The stain on the vests of the Western media comes from the blood of Gaza

On April 8, 2003, Palestinian reporter Tareq Ayyoub was reporting for Al Jazeera on the US invasion of Iraq when he was killed by two US missiles that hit the network’s headquarters in Baghdad.

The station was clearly marked as a media center and the US military had been notified of its location.

On the same day, the Abu Dhabi TV station was also hit in another area of ​​Baghdad, and an American tank fired shells at the Palestine Hotel, where most of the foreign journalists were staying. Journalists Taras Protsyuk of Reuters and Jose Couso from the Spanish network Telecinco were killed.

That day, a total of three locations in Baghdad where journalists were staying were fired upon by US forces.

Following recent Israeli military statements in light of the massacre of Palestinian journalists in Gaza, which stated that “Gaza is not a safe place. You don’t belong there,” then-Pentagon spokeswoman Victoria Clarke warned at the end of that bloody day in Iraq that Baghdad “is not a safe place. You don’t belong there.”

The onslaught on Gaza since October 7, 2023, has the dubious reputation of being the deadliest for media professionals since the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) began keeping records more than three decades ago. It is even deadlier than Iraq, which set its own macabre record.

According to a July 2024 report by the Gaza government’s media office, 165 Palestinian journalists have been killed.

For comparison, 68 journalists and media workers were murdered worldwide in all of 2022.

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has said that media workers are being deliberately targeted, a concern shared by the CPJ, the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) and the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate (PJS). Let there be no confusion: this is an attack on journalism. This is a war on the truth.

And it’s not just journalists. Poets, writers, influencers and medical professionals have been targeted in an attempt to control the narrative and erase the reality of decades of Palestinian ethnic cleansing.

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In The Palestine Question (1979) Palestinian intellectual Edward Said wrote: “The creation of Israel was not merely a geopolitical maneuver but a calculated attempt to ensure Western dominance in the Middle East, with Israel serving as a strategic base for American interests.”

Once Israel once again becomes an American outpost in the Middle East, we will be freed from the guise of American responsibility to Israel and can interpret Israeli actions in accordance with the standards America has previously set in the region, most notably in Iraq, but also in Syria, where the arming of rogue gangs currently underway in Gaza served as a reckless and ultimately dangerous strategy to destabilize the Assad regime.

The parallels with the US attacks on journalists in Iraq are striking. Then, as now, journalists are attacked for providing information that contradicts the official propaganda of the US and its satellite.

As ever, Western journalists, who are often the first – and rightly so – to question the official narratives in the South, seem at best unable to decipher their own governments’ spin on the reporting, or their deliberate complicity in its dissemination.

Either way, the massive failure to report fairly, accurately or contextually on the latest chapter in the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians may be the final nail in the coffin for the trust of the younger audience in the mainstream media (MSM), which has been on the decline for a long time. Who needs a “counter-voice” to months of videos of wounded children screaming from under the rubble?

At every turn, from international law to human rights to the protection of health workers and journalists, the free pass given to Israel has undermined not only the US’s standing in the world, but also confidence in an international system of law and cooperation designed to prevent some of the worst chapters in world history from repeating themselves.

We have degraded the entire system of international law and order for Israel. The question every journalist must ask is: why? And yet.

As journalists, our failure to stand up for and protect our colleagues in times of need has made the profession more dangerous for all of us, especially those in frontline reporting situations. What do we say to terrorists who kidnap and torture journalists? That’s what America’s greatest ally—and the most “moral” military on the planet—does.

A former colleague of mine, Al Jazeera English correspondent from Gaza Youmna el-Sayed has spoken out about the cowardice of so many Western colleagues in telling the truth on the ground.

She stresses that international journalists and media organizations have not fought enough for access to Gaza.

The BBC has often described the ongoing conflict as ‘complex’. But as some of my brave colleagues have pointed out, it is no more complex than any other conflict.

Our job as journalists is to cut through the rhetoric and the misinformation; to explain what is happening and what led to it — that is literally the mandate. In no other conflict have I personally seen the degree of deliberate obfuscation of the truth as I have seen in the Israeli attack on Gaza by colleagues, by journalists whose literal job it is to cut through the spin.

It is a shameful indictment of the deep corruption of our accountability institutions and a key pillar of any functioning democracy that only a small number of journalists notice that Gaza is still not being reported accurately.

For the rare colleagues who dared to tackle Israeli propaganda, swift and severe punishments followed.

Sky’s Belle Donati disappeared from the screen after her interview with Israeli propagandist Danny Danon. LBC’s Sangita Myska was taken off the air, MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan and in newsrooms across the Western world, lesser-known figures — less visible and more vulnerable journalists, mainly of colour, have also been sidelined or removed from newsrooms already overwhelmingly white in their composition and output.

And it’s not just Western media that are suppressing journalists who dare to question the Israeli narrative. In recent weeks, prominent pro-Palestinian journalists and activists have been arrested in the UK on spurious ‘terrorism’ charges; the message is clear: if you stand up for Palestine, expect to be silenced.

Mainstream media: a ‘mechanism’ of the Gaza genocide

The disease of irresponsible, pro-Israel servility is spreading like wildfire. Saudi media is now parroting Israeli rules, while the Emirates are paying influencers to spread the absurd idea that Israel’s occupation is somehow religiously justified — normalization through disinformation is in full swing.

I have had the great honour of working for a network – Al Jazeera English – that has done a fantastic job in its reporting and continues to do so. But it has so often been isolated and it does so under immense pressure, both from the undue pressure put on it by external, including regional powers, and from the attacks on Al Jazeera journalists, including some of the network’s most recognisable and senior correspondents and their families.

Palestinian journalists are paid to report live on their bloody massacre. The price for our failure as mainstream news organizations to hold those in power accountable and report honestly is not only complicity in the massacre in question, but also the loss of one of the most important pillars of all democratic institutions: a free press.

Former UN official Craig Mokhiber points out that Western media companies have become part of the mechanism of genocide in Palestine and that there are historical precedents that show these companies are held accountable.

He points out that the Genocide Convention criminalizes not only genocide itself, but also “incitement to commit genocide and complicity in genocide — prohibitions that apply not only to States but also to private actors.” At the Nuremberg Tribunal after the Holocaust, the court found that Julius Streicher’s media outlet The Sturmer published articles “inciting murder and extermination” while being aware of the atrocities committed by Nazi Germany against European Jews.

Fifty years later, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) convicted three media figures for their role in inciting the genocide in Rwanda.

Seventy-six years after the Nakba, who will stand up for photojournalist Momen Faiz, who had both legs amputated in the 2008 bombing of Gaza? Or Sami Shehada, whose right leg was recently amputated and now struggles in a tent in Gaza without adequate medical care? Or Farah Ammar, a media studies student before the war who lost her leg, her eye, and all hope for the future? Or the hundreds of others.

There must be accountability for our media’s complicity in the dehumanization of Palestinians and the lubrication of Israel’s genocide — and a cleansing of the deep corruption within our institutions that made it possible. The truth is that as the first anniversary of the ongoing assault approaches, there are no more excuses, only the necessary accountability of those we once considered our colleagues.

Dr Myriam Francois is an award-winning French-Irish documentary filmmaker, journalist and writer. Her work has appeared widely in the British and international press, including the Guardian, TIME, Foreign Policy, the Telegraph, CNN Online and the New Statesman.

Myriam’s award-winning directorial debut documentary Finding Alaa (BBC/CBC 2023), under her production company MPWR Productions, won the “Special Mention” Award at Doc Fest’23 and “Best Short” at the Independent Shorts Festival, So-Cal, USA Film Awards. The film has been longlisted for the 2024 BAFTA as “Best Short Film”. She is also the host of the podcast “We Need to Talk About Whiteness”.

Follow her on X: @MyriamFrancoisC

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The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of The New Arab, its editors or staff.