As the US and Israel battle to control the narrative of their war against Iran, their messaging gets harder to defend, reports Al Jazeera’s Listening Post.

With the war entering its third week, the upper hand that the United States and Israel hold militarily is being countered asymmetrically by Iran which has been targeting various economic pressure points outside of its borders.

With censorship and propaganda shaping coverage on all sides, news audiences are having to navigate a confused and often misleading maze of information.

Contributors:
Vali Nasr – Professor, Johns Hopkins University
Michael Omer-Man – Director of research for Israel-Palestine, DAWN
Matt Duss – Executive vice-president, Center for International Policy (CIP)
Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi – Lecturer, University of St Andrews

On our radar
Israeli media outlets published near-simultaneous reports, citing anonymous officials, claiming Gulf states had attacked Iran. Qatar and the United Arab Emirates quickly denied the allegations, forcing corrections.

Critics say that the aim of the coverage was to suggest Gulf support for Israel and pull those states into the conflict. Tariq Nafi looks at how the episode has fuelled anger across the Arab world towards Washington and Tel Aviv.

Out Of Control: An escalating war accompanied by escalating war rhetoric    Video: AJ Listening Post

Battlefield AI: An interview with Matt Mahmoudi
Since the first attacks on Iran, the White House and Pentagon have been eager to test new military technologies.

As seen previously in Gaza, AI systems appear to be playing a central role in identifying targets and guiding strikes.

This raises serious ethical and accountability questions about how life-and-death decisions are being made on the battlefield.

Amnesty Tech researcher and assistant professor at the University of Cambridge, Matt Mahmoudi joins The Listening Post to discuss AI-assisted warfare.

I came across this statement from an independent media source this week:

“The mainstream media is doing what it always does in wartime: manufacturing consent, sanitising atrocities and platforming war criminals.”

It came to mind immediately when I read The Times newspaper obituary for Ayatollah Ali Khamenei which was reprinted in the Christchurch Press at the weekend.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was murdered by the US-Israel in the initial strikes of their illegal bombing and killing campaign in Iran — an assault that rips up international law and trashes the United Nations Charter.

• READ MORE: Oil tankers hit in Iraq, Tehran sets 3 conditions for peace
• Why Trump is in so much danger with his illegal Iran war
• Ramzy Baroud: Israel’s greatest weapon was fear – and it’s now failing
• An anti-war meeting in Auckland that was protested against by pro-Israel/pro-American Iranians
• Other US-Israeli war on Iran reports
• Other images and video fromthe Stop Wars meeting

The obituary was a straight piece of Western propaganda which did nothing to hide its blatant disinformation (deliberate misinformation). It may as well have come straight from an Israeli propaganda unit — it may well have for all I know — with its demonisation of the Iranian leadership.

The Times claimed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had “…approved the development of a clandestine nuclear weapons programme that could, if ever completed, threaten Israel’s very existence, destabilise the Middle East and imperil global oil supplies”.

This is an obvious lie. Israel’s Prime Minister — and well-known war criminal — Benjamin Netanyahu has been saying for 30 years that Iran is just a few weeks or months away from producing a nuclear weapon.

The fact is that all credible analysts, including inside US intelligence, agree Iran never decided to pursue nuclear weapons and the United Nations nuclear watchdog, the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) has never detected such a programme. In fact, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei declared nuclear weapons to be “religiously forbidden under Islamic law”.

The rest of the obituary is riddled with similar untruths and distortions in a ham-fisted justification of US/Israel’s assault on Iran. If The Times has set out to undermine confidence in Western media reporting on West Asia (Middle East) this would be an excellent example.

Platforming war criminals
How much Western media time and space has been given to Trump and Netanyahu in the past 11 days to spread lies and disinformation direct to Western audiences? And how much time has been given to the Iranian leadership, UN officials or international experts to debunk the US/Israeli justifications for war?

Meanwhile, the media have platformed Iranian New Zealanders, who oppose the Iranian leadership and support the appointment of the former Shah’s son Reza Pahlavi, to lead the country.

The previous Shah’s rule was a brutal dictatorship where tens of thousands were murdered or imprisoned by the Shah’s secret police, the Savak. The Shah’s dictatorship was backed by the US and Western interests till its overthrow in 1979.

The new proposed Shah is no different from his father, posing with Netanyahu and celebrating the bombing and killing in Iran.

So why has our mainstream media given so much attention to Iranians here who celebrate death and destruction in Iran alongside people waving the Israeli flag — a symbol of genocide and apartheid — and inviting Destiny Church to join them. A real horror show!

And when it comes to women’s rights, why is the Western media so happy to denounce restrictions on clothing for women in Iran but ignore Israel’s denial of rights to Palestinian women in Gaza whom Amnesty International this week says face the erosion of health and safety in Gaza in a “deliberate act of war targeting women and girls”.

Sanitising atrocities
And why has the Western media all but ignored the US/Israeli missile attack on the girls school in Iran killing at least 165 children? Imagine if this were an attack on a school in Israel or the US? Imagine the apoplectic outrage. Imagine the rush to sanctions and war?

This attack and murder of Iranian girls is sidelined for the same reason Israel’s genocide in Gaza killing tens of thousands of women and children is being downplayed.

Sanitising atrocities by the US or Israel and finding excuses, justifications or explanations for them is in the Western media’s DNA.

The Press and Western media take all their stories from Western sources such as Reuters and Associated Press news agencies and Western newspapers such as The Times and Daily Telegraph. They would never dream of including stories from Al Jazeera or any Palestinian news sources.

I would once have lamented the loss of mainstream media reporting on issues but it’s no longer possible to pretend it is in any way a force for good.

John Minto is national chair of the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA). This article was first published by The Daily Blog and is republished by Asia Pacific Report with the author’s permission.

COMMENTARY: By Michael West

We are led by fools and sycophants. The illegal, unprovoked invasion of Iran is not just garden-variety stupidity. This is stupidity on a grandiose, stratospheric scale.

The Israeli propaganda narrative that Iranians would sprinkle rose petals at the feet of their invaders has not come to pass. It has already been demolished in fact.

Instead of bringing freedom and democracy — “regime change” — we have brought chaos, possibly a world war, and definitely the destruction of the Middle East.

• READ MORE: War rages in the Middle East as Trump vows to continue Iran attack — death toll tops 1000
• Iran mourns 165 girls, staff killed in school strike during US-Israel war
• Other US-Israel attack on Iran reports

The world economy is being hit hard as we write; oil prices spiralling, energy prices about to soar, and the inexorable spectre of inflation and recession.

And it didn’t have to happen.

This was a war of choice. Even without the “Epstein Coalition” — as the Iranian media so aptly dubs their invaders — murdering 165 Iranian school girls on day one, “peace through strength” was never going to happen.

Quite the contrary. The illegal and unprovoked invasion of Iran has hardened the resolve of Iranians, who are massing in their hundreds of thousands across the country to mourn their dead and chant “Death to America”, to back their regime.

Where was the advice?
The Epstein Coalition killed the Ayatollah, who was actually against nuclear power; he was a moderate.

Did Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Foreign Minister Penny Wong not seek advice from Foreign Affairs that attacking Iran was folly, that the anti-regime protesters were a minority, that the pre-invasion protests were a Mossad and CIA psyop, that Iran might attack US proxy states in the region, that invasion would be a Brobigdadgian mistake?

Or did they ignore the advice in favour of a Washington regime compromised by the Epstein pedophile scandal?

And now, we see the feeble, hypocritical whining by Israel and its supporters about Iran attacking the Gulf states. Is that our only moral defence?

Decades of supporting these regimes: Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates — US proxy states all — regimes now unravelling, the oil price is soaring, inflation and recession are beckoning globally.

Images are emerging from Bahrain of locals cheering on the Iranian missiles. Were DFAT and our politicians unaware of popular angst in the Gulf states against American imperialism?

And what did they expect Iran to do in the face of this existential threat? Not blow up American bases and infrastructure while the US attacked them; after the US betrayed them at the very negotiating table when they were offering significant concessions on nuclear enrichment, all to avoid war? This war.

War drums over Tehran.             Video: The West Report

Australia, the US flunkies
Yet here was Australia, Saturday night, first out of the blocks worldwide to throw its support behind Donald Trump and his preposterous “Operation Epic Fury”, a probable pedophile being blackmailed and led around by the genocidal Benjamin Netanyahu like a pony at the fairground show.

“Operation Epstein Fury”, it was fast labelled. The soaring, craven stupidity is hard to grasp. Both major parties backing it.

Albo first, then Angus Taylor rushing to tow the Donald’s line. Then, One Nation’s Pauline Hanson, too, who even congratulated and praised Netanyahu. We are led by fools and sycophants.

The flawed defence of atrocity
To address the empty rhetoric of the pro-war lobby, criticism of this war does not equate to support for the regime in Iran. Defenders of the US-Israel atrocity are busy with their swarms of social media bots peddling the argument that “you are an Islamist terror supporter” if you criticise the invasion.

This is the 2026 version of “You are a Hamas supporter” if you argue against genocide in Gaza.

The cold facts of this debacle are that regime change does not work, that Iran did not want this war, that Iran appears to be exceptionally well prepared, that the Epstein Coalition, which Australia supports, is daily backing war crimes: blowing up hospitals, schools and civilian infrastructure.

This is a war which has already been lost.

The obvious reality is that regime change wars are a demonstrable failure. Vietnam. Iraq. Afghanistan. Iraq — a million dead, irretrievable regional stability. In Afghanistan, 20 years, trillions of dollars spent, four US presidents, six Australian PMs — all to replace the Taliban . . . with the Taliban.

And here we are, the world’s busybodies, doing it again.

Who would ever negotiate with the US in good faith again, or Israel for that matter? Iran did not want this war. Iran has not attacked another country in 300 years.

The US lured them to the negotiating table, then, without warning, murdered their leadership. This echoes last year’s 12-day war, where Israel and the US lured them in on the premise of good faith talks, then murdered them and now play the victim.

What did they expect Iran to do in the face of this existential threat?

The record speaks for itself. The US is the biggest invader of other countries in history. Israel has, last year alone, attacked Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen, Jordan, Palestine, Qatar, Tunisia, Malta, and Greece.

Six illegal attacks of sovereign nations, as well as three illegal attacks in international waters equals nine all up. In one year.

And now they are invading Lebanon again, seizing more territory as their puppets, America, fight their campaign against Iran.

Albo, what are you doing?
We know who the warmongers are. We are the warmongers. Yet, in his bizarre statement of support, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was the fastest out of the blocks of all the allies on the weekend, issuing a false statement.

Australia stands with the brave people of Iran in their struggle against oppression.

For decades, the Iranian regime has been a destabilising force, through its ballistic missile and nuclear programs, support for armed proxies, and brutal acts of violence and intimidation.

Iran…

— Anthony Albanese (@AlboMP) February 28, 2026

The claim, echoed by the usual warmongers of the Lib-Lab establishment, is that Iran is guilty of attacks on Australian soil, referencing alleged attacks on a deli in Bondi.

Apart from the common sense, why would Iran commit an act of terror on a deli in Bondi? Senior police have conceded that there is no evidence of this.

The nuclear furphy
Then there is the age-old claim that Iran is about to produce nuclear weapons. The US and Israel’s nuclear risk claims have been so roundly discredited it’s a joke.

Benjamin Netanyahu has been trying to instigate a war against Iran for 30 years — claiming Iran is days away, weeks away, months away from nuclear missiles.

And they were at the negotiating table again when the Epstein forces murdered them.

The propaganda
We are now seeing mainstream media decry the “illegal attacks” on Israel and the Gulf states. Yet the ‘victim card” is tapped out.

Around the world, outside the legacy media propaganda, there is little sympathy for Israel having razed Gaza and slaughtered between 72,000 and 700,000 Palestinians while stealing more land in the West Bank daily.

It will continue. The media and political classes have failed so majestically that they can only try to salvage their authority with more propaganda.

The deplorable coverage of the murdered schoolgirls in Iran is a case in point. The “40 beheaded babies” and the “mass rapes” of Hamas filled the headlines in the West on October 8, 2023. Yet real murders — 165 murdered schoolgirls — have hardly rated a mention. Yes, a mention perhaps, but a side story, buried, no headlines of outrage.

Can’t handle the truth?

Is the truth too hard to handle? Is it not evident to everybody except the most brainwashed advocate of the Epstein lobby that Israel — the government, the state — is the problem here?

Netanyahu has won his ambition to drag America into a war against Iran, and if you follow the money, while world stock markets teeter, the stock market in Tel Aviv is surging, replete with weapons companies as it is.

Meanwhile, the ASX is tanking, ergo our savings. Oil prices are surging, ergo higher energy prices and inflation. The Houthis, Iran’s allies, are shooting again in the Red Sea while, on the other side of the Arabian peninsula, Iran has blocked the Straits of Hormuz, choking off a large chunk of the world’s oil supply.

Higher prices in India and China will mean higher prices for imports and inflation around the world.

The lessons of history have not been learnt; in fact, they have been discarded in spectacular fashion.

> 70 years ago, Iran looked just like any Western country.
> Short skirts, rock’n’roll, open universities.
> It’s 1953. Iran elects a secular socialist: Mohammad Mossadegh.
> He nationalizes oil. That pisses off BP.
> Cold War excuse.
> CIA and MI6 stage a coup. Operation Ajax.
>… pic.twitter.com/ZNWaLdBlCN

— Dr. Simon Goddek (@goddek) March 1, 2026

Michael West established Michael West Media in 2016 to focus on journalism of high public interest, particularly the rising power of corporations over democracy. West was formerly a journalist and editor with Fairfax newspapers, a columnist for News Corp and even, once, a stockbroker.

ANALYSIS: By Nick Riemer

In December, the NSW Labor government gave itself the power to ban street marches for an indefinite period. We saw what that meant on February 9 as violent police charged, maced, beat and arrested protesters against Herzog’s visit.

In January, the federal ALP introduced new hate speech laws, which confer unprecedented discretion on the government to criminalise speech and groups to which it objects.

Now, in a further stride down its authoritarian road, the federal government is reported to be proceeding with plans for “political training” for Australian university staff.

• READ MORE: Palestinian education is being destroyed by Israel’s policy of withholding customs revenues from the Palestinian Authority
• Other Gaza and Australia reports

According to several recent reports, the federal government has agreed that “antisemitism training” will be a “key” area in which universities’ response to antisemitism will be assessed.

University employees will, apparently, be required to undergo indoctrination in the ideology of the pro-Israel lobby, which identifies Zionism and Judaism and treats critics of Israel as likely antisemites.

The training will involve “understanding of Jewish peoplehood, their attachment to Israel and identity beyond faith” — the characteristically unclear phrasing of the government’s Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism, Jillian Segal, who is responsible for the “Antisemitism report card” plan.

The thought police
Compulsory training in a political ideology befits a police state, not a notional democracy — a status that NSW Premier Chris Minns, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and the rest of the political establishment are undermining like none before them.

Amidst the uproar over Israeli President Isaac Herzog’s visit, the move has not had the discussion it deserves. Requiring university staff to undergo “training” in the ideology of Israeli apartheid is as unacceptable as it would have been to require training in that of South African apartheid or Hindu supremacism.

Compulsory training in any particular ideology — Zionism, fascism, liberalism — is a body blow against university independence.

Segal’s plan has been roundly criticised by the progressive side of politics, including by Jewish organisations, but has the support of the entire Zionist establishment and the major parties.

Stopping free inquiry
The plan was originally devised in mid-2025, but was put on hold after Segal was discredited by revelations of her family’s connections, through generous donations, with the far-right, anti-immigrant group Advance.

Now, the ALP appears to be implementing it. Under the obligatory cover of combating antisemitism, the training is clearly intended to further attack genocide opponents in higher education.

The measure shows a flagrant contempt for the basic role of universities in a supposedly liberal society — the necessary cliché that the campus is a place where controversial ideas can be expressed and discussed, no matter what powerful political actors they alienate.

Academic freedom is an ideal, not a reality, but it is still an essential principle of true intellectual work.

The extent to which it is observed is an indicator of the overall state of democracy in a country.

Little is currently known about how the antisemitism training will work in practice. Segal’s blueprint is — no doubt intentionally — extremely vague.

Regardless of the form it takes, the training is designed to elevate anti-Jewish hate above all other kinds of racism as especially deserving of redress — what other form of racism has its own training? — and to enforce Zionists’ chauvinistic insistence that they are the only Jews worthy of the name.

Both intentions are profoundly racist.

How the training will be assessed is also unclear. We have no knowledge of what the consequences would be for the many university staff who will refuse to participate in Zionist indoctrination. We also have no inkling of the size of the financial penalties against non-compliant universities that Segal, in full Trumpian mode, wants to apply.

According to Times Higher Education, they will be “significant”.

To the right of Trump
The current US administration has already mandated widespread student training designed to vilify Palestine solidarity as antisemitic. The Australian proposal of something similar for university staff puts Albanese and his government to the right of Trump.

The government has appointed Greg Craven, the former VC of the Australian Catholic University, as the political commissar responsible for the training and other elements of Segal’s “report card” process.

Craven has pooh-poohed the idea that cracking down on anti-Zionist speech could constitute any threat to civil liberties. The issue, he writes, is fundamentally one of “national defence”.

Albanese’s new hate speech laws, for example, are needed because our current legal and constitutional arrangements

are based on the assumption that our commonwealth faces no deadly external or internal threats.

Read that again. We are, Craven thinks, essentially at war. This means that we have to be the ones to suspend the basic democratic norms we love so much, because otherwise the jihadists will do it for us.

He sees pro-Palestinian critics of the hate speech laws as spreading “morally bankrupt intellectual effluent”.

“A couple of decades’ house arrest for Louise Adler,” he writes, is “appealing”. This is kind of right-wing trolling that, in 2026, equips someone to be entrusted by the ALP with the future of academic freedom in Australia.

University leaders can’t be trusted
Mass defiance of the training is the only feasible response. University authorities certainly cannot be trusted to push back. They have made it clear that they are perfectly willing to turn their institutions into Zionist propaganda mills.

Universities Australia welcomed Segal’s recommendations when they were first made in July; the supine Group of Eight has not raised a peep of protest against the political training proposal.

The training will, however, pose serious headaches for university managers. But, far from protesting, they might even welcome the opportunity to discipline Palestine-supporting staff, who are usually also at the forefront of union and other progressive campus activism.

Last year’s gratuitous purge of academics at Macquarie University disproportionately targeted Palestine supporters, union activists and women.

As decades of their imposition of cuts and austerity in the sector show, many vice-chancellors and their deputies are more than ready to sacrifice higher education wholesale, at any price. Their rewards are the prestige and salary that come with a career in senior university management.

In this year’s Australia Day honours, Professor Annamarie Jagose, the provost of the University of Sydney, was rewarded with an Order of Australia medal for “service to tertiary education”. She was far from the only university executive to get a gong.

Awarding this honour, at this moment, to the second-highest office holder at Sydney, which has led the way in its repression of anti-genocide activism, is not anodyne, and it is hard not to read it as a federal

reward for the university’s readiness to politically and ideologically serve the cause of genocide.

Police state on campus
Not content with feting Israel’s bomb-signing terrorist-in-chief, Albanese is also destroying the notional independence of the university system, imposing a political standard to which teaching and administrative staff must conform, and delivering campuses into the hands of a far-right lobby that is milking the 2025 atrocity at Bondi for all it is worth.

After Bondi, no authoritarian bridge seems too far for the ALP and Coalition. Crossing dangerous new frontiers in political repression will be the principal legacy of Anthony Albanese and his Labor colleagues.

Their reforms threaten to fundamentally alter the character of society, which will become more autocratic, more racist, less rational and less free.

Everyone who supports the reckless and bankrupt Labor Party is accountable.

During the genocide, universities have played the role of being a testing ground for repressive policies that were soon rolled out more widely.

Before the NSW government restricted street protests, Australian vice-chancellors restricted them on campus. The federal government’s hate speech laws were prefigured by crackdowns on anti-Zionist or pro-Palestinian expression in universities.

Under their supposedly “liberal” leadership, campuses have consistently trialled the next features of the Australian police state. Once Zionist political training has become established in universities,

there is nothing to stop it from being rolled out more widely.

Nick Riemer is a senior lecturer at the University of Sydney and academic vice-president of the university’s National Tertiary Education Union branch. A long-time Palestine activist, he is the author of Boycott Theory and the Struggle for Palestine. Available here. This article was first published by Michael West Media and is republished with permission.

The internationally recognised Lemkin Institute for the Prevention of Genocide has issued severe criticism of Germany.

In a statement dated 13 January 2026, it “condemns the persistent efforts by several high-profile German civil society organisations to deny the ongoing genocide in Gaza and to disseminate disinformation and denialist narratives among German political decision-makers.”

At the same time, the institute accuses major German media corporations of having become “the Israeli government’s most loyal mouthpiece”.

• READ MORE: Rights advocates welcome Canada’s exclusion from Trump’s Gaza ‘Board of Peace’
• Other Gaza genocide reports

German policymakers are likewise criticised for turning away from the “international legal order” — an order “that was created in large part due to the horrors it produced”.

This refers to Nazi crimes, including the Holocaust against European Jews, the genocide of the Sinti and Roma, and the war of annihilation against the Soviet Union.

Systematic denial of the Gaza genocide
The institute denounces the fact that, in Germany, the reality continues to be denied that Israel has been responsible for a genocide in the Gaza Strip lasting at least two years since 7 October 2023.

This criticism is directed not only at governing parties and senior political figures, but also at Germany’s leading media outlets: “Germany’s largest media outlets have abandoned their journalistic responsibilities, threatening critical voices and effectively becoming the Israeli government’s most loyal mouthpiece.”

According to the report, this systematic denial of genocide is driven primarily by political pressure from above as well as by Israeli lobbying and disinformation efforts.

The latter are attributed in particular to the Middle East Peace Forum (NAFFO), the Europe Israel Press Association (EIPA), the German-Israeli Society (DIG), and the European Leadership Network (ELNET), including its Forum of Strategic Dialogue (FSD).

“In this symbiosis, organisations deliver the pseudo-arguments that German politicians rely on to legitimise an otherwise untenable political stance.

“In return, these organisations are rewarded with public funding or privileged access to Parliament.

“By financing, platforming, and politically endorsing actors that discredit UN bodies, ignore well-established legal standards, and engage in genocide denial, Germany has turned its back on an international legal order that was created in large part due to the horrors it produced.“

Call for political reversal
The report points out that both Israel and Germany are currently before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) — Israel accused of genocide, Germany of possible complicity.

The latter, in particular, continues to be almost entirely ignored in Germany’s public discourse.

Against this backdrop, the Lemkin Institute issues an urgent appeal to German state authorities “to immediately halt all active financing, dissemination, and legitimation of genocide denialist propaganda masked as critical expertise.”

It continues: “We further urge the German government to withdraw public funding and end privileged parliamentary access for organisations and initiatives engaged in genocide denial and the systematic discrediting of international legal institutions.

“We remind Germany and all its political bodies of their obligations under the Genocide Convention, including the duty to prevent and punish genocide and any forms of complicity.

“Above all, we call on the German state to end its complicity in the genocide against Palestinians, including through arms exports to and uncritical diplomatic support for the state committing genocide.“

Connecting global grassroots
The Lemkin Institute is an internationally active NGO based in the United States. It is named after Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-Jewish jurist and Holocaust survivor who coined the term “genocide”.

The institute’s mission is “to connect the global grassroots with the tools of genocide prevention.”

As early as April 2024, the institute stated that the current Israeli genocide was not confined to the Gaza Strip alone, but affected all of Palestine, including the West Bank.

Leon Wystrychowski is a journalist, historian, Middle East scholar and Palestine activist from Germany.

Former Israeli military spokesperson Daniel Hagari says Israel has “lost the war on social media,” describing the online space as the most dangerous and complex arena shaping global public opinion, especially among younger generations.

Speaking at the annual conference of the Jewish Federations of North America in Washington, DC, Hagari urged the creation of a powerful new propaganda apparatus modelled on the capabilities and structure of Unit 8200, Israel’s elite cyber intelligence division, reports Middle East Monitor.

He argued that Israel must now fight “a battle of images, videos, and statistics—not lengthy texts.”

• READ MORE: Other Israeli propaganda reports
• Other Gaza reports

Hagari proposed establishing a unit capable of monitoring anti-Israel content across platforms, in real time and in multiple languages, supplying rapid-response messaging and data to government and media outlets.

His plan also calls for the systematic creation of fake online identities, automated bot networks, and the use of unofficial bloggers — “preferably mostly young women” — to shape global perceptions.

He warned that the decisive phase of this battle would unfold a decade from now, when students using artificial intelligence tools searched for information on the events of October 7 and encountered “two completely contradictory narratives.”

Hagari, a former navy officer who served in sensitive military roles, became Israel’s top military spokesperson in 2023 before being dismissed from the position earlier this year.

Israelis are determined to erase the evidence of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, through the use of paid and instructed propagandists to reshape the historical record.

Zionists have also taken over social media platforms. Those who are critical of Israel are being censored or arrested.

From YouTube to X, Wikipedia, and TikTok, Zionists are capturing all means of communication to erase the evidence of its genocide, reshape the historical record, and censor those critical of it.

• READ MORE: Why Israel’s $150 million ‘public diplomacy’ budget has failed so abysmally
• Other Israeli hasbara reports

Meanwhile, the Israel Lobby exercises its power through intimidation, paying influencers to endorse it, and arresting dissenters whom they frame as terrorists.

Last December, Israel announced it was boosting its Foreign Affairs Ministry “hasbara” (propaganda) budget by an extra US$150 million.

Back in August, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu admitted to reporters that Tel Aviv was losing to “propaganda” war.

“I think that we’ve not been winning [the propaganda war], to put it mildly … There are vast forces arrayed against us,” he stated at the time, blaming the algorithms for this defeat.

Dismantling free speech
Since then, Israel has been working to dismantle free speech and censor everything critical of it, across social media, as part of an all-encompassing crackdown.

This press conference was no accident; instead, it was part of a much larger scheme that began in July with a targeted campaign aimed at brainwashing right-wing conservatives in the West.

The propaganda plan was hatched in three parts: One being Netanyahu going on a number of right-wing podcasts; another being a social media censorship campaign, along with the financing of propaganda trips to Israel for right-wing influencers.

Benjamin Netanyahu’s appearance on the Nelk Boys podcast was his first stop in his attempt to revive right-wing support for him personally, yet it received enormous backlash at the time.

The podcasters were widely condemned for both “normalising” and asking no critical questions of the Prime Minister, who currently has an International Criminal Court (ICC) war crimes warrant out for his arrest.

The Israeli Prime Minister then went on a round of coordinated interviews across the American corporate media, as a range of other right-wing podcasters hosted him. The difference between the corporate media and the podcasters who hosted him was that the podcasters were even less critical and actively worked to bolster his image.

These disingenuous podcast hosts even attempted to frame themselves as defying cancel culture, being edgy and going against the mainstream, despite the fact that they were simply doing a worse job than that of the corporate media, battling nothing more than their own followings.

Erica Mindel – censorship Tsar
Meanwhile, in the background, TikTok hired Erica Mindel, an ex-Israeli soldier and ex-ADL employee who openly bragged of her loyalty to Israel, as its new “Hate Speech” censorship Tsar.

A move that appeared to have gone relatively unnoticed, but began to shape what was deemed acceptable discourse on the platform.

As this was in the works, the Israeli foreign ministry had already funded trips for 16 right-wing influencers to travel to Israel on closely coordinated propaganda trips. Their goal was to bring 550 such influencers on fully financed tours by the end of the year, which later included figures like Tommy Robinson and even former rapper Azealia Banks.

Upon visiting the White House in October, Benjamin Netanyahu attended a meeting with right-wing influencers and openly discussed ideas to capture social media platforms.

At this point, the agenda to kill content critical of Israel was already underway, as the TikTok app that the Israel Lobby sought to ban just a year prior fell into the hands of pro-Israel billionaires.

The world’s second-richest man and top donor to the Israeli military, Larry Ellison, is a key figure in this picture, as his company, Oracle, is poised to take over TikTok. The move was recently praised by The Times of Israel as “raising hopes for tougher anti-Semitism rules”.

Meanwhile, Ellison was busy buying up CBS News and installing the completely inexperienced, vehemently pro-Israel journalist, Bari Weiss, as the channel’s top executive.

Inexperienced for role
Weiss, whose claim to fame was being a temporary opinion piece writer at The New York Times before leaving and attempting to carve out a career as a right-wing commentator and, later, news outlet owner, is clearly inexperienced for taking on her current role.

Ellison just so happens to be a major stakeholder in Elon Musk’s Tesla and X.

In early October, YouTube also decided to quietly delete at least 700 videos from the platform that documented Israeli human rights violations, along with the accounts of three prominent Palestinian human rights groups: Al-Haq, Al-Mezan Center, and the Palestinian Center for Human Rights.

The Intercept published an article explaining the move as a “capitulation” to President Donald Trump’s recent sanctions, enacted to shield Israel from accountability for its copiously documented war crimes.

Then there is Wikipedia co-founder, Jimmy Wales, who came out against the website’s page covering the Gaza Genocide, asserting that it “needs immediate attention”.

“At present, the lead and overall presentation state, in Wikipedia’s voice, that Israel is committing genocide, although that claim is highly contested,” Wales stated, claiming it violates the platform’s “neutral” point of view.

At present, every major human rights organisation, including Israel’s own B’Tselem, all the top legal organisations relevant to the issue, the United Nations, and the most representative body of genocide scholars, all agree that Israel is committing genocide.

ICJ’s “plausible genocide’
In fact, the International Court of Justice (ICJ)’s ruling on the matter considers it a plausible genocide. The only ones disputing this fact are the Israelis themselves, ideologically committed and/or paid Zionist propagandists, in addition to Israeli allies who are also implicated in the crime of all crimes.

Objective truth is, however, not relevant to any of these bad-faith actors. This is because Israel and its powerful lobbying arms are actively pursuing a total crackdown on criticism of Israeli war crimes.

On X (Twitter), a new censorship warning has been placed over all images and videos from Gaza that show Israeli war crimes, also.

What is currently happening is a widespread attempt to wipe content from the internet, erase the truth, ban, deport, and arrest those critical of Israel. All this as the Israel Lobby brings social media and corporate media under its direct control, using the excuse of “anti-Semitism” and “terrorism” to do so.

Israel’s censorship crackdown, which the Trump administration is working alongside to complete, is by far the worst iteration of cancel culture yet.

The ongoing crackdown on academic freedom, for example, in order to silence criticism of Israel, is by far the most severe in US history.

Meanwhile, the ADL has just set up a “Mamdani monitor” to track the democratically elected incoming New York City mayor.

The National Press Club of Australia has abruptly cancelled a scheduled address by renowned journalist and Pulitzer Prize–winning author Chris Hedges, who was set to deliver a talk titled “The Betrayal of Palestinian Journalists”.

The event, planned for October 20, was to expose how Western media amplify Israeli propaganda while silencing voices documenting Israel’s atrocities in Gaza.

Instead, the Press Club is reportedly considering Israel’s ambassador, retired IDF lieutenant-colonel Amir Maimon, as a replacement speaker, a move critics say perfectly illustrates the very censorship and bias Hedges intended to discuss.

• READ MORE: The National Press Club of Australia, caving to the Israel lobby, Cancels My Talk on Our Betrayal of Palestinian Journalists
• Statement by the National Press Club
• The betrayal of Palestinian journalists — Chris Hedges

Amid an ongoing genocide in Gaza, where more than 278 Palestinian journalists have been killed, many deliberately targeted, the Press Club’s decision to silence a veteran war correspondent while platforming a representative of the Israeli occupation underscores a disturbing alignment with state propaganda.

It signals a betrayal of journalistic ethics and Australia’s public right to hear unfiltered truths about Israel’s war crimes.

Rather than promoting balance, the National Press Club has chosen complicity, showing that press freedom ends where Israeli interests begin.

https://t.co/DsCUdkL7xk

— Chris Hedges (@ChrisLynnHedges) October 3, 2025

Chris Hedges – Statement by the National Press Club. pic.twitter.com/RNYsyUn9Z9

— National Press Club (@PressClubAust) October 4, 2025

COMMENTARY: By Walden Bello

When the Flores and Velasco articles and posts whitewashing Israel’s genocidal policies in Gaza first came out a few days ago, I was waiting for people in the Philippine media to criticise and denounce them since they were so obviously hack pieces that did not meet the minimal standards of decent journalism.

I waited and waited, until I realised that there were no media people or organisations that were going to speak up.

Where were the progressive and liberal voices, apart from those of Richard Heydarian and Inday Espina Varona?

• READ MORE: The betrayal of Palestinian journalists
• Which Australian journalists and politicians have gone on trips to Israel and Palestine?
• Other reports on the Israeli war on Gaza media bias

This was the reason I felt compelled to issue the statement condemning the sordid reporting of Flores (The Philippine Star) and Velasco (Daily Tribune).

I was not out to do an expose, but that’s what it effectively became. In my subsequent posts, I raised the question of what was the reason just two journalists were willing to challenge the stories.

Was it a case of circling the wagons to protect errant colleagues? Was it fear of ties with the Israeli state being exposed by the Israelis in retaliation? Was it fear of physical or political reprisals by the Israelis?

These may have played a part, but the deafening silence meant there was something bigger at work.

This morning I received a long text from a prominent media practitioner that provided the answer. It’s not fear. It’s actually worse: agreement with Zionist ideology and policies, including genocide.

That the person asked me not to divulge his name for fear of suffering retribution from his colleagues stunned me. OMG, is this how deep the rot is with our media? ? Here is his disconcerting revelation to me:

‘Most are prejudiced’
“Yes some are scared, but honestly most of them actually are prejudiced against Muslims and side with the Zionists anytime.

“Most believe in the US religious fascist Zionist narrative, and also cannot accept that the world has changed — that the US is no longer the unipower it was decades ago, and that Russia, China, India and BRICS are on the rise.

“And also, you should hear them talk about how Filipino Muslims should be wiped off the face of the earth.

“These are college graduates from UP [University of the Philippines], UST [University of Santo Tomas], Ateneo who studied media.

“Whenever I would voice empathy for the Muslim minority here, or Palestinians, I’d be called stupid. Same also because I refused to join in the corruption.

“Oh, and also they have the same prejudice against China and the Chinese and mistake the Japanese imperial army atrocities as something China did to us!

“Also this is not limited to media. I have batchmates from UP Diliman, medical doctors, lawyers, engineers who also have the same prejudices.”

He added: “Some of these journalists have won awards abroad.”

Walden Bello is a Filipino academic and analyst of Global South issues who was awarded Amnesty International Philippines’ Most Distinguished Defender of Human Rights Award in 2023. He has also served as a member of the House of Representatives of the Philippines.

I am alarmed by reports that Filipino journalists were flown in by the Israeli government to participate in what is essentially a whitewashing campaign for the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

At least two articles, atrocious excuses for journalism, have come out of this trip.One is a piece by Wilson Lee Flores for The Philippine Star, entitled “Israel beyond the headlines: Where ancient stones speak.”

By attempting to divert attention from the massacre of Palestinian civilians to “the Old City’s labyrinthine alleys,” Flores acts as an apologist for war crimes, akin to writing a travel blog about Nazi Germany.

• READ MORE: At Gaza’s border, influencers broadcast Israeli propaganda
• Israel’s starvation denial is an Orwellian farce — The Israeli ‘hasbara’ cannot disprove the obvious, but it can obfuscate and exhaust
• Other Israeli war on Gaza reports

In a Facebook post, Flores further parrots Israel’s propaganda by highlighting how the brutal IDF employs both men and women to carry out atrocities, a cynical weaponisation of “feminism.”

Even more repulsive is the piece from the Daily Tribune about “Gaza’s Fake Famine” from Vernon Velasco. It is a parody of a story, overly simplifying the famine of Gaza to a matter of food truck logistics, and uncritically quoting an IDF Officer.

Fittingly, the article contains three photos of shipping containers but not a single photo of a human being.

This runs counter to facts laid out by UN officials, including Joyce Msuya, the UN’s Assistant Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, who points out how half a million people face “starvation, destitution, and death”.

‘Moral failure’ over Gaza
A study published in the prestigious medical journal Lancet points to the “moral failure” as 1-2 million people live in the most extreme food insecurity level (phase 5 or catastrophe famine) according to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC).

This famine unfolds as shameless journalists make food vlogs kilometres away.

The facts are clear. At least 63,000 people have been killed and 150,000 injured, with women and children making up a significant portion of the casualties. The UN has also reported that nearly 90 percent of Gaza’s population (around 1.9 million people) has been displaced.

Widespread destruction has left over 70 percent of Gaza’s infrastructure destroyed, including more than 94 percent of hospitals either damaged or destroyed. No amount of narrative spin or “complexity” can sanitise this genocide.

As we celebrate National Press Freedom Day, I implore friends in the press to not fall for the lies of the murderous Zionist regime.

It would be tragic for journalists to provide cover for a regime that has murdered at least 240 of their peers.

Filipino journalists must shed the unhealthy culture of silence and non-intervention, and not hesitate to criticise errant colleagues.

They must make it clear that these recipients of Zionist gold are a disgrace to Philippine journalism. The Philippine government must look into the activities of the Israeli Embassy and their manipulation of local media narratives to sanitise their genocide.

Filipino journalists must stand in solidarity with their slain colleagues abroad, not with their killers.

Walden Bello is a Filipino academic and analyst of Global South issues who was awarded Amnesty International Philippines’ Most Distinguished Defender of Human Rights Award in 2023. He has also served as a member of the House of Representatives of the Philippines.

Many people have been closely following the journey this week of the Madleen, a small humanitarian yacht seeking to break Israel’s illegal blockade of Gaza with a crew of 12 on board, including humanitarian activists and journalists.

This morning we woke to the harrowing, yet not unexpected, news that the vessel had been illegally hijacked by Israeli forces, who boarded and took the crew captive into Israeli territories, in contravention of international law.

Yet another on the long list of war crimes Israel has committed over the last 20 months of genocide, and decades of illegal occupation.

• READ MORE: Palestinian supporters in NZ accuse Israel of ‘state piracy’ and condemn silence
• Israeli commandos seize Gaza-bound aid ship Madleen, take it to Israel
• Israeli forces intercept Gaza freedom aid boat Madleen – cut communications
• Other Israeli war on Gaza reports

Communication with the crew was lost after the final moments of tense onboard footage as they donned lifejackets, threw phones and other sensitive data overboard, and raised their arms in preparation for whatever might come next.

Israel has a detailed history of attacking all previous freedom flotillas — including the 2010 mission aboard the Mavi Marmara in which 10 crew were killed and dozens more injured when Israeli forces hijacked the humanitarian vessel.

Another mission earlier this year was cut short when it was targeted by an airstrike in international waters, injuring crew.

The next updates were scenes filmed by Israeli forces which appear to show them calmly handing bread rolls and water to the detained crew, painting a picture which immediately recalled my own experience last year being unlawfully arrested in the southern West Bank.

Detained while documenting
I was detained while documenting armed settler violence, taken illegally to a military base where myself and three other internationals were given a bathroom stop, bread and water.

While we ate, they filmed us, saying “You are unharmed, yes? We are looking after you well?”

We were then loaded into a police van where a Palestinian farmer sat blindfolded, in silence, with his hands zip-tied behind him.

Israel loves to put on a show of their “humane treatment” when internationals are present and cameras are rolling, but it’s a shallow and sinister facade for their abusive racism and cruelty towards Palestinians.

It appears their response to the Madleen’s crew over the next few days will be exactly that. Don’t buy into it; this is no more than deeply sinister propaganda to cover state-backed racism, supremacy, and cruelty.

Families in Gaza are still facing indiscriminate airstrikes, continuous displacement, forced starvation, and the phony Israel/US “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation” which has led to more than 100 civilians being shot while desperately seeking food.

Thousands of trucks still wait at the border to Gaza, barred entry by Israeli forces, while Palestinians face severe malnutrition and a man-made famine.

The New Zealand government has still not placed a single sanction on the Israeli state.

Cole Martin is an independent New Zealand photojournalist based in the Middle East and a contributor to Asia Pacific Report.

SPECIAL REPORT: By Wendy Bacon and Yaakov Aharon

While Australia’s universities continue to repress pro-Palestine peace protests, they gave the green light to pro-Israel events earlier this month, sparking outrage from anti-war protesters over the hypocrisy.

Israeli lobby groups StandWithUs Australia (SWU) and Israel-IS organised a series of university events this week which featured Israel Defense Force (IDF) reservists who have served during the war in Gaza, two of whom lost family members in the Hamas resistance attack on October 7, 2023.

The events were promoted as “an immersive VR experience with an inspiring interfaith panel” discussing the importance of social cohesion, on and off campus.”

• READ MORE: Israeli activists infiltrate Labor Party in grassroots putsch to hit Greens
• Manufactured antisemitism. Universities relied on fudged numbers

Hundreds of staff and students at Monash, Sydney Uni, UNSW and UTS signed letters calling on their universities to “act swiftly to cancel the SWU event and make clear that organisations and individuals who worked with the Israel Defense Forces did not have a place on UNSW campuses.”

SWU is a global charity organisation which supports Israel and fights all conduct it perceives to be “antisemitic”. It campaigns against the United Nations and international NGOs’ findings against Israel and is currently supporting actions to suspend United States students supporting Palestine.

It established an office in Sydney in 2022 and Michael Gencher, who previously worked at the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies, was appointed as CEO.

The event’s co-sponsor, Israel-IS, is a similar propaganda outfit whose mission is to “connect with people before they connect with ideas” particularly through “cutting edge technologies like VR and AI.”

Among their 18 staff, one employee’s role is “IDF coordinator’” while two employees serve as “heads of Influencer Academy”.

The events were a test for management at Monash, UTS, UNSW and USyd to see how far each would go in cooperating with the Israel lobby.

Some events cancelled
At Monash, an open letter criticising the event was circulated by staff and students. The event was then cancelled without explanation.

At UNSW, 51 staff and postgraduate students signed an open letter to vice-chancellor Atilla Brungs, calling for the event’s cancellation. It was signed on their behalf by Jessica Whyte, an associate professor of philosophy in arts and law and Noam Peleg, associate professor in the Faculty of Law and Justice.

Prior to the scheduled event, Michael West Media sent questions to UNSW. After the event was scheduled to occur, the university responded to MWM, informing us that it had not taken place.

As of today, two days after the event was scheduled, vice-chancellor Brungs has not responded to the letter.

UTS warning to students
The UTS branch of the Australasian Union of Jewish Students partnered with Israel-IS in organising the UTS event, in alignment with their core “pillars” of Zionism and activism. The student group seeks to “promote a positive image of Israel on campus” to achieve its vision of a world where Jewish students are committed to Israel.

UTS Students’ Association, Palestinian Youth Society and UTS Muslim Student Society wrote to management but deputy vice-chancellor Kylie Readman rejected pleas. She replied that the event’s organisers had guaranteed it would be “a small private event focused on minority Israeli perspectives” and that speakers would only speak in a personal capacity.

While acknowledging the conflict in the Middle East was stressful for many at UTS, she then warned students, “UTS has not received formal notification of any intent to protest, as is required under the campus policy. As such, I must advise that any protest activity planned for 2nd April will be unauthorised. I would urge you to encourage students not to participate in an unauthorised protest.”

Students who allegedly breach campus policies can face disciplinary proceedings that can lead to suspension.

UTS Student Association president Mia Campbell told MWM, “The warning given by UTS about protesting definitely felt intimidating and frightening to a number of students, including myself.

“Especially as a law student, misconduct allegations can affect your admission to the profession . . .  but with all other avenues of communication exhausted between us and the university, it felt like we didn’t have a choice.

I don’t want to look back on what I was doing during this genocide and have done any less than what was possible at the time.

Sombre, but quietly angry protest
The UTS protest was sombre but quietly angry. Speakers read from lists naming dead Palestinian children.

One speaker, who has lost 120 members of his extended family in Gaza, explained why he protested: “We have to be backed into a corner, told we can’t protest, told we can’t do anything. We’ve exhausted every single policy . . . Add to all that we are threatened with misconduct.”

Do you think we can stay silent while there are people on campus who may have played a part in the killings in Gaza?

SWU at University of Sydney
University of Sydney staff and students who signed an open letter received no reply before the event.

Activists from USyd staff in support of Palestine, Students Against War and Jews Against the Occupation ‘48 began protesting outside the Michael Spence building that houses the university’s senior executives on the Wednesday evening, April 2.

Escorted by UTS security, three SWU representatives arrived. A small group was admitted. Soon afterwards, the participants could be seen from below in the building’s meeting room.

A few protesters remained and booed the attendees as they left. These included Mark Leach, a far right Christian Zionist and founder of pro-Israeli group Never Again is Now. Later on X, he condemned the protesters and described Israel as a “multi-ethnic enclave of civilisation.”

Warning letters for students
Several student activists have received letters recently warning them about breaching the new USyd code of conduct regulating protests. USyd has also adopted a definition of anti-semitism which critics say could restrict criticism of Israel.

It has been slammed by the Jewish Council of Australia as “dangerous” and “unworkable”.

A Jews against Occupation ’48 speaker, Judith Treanor, said, “Welcoming this organisation makes a mockery of this university’s stated values of respect, non-harassment, and anti-racism.

“In the context of this university’s adoption of draconian measures to stifle freedom of expression in relation to Palestine, the decision to host this event promoting Israel reveals a shocking level of hypocrisy and a huge abuse of power.”

No stranger to USyd
Michael Gencher is no stranger to USyd. Since October 2023, he has opposed student encampments and street protests.

On one occasion, he visited the USyd protest student encampment in support of Palestine with Richard Kemp, a retired British army commander who tirelessly promotes the IDF. Kemp’s most recent X post congratulates Hungary for withdrawing from “the International Criminal Kangaroo Court. Other countries should reject this political court and follow suit.”

Kemp and Gencher filmed themselves attempting to interrogate students about their knowledge of conflict in the Middle East on May 21, 2024, but the students refused to be provoked and declined to engage.

In May 2024, Gercher helped organise a joint rally at USyd with Zionist Group Together with Israel, a partner of far-right group Australian Jewish Association. Extreme Zionist Ofir Birenbaum, who was recently exposed as covertly filming staff at an inner city cafe, Cairo Takeaway, helped organise the rally.

Students at the USyd encampment told MWM  that they experienced provocative behaviour towards them during the May rally.

Opposition to StandWithUs
Those who oppose the SWU campus events draw on international findings condemning Israel and its IDF, explained in similar letters to university leaders.

After the USyd event, those who signed a letter received a response from vice-chancellor Mark Scott.

He explained, “We host a broad range of activities that reflect different perspectives — we recognise our role as a place for debate and disagreeing well, which includes tolerance of varied opinions.”

His response ignored the concerns raised, which leaves this question: Why are organisations that reject all international and humanitarian legal findings, including ones of genocide and ethnic cleansing,

being made to feel ‘safe and welcome’ when their critics risk misconduct proceedings?

SWU CEO Michael Gencher went on the attack in the Jewish press:

“We’re seeing a coordinated attempt to intimidate universities into silencing Israeli voices simply because they don’t conform to a radical political narrative.” He accused the academics of spreading “provable lies, dangerous rhetoric, and blatant hypocrisy.”

SWU regards United Nations and other findings against Israel as false.

Mediawatch on RNZ today strongly criticised Stuff and YouTube among other media for using Israeli propaganda’s “Outbrain” service.

Outbrain is a company founded by the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) military and its technology can be tracked back to a wealthy entrepreneur, which in this case could be a euphemism for a megalomaniac.

He uses the metaphor of a “dome”, likening it to the dome used in warfare.

• LISTEN: The RNZ Mediawatch broadcast on Outbrain (at 30min40)
• READ MORE: Outbrain Discovery Outperforms Search and Social for Israel’s Ministry of Tourism
• Israel’s image crisis and the limits of propaganda – AJ Listening Post
• Israel boosts propaganda funding by $150m to sway global opinion against genocide
• Outbrain’s $1 billion Teads deal: The latest in Israel’s high-stakes acquisition spree
• Other propaganda reports

Outbrain, which publishes content on New Zealand media, picks up what’s out there and converts and distorts it to support Israel. It twists, it turns, it deceives the reader.

Presenter Colin Peacock of RNZ’s Mediawatch programme today advised NZ media to ditch the propaganda service.

Outbrain uses the media in the following way. The content user such as Stuff pays Outbrain and Outbrain pays the user, like Stuff.

“Both parties make money when users click on the content,” said Peacock.

‘Digital Iron Dome’
The content on the Stuff website came via “Digital Iron Dome” named after the State of Genociders’ actual defence system. It is run by a tech entrepreneur quoted on Mediawatch:

“Just like a physical iron dome that scans the open air and watches for any missiles . . . the digital iron dome knows how to scan the internet. We know how to buy media. Pro-Israeli videos and articles and images inside the very same articles going against Israel,” says the developer of the propaganda “dome” machine.

Peacock said the developer had stated that the digital dome delivered “pro-Jewish”* messages to more than 100 million people worldwide on platforms like Al Jazeera, CNN — and last weekend on Stuff NZ — and said this information went undetected as pro-Israel material, ensuring it reached, according to the entrepreneur: “The right audience without interference.”

According to Wikipedia, Outbrain was founded by Yaron Galai and Ori Lahav, officers in the Israeli Navy. Galai sold his company Quigo to AOL in 2007 for $363 million. Lahav worked at an online shopping company acquired by eBay in 2005.

The company is headquartered in New York with global offices in London, San Francisco, Chicago, Washington DC, Cologne, Gurugram, Paris, Ljubljana, Munich, Milan, Madrid, Tokyo, São Paulo, Netanya, Singapore, and Sydney.

Peacock pointed out that other advocacy organisations had already been buying and posting content, there was nothing new about this with New Zealand news media.

But — and this is important — the Media Council ruled in 2017 that Outbrain content was the publisher’s responsibility: that the news media in NZ were responsible for promoted links that were offered to their readers.

“Back then publishers at Stuff and the Herald said they would do more to oversee the content, with Stuff stating it is paid promoted content,” said Peacock, in his role as the media watchdog.

Still ‘big money business’
“But this is also still a big money business and the outfits using these tools are getting much bigger exposure from their arrangements with news publishers such as Stuff,” he said.

He pointed out that the recently appointed Outbrain boss for Australia New Zealand and Singapore, Chris Oxley, had described Outbrain as “a leader in digital media connecting advertisers with premium audiences in contextually relevant environments”.

The watchdog Mediawatch said that news organisations should drop Outbrain.

“Media environments where news and neutrality are important aren’t really relevant environments for political propaganda that’s propagated by online opportunists who know how to make money out of it and also to raise funds while they are at it, ” said Peacock.

“These services like Outbrain are sometimes called ‘recommendation engines’ but our recommendation to news media is don’t use them for the sake of the trust of the people you say you want to earn and keep: the readers,” said Peacock.

Saige England is a journalist and author, and member of the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA).

* Being “pro-Jewish” should not be equated with being pro-genocide nor should antisemitism be levelled at Jews who are against this genocide. The propaganda from Outbrain does a disservice to Palestinians and also to those Jewish people who support all human rights — the right of Palestinians to life and the right to live on their land.

Palestine solidarity protesters today demonstrated at the Auckland headquarters of Television New Zealand, accusing the country’s major TV network of broadcasting “propaganda” backing Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza.

About 50 protesters targeted the main entrance to the TVNZ building near Sky Tower and also picketed a side gate entrance for media workers for about an hour.

The protest climaxed a week of critical responses from commentators and critics of TVNZ’s Q&A senior reporter/presenter Jack Tame’s 45-minute interview with Israel ambassador Ran Yaakoby last Sunday which Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) secretary Neil Scott described as “a platform for propaganda to excuse the genocide happening in Gaza over the last six months”.

• READ MORE: October 7: Forensic analysis shows Hamas abuses, many false Israeli claims
• Israel social security data reveals true picture of October 7 deaths
• Israel’s war on Gaza updates: Evidence of torture, executions in mass grave

Waving Palestine flags and placards declaring “Bias”, “silence is complicity — free Palestine,” and “Balanced journalism — my ass,” the protesters chanted “Jack Tame, you cannot hide – you’re complicit with genocide.”

Chalked on the pavement and on the walls were slogans such as “Jack ‘Shame’ helped kill MSM”, “TVNZ stop platforming genocide and Zionism”, “TVNZ genocide apologists” and “137 journalists killed” in reference to the mainly Palestinian journalists targeted by Israeli military forces.

Across the street, a wall slogan said: “TVNZ (Q&A) broadcast Israeli lies about Gaza”. Other slogans condemned the lack of Palestinian voices in TVNZ coverage – there are about 288 Palestinian people in New Zealand, according to the 2018 Census.

Palestinian advocate Billy Hania of the Palestinians in Aotearoa Coordinating Committee (PACC) said: “We demand TVNZ refrain from parroting the Israeli propaganda narrative and return to practise its duty of professional journalism.”

Ironically, TVNZ tonight screened a rare Palestinian story — a heart-rending report about the tragic death in Gaza of a baby girl, Sabreen Joudeh, “Patience” in Arabic, who had been saved from her dying mother’s womb after an Israeli air strike on their family home.

The TVNZ report interviewed the related Gouda family in Auckland hours before Abdallah Gouda, a doctor, flew out to Turkiye to join a humanitarian aid flotilla leaving for Gaza.

PSNA’s Neil Scott criticises TVNZ coverage of Gaza.   Video: Café Pacific

Criticism of ‘complicity’?
“Jack Tame, you’re a professional,” yelled PSNA secretary Scott through a loud hailer addressing TVNZ. “You know what would be set up, you have to know.

“But you allowed it to happen!”

“I don’t get you Jack, stupid or complicit? Complicit or stupid? One of the two.”

Critics are understood to be filing complaints about the alleged “one-sidedness” of the programme citing many specific criticisms.

“We’re here today because of Jack Tame’s Q&A report for TVNZ,” said Scott.

A Palestine protester calls out TVNZ journalist Jack Tame for alleged bias over Gaza. Video: Café Pacific

With the war having passed 200 days this week with more than 34,000 Palestinians having been killed — mostly children and women — and 392 bodies having been recovered from three separate mass graves discovered at two hospitals after they were destroyed by the Israeli military, some of his complaints were that presenter Tame:

• Interviewed Ambassador Yaakoby at the Israeli Embassy in Wellington instead of at a TVNZ studio with the New Zealand flag being showed alongside the Israeli flag. “Tying the two countries together – a professional would have had the New Zealand flag removed”;
• Did not provide context around the October 7 Hamas attack on southern Israel at the start of the interview – “more than 75 years of repression since 750,000 Palestinians were expelled as refugees from their homeland in the 1948 Nakba”;
• Asking a series of questions that the Israeli ambassador “avoided, changed, or outright lied” in his response;
• Did not follow up with the questions as needed; and
• Avoided the questions that “would have placed the issue of the Israeli attack on Gaza” in context.

Platform for propaganda
“Essentially, Tame gave Israel a platform for propaganda to excuse the genocide happening in Gaza over the last six months,” said Scott.

Among the contextual questions that Scott claimed Tame should have questioned Ambassador Yaakoby on were the envoy’s unchallenged claim that “1400 people had been butchered” by Hamas fighters.

In fact, the documented figure is 1139 — 695 civilians, including 36 children, and 373 security force members, according to a France 24 report citing official sources.

“The ambassador didn’t mention that more than 350 Israeli soldiers were among those killed — at their military posts,” Scott said.

“Many of the others were aged between 18 and 40 and in the military reserves.”

Also, no mention was made of the controversial Hannibal Directive which reportedly led to the Israeli military killing many of its own countrymen and women captives as the resistance fighters retreated back to Gaza.

The controversial Q&A interview with Israeli Ambassador Ran Yaakoby. Video: TVNZ

Among other responses to TVNZ’s Q&A this week, Palestine solidarity advocate and PSNA chair John Minto declared in an open letter to TVNZ published by The Daily Blog that the programme “breached all the standards of decent journalism. In other words it was offensive, discriminatory, inaccurate and grossly unfair.”

‘Unchallenged lies’
“It wasn’t journalism – it was 45-minutes of uninterrupted and unchallenged Israeli lies, misinformation and previously-debunked propaganda. It was outrageous. It was despicable,” Minto wrote.

“The country which for six months has conducted genocide against the Palestinian people of Gaza was given free rein to pour streams of the most vile fabrications and misinformation against Palestinians directly into the homes of New Zealanders. And without a murmur of protest from Jack Tame.

“Even the most egregious lies such as the ‘beheaded babies’ myth were allowed to be broadcast without challenge despite this Israeli propaganda having been discredited months ago.

“The interview showed utter contempt for Palestine and Palestinians as well as New Zealanders who were assailed with this stream of racist deceits and falsehoods with Q&A as the conduit.”

Among a stream of social media comments, one person remarked “On John Tame’s YouTube channel it gained a lot of comments fairly quickly . . .

“These comments were encouraging as at least 95 percent were denouncing the interview . . . with a lot of them debunking the endless stream of blatant lies and atrocity propaganda that poured out of the Israeli ambassador’s mouth.

“Most of the posters were obviously from our country and it was a great example of how Israel’s actions have shattered its reputation with their propaganda fooling hardly anyone anymore.

“It’s a bit like a little child with chocolate all over their face denying they ate the chocolate . . . except in Israel’s case it’s civilian blood all over their face . . .

“Anyway, when I revisited the thread the comments had been purged and deleted.”

On the Q&A YouTube channel, @ZaraLomas commented: “The fact that Q&A are deleting critical comments speaks volumes about their integrity (or lack thereof), and their faith in this shocking piece of ‘journalism’.”

PACC call for ‘truth and accuracy’
In a statement calling for “truth and accuracy in the face of state propaganda”, the Palestinians in Aotearoa Coordinating Committee (PACC) said that Palestinian New Zealanders were in a community that needed “accurate journalism, as we witness the deadliest period of modern history unfold for our people”.

A “hasty two-minute Palestinian response” in a news bulletin to follow the ambassador’s 45-minute interview as arranged by TVNZ was inadequate and rejected.

“Our stake in this is irrefutable. Palestinian perspectives need to be heard on their own terms, not just in brief response to Israeli propaganda,” said the PACC.

The committee called for a comprehensive 45-minute Q&A session with a Palestinian advocate to “ensure a balanced perspective”.

Last week’s leaked New York Times staff directive, as to what words can and cannot be used to describe the carnage Israel is raining on Palestinians, is proof positive, since those reports are published verbatim here in New Zealand, that our understanding of the conflict is carefully managed to always reflect a pro-Israel bias.

Forget the humanity of 120,000 dead and wounded Palestinians and countless others facing famine and disease sheltering in tents or what’s left of destroyed buildings, even internationally recognised terms and phrases such as “genocide,” “occupied territory,” “ethnic cleansing” and even “refugee camps” are discouraged, along with “slaughter”, “massacre” and “carnage”.

Though such language restrictions are claimed to be in the interests of “fairness”, an earlier investigation showed that between October 7 and November 14, The Times used the word “massacre” 53 times when it referred to Israelis being killed by Palestinians and only once in reference to Palestinians being killed by Israel.

• READ MORE: Donors urged to re­sume UN­R­WA fund­ing as re­view finds no Is­raeli ev­i­dence
• Media bias over Palestine
• Other War on Gaza reports

By that date, thousands of Palestinians had perished, the vast majority of whom were women and children, and most of them were killed inside their own homes, in hospitals, schools or United Nations shelters.

This carefully managed use of words is deliberate and insidious and, as Jack Tame’s interview with Israel’s ambassador on last Sunday’s Q&A programme showed, even our most experienced media people are not immune to its effects.

Here is our interview with Israel Ambassador, Ran Yaakoby. From this morning’s @NZQandA https://t.co/pSHdxpccre

— Jack Tame (@jacktame) April 20, 2024

From his introduction, “establishing” that the genocide taking place in Gaza had its genesis in the October 7 attack by Hamas, and not in the Nakba of 1948, Jack Tame and TVNZ facilitated an almost hour-long presentation of pro-Israel propaganda, justifying its atrocities.

For its appalling lack of balance, including Tame’s obsequious allowance and nodding agreement with the Israeli ambassador’s thoroughly discredited claims of Hamas atrocities; “beheadings” “necrophilia” and for describing Israelis’ as being “butchered” (five times he used the word) while Palestinians were merely “killed”, this was a new low in our media’s record of bias when it comes to the presentation of the facts about the Palestine/Israel conflict.

In the very week that we prepare to remember the horrific sacrifices made in previous wars and even as Israel‘s genocidal slaughter of Palestinians brings us closer to World War Three than at any time since the Cuban missile crisis, that TVNZ should have, pre-recorded and so had time to edit, such a disgraceful presentation is simply appalling — and heads should roll.

Republished from The Daily Blog with permission.

Acclaimed journalist Mehdi Hasan joins Democracy Now! to discuss US media coverage of the Israeli war on Gaza and how the war is a genocide being abetted by the United States.

Hasan says US media is overwhelmingly pro-Israel and fails to convey the truth to audiences.

“Palestinian voices not being on American television or in American print is one of the biggest problems when it comes to our coverage of this conflict,” he says.

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Hasan has just launched a new media company, Zeteo, which he started after the end of his weekly news programme on MSNBC earlier this year.

Hasan’s interviews routinely led to viral segments, including his tough questioning of Israeli government spokesperson Mark Regev, but the cable network announced it was canceling his show in November.

The move drew considerable outrage, with critics slamming MSNBC for effectively silencing one of the most prominent Muslim voices in US media.

Rafah invasion threat
Meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu continues to threaten a ground invasion of Rafah in southern Gaza, which human rights groups warn would be a massacre.

President Biden has said such an escalation is a “red line” for him, but Netanyahu has vowed to push ahead anyway.

“Where is the outcry here in the West?” asks Hasan of reports of Israeli war crimes, including the killing of more than 100 journalists in the past five months in Gaza and the blockade of aid from the region.

“It’s a stain on [Biden’s] record, on America’s conscience.”

Transcript:

NERMEEN SHAIKH: The death toll in Gaza has topped 31,300. At least five people were killed on Wednesday when Israel bombed an UNRWA aid distribution center in Rafah — one of the UN agency’s last remaining aid sites in Gaza. The head of UNRWA called the attack a “blatant disregard [of] international humanitarian law”.

This comes as much of Gaza is on the brink of famine as Israel continues to limit the amount of aid allowed into the besieged territory. At least 27 Palestinians have died of starvation, including 23 children.

Meanwhile, Al Jazeera has reported six Palestinians were killed in Gaza City when Israeli forces opened fire again on crowds waiting for food aid. More than 80 people were injured.

In other news from Gaza, Politico reports the Biden administration has privately told Israel that the US would support Israel attacking Rafah as long as it did not carry out a large-scale invasion.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, we begin today’s show looking at how the US media is covering Israel’s assault on Gaza with the acclaimed TV broadcaster Mehdi Hasan. In January, he announced he was leaving MSNBC after his shows were cancelled. Mehdi was one of the most prominent Muslim voices on American television.

In October, the news outlet Semafor reported MSNBC had reduced the roles of Hasan and two other Muslim broadcasters on the network, Ayman Mohyeldin and Ali Velshi, following the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel.

US Media fails on Gaza, fascism.       Video: Democracy Now!

Then, in November, MSNBC announced it was cancelling Hasan’s show shortly after he conducted this interview with Mark Regev, an adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. This is an excerpt:

MEHDI HASAN: You say Hamas’s numbers — I should point out, just pull up on the screen, in the last two major Gaza conflicts, 2009 and 2014, the Israeli military’s death tolls matched Hamas’s Health Ministry death tolls, so — and the UN, human rights groups all agree that those numbers are credible. But look, your wider point is true.

MARK REGEV: Can I challenge that?

MEHDI HASAN: We shouldn’t —

MARK REGEV: Will you allow me —

MEHDI HASAN: We shouldn’t —

MARK REGEV: — to challenge that, please? Can I just challenge that?

MEHDI HASAN: Briefly, if you can.

MARK REGEV: I’d like to challenge that.

MEHDI HASAN: Briefly.

MARK REGEV: I’ll try to be as brief as you are, sir. Those numbers are provided by Hamas. There’s no independent verification. And secondly, more importantly, you have no idea how many of them are Hamas terrorists, combatants, and how many are civilians. Hamas would have you believe that they’re all civilians, that they’re all children.

And here we have to say something that isn’t said enough. Hamas, until now, we’re destroying their military machine, and with that, we’re eroding their control.

But up until now, they’ve been in control of the Gaza Strip. And as a result, they control all the images coming out of Gaza. Have you seen one picture of a single dead Hamas terrorist in the fighting in Gaza? Not one.

MEHDI HASAN: Yeah, but I have —

MARK REGEV: Is that by accident, or is that —

MEHDI HASAN: But I have, Mark —

MARK REGEV: — because Hamas can control — Hamas can control the information coming out of Gaza?

MEHDI HASAN: Mark, but you asked me a question, and you said you would be brief. I haven’t. You’re right. But I have seen lots of children with my own lying eyes being pulled from the rubble. So —

MARK REGEV: Now, because they’re the pictures Hamas wants you to see. Exactly my point, Mehdi.

MEHDI HASAN: And also because they’re dead, Mark. Also —

MARK REGEV: They’re the pictures Hamas wants — no.

MEHDI HASAN: But they’re also people your government has killed. You accept that, right? You’ve killed children? Or do you deny that?

MARK REGEV: No, I do not. I do not. I do not. First of all, you don’t know how those people died, those children.

MEHDI HASAN: Oh wow.

AMY GOODMAN: “Oh wow,” Mehdi Hasan responded, interviewing Netanyahu adviser Mark Regev on MSNBC. Soon after, MSNBC announced that he was losing his shows. Since leaving the network, Mehdi Hasan has launched a new digital media company named Zeteo.

Mehdi, welcome back to Democracy Now! It’s great to have you with us. I want to start with that interview you did with Regev. After, you lost your two shows, soon after. Do you think that’s the reason those shows were cancelled? Interviews like that?

MEHDI HASAN: You would have to ask MSNBC, Amy. And, Amy and Nermeen, thank you for having me on. It’s great to be back here after a few years away. Look, the advantage of not being at MSNBC anymore is I get to come on shows like this and talk to you all. You should get someone from MSNBC on and ask them why they cancelled the shows, because I can’t answer that question. I wish I knew. But there we go.

The shows were cancelled at the end of November. I quit at the beginning of January, because I wanted to have a platform of my own. I couldn’t really spend 2024, one of the most important news years of our lives — genocide in Gaza, fascism at the door here in America with elections — couldn’t really spend that being a guest anchor and a political analyst, which is what I was offered at MSNBC while I was staying there. I wanted to leave. I wanted to get my voice back.

And that’s why I launched my own media company, as you mentioned, called Zeteo, which we’ve done a soft launch on and we’re going to launch properly next month. But I’m excited about all the opportunities ahead, the opportunity to do more interviews like the one I did with Mark Regev.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, Mehdi, could you explain Zeteo? First of all, what does it mean? And what is the gap in the US media landscape that you hope to fill? You’ve been extremely critical of the US media’s coverage of Gaza, saying, quite correctly, that the coverage has not been as consistent or clear as the last time we saw an invasion of this kind, though far less brutal, which was the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

MEHDI HASAN: Yeah, it’s a great question. So, on Zeteo, it’s an ancient Greek word, going back to Socrates and Plato, which means to seek out, to search, to inquire for the truth. And at a time when we live in a, some would say, post-truth society — or people on the right are attempting to turn it into a post-truth society — I thought that was an important endeavor to embark upon as a journalist, to go back to our roots.

In terms of why I launch it and the media space, look, there is a gap in the market, first of all, on the left for a company like this one. Not many progressives have pulled off a for-profit, subscription-based business, media business. We’ve seen it on the right, Nermeen, with, you know, Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire and Bari Weiss’s The Free Press, and even Tucker Carlson has launched his own subscription-based platform since leaving Fox.

And on the progressive space, we haven’t really done it. Now, of course, there are wonderful shows like Democracy Now! which are doing important, invaluable journalism on subjects like Gaza, on subjects like the climate. But across the media industry as a whole, sadly, in the US, the massive gap is there are not enough — I don’t know how to put it — bluntly, truth tellers, people who are willing to say — and when I say “truth tellers,” I don’t just mean, you know, truth in a conventional sense of saying what is true and what is false; I’m saying the language in which we talk about what is happening in the world today.

Too many of my colleagues in the media, unfortunately, hide behind lazy euphemisms, a both-sides journalism, the idea that you can’t say Donald Trump is racist because you don’t know what’s in his heart; you can’t say the Republican Party is going full fascist, even as they proclaim that they don’t believe in democracy as we conventionally understand it; we can’t say there’s a genocide in Gaza, even though the International Court of Justice says such a thing is plausible.

You know, we run away from very blunt terms which help us understand world. And I want to treat American consumers of news, global consumers of news — it’s a global news organisation which I’m founding — with some respect. Stop patronising them. Tell them what is happening in the world, in a blunt way.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, Mehdi, talk about this. I mean, in your criticism of the US media’s coverage, in particular, of Israel’s assault on Gaza — I mean, of course, you have condemned what happened, the Hamas attack in Israel on October 7. You’ve also situated the attack in a broader historical frame, and you’ve received criticism for doing that.

And in response, you’ve said, “Context is not causation,” and “Context is not justification.” So, could you explain why you think context, history, is so important, and the way in which this question is kind of elided in US media coverage, not just of the Gaza crisis, but especially so now?

MEHDI HASAN: So, I did an interview with Piers Morgan this week. And if you watch Piers Morgan’s shows, he always asks his pro-Palestinian guests or anyone criticising Israel, you know, “Condemn what happened on October 7.” It’s all about October the 7th. And what happened on October 7 was barbarism. It was a tragedy. It was a terror attack. Civilians were killed. War crimes were carried out. Hostages were taken. And we should condemn it. Of course we should, as human beings, if nothing else.

But the world did not begin on October 7. The idea that the entire Middle East conflict, Israel-Palestine, the occupation, apartheid, can be reduced to October 7 is madness. And it’s not just me saying that.

You talk to, you know, leading Israeli peace campaigners, even some leading Israeli generals, people like Shlomo Brom, who talk about having to understand the root causes of a people under occupation fighting for freedom. And it’s absurd to me that in our media industry people should try and run away from context.

My former colleagues Ali Velshi and Ayman Mohyeldin, who Amy mentioned in the introduction, they were on air on October 7 as news was coming in of the attacks, and they provided context, because they’re two anchors who really understand that part of the world.

Ayman Mohyeldin is perhaps the only US anchor who’s ever lived in Gaza. And they came under attack online from certain pro-Israel people for providing context. This idea that we should be embarrassed or ashamed or apologetic as journalists for providing context on one of the biggest stories in the world is madness.

You cannot understand what is happening in the world unless we, unless you and I, unless journalists, broadcasters, are explaining to our viewers and our listeners and our readers why things are happening, where forces are coming from, why people are behaving the way they do. And I know America is a country of amnesiacs, but we cannot keep acting as if the world just began yesterday.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to ask you about a piece in The Intercept — you also used to report for The Intercept — the headline, “In internal meeting, Christiane Amanpour confronts CNN brass about ‘double standards’ on Israel coverage”. It’s a really interesting piece. They were confronting the executives, and “One issue that came up,” says The Intercept, “repeatedly is CNN’s longtime process for routing almost all coverage relating to Israel and Palestine through the network’s Jerusalem bureau.

As The Interceptreported in January, “the protocol — which has existed for years but was expanded and rebranded as SecondEyes last summer — slows down reporting on Gaza and filters news about the war through journalists in Jerusalem who operate under the shadow of Israel’s military censor.”

And then it quotes Christiane Amanpour, identified in a recording of that meeting. She said, “You’ve heard from me, you’ve heard my, you know, real distress with SecondEyes — changing copy, double standards, and all the rest,” Amanpour said. The significance of this and what we see, Mehdi? You know, I’m not talking Fox right now. On MSNBC . . .

MEHDI HASAN: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: . . . and on CNN, you rarely see Palestinians interviewed in extended discussions.

MEHDI HASAN: So, I think there’s a few issues there, Amy. Number one, first of all, we should recognise that Christiane Amanpour has done some very excellent coverage of Gaza for CNN in this conflict. She’s had some very powerful interviews and very important guests on. So, credit to Christiane during this conflict. Number two . . .

AMY GOODMAN: International . . .

MEHDI HASAN: . . .  I think US media organisations . . .

AMY GOODMAN: . . .  I just wanted to say, particularly on CNN International, which is often not seen . . .

MEHDI HASAN: Very good point.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: On CNN domestic.

MEHDI HASAN: Very good — very good point, Amy. Touché.

The second point, I would say, is US media organisations, as a whole, are engaging in journalistic malpractice by not informing viewers, listeners, readers that a lot of their coverage out of Israel and the Occupied Territories is coming under the shadow of an Israeli military censor.

How many Americans understand or even know about the Israeli military censor, about how much information is controlled? We barely understand that Western journalists are kept out of Gaza, or if when they go in, they’re embedded with Israeli military forces and limited to what they can say and do.

So I think we should talk about that in a country which kind of prides itself on the First Amendment and free speech and a free press. We should understand the way in which information comes out of the Occupied Territories, in particular from Gaza.

And the third point, I would say, is, yeah, Palestinian voices not being on American television or in American print is one of the biggest problems when it comes to our coverage of this conflict. When we talk about why the media is structurally biased towards one party in this conflict, the more powerful party, the occupier, we have to remember that this is one of the reasons.

Why are Palestinians dehumanised in our media? This is one of the reasons. We don’t let people speak. That’s what leads to dehumanisation. That’s what leads to bias.

We understand it at home when it comes to, for example, Black voices. In recent years, media organisations have tried to take steps to improve diversity on air, when it comes to on-air talent, when it comes to on-air guests, when it comes to balancing panels. We get that we need underrepresented communities to be able to speak. But when it comes to foreign conflicts, we still don’t seem to have made that calculation.

There was a study done a few years ago of op-eds in The New York Times and The Washington Post on the subject of Israel-Palestine from 1970 to, I think it was, 2000-and-something, and it was like 2 percent of all op-eds in the Times and 1 percent in the Post were written by Palestinians, which is a shocking statistic.

We deny these people a voice, and then we wonder why people don’t sympathise with their plight or don’t — aren’t, you know, marching in the street — well, they are marching in the streets — but in bigger numbers. Why America is OK and kind of, you know, blind to the fact that we are complicit in a genocide of these people? Because we don’t hear from these people.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, Mehdi, I mean, explain why that’s especially relevant in this instance, because journalists have not been permitted access to Gaza, so there is no reporting going on on the ground that’s being shown here. I mean, dozens and dozens of journalists have signed a letter asking Israel and Egypt to allow journalists access into Gaza. So, if you could talk about that, why it’s especially important to hear from Palestinian voices here?

MEHDI HASAN: Well, for a start, Nermeen, much of the imagery we see on our screens here or in our newspapers are sanitised images. We don’t see the full level of the destruction. And when we try and understand, well, why are young people — why is there such a generational gap when it comes to the polling on Gaza, on ceasefire, why are young people so much more antiwar than their elder peers, part of the reason is that young people are on TikTok or Instagram and seeing a much less sanitised version of this war, of Israel’s bombardment.

They are seeing babies being pulled from the rubble, limbs missing. They are seeing hospitals being — you know, hospitals carrying out procedures without anesthetic. They are seeing just absolute brutality, the kind of stuff that UN humanitarian chiefs are saying we haven’t seen in this world for 50 years.

And that’s the problem, right? If we’re sanitising the coverage, Americans aren’t being told, really, aren’t being informed, are, again, missing context on what is happening on the ground. And, of course, Israel, by keeping Western journalists out, makes it even easier for those images to be blocked, and therefore you have Palestinian — brave Palestinian journalists on the ground trying to film, trying to document their own genocide, streaming it to our phones.

And we’ve seen over a hundred of them killed over the last five months. That is not an accident. That is not a coincidence. Israel wants to stamp out independent voices, stamp out any kind of coverage of its own genocidal behavior.

And therefore, again, you’re able to have a debate in this country where the political debate is completely disconnected to the public debate, and the public debate is completely misinformed. I’m amazed, Nermeen, when you look at the polling, that there’s a majority in favor of a ceasefire, that half of all Democrats say this is a genocide. Americans are saying that to pollsters despite not even getting the full picture. Can you imagine what those numbers would look like if they actually saw what was happening on the ground?

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, I want to go to what is unfolding right now in Gaza. You said in a recent interview that in the past Israel was, quote, “mowing the lawn,” but now the Netanyahu government’s intention is to erase the population of Gaza. So let’s go to what Prime Minister Netanyahu said about the invasion of Rafah, saying it would go ahead and would last weeks, not months. He was speaking to Politico on Sunday.

PRIME MINISTER BENJAMIN NETANYAHU: We’re not going to leave them. You know, I have a red line. You know what the red line is? That October 7th doesn’t happen again, never happens again. And to do that, we have to complete the destruction of the Hamas terrorist army. … We’re very close to victory. It’s close at hand.

We’ve destroyed three-quarters of Hamas fighting terrorist battalions, and we’re close to finishing the last part in Rafah, and we’re not going to give it up. … Once we begin the intense action of eradicating the Hamas terrorist battalions in Rafah, it’s a matter of weeks and not months.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, Mehdi, your response to what Netanyahu said and what the Israelis have proposed as a safe place for Gazans to go — namely, humanitarian islands?

MEHDI HASAN: So, number one, when you hear Netanyahu speak, Nermeen, doesn’t it remind you of George Bush in kind of 2002, 2003? It’s very — you know, invoking 9/11 to justify every atrocity, claiming that you’re trying to protect the country, when you, yourself, your idiocy and your incompetency, is what led to the attacks. You know, George Bush was unable to prevent 9/11, and then used 9/11 to justify every atrocity, even though his incompetence helped allow 9/11 to happen.

And I feel the same way: Netanyahu allowed the worst terror attack, the worst massacre in Israel to happen on his watch. Many of his own, you know, generals, many of his own people blame him for this. And so, it’s rich to hear him saying, “My aim is to stop this from happening again.” Well, you couldn’t stop it from happening the first time, and now you’re killing innocent Palestinians under the pretence that this is national security.

Number two, again George Bush-like, claiming that the war is nearly done, mission is nearly accomplished, that’s nonsense. No serious observer believes that Hamas is finished or that Israel has won some total victory. A member of Netanyahu’s own war cabinet said recently, “Anyone who says you can absolutely defeat Hamas is telling tall tales, is lying.” That was a colleague of Netanyahu’s, in government, who said that.

And number three, the red line on Rafah that Biden suppposedly set down and that Netanyahu is now mocking, saying, “My own red line is to do the opposite,” what on Earth is Joe Biden doing in allowing Benjamin Netanyahu to humiliate him in this way with this invasion of Rafah, even after he said he opposes it? I mean, it’s one thing to leak stuff . . .

AMY GOODMAN: Mehdi . . .

MEHDI HASAN: . . . over a few months . . .

AMY GOODMAN: . . . let’s go to Biden speaking on MSNBC. He’s being interviewed by your former colleague Jonathan Capehart, as he was being questioned about Benjamin Netanyahu and saying he’s hurting Israel more than helping Israel.

PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: He has a right to defend Israel, a right to continue to pursue Hamas. But he must, he must, he must pay more attention to the innocent lives being lost as a consequence of the actions taken.

He’s hurting — in my view, he’s hurting Israel more than helping Israel by making the rest of the world — it’s contrary to what Israel stands for. And I think it’s a big mistake. So I want to see a ceasefire.

AMY GOODMAN: And he talked about a, well, kind of a red line. If you can address what Biden is saying and what he proposed in the State of the Union, this pier, to get more aid in, and also the dropping — the airdropping of food, which recently killed five Palestinians because it crushed them to death, and the humanitarian groups, United Nations saying these airdrops, the pier come nowhere near being able to provide the aid that’s needed, at the same time, and the reason they’re doing all of this, is because Israel is using US bombs and artillery to attack the Palestinians and these aid trucks?

MEHDI HASAN: Yeah, it’s just so bizarre, the idea that you could drop bombs, on the one hand, and then drop aid, on the other, and you’re paying for both, and then your aid ends up killing people, too. It’s like some kind of dark Onion headline. It’s just beyond parody. It’s beyond belief.

And as for the pier, as you say, it does not come anywhere near to adequately addressing the needs of the Palestinian people, in terms of the sheer scale of the suffering, half a million people on the brink of famine, over a million people displaced. Four out of five of the hungriest people in the world, according to the World Food Programme, are in Gaza right now.

The idea that this pier would, A, address the scale of the suffering, and, B, in time — I mean, it’s going to take time to do this. What happens to the Palestinians who literally starve to death, including children, while this pier is being built?

Finally, I would say, there’s reporting in the Israeli press, Amy, that I’ve seen that suggests that the pier idea comes from Netanyahu, that the Israeli government are totally fine with this pier, because it allows them still to control land and air access into Gaza, which is what they’ve always controlled and which in this war they’ve monopolised.

The idea that the United States of America, the world’s only superpower, cannot tell its ally, “You know what? We’re going to put aid into Gaza because we want to, and you’re not going to stop us, especially since we’re the ones arming you,” is bizarre.

It’s something I think Biden will never be able to get past or live down. It’s a stain on his record, on America’s conscience. The idea that we’re arming a country that’s engaged in a “plausible genocide,” to quote the ICJ, is bad enough. That we can’t even get our own aid in, while they’re bombing with our bombs, is just madness.

And by the way, it’s also illegal. Under US law, you cannot provide weaponry to a country which is blocking US aid. And by the way, it’s not me saying they’re blocking US aid. US government officials have said, “Yes, the Israeli government blocked us from sending flour in,” for example.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, Mehdi, let’s go to the regional response to this assault on Gaza that’s been unfolding with the kind of violence and tens of thousands of deaths of Palestinians, as we’ve reported. Now, what has — how has the Arab and Muslim world responded to what’s going on? Egypt, of course, has repeatedly said that it does not want displaced Palestinians crossing its border. The most powerful Muslim countries, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the Emirates, if you can talk about how they’ve responded? And then the Axis — the so-called Axis of Resistance —  Houthis, Hezbollah, etc. — how they have been trying to disrupt this war, or at least make the backers of Israel pay a price for it?

MEHDI HASAN: So, I hear people saying, “Oh, we’re disappointed in the response from the Arab countries.” The problem with the word “disappointment” is it implies you had any expectations to begin with. I certainly didn’t. Arab countries have never had the Palestinians’ backs.

The Arab — quote-unquote, “Arab street” has always been very pro-Palestinian. But the autocratic, the despotic, the dictatorial rulers of much of the Arab world have never really had the interests of the Palestinian people at their heart, going back right to 1948, when, you know, Arab countries attacked Israel to push it into the sea, but, actually, as we know from historians like Avi Shlaim, were not doing that at all, and that some of them, like Jordan, had done deals with Israel behind the scenes.

So, look, Arab countries have never really prioritised the Palestinian people or their needs or their freedom. And so, when you see some of these statements that come out of the Arab world at times like this, you know, you have to take them with a shovel of salt, not just a grain.

Also, I would point out the hypocrisy here on all sides in the region. You have countries like Saudi Arabia and the UAE, which were involved in a brutal assault on Yemen for many years, carried out very similar acts to Israel in Gaza in terms of blockades, starvation, malnourishment of the Yemeni children, in terms of bombing of refugee camps and hospitals and kids and school buses. That all happened in Yemen.

Arab countries did that, let’s just be clear about that, things that they criticise Israel for doing now. And, of course, Iran, which sets itself up as a champion of the Palestinan people, when Bashar al-Assad was killing many of his own people, including Palestinian refugees, in places like the al-Yarmouk refugee camp, Iran and Russia, by the way, were both perfectly happy to help arm and support Assad as he did that.

So, you know, spare me some of the grandiose statements from Middle East countries, from Arab nations to Iran, on all of it. There’s a lot of hypocrisy to go around.

Very few countries in the world, especially in that region, actually have Palestinian interests at heart. If they did, we would have a very different geopolitical scene. There is reporting, Nermeen, that a lot of these governments, like Saudi Arabia, privately are telling Israel, “Finish the job. Get rid of them. We don’t like Hamas, either. Get rid of them,” and that Saudis actually want to do a deal with Israel once this war is over, just as they were on course to do, apparently, according to the Biden administration.

We know that other Arab countries already signed the, quote-unquote, “Abraham Accords” with Israel on Trump’s watch.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to ask you about the number of dead Palestinian journalists and also the new UN investigation that just accused Israel of breaking international law over the killing of the Reuters video journalist Issam Abdallah in southern Lebanon. On October 13, an Israeli tank opened fire on him and a group of other journalists. He had just set up a live stream on the border in southern Lebanon, so that all his colleagues at Reuters and others saw him blown up.

The report stated, quote, “The firing at civilians, in this instance clearly identifiable journalists, constitutes a violation of . . .  international law.” And it’s not just Issam in southern Lebanon. Well over 100 Palestinian journalists in Gaza have died. We’ve never seen anything like the concentration of numbers of journalists killed in any other conflict or conflicts combined recently. Can you talk about the lack of outrage of other major news organisations and what Israel is doing here? Do you think they’re being directly targeted, one after another, wearing those well-known “press” flak jackets? It looks like we just lost audio to Mehdi Hasan.

MEHDI HASAN: Amy, I can — I can hear you, Amy, very faintly.

AMY GOODMAN: Oh, OK. So . . .

MEHDI HASAN: I’m going to answer your question, if you can still hear me.

AMY GOODMAN: Great. We can hear you perfectly.

MEHDI HASAN: So, you’re very faint to me. So, while I speak, if someone wants to fix the volume in my ear. Let me answer your question about journalists.

It is an absolute tragedy and a scandal, what has happened to journalists in Gaza, that we have seen so many deaths in Gaza. And the real scandal, Amy, is that Western media, a lot of my colleagues here in the US media, have not sounded the alarm, have not called out Israel for what it’s done. It’s outrageous that so many of our fellow colleagues can be killed in Gaza while reporting, while at home, losing family members, and yet there’s not a huge global outcry.

When Wael al-Dahdouh, who we just saw on the screen, from Al Jazeera, loses his immediate family members and carries on reporting for Al Jazeera Arabic, why is he not on every front page in the world? Why is he not a hero? Why is he not sitting down with Oprah Winfrey?

I feel like, you know, when Evan Gershkovich from The Wall Street Journal is wrongly imprisoned in Russia, we all campaign for Evan to be released. When Ukrainian journalists are killed, we all speak out and are angry about it. But when Palestinian journalists are killed on a level we’ve never seen before, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, where is the outcry here in the West over the killing of them?

We claim to care about a free press. We claim to oppose countries that crack down on a free press, on journalism. We say journalism is not a crime. But then I don’t hear the outrage from my colleagues here at this barbarism in Gaza, where journalists are being killed in record numbers.

This is republished from Democracy Now! under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States Licence.

New Zealand news media came under fire at today’s Palestine solidarity rally in Auckland calling for an immediate ceasefire in the war in Gaza with speakers condemning what they said was pro-Israeli “bias” and “propaganda”.

About 500 protesters waved Palestinian flags and many placards declaring “If you’re not heartbroken and furious, you’re not paying attention – stop the genocide”, “Killing kids is not self-defence” and “Western ‘civility, democracy, humanity, morality’ – bitch, where?”.

They gave Prime Minister Christopher Luxon’s government a grilling for the “weak” response to Israel atrocities.

• READ MORE: Israel’s war on Gaza live: UN, medics say many wounded in the Gaza food aid ‘massacre’ were shot
• Standoff during haka at Christchurch Gaza protest
• When the imperial media report on an Israeli massacre – Caitlin Johnstone

Many speakers were angry over the massacre of starving Palestinians when Israeli military forces opened fire on a crowd seeking aid in the central Gaza City area on Thursday with latest Gaza Health Ministry reports indicating that at least 115 Gazans had been killed with 760 wounded.

The overall death toll is now 30,228 Palestinians killed and 71,377 wounded in Gaza since the war began on October 7.

The UN Human Rights office called for a swift and independent probe into the food aid shootings, saying “at least 14 “similar attacks had occurred since mid-January.

The Biden administration has announced a plan with Jordan to airdrop aid into Gaza but former USAID director Dave Harden has criticised the move as “ineffectual” for the huge humanitarian need of Gaza.

Airdrops ‘symbol of failure’
“Airdrops are a symbol of massive failure,” he told Al Jazeera.

The bodies of three more Palestinians killed in the food aid slaughter were recovered.

The New Zealand media were condemned for relying on “flawed” Western coverage and journalists embedded with the Israeli military.

“The New Zealand media ‘scalps’ information to create public perceptions rather than informing the public of the facts so that we can come to the conclusion that what Israel is doing in Gaza is genocide,” Neil Scott, secretary of the Palestine Solidarity Network  (PSNA), told the crowd.

PSNA’s Neil Scott addressing the Palestine solidarity crowd today. Video: APR

“What Israel is doing in Palestine is apartheid, what Israel is doing in Palestine is occupation – each of those three, plus way more, are crimes against humanity.

“And what is the New Zealand media doing and saying about this?”

“Nothing,” shouted many in the crowd.

“Nada,” continued Scott.

‘Puppies are cute’
“Puppies? Puppies are cute. We’ll get those on TV.

“Genocide. Apartheid. Occupation. Crimes against humanity. Don’t give us news.”

Scott led a deputation of protesters to the headquarters of Television New Zealand yesterday, citing many examples of misinformation of lack of fair and “truthful” coverage.

But management declined to speak to the protesters and the 1News team failed to cover the protest over TVNZ’s coverage of the war on Gaza.

Criticisms have been mounting worldwide against Western news media coverage, especially in the United Kingdom and the United States, the staunchest supporters of Israel and the source of most of NZ’s global news services, including the Middle East.

CNN ‘climate of hostility’
Yesterday, the investigative website Intercept reported how CNN media staff, including the celebrated international news anchor Christiane Amanpour, had confronted network executives over what they claimed as stories about the war on Gaza being changed and a “climate of hostility” towards Arab journalists.

According to a leaked internal recording, Amanpour told management that the CNN policy was causing “real distress” over “changing copy” and ”double standards”.

Meanwhile, one of some 50 protests across New Zealand today – in Christchurch – was disrupted by a group of counter-demonstrators supporting Israel who performed a haka at the Bridge of Remembrance.

The group from the Freedoms and Rights Coalition – linked to the Destiny Church – waved Israeli flags and chanted “go back to Israel”.  The pro-Palestinian supporters yelled “shame on them” and carried on with their regular weekly march to Cathedral Square.

Why is Aotearoa New Zealand media so silent on the Gaza genocide happening before our eyes?

Amid unreported-in-Aotearoa media stories of horrific bombings killing dozens of Palestinians in a “heinous massacre” in central Gaza and UN reports of sexual assault allegations against Palestinian women and children by Israeli military forces, New Zealanders will be protesting, rallying and marching again today in 22 centres across the country.

So much of the Israeli propaganda which is driving the massive assault on the Palestinians of Gaza has been unravelling quickly but this is not being reported to the public in Western countries such as New Zealand.

• READ MORE: US vetoes another UN Security Council resolution urging Gaza war ceasefire
• Al Jazeera’s live newsfeed on Gaza
• Other John Minto commentaries

Allegations such as beheaded babies, horrendous sexual assault claims and allegations of UNRWA involvement in the October 7 attack have all unravelled but New Zealanders are none the wiser.

The internationally reported claims that pro-Palestine protesters chanted “Gas the Jews” outside the Sydney Opera house after October 7 have been shown to be the rubbish they always were.

Political analyst Marwan Bishara analyses the illegal Israeli occupation of Palestine.   Video: Al Jazeera

But despite the initial claims being widely reported by New Zealand media, we are not aware of any corrections, apologies or reporting of the truth to New Zealanders.

The New Zealand media has been as complicit as most of the media across the Western world in amplifying Israeli lies and racist propaganda while sidelining Palestinian viewpoints.

Protests this weekend
The protests this week continue to demand that our government:

• Condemn the Israeli slaughter and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians;
• No attack on Rafah;
• Reinstate funding for the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestinians;
• Call for an immediate and permanent ceasefire in Gaza;
• Withdraw from the war on Yemen; and
• Close the Israeli Embassy

Details of protest events across the country are on the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa Facebook event page.

John Minto is national chair of the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA). Republished with permission from The Daily Blog.

US blocks ceasefire again
Asia Pacific Report: The United States this week vetoed another United Nations Security Council draft resolution on Israel’s war on Gaza, blocking a demand for an immediate ceasefire.

This was the third US veto against humanitarian ceasefire resolutions in the UNSC over the war in Gaza. The United Kingdom abstained, but all other 13 countries — including the three other permanent members China, France and Russia — voted for it.

In introducing the resolution on Tuesday, Amar Bendjama, Algeria’s ambassador to the UN, said:

“This resolution is a stance for truth and humanity, standing against the advocates for murder and hatred. Voting against it implies an endorsement of the brutal violence and collective punishment inflicted upon them [the Palestinians].”

The number of Palestinian prisoners who have died in Israeli police custody has risen to 10 since October 7 after the latest death, according to the Palestinian Prisoners’ Club, reports AA news agency.

John Minto is national chair of the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA).

Reporting Israel’s war on Gaza has become the greatest credibility challenge for journalists and media of our times. The latest assassination of an Al Jazeera photojournalist yesterday while documenting atrocities has prompted a leading analyst to appeal to global journalists to “take a stand” to protect the profession.

The killing of Hamza Dahdoud, the 27-year-old eldest son of Al Jazeera Gaza bureau chief Wael Dahdouh, along with freelancer Mustafa Thuraya, has taken the death toll of Palestinian journalists to 109 (according to Al Jazeera sources while global media freedom watchdogs report slightly lower figures).

Emotional responses and a wave of condemnation has thrown the spotlight on the toll faced by reporters and their families.

• READ MORE: War on Gaza: The voices that really matter are the journalists on the ground
• Israeli military accused of targeting journalists and their families in Gaza
• Safe zones: Israel’s technologies of genocide
• This Israel has no future in the Middle East – Marwan Bishara

Wael Dahdouh, 52, lost his wife, daughter, grandson and 15-year-old son on October 25 in an earlier Israeli air raid that hit the house they were sheltering in. After mourning for several hours, Dahdouh senior was back on the job documenting the war.

Just under 20 months ago, Al Jazeera’s best known correspondent, Shireen Abu Akleh, was fatally shot by an Israeli sniper while reporting on the Occupied West Bank on 11 May 2022 in what Paris-based Reporters Without Borders (RSF) condemned by saying this “systematic Israeli impunity is outrageous.”

The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists protested about the killing of Hamza Dahdoud and Thuraya, saying it “must be independently investigated, and those behind their deaths must be held accountable”.

But few journalists would accept that this is anything other a targeted killing, as most of the deaths of Palestinian journalists in the latest Gaza war have been – a war on Palestinian journalism in an attempt to suppress the truth.

‘Nowhere safe in Gaza’
Certainly, Al Jazeera’s Palestinian-Israeli political affairs analyst and Marwan Bishara, who was born in Nazareth, has no doubts.

Speaking on the 24-hour Qatari world news channel, with at least 22,835 people killed in Gaza – 70 percent of them women and children — he said: “Nowhere is safe in Gaza and no journalists are safe . . . That tells us something.

“Killing the messenger”: Marwan Bishara’s interview with Al Jazeera — more tampering over the message? There is nothing “sensitive” in this clip.

“It is understood they are war journalists. But still the fact that more than 100 journalists were killed within three months is breaking yet another record in terms of killing children, and destruction of hospitals and schools, and the killing of United Nations staff.

“And now with 109 journalists killed this definitely requires a certain stand on the part of our colleagues around the world. Not just in a higher up institution.

“I am talking about journalists around the world – those who came to cover the World Cup in Doha for labour rights, or whatever. Those who are shedding tears in the Ukraine, those who are trying to cover Xinjiang in China [persecution of the Uyghur people], those who are claiming there are genocides happening right, left and centre – from China to Ukraine, to elsewhere.

“The same journalists who see in plain sight what is happening in Gaza should – regardless if we disagree on Israel’s motives, or Israel’s objectives in this war – must agree that the protection of journalists and their families is indispensable for our profession. And for their profession,” Bishara said.

“Journalists, and journalism associations and syndicates around the world – especially in those countries with influence on Israel, as in Europe, or the United States; journalists need to take a stand on what is going on in Gaza.

New investigations on U.S. and UK media bias have exposed chilling double standards by Western media when it comes to reporting on killings of Israelis compared to killings of Palestinians in Gaza. pic.twitter.com/uQ0I7cT340

— AJ+ (@ajplus) January 10, 2024

‘Cannot go unanswered’
“This cannot continue and go on unanswered. What about them?

“They’re going to be from various media outlets deploying journalists in war-stricken areas. They will have to call for the defence of journalists and their lives and their protection.

“This cannot go on like this unabated in Gaza,” Bishara added, as Israeli defence officials have warned the fighting could go on for another year.

The South African genocide case filed against Israel in the International Court of Justice seeking an interim injunction for a ceasefire and due for a hearing later this week could pose the best chance for an end to the war.

Bishara has partially blamed Western news networks for failing to report the war on Gaza accurately and fairly, a criticism he has made in the past and his articles about Israel are insightful and damning.

His call for a stand by journalists has in fact been echoed in some quarters where “media bias” has been challenged, opening divisions among media groups about fairness and balance that have become the most bitter since the climate change and covid pandemic debates when media “deniers” and “bothsideism” threatened to undermine science.

In November, more than 1500 journalists from scores of US media organisations signed an open letter calling for integrity in Western media’s coverage of “Israeli atrocities against Palestinians”.

Israel has blocked foreign press entry, heavily restricted telecommunications and bombed press offices. Some 50 media headquarters in Gaza have been hit in the past month.

Israeli forces explicitly warned newsrooms they “cannot guarantee” the safety of their employees from airstrikes. Taken with a decades-long pattern of lethally targeting journalists, Israel’s actions show wide scale suppression of speech.

In the United Kingdom, eight BBC journalists wrote an open letter in late November to Al Jazeera accusing the British broadcaster of bias in its coverage of Gaza.

A 2300-word letter claimed that the BBC had a “double standard” and was failing to tell the Israel-Palestine conflict accurately, “investing greater effort in humanising Israeli victims compared with Palestinians, and omitting key historical context in coverage”.

What is next? He lost everyone!!! Literally!!! #GazaGenocide pic.twitter.com/1LVh4eruIt

— Palestine News (@palestine) January 7, 2024

In Australia, another open letter by scores of journalists and the national media union MEAA called for “integrity, transparency and rigour” in the coverage of the war and joined the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), RSF and others condemning the Israeli attacks on journalists and journalism.

Leading Australian newspaper editors of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age and the Nine network hit back by banning staff who had signed the letter. According to the independent Crikey, a senior Nine staff journalist resigned and readers were angrily cancelling their newspaper subscriptions over the ban.

Crikey later exposed many editors and journalists who had made junket trips to Israel and is currently keeping an inventory of these “influenced” media people — at least 77 have been named so far.

In The Daily Blog, editor Martyn Bradbury has also questioned how many New Zealand journalists have also been influenced by Israeli media massaging. Bradbury wrote:

“If Israel has sunk that much time and resource charming Australian journalists and politicians, the question has to be asked, [has] the pro-Israel lobby sent NZ journalists and politicians on these junkets and if they have, who are they?”

He wrote to the NZ Press Gallery, the “journalist union” and media companies requesting a list of names.

Pacific journalists ought to be also added to the list.

I have just returned from a two-month trip in the Mediterranean, Red Sea and Australia. After a steady diet of comprehensive and well backgrounded reporting from global news channels such as TRT World News and Al Jazeera (which contrasted sharply in quality, depth and fairness with stereotypical Western coverage such as from BBC and CNN), I was stunned by the blatant bias of much of the Australian news media, particularly News Corp titles such as The Australian and The Advertiser in Adelaide.

Some examples of the bias and my commentaries can be seen here, here, here, here, here and here.

A pithy indictment of much of the Western reporting — including in New Zealand — can be read in the Middle East Eye and other publications.

Exposing much of the Israeli propaganda and fabricated claims since October 7 (and even from time of The Nakba in 1948), award-winning columnist Peter Osborne wrote:

“I am haunted by one other consideration. It is not just that Western commentators, columnists and chat show hosts often don’t know what they are talking about. It’s not even that they pretend they do.

“It’s the comfort of their lives. They sit in warm, pleasant studios where they earn six-figure sums for their opinions. They take no risks and convey no truths.”

A polar opposite from the Gaza carnage and the risks that courageous Palestinian journalists face daily to bear witness. They are an inspiration to the rest of us.

Dr David Robie is editor and publisher of Asia Pacific Report and Café Pacific.

By Antony Loewenstein

The Israeli defence industry inspires nations across the globe, many of which view themselves as under threat from external enemies.

The Taiwanese foreign minister, Joseph Wu, recently told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that: “Every aspect of the Israeli fighting capability is amazing to the Taiwanese people and the Taiwanese government.”

Wu explained that he appreciated how Israel protected its own country because, “basically, we [Taiwan] have barely started. The fighting experiences of Israel are something we’re not quite sure about ourselves. We haven’t had any war in the last four or five decades, but Israel has that kind of experience”.

• READ MORE: Antony Loewenstein: Palestine a testing ground for war tech
• Middle East Eye
• Antony Loewenstein’s website

Wu also expressed interest in Israeli weapons, suggesting his country had considered their usefulness in any potential war with China.

“Israel has the Iron Dome,” he said, referring to Israel’s defence system against short-range missiles. “We should look at some of the technology that has been used by the Israelis in its defence. I’m not sure whether we can copy it, but I think we can look at it and learn from it.”

It isn’t just Taiwan imagining itself as akin to Israel. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in April 2022 that his vision for his nation was to mimic “the Jewish state“.

Two months after Russia’s illegal invasion of its territory, Zelensky, who is a long-time supporter of Israel, argued that “our people will be our great army. We cannot talk about ‘Switzerland of the future’ — probably, our state will be able to be like this a long time after. But we will definitely become a ‘big Israel’ with its own face.”

Zelensky went on to explain that what he meant was the need in the future to have “representatives of the armed forces or the national guard in all institutions, supermarkets, cinemas; there will be people with weapons.”

The Palestine laboratory
This admiration for Israel is both unsurprising and disturbing. The praise for Israel almost always completely ignores its occupation of Palestinian territory — one of the longest in modern times — and the ways in which this colonial project is implemented.

When Taiwan, Ukraine or any other country looks to Israel for innovation, it’s a highly selective gaze which completely disappears the more than five million Palestinians under Israeli military occupation in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza.

The appeal of the Palestine laboratory is endless. I’ve spent the last years researching this concept and its execution in Palestine and across the globe.

My new book, The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World, uncovers how Israel has used the occupied Palestinians as the ultimate guineapigs when developing tools of repression, from drones to spyware and facial recognition to biometric data, while maintaining an “enemy” population, the Palestinians, under control for more than half a century.

Israel has sold defence equipment to at least 130 countries and is now the 10th biggest arms exporter in the world. The US is still the dominant player in this space, accounting for 40 percent of the global weapons industry.

Washington used its failed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as a testing ground for new weapons. During the current Russian invasion of Ukraine, the war has been a vital “beta test” for new weapons and sophisticated forms of surveillance and killing.

But Israel has a ready-made population of occupied Palestinians over which it has complete control. For more than five decades, Israeli intelligence authorities have built an NSA-level system of surveillance across the entire occupied Palestinian territories.

Nowhere is completely immune from listening, watching or following.

In the last decade, the most infamous example of Israeli repression tech is Pegasus, the phone hacking tool developed by the company NSO Group. Used and abused by dozens of nations around the world, Mexico is its most prolific adherent.

I spoke to dissidents, lawyers and human rights activists in Togo, Mexico, India and beyond whose lives were upended by this invasive, mostly silent tool.

Israeli state and spyware
However, missing from so much of the western media coverage, including outrage against NSO Group and its founders who were Israeli army veterans, is acknowledgement of the close ties between the firm and the Israeli state.

NSO is a private corporation in name only and is in fact an arm of Israel’s diplomacy, used by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Mossad to attract new friends in the international arena. Despite being blacklisted by the Biden administration in November 2021, the company still hopes to continue trading.

My research, along with that of other reporters, has shown a clear connection between the sale of Israeli cyberweapons and Israel’s attempts to neuter any potential backlash to its illegal occupation.

From Rwanda to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to India, Israeli spyware and surveillance tech are used by countless democracies and dictatorships alike.

Beyond Pegasus, many other similar tools have been deployed by newer and lesser-known Israeli companies, though they’re just as destructive. The problem isn’t just Pegasus — it could close down tomorrow and the privacy-busting technology would transfer to any number of competitors — but the unquenchable desire by governments, police forces and intelligence services for the relatively inexpensive Israeli tech that powers it.

India is even looking for alternatives to NSO Group with a less controversial history.

The Palestine laboratory is so successful because nobody wants to seriously regulate the fruits of its labours.

Ideological alignment
The extent of Israeli collusion with 20th and 21st century repression is overwhelming.

Perhaps the most revealing was the deep relationship between apartheid South Africa and Israel. It wasn’t just about arms trading, but an ideological alignment between two states that truly believed that they were fighting for their very existence.

In 1976, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin invited South African Prime Minister John Vorster, a Nazi sympathiser during the Second World War, to visit Israel. His tour included a stop at Yad Vashem, the country’s Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem.

When Vorster arrived in Israel, he was feted by Rabin at a state dinner. Rabin toasted “the ideals shared by Israel and South Africa: the hopes for justice and peaceful coexistence”. Both nations faced “foreign-inspired instability and recklessness”.

Israel and South Africa viewed themselves as under attack by foreign bodies committed to their destruction. A short time after Vorster’s visit, the South African government yearbook explained that both states were facing the same issue: “Israel and South Africa have one thing above all else in common: they are both situated in a predominantly hostile world inhabited by dark peoples.”

A love of ethnonationalism still fuels Israel today, along with a desire to export it. Some arms deals with nations, such as Bangladesh or the Philippines, are purely on military grounds and to make money.

Israel places barely any restrictions on what it sells, which pleases leaders who don’t want meddling in their actions. Pro-Israel lobbyists are increasingly working for repressive states, such as Bangladesh, to promote their supposed usefulness to the West.

Israel and the global far right
But Israel’s affinity with Hungary, India and the global far right, a group that traditionally hates Jews, speaks volumes about the inspirational nature of the modern Israeli state. As Haaretz journalist Noa Landau recently wrote, while explaining why Netanyahu’s government defended the latest arguably antisemitic comments by Elon Musk about George Soros:

“The government’s mobilisation in the service of stoking antisemitism is not surprising. It is the fruit of a long and consistent process in which the Netanyahu government has been growing closer to extreme right-wing elements around the world, at the expense of Jewish communities it purports to represent.”

It’s worth pausing for a moment to reflect on this undeniable reality. Israel, which claims to represent global Jewry, is encouraging an alignment between itself and a hyper-nationalist, bigoted and racist populism, regardless of the long-term consequences for the safety and security of Jews around the world.

Israel has thrived as an ethnonationalist state for so long because the vast bulk of the world grants it impunity. European nations have been key supporters of Israel, willing to overlook its occupation and abuse of Palestinians.

According to newly declassified documents from the files of Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, between 1967 and 1990 it’s clear that West Germany was becoming more critical of Israel’s settlement project in Palestine, but the main concern was protecting its own financial interests in the region if a regional war broke out.

In a document written on 16 February 1975 to the deputy director of Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs for Western Europe, Nissim Yaish, before Israel’s Foreign Minister Yigal Allon’s visit to West Germany, Yaish explained the thinking in his country’s diplomatic bureaucracy:

“There is unanimity that this time such a war will have a far-reaching impact on all its affairs internally and externally and that it could wreak a Holocaust on the German economy. Based on this attitude, West Germany is interested in rapid progress toward a [peace] agreement.”

Western silence
But there has rarely been any serious interest in pursuing peace, or holding Israel to account for its blatantly illegal actions, because the economic imperative is too strong. Even today, when another Nakba against Palestinians is becoming more possible to imagine, there’s largely silence from Western elites.

Germany has banned public recognition of the 1948 Nakba and criminalised any solidarity with the Palestinian people. Germany is also keen to buy an Israeli missile defence system, confirming its priorities.

This is why Israeli apartheid and the Palestine laboratory are so hard to stop; countless nations want a piece of Israeli repression tech to surveil their own unwanted populations or election meddling support in Latin America or Africa.

Without a push for accountability, economic boycotts and regulation or banning Israeli spyware — the EU is flirting with the idea — Israel can feel comfortable that its position as a global leader in offensive weapons is secure.

This article was first published in the Middle East Eye.

The late Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a Nobel laureate and tireless campaigner against South African apartheid, once observed: “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.”

For decades, the BBC’s editorial policy in reporting on Israel and Palestine has consistently chosen the side of the oppressor — and all too often, not even by adopting the impartiality the corporation claims as the bedrock of its journalism.

Instead, the British state broadcaster regularly chooses language and terminology whose effect is to deceive its audience. And it compounds such journalistic malpractice by omitting vital pieces of context when that extra information would present Israel in a bad light.

• READ MORE:  Israeli forces attack worshippers in Al-Aqsa Mosque raid
• Jonathan Cook’s independent website and blog

BBC bias — which entails knee-jerk echoing of the British establishment’s support for Israel as a highly militarised ally projecting Western interests into the oil-rich Middle East – was starkly on show once again this week as the broadcaster reported on the violence at Al-Aqsa Mosque.

Social media was full of videos showing heavily armed Israeli police storming the mosque complex during the holy Muslim fasting month of Ramadan.

Police could be seen pushing peaceful Muslim worshippers, including elderly men, off their prayer mats and forcing them to leave the site. In other scenes, police were filmed beating worshippers inside a darkened Al-Aqsa, while women could be heard screaming in protest.

What is wrong with the British state broadcaster’s approach — and much of the rest of the Western media’s — is distilled in one short BBC headline: “Clashes erupt at contested holy site.”

Into a sentence of just six words, the BBC manages to cram three bogusly “neutral” words, whose function is not to illuminate or even to report, but to trick the audience, as Tutu warned, into siding with the oppressor.

Furious backlash
Though video of the beatings was later included on the BBC’s website and the headline changed after a furious online backlash, none of the sense of unprovoked, brutal Israeli state violence, or its malevolent rationale, was captured by the BBC’s reporting.

To call al-Aqsa a ‘contested holy site’, as the BBC does, is simply to repeat a propaganda talking point from Israel, the oppressor state, and dress it up as neutral reporting

The “clashes” at al-Aqsa, in the BBC’s telling, presume a violent encounter between two groups: Palestinians, described by Israel and echoed by the BBC as “agitators”, on one side; and Israeli forces of law and order on the other.

That is the context, according to the BBC, for why unarmed Palestinians at worship need to be beaten. And that message is reinforced by the broadcaster’s description of the seizure of hundreds of Palestinians at worship as “arrests” — as though an unwelcome, occupying, belligerent security force present on another people’s land is neutrally and equitably upholding the law.

“Erupt” continues the theme. It suggests the “clashes” are a natural force, like an earthquake or volcano, over which Israeli police presumably have little, if any, control. They must simply deal with the eruption to bring it to an end.

And the reference to the “contested” holy site of Al-Aqsa provides a spurious context legitimising Israeli state violence: police need to be at Al-Aqsa because their job is to restore calm by keeping the two sides “contesting” the site from harming each other or damaging the holy site itself.

The BBC buttresses this idea by uncritically citing an Israeli police statement accusing Palestinians of being at Al-Aqsa to “disrupt public order and desecrate the mosque”.

Palestinians are thus accused of desecrating their own holy site simply by worshipping there — rather than the desecration committed by Israeli police in storming al-Aqsa and violently disrupting worship.

The History of Al-Aqsa Mosque.  Video: Middle East Eye

Israeli provocateurs
The BBC’s framing should be obviously preposterous to any rookie journalist in Jerusalem. It assumes that Israeli police are arbiters or mediators at Al-Aqsa, dispassionately enforcing law and order at a Muslim place of worship, rather than the truth: that for decades, the job of Israeli police has been to act as provocateurs, dispatched by a self-declared Jewish state, to undermine the long-established status quo of Muslim control over Al-Aqsa.

Events were repeated for a second night this week when police again raided Al-Aqsa, firing rubber bullets and tear gas as thousands of Palestinians were at prayer. US statements calling for “calm” and “de-escalation” adopted the same bogus evenhandedness as the BBC.

The mosque site is not “contested”, except in the imagination of Jewish religious extremists, some of them in the Israeli government, and the most craven kind of journalists.

True, there are believed to be the remains of two long-destroyed Jewish temples somewhere underneath the raised mount where al-Aqsa is built. According to Jewish religious tradition, the Western Wall — credited with being a retaining wall for one of the disappeared temples – is a place of worship for Jews.

But under that same Jewish rabbinical tradition, the plaza where Al-Aqsa is sited is strictly off-limits to Jews. The idea of Al-Aqsa complex as being “contested” is purely an invention of the Israeli state — now backed by a few extremist settler rabbis — that exploits this supposed “dispute” as the pretext to assert Jewish sovereignty over a critically important piece of occupied Palestinian territory.

Israel’s goal — not Judaism’s — is to strip Palestinians of their most cherished national symbol, the foundation of their religious and emotional attachment to the land of their ancestors, and transfer that symbol to a state claiming to exclusively represent the Jewish people.

To call Al-Aqsa a “contested holy site”, as the BBC does, is simply to repeat a propaganda talking point from Israel, the oppressor state, and dress it up as neutral reporting.

‘Equal rights’ at Al-Aqsa
The reality is that there would have been no “clashes”, no “eruption” and no “contest” had Israeli police not chosen to storm Al-Aqsa while Palestinians were worshipping there during the holiest time of the year.

This is not a ‘clash’. It is not a ‘conflict’. Those supposedly ‘neutral’ terms conceal what is really happening: apartheid and ethnic cleansing

There would have been no “clashes” were Israeli police not aggressively enforcing a permanent occupation of Palestinian land in Jerusalem, which has encroached ever more firmly on Muslim access to, and control over, the mosque complex.

There would have been no “clashes” were Israeli police not taking orders from the latest – and most extreme – of a series of police ministers, Itamar Ben Gvir, who does not even bother to hide his view that Al-Aqsa must be under absolute Jewish sovereignty.

There would have been no “clashes” had Israeli police not been actively assisting Jewish religious settlers and bigots to create facts on the ground over many years — facts to bolster an evolving Israeli political agenda that seeks “equal rights” at Al-Aqsa for Jewish extremists, modelled on a similar takeover by settlers of the historic Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron.

And there would have been no “clashes” if Palestinians were not fully aware that, over many years, a tiny, fringe Jewish settler movement plotting to blow up Al-Aqsa Mosque to build a Third Temple in its place has steadily grown, flourishing under the sponsorship of Israeli politicians and ever more sympathetic Israeli media coverage.

Cover story for violence
Along with the Israeli army, the paramilitary Israeli police are the main vehicle for the violent subjugation of Palestinians, as the Israeli state and its settler emissaries dispossess Palestinians, driving them into ever smaller enclaves.

This is not a “clash”. It is not a “conflict”. Those supposedly “neutral” terms conceal what is really happening: apartheid and ethnic cleansing.

Just as there is a consistent, discernible pattern to Israel’s crimes against Palestinians, there is a parallel, discernible pattern in the Western media’s misleading reporting on Israel and Palestine.

Palestinians in the occupied West Bank are being systematically dispossessed by Israel of their homes and farmlands so they can be herded into overcrowded, resource-starved cities.

Palestinians in Gaza have been dispossessed of their access to the outside world, and even to other Palestinians, by an Israeli siege that encages them in an overcrowded, resourced-starved coastal enclave.

And in the Old City of Jerusalem, Palestinians are being progressively dispossessed by Israel of access to, and control over, their central religious resource: Al-Aqsa Mosque. Their strongest source of religious and emotional attachment to Jerusalem is being actively stolen from them.

To describe as “clashes” any of these violent state processes — carefully calibrated by Israel so they can be rationalised to outsiders as a “security response” — is to commit the very journalistic sin Tutu warned of. In fact, it is not just to side with the oppressor, but to intensify the oppression; to help provide the cover story for it.

That point was made this week by Francesca Albanese, the UN expert on Israel’s occupation. She noted in a tweet about the BBC’s reporting of the Al-Aqsa violence: “Misleading media coverage contributes to enabling Israel’s unchecked occupation & must also be condemned/accounted for.”

Bad journalism
There can be reasons for bad journalism. Reporters are human and make mistakes, and they can use language unthinkingly, especially when they are under pressure or events are unexpected.

It is an editorial choice that keeps the BBC skewing its reporting in the same direction: making Israel look like a judicious actor pursuing lawful, rational goals

But that is not the problem faced by those covering Israel and Palestine. Events can be fast-moving, but they are rarely new or unpredictable. The reporter’s task should be to explain and clarify the changing forms of the same, endlessly repeating central story: of Israel’s ongoing dispossession and oppression of Palestinians, and of Palestinian resistance.

The challenge is to make sense of Israel’s variations on a theme, whether it is dispossessing Palestinians through illegal settlement-building and expansion; army-backed settler attacks; building walls and cages for Palestinians; arbitrary arrests and night raids; the murder of Palestinians, including children and prominent figures; house demolitions; resource theft; humiliation; fostering a sense of hopelessness; or desecrating holy sites.

No one, least of all BBC reporters, should have been taken by surprise by this week’s events at Al-Aqsa.

The Muslim holy fasting month of Ramadan, when Al-Aqsa is at the heart of Islamic observance for Palestinians, coincided this year with the Jewish Passover holiday, as it did last year.

Passover is when Jewish religious extremists hope to storm Al-Aqsa Mosque complex to make animal sacrifices, recreating some imagined golden age in Judaism. Those extremists tried again this year, as they do every year — except this year, they had a police minister in Ben Gvir, leader of the fascist Jewish Power party, who is privately sympathetic to their cause.

Violent settler and army attacks on Palestinian farmers in the occupied West Bank, especially during the autumn olive harvest, are a staple of news reporting from the region, as is the intermittent bombing of Gaza or snipers shooting Palestinians protesting their mass incarceration by Israel.

It is an endless series of repetitions that the BBC has had decades to make sense of and find better ways to report.

It is not journalistic error or failure that is the problem. It is an editorial choice that keeps the British state broadcaster skewing its reporting in the same direction: making Israel look like a judicious actor pursuing lawful, rational goals, while Palestinian resistance is presented as tantrum-like behaviour, driven by uncontrollable, unintelligible urges that reflect hostility towards Jews rather than towards an oppressor Israeli state.

Tail of a mouse
Archbishop Tutu expanded on his point about siding with the oppressor. He added: “If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse, and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.”

This week, a conversation between Ben Gvir, the far-right, virulently anti-Arab police minister, and his police chief, Kobi Shabtai, was leaked to Israel’s Channel 12 News. Shabtai reportedly told Ben Gvir about his theory of the “Arab mind”, noting: “They murder each other. It’s in their nature. That’s the mentality of the Arabs.”

This conclusion — convenient for a police force that has abjectly failed to solve crimes within Palestinian communities — implies that the Arab mind is so deranged, so bloodthirsty, that brutal repression of the kind seen at Al-Aqsa is all police can do to keep a bare minimum of control.

Ben Gvir, meanwhile, believes a new “national guard” — a private militia he was recently promised by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — can help him to crush Palestinian resistance. Settler street thugs, his political allies, will finally be able to put on uniforms and have official licence for their anti-Arab violence.

This is the real context — the one that cannot be acknowledged by the BBC or other Western outlets — for the police storming of Al-Aqsa complex this week. It is the same context underpinning settlement expansion, night raids, checkpoints, the siege of Gaza, the murder of Palestinian journalists, and much, much more.

Jewish supremacism undergirds every Israeli state action towards Palestinians, tacitly approved by Western states and their media in the service of advancing Western colonialism in the oil-rich Middle East.

The BBC’s coverage this week, as in previous months and years, was not neutral, or even accurate. It was, as Tutu warned, a confidence trick — one meant to lull audiences into accepting Israeli violence as always justified, and Palestinian resistance as always abhorrent.

Jonathan Cook is the author of three books on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and a winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His website and blog can be found at www.jonathan-cook.net. This article was first published at Middle East Eye and is republished with the permission of the author.

Pacific Media Watch newsdesk

An investigation by Al Jazeera has obtained an image of the bullet used to kill the network’s journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, reports Al Jazeera staff.

The photograph for the first time shows the type of ammunition used to kill the veteran Al Jazeera correspondent in the occupied West Bank last month.

According to ballistic and forensic experts, the green-tipped bullet was designed to pierce armour and is used in an M4 rifle. The round was extracted from her head.

• READ MORE: Other reports on the assassination of Shireen Abu Akleh

The bullet was analysed using 3D models and, according to experts, it was 5.56mm calibre – the same as used by Israeli forces. The round was designed and manufactured in the United States, experts said.

In this undated photo, Shireen Abu Akleh stands next to a TV camera above the Old City of Jerusalem [Al Jazeera Media Network]

Fayez al-Dwairi, a former Jordanian major-general, told Al Jazeera the weapon and round used to kill Abu Akleh are regularly carried by Israeli forces.

“This M4 and this munition is used by the Israeli army. It is available and used by the units. I cannot say the whole unit, or most of the soldiers, but they use it,” al-Dwairi told Al Jazeera.

“When any soldier uses it, he uses it for a definite target — he wants to hunt, he wants to kill … There is no way to use it for another thing.”

Palestinian assistant Multilateral Affairs Minister Ammar Hijazi told Al Jazeera the bullet will remain with the Palestinian government for further investigation.

Abu Akleh, a longtime TV correspondent for Al Jazeera Arabic, was killed last month while covering Israeli army raids in the city of Jenin.

Abu Akleh’s case was sent to the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the investigation was recently handed over to the ICC prosecutor. The status of the case, however, remains unclear.

“We think there is enough evidence with the prosecutor … that proves without reasonable doubt that the crime committed against Shireen Abu Akleh was done by the Israeli occupation and they are the perpetrators of this awful crime and they should be held responsible for it,” said Hijazi.

‘Trigger-happy policies’
Abu Akleh was wearing a press vest and standing with other journalists when she was killed.

Israeli authorities initially said Palestinian fighters were responsible for her death, circulating video of Palestinian men shooting down an alleyway. However, researchers from the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem found the spot where the clip was filmed and proved it was impossible to shoot Abu Akleh from there.

In an interview, Omar Shakir — Israel and Palestine director at Human Rights Watch — said all evidence indicates the kill shot came from an Israeli soldier.

Sherif Mansour, MENA programme coordinator of the Committee to Protect Journalists, told Al Jazeera from Washington, DC, that “the pattern” of killing Palestinian media workers “is well known”.

“We have documented at least 19 journalists who were killed by Israeli fire, some of them in the Gaza wars in vehicles marked as press in 2012 and 2014,” Mansour said.

“Some of them were also killed by Israeli snipers while wearing vests with press signs, away from any threatening situation, two of them in 2018. Clearly, we have a problem here of trigger-happy policies that allows this to continue.”

Shireen Abu Akleh: What happened? Video: Al Jazeera

‘Justice and accountability’
In what appeared to be an unprovoked assault at the Al Jazeera correspondent’s funeral days after she was killed, Israeli officers attacked pallbearers, which almost caused them to drop Abu Akleh’s coffin — an incident broadcast live that caused international outrage.

An Israeli police investigation into the attack concluded no one should be punished, despite finding there had been police misconduct, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported.

Al Jazeera’s Nida Ibrahim, reporting from Ramallah in the occupied West Bank, said for Palestinians their version of events is being “confirmed by so many investigations”, including the latest one by Al Jazeera.

“Palestinians have been saying from day one that they know that the bullet that hit Shireen came from Israeli soldiers. The witnesses, the videos that we’ve seen from Palestinians who were there, show there were no Palestinian fighters around the area where Shireen was in,” Ibrahim said.

“Palestinians are seeking now is justice and accountability.”

‘The root cause’
A dual Palestinian-US national, Abu Akleh was one of Al Jazeera’s first field correspondents, joining the network in 1997.

Ori Givati, a former Israeli soldier now with the advocacy group Breaking the Silence, said the round that was analysed was a “very common bullet”.

“It is the bullet that most [Israeli] soldiers use during their service,” he told Al Jazeera.

“This investigation into Shireen’s killing is extremely important, but we also have to remember these incidents happen on a weekly basis.

“Our country understands that if you really look into these cases it all goes back to the root cause. It is why the system is terrified from actually conducting investigations. I haven’t seen Israel really investigate any incident.”

Al Jazeera emailed Israel’s Foreign Press Department for comment early Friday but did not immediately receive a response.

Pacific Media Watch collaborates with Reporters Without Borders.

The absolute impunity which the Aotearoa New Zealand government has given to Israel’s racist apartheid regime over many decades and the cowering of the Aotearoa New Zealand media in the face of threats of false smears of anti-semitism from the racist pro-Israel lobby are key factors in the daily murder and mayhem conducted by Israeli troops in Palestine.

The latest killing is of Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh which was described by Al Jazeera and eyewitnesses as an “assassination in cold-blood”.

This veteran journalist has been the “voice of the voiceless” as she has fearlessly reported for Al Jazeera on Israel’s military occupation of Palestine over many decades.

• READ MORE: Shireen Abu Akleh: Al Jazeera reporter killed by Israeli forces
• Western media slammed for coverage of Shireen Abu Akleh’s killing
• Behind the tears for Shireen, more evidence of Israel’s daily crimes with impunity
• A tribute on Al Jazeera’s The Stream
• Other reports on the assassination of Shireen Abu Akleh

Her fearlessness is in sharp contrast to local media reporting on Israel/Palestine which includes multiple, repeated inaccuracies which reinforce Israel’s “justifications” for its brutality.

Most New Zealanders do not even know that Israel runs a military occupation over the entire area of historic Palestine.

With rare exceptions, our media simply provide a safe portal for Israeli propaganda.

Israel’s unbridled brutality
Meanwhile, our Ministry of Foreign Affairs, if they say anything at all about Israel’s occupation or unbridled brutality are much more likely to criticise Palestinians than they are to criticise Israel.

If they spoke out about the Russian invasion of Ukraine like they do with the situation in the Middle East, they would be blaming Ukrainians for “provocations against Russian troops” and asking Ukrainians to exercise “maximum restraint” in the face of Russian brutality.

It’s hypocrisy on a grand scale.

We call out human rights abuses to a US agenda. We condemn Russia and China but look the other way with Israeli or Indonesian brutality (as in West Papua).

None of this has changed under the current minister Nanaia Mahuta who has been silent for more than 18 months on the Palestinian struggle.

Silence is never an option when it comes to human rights. It is the position of cowards.

Until Israel is called out for its racist apartheid policies and the consequences which flow from that, it will continue to murder with impunity.

We have yet again asked the minister to speak out and demand an independent investigation and accountability for Shireen Abu Akleh’s assassination.

John Minto is a political activist and commentator, and spokesperson for Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa. This article was first published by The Daily Blog and is republished with the author’s permission.