EMERGENCY CALL OUT TO ALL SUBSTACKERS! -- Challenge US/Israeli Slaughter Of Palestinian Journalists

Pass this along. Time to rally for our brothers and sisters in free speech and information. Resist. Persist. Or choose to submit.

Illustration by Mark Taylor / DeMOCKracy.ink

By Mark Taylor
DeMOCKracy.ink (10/25/24)

Please watch the video below from Jeremy Scahill of Drop Site News calling for journalists to support the safety of journalists in Gaza. It would be wonderful if corporate media journalists would find the cajones to speak up, but my guess is there will be few if any, especially those working for corporate publications and media networks busy censoring and pushing grotesque pro-Israel propaganda.

Substack writers are many and our voices need to be heard. Please listen to Scahill then call the White House and your Congressional ‘representatives’. Yes, I know they're are all paid employees of Zionist lobby groups, but we need to try.

We don’t have control over the outcome of our efforts, but we do have control of whether we try. Also, understand, standing up for our colleagues in Gaza is standing up for ourselves because no matter which nitwit wins Nov. 5th, our future is on the line as well. Don’t for a moment assume that we — you — are immune to what our brother writers in Gaza are facing. All tyranny eventually comes home. That is a fact of all collapsing empires.

Pass this along or write up your own post, but — brothers and sisters — let’s get the word out.

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Stand With Palestinian Journalists: Drop Site's Emergency Statement On IDF Threats

Drop Site News (10/25/24)

Drop Site’s Jeremy Scahill and Sharif Abdel Kouddous deliver an urgent appeal to protect Palestinian journalists, in light of the IDF releasing what amounts to a hit list targeting six Al-Jazeera reporters. Drop Site urges all journalists to speak out against the threats to our Palestinian colleagues.

9-minute video

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IDF Kills Three Journalists In Attack On Press Compound In Lebanon: 'This is a war crime'

"These were just journalists that were sleeping in bed after long days of covering the conflict," said one reporter who was present at the time of the Israeli attack.

By Jake Johnson
Common Dreams (10/25/24)

The Israeli military on Friday bombed a residential compound in southern Lebanon housing more than a dozen reporters from seven Lebanese and international media outlets, killing three journalists and wounding several others.

"This is a war crime," Ziad Makary, Lebanon's minister of information, said in the wake of the attack, which was carried out in the early hours of the morning while the victims were asleep.

Two Al-Mayadeen TV said one of its camera operators, Ghassan Najar, and broadcast technician Mohammed Rida were killed in the Israeli bombing. The other journalist killed was Wissam Qassim of Al-Manar TV.

Imran Khan, a senior correspondent for Al Jazeera who was present at the compound at the time of the Israeli attack, said there was no warning issued ahead of the strike.

"These were just journalists that were sleeping in bed after long days of covering the conflict," said Khan.

Photographs and video footage from the site of the Israeli attack show the ruins of a building and a destroyed vehicle with a large "press" label on the hood.

"We are bidding farewell to one colleague after the other due to these Israeli crimes," Al Jadeed reporter Mohammad Farhat said the aftermath of the deadly strike.

The Associated Pressreported that "Ali Shoeib, Al-Manar's well-known correspondent in south Lebanon, was seen in a video filming himself with a cellphone saying that the camera operator who had been working with him for months was killed."

"Shoeib said the Israeli military knew that the area that was struck housed journalists of different media organizations," AP added. "Lebanon's Health Minister said Friday that 11 journalists have been killed and eight wounded since exchanges of fire began along the Lebanon-Israel border in early October 2023."

The Committee to Protect Journalists, a group that has been tracking Israel's attacks on journalists in Lebanon, Gaza, and the West Bank, said Friday that it "strongly condemns Israel's killing of three journalists in southern Lebanon earlier today."

"The international community must act to stop Israel's long-standing pattern of impunity in journalist killings," the group said.

The Israeli attack on journalists in southern Lebanon came days after Israel's military accused six Gaza-based Al Jazeera reporters of being fighters in Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad—a claim the Qatar-based outlet forcefully denied and condemned as "a blatant attempt to silence the few remaining journalists in the region, thereby obscuring the harsh realities of the war from audiences worldwide."

"These baseless claims follow Al Jazeera's recent exposé of potential war crimes committed by Israeli forces during the ongoing war on Gaza," the Al Jazeera Media Network said in a statement Wednesday. "These journalists have been steadfastly reporting from northern Gaza, with Al Jazeera being the sole international media presence documenting the unfolding humanitarian crisis resulting from Israel's siege and bombardment of civilian populations."

"Al Jazeera calls on the international community to act with the utmost urgency to protect these journalists' lives and to put an end to Israeli crimes against media professionals. The network reaffirms its commitment to delivering accurate, impartial reporting from conflict zones, despite the grave risks and baseless accusations faced by its journalists," the outlet continued. "Al Jazeera stands firm in its belief that journalism is not a crime, and we will continue to bring the truth to light, no matter what obstacles or threats we face."

Link to story

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Israel’s War On Journalism

Israel’s genocide includes the most draconian censorship and intentional murder of journalists since the creation of the modern war correspondent. The consequences will be catastrophic.

Chris Hedges Report (10/25/24)

There are some 4,000 foreign reporters accredited in Israel to cover the war. They stay in luxury hotels. They go on dog and pony shows orchestrated by the Israeli military. They can, on rare occasions, be escorted by Israeli soldiers on lightning visits to Gaza, where they are shown alleged weapons caches or tunnels the military says are used by Hamas. They dutifully attend daily press conferences. They are given off-the-record briefings by senior Israeli officials who feed them information that often turns out to be untrue. They are Israel’s unwitting and sometimes witting propagandists, stenographers for the architects of apartheid and genocide, hotel room warriors. Bertolt Brecht acidly called them the spokesmen of the spokesmen.

And how many foreign reporters are there in Gaza? None.

The Palestinian reporters in Gaza who fill the void often pay with their lives. They are targeted, along with their families, for assassination. At least 128 journalists and media workers in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon, have been killed and 69 have been imprisoned, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, marking the deadliest period for journalists since the organization began collecting data in 1992. 

Israel bombed a building on Friday in southern Lebanon housing seven media organizations, killing three journalists from Al Mayadeen and Al Manar and injuring 15 others. Since Oct. 7, Israel has killed 11 journalists in Lebanon.  

Al Jazeera cameraman Fadi al-Wahidi, who was shot in the neck in the Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza by an Israeli sniper earlier this month, is in a coma. Israel has refused permission for him to seek medical care outside of Gaza. Like most of the targeted journalists, including his murdered colleague Shireen Abu Akleh, he was wearing a helmet and flak jacket that identified him as press.

The Israeli military has branded as “terrorists” six Palestinian journalists in Gaza who work for Al Jazeera. 

“These 6 Palestinians are among the last journalists surviving Israel's onslaught in Gaza,” United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese, said. “Declaring them ‘terrorists’ sounds like a death sentence.”

The scale and savagery of the Israeli assault on the media dwarfs anything I witnessed during my two decades as a war correspondent, including in Sarajevo where Serb snipers regularly took aim at reporters. Twenty-three journalists were killed in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina during the Yugoslav Wars between 1991 and 1995. Twenty-two were killed when I covered the war in El Salvador. Sixty-eight journalists were killed in World War II and 63 were killed in Vietnam. But unlike in Gaza, Bosnia and El Salvador, journalists were usually not targeted. 

Israel’s assault on press freedom is unlike anything we have experienced since William Howard Russell, the godfather of modern war reporting, sent back dispatches from the Crimean War. Its onslaught against journalists is in a category by itself.

Representative James P. McGovern and 64 House members sent a letter to President Joseph Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken calling for the United States to push for Israel to allow unimpeded access for U.S. and international journalists. In July, over 70 media and civil society organizations signed an open letter calling on Israel to permit foreign reporters into Gaza. 

Israel has not budged. Its ban on international journalists in Gaza remains in place. Its genocide grinds forward. Hundreds of Palestinian civilians are killed and wounded daily. During October, Israel killed at least 770  Palestinians in northern Gaza. Israel spins out its lies and fabrications, from Hamas using Palestinians as human shields, to mass rape and beheaded babies, to a captive press that slavishly amplifies them. By the time the lies are exposed, often weeks or months later, the media cycle has moved on and few notice.

Ominous consequences

Israel’s wholesale censorship and assassination of journalists will have ominous consequences. It further erodes what few protections we once had as war correspondents. It sends an unequivocal message to any government, despot or dictator that seeks to mask its crimes. It heralds, like the genocide itself, a new world order, where mass murder is normalized, totalitarian censorship is permissible and journalists who try and expose the truth have very short life expectancies. 

Israel, with the fulsome support of the U.S. government, is eviscerating the last shreds of freedom of the press. …

Read the rest

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CIRCLE OF CENSORSHIP WIDENS! Literary Institutions Are Pressuring Authors To Shut Up About Gaza

Requiring authors remain silent about war at the risk of losing their livelihoods is not only ironic but also sinister.

By Lisa Ko
Truthout (10/25/24)

hen writer and disability justice activist Alice Wong received a MacArthur Fellowship earlier this month, she shared a statement about accepting it “amidst the genocide happening in Gaza.” The backlash was swift, with a deluge of posts on X attacking Wong’s character and accusing her of antisemitism.

This conflation of opposition to Israel’s military action with hatred of Jewish people is only one part of a broader wave of political and social repression that is attempting to silence writers speaking out against the war. In the past month alone, authors who have criticized Israel’s ongoing bombardment of Gaza — which is funded largely by the U.S. — have been labeled extremists, been suspended and fired from faculty jobs, and targets of defamation and harassment.

I had my own recent experience with the latter following an incident with the New York State Writers Institute’s Albany Book Festival. I reached out privately to the festival organizers in support of a fellow author, Aisha Abdel Gawad, expressing concern about the public rhetoric of the moderator with whom we were to share a panel. In social media posts and published articles, the moderator mocked people who advocate for a ceasefire by calling them “terror apologists” and other names. Such rhetoric seemed disturbing in its mischaracterization of those mourning the loss of life, including Palestinian lives. In response, the assistant director of the Writers Institute emailed the moderator calling our concerns “crazy,” going so far as to fabricate a story that I refused “to be on a panel with a ‘Zionist,’” a message that was then made public. This resulted in death and rape threats, harassing messages and the loss of professional opportunities for me and Abdel Gawad.

To set the record straight, I neither refused to be on the panel nor used the word “Zionist,” but this clarification, while necessary, is not the point. The implication is that vitriol directed at those opposing war and genocide is acceptable; objecting to such vitriol is not.

Many of us who have spoken out against Israel’s war on Gaza have not only opposed the war, but also drawn connections between the violence there and other interlocking crises: mass death and displacement in Sudan, the Congo and Haiti; the disparity between U.S. military funding for war and funding for escalating climate catastrophes; the expansion of carceral systems, including surveillance and militarization of policing; and the increased criminalization of dissent following the racial justice protests in 2020, quelling connections between the global and the domestic. Suppression of dissent also suppresses connections between people and communities in a time of organized abandonment, a time when we need each other even more.

For writers, censorship and suppression is also taking place within notable arts institutions. PEN America — which canceled its 2024 annual awards this spring after nearly half the nominees withdrew their books from consideration due to the organization’s response to Israel’s war on Gaza — is now asking publishers to confirm with authors that they want their books to be considered for the 2025 awards, ostensibly to avoid finalists again withdrawing in protest and to circumvent a writers’ boycott of the organization. Canada’s Giller Prize, which was plagued by protests and withdrawals over its primary sponsor’s financial investment in Israeli arms manufacturer Elbit Systems, has made confirmation of intent to participate in the awards — attempting to ensure that finalists will not decline the prize or use the opportunity to speak out about Palestine — a requirement for author eligibility.

To pressure authors to remain silent about institutional response to war in order to be eligible for prestigious literary prizes is not only ironic — PEN America’s mission, for instance, is to protect freedom of expression — but sinister. A culture that demands certain political allegiances from its writers and artists at the risk of losing career opportunities is one that is antithetical to democratic values, and harkens back to the McCarthy-era Hollywood blacklist that barred writers from employment on suspicions of “subversive” and “un-American” leanings.

In many of the attacks I received, the senders referenced my race in their threats, suggesting I should shut up or meet with physical violence. Yet I, too, have my own stake in speaking out against war and occupation. I was born in the U.S., in part because, like so many children of immigrants, of U.S. military presence in my ancestors’ home country — the Philippines, a former U.S. colony. My parents immigrated during a period of martial law, led by U.S.-supported dictator Ferdinand Marcos, who imprisoned and disappeared thousands of journalists, writers and editors. Marcos’s son, now currently president, recently expanded U.S. military access to Philippines bases.

Acceptance of the violence

Much of my writing has explored the ways in which Asian assimilation in the U.S. is negotiated, including our complicity in U.S. imperialism: As Viet Thanh Nguyen writes, “The condition of our belonging, our inclusion, is our silence.” Advocates against anti-Asian violence focus on very real problems of harassment, bullying and discrimination, but stop short of extending the connections globally to include the violence of the U.S. “forever wars” in Asia, Africa and the Middle East. To be Asian American is to carry this dissonance, as our Americanness hinges on our acceptance of the violence carried out in our names and against our people. It hinges on our obedience, our gratitude.

I’m a novelist. I study and teach the craft of writing stories. I can trace how storytelling has been used to vilify in order to legitimize violence — including the recent framing of immigration as a “border crisis,” insidious misinformation about Haitian Americans and transgender people, and references to Palestinians as “human animals.”

Although stories can be used to inflict suffering, the opposite is also true. Writers choose our words for clarity and truth, to build love and solidarity. Failing to do so can harden our hearts, making us more susceptible to justifying harm done to others. And by dehumanizing others, we also harm ourselves. It is our ability to create connections — and the power of these connections — that makes writers a target for repression, and why it’s critical to withstand it. Our belonging is not contingent on our silence; our humanity is contingent on breaking it.

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