacks against Palestinians in the West Bank, according to the UN. Nine people have been killed during these attacks, in addition to the nearly 400 people killed by the Israeli army as of early March.

Since October, the Israeli government has issued over 100,000 gun licenses — with the highest rates of arms among illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank. The government has weighed arming certain West Bank settlements with anti-tank missiles. 

Journalists’ freedom of movement has also been heavily restricted by the establishment of dozens of new checkpoints and confinement of entire villages since the war broke out. “Now I can’t move from Jenin to Nablus because of the presence of checkpoints,” Abed said. The two West Bank cities are 40 kilometers away from each other.

When passing through checkpoints, Abed uses his personal ID rather than his journalist ID, which is issued by the Palestinian Authority — the nominal governing body in the West Bank. He does so “out of fear of being delayed, or detained at any moment for covering the crimes of the occupation.” 

In 2000, Israeli press cards were definitively denied for West Bank journalists. Without them, it takes them significantly longer to pass through Israeli checkpoints. Checkpoints can take hours to pass through to travel small distances.

Once on site, journalists’ movement is heavily restricted by the Israeli army. “Army vehicles come in close proximity to obstruct us,” Abed said, showing a video of an armored vehicle honking and rolling towards him and his colleagues in Jenin last December. 

Israel has also sent a clear deterrent message to journalists through past and recent killings of Palestinian journalists, both in the West Bank and in Gaza.

Psychological toll

While there has been a sharp uptick in attacks on journalists during the war, “violations against Palestinian journalists are a continuation, not a result of October 7,” Walid Batrawi, a journalist from Ramallah who now serves on the board of the International Press Institute, told Global Voices. 

In 2022, the Israeli army and security forces committed at least 479 violations against journalists.

Although these crimes are well documented by local and international bodies, impunity prevails. “When the soldier who shot Shireen Abu Aqleh was identified, he evaded punishment, which means everything will repeat itself,” Batrawi explained.

In the absence of the rule of law, fear is rampant. “There is perpetual fear and uncertainty as to if he puts ‘press’ on his car, is he protected or a target?,” he added. The International Committee to Protect Journalists is investigating the intentional targeting and murder of a dozen journalists by the Israeli army. 

Israeli forces use fear and intimidation to “silence every free voice in the West Bank,” Aasi said. “It’s part of an attempt to impose self-censorship.”

“You might be the target of the next bullet, this is something that stays with Palestinian journalists. When I leave the house, I’m counting on the fact I may not return,” Abed said.

Collective punishment is also a source of widespread fear. “Not only journalists have become targets, their families have become targets. This impacts every Palestinian journalist,” Barakat said. 

The psychological costs are high. “I’m afraid I won’t get home to my three children. I’m afraid something will happen, I feel I can’t control my life,” said Nofal. “Our trauma affects our social lives, our relationships with the people around us.” 

But with time, death becomes normalized. “Every day I photograph funerals. I’ve started to fear that if I lose someone I love I won’t feel the loss, it has become something normal for me,” Abed said. 

Written byNatacha Danon

(The Conversation) – Accusations about Israeli censorship of the media went mainstream in the US recently when the New York Times published an opinion piece headlined: The Israeli Censorship Regime is Growing. That Needs to Stop..

In the piece Jodie Ginsberg, the chief executive of the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), wrote: “The high rate of journalists’ deaths and arrests, including a slew in the West Bank; laws allowing its government to shut down foreign news outlets deemed a security risk, which the prime minister has explicitly threatened to use against Al Jazeera; and its refusal to permit foreign journalists independent access to Gaza all speak to a leadership that is deliberately restricting press freedom. That is the hallmark of a dictatorship, not a democracy.”

As well as restrictions on media access to Gaza, particular broadcasters face other restrictions. At the start of April Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu had proclaimed he would “act immediately to stop” Qatar-based broadcaster Al Jazeera’s operations inside Israel.

Israel’s parliament passed a bill allowing it to close Al Jazeera’s office in Israel, block its website and ban local channels from using its coverage. However ongoing ceasefire negotiations with Hamas, brokered through Qatar, were perhaps a bulwark against haste. The company is still broadcasting from Israel, but its future status is uncertain.

At the annual International Journalism Festival in Perugia on April 17-21, one of Al Jazeera’s former Gaza-based correspondents Youmna ElSayed, spoke of the dangers of covering the war as a Palestinian journalist, including the belief that she, along with others, had been targeted by the Israeli military. “Journalists were under fire from day one,” she said. Despite having little equipment and the destruction of media offices, “We did what we could to show the world what was really going on,” she said.

The CPJ said on April 20 that at least 97 journalists and media workers were among the more than 34,000 people killed since the war began.

ElSayed regretted leaving Gaza but said it was her only choice to save the lives of her children. She said: “This entire world would have known nothing, seen nothing of what has been happening in Gaza … if it wasn’t for those Palestinian journalists.”

She claimed that international journalists had given up on forcing the Israeli army to let them into Gaza. “This is something that is unprecedented and has not happened anywhere else in the world. But yet, international journalists have given up on that right.”

Access to Gaza

However, journalists’ organisations and the correspondents themselves have been lobbying for access to Gaza for months now. But the Israeli government appears to be not giving way.

“Eyeless in Gaza,” by Juan Cole, Digital, Dream, Dreamworld v. 3, PS Express, 2024

The BBC’s international editor Jeremy Bowen, also speaking in Perugia, confirmed that it had been a really difficult story to cover, principally, “because the main meat of it – which is what’s happening in Gaza, we can’t get close to”.

From a production point of view, he said sometimes it feels like, “climbing through mud trying to generate the material that’s necessary to put together a report for television news”. He added it was very hard “to be a TV reporter on a story that you can’t see yourself”.

The Israeli government says the number of international journalists given press accreditation to work in Israel since October 2023 is 3,400. This has given journalists access to the West Bank and enabled coverage of settler violence against the local Palestinian population, but not to Gaza.

But as I wrote in November, the only permitted trips into Gaza have been via Israel Defense Forces-controlled embeds (where the journalist travels with the military and therefore their ability to see or cover stories is restricted).

CNN’s Clarissa Ward was the first foreign journalist who made it into Gaza without the army, and she did this by accompanying an aid convoy supported by the United Arab Emirates in December 2023. During this two-hour trip to Rafah, where 2.3 million residents are now based, the area was bombed and she filmed operations in a field hospital, and talked to doctors and injured children.

With 20 years of war reporting under her belt, she concluded: “Like Grozny, Aleppo and Mariupol, Gaza will go down as one of the great horrors of modern warfare.”

From outside the country, media outlets keep trying to check and verify information on the bombings from the IDF by using geo-location and AI software to scan satellite imagery for bomb craters and destruction. In December this enabled the New York Times to conclude that “during the first six weeks of the war in Gaza, Israel routinely used one of its biggest and most destructive bombs in areas it designated safe for civilians”.

Israeli media coverage

Within Israel, the media are mostly publishing the IDF version of events unchallenged. According to Israeli journalist and activist Anat Saragusti: “Hebrew-speaking Israelis watching television news are not exposed at all to what’s going on in Gaza. We don’t see atrocities, the rubble, the destruction and the humanitarian crisis. The world sees something completely different.”

Meanwhile, the left-wing newspaper Haaretz (published in Hebrew and in English) has been threatened with financial penalties for “sabotaging Israel in wartime” through its more nuanced journalism. According to reporter Ido David Cohen, writing in December, it is the television news channels that present the most extreme example of censorship, as they have “devoted themselves to national morale, exclusively relying on official military statements and completely ignoring Palestinian casualties”.

In the same article, cultural commentator and academic David Gurevitz claimed the numbers of Palestinians killed remains an abstract concept for many Israelis: “The Israeli audience isn’t capable of accommodating two kinds of pain together, seeing and identifying with the human victim of the other side as such, and the media follow suit.”

This argument was backed up this month by Israeli journalist Yossi Klein who wrote: “The most taboo number in Israel is 34,000. You can’t talk about it, you can’t mention it, and if someone speaking on a panel accidentally blurts it out, they should add, disdainfully: ‘according to Palestinian sources’.”

Colleen Murrell, Full Professor in Journalism, Dublin City University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.