International activist Aysenur Ezgi was killed by Israeli occupation forces in Gaza. In reporting on her death, ‘the passive voice is preferred’ by mainstream media, turning her murder into a tragedy when ‘she died in the Westbank’ after ‘getting shot in the head’ rather than being an intentional action, where she was in fact ‘deliberately targeted by and Israeli sniper’, the writer says. – Picture: via Social Media

By Jeremy Salt

Israel was created as a rampart of ‘western civilisation’ in the barbarous east but now the rampart is at risk of being overwhelmed.

A wave of censorship in the ‘western’ world might be said to be turning ‘liberal democracies’ into authoritarian states except they never were liberal. The red lines were always there in what the politicians would say and not say what the media would publish and what it would not publish.

In the application of this ground rule, there was little difference between the ‘liberal’ Guardian and the ‘conservative’ Daily Telegraph. Reporting the Middle East was always the prime example of how the mainstream media controlled the narrative until social media came along and – for all its faults – upset the apple cart.

The print ‘explainers’ and ‘what you need to know’ were never what we needed explaining or needed to know but only what the media thought we needed to know and that was always far off the mark. Social media disrupted this attempt to set and dominate the narrative, which is why, in their war on ‘misinformation’, governments are targeting it while leaving the mainstream alone.

Covid set the scene for the current wave of suppression. The virus was used to terrorise people into submission and complicity. Human rights were trampled on and dissidents were given the Hamas treatment. They were tracked down by police and arrested for daring to challenge what the government and the media wanted people to believe. Tear gas and rubber bullets were used to stifle public dissent.

Even humour was cancelled, as the Australian cartoonist Michael Leunig found out when borrowing from the ‘tank man’ in Tiananmen Square in 1989, he drew a frightened individual cowering in front of a tank with a syringe instead of a barrel. His employer, the Melbourne Age, refused to publish it plus other cartoons mocking vaccination, on the grounds that they added up to ‘misinformation’.

Needless to say, by suppressing vital information from British, European, and US government sites about the broad-spectrum consequences of vaccination, the Age itself was guilty of serial daily misinformation.

A strong supporter of the Palestinians, Leunig had already been cancelled in 2002 by a previous Age editor who refused to publish a two-panel cartoon showing the entrance to Auschwitz alongside the gate into Gaza. As the editor was Jewish and a late age convert to Zionism from socialist Bundism, the question of whether that had anything to do with his decision was an obvious one but no one dared ask it, no doubt for fear of being called an antisemite.

The Age silenced Leunig during the Covid years not only by censoring some of his cartoons but by refusing to publish him at all on the news pages. He was relegated to the weekend edition, alongside food and book reviews and in August this year he was finally sacked. The whole process was reminiscent of how troublesome artists and writers are dealt with in an authoritarian state and not – supposedly – in a ‘liberal’ democracy.

In 2014 the Sydney Morning Herald – a sister publication of the Age – published a cartoon by Glen le Lievre showing a Jewish settler sitting in a comfortable chair on a hilltop pointing a remote control at Gaza as it was being bombed.

This is exactly what settlers at Sderot were doing at the time, a nice night’s entertainment, with cheering and clapping when the missiles landed on residential buildings and killed entire families.

The cartoon showed the Star of David on the back of the settler’s chair. Hijacked from Judaism, it has been turned into the symbol of a genocidal state, yet before the theatrically concocted fury of Israel’s partisans, the SMH backed down and apologised. The author of the article accompanying the cartoon, Mike Carlton, one of Australia’s best-known journalists, quit in disgust.

Gaza has greatly accelerated the war on freedom of expression. The gloves are off everywhere, and Authority has shown that it will be as brutal as it needs to be. In the UK an armada of police cars and vans arrived outside Sarah Wilkinson’s house at seven in the morning. Seventeen or 18 police in plain clothes or wearing balaclavas stormed into the house, ransacked it, stole money, emptied the urn holding her mother’s ashes onto the floor, seized her passport and all electronic equipment, including her phone, and took her away in her pyjamas and dressing gown. Forbidden to travel anywhere, she is now basically under house arrest.

This police state handling of dissenters and ‘activists’ is only the start. The state is determined to have its way whatever it takes. The listing of Hamas, Palestine Islamic Jihad, and Hezbollah as ‘terrorist organisations’ are the ostensibly legal but political weapons it is using to protect a terrorist genocidal state.

The media is purging its own dissidents. Steve Bell, a Guardian cartoonist for 42 years, was sacked in October 2023 for a drawing in which a pugnacious Netanyahu told Gazan residents to “get out now”. This is precisely what Netanyahu was doing but that was not enough to stop the accusation of an “antisemitic trope” that led to the Guardian’s gutless decision to dismiss him.

In Australia, the ABC – the national state broadcaster – sacked journalist Antoinette Lattouf for sharing a Human Rights Watch (HRW) post saying that Israel was using starvation as a weapon of war in Gaza. She didn’t say it herself, only shared it in a social media message, but that was still too much for the ABC.

The figures showing malnutrition, starvation and Israel’s blocking of aid convoys were enough to prove the point that starvation was being used as a weapon of war but again it was the genocidal state and not its victims that had to be protected. Acting on accusations of “bias and anti-semitism”, Lattouf was sacked on “orders from above”, she said, before announcing she would be suing.

The Kuffiyeh Threat

Artists and writers are also being targeted. In November 2023 donors to the Sydney Theatre Company threatened to withdraw funding after actors took a curtain call wearing kuffiyehs. Buckling under to the money threat, the company apologised on the grounds that the wearing of kuffiyehs was “a threat to safe workplaces and theatres”. What it did threaten, of course, was the Zionist hold on public opinion.

Early in 2024 Zionist pressure was brought to bear on the directors of the Adelaide and Melbourne writers’ festivals because of their inclusion of Palestinian writers and topics in their programs but admirably, both stood their ground, and the festivals went ahead as planned.

In August the administration of the State Library of Victoria (SLV) cancelled the contracts of four ‘pro-Palestinian’ writers who were to run a ‘boot camp’ for teenage writers on the grounds that it needed to conduct a “child and cultural safety review”. The real reason was Gaza and the probability of honest answers these writers would give to questions by intelligent young people.

Even the concert hall was affected. The Melbourne Symphony Orchestra had arranged a performance by the pianist Jayson Gillham but cancelled it after at a previous concert he included a short piece dedicated to murdered Palestinian journalists in Gaza.

This episode brought to a head longstanding discontent with the orchestra’s management, resulting in the firing of its chief executive. The musicians stood as one alongside Jayson Gillham in their defence of artistic freedom.

It is not just Australia, of course. Artists, writers, and academics are being targeted across the ‘western’ world. They are losing their jobs and having academic articles rejected if they dare mention the genocide. Germany is especially vigorous, even threatening Electronic Intifada editor Ali Abunimah with prosecution and imprisonment if he dared speak to a Zoom conference on Palestine. The fact that Abunimah lives in the US made no difference. Abunimah gave his talk anyway.

Zionist campus harassment in the US has gone on for decades. Unsuccessful attempts were made to drive Edward Said out of his job at Columbia University after his appointment in the late 1960s. In 2007, lobby pressure exerted mainly through Alan Dershowitz ended in DePaul University’s decision to deny tenure to Norman Finkelstein, despite his outstanding research and publication record. Other academics who dare to speak out have fallen victim to the same vicious campaigning.

After 20 years the lobby is still trying – unsuccessfully so far – to bully Columbia University into removing Joseph Massad from his position as Professor of Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History.

With Massad writing forcefully against the Gaza genocide, the campaign picked up speed again, this time including open attacks on his views in the US Congress and opposition from his own university’s president, Minouche Shafik, who allowed New York police onto the campus to harass pro-Palestinian demonstrators. Shafik was eventually forced to resign, and Professor Massad remained in his job.

While expressing sympathy for the civilian victims of war and expressing hope for a ceasefire, the media rarely if ever holds Israel directly responsible for the horrific war crimes it is committing. The passive voice is preferred. Murder is turned into ‘tragedy’ and Israel is disconnected from the event. Thus, according to the New York Post, American-Turkish activist Aysenur Ezgi Eygi died on the West Bank “after getting shot in the head”, not after being deliberately targeted by an Israeli sniper.

Publishing false accusations of rape against Hamas, the New York Times cemented its position of long-term unreliability on the question of Palestine by issuing ‘guidelines’ on the words and phrases its reporters should avoid.

They include genocide, ethnic cleansing, refugee camps, slaughter, massacre, carnage and even Palestine, the object clearly being to protect Israel from the accurate description of its crimes.

PEN America (originally Poets, Essayists and Novelists but now inclusive of all literature) made its own spineless contribution to freedom of speech by expressing “sorrow and outrage” over the “humanitarian crisis in Israel and Gaza” war and “sharing the ongoing anguish of Israelis” while not sharing the anguish of the relatives of the tens of thousands of Palestinians murdered by Israel.

Despite its basic raison d’etre – freedom of speech – even as it organised a forum for an Israeli to justify the war on Gaza, PEN refused to hold Israel directly responsible for the killing of hundreds of Palestinian writers, poets and teachers and causing the large-scale destruction of hundreds of their schools, universities and libraries

The head of PEN, Suzanne Nossel, is a former US government official and CEO of Amnesty International USA who was forced to resign from that position after criticism that she was using it to further US military aims in Afghanistan and other countries.

Pained by the situation in Gaza, but nowhere near the point of condemning Israel, PEN has set up a $100,000 fund “to support writers affected by the war”. How this can be done when ‘affected’ writers are dead, PEN can explain.

Digital platforms play a central role in monitoring, influencing and suppressing freedom of expression. A recent 51-page report by Human Rights Watch (HRW) – ‘Meta’s Broken Promises: Systematic Censorship of Palestinian Content on Instagram and Facebook’ – is of course only the tip of a much larger problem.

Most recently Meta’s suppression includes The Cradle, a necessary source of information on the genocide. On August 16 Meta permanently banned The Cradle from its social media platforms, including Facebook and Instagram, for “praising terrorist organisations” and “inciting violence”. No appeal would be allowed and there would be no review. All Cradle content would be permanently deleted, and no one would be able to see or find its account. Down the memory hole, it was all sent, wiped out as if it never existed in precise Orwellian fashion.

Meta is only part of a broad framework of internet and social media surveillance and suppression. When dozens of Google workers came out in protest against the $1.2 billion ‘Project Nimbus’ contract signed between Google, Amazon and the Israeli military, providing Israel with Cloud computing and AI technology that further enables the genocide, they were sacked.

Collaborating with governments, digital platforms have been assigned the task of controlling social media content. Governments will not intervene directly to correct ‘misinformation’ and suppress ‘fake news’: they are passing legislation so the digital platform goliaths will do the job for them and take the consequences if they don’t. Given their enormous revenue this should not cause too much pain.

In the name of suppressing antisemitism or hate mail, online surveillance by government agencies will further target anyone passing on social media views critical of Israel. The mainstream media, a major purveyor of misinformation by any measure, is not to be touched.

Anyone not certain of the veracity of what they are reading on the internet is advised to turn to the ‘reliable’ mainstream media or one of the many ‘fact checkers’ set up by the media, sometimes in conjunction with universities. There is no provision for the ‘fact checkers’ themselves to be checked for their often-slanted reading of ‘facts’, and of course governments are not interested in any examination of their own propaganda.

The Chinese dissident Ai Weiwei has likened Gaza censorship to Mao’s China. In fact, the problem is now global. Gaza has triggered off a large-scale assault on human rights, rapidly no longer regarded as rights. ‘Liberal democracies’ are turning into openly authoritarian states. Human rights and civil society refer to an old-fashioned world. Nostalgia is out and the new world order, even more brutalist than the old, is in.

The developing model is something along the lines of an authoritarian ‘democracy’, consensual authoritarianism or ‘liberal’ authoritarianism, the Chinese model, in which the economics are ‘liberal’, but freedom of expression is not.

Why governments, institutions, and corporations are protecting a genocidal state and enabling its crimes comes down to the power and influence that money can buy. Political parties and individual politicians everywhere live in bondage to Zionist lobbyists and the damage they can do if their wishes are not met. Defending genocide, they are overplaying their hand for all to see but the result is still government policies on the Middle East that turn a vicious, psychopathic state into the victim and its victims into the perpetrators of crimes unknown in history.

This inversion of truth, this pandering to state mass murderers is grotesque and obscene but it is where the collective ‘west’ is ending up after 500 years of global domination maintained through its own invasions, occupations and genocides.

Israel was created as a rampart of ‘western civilisation’ in the barbarous east but now the rampart is at risk of being overwhelmed. There is a powerful mixture of identity of interests, collective histories and pathologies here. The ‘west’ cannot condemn what it created, cannot spurn its own love child and must protect it no matter what it does. If Israel is lost, the ‘west’ will be lost: that seems to be the attitude.

* Jeremy Salt taught at the University of Melbourne, at Bosporus University in Istanbul and Bilkent University in Ankara for many years, specializing in the modern history of the Middle East. Among his recent publications is his 2008 book, The Unmaking of the Middle East. A History of Western Disorder in Arab Lands (University of California Press) and The Last Ottoman Wars. The Human Cost 1877 – 1923 (University of Utah Press, 2019).

** He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.

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