AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, “War, Peace and the Presidency.” I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: As we continue to look at Donald Trump’s return to the White House, we turn now to look at what it means for the world, from Israel’s war on Gaza to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. During his victory speech, Trump vowed that he was going to “stop wars”.
But what will Trump’s foreign policy actually look like?
AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined now by Fatima Bhutto, award-winning author of several works of fiction and nonfiction, including The Runaways, New Kings of the World. She is co-editing a book along with Sonia Faleiro titled Gaza: The Story of a Genocide, due out next year. She writes a monthly column for Zeteo.
Start off by just responding to Trump’s runaway victory across the United States, Fatima.
Fatima Bhutto on the Kamala Harris “support for genocide”. Video: Democracy Now!
FATIMA BHUTTO: Well, Amy, I don’t think it’s an aberration that he won. I think it’s an aberration that he lost in 2020. And I think anyone looking at the American elections for the last year, even longer, could see very clearly that the Democrats were speaking to — I’m not sure who, to a hall of mirrors.
They ran an incredibly weak and actually macabre campaign, to see Kamala Harris describe her politics as one of joy as she promised the most lethal military in the world, talking about women’s rights in America, essentially focusing those rights on the right to termination, while the rest of the world has watched women slaughtered in Gaza for 13 months straight.
You know, it’s very curious to think that they thought a winning strategy was Beyoncé and that Taylor Swift was somehow a political winning strategy that was going to defeat — who? — Trump, who was speaking to people, who was speaking against wars. You know, whether we believe him or not, it was a marked difference from what Kamala Harris was saying and was not saying.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Fatima, you wrote a piece for Zeteo earlier this year titled “Gaza Has Exposed the Shameful Hypocrisy of Western Feminism.” So, you just mentioned the irony of Kamala Harris as, you know, the second presidential candidate who is a woman, where so much of the campaign was about women, and the fact that — you know, of what’s been unfolding on women, against women and children in Gaza for the last year. If you could elaborate?
FATIMA BHUTTO: Yeah, we’ve seen, Nermeen, over the last year, you know, 70 percent of those slaughtered in Gaza by Israel and, let’s also be clear, by America, because it’s American bombs and American diplomatic cover that allows this slaughter to continue unabated — 70 percent of those victims are women and children.
We have watched children with their heads blown off. We have watched children with no surviving family members find themselves in hospital with limbs missing. Gaza has the largest cohort of child amputees in the world. And we have seen newborns left to die as Israel switches off electricity and fuel of hospitals.
So, for Kamala Harris to come out and talk repeatedly about abortion, and I say this as someone who is pro-choice, who has always been pro-choice, was not just macabre, but it’s obscene. It’s an absolute betrayal of feminism, because feminism is about liberation. It’s not about termination.
And it’s about protecting women at their most vulnerable and at their most frightened. And there was no sign of that. You know, we also saw Kamala Harris bring out celebrities. I mean, the utter vacuousness of bringing out Jennifer Lopez, Beyoncé and others to talk about being a mother, while mothers are being widowed, are being orphaned in Gaza, it was not just tone deaf, it seemed to have a certain hostility, a certain contempt for the suffering that the rest of us have been watching.
I’d also like to add a point about toxic masculinity. There was so much toxicity in Kamala Harris’s campaign. You know, I watched her laugh with Oprah as she spoke about shooting someone who might enter her house with a gun, and giggling and saying her PR team may not like that, but she would kill them.
You don’t need to be a man to practice toxic masculinity, and you don’t need to be white to practice white supremacy, as we’ve seen very clearly from this election cycle.
AMY GOODMAN: And yet, Fatima Bhutto, if you look at what Trump represented, and certainly the Muslim American community, the Arab American community, Jewish progressives, young people, African-Americans certainly understood what Trump’s policy was when he was president.
And it’s rare, you know, a president comes back to serve again after a term away. It’s only happened once before in history.
But you have, for example, Trump moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem. You have an illegal settlement named after Trump in the West Bank. The whole question of Netanyahu and his right-wing allies in Israel pushing for annexation of the West Bank, where Trump would stand on this.
And, of course, you have the Abraham Accords, which many Palestinians felt left them out completely. If you can talk about this? These were put forward by Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner, who, when the massive Gaza destruction was at its height, talked about Gaza as waterfront real estate.
FATIMA BHUTTO: Absolutely. There’s no question that Trump has been a malign force, not just when it concerns Palestinians, but, frankly, out in the world. But I would argue there’s not very much difference between what these two administrations or parties do. The difference is that Trump doesn’t have the gloss and the charisma of an Obama or — I mean, I can’t even say that Biden has charisma, but certainly the gloss.
Trump says it. They do it. The difference — I can’t really tell the difference anymore.
We saw the Biden administration send over 500 shipments of arms to Israel, betraying America’s own laws, the fact that they are not allowed to export weapons of war to a country committing gross violations of human rights. We saw Bill Clinton trotted out in Michigan to tell Muslims that, actually, they should stop killing Israelis and that Jews were there before them.
I mean, it was an utterly contemptuous speech. So, what is the difference exactly?
We saw Bernie Sanders, who was mentioned earlier, write an op-ed in The Guardian in the days before the election, warning people that if they were not to vote for Kamala Harris, if Donald Trump was to get in, think about the climate crisis. Well, we have watched Israel’s emissions in the first five months of their deadly attack on Gaza release more planet-warming gases into the atmosphere than 20 of the world’s most climate-vulnerable nations release in a year.
So, I don’t quite see that there’s a difference between what Democrats allow and what Trump brags about. I think it’s just a question of crudeness and decorum and politeness. One has it, and one doesn’t. In a sense, Trump is much clearer for the rest of the world, because he says what he’s going to do, and, you know, you take him at his word, whereas we have been gaslit and lied to by Antony Blinken on a daily basis now since October 7th.
Every time that AOC or Kamala Harris spoke about fighting desperately for a ceasefire, we saw more carnage, more massacres and Israel committing crimes with total impunity. You know, it wasn’t under Trump that Israel has killed more journalists than have ever been killed in any recorded conflict. It’s under Biden that Israel has killed more UN workers than have ever been killed in the UN’s history. So, I’m not sure there’s a difference.
And, you know, we’ll have to wait to see in the months ahead. But I don’t think anyone is bracing for an upturn. Certainly, people didn’t vote for Kamala Harris. I’m not sure they voted for Trump. We know that she lost 14 million votes from Biden’s win in 2020. And we know that those votes just didn’t come out for the Democrats. Some may have migrated to Trump. Some may have gone to third parties. But 14 million just didn’t go anywhere.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, Fatima, if you could, you know, tell us what do you think the reasons are for that? I mean, the kind of — as you said, because it is really horrifying, what has unfolded in Gaza in the last 13 months. You’ve written about this. You now have an edited anthology that you’re editing, co-editing. You know, what do you think accounts for this, the sheer disregard for the lives of tens of thousands of Palestinians who have been killed in Gaza?
FATIMA BHUTTO: It’s a total racism on the part not just of America, but I’m speaking of the West here. This has been betrayed over the last year, the fact that Ukraine is spoken about with an admiration, you know, Zelensky is spoken about with a sort of hero worship, Ukrainian resisters to Russia’s invasion are valorised.
You know, Nancy Pelosi wore a bracelet of bullets used by the Ukrainian resistance against Trump [sic]. But Palestinians are painted as terrorists, are dehumanised to such an extent. You know, we saw that dehumanisation from the mouths of Bill Clinton no less, from the mouths of Kamala Harris, who interrupted somebody speaking out against the genocide, and saying, “I am speaking.”
What is more toxically masculine than that?
We’ve also seen a concerted crackdown in universities across the United States on college students. I’m speaking also here of my own alma mater of Columbia University, of Barnard College, that called the NYPD, who fired live ammunition at the students. You know, this didn’t happen — this extreme response didn’t happen in protests against apartheid. It didn’t happen in protests against Vietnam in quite the same way.
And all I can think is, America and the West, who have been fighting Muslim countries for the last 25, 30 years, see that as acceptable to do so. Our deaths are acceptable to them, and genocide is not a red line.
And, you know, to go back to what what was mentioned earlier about the working class, that is absolutely ignored in America — and I would make the argument across the West, too — they have watched administration after, you know, president and congressmen give billions and billions of dollars to Ukraine, while they have no relief at home.
They have no relief from debt. They have no relief from student debt. They have no medical care, no coverage. They’re struggling to survive. And this is across the board. And after Ukraine, they saw billions go to Israel in the same way, while they get, frankly, nothing.
AMY GOODMAN: Fatima Bhutto, we want to thank you so much for being with us, award-winning author of a number of works of fiction and nonfiction, including The Runaways and New Kings of the World, co-editing a book called Gaza: The Story of a Genocide, due out next year, writes a monthly column for Zeteo.
Coming up, we look at Trump’s vow to deport as many as 20 million immigrants and JD Vance saying, yes, US children born of immigrant parents could also be deported.
Decayed societies, where a population is stripped of political, social and economic power, instinctively reach out for cult leaders . . . such as Donald Trump. Image: X/LennartWen/Banksy
ANALYSIS: By Chris Hedges
In the end, the US election was about despair. Despair over futures that evaporated with deindustrialisation. Despair over the loss of 30 million jobs in mass layoffs.
Despair over austerity programmes and the funneling of wealth upwards into the hands of rapacious oligarchs. Despair over a liberal class that refuses to acknowledge the suffering it orchestrated under neoliberalism or embrace New Deal-type programmes that will ameliorate this suffering.
Despair over the futile, endless wars, as well as the genocide in Gaza, where generals and politicians are never held accountable. Despair over a democratic system that has been seized by corporate and oligarchic power.
This despair has been played out on the bodies of the disenfranchised through opioid and alcoholism addictions, gambling, mass shootings, suicides — especially among middle-aged white males — morbid obesity and the investment of our emotional and intellectual life in tawdry spectacles and the allure of magical thinking, from the absurd promises of the Christian right to the Oprah-like belief that reality is never an impediment to our desires.
These are the pathologies of a deeply diseased culture, what Friedrich Nietzsche
calls an aggressive despiritualised nihilism.
Donald Trump is a symptom of our diseased society. He is not its cause. He is what is vomited up out of decay. He expresses a childish yearning to be an omnipotent god. This yearning resonates with Americans who feel they have been treated like human refuse. But the impossibility of being a god, as Ernest Becker writes, leads to its dark alternative — destroying like a god. This self-immolation is what comes next.
Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party, along with the establishment wing of the Republican Party, which allied itself with Harris, live in their own non-reality-based belief system.
Smug, ‘moral’ crusade
Harris, who was anointed by party elites and never received a single primary vote, proudly trumpeted her endorsement by Dick Cheney, a politician who left office with a 13 percent approval rating. The smug, self-righteous “moral” crusade against Trump stokes the national reality television show that has replaced journalism and politics.
It reduces a social, economic and political crisis to the personality of Trump. It refuses to confront and name the corporate forces responsible for our failed democracy. It allows Democratic politicians to blithely ignore their base — 77 percent of Democrats and 62 percent of independents support an arms embargo against Israel.
The open collusion with corporate oppression and refusal to heed the desires and needs of the electorate neuters the press and Trump critics. These corporate puppets stand for nothing, other than their own advancement. The lies they tell to working men and women, especially with programmes such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), do far more damage than any of the lies uttered by Trump.
Oswald Spengler in The Decline of the West predicted that, as Western democracies calcified and died, a class of “monied thugs,” people such as Trump, would replace the traditional political elites. Democracy would become a sham. Hatred would be fostered and fed to the masses to encourage them to tear themselves apart.
The American dream has become an American nightmare.
The social bonds, including jobs that gave working Americans a sense of purpose and stability, that gave them meaning and hope, have been sundered. The stagnation of tens of millions of lives, the realisation that it will not be better for their children, the predatory nature of our institutions, including education, health care and prisons, have engendered, along with despair, feelings of powerlessness and humiliation. It has bred loneliness, frustration, anger and a sense of worthlessness.
Collective mood to sadness “When life is not worth living, everything becomes a pretext for ridding ourselves of it . . .,” Émile Durkheim wrote. “There is a collective mood, as there is an individual mood, that inclines nations to sadness. . . . For individuals are too closely involved in the life of society for it to be sick without their being affected. Its suffering inevitably becomes theirs.”
Decayed societies, where a population is stripped of political, social and economic power, instinctively reach out for cult leaders. I watched this during the breakup of the former Yugoslavia. The cult leader promises a return to a mythical golden age and vows, as Trump does, to crush the forces embodied in demonised groups and individuals that are blamed for their misery.
The more outrageous cult leaders become, the more cult leaders flout law and social conventions, the more they gain in popularity. Cult leaders are immune to the norms of established society. This is their appeal. Cult leaders seek total power. Those who follow them grant them this power in the desperate hope that the cult leaders will save them.
All cults are personality cults. Cult leaders are narcissists. They demand obsequious fawning and total obedience. They prize loyalty above competence. They wield absolute control. They do not tolerate criticism. They are deeply insecure, a trait they attempt to cover up with bombastic grandiosity. They are amoral and emotionally and physically abusive. They see those around them as objects to be manipulated for their own empowerment, enjoyment and often sadistic entertainment.
All those outside the cult are branded as forces of evil, prompting an epic battle whose natural expression is violence.
We will not convince those who have surrendered their agency to a cult leader and embraced magical thinking through rational argument. We will not coerce them into submission. We will not find salvation for them or ourselves by supporting the Democratic Party.
Whole segments of American society are now bent on self-immolation. They despise this world and what it has done to them. Their personal and political behaviour is willfully suicidal. They seek to destroy, even if destruction leads to violence and death. They are no longer sustained by the comforting illusion of human progress, losing the only antidote to nihilism.
Work essential for human dignity
Pope John Paul II in 1981 issued an encyclical titled Laborem Exercens, or “Through Work.” He attacked the idea, fundamental to capitalism, that work was merely an exchange of money for labour. Work, he wrote, should not be reduced to the commodification of human beings through wages. Workers were not impersonal instruments to be manipulated like inanimate objects to increase profit. Work was essential to human dignity and self-fulfillment. It gave us a sense of empowerment and identity. It allowed us to build a relationship with society in which we could feel we contributed to social harmony and social cohesion, a relationship in which we had purpose.
The Pope castigated unemployment, underemployment, inadequate wages, automation and a lack of job security as violations of human dignity. These conditions, he wrote, were forces that negated self-esteem, personal satisfaction, responsibility and creativity. The exaltation of the machine, he warned, reduced human beings to the status of slaves. He called for full employment, a minimum wage large enough to support a family, the right of a parent to stay home with children, and jobs and a living wage for the disabled. He advocated, in order to sustain strong families, universal health insurance, pensions, accident insurance and work schedules that permitted free time and vacations. He wrote that all workers should have the right to form unions with the ability to strike.
We must invest our energy into organising mass movements to overthrow the corporate state through sustained acts of mass civil disobedience. This includes the most powerful weapon we possess — the strike. By turning our ire on the corporate state, we name the true sources of power and abuse. We expose the absurdity of blaming our demise on demonised groups such as undocumented workers, Muslims or Blacks.
We give people an alternative to a corporate-indentured Democratic Party that cannot be rehabilitated. We make possible the restoration of an open society, one that serves the common good rather than corporate profit. We must demand nothing less than full employment, guaranteed minimum incomes, universal health insurance, free education at all levels, robust protection of the natural world and an end to militarism and imperialism.
We must create the possibility for a life of dignity, purpose and self-esteem. If we do not, it will ensure a Christianised fascism and ultimately, with the accelerating ecocide, our obliteration.
Less than 48 hours before election day, Donald Trump told a rally of his supporters that he wouldn’t mind if someone shot the journalists in front of him. Image: The Conversation/Democracy Now!
ANALYSIS: By Julie Posetti and Waqas Ejaz
Press freedom is a pillar of American democracy. But political attacks on US-based journalists and news organisations pose an unprecedented threat to their safety and the integrity of information.
Less than 48 hours before election day, Donald Trump, now President-elect for a second term, told a rally of his supporters that he wouldn’t mind if someone shot the journalists in front of him.
“I have this piece of glass here, but all we have really over here is the fake news. And to get me, somebody would have to shoot through the fake news. And I don’t mind that so much,” he said.
A new survey from the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ) highlights a disturbing tolerance for political bullying of the press in the land of the First Amendment. The findings show that this is especially true among white, male, Republican voters.
We commissioned this nationally representative survey of 1020 US adults, which was fielded between June 24 and July 5 2024, to assess Americans’ attitudes to the press ahead of the election. We are publishing the results here for the first time.
More than one-quarter (27 percent) of the Americans we polled said they had often seen or heard a journalist being threatened, harassed or abused online. And more than one-third (34 percent) said they thought it was appropriate for senior politicians and government officials to criticise journalists and news organisations.
Tolerance for political targeting of the press appears as polarised as American society. Nearly half (47 percent) of the Republicans surveyed approved of senior politicians critiquing the press, compared to less than one-quarter (22 percent) of Democrats.
Our analysis also revealed divisions according to gender and ethnicity. While 37 percent of white-identifying respondents thought it was appropriate for political leaders to target journalists and news organisations, only 27 percent of people of colour did. There was also a nine-point difference along gender lines, with 39 percent of men approving of this conduct, compared to 30 percent of women.
It appears intolerance towards the press has a face — a predominantly white, male and Republican-voting face.
New survey finds an alarming tolerance for attacks on the press in the US – particularly among white, Republican men https://t.co/duMSRAVpWa
Press freedom fears This election campaign, Trump has repeated his blatantly false claim that journalists are “enemies of the people”. He has suggested that reporters who cross him should be jailed, and signalled that he would like to revoke broadcast licences of networks.
Relevant, too, is the enabling environment for viral attacks on journalists created by unregulated social media companies which represent a clear threat to press freedom and the safety of journalists. Previous research produced by ICFJ for Unesco concluded that there was a causal relationship between online violence towards women journalists and physical attacks.
While political actors may be the perpetrators of abuse targeting journalists, social media companies have facilitated their viral spread, heightening the risk to journalists.
We’ve seen a potent example of this in the current campaign, when Haitian Times editor Macollvie J. Neel was “swatted” — meaning police were dispatched to her home after a fraudulent report of a murder at the address — during an episode of severely racist online violence.
Trajectory of Trump attacks Since the 2016 election, Trump has repeatedly discredited independent reporting on his campaign. He has weaponised the term “fake news” and accused the media of “rigging” elections.
“The election is being rigged by corrupt media pushing completely false allegations and outright lies in an effort to elect [Hillary Clinton] president,” he said in 2016. With hindsight, such accusations foreshadowed his false claims of election fraud in 2020, and similar preemptive claims in 2024.
His increasingly virulent attacks on journalists and news organisations are amplified by his supporters online and far-right media. Trump has effectively licensed attacks on American journalists through anti-press rhetoric and undermined respect for press freedom.
In 2019, the Committee to Protect Journalists found that more than 11 percent of 5400 tweets posted by Trump between the date of his 2016 candidacy and January 2019 “. . . insulted or criticised journalists and outlets, or condemned and denigrated the news media as a whole”.
After being temporarily deplatformed from Twitter for breaching community standards, Trump launched Truth Social, where he continues to abuse his critics uninterrupted. But he recently rejoined the platform (now X), and held a series of campaign events with X owner and Trump backer Elon Musk.
The failed insurrection on January 6, 2021, rammed home the scale of the escalating threats facing American journalists. During the riots at the Capitol, at least 18 journalists were assaulted and reporting equipment valued at tens of thousands of dollars was destroyed.
This election cycle, Reporters Without Borders logged 108 instances of Trump insulting, attacking or threatening the news media in public speeches or offline remarks over an eight-week period ending on October 24.
Meanwhile, the Freedom of the Press Foundation has recorded 75 assaults on journalists since January 1 this year. That’s a 70 percent increase on the number of assaults captured by their press freedom tracker in 2023.
A recent survey of hundreds of journalists undertaking safety training provided by the International Women’s Media Foundation found that 36 percent of respondents reported being threatened with or experiencing physical violence. One-third reported exposure to digital violence, and 28 percent reported legal threats or action against them.
US journalists involved in ongoing ICFJ research have told us that they have felt particularly at risk covering Trump rallies and reporting on the election from communities hostile towards the press. Some are wearing protective flak jackets to cover domestic politics. Others have removed labels identifying their outlets from their reporting equipment to reduce the risk of being physically attacked.
And yet, our survey reveals a distinct lack of public concern about the First Amendment implications of political leaders threatening, harassing, or abusing journalists. Nearly one-quarter (23 percent) of Americans surveyed did not regard political attacks on journalists or news organisations as a threat to press freedom. Among them, 38 percent identified as Republicans compared to just 9 percent* as Democrats.
The anti-press playbook Trump’s anti-press playbook appeals to a global audience of authoritarians. Other political strongmen, from Brazil to Hungary and the Philippines, have adopted similar tactics of deploying disinformation to smear and threaten journalists and news outlets.
Such an approach imperils journalists while undercutting trust in facts and critical independent journalism.
History shows that fascism thrives when journalists cannot safely and freely do the work of holding governments and political leaders to account. As our research findings show, the consequences are a society accepting lies and fiction as facts while turning a blind eye to attacks on the press.
*The people identifying as Democrats in this sub-group are too few to make this a reliable representative estimate.
Note: Nabeelah Shabbir (ICFJ deputy director of research) and Kaylee Williams (ICFJ research associate) also contributed to this article and the research underpinning it. The survey was conducted by Langer Research Associates in English and Spanish. ICFJ researchers co-developed the survey and conducted the analysis.
Mainstream Western politics and culture pretend the rest of the world does not exist. The mainstream Western worldview shrinks the earth down to US-aligned countries and acts as though the billions of people who live in the Global South do not share a planet with us.
You really see this illustrated in US presidential election season, when debates will feature five or six minutes on “foreign policy” with the remaining two hours dedicated to “domestic policy” and culture war wedge issues despite the the White House’s relationship with foreign countries having orders of magnitude more significant real-world consequences.
Americans discuss election results as though the whole thing revolves around them and their feelings and how much more convenient or inconvenient the next president might make their lives, while Europeans discuss what the results might mean for NATO expenses and trade agreements.
The fact that the next US president will be committing genocide, starving people with economic sanctions and increasing Washington’s stranglehold on earth’s population by any amount of violence and tyranny necessary barely ever enters into the conversation.
Whenever you hear Western officials talking about how “the international community” views a particular issue, they’re almost always talking about the US, Canada, Europe, Australia, and maybe a few US-aligned Asian countries like Japan and South Korea — while pretending the rest of the world just isn’t there.
The mainstream Western world view. Video/audio: Caitlin Johnstone
You see it in politics, but you see it throughout our culture too. In our movies, our shows, our conversations, our thoughts. We don’t really think about all the exploitative imperialist extraction of resources and labour that makes our lifestyles possible, even though it directly affects damn near every waking moment of our lives.
You wouldn’t be reading this sentence right now had not this exact dynamic led to a highly complex electronic device making its way into your field of vision.
We just conduct ourselves from moment to moment like this relationship isn’t happening. It’s as though we’re all walking around with living people strapped to our feet like slippers, but we’re just laughing and talking about the weather and celebrities and how we’re feeling about this and that without ever acknowledging the existence of the human beings we’re standing on top of.
The Global South is omitted from our thinking and our conversations in this way all the time, leaving us in this fractured, redacted mental universe where we pretend we’re the only people living in this rapidly shrinking world. Our lives are no less significant or valuable than those of people in Africa or Asia, but we live as though they don’t exist, even when their labour may affect our moment to moment reality far more than the white-skinned person we’re paying attention to in this instant.
This is going to have to change if we’re to become a conscious species and create a healthy world together. Our perception of the world is going to have to reflect the actual world, not just the small cloistered segment which exists within the confines of Western civilisation.
We’re going to have to start thinking about humanity as a whole and stop living the lie that we are not intimately interconnected with the lives on every populated continent.
Until we open up our worldview and begin taking into account the needs and struggles of our fellow human beings around the world, it will be like we’re at a dinner party that’s being waited on by slaves.
We’re all looking at each other and talking about our lives and our families as the slaves clear our plates and refill our drinks, never acknowledging them or discussing the fact that they’re being kept as material property and forced to do what they’re doing to avoid punishment and torture.
Until we demand their freedom and invite them to come and dine with us, we’re going to be in a highly dysfunctional and abusive relationship with them, and nothing will ever feel quite right — because it won’t be.
The defamed Al Jazeera Six journalists . . . accused and threatened by Israel, Talal Mahmoud, Anas Al-Sharif, Hossam Shabat, Alaa Salameh, Ashraf Al-Saraj and Ismail Abu Omar are believed to be the last surviving reporters on the ground covering the genocide in the northern Gaza area under siege. Montage: Reporters Without Borders
Western publics are being subjected to a campaign of psychological warfare, where genocide is classed as ‘self-defence’ and opposition to it ‘terrorism’. Jonathan Cook reports as the world marked the International Day to End Impunity for Crimes against Journalists at the weekend.
ANALYSIS: By Jonathan Cook
Israel knew that, if it could stop foreign correspondents from reporting directly from Gaza, those journalists would end up covering events in ways far more to its liking.
They would hedge every report of a new Israeli atrocity – if they covered them at all – with a “Hamas claims” or “Gaza family members allege”. Everything would be presented in terms of conflicting narratives rather than witnessed facts. Audiences would feel uncertain, hesitant, detached.
Israel could shroud its slaughter in a fog of confusion and disputation. The natural revulsion evoked by a genocide would be tempered and attenuated.
For a year, the networks’ most experienced war reporters have stayed put in their hotels in Israel, watching Gaza from afar. Their human-interest stories, always at the heart of war reporting, have focused on the far more limited suffering of Israelis than the vast catastrophe unfolding for Palestinians.
That is why Western audiences have been forced to relive a single day of horror for Israel, on October 7, 2023, as intensely as they have a year of greater horrors in Gaza — in what the World Court has judged to be a “plausible” genocide by Israel.
That is why the media have immersed their audiences in the agonies of the families of some 250 Israelis — civilians taken hostage and soldiers taken captive — as much as they have the agonies of 2.3 million Palestinians bombed and starved to death week after week, month after month.
That is why audiences have been subjected to gaslighting narratives that frame Gaza’s destruction as a “humanitarian crisis” rather than the canvas on which Israel is erasing all the known rules of war.
Western media’s human-interest stories, always at the heart of war reporting, have focused on the far more limited suffering of Israelis than the vast catastrophe unfolding for Palestinians. Image: www.jonathan-cook.net
While foreign correspondents sit obediently in their hotel rooms, Palestinian journalists have been picked off one by one — in the greatest massacre of journalists in history.
Israel is now repeating that process in Lebanon. On the night of October 24, it struck a residence in south Lebanon where three journalists were staying. All were killed.
In an indication of how deliberate and cynical Israel’s actions are, it put its military’s crosshairs on six Al Jazeera reporters last month, smearing them as “terrorists” working for Hamas and Islamic Jihad. They are reportedly the last surviving Palestinian journalists in northern Gaza, which Israel has sealed off while it carries out the so-called “General’s Plan”.
Israel wants no one reporting its final push to ethnically cleanse northern Gaza by starving out the 400,000 Palestinians still there and executing anyone who remains as a “terrorist”.
These six join a long list of professionals defamed by Israel in the interests of advancing its genocide — from doctors and aid workers to UN peacekeepers.
Sympathy for Israel Perhaps the nadir of Israel’s domestication of foreign journalists was reached last month in a report by CNN. Back in February whistleblowing staff there revealed that the network’s executives have been actively obscuring Israeli atrocities to portray Israel in a more sympathetic light.
In a story whose framing should have been unthinkable — but sadly was all too predictable — CNN reported on the psychological trauma some Israeli soldiers are suffering from time spent in Gaza, in some cases leading to suicide.
Committing a genocide can be bad for your mental health, it seems. Or as CNN explained, its interviews “provide a window into the psychological burden that the war is casting on Israeli society”.
In its lengthy piece, titled “He got out of Gaza, but Gaza did not get out of him”, the atrocities the soldiers admit committing are little more than the backdrop as CNN finds yet another angle on Israeli suffering. Israeli soldiers are the real victims — even as they perpetrate a genocide on the Palestinian people.
One bulldozer driver, Guy Zaken, told CNN he could not sleep and had become vegetarian because of the “very, very difficult things” he had seen and had to do in Gaza.
What things? Zaken had earlier told a hearing of the Israeli Parliament that his unit’s job was to drive over many hundreds of Palestinians, some of them alive.
CNN reported: “Zaken says he can no longer eat meat, as it reminds him of the gruesome scenes he witnessed from his bulldozer in Gaza.”
Doubtless some Nazi concentration camp guards committed suicide in the 1940s after witnessing the horrors there — because they were responsible for them. Only in some weird parallel news universe, would their “psychological burden” be the story.
After a huge online backlash, CNN amended an editor’s note at the start of the article that originally read: “This story includes details about suicide that some readers may find upsetting.”
Readers, it was assumed, would find the suicide of Israeli soldiers upsetting, but apparently not the revelation that those soldiers were routinely driving over Palestinians so that, as Zaken explained, “everything squirts out”.
Banned from Gaza Finally, a year into Israel’s genocidal war, now rapidly spreading into Lebanon, some voices are being raised very belatedly to demand the entry of foreign journalists into Gaza.
This week — in a move presumably designed, as November’s elections loom, to ingratiate themselves with voters angry at the party’s complicity in genocide — dozens of Democratic members of the US Congress wrote to President Joe Biden asking him to pressure Israel to give journalists “unimpeded access” to the enclave.
Don’t hold your breath.
Western media have done very little themselves to protest their exclusion from Gaza over the past year — for a number of reasons.
Given the utterly indiscriminate nature of Israel’s bombardment, major outlets have not wanted their journalists getting hit by a 2000lb bomb for being in the wrong place.
That may in part be out of concern for their welfare. But there are likely to be more cynical concerns.
Having foreign journalists in Gaza blown up or executed by snipers would drag media organisations into direct confrontation with Israel and its well-oiled lobby machine.
The response would be entirely predictable, insinuating that the journalists died because they were colluding with “the terrorists” or that they were being used as “human shields” — the excuse Israel has rolled out time and again to justify its targeting of doctors in Gaza and UN peacekeepers in Lebanon.
But there’s a bigger problem. The establishment media have not wanted to be in a position where their journalists are so close to the “action” that they are in danger of providing a clearer picture of Israel’s war crimes and its genocide.
The media’s current distance from the crime scene offers them plausible deniability as they both-sides every Israeli atrocity.
In previous conflicts, western reporters have served as witnesses, assisting in the prosecution of foreign leaders for war crimes. That happened in the wars that attended the break-up of Yugoslavia, and will doubtless happen once again if Russian President Valdimir Putin is ever delivered to The Hague.
But those journalistic testimonies were harnessed to put the West’s enemies behind bars, not its closest ally.
The media do not want their reporters to become chief witnesses for the prosecution in the future trials of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Defence Minister, Yoav Gallant, at the International Criminal Court. The ICC’s Prosecutor, Karim Khan, is seeking arrest warrants for them both.
After all, any such testimony from journalists would not stop at Israel’s door. They would implicate Western capitals too, and put establishment media organisations on a collision course with their own governments.
The Western media does not see its job as holding power to account when the West is the one committing the crimes.
Censoring Palestinians Journalist whistleblowers have gradually been coming forward to explain how establishment news organisations — including the BBC and the supposedly liberal Guardian — are sidelining Palestinian voices and minimising the genocide.
An investigation by Novara Media recently revealed mounting unhappiness in parts of The Guardian newsroom at its double standards on Israel and Palestine.
Its editors recently censored a commentary by preeminent Palestinian author Susan Abulhawa after she insisted on being allowed to refer to the slaughter in Gaza as “the holocaust of our times”.
Senior Guardian columnists such as Jonathan Freedland made much during Jeremy Corbyn’s tenure as leader of the Labour party that Jews, and Jews alone, had the right to define and name their own oppression.
That right, however, does not appear to extend to Palestinians.
As staff who spoke to Novara noted, The Guardian’s Sunday sister paper, The Observer, had no problem opening its pages to British Jewish writer Howard Jacobson to smear as a “blood libel” any reporting of the provable fact that Israel has killed many, many thousands of Palestinian children in Gaza.
One veteran journalist there said: “Is The Guardian more worried about the reaction to what is said about Israel than Palestine? Absolutely.”
Another staff member admitted it would be inconceivable for the paper to be seen censoring a Jewish writer. But censoring a Palestinian one is fine, it seems.
Other journalists report being under “suffocating control” from senior editors, and say this pressure exists “only if you’re publishing something critical of Israel”.
According to staff there, the word “genocide” is all but banned in the paper except in coverage of the International Court of Justice, whose judges ruled nine months ago that a “plausible” case had been made that Israel was committing genocide. Things have got far worse since.
Whistleblowing journalists Similarly, “Sara”, a whistleblower who recently resigned from the BBC newsroom and spoke of her experiences to Al Jazeera’s Listening Post, said Palestinians and their supporters were routinely kept off air or subjected to humiliating and insensitive lines of questioning.
Some producers have reportedly grown increasingly reluctant to bring on air vulnerable Palestinians, some of whom have lost family members in Gaza, because of concerns about the effect on their mental health from the aggressive interrogations they were being subjected to from anchors.
According to Sara, BBC vetting of potential guests overwhelmingly targets Palestinians, as well as those sympathetic to their cause and human rights organisations. Background checks are rarely done of Israelis or Jewish guests.
She added that a search showing that a guest had used the word “Zionism” — Israel’s state ideology — in a social media post could be enough to get them disqualified from a programme.
Even officials from one of the biggest rights group in the world, the New York-based Human Rights Watch, became persona non grata at the BBC for their criticisms of Israel, even though the corporation had previously relied on their reports in covering Ukraine and other global conflicts.
Israeli guests, by contrast, “were given free rein to say whatever they wanted with very little pushback”, including lies about Hamas burning or beheading babies and committing mass rape.
An email cited by Al Jazeera from more than 20 BBC journalists sent last February to Tim Davie, the BBC’s director-general, warned that the corporation’s coverage risked “aiding and abetting genocide through story suppression”.
Upside-down values These biases have been only too evident in the BBC’s coverage, first of Gaza and now, as media interest wanes in the genocide, of Lebanon.
Headlines — the mood music of journalism, and the only part of a story many of the audience read — have been uniformly dire.
For example, Netanyahu’s threats of a Gaza-style genocide against the Lebanese people last month if they did not overthrow their leaders were soft-soaped by the BBC headline: “Netanyahu’s appeal to Lebanese people falls on deaf ears in Beirut.”
Reasonable readers would have wrongly inferred both that Netanyahu was trying to do the Lebanese people a favour (by preparing to murder them), and that they were being ungrateful in not taking up his offer.
It has been the same story everywhere in the establishment media. In another extraordinary, revealing moment, Kay Burley of Sky News announced last month the deaths of four Israeli soldiers from a Hezbollah drone strike on a military base inside Israel.
With a solemnity usually reserved for the passing of a member of the British royal family, she slowly named the four soldiers, with a photo of each shown on screen. She stressed twice that all four were only 19 years old.
Sky News seemed not to understand that these were not British soldiers, and that there was no reason for a British audience to be especially disturbed by their deaths. Soldiers are killed in wars all the time — it is an occupational hazard.
And further, if Israel considered them old enough to fight in Gaza and Lebanon, then they were old enough to die too without their age being treated as particularly noteworthy.
But more significantly still, Israel’s Golani Brigade to which these soldiers belonged has been centrally involved in the slaughter of Palestinians over the past year. Its troops have been responsible for many of the tens of thousands of children killed and maimed in Gaza.
Each of the four soldiers was far, far less deserving of Burley’s sympathy and concern than the thousands of children who have been slaughtered at the hands of their brigade. Those children are almost never named and their pictures are rarely shown, not least because their injuries are usually too horrifying to be seen.
It was yet more evidence of the upside-down world the establishment media has been trying to normalise for its audiences.
It is why statistics from the United States, where the coverage of Gaza and Lebanon may be even more unhinged, show faith in the media is at rock bottom. Fewer than one in three respondents — 31 percent — said they still had a “great deal or fair amount of trust in mass media”.
Crushing dissent Israel is the one dictating the coverage of its genocide. First by murdering the Palestinian journalists reporting it on the ground, and then by making sure house-trained foreign correspondents stay well clear of the slaughter, out of harm’s way in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.
And as ever, Israel has been able to rely on the complicity of its Western patrons in crushing dissent at home.
Last week, a British investigative journalist, Asa Winstanley, an outspoken critic of Israel and its lobbyists in the UK, had his home in London raided at dawn by counter-terrorism police.
Though the police have not arrested or charged him — at least not yet — they snatched his electronic devices. He was warned that he is being investigated for “encouragement of terrorism” in his social media posts.
Police told Middle East Eye that his devices had been seized as part of an investigation into suspected terrorism offences of “support for a proscribed organisation” and “dissemination of terrorist documents”.
The police can act only because of Britain’s draconian, anti-speech Terrorism Act.
Section 12, for example, makes the expression of an opinion that could be interpreted as sympathetic to armed Palestinian resistance to Israel’s illegal occupation — a right enshrined in international law but sweepingly dismissed as “terrorism” in the West — itself a terrorism offence.
Those journalists who haven’t been house-trained in the establishment media, as well as solidarity activists, must now chart a treacherous path across intentionally ill-defined legal terrain when talking about Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
Winstanley is not the first journalist to be accused of falling foul of the Terrorism Act. In recent weeks, Richard Medhurst, a freelance journalist, was arrested at Heathrow airport on his return from a trip abroad. Another journalist-activist, Sarah Wilkinson, was briefly arrested after her home was ransacked by police.
Their electronic devices were seized too.
Meanwhile, Richard Barnard, co-founder of Palestine Action, which seeks to disrupt the UK’s supply of weapons to Israel’s genocide, has been charged over speeches he has made against the genocide.
It now appears that all these actions are part of a specific police campaign targeting journalists and Palestinian solidarity activists: “Operation Incessantness”.
The message this clumsy title is presumably supposed to convey is that the British state is coming after anyone who speaks out too loudly against the British government’s continuing arming and complicity in Israel’s genocide.
Notably, the establishment media have failed to cover this latest assault on journalism and the role of a free press — supposedly the very things they are there to protect.
The raid on Winstanley’s home and the arrests are intended to intimidate others, including independent journalists, into silence for fear of the consequences of speaking up.
This has nothing to do with terrorism. Rather, it is terrorism by the British state.
Once again the world is being turned upside down.
Echoes from history The West is waging a campaign of psychological warfare on its populations: it is gaslighting and disorientating them, classing genocide as “self-defence” and opposition to it a form of “terrorism”.
This is an expansion of the persecution suffered by Julian Assange, the Wikileaks founder who spent years locked up in London’s Belmarsh high-security prison.
His unprecedented journalism — revealing the darkest secrets of Western states — was redefined as espionage. His “offence” was revealing that Britain and the US had committed systematic war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Now, on the back of that precedent, the British state is coming after journalists simply for embarrassing it.
Late last month I attended a meeting in Bristol against the genocide in Gaza at which the main speaker was physically absent after the British state failed to issue him an entry visa.
The missing guest — he had to join us by zoom — was Mandla Mandela, the grandson of Nelson Mandela, who was locked up for decades as a terrorist before becoming the first leader of post-apartheid South Africa and a feted, international statesman.
Mandla Mandela was until recently a member of the South African Parliament.
A Home Office spokesperson told Middle East Eye that the UK only issued visas “to those who we want to welcome to our country”.
Media reports suggest Britain was determined to exclude Mandela because, like his grandfather, he views the Palestinian struggle against Israeli apartheid as intimately linked to the earlier struggle against South Africa’s apartheid.
The echoes from history are apparently entirely lost on officials: the UK is once again associating the Mandela family with terrorism. Before it was to protect South Africa’s apartheid regime. Now it is to protect Israel’s even worse apartheid and genocidal regime.
The world is indeed turned on its head. And the West’s supposedly “free media” is playing a critical role in trying to make our upside-down world seem normal.
That can only be achieved by failing to report the Gaza genocide as a genocide. Instead, Western journalists are serving as little more than stenographers. Their job: to take dictation from Israel.
Jonathan Cook is an award-winning British journalist. He was based in Nazareth, Israel, for 20 years and returned to the UK in 2021. He is the author of three books on the Israel-Palestine conflict, including Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair (2008). In 2011, Cook was awarded the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism for his work on Palestine and Israel. This article was first published in Middle East Eye and is republished with the author’s permission.
The assault on the New Zealand media is dangerous and deeply counter productive at a time when collective action is desperately required for the enormous adaptation realities we are about to confront in a globalised economy that is becoming more geopolitically destabilised and climate change impacted. Image: TDB
COMMENTARY: By Martyn Bradbury, editor of The Daily Blog
Folks, the New Zealand media landscape is imploding and that risks terrible damage to our collective understanding of facts, agreed basic narrative of society and the ability to hold the powerful to account in a democracy.
There has been no shortage of New Zealand job cuts news in the past few weeks. Image: RNZ screenshot APR
“Job cuts continue at most of the country’s major media outlets and there is a warning that legislation some hope might help the sector could be a killer blow for many participants.
In recent weeks, there has been no shortage of job cuts news.
Here is an overview of what has been reported.
Stuff Stuff has disestablished video journalist roles in Auckland, while adding new ones in Wellington and Christchurch, cut audio roles, disestablished two senior roles to create a new head of multimedia content and strategy, and is understood to be holding meetings with other teams about cuts.
It is understood it has severed ties with style platform Ensemble, which it acquired in 2021 as part of a “life and style refresh”. Stuff did not respond to requests for comment.
NZME The NZ Herald has brought an end to its Focus video bulletin, and host Cheree Kinnear has had her role disestablished. Earlier in the year, the company cut about a dozen roles as it moved resources from the regions into Wellington and Christchurch.
Whakaata Māori Whakaata Māori said it was still working through a “realignment process:” and would not comment further until final decisions had been made. It was reported earlier that staff were warned of job cuts and the potential axing of its daily news bulletin. It faces a projected funding reduction of more than $10 million by 2027. A spokesperson said it expected to have the plan finalised by November.
TVNZ TVNZ is going through still more cost-cutting, after bringing an end to Fair Go and Sunday earlier in the year. It wants to find $30 million in savings or extra revenue over the next year and has revealed plans to close its website. A spokesperson said it was still working through a ‘feedback process’.
Mediaworks Mediaworks is proposing job cuts for a second year in a row. But a spokesperson said the situation might have been overstated in reports that ‘dozens’ of staff could be affected. ‘We are only looking at the function and future of two roles at MediaWorks, in different areas of the business. While they’re still in consultation we won’t speculate on the outcome.”
The assault on our media is dangerous and deeply counter productive at a time when collective action is desperately required for the enormous adaptation realities we are about to confront in a globalised economy that is becoming more geopolitically destabilised and climate change impacted.
Social media hate algorithms have manufactured rabbit holes of demented realities and caused us to hate one another rather than the system that exploits us all.
The Big Tech Tzars have manipulated our collective fear, ego, anger and insecurities through social media in a way that has led to the largest psychological civil war ever launched against one another.
We are but meat bags secreting hormones addicted to dopamine rewards for fat, sugar, salt and sex in a cultural landscape of individualism uber alles where we sing sweet secret lies to ourselves to make sense of a world around us that is frightening and in constant entropy.
Meanwhile, the planet burns and every aspect of our existence is monetarised for big data to sell us more stuff we can’t afford. We are alienated and anesthetized by a consumer culture that keeps us neurotic and disconnected. Our work, our existence, every move we make are all built to suck money to a minority class that sits above us while under neoliberalism, globalisation, financialisation, and automation, our existence as individuals has only become more disposable.
BUT . . . we shall not fade into the dark. We will rage for the dying light.
There are a range of NZ media doing amazing work and who deserve our collective support because if we don’t start to unify now, we will all be swept aside.
You should all be visiting the following media and consider supporting them as best we can.
Honestly the best critique of foreign policy in New Zealand. You can watch the podcast here live when it goes out or find them on The Daily Blog site listed in the right had corner. You learn more in 30 minutes with them than you will ever glean from the mainstream media. Why the hell NZ on Air is not sponsoring this astounds me, they do more explanation of what’s actually going on than any other NZ media network.
Gordon remains the best political blogger in New Zealand. His Werewolf blog is a weekly must read and he does more independent researched journalism than anyone else in the game. If you are not reading Gordon Campbell each week, you shouldn’t be commenting on politics.
Bryan Bruce is an investigative reporter who works tirelessly for a civil debate on the issues of inequality and poverty. His documentaries remain some of the most important popular critiques of neoliberalism and capitalism in NZ.
Our very own military strategist Ben Morgan has his own Substack account. He has been blogging for TDB for over 2 years, updating strategic movements in the Pacific and the Ukraine/Russia conflict. He is readable and gives a far better regular insight to what is happening than any other mainstream media commentator.
Nick offers a wickedly sharp critique of the political right. His skill and fluidity of writing marks him as an artisan blogger who is an important artist and under-rated blogger who deserves far greater recognition.
During an emergency, the marae always becomes one of the central points of the community response, the same is happening in media. As the media emergency occurs, it is the Māori media that step up and become the central point of journalism. Waatea Radio has recently expanded into digital journalism and the new power of that journalism is providing a real alternative to the dying mainstream media monoliths.
Our comrades over at the Against the Current blog offer weekly insights and criticism into the weeks events from a staunch socialist perspective. It is always well researched and well reasoned.
Idiot Savant is one of the OGs of NZ blogging. They are is a must read weekly blogger with some of the best criticisms of Government policy with a deep focus on policy and the counter productive outcomes of that policy. Fearless with the strongest values in NZ Blogging, the NZ Blogosphere would be a lesser place without No Right Turn.
You cannot deny that the RNZ Politics team have been producing some of the best journalism this year. They have become the benchmark and the record of choice for NZ journalism. Sure there are constant screw ups (Mick Hall should never have been sacked), but that’s management issues from people who are never held accountable, but the journalism they have been producing this year has been mana-enhancing for the profession.
I’m not a personal fan of Guyon Espiner, but you can’t question the journalism he provides. His relatively new podcast does hold the powerful to account and it’s probably the sharpest political interview in NZ. You can’t ignore his intelligence or how well researched he is.
No one is going to pretend Chris Lynch is leftwing, but this isn’t a list of leftwing media to follow, this is a list of good journalism regardless of political persuasion. Lynch has a deep entry to Christchurch and is the first person to turn to when an issue hits New Zealand’s second-largest city.
It’s simply the best current affairs show on NZ Television. Week after week they produce the most insightful and interesting content and I honestly believe that if this show was prime time TVNZ, our country would actually be a smarter place to live in . . . This amazing piece on Willie’s Oxford Speech is the best thing you will see on TV this year…
Our Iwi vs Peewee Treaty debate was the highest rating debate this year with over 150,000 viewers over many different media networks all joining together to bring it to the people. It’s success was a reminder how the new media are becoming the Fourth Estate.
He is simply the best economist in NZ. If there are only 3 NZ news organisations you can fund, he is one of them! He brings new facts and critiques to Government policy that is actually the best in the game. You have to follow him daily or you have no place thinking you know anything. If there is a debate on economics and Bernard Hickey isn’t here, it aint worth engaging with.
Newsroom, without a doubt, now generates the best daily journalism in NZ. Their critique of the economy and politics is probably the best in the country. It is super intelligent and presents coherent well thought out and reasoned counter points to government babble. If there is a news source worth supporting, it is NewsRoom.
Gavin Ellis is an old school editor and his arguments are always focused on a better public broadcasting model. His observations on where the media landscape is going are some of the best in NZ. He is a weekly must read to understand what is happening in the media ecosystem.
Finally a reason to read The Standard! The Left have lacked any true muscular champions and Mountain Tui is finally that voice. Excellent political criticism and insight all from behind an anonymous veil that allows for honesty. Widely rumoured to be Shane Te Pou.
Part of a new class of leftwing commentator who has sprung up on the social media platforms, Spider Hoof is funny, clever and always worth checking out on Twitter.
One of the best political podcasts in the country, Mihi is one of our political journalist treasures and her team bring the best criticisms. They were the first media outlet to really expose the Atlas Network and its influence on our political system, no one else had the courage to do that.
Part of the new wave of commentators who use social media platforms to communicate with, he is another incredibly sharp critic of the government and well worth reading.
A very talented historian who has the ability to connect the past with what is happening in the present. One of the few people where you genuinely learn something new every time you read them. Incredible knowledge of NZ’s hidden history.
Clint Smith is one of the best political twitter accounts you can follow. Up to the minute critiques on government policy, he is one of the few whose hot takes are 99 percent right. He is an excellent starting position for anyone wanting to keep up with the news cycle.
He is a cross between Noam Chomsky and Harry Potter. I regard Max as one of NZ’s best political intellectuals, he is a policy geek beyond policy geeks. If there was a God, Max would be prime minister.
Baby Horse killer, fireworks aficionado, devoted father & husband, fanatical libertarian, redemption champion, cthulla of capitalism, liquidator, ACT & Taxpayers Union cheerleader, newspaper columnist and my weekly sparring partner on The Working Group podcast, Damien Grant
Damien Grant is a dangerous libertarian lunatic who will be the first up against the wall when the Revolution comes, of that there can be no doubt, but it will be a clean painless shooting because he’s the best newspaper columnist in the game!
He’s earned a quick death!
I believe a newspaper columnist takes the events of the week and provides a deeper more reflective view that contextualises beyond the headlines.
A good columnist makes us rethink our perspectives, makes us laugh and actually adds to the debate.
Damien was one of the few to highlight the horror of Oranga Tamariki’s reverse uplifts, the Puberty Blocker Cass Report and he has criticised the Right with as much passion as he criticises the Left and his refusal to simply accept the demands of the mob make him a worthy critic.
There are very few reasons to buy a NZ Herald subscription; Simon Wilson is one of them. Ever since Mayor Wayne Brown tried to shut down having to do any interviews with Simon, he has become a must read to understand what is happening in Auckland City. He is a talented writer with a real ability to move the dial on Auckland Politics.
John Campbell — TVNZ
The Public Broadcaster is free of the commercial and political constraints other broadcasters face, the Public Broadcaster can speak truth to power and has the obligation to do so!
John Campbell is not writing opinion pieces, he’s writing analysis and thinking deeper than the current shallow mainstream media allows for.
Attacking his journalism and his analysis under the guise of balance is a false narrative designed to strangle his voice.
If people of insight and oversight can see the looming social carnage this hard right racist climate denying government is manufacturing, they have an obligation to speak out.
She’s just so good and a weekly must read. Probably the best political journalist in front at the moment, her critique of ACT this year has been next level.
The BHN boys, Pat and Chewie have created a whole new late night online news audience and are the masters of this new medium. Always interesting, always challenging, they are the future of media in this country.
Dr David Robie is one the great Pacific Journalists and with Café Pacific and Asia Pacific Report provides a news source focused on the Asia-Pacific and what is happening in our geopolitical neighbourhood. We are fortunate to have him guest blog on TDB regularly.
Forced out by RNZ for telling the truth, Mick Hall was pushed into the spotlight after he correctly inserted context to international wire stories. He should never have been forced out, and now writes at the very excellent Consortium News.
5 to avoid:
Not all media are created equally. There is some media you just want to avoid.
ZB –If you want to be a rich prick with rich prick attitudes that make you a dickhead, ZB is for you. The ZB Troll Farm are always malicious and frustrated, like a Parking Warden who hasn’t had an orgasm for a month. These are literally people you would not piss on if they were on fire.
The Platform & Reality Check Radio schism
On one side you have a cross burning, redneck banjo twanging witch hunter who believes in science and on the other side you have a cross burning, redneck banjo twanging witch hunter who doesn’t believe in science. The great schism of contrarian media between The Platform and Reality Check Radio is more akin to twins trying to eat each other in the womb. It’s like watching a death cage match between Voldemort and Trump in that you aren’t sure who to cheer for, you just want them to both kill each other.
The folded arms tells you everything
CounterSpin Media
Anyone who admits to listening CounterSpin Media should be slowly ostracised until you never hear from them ever again. Family members should be removed from the will and NEVER accept a Facebook friend request. There’s batshit crazy, and then there are people who listen to CounterSpin Media. It’s the sort of media Liz Gun would appear on and get a sympathetic hearing.
Seven Sharp
There is a reason this nation is as thick as pig shit, and it’s TVNZ’s 7 Sharp. The manner in which TVNZ have bastardised the 7pm current affairs slot into a lightweight infotainment project is why we can’t have nice things. Oh we all love Hill’s and her latest battle with what some male viewer thinks she would wear, but it’s dross fronted by private school kids who have never gone without. It’s as intellectually anaemic as it is banal. How the fuck does this stay on while actual current affairs gets cancelled?
Democracy Project
It was something that was a must read, but now it’s behind a Paywall, it is nothing more than a weekly intelligence report for corporations. Trotter has mutated into an angry reactionary cracker and it’s like watching your favourite Netflix show meltdown into crap. Trotter is now True Detective Season 4, that’s what he is. If we could harness the energy Bryce Edwards now spends on fastidiously ignoring The Daily Blog, we could solve climate change.
The NZ Elites and The Democracy Project are terrified about the falling trust in them as experts, politicians, the media and shock horror even business people.
The Establishment in New Zealand is becoming deeply unpopular. A range of new survey data shows that public discontent with politicians, the media, business and NGOs continues to grow.
…these NZ Elites + Democracy Project are reading this falling trust as a threat to their power rather than a symptom of a bigger societal issue.
Let’s acknowledge first the effect of capitalism on the Fourth Estate.
Capitalism’s Effects on Journalism:
Market censorship and informational redlining
content decisions driven by profit encouraging ‘low-quality information’.
encourages oligarchy.
high quality public information is being cut.
Trump rates while the climate kills ratings.
Capitalism has such total control over journalism it warps media into being a supply and demand equation.
Institutional collapse is ‘beyond our control’. Remember how Melissa Lee just shrugged and left the collapse to the market?
Rather than losing an essential part of our infrastructure, Newshub’s collapse is simply sold as the market working. We have allowed capitalism and its values to supersede our belief in the collective good and power of the commons.
Journalism has been bastardised into just a product.
A capitalist media can never solve the problems of market failure because it’s an inbuilt feature of capitalist media to fail.
The early hyper-commercialisation of US journalism saw less than 50 percent revenue from advertising revenue because the early media in America was highly subsidised.
When capitalist hyper-commercialisation culture kicked in, they stopped seeing their audience as citizens needing informing and saw them as consumers and the advertising percentage of revenue soars.
This has resulted in a structural crisis for journalism.
US newspapers are still a major source of local journalism
ad-dependent business model is broken because the monopoly of news has been broken.
Local journalism is no longer profitable.
Newspapers are closing and taken over by vulture capitalists.
the model is broken
This has created news deserts where there is no local news.
Social costs of the Journalism Crisis
less informed about politics
less civically engaged
less likely to vote
higher levels of corruption
increased polarisation
The truth is paywalled, but the lies are free
No wonder people are losing trust in media, politicians and shock horror business people!
We need to think of the media not as another commodity, but as ‘the commons’ and a de-commercialised structure demands we see journalism as a common good.
I love how it’s always a great time to buy a house according to the NZ Herald because The Herald’s advertising is so dependent on real estate. There is NEVER a genuine attempt to challenge what a class of landlords forever screwing over renters will actually create in this country, because, according to the NZ Herald, it’s never been a better time to buy a house!
Trust in news has dropped to 33 percent in 2024 from 53 percent in 2020.
From the social contract theory, trust has fallen because people don’t believe the media are upholding their end of that contract.
Part of this is driven by the politicians themselves. Winston’s attack on the media is unhinged madness which works because he is so reliant on low news engaged voters who get their news off Facebook.
This ocean of criticism against the media goes beyond fair criticism to open hostility and abuse.
There is a correlation between distrust and unfair criticism but I also want to see the correlation between loneliness and believing crazy stuff you’ve read on Facebook.
The social contract of the Fourth Estate has been sold off in favour of a consumer media network.
They examine the way the Public Journalism Fund has been twisted into state propaganda by Winston’s lies.
Our drop in trust has been more extreme than many other countries.
It’s an interesting argument but my sense is that the reason this attack on the media has been so successful is because the mainstream corporate media had been neglecting the interests of working people for many years. The first editorial the NZ Herald ever ran was begging white New Zealander’s to go to war against Māori. Trump’s use of “fake news” was popular because the mainstream media had been selling capitalist values, not Fourth Estate journalism to Americans for decades.
Social media allowed the legacy media gatekeepers to be overthrown and the resulting anarchy has led to a world of fractured realities.
Winston’s big lie that the entire mainstream media were bought off because of the Public Journalism Fund appeals to the conspiracy electorate NZF need to stay over 5 percent now.
I wrote many bogs critical of the funding notes that NZ on Air put forward that stipulated that if you wanted public funding for Māori media that you couldn’t breach basic tenants of Treaty value because it created the impression of an editorial direction that wasn’t there, but to conflate what were funding notes to mean the entire media had been bribed is Winstonian in its deceitful manipulation.
What Winston chooses to miss is that there was a follow up response by NZ on Air on those funding notes stating that ultimately editorial control was with the content producer.
So yes, there were stupidly woke Wellington guidelines but those notes were superseded by the reminder of editorial independence.
What he also failed to acknowledge is that a large chunk of that Public Journalism money was for positions and training.
By claiming that amounts to the entire media being bribed is not disingenuous or just false, it is malicious.
Winston is channeling Trump with his “Big Lie”.
The “Big Lie” by Winston is that the entire media were bribed.
This has caused enormous damage which he has benefited from.
But again, I think it’s deeper than just Winston AND the righteous cynicism many have towards mainstream media.
Covid was a universal experience, we all sacrificed equally in an unequal world, it has had enormous impacts on us and one of those enormous impacts has been crippling loneliness.
More and more of us are lonely and it was kicked off by being forced to stay home during the pandemic.
That loneliness is desperately corrosive to the spirit and to the person, and the dichotomy of intense loneliness combined with mass 24/7 social media connectivity has made many of us insane with a level of anger and feral hate that is the call signs of a terribly tortured individual.
We have been brainwashed by hate algorithms for the profit margins of vast Tech Gods.
Martyn Bradbury is editor and publisher of The Dally Blog where this article was first published.
Peaceful West Papuan political activist Filep Karma while imprisoned in Abepura jail in Jayapura in December 2014. His supporters released his book on Indonesian racism in West Papua on 1 December 2014. He died in mysterious circumstances in a scuba diving tragedy in November 2022. Image: Andreas Harsono/Human Rights Watch
SPECIAL REPORT: By Andreas Harsono in Jakarta
In December 2008, I visited Abepura prison in Jayapura, West Papua, to verify a report sent to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture alleging abuses inside the jailhouse, as well as shortages of food and water.
After prison guards checked my bag, I passed through a metal detector into the prison hall, joining the Sunday service with about 30 prisoners. A man sat near me. He had a thick beard and wore a small Morning Star flag on his chest.
The flag, a symbol of independence for West Papua, is banned by the Indonesian authorities, so I was a little surprised to see it worn inside the prison.
I immediately recognised him. Karma was arrested in 2004 after giving a speech on West Papua nationalism, and had been sentenced to 15 years in prison for “treason”.
It was the beginning of my many interviews with Karma. And I began to understand what made him such a courageous leader.
Born in 1959 in Jayapura, Karma was raised in an elite, educated family.
Student-led protests
In 1998, when Karma returned after studying from the Asian Institute of Management in Manila, he found Indonesia engulfed in student-led protests against the authoritarian rule of President Suharto.
On 2 July 1998, he led a ceremony to peacefully raise the Morning Star flag on Biak Island. It prompted a deadly attack by the Indonesian military that the authorities said killed at least eight Papuans, but Papuans recovered 32 bodies. Karma was arrested and sentenced to 18 months in prison.
Karma gradually emerged as a leader who campaigned peacefully but tirelessly on behalf of the rights of Indigenous Papuans. He also worked as a civil servant, training new government employees.
He was invariably straightforward and precise. He provided detailed data, including names, dates, and actions about torture and other mistreatment at Abepura prison.
Human Rights Watch published these investigations in June 2009. It had quite an impact, prompting media pressure that forced the Ministry of Law and Human Rights to investigate the allegations.
In August 2009, Karma became seriously ill and was hospitalised at the Dok Dua hospital. The doctors examined him several times, and finally, in October, recommended that he be sent for surgery that could only be done in Jakarta.
But bureaucracy, either deliberately or through incompetence, kept delaying his treatment. “I used to be a bureaucrat myself,” Karma said. “But I have never experienced such [use of] red tape on a sick man.”
Papuan political prisoners Jefry Wandikbo (left) and Filep Karma (center) chat with the author Andreas Harsono at Abepura prison in Jayapura, Papua, in May 2015. They continued to campaign against arbitrary detention by the Indonesian authorities. Image: Ruth Ogetay/HRW
Health crowdfunding
His health problems, however, drew public attention. Papuan activists started collecting money to pay for the airfare and surgery in Jakarta. I helped write a crowdfunding proposal. People deposited the donations directly into his bank account.
I was surprised when I found out that the total donation, including from some churches, had almost reached IDR1 billion (US$700,000). It was enough to also pay for his mother, Eklefina Noriwari, an uncle, a cousin and an assistant to travel with him. They rented a guest house near the hospital.
Some wondered why he travelled with such a large entourage. The answer is that Indigenous Papuans distrust the Indonesian government. Many of their political leaders had mysteriously died while receiving medical treatment in Jakarta. They wanted to ensure that Filep Karma was safe.
When he was admitted to Cikini hospital, the ward had a small security cordon. I saw many Indonesian security people, including four prison guards, guarding his room, but also church delegates, visiting him.
Papuan students, mostly waiting in the inner yard, said they wanted to make sure, “Our leader is okay.”
After a two-hour surgery, Karma recovered quickly, inviting me and my wife to visit him. His mother and his two daughters, Audryn and Andrefina, also visited my Jakarta apartment. In July 2011, after 11 days in the hospital, he was considered fit enough to return to prison.
In May 2011, the Washington-based Freedom Now filed a petition with the UN Working Group on arbitrary detention on Karma’s behalf. Six months later, the Working Group determined that his detention violated international standards, saying that Indonesia’s courts “disproportionately” used the laws against treason, and called for his immediate release.
President refused to act
But President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono refused to act, prompting criticism at the UN forum on the discrimination and abuses against Papuans.
I often visited Karma in prison. He took a correspondence course at Universitas Terbuka, studying police science. He read voraciously.
He studied Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King on non-violent movements and moral courage. He also drew, using pencil and charcoal. He surprised me with my portrait that he drew on a Jacob’s biscuit box.
His name began to appear globally. Chinese artist Ai Weiwei drew political prisoners, including Karma, in an exhibition at Alcatraz prison near San Francisco. Amnesty International produced a video about Karma.
Interestingly, he also read my 2011 book on journalism, “Agama” Saya Adalah Jurnalisme (My “Religion” Is Journalism), apparently inspiring him to write his own book. He used an audio recorder to express his thoughts, asking his friends to type and to print outside, which he then edited.
His 137-page book was published in November 2014, entitled, Seakan Kitorang Setengah Binatang: Rasialisme Indonesia di Tanah Papua (As If We’re Half Animals: Indonesian Racism in West Papua). It became a very important book on racism against Indigenous Papuans in Indonesia.
The Indonesian government, under new President Joko Widodo, finally released Karma in November 2015, and after that gradually released more than 110 political prisoners from West Papua and the Maluku Islands.
Release from jail celebration
Hundreds of Papuan activists welcomed Karma, bringing him from the prison to a field to celebrate with dancing and singing. He called me that night, saying that he had that “strange feeling” of missing the Abepura prison, his many inmate friends, his vegetable garden, as well as the boxing club, which he managed. He had spent 11 years inside the Abepura prison.
“It’s nice to be back home though,” he said laughing.
He slowly rebuilt his activism, traveling to many university campuses throughout Indonesia, also overseas, and talking about human rights abuses, the environmental destruction in West Papua, as well as his advocacy for an independent West Papua.
Students often invited him to talk about his book.
In Jakarta, he rented a studio near my apartment as his stopping point. We met socially, and also attended public meetings together. I organised his birthday party in August 2018. He bought new gear for his scuba diving. My wife, Sapariah, herself a diving enthusiast, noted that Karma was an excellent diver: “He swims like a fish.”
Filep Karma (right) with his brother-in-law George Waromi at Base G beach, Jayapura, Papua, on 30 October 2022. Karma said he planned to go spearfishing alone. His body washed ashore two days later. Image: Larz Barnabas Waromi/HRW
The resistance of Papuans in Indonesia to discrimination took on a new phase following a 17 August 2019 attack by security forces on a Papuan student dormitory in Surabaya, Indonesia’s second largest city, in which the students were subjected to racial insults.
The attack renewed discussions on anti-Papuan racial discrimination and sovereignty for West Papua. Papuan students and others acting through a social media movement called Papuan Lives Matter, inspired by Black Lives Matter in the United States, took part in a wave of protests that broke out in many parts of Indonesia.
The new Human Rights Watch report “If It’s Not Racism, What Is It?”: Discrimination and Other Abuses Against Papuans in Indonesia. Image: HRW screenshot APR
Everyone reading Karma’s book
Everyone was reading Filep Karma’s book. Karma protested when these young activists, many of whom he personally knew, such as Sayang Mandabayan, Surya Anta Ginting and Victor Yeimo, were arrested and charged with treason.
“Protesting racism should not be considered treason,” he said.
The Indonesian government responded by detaining hundreds. Papuans Behind Bars, a nongovernmental organisation that monitors politically motivated arrests in West Papua, recorded 418 new cases from October 2020 to September 2021. At least 245 of them were charged, found guilty, and imprisoned for joining the protests, with 109 convicted of “treason”.
However, while in the past, Papuans charged with political offences typically were sentenced to years — in Karma’s case, 15 years — in the recent cases, perhaps because of international and domestic attention, the Indonesian courts handed down much shorter sentences, often time already served.
The coronavirus pandemic halted his activism in 2020-2022. He had plenty of time for scuba diving and spearfishing. Once he posted on Facebook that when a shark tried to steal his fish, he smacked it on the snout.
On 1 November 2022, my good friend Filep Karma was found dead on a Jayapura beach. He had apparently gone diving alone. He was wearing his scuba diving suit.
His mother, Eklefina Noriwari, called me that morning, telling me that her son had died. “I know you’re his close friend,” she told me. “Please don’t be sad. He died doing what he liked best . . . the sea, the swimming, the diving.”
West Papua was in shock. More than 30,000 people attended his funeral, flying the Morning Star flag, as their last act of respect for a courageous man. Mourners heard the speakers celebrating Filep Karma’s life, and then quietly went home.
It was peaceful. And this is exactly what Filep Karma’s message is about.
Covers of Islands Business . . . an influential regional news magazine telling Pacific stories and covering key issues. Image: Teagan Laszlo/QUT
PROFILE: By Teagan Laszlo
For Samantha Magick, journalism isn’t just a job. It is a lifelong commitment to storytelling, advocacy, and empowering voices often overlooked in the Pacific.
As the managing editor and publisher at Islands Business, the Pacific Islands’ longest surviving news and business monthly magazine, Magick’s commitment to quality reporting and journalistic integrity has established her as a leading figure in the region’s news industry.
Magick’s passion for journalism began at a young age.
“I wanted to be a journalist when I was like 12,” Magick recalls. “When I left school, that’s all I wanted to study.”
She remembers her family’s disapproval when she would write stories as a child, as they thought she was “sharing secrets”. Despite that early condemnation, Magick’s thriving journalism career has taken her across continents and exposed her to diverse media landscapes.
After completing a Bachelor of Communications with a major in journalism at Charles Sturt University in Bathurst, Australia, Magick began her career at Communications Fiji Limited (CFL), a prominent Fijian commercial network.
She progressed over 11 years from a cadet to CFL’s news director.
Guidance of first boss
Magick attributes some of her early success to the guidance of her first boss and CFL’s founder, William Parkinson. She considers herself fortunate to have had a supportive mentor who led by example and dared to take risks early in life, such as founding a radio station in his 20s.
After leaving CFL, Magick’s career took her across the globe, including regional Pacific non-government organisations, news publications in Hawai’i and Indonesia, and even international legal organisations in Italy.
Magick, who is of both Fijian and Australian heritage, returned to Suva in 2018, where she began her current role as Islands Business’s managing editor.
“I’ve chosen to make my life in Fiji because I feel more myself here,” Magick says, reflecting on her deep connection to the island nation.
Magick’s vision for Islands Business focuses on delving into the deeper, underlying narratives often overshadowed by breaking news cycles and free, readily available news content.
“We need to be able to demonstrate the value of investigation, big picture reporting rather than the day-to-day stuff,” Magick says.
Magick prides herself on creating a diverse and inclusive newsroom that reflects the communities it serves.
Need for diverse newsroom
“You have to have a diverse newsroom,” she emphasises, recognising the importance of amplifying marginalised voices. “For example, there is a conscious effort to make sure our magazine is not full of photos of men shaking hands with other men.”
Magick also believes journalists have a responsibility to advocate for change, as demonstrated by Islands Business’s dedication to tackling pressing issues from climate change to media freedom.
“Why would I give a climate change denier space?” Magick questions when discussing the need to balance objectivity and advocacy. “Because it’s kind of going to sell magazines? Because it’s going to create a bit of a stir online? That’s not something we believe in.”
Despite her success, Magick’s career has not been without challenges. Magick worked through Fiji’s former draconian media restriction laws under the Media Industry Development Act 2010, while also navigating the shift to digital media.
Islands Business managing editor Samantha Magick (right) with Fiji Times reporter Rakesh Kumar and chief editor Fred Wesley (centre) celebrating the repeal of the draconian Fiji media law last year . . . ““Why would I give a climate change denier space?” Image: Lydia Lewis/RNZ Pacific
Magick emphasises the need to constantly upskill and re-evaluate strategies to ensure she and Islands Business can effectively navigate the constantly evolving media landscape.
From learning to capitalise on social media analytics to locating reputable information sources when many of them feared to speak to the journalists due to the risk of legal retribution, Magick believes flexibility and perseverance are crucial to staying ahead in media.
In her early career, Magick also faced sexism and misogyny in the media industry. “When I think back about the way I was treated as a young journalist, I feel sick,” Magick says as she reflects on how she and her female colleagues would warn each other against interviewing certain sources alone.
Supporting aspiring journalists
The challenges Magick has faced undoubtably contribute to her dedication to supporting aspiring journalists, as evident through Kite Pareti’s journey. Starting as a freelance writer with no newswriting experience in March 2022, Pareti has since progressed to one of two full-time reporters at Islands Business.
Pareti expresses gratitude for the opportunities she’s had while working at Islands Business, and for the mentorship of Magick, whom she describes as “family”.
“Samantha took a chance on me when I had zero knowledge on news writing,” Pareti says. “So I’m grateful to God for her life and for allowing me to experience this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”
Magick reciprocates this sentiment. “Recently, I am inspired by some of our younger reporters in the field, and their ability to embrace and leverage technology — they’re teaching me.”
Magick anticipates an exciting period ahead for Islands Business, as she aims to attract a younger, professionally driven, and regionally focused audience to their platforms.
When asked about her aspirations for journalism in the region, Magick says she hopes to see a future where Pacific voices remain at the centre, “telling their own stories in all their diversities”.
Teagan Laszlo was a student journalist from the Queensland University of Technology who travelled to Fiji with the support of the Australian Government’s New Colombo Plan Mobility Programme. This article is published in a partnership of QUT with Asia Pacific Report, Asia Pacific Media Network (APMN) and The University of the South Pacific.
It’s ironic that the United States and its closest ally, Israel, a state born out of the horrors of the Second World World War, have spent the better part of the past 75 years undermining the so-called rules-based international order (RBO).
After all, the RBO was established in the wake of war, under US leadership, to prevent a repeat of that costly conflict, which killed more than 50 million people, including six million Jews in the Nazi Holocaust.
The United Nations is arguably the most important pillar of the RBO. It is tasked with keeping international peace, preventing wars of aggression, and ensuring that human rights atrocities — such as those committed in the Holocaust — are never repeated.
The US and Israel, however, have long viewed the UN with a special disdain and worked to render it ineffective.
As American international law scholar Richard Falk detailed in his 2008 book, The Costs of War: International Law, the UN, and World Order, they have “repeatedly and defiantly” broken the so-called “Nuremberg promise” — that legal standards used against the Nazi regime would be applied to all future states, including the US and the rest of the Second World Allied Powers — “thereby undermining any prospect for peace and normalcy in the world”.
Falk established that the US, in particular, worked consistently at “weakening … international law” and “eroding . . . the authority of the United Nations”.
Indeed, major US foreign policy decisions, such as its 2003 invasion of Iraq, have repeatedly demonstrated what renowned philosopher Noam Chomsky defined as Washington’s “contempt for the international system”.
US ‘stigmatising enemies’
Sure, the US also has a history of invoking the importance of upholding the RBO or protecting the UN, but it only does this to advance its own interests, such as when it seeks to “stigmatise enemies”.
Whenever the UN refuses to follow the US lead or makes a move that undermines the interests of its allies, Washington swiftly makes its contempt for the organisation clear.
US “contempt” for the international system is perhaps the most evident in its veto record at the UN Security Council.
Between 1972 — when the US first used its veto power to support Israel — and December 2023, the US vetoed 77 resolutions, including 45 critical of Israel.
In February 2024, the US used its veto power for the 78th time since 1972, marking the 46th instance of shielding Israel.
During this time period, no other permanent Security Council member has come close to the US mark — Russia (44), China (16), the UK (17), and France (9) have used their veto powers a combined total of 86 times.
During the current Israeli war on Gaza alone, the US has vetoed three UN Security Council ceasefire resolutions on behalf of Israel.
Israel intensifies UN attacks
Meanwhile, under US protection, Israel has intensified its attacks on the UN’s Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) since the beginning of its genocide in Gaza.
In January 2024, Israel accused UNRWA of “terrorism”, prompting the US to cut funding to the agency, which provides essential services to millions of Palestinians.
On Monday, the Israeli Parliament — Knesset — approved a bill to ban UNRWA from operating in both Gaza and the West Bank, and Israel is also seeking to declare UNRWA as a “terrorist” organisation.
Israel has long been at war with UNRWA, but these recent actions represent a significant escalation, especially when considered against the backdrop of recent Israeli violence in Gaza.
During the ongoing war, Israel has repeatedly bombed UN schools and killed more than 220 UN staff members. No other conflict in UN history has killed such a high number of UN staff.
During the current war, Israel has also demonstrated its contempt for the UN in other, symbolic ways.
In May 2024, Israel’s Ambassador to the UN, Gilad Erdan, shredded a copy of the UN charter in protest of the UN General Assembly’s decision to grant certain rights to Palestine.
‘Contemptuous farce’
Last month, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivered a speech at the UN, during which he referred to the institution as a “swamp of antisemitic bile,” a “contemptuous farce,” and “contemptible in the eyes of decent people everywhere”.
Shortly after Netanyahu’s speech, Israel declared UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres “persona non grata,” accused him of “backing terrorists, rapists, and murderers,” and banned him from entering Israel.
Most recently, Israel launched a series of apparently deliberate attacks on UN peacekeepers in Lebanon.
As Israel has escalated its attacks on the UN, the US has largely remained idle. For instance, when 40 countries condemned Israel’s attacks on UN peacekeepers, the US declined to endorse the statement.
The US and Israel have also consistently attacked, insulted and attempted to undermine the International Court of Justice (ICJ) — the UN’s principal judicial organ — ever since a case of genocide was raised against Israel there.
Noam Chomsky famously described the US and Israel as the world’s two leading “rogue states”. History shows that rogue actors eventually face serious consequences.
The US and Israel would be wise to rein themselves in sooner rather than later, as a weakened international system risks creating chaos that could hasten their own decline.
The American empire is already in decline, and Israel’s war on Gaza is further damaging the US’s international standing while jeopardising its strategic and economic interests.
As for Israel, its actions in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon may also be accelerating its own collapse, as suggested by Israeli scholar Ilan Pappe and countless other analysts of the region.
Both Israel and the US should recognise the extent to which they need the UN and the RBO, if for no other reason than to safeguard their interests.
Dr Mohamad Elmasry is professor in the media studies programme at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies. This article was first published by Al Jazeera.
Speakers at the People's Forum Session on Freedom of Expression at CHOGM 2024 in Apia, Samoa, last week . . . moderator (from left) Shahidul Alam (Bangladesh), Lance Polu (Samoa), Kalafi Moala (Tonga) Kumi Naidoo (South Africa) and Neha Dixit (India). Image: Talamua Media
The Commonwealth Heads of Government adopted the Commonwealth Principles on Freedom of Expression and the Role of the Media in Good Governance at their summit meeting in Apia, Samoa, last week.
These Principles highlight the importance of freedom of expression and media freedom to democracy. They state that Commonwealth governments “should consider repealing or amending laws which unduly restrict the right to freedom of expression”.
The Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative and the Commonwealth Journalists’ Association called on states to take practical and effective steps to end arbitrary and excessive restrictions on free expression. The Commonwealth as a whole must audit progress and engage with civil society to ensure that these Principles are implemented in reality.
Freedom of expression is not just a right in itself — it is the foundation that allows us to exercise and defend all other human rights, and is safeguarded under international law.
However, as we know all too well, this right is under threat.
According to UNESCO, in Commonwealth countries alone, 178 journalists were killed between 2006 and 2020. Furthermore, the impunity rate for the killings of journalists during that same time is 96 percent — which is notably higher than the global impunity rate of 87 percent.
Restrictive, colonial-era laws
Many Commonwealth countries still maintain restrictive, colonial-era laws that curtail free expression, suppress diverse voices, and inhibit the transparency that is essential for democracy.
In the Commonwealth:
41 countries continue to criminalise defamation; 48 countries still retain laws related to sedition; and
“These laws, often enforced through criminal sanctions, have a chilling effect on activists, journalists, iand others who fear retaliation for speaking truth to power”, said William Horsley of the Commonwealth Journalists’ Association.
“This has led to an alarming rise in self-censorship and a decline in the independent and dissenting voices that are vital for holding governments accountable.”
Civil society response
The Principles were first put forward by a group of civil society organisations in response to a general deterioration in legal protections and the working environment for journalists.
The CJA convened other civil society organisations, including the CHRI, Commonwealth Lawyers Association and the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, before Commonwealth member states reviewed and adopted the Principles in the form which was adopted by heads of government at the 2024 CHOGM.
States are “urged to take concrete and meaningful steps to implement them within their domestic frameworks, as set out in the CHOGM Samoa Communiqué“.
The joint report Who Controls the Narrative? Legal Restrictions on Freedom of Expression in the Commonwealth reveals the increasing use of criminal law provisions, including those related to defamation, sedition, blasphemy, and national security, to restrict freedom of expression and media freedom within the Commonwealth.
The report is the product of extensive collaboration between Commonwealth partners, legal experts, academics, human rights advocates, and media professionals, and provides a comprehensive analysis of the legal frameworks governing freedom of expression and outlines clear pathways for reform.
In addition to analysing legal restrictions on free speech in Commonwealth states, the report puts forward actionable recommendations for reform.
These include regional and national-level proposals, as well as broader Commonwealth-wide recommendations aimed at strengthening legal frameworks, promoting judicial independence, encouraging media pluralism, and enhancing international accountability mechanisms.
#Commonwealth Heads of Government (#CHOGM2024) adopted the Commonwealth Principles on Freedom of Expression and the Role of the Media in Good Governance at their summit meeting in Apia, #Samoa🇼🇸. https://t.co/HP9Lr1Aire
Reforms essential
These reforms are essential for establishing an environment where free expression can thrive, allowing individuals to speak without fear of reprisal.
“While many member states share a colonial legal legacy that includes repressive laws still in effect today, they also share a commitment to democratic governance and the rule of law as set out in the Commonwealth Charter,” said Sneh Aurora, director of the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative.
“The Commonwealth has the potential to lead by example in promoting freedom of expression through legal reform, ensuring that criminal laws are not misused to silence dissent.
“The Principles provide an important opportunity for Commonwealth governments to bring their national laws in line with international human rights laws.”
