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Category: Censorship

  • Quixotic Regulation: Australia’s eSafety Commissioner Capitulates

    It was given top billing, a near absurd show intended to rope in content on a global social media platform, thereby denying all outside Australia access to it.  Because an Australian official had deemed a video too disturbing and offensive for Australians of ordinary sensibility (the standard remains opaquely absurd), the world’s citizenry were also to be barred from viewing it.  It did not matter that those in the US, for instance, could readily digest the same, unabridged content, or that news networks in that country could readily broadcast the material in its entirety.

    On April 16, Australia’s eSafety commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, smacked X (formerly known as Twitter) and Meta with legal notices to remove links to a video within 24 hours depicting what her office declared to be “gratuitous or offensive violence with a high degree of impact and detail”.  The video featured a livestreamed church service at Sydney’s Assyrian Orthodox Christ the Good Shepherd Church, which was abruptly interrupted by a stabbing assault.  The perpetrator was a 16-year-old youth.  Two churchmen, Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel and Rev. Isaac Royel, were injured.

    X Corp’s erratic, truculent CEO thought differently about this overly generous extension of Australia’s Online Safety Act.  Elon Musk found Inman Grant’s demand insensible, calling her a “censorship commissar” in her insistence on global content bans.  While he was happy to acquiesce to restricting access to the video in Australia, the world was quite something else.

    The issue wound its way to the Federal Court.  On May 15, the Commissioner’s case received something of a sinking blow.  Justice Geoffrey Kennett pondered the “potential consequences for orderly and amicable relations between nations, if a notice with the breath contended for were enforced”.  It would, for instance, “be ignored or disparaged in other countries”.  In the United States, no court would agree to enforce any relevant injunction requiring X Corp to take down the relevant URLs, numbering 65.

    The judge acknowledged that the Online Safety Act covered “acts, omissions, matters and things outside Australia” but did not stipulate what “all reasonable steps” were in the context of removing material.  “A clear expression of intention would be necessary to support a conclusion that Parliament intended to empower the Commissioner to issue removal notices with the effect for which she contends.”  It followed that she had failed to establish “that compliance with the removal notice entails blocking access to the 65 URLs by all users of X Corp.”

    The matter should have ended there, but the regulatory instinct of condescending officials is often obstinate.  As proceedings continued through the month, more opposition manifested.  On May 27, Justice Kennett granted orders permitting the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) leave to intervene.  The intervention, reasoned FIRE, sought “to focus the court’s attention on how a global takedown order would disregard the strong free speech protections of countries like the US and lend an air of legitimacy to repressive regimes’ efforts to assert control over online content everywhere.”

    On June 5, the Commissioner finally filed a notice of discontinuance in proceedings against X.  The EFF stated with much satisfaction “that the Commissioner saw the error of her efforts”, reasoning that such global take down notices “threaten freedom of expression around the world, creating conflicting legal obligations, and lead to the lowest common denominator of internet content being available around the world”.  Doing so permitted “the least tolerant legal system to determine what we all are able to read and distribute online.”

    Very true – except that the Commissioner showed few signs of enlightenment, and certainly nothing in mending her crypto-authoritarian ways.  A statement from Inman Grant showed that her program of infantilisation and regulation of the Internet is an ongoing one.  “Our sole goal and focus in issuing our removal notice was to prevent this extremely violent footage from going viral, potentially inciting further violence and inflicting more harm on the Australian community. I stand by my investigators and the decisions eSafety made.”

    In Inman Grant’s mind, Australians generally accepted (very good of her to think so) that such “graphic material should not be broadcast on television, which begs an obvious question why it should be allowed to be distributed freely and accessible online 24/7 to anyone, including children.”  As the country’s online safety regulator, she expected “reasonable companies to be taking action in relation to this type of content.”

    Unfortunately for free speech advocates and information libertarians, the Commissioner’s paranoia does have an audience. Ever since its creation, the Australian Commonwealth has shown a parental obsession with censorship.  And now, we have such sentiments as those of Michael Miller, Executive Corp Australasia Executive Chairman, lecturing the public about the need for big tech companies to pay “a social license” should they “want access to Australian consumers”.

    Such an encumbering license would permit the Australian government “to make the platforms liable for all content that is amplified, curated, and controlled by their algorithms or recommender engines”.  It would also grant the government powers to “ultimately block access to our country and our people if they refuse to play by our rules.”

    When an entity such as News Corp gives advice on what should or should not be accessible to the broader citizenry of any country, the bells should be going off.  The Big Tech behemoths have much to answer for – the destruction of privacy, the ruthless monetisation of user data, behavioural modification and hypnotic seduction.  But governments of all hues always cling to the same logic: the public is a dangerous beast best fed morsels of information rather than the whole buffet.  Ignorance breeds manageable docility.

    The post Quixotic Regulation: Australia’s eSafety Commissioner Capitulates first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Chinese artist hits back at party censorship with trashy performance

    A Chinese artist is hitting back at the Communist Party’s ongoing attempts to censor cultural expression even far beyond China’s borders with an exhibit in Sydney depicting the kind of “garbage” that gets produced when artists agree to stay within the government’s “red lines.”

    As part of her performance art exhibit at Sydney’s Passage Gallery — titled “Junk,” which runs through July 19 – Xiao Lu creates artwork live, but within a pattern of red neon strips, before crumpling it up and tossing it away like trash.

    “The whole of the Passage Gallery exhibition hall is set up as a black space,”  Xiao told RFA Mandarin at the launch of her exhibit. “There are red lights that represent China’s censorship of art exhibitions and free speech.”

    “In Chinese, we use the phrase ‘red lines’ to denote lines that can’t be crossed,” Xiao said. “If you cross them, something bad will happen.”

    She said it’s not just in China that Beijing stifles creativity, however.

    “Self-censorship by art institutions invades everyone’s soul,” Xiao said, adding that even exhibition venues in Australia can be wary of annoying the Chinese government.

    “Even here, it’s rare to see an exhibit that truly reflects the reality of China,” she said.

    It’s not that Australia lacks work by Chinese artists. In Sydney alone, small and large venues alike run frequent shows year round that are lavishly sponsored by Chinese companies.

    “Most of those exhibits focus on work with ‘Chinese characteristics’ that is overwhelmingly unrelated to political and social reality in China today,” she said.

    ENG_CHN_ART CENSORSHIP_06172024.2.jpg
    Chinese artist Xiao Lu’s performance art exhibit at Sydney’s Passage Gallery, June 14, 2024. (Lionel TC/RFA)

    “This is increasingly similar to what’s happening in China, where most of the works I see are devoid of content,” Xiao said. “Contemporary art shouldn’t be about eulogizing something, or focusing on superficial form.”

    “It should face up to the problems of the age it is living in, and raise questions about them,” she said. “I don’t see this kind of work in China, but I only see it rarely in Australia, which is a problem.”

    ‘Soft-power infiltration’

    Xiao cites an example of Sydney’s Vermilion Art gallery, which invited her to write an article about the situation in China during the stringent restrictions of the zero-COVID era.

    “I was still in China when I received a call from a gallery asking me to write an article about the situation in China,” Xiao said. “It was during the pandemic [restrictions], and I wrote an article about lockdown. But the gallery didn’t dare to publish it.”

    Radio Free Asia approached Vermilion Art and invited them to respond to Xiao’s allegations, but no reply had been received by the time of publication.

    Taiwan-based artist Kacey Wong, who went to art school in Australia, agreed with Xiao’s assessment that Beijing is packaging approved forms of art to be shown in overseas galleries.

    “They take ancient Chinese culture and add various Communist Party-influenced elements to it, then export it as a form of soft-power infiltration and soft-power confrontation,” Wong said.

    “The Chinese Communist Party turns every walk of life into a battlefield,” he said.

    In January, Xiao boycotted an exhibition of Chinese art linked to former Australian Ambassador Geoff Raby, saying he had been lauded by the Communist Party newspaper the People’s Daily in December 2019 for his uncritical attitude to Beijing.

    In February, she held an exhibit in Melbourne which hit back at Beijing’s suppression of the 2019 Hong Kong protests and its clearance operations targeting the low-income population in the Chinese capital.

    Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.


    This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Lionel TC for RFA Mandarin.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • In our make-believe politics, the strings pulled by the super-rich are all too visible

    We live in a world of make-believe politics, a world where strings pulled in the interests of the super-rich are ever more visible. And yet we are expected to pretend we cannot see those strings. More astonishing still, many people really do seem blind to the puppet show.

    1. The “leader of the free world”, President Joe Biden, can barely maintain his attention for more than a few minutes without straying off topic, or wandering offstage. When he has to walk before the cameras, he does so like he is auditioning for the role of a geriatric robot. His whole body is gripped with the concentration he needs to walk in a straight line.

    And yet we are supposed to believe he is carefully working the levers of the western empire, making critically difficult calculations to keep the West free and prosperous, while keeping in check its enemies – Russia, China, Iran – without provoking a nuclear war. Is he really capable of doing all that when he struggles to put one foot in front of the other?

    2. Part of that tricky diplomatic balancing act Biden is supposedly conducting, along with other western leaders, relates to Israel’s military operation in Gaza. The West’s “diplomacy” – backed by weapons transfers – has resulted in the murder of tens of thousands of Palestinians, most of them women and children; the gradual starvation of 2.3 million Palestinians over many months; and the destruction of 70 per cent of the enclave’s housing stock and almost all of its major infrastructure and institutions, including schools, universities and hospitals.

    And yet we are supposed to believe that Biden has no leverage over Israel, even though Israel is entirely dependent on the United States for the weapons it is using to destroy Gaza.

    We are supposed to believe Israel is acting solely in “self-defence”, even when most of the people being killed are unarmed civilians; and that it is “eliminating” Hamas, even though Hamas doesn’t appear to have been weakened, and even though Israel’s starvation policies will take their toll on the young, elderly and vulnerable long before they kill a single Hamas fighter.

    We are supposed to believe that Israel has a plan for the “day after” in Gaza that won’t look anything like the outcome these policies appear designed to achieve: making Gaza uninhabitable so that the Palestinian population is forced to leave.

    And on top of all this, we are supposed to believe that, in ruling that a “plausible” case has been made that Israel is committing genocide, the judges of the world’s highest court, the International Court of Justice, have shown they do not understand the legal definition of the crime of genocide. Or possibly that they are driven by antisemitism.

    3. Meanwhile, the same western leaders arming Israel’s slaughter of many tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, including more than 15,000 children, have been shipping hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of armaments to Ukraine to assist its armed forces. Ukraine must be helped, we are told, because it is the victim of an aggressive neighbouring power, Russia, determined on expansion and land theft.

    And yet we are supposed to ignore the two decades of western military expansion eastwards, via Nato, that has finally coming knocking, in Ukraine, on Russia’s door – and the fact that the West’s best experts on Russia warned throughout that time that we were playing with fire in doing so and that Ukraine would prove a red line for Moscow.

    We are supposed to make no comparison between Russia’s aggression against Ukraine and Israel’s aggression against the Palestinians. In the latter case, Israel is supposedly the victim, even though it has been violently occupying its Palestinian neighbours’ territory for three-quarters of a century while, in flagrant violation of international law, building Jewish settlements on the territory meant to form the basis of a Palestinian state.

    We are supposed to believe that the Palestinians of Gaza have no right to defend themselves comparable to Ukraine’s right – no right to defend against decades of Israeli belligerence, whether the ethnic cleansing operations of 1948 and 1967, the apartheid system imposed on the remnant Palestinian population afterwards, the 17-year blockade of Gaza that denied its inhabitants the essentials of life, or the “plausible genocide” the West is now arming and providing diplomatic cover for.

    In fact, if the Palestinians do try to defend themselves, the West not only refuses to help them, as it has Ukraine, but considers them terrorists – even the children, it seems.

    4. Julian Assange, the journalist and publisher who did most to expose the inner workings of western establishments, and their criminal schemes in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, has been behind bars for five years in Belmarsh high-security prison. Before that, he spent seven years arbitrarily detained – according to United Nations legal experts – in the Ecuadorean embassy in London, forced to seek asylum there from political persecution. In an interminable legal process, the US seeks his extradition so he can be locked away in near-isolation for up to 175 years.

    And yet we are supposed to believe that his 12 years of effective detention – having been found guilty of no crime – is entirely unrelated to the fact that, in publishing secret cables, Assange revealed that, behind closed doors, the West and its leaders sound and act like gangsters and psychopaths, especially about foreign affairs, not like the stewards of a benign global order they claim to be overseeing.

    The leaked documents Assange published show western leaders ready to destroy whole societies to further western resource domination and their own enrichment – and eager to wield the most outrageous lies to achieve their goals. They have no interest in upholding the supposedly cherished value of freedom of the press, except when that freedom is being weaponised against their enemies.

    We are supposed to believe that western leaders genuinely want journalists to act as a watchdog, a restraint, on their power even when they are hounding to death the very journalist who created a whistleblowers’ platform, Wikileaks, to do precisely that. (Assange has already suffered a stroke from the more than a decade-long strain of fighting for his freedom.)

    We are supposed to believe that the West will give Assange a fair trial, when the very states colluding in his incarceration – and in the CIA’s case, planned assassination – are the ones he exposed for engaging in war crimes and state terrorism. We are supposed to believe that they are pursuing a legal process, not persecution, in redefining as the crime of “espionage” his efforts to bring transparency and accountability to international affairs.

    5. The media claim to represent the interests of western publics in all their diversity, and to act as a true window on the world.

    We are supposed believe that this same media is free and pluralistic, even when it is owned by the super-rich as well as western states that were long ago hollowed out to serve the super-rich.

    We are supposed to believe that a media completely dependent for its survival on revenues from big corporate advertisers can bring us news and analysis without fear or favour. We are supposed to believe that a media whose primary role is selling audiences to corporate advertisers can question whether, in doing so, it is playing a beneficial or harmful role.

    We are supposed to believe that a media plugged firmly into the capitalist financial system that brought the global economy to its knees in 2008, and has been hurtling us towards ecological catastrophe, is in a position to evaluate and critique that capitalist model dispassionately, that media outlets could somehow turn on the billionaires who own them, or could forego the income from the billionaire-owned corporations that prop up the media’s finances through advertising.

     

    We are supposed to believe that the media can objectively assess the merits of going to war. That is, wars waged serially by the West – from Afghanistan to Iraq, from Libya to Syria, from Ukraine to Gaza – when media corporations are embedded in corporate conglomerations whose other big interests include arms manufacturing and fossil-fuel extraction.

    We are supposed to believe that the media uncritically promotes endless growth for reasons of economic necessity and common sense, even though the contradictions are glaring: that the forever growth model is impossible to sustain on a finite planet where resources are running out.

    6. In western political systems, unlike those of its enemies, there is supposedly a meaningful democratic choice between candidates representing opposing worldviews and values.

    We are supposed to believe in a western political model of openness, pluralism and accountability even when in the US and UK the public are offered an electoral scrap between two candidates and parties that, to stand a chance of winning, need to win favour with the corporate media representing the interests of its billionaire owners, need to keep happy billionaire donors who fund their campaigns, and need to win over Big Business by demonstrating their unwavering commitment to a model of endless growth that is completely unsustainable.

    We are supposed to believe that these leaders serve the voting public – offering a choice between right and left, between capital and labour – when, in truth, the public is only ever presented with a choice between two parties prostrated before Big Money, when the parties’ policy programmes are nothing more than competitions in who can best appease the wealth-elite.

    We are supposed to believe that the “democratic” West represents the epitome of political health, even though it repeatedly dredges up the very worst people imaginable to lead it.

    In the US, the “choice” imposed on the electorate is between one candidate (Biden) who should be in pottering around his garden, or maybe preparing for his final, difficult years in a care home, and a competitor (Donald Trump) whose relentless search for adoration and self-enrichment should never have been indulged beyond hosting a TV reality show.

    In the UK, the “choice” is no better: between a candidate (Rishi Sunak) richer than the British king and equally cosseted and a competitor (Sir Keir Starmer) who is so ideologically hollow that his public record is an exercise in decades of shape-shifting.

    All, let us note, are fully signed up to the continuing genocide in Gaza, all are unmoved by many months of the slaughter and starvation of Palestinian children, all are only too ready to defame as antisemites anyone who shows an ounce of the principle and humanity they all too obviously lack.

    The super-rich may be just out of view, but the strings they pull are all too visible. Time to cut ourselves loose.

    The post In our make-believe politics, the strings pulled by the super-rich are all too visible first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Academia is only as free as powerful donors allow it to be

    Anyone who imagines there is something resembling academic freedom in the US, or elsewhere in the West for that matter, needs to read this article in the Intercept on an extraordinary – or possibly not so extraordinary – episode of censorship of a Palestinian academic. It shows how donors are the ones really pulling the strings in our academic institutions.

    Here’s what happened:

    1. The prestigious Harvard Law Review was due to publish its first-ever essay by a Palestinian legal scholar late last year, shortly after Hamas’ October 7 attack in Israel. Hurrah (finally) for academic freedom!

    2. However, the essay, which sought to establish a new legal concept of the Nakba – the mass expulsion of Palestinian civilians from their homeland in 1948 to create what would become the self-defined Jewish state of Israel – was pulled at the last moment, despite the fact the editors had subjected it to intense editorial checks and scrutiny. The Harvard Review got cold feet – presumably because of the certainty the essay would offend many of the university’s donors and create a political backlash.

    3. Editors at the rival Columbia Law Review decided to pick up the baton. They asked the same scholar, Rabea Eghbariah, to submit a new, much longer version of the essay for publication. It would be the first time a Palestinian legal scholar had been published by the Columbia Law Review too. Hurrah (finally) for academic freedom!

    4. Aware of the inevitable pushback, 30 editors at the Review spent five months editing the essay, but did so in secret and mostly anonymously to protect themselves from reprisals. The article was subjected to unprecedented scrutiny.

    5. Alerted to the fact that the essay had been leaked and that pressure was building from powerful figures associated with Columbia university and the Washington establishment to prevent publication, the editors published the article this month, unannounced, on the Review’s website. Hurrah (finally) for academic freedom!

    6. But within hours, the Review’s board of directors, comprising law professors and alumni, some with official roles in the federal government, demanded that the essay be taken down. When the editors refused, the whole website was pulled offline. The homepage read “Website under maintenance.”

    7. Hurrah for… the Israel lobby (again).

    If even the academic community is so browbeaten by donors and the political establishment that they dare not allow serious academic debate, even over a legal concept, what hope is there that politicians and the media – equally dependent on Big Money, and even more sensitive to the public pressure of lobbies – are going to perform any better.

    University complicity in the Gaza genocide – brought out of the shadows by the campus protests – highlights how academic institutions are tightly integrated into the political and commercial ventures of western establishments.

    The universities’ savage crackdown on the student encampments – denying them any right to peacefully protest complicity in genocide by the very institutions to which they pay their fees – further underscores the fact that universities are there to maintain the semblance of free and open debate but not the substance. Debate is allowed but only within strictly controlled, and policed, parameters.

    Academic institutions, politicians and the media speak as one on the Gaza genocide for a reason. They are there not promote a dialectics in which truth and falsehood can be tested through open discussion, but to confer legitimacy on the darkest agendas of the establishment they serve.

    Our public debates are rigged to avoid topics that would be difficult for western elites to counter, like their current support for genocide in Gaza. But the very reason we have a genocide in Gaza is because lots of other debates we should have had decades ago have not been allowed to take place, including the one Eghbariah was trying to raise: that the Nakba that began in 1948 and has continued ever since for the Palestinian people needs its own legal framework that incorporates apartheid and genocide.

    Israel’s genocide in Gaza was made possible precisely because western establishments avoided any meaningful scrutiny of, or engagement with, the events of the Nakba for more than 75 years. They pretended either that the ethnic cleansing of 1948 never happened, or that it was the Palestinians’ choice to ethnically cleanse themselves.

    In the decades that followed, western establishments pretended that the illegal colonisation of Palestine by Jewish settlers and the reality of apartheid rule faced by Palestinians – hidden under the rubric of a “temporary occupation” – either weren’t happening, or could be solved through a bogus, bad-faith “peace process”.

    There was never accountability, there was no truth or reconciliation. The western establishment are still furiously avoiding that debate 76 years on, as Eghbariah’s experiences at the hands of the Harvard and Columbia Law Reviews prove.

    We can only pray we don’t have to wait another three-quarters of a century before western elites consider acknowledging their complicity in the genocide of Gaza.

    The post Academia is only as free as powerful donors allow it to be first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Communication Crackdown in Federal Prisons Has Been Operating Quietly Until Now

    The Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) has quietly but steadily been implementing a nationwide policy that silences the voices of people incarcerated in federal prisons by preventing them from sharing the same email and phone contacts for people on the outside, also known as a “double contact ban.” The policy, which gives prison authorities wide leeway to censor communications, appears to have gone…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Palestinian Lawyer Censored for “Nakba as a Legal Concept” Article Speaks Out

    The website of the Columbia Law Review was taken down by its board of directors on Monday after student editors refused a request from the board to halt the publication of an academic article written by Palestinian human rights lawyer Rabea Eghbariah titled “Toward Nakba as a Legal Concept.” The article argues for the Nakba to be developed as a unique legal framework, related to but distinct from…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Columbia Law Review website shut down over ‘censored’ article critical of Israel

    Pacific Media Watch

    The editorial board of the Columbia Law Review journal — made up of faculty and alumni from the university’s law school — shut down the review’s website on Monday after editors refused to halt publication of an academic article by a Palestinian human rights lawyer that was critical of Israel.

    Al Jazeera reports that the student editors of the journal said they were pressured by the board to not publish the article which accused Israel of carrying out genocide in Gaza and implementing an apartheid regime against Palestinians.

    The review’s website was taken down after the article was published on Monday morning and remained offline last night, reports AP news agency.

    Columbia Law Review
    Columbia Law Review . . . “under maintenance”. Image: APR screenshot

    A static homepage informed visitors the domain was “under maintenance”.

    Several editors at the Columbia Law Review described the board’s intervention as an unprecedented breach of editorial independence at the periodical.

    In a letter sent to student editors yesterday, the board of directors said it was concerned that the article, titled “Nakba as a Legal Concept,” had not gone through the “usual processes of review or selection for articles”.

    However, the editor involved in soliciting and editing the aricle said they had followed a “rigorous review process”.

    ‘A microcosm of repression’
    The author of the article, human rights lawyer Rabea Eghbariah, a Harvard doctoral candidate, said the suspension of the journal’s website should be seen as “a microcosm of a broader authoritarian repression taking place across US campuses”.

    The Intercept reports that this was the second time in barely eight months that Eghbariah had been censored by US academic publications.

    Columbia Law Review
    Columbia Law Review . . . second journal to censor Palestinian law scholar over Nakba truth. Image: APR screenshot

    Last November, the Harvard Law Review made the unprecedented decision to “kill” (not publish) the author’s edited essay prior to publication. The author was due to be the first Palestinian legal scholar published in the quality journal.

    As The Intercept reported at the time, “Eghbariah’s essay — an argument for establishing ‘Nakba’, the expulsion, dispossession, and oppression of Palestinians, as a formal legal concept that widens its scope — faced extraordinary editorial scrutiny and eventual censorship.”

    “When the Harvard publication spiked his article, editors from another Ivy League law school reached out to Eghbariah.

    “Students from the Columbia Law Review solicited a new article from the scholar and, upon receiving it, decided to edit it and prepare it for publication.

    “Now, eight months into Israel’s onslaught against Gaza, Eghbariah’s work has once again been stifled.”

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Broadcast bill passed by Uruguay Senate threatens press freedom

    Mexico City, May 30, 2024—Uruguayan authorities should not approve a proposed broadcast law passed by the Senate and should ensure that all media legislation is discussed broadly, including with civil society organizations and journalist representatives, the Committee to Protect Journalists said Thursday.

    On May 14, the Uruguayan Senate approved the proposed “Law of Audiovisual Content Broadcasting Services” without consulting civil society organizations or other groups, according to news reports.

    Article 72 of the proposed law states that broadcasting services “have the duty to provide citizens with information, analysis, opinions, comments, and evaluations in a complete, impartial, serious, rigorous, plural, and balanced manner among and regarding political actors.” Local civil rights groups, including press freedom organization CAinfo, have warned this could potentially serve as a state control mechanism over the media.

    The House of Representatives must vote in June to either approve or reject the bill without amendments, according to the news reports.

    “Uruguayan lawmakers should not approve the proposed broadcasting law and should ensure that any new legislation is discussed broadly,” said Cristina Zahar, CPJ’s Latin America program coordinator, in Sao Paulo. “Control over what constitutes ‘complete, impartial, serious, rigorous, plural, and balanced’ information should never be in the hands of the state.”

    Fabián Werner, president of CAinfo, told CPJ that the bill would put Uruguay in a dangerous position, especially ahead of the country’s general elections scheduled for October 27.

    “This new law was rushed through the Senate to avoid democratic discussion and goes against international standards of freedom of expression,” he said. “It is very bad for democracy, human rights, and freedom of expression.”

    Werner said that Uruguay’s current media law, approved by the government of former President José Mujica in 2013, was widely discussed with civil society sectors and international organizations such as UNESCO before and after passage.

    International organizations, including the Inter American Press Association, UNESCO, and the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, have also expressed concerns about the proposed law.

    CPJ emailed the president of the Uruguayan House of Representatives, Ana Olivera, but did not immediately receive a reply.


    This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Geoffrey King/CPJ Technology Program Coordinator and Tom Lowenthal/CPJ Staff Technologist.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Get Up, Stand Up, Don’t Give Up the Fight: Know Your Rights or You Will Lose Them

    If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.

    — Thomas Jefferson

    If America’s schools are to impart principles of freedom and democracy to future generations, they must start by respecting the constitutional rights of their students

    Take the case of Lucas Hudson.

    With all the negative press being written about today’s young people, it’s refreshing to meet a young person who not only knows his rights but is prepared to stand up for them.

    Lucas is a smart kid, a valedictorian of his graduating class at the Collegiate Academy at Armwood High School in Hillsborough County, Fla.

    So, when school officials gave Lucas an ultimatum: either remove most of his speech’s religious references from his graduation speech—in which he thanked the people who helped shape his character, reflected on how quickly time goes by, and urged people to use whatever time they have to love others and serve the God who loves us—or he would not be speaking at all, Lucas refused to forfeit his rights.

    That’s when Lucas’s father turned to The Rutherford Institute for help.

    In coming to Lucas’ defense, attorneys for The Rutherford Institute warned school officials that their attempts to browbeat Lucas into watering down his graduation speech could expose the school to a First Amendment lawsuit.

    Thankfully for Lucas, the school backed down, and he was able to deliver his speech as written.

    It doesn’t always work out so well, unfortunately.

    Over the course of The Rutherford Institute’s 42-year history, we have defended countless young people who found themselves censored, silenced and denied their basic First Amendment rights, especially when they chose to exercise their rights to free speech and religious freedom.

    In case after case, we encounter an appalling level of ignorance on the part of public school officials who mistakenly believe that the law requires anything religious be banned from public schools.

    Here’s where government officials get it wrong: while the government may not establish or compel a particular religion, it also may not silence and suppress religious speech merely because others might take offense.

    People are free to ignore, disagree with, or counter the religious speech of others, but the government cannot censor private religious speech.

    Unfortunately, you can only defend your rights when you know them, and the American people—and those who represent them—are utterly ignorant about their freedoms, history, and how the government is supposed to operate.

    As Morris Berman points out in his book Dark Ages America, “70 percent of American adults cannot name their senators or congressmen; more than half don’t know the actual number of senators, and nearly a quarter cannot name a single right guaranteed by the First Amendment. Sixty-three percent cannot name the three branches of government. Other studies reveal that uninformed or undecided voters often vote for the candidate whose name and packaging (e.g., logo) are the most powerful; color is apparently a major factor in their decision.”

    More than government corruption and ineptitude, police brutality, terrorism, gun violence, drugs, illegal immigration or any other so-called “danger” that threatens our nation, civic illiteracy may be what finally pushes us over the edge.

    As Thomas Jefferson warned, no nation can be both ignorant and free.

    Unfortunately, the American people have existed in a technology-laden, entertainment-fueled, perpetual state of cluelessness for so long that civic illiteracy has become the new normal for the citizenry.

    In fact, most immigrants who aspire to become citizens know more about national civics than native-born Americans. Surveys indicate that half of native-born Americans couldn’t correctly answer 70% of the civics questions on the U.S. Citizenship test.

    Not even the government bureaucrats who are supposed to represent us know much about civics, American history and geography, or the Constitution although they take an oath to uphold, support and defend the Constitution against “enemies foreign and domestic.”

    For instance, a couple attempting to get a marriage license was recently forced to prove to a government official that New Mexico is, in fact, one of the 50 states and not a foreign country.

    You can’t make this stuff up.

    Those who gave us the Constitution and the Bill of Rights believed that the government exists at the behest of its citizens. The government’s purpose is to protect, defend and even enhance our freedoms, not violate them.

    It was no idle happenstance that the Constitution opens with these three powerful words: “We the people.”

    Those who founded this country knew quite well that every citizen must remain vigilant or freedom would be lost. As Thomas Paine recognized, “It is the responsibility of the patriot to protect his country from its government.”

    You have no rights unless you exercise them.

    Still, you can’t exercise your rights unless you know what those rights are.

    “If Americans do not understand the Constitution and the institutions and processes through which we are governed, we cannot rationally evaluate important legislation and the efforts of our elected officials, nor can we preserve the national unity necessary to meaningfully confront the multiple problems we face today,” warns the Brennan Center in its Civic Literacy Report Card. “Rather, every act of government will be measured only by its individual value or cost, without concern for its larger impact. More and more we will ‘want what we want, and [will be] convinced that the system that is stopping us is wrong, flawed, broken or outmoded.’”

    Education precedes action.

    As the Brennan Center concludes “America, unlike most of the world’s nations, is not a country defined by blood or belief. America is an idea, or a set of ideas, about freedom and opportunity. It is these ideas that bind us together as Americans and have kept us free, strong, and prosperous. But these ideas do not perpetuate themselves. They must be taught and learned anew with each generation.”

    There is a movement underway to require that all public-school students pass the civics portion of the U.S. naturalization test—100 basic facts about U.S. history and civics—before receiving their high-school diploma, and that’s a start.

    Lucas Hudson would have passed such a test with flying colors.

    On graduation day, Lucas stepped up to the podium and delivered his uncensored valedictorian speech as written, without any interference by school censors.

    As Lucas’s father relayed to The Rutherford Institute:

    In the end, Lucas got to give his entire speech the way he wanted to give it, and everybody was paying attention.  Nobody got hurt.  Nothing bad happened.  It was just a young man using the First Amendment rights to speak his mind regarding his personal beliefs. [Lucas] never thought a few sentences in a speech would create such a controversy in his world, but this speech turned into a defining moment for him.  He will never be the same after this experience, but this permanent change is a good thing.  When it mattered, Lucas stood up for himself, and when those he stood up against tried to push him down, [The Rutherford Institute] came to his aide and backed him up to make it a fair fight. I am comforted to know you are defending the rights of the people.  These fights matter.  Every time you defend the rights of one person, you defend the rights of every person.  You helped my son fight for his rights against the school, and, in doing so, Hillsborough County Public Schools will think twice before infringing on the rights of future students. Your defense of Lucas became an inspiration for the students in his school and sparked a healthy and meaningful debate among the teachers, students, and parents about the value of the First Amendment and the need for limits on government control over our personal beliefs.  You are fighting for good and doing important work.  Don’t ever stop. Thank you, Rutherford Institute, for being there for my son when he needed you most.

    America needs more freedom fighters like Lucas Hudson and The Rutherford Institute.

    It’s up to us.

    We have the power to make and break the government.

    We the American people—the citizenry—are the arbiters and ultimate guardians of America’s welfare, defense, liberty, laws and prosperity.

    We must act—and act responsibly.

    A healthy, representative government is hard work. It takes a citizenry that is informed about the issues, educated about how the government operates, and willing to make the sacrifices necessary to stay involved.

    As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, it’s our job to keep freedom alive using every nonviolent means available to us.

    As Martin Luther King Jr. recognized in a speech delivered on December 5, 1955, just four days after Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to relinquish her seat on a Montgomery city bus: “Democracy transformed from thin paper to thick action is the greatest form of government on earth.”

    Know your rights. Exercise your rights. Defend your rights. If not, you will lose them.

    The post Get Up, Stand Up, Don’t Give Up the Fight: Know Your Rights or You Will Lose Them first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • K-12 Schools in New Jersey Are Becoming a Battlefield Over Palestine Advocacy

    On the heels of the eruption of the university movement for Palestine and the subsequent wave of repression that has been at the center of national politics, Congress has begun questioning K-12 school districts about how they will clamp down on the movement for Palestine. Under the guise of addressing “antisemitism,” public K-12 schools may become more of a flashpoint across the country over…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • From COVID-19 to Campus Protests: How the Police State Muzzles Free Speech

    The police state does not want citizens who know their rights.

    Nor does the police state want citizens prepared to exercise those rights.

    This year’s graduates are a prime example of this master class in compliance. Their time in college has been set against a backdrop of crackdowns, lockdowns and permacrises ranging from the government’s authoritarian COVID-19 tactics to its more recent militant response to campus protests.

    Born in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, these young people have been raised without any expectation of privacy in a technologically-driven, mass surveillance state; educated in schools that teach conformity and compliance; saddled with a debt-ridden economy on the brink of implosion; made vulnerable by the blowback from a military empire constantly waging war against shadowy enemies; policed by government agents armed to the teeth ready and able to lock down the country at a moment’s notice; and forced to march in lockstep with a government that no longer exists to serve the people but which demands they be obedient slaves or suffer the consequences.

    And now, when they should be empowered to take their rightful place in society as citizens who fully understand and exercise their right to speak truth to power, they are being censored, silenced and shut down.

    Consider what happened recently in Charlottesville, Va., when riot police were called in to shut down campus protests at the University of Virginia staged by students and members of the community to express their opposition to the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Palestine.

    As the local newspaper reported, “State police sporting tactical gear and riot shields moved in on the demonstrators, using pepper spray and sheer force to disperse the group and arrest the roughly 15 or so at the camp, where for days students, faculty and community members had sang songs, read poetry and painted signs in protest of Israel’s ongoing war in the Palestinian territory of Gaza.”

    What a sad turn-about for an institution which was founded as an experiment in cultivating an informed citizenry by Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, champion of the Bill of Rights, and the nation’s third president.

    Unfortunately, the University of Virginia is not unique in its heavy-handed response to what have been largely peaceful anti-war protests. According to the Washington Post, more than 2300 people have been arrested for taking part in similar campus protests across the country.

    These lessons in compliance, while expected, are what comes of challenging the police state.

    Free speech can certainly not be considered “free” when expressive activities across the nation are being increasingly limited, restricted to so-called free speech zones, or altogether blocked.

    Remember, the First Amendment gives every American the right to “petition his government for a redress of grievances.”

    Along with the constitutional right to peacefully (and that means non-violently) assemble, the right to free speech allows us to challenge the government through protests and demonstrations and to attempt to change the world around us—for the better or the worse—through protests and counterprotests.

    If citizens cannot stand out in the open and voice their disapproval of their government, its representatives and its policies without fearing prosecution, then the First Amendment with all its robust protections for free speech, assembly and the right to petition one’s government for a redress of grievances is little more than window-dressing on a store window—pretty to look at but serving little real purpose.

    After all, living in a representative republic means that each person has the right to take a stand for what they think is right, whether that means marching outside the halls of government, wearing clothing with provocative statements, or simply holding up a sign.

    That’s what the First Amendment is supposed to be about: it assures the citizenry of the right to express their concerns about their government to their government, in a time, place and manner best suited to ensuring that those concerns are heard.

    Unfortunately, through a series of carefully crafted legislative steps and politically expedient court rulings, government officials have managed to disembowel this fundamental freedom, rendering it with little more meaning than the right to file a lawsuit against government officials.

    In more and more cases, the government is declaring war on what should be protected political speech whenever it challenges the government’s power, reveals the government’s corruption, exposes the government’s lies, and encourages the citizenry to push back against the government’s many injustices.

    Indeed, there is a long and growing list of the kinds of speech that the government considers dangerous enough to red flag and subject to censorship, surveillance, investigation and prosecution: hate speech, conspiratorial speech, treasonous speech, threatening speech, inflammatory speech, radical speech, anti-government speech, extremist speech, etc.

    Clearly, the government has no interest in hearing what “we the people” have to say.

    Yet if Americans are not able to peacefully assemble for expressive activity outside of the halls of government or on public roads on which government officials must pass, or on college campuses, the First Amendment has lost all meaning.

    If we cannot stand peacefully outside of the Supreme Court or the Capitol or the White House, our ability to hold the government accountable for its actions is threatened, and so are the rights and liberties that we cherish as Americans.

    And if we cannot proclaim our feelings about the government, no matter how controversial, on our clothing, or to passersby, or to the users of the world wide web, then the First Amendment really has become an exercise in futility.

    The source of the protest shouldn’t matter. The politics of the protesters are immaterial.

    To play politics with the First Amendment encourages a double standard that will see us all muzzled in the end.

    The power elite has made their intentions clear: they will pursue and prosecute any and all words, thoughts and expressions that challenge their authority.

    As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, this is the final link in the police state chain.

    If ever there were a time for us to stand up for the right to speak freely, even if it’s freedom for speech we hate, the time is now.

     

    The post From COVID-19 to Campus Protests: How the Police State Muzzles Free Speech first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Anti-LGBTQ Censorship Is Endangering Trans People Behind Bars

    The rampant banning of texts about queer and transgender people has been in the news a lot recently, but nowhere is book banning more of an issue than in prison. Trans people, in particular, suffer from prisons’ arbitrary restrictions. Sophia Alexsandra Brett Laferriere, a trans woman living in a Washington state prison, told Truthout via the prison’s online messaging system…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Indeed, there is no comparison: Israel’s crimes are far worse than Hamas’

    There is one thing we should all be able to agree with Benjamin Netanyahu on: Any comparison between Israel’s war crimes and those of Hamas is, as the Israeli prime minister put it, “absurd and false” and a “distortion of reality”.Here’s why:

    * Israeli war crimes have been ongoing for more than seven decades, long predating Hamas’ creation.

    * Israel has kept the Palestinians of Gaza caged into a concentration camp for the past 17 years, denying them connection to the outside world and the essentials of life. Hamas managed to besiege a small part of Israel for one day, on October 7.

    * For every Israeli killed by Hamas on October 7, Israel has slaughtered at least 35 times that number of Palestinians. Similar kill-ratios grossly skewed in Israel’s favour have been true for decades.

    * Israel has killed more than 15,000 Palestinian children since October – and many tens of thousands more Palestinian children are missing under rubble, maimed or orphaned. By early April, Israel had killed a further 114 children in the West Bank and injured 725 more. Hamas killed a total of 33 Israeli children on October 7.

    * Israel has laid waste to Gaza’s entire health sector. It has bombed its hospitals, and killed, beaten and kidnapped many hundreds of medical personnel. Hamas has not attacked one Israeli hospital.

    * Israel has killed more than 100 journalists in Gaza and more than 250 aid workers. It has also kidnapped a further 40 journalists. Most are presumed to have been taken to a secret detention facility where torture is rife. Hamas is reported to have killed one Israeli journalist on October 7, and no known aid workers.

    * Israel is actively starving Gaza’s population by denying it food, water and aid. That is a power – a genocidal one – Hamas could only ever dream of.

    * Israel has been forcibly removing Palestinians from their lands for more than 76 years to build illegal Jewish settlements in their place. Hamas has not been able to ethnically cleanse a single Israeli, nor build a single Palestinian settlement on Israeli land.

    * Some 750,000 Palestinians are reported to have been taken hostage and jailed by Israel since 1967 – an unwelcome rite of passage for Palestinian men and boys and one in which torture is routine and military trials ensure a near-100% conviction rate. Until October 7, Hamas had only ever managed to take hostage a handful of the Israeli soldiers whose job is to oppress Palestinians.

    * And, while Hamas is designated a terrorist organisation by western states, those same western states laud Israel, fund and arm it, and provide it with diplomatic cover, even as the World Court rules that a plausible case has been made it is committing a genocide in Gaza.

    Yes, Netanyahu is right. There is no comparison at all.

    The post Indeed, there is no comparison: Israel’s crimes are far worse than Hamas’ first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Gaza is our moment of truth

    A protest by students at George Washington University. Probal Rashid SIPA USA)

    Powerful student movements in the 1960s and 1970s shook the world’s conscience to end America’s slaughter in Vietnam and Cambodia. The moral force of Black people rising together in their pain and rage against legislated racism changed the social fabric of America, ending formal segregation and ushering a new era in the struggle against institutional racialism.

    Power did what power does, deploying brute force, murder, intimidation, silencing, marginalizing, surveillance and all manner of corrupt policing.

    We see the outcome and we think we know it.

    Labels like “victory” and “advancement” are applied. “Civil rights” is a term spoken as an absolute, a singular point of history with a terrible before and liberated after.

    It’s the “happy ending” reframing of what is indeed a boundless thread of struggle for Black liberation stretching in both directions through time.

    The resilience of elite capitalist rule relies heavily on such narrative construction that manipulates public imagination with platitudes and reversible concessions, followed by a rebranding of oppression.

    Enslavement becomes mass incarceration and purposeful drug addiction. Segregation is sacrificed to be replaced with conscription of Black faces around the same table of power ethos.

    Rebooted with greater cruelty

    Power adapted since the 1960s, creating new stops, levers, gates and gatekeepers. They lulled us back into their system, rebooted it with greater cruelty and corruption, and retooled it with distractions and celebrity worship while they consolidated and concentrated power in the hands of a tiny minority.

    They bought politicians, who in turn work to safeguard and increase the wealth and influence of this elite minority, turning millionaires into billionaires and soon trillionaires, a staggering wealth gap built on the misery of the masses. They created laws to exonerate their criminality and criminalize dissent.

    They busted up the unions, subjugated workers and pitted them against each other. Instead of confronting the bosses, workers were manipulated into demanding iron borders and separation of families at those borders.

    They gutted regulations and bought up the airwaves to now dictate the content of 95 percent of everything we see, hear and read in the way of journalism, entertainment, education and cultural productions.

    This is the reason terrorist characters dominate Arab depictions in Hollywood. It’s the reason for the unusually high number of casual mentions of Israeli benevolence or genius in so many television series and films; the reason why Palestinian humanity is ignored or at best obscured in both print and broadcast news media no matter how many atrocities we face at Israel’s hands.

    It’s why Black media outlets, owned and run by Zionists of all stripes, take out hit pieces on the likes of Amanda Seales for her righteous stand on Palestine.

    Instead of paying taxes, these billionaires “donate” to universities sufficient sums to impose their vision not only for higher education, but for the acceptable expression of constitutional rights like the First Amendment.

    For example, outraged by a Palestinian literature festival – a beautiful celebration of Palestinian excellence and indigenous heritage – the billionaires Marc Rowan, Dick Wolf and the Lauder family conspired to remove the president of the University of Pennsylvania for her insufficient deference to their interpretation of academic freedom.

    Enlisting their hired goons in Congress, they and others of their ilk, like Bill Ackman, denigrated and/or removed more university presidents for the same reason.

    They even managed to bring the internet – which gave the 1990s generation hope for real democracy – under their nefarious control through algorithms and various forms of surveillance and censorship.

    Hiding the horrors

    Americans tried to stop the march of US corporate and Zionist warmongers toward war in the early 2000s, but they marched on, trampling our will and the bodies of millions of Iraqis. And the world watched as the US pulverized Iraq, a once glorious, high functioning ancient society.

    An “embedded” media hid the bloody horrors and kept the secrets of US corporate looting of Iraq’s treasures and laundering of US tax dollars through rebuilding schemes.

    Desensitized, Americans didn’t bother protesting when the US did the same in Libya, spurring a staggering de-development of one of Africa’s most advanced nations into a veritable human slave market.

    The enslavement and mutilation of Congolese children and whole families in mineral mines to benefit American tech billionaires (as well as Israel’s blood diamond trade) barely elicit a blip in Western media, a shockingly cruel reality they continue to obscure.

    There are hundreds more examples of American and Israeli militarism killing and destroying others in the service of this ruling corporate class.

    Mass surveillance of the populace followed the gutting and looting of public education in the United States. The rich got richer and the poor became destitute.

    In the name of technology and efficiency, capitalists degraded our food and water – poisoned them even – benefitting pharmaceutical billionaires who keep the masses teetering on the edge of health.

    Popular gurus pushed philosophies of individualism, contempt for family, and various forms of alienation that shattered community and social or familial bonds, leaving vast swaths of the people unable to cope with life without drug varieties, both legal and illegal.

    They have weighed us down with the fake dreams they scripted for us – insurmountable debt as a stand-in for family and education, blood diamonds as a stand-in for love and carnage abroad as a stand-in for greatness. They sold us a glorious pile of shit and made us think it was a normal – even inevitable – way of life.

    They glorified obsessive consumerism and obscenely ostentatious lifestyles. And we let them, believing it was our choice.

    But we had none.

    An American illusion

    Choice, like democracy and free press, is an American illusion, a fairytale they peddle in school, newspapers and songs.

    Look how quickly they disbanded, silenced and erased memory of the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011. Look how we are taught to believe that change can only come through the ballot box, where we’re told to “choose” between two war criminals one election after another.

    This moment of livestreamed genocide is the culmination of decades of global capitalist criminality and genocidal Western and Zionist imperialism. We watch in horror as whole Palestinian families are buried alive in their homes, crushed beneath the weight of rubble, their bodies torn and shredded.

    Then they gaslight us.

    Politicians, spokespeople, pundits, journalists and broadcasters take to the airways to convince us that we hadn’t just seen brains, tongues and eyeballs spilling from the crushed skulls of children and babies. Or worse, that they somehow deserved it.

    “Fog of war.”

    “Collateral damage.”

    “Hamas. Hamas. Hamas.”

    “The only democracy.”

    “Self-defense.”

    Over and over they use their wicked justifications and obfuscations. They speak to us as if we’re stupid because they’re accustomed to our silence and acquiescence.

    And they go on, prancing into the Met Gala in obscene finery, the vulgarity of which is made all the more apparent in juxtaposition to the burned and dismembered small bodies on the same day, pouring into Gaza’s few remaining hospitals, screaming, bewildered, in shock and in pain.

    But thank God for the students.

    Thank God for every Palestinian journalist and every Palestinian healthcare worker risking their lives day in and out to serve their people.

    For every fighter choosing martyrdom over indignity.

    For the local organizations and activists you never hear about, but whose work has been keeping thousands alive. I dare not say their names, lest they become targets.

    For Naledi Pandor in South Africa, Francesca Albanese at the United Nations and Clare Daly in the European Parliament.

    For the masses rising up in #Blockout2024. For artists and musicians from Roger Waters and Talib Kweli, to Macklemore and Black Thought, Questlove and more.

    For Yemen, South Africa and Colombia. For every person who refuses to remain silent.

    All dots connected

    This time is different from the uprisings of the 1960s and 1970s. There is a new sense of global interconnection, an emerging class consciousness and foundational political analyses predicated on post-colonial studies and intersectionality.

    Back then the white students protesting the war wouldn’t unite with the Black Panthers because they couldn’t connect the dots. All dots are connecting now.

    Gaza is no longer the enclave sealed and besieged by Israel and Abdulfattah al-Sisi’s Egypt into a concentration camp. Gaza is no longer the densely-populated strip of Israeli-occupied land.

    Rather, Gaza is now all the world.

    Gaza is our collective moment of truth, the meaning in our lives. It is the clarity we need and seek.

    It is the definitive divide between us and the ruling class that tramples us.

    It is us or them. There is no middle place now.

    All the borders fade, leaving us united to confront this greedy genocidal minority everywhere.

    Gaza is the most anguished place on earth at this hour, dimmed by unimaginable Zionist cruelty, which their military and society conduct with perverted glee that they set to music for TikTok.

    And from this tortured place of rubble, death and misery there springs the greatest light we have ever known to guide us out of the darkness in which we’ve been forced to live. The light of our ancestors – from Palestine and Alkebulan to Turtle Island and Aotearoa.

    Gaza may well be our last chance to save humanity.

    If we allow the wheels of this genocidal Zionist engine to keep turning, there will be no more limits to fascism. There will be no shame or red lines before which they will halt.

    This struggle can no more be just about a ceasefire. It must demand liberation and accountability across our burning planet.

    Already they are using the tactics of brute force, violent intimidation, suspension and marginalization. They will attempt the same dismantlement, silencing and erasure they did with the Occupy Wall Street movement.

    They will offer half-baked promises with no teeth, enough to quiet matters long enough to adopt new strategies and enact new laws.

    If we stop they will adapt, and they will do so with artificial intelligence, against which we may well have no defenses, not for a long time to come. So beware of their concessions.

    Beware of victory that pulls us back into the lanes they made.

    We cannot allow Israeli genocide against a defenseless and captive indigenous population to become a whitewashed, declawed historic moment of before and after.

    We cannot leave the lawns and streets and courts and battlefields until Zionism is dismantled and Palestine is free.

    This moment belongs to the people. We can dream our own dreams and create a new world in every personal act of refusal to participate in this horrible system predicated on genocide and unending exploitation.

    Together we are powerful beyond our wildest imaginations. Compassion and defiance are our superpowers, and this is just our origin story.

    The youth are leading and showing us that the future is ours, if we dare to claim it.

    • First published in The Electronic Intifada

    The post Gaza is our moment of truth first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Two poems, four years in detention: the Chinese dissident who smuggled his writing out of prison

    My poems were written in anger after Tiananmen Square. But what motivates most prison writing is a fear of forgetting. Today I am free, but the regime has never stopped its war on words

    Most of my manuscripts are locked up in the filing cabinets of the ministry of security, and the agents there study and ponder them repeatedly, more carefully than the creator himself. The guys working this racket have superb memories; a certain chief of the Chengdu public security bureau can still recite the poems I published in an underground magazine in the 1980s. While the literati write nostalgically, hoping to go down in literary history, the real history may be locked in the vaults of the security department.

    The above is excerpted from my book June 4: My Testimony, published in Taiwan in 2011. I wrote that book three times, the later drafts on paper much better than the paper I used for writing in prison, which was so soft and brittle I had to write very lightly. Paper outside prison is solid and flexible enough that you don’t have to worry about puncturing it with the tip of a pen. Thus, I restrained myself and filled in a page of paper, and then how many thousand – ten thousand? More? How many ant-sized words can be packed on to a page? Who knows.

    On 10 October 1995, at two in the afternoon, three police cars carrying about a dozen special agents burst in on me. Everything was carried out in accordance with “legal procedures”, the officers’ IDs and search warrant were presented, the entire search process was meticulously videotaped, and all written matter in the house (including manuscripts, letters, and notes) was confiscated. And this included the very nearly completed draft of this testimony – more than 300,000 characters representing my painstaking efforts of the past year and a half.

    I was breathing normally, signed with a smile, and asked: “Should I bring clothes?” The answer: “No.” I was uneasy leaving my money and valuables at home as I prepared to be the guest of the state for a long time. The agents laughed.

    At 10 o’clock in the evening, I exited the Baiguolin police station in the Xicheng district of Chengdu and was politely told: “Don’t leave the city for the next month.” Thank God, my head was still on my shoulders and I could still write.

    I cursed my carelessness with the foulest language imaginable and set about rewriting with all my might. Without inspiration or passion, the pen slashed the paper to ribbons, and often I could only produce a few hundred words a day. Staring at the paper was useless, and cold sweat couldn’t solve my writer’s block. But I’d made a bet; I couldn’t admit defeat. I wanted to use this to validate my own stupid way of living as an insignificant individual – a bet with the world’s largest dictatorship – with writing materials, so that in future my kids won’t think their dad was just talking big.

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Virtual Home Invasions: We’re Not Safe from Government Peeping Toms

    The spirit of the Constitution, drafted by men who chafed against the heavy-handed tyranny of an imperial ruler, would suggest that one’s home is a fortress, safe from almost every kind of intrusion.

    Unfortunately, a collective assault by the government’s cabal of legislators, litigators, judges and militarized police has all but succeeded in reducing that fortress—and the Fourth Amendment alongside it—to a crumbling pile of rubble.

    We are no longer safe in our homes, not from the menace of a government and its army of Peeping Toms who are waging war on the last stronghold of privacy left to us as a free people.

    The weapons of this particular war on the privacy and sanctity of our homes are being wielded by the government and its army of bureaucratized, corporatized, militarized mercenaries.

    Government agents—with or without a warrant, with or without probable cause that criminal activity is afoot, and with or without the consent of the homeowner—are now justified in mounting virtual home invasions using surveillance technology—with or without the blessing of the courts—to invade one’s home with wiretaps, thermal imaging, surveillance cameras, aerial drones, and other monitoring devices.

    Just recently, in fact, the Michigan Supreme Court gave the government the green light to use warrantless aerial drone surveillance to snoop on citizens at home and spy on their private property.

    While the courts have given police significant leeway at times when it comes to physical intrusions into the privacy of one’s home (the toehold entry, the battering ram, the SWAT raid, the knock-and-talk conversation, etc.), the menace of such virtual intrusions on our Fourth Amendment rights has barely begun to be litigated, legislated and debated.

    Consequently, we now find ourselves in the unenviable position of being monitored, managed, corralled and controlled by technologies that answer to government and corporate rulers.

    Indeed, almost anything goes when it comes to all the ways in which the government can now invade your home and lay siege to your property.

    Consider that on any given day, the average American going about his daily business will be monitored, surveilled, spied on and tracked in more than 20 different ways, by both government and corporate eyes and ears.

    A byproduct of this surveillance age in which we live, whether you’re walking through a store, driving your car, checking email, or talking to friends and family on the phone, you can be sure that some government agency is listening in and tracking your behavior.

    This doesn’t even begin to touch on the corporate trackers that monitor your purchases, web browsing, Facebook posts and other activities taking place in the cyber sphere.

    Stingray devices mounted on police cars to warrantlessly track cell phones, Doppler radar devices that can detect human breathing and movement within in a home, license plate readers that can record up to 1800 license plates per minute, sidewalk and “public space” cameras coupled with facial recognition and behavior-sensing technology that lay the groundwork for police “pre-crime” programs, police body cameras that turn police officers into roving surveillance cameras, the internet of things: all of these technologies (and more) add up to a society in which there’s little room for indiscretions, imperfections, or acts of independence—especially not when the government can listen in on your phone calls, read your emails, monitor your driving habits, track your movements, scrutinize your purchases and peer through the walls of your home.

    Nowhere to run and nowhere to hide: this is the mantra of the architects of the Surveillance State and their corporate collaborators.

    Government eyes see your every move: what you read, how much you spend, where you go, with whom you interact, when you wake up in the morning, what you’re watching on television and reading on the internet.

    Every move you make is being monitored, mined for data, crunched, and tabulated in order to amass a profile of who you are, what makes you tick, and how best to control you when and if it becomes necessary to bring you in line.

    Cue the dawning of the Age of the Internet of Things (IoT).

    In the not-too-distant future, “just about every device you have—and even products like chairs, that you don’t normally expect to see technology in—will be connected and talking to each other.”

    It is estimated that 127 new IoT devices are connected to the web every second.

    These Internet-connected techno gadgets include smart light bulbs that discourage burglars by making your house look occupied, smart thermostats that regulate the temperature of your home based on your activities, and smart doorbells that let you see who is at your front door without leaving the comfort of your couch.

    Given the speed and trajectory at which these technologies are developing, it won’t be long before these devices become government informants, reporting independently on anything you might do that runs afoul of the Nanny State.

    Moreover, it’s not just our homes and personal devices that are being reordered and reimagined in this connected age: it’s our workplaces, our health systems, our government, our bodies and our innermost thoughts that are being plugged into a matrix over which we have no real control.

    It is expected that by 2030, we will all experience The Internet of Senses (IoS), enabled by Artificial Intelligence (AI), Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), 5G, and automation. The Internet of Senses relies on connected technology interacting with our senses of sight, sound, taste, smell, and touch by way of the brain as the user interface. As journalist Susan Fourtane explains, “Many predict that by 2030, the lines between thinking and doing will blur… By 2030, technology is set to respond to our thoughts, and even share them with others.”

    Once technology is able to access and act on your thoughts, not even your innermost thoughts will be safe from the Thought Police.

    Thus far, the public response to concerns about government surveillance has amounted to a collective shrug.

    Yet as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, when the government sees all and knows all and has an abundance of laws to render even the most seemingly upstanding citizen a criminal and lawbreaker, then the old adage that you’ve got nothing to worry about if you’ve got nothing to hide no longer applies.

    The post Virtual Home Invasions: We’re Not Safe from Government Peeping Toms first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Romney and Blinken Admit Tiktok Ban Sought to Censor Gaza News

    A discussion between U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Sen. Mitt Romney over the weekend included what one critic called an “incredible mask-off moment,” with the two officials speaking openly about the U.S. government’s long-term attempts to provide public relations work for Israel in defense of its policies in the occupied Palestinian territories — and its push to ban TikTok in order to…

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    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Why impact of Israel-Gaza war has become harder to document

    Israel’s surprise attack on Al-Shifa hospital in northern Gaza on March 18, and the two weeks of fighting that followed, resulted in hundreds of deaths and a trail of destruction. It also left a morass of contradictory information about exactly who was killed there, who was arrested, and who went missing.  

    As the Israel-Gaza war enters its eighth month, the verification of such information has slowed to a crawl. An unprecedented number of deaths, with more than 90 Palestinian journalists killed by Israeli forces since the start of the war, displacement, and censorship are all making it exponentially harder to confirm information about the conflict’s devastating impact on Gaza’s media community – and, by extension, about the broader impact of the war.

    “At the start of the war it would take us a day or two to verify information about a journalist who had been killed or injured,” said CPJ Program Director Carlos Martínez de la Serna. “Collecting and vetting this information is now taking us weeks or months, and in some cases won’t be possible at all.”

    More than six weeks after the Al-Shifa hospital attack, CPJ is still working to verify what happened to four people on the site who may have been journalists. Were they killed, did they go missing, or were they detained in the raid, and were they working as journalists at the time? Efforts to glean accurate information about these four have been obstructed by a communications blackout, conflicting accounts, and the near-total destruction of the Al-Shifa site, where evidence may be destroyed or buried under the rubble.

    One effect of this uncertainty is that the names of these journalists are not yet included in CPJ’s reports about other journalists held in the Al-Shifa attack – a stark illustration that the true casualty count may be much higher, and may not be known for months or even years.

    These constraints have become the norm in Gaza and, as the number of media workers in the region dwindles, pose fresh challenges to CPJ’s real-time documentation of the war’s toll on journalists.

    “Every bit of information we cannot access means the world loses more of its ability to understand what is happening in the war, how it has affected journalists and media workers, and who is specifically accountable,” said Mohamed Mandour, a researcher on the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) program.

    Devastating loss of local sources

    The decimation and displacement of Gaza’s media community, which was estimated to number at least 1,000 before the war, means that there are fewer and fewer local journalists left to provide details about the fate of their colleagues. As of May 6, at least 97 journalists and media workers had been killed in Gaza, Lebanon, and Israel since October 7, 2023, the vast majority (92) Palestinians killed in Israeli strikes. Others have been injured, fled into exile, and had their offices destroyed. 

    Those who died may have been directly targeted or victims of a broader attack, but with whole families killed in many instances, there are fewer survivors to provide information about the circumstances of a relative’s death. To date, CPJ has determined that at least three journalists were directly targeted by Israeli forces in killings which CPJ classifies as murders, but is still researching the details for confirmation in 10 other cases that indicate possible targeting. 

    More Israel-Gaza war coverage

    CPJ has been documenting the impact of the war’s impact on journalists since it began October 7, 2023, when Hamas launched an unprecedented surprise attack against Israel, which responded by declaring war on Hamas and launching airstrikes and a ground assault on Gaza. CPJ has also offered safety guides on war reporting, psychological safety, and advice for journalists arrested or detained. 

    * List of journalist casualties
    * 2023 report: War brings journalist killings to devastating high
    * Palestinian journalists detained by Israel in record numbers
    * Methodology
    * Full coverage

    “Imagine the amount of information we could have had if nearly 100 journalists had not been killed,” Mandour said. “Many journalists have also fled Gaza, some in urgent need of medical care that is not available, especially after the attacks on hospitals. Others fled to avoid being killed or injured, as there is no longer a safe space for journalists in Gaza, not even hospitals.”

    The overall scale of loss has made it harder for journalists to get the information they need to convey the full impact of the war. 

    Diaa Al-Kahlout, the Gaza bureau chief for Al-Araby Al-Jadeed, who recently told CPJ that he was tortured during 33 days in Israeli detention, said that the outside world “sees only 10% of the actual reality” in Gaza. “I used to be able to get all the news, and today, many significant stories haven’t been covered,” he said.

    Diaa Al-Kahlout, Gaza bureau chief for Al-Araby Al-Jadeed, recently told CPJ that he was tortured during 33 days in Israeli detention. (Photo: Courtesy of Diaa Al-Kahlout)

    In addition to journalists and their families, others who could have provided information about the situation for journalists are now dead, displaced, or injured. One of those injured and now in exile is Abdullah Al-Hajj, a photographer for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), who provided crucial drone imagery of war damage before he was severely injured in a February Israeli strike in which he lost both legs. Al-Hajj was being treated in Al-Shifa hospital when Israel raided it in March, but survived and was later evacuated to Qatar.

    More than 34,000 Palestinians are estimated to have been killed in the war, and an April 28 Wall Street Journal report notes that Gaza health authorities – a primary source of casualty data for institutions like the U.N. – say they can no longer provide an accurate count of the dead. 

    Precarious living conditions

    Another factor hampering access to information is that overstretched Gaza journalists are drained by the same dire shortages as other residents, struggling to find food, equipment, protective gear, and safe places to stay. “They are busy trying to save their own lives,” said Mandour.

    “The day-to-day includes a lot of uncertainty and unpredictability,” Hoda Osman, executive editor of Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism (ARIJ), told CPJ recently. “They have a home today, they might not have a home tomorrow. They have their family members with them today, they might lose them tomorrow. They themselves are alive today, they might be injured or killed tomorrow.”

    Absence of foreign journalists

    The near-total ban on international journalists allowed in Gaza further complicates the situation. In most conflicts, a rotating international press corps provides additional coverage and can help assist in documentation of threats to journalists.

    Before the war, many foreign press outlets had offices in Gaza, but those bureaus have been unable to operate effectively after many were damaged during Israeli attacks. Those hit included the building housing international news agency Agence France-Presse, which had been streaming live images of the war from a camera at the top of the building.

    Despite more than 4,000 international journalists coming to Israel to cover the war, the High Court in Israel upheld the IDF’s decision to prevent almost all foreign media from Gaza. The only exceptions are a handful of tightly controlled army-led press tours. 

    “With so many Palestinian journalists killed, in exile, or physically and psychologically depleted after months of reporting and living in a conflict zone, and no international media present within Gaza either, the process of finding credible sources to verify the facts on the ground has become increasingly difficult,” CPJ MENA Representative Doja Daoud said.

    For CPJ, this dearth of sources means that it is taking longer to investigate whether a victim meets the organization’s criteria for classification as a journalist and to ensure that CPJ researchers have more than one source confirming details of a situation involving members of the media.

    “We are trying to preserve the history of what’s happening to the journalists themselves and the increasingly difficult situation they are in,” said Daoud. “And we want to be fair to everyone who is a journalist or media worker by not adding anyone to the list who should not be there or by skipping anyone. Even if we must work more slowly, it is worth the wait.”

    Communications breakdowns

    Frequent communications blackouts and destruction of media equipment are further disrupting efforts to gather information about the war. CPJ researchers say that calls that do get through are plagued with background noise from constant drone flyovers, and voice messages can get lost in often-unreliable internet connections. Journalists’ vehicles, computers, phones, cameras, and other gear also have been destroyed in attacks. “At the start of the war, it was easy to call anyone in Gaza and hear back from them immediately. Now you are not sure when or if you’ll get a response,” Mandour said. “The drone attack on Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital was less damaging than at Al-Shifa, but many journalists still lost their phones and laptops so their ability to communicate was gone.”

    Deteriorating due process

    In the case of journalist arrests – most of which have happened in the Israeli-occupied West Bank – “we are finding it difficult to document arrests because even the lawyers for the journalists’ families don’t have access to the details,” said Ignacio Delgado Culebras, a consultant for CPJ’s MENA team. “Due process is failing because authorities can use administrative detention laws to put people behind bars without charging them or publicly disclosing evidence. It’s only over time we find out where they are held or whether there are any charges filed.” 

    In one of the cases CPJ is investigating, freelance journalist Hamza al-Safi was arrested in February, but his wife still doesn’t know the reason for his arrest or the charges he is facing. Al-Safi, who contributes to the Hamas-affiliated Quds News Network, the news website Al-Jarmaq News, and other outlets, was arrested at his house in the West Bank on February 9, according to news reports and his wife.

    Israel’s use of administrative detention, a practice in place before the onset of the war, has long been condemned by human rights groups and U.N. experts.

    Fear of retribution in multiple regions, perceptions of indifference

    Many sources are increasingly afraid to speak out. “People don’t want to be killed, attacked, or imprisoned by the authorities for echoing critical voices” whether those authorities are Hamas or Israel, Daoud said. 

    Daoud noted that this fear transcends borders as journalists in Israel, Lebanon, Jordan, and Egypt have all faced violence and censorship during the war: 

    • Israel raided and closed the Jerusalem office of Al-Jazeera after the Israeli cabinet voted on May 5 to shut down the broadcasts of the Qatar-based channel in Israel under a law that could also restrict other international outlets working in Israel if they are deemed to be a threat to the country’s security. Israeli journalists have said they fear expressing views critical of their country’s actions in the war. Some have been attacked by Israeli citizens while covering events. Military officials have also voiced concerns about government efforts to stifle reporting. 
    • In Lebanon, at least five journalists, who spoke to CPJ anonymously for fear of retribution, said they had been detained in the country while trying to document the war in the south. Others have faced online threats and investigations for being critical of the war.
    • In Jordan, journalists have been detained for reporting on the protests in front of the Israeli embassy in Amman. Charges of “impersonating a journalist” are being brought against journalists who aren’t members of the government-approved Press Syndicate. (Most practicing journalists are not in the syndicate.) Many journalists also tell CPJ they are facing threats but do not want to report them publicly.
    • Egypt has banned international and Egyptian journalists from entering Gaza through the Rafah border crossing. Additionally, when one of the few independent media outlets in Egypt, Mada Masr, reported on the effect of the Israel-Gaza war in Egypt, the Egyptian authorities banned Mada Masr’s website for six months and referred its editor-in-chief for prosecution.

    Perceptions of global indifference are also making people more cautious in providing information. “In the beginning of the war people were interested in exposing actions against journalists,” Mandour said. “Now everyone knows the international community has been ineffective in stopping media arrests and violence. They wonder why they should speak out if they are not getting any protection.”

    CPJ’s road to accountability

    CPJ believes that the decline in reporting – along with the war’s impact on the media – will continue if Israel is able to continue attacking and imprisoning journalists without consequence. “Deadly Pattern,” a CPJ investigation published in May 2023, found that Israel did not charge any soldiers for 20 journalist killings in over 22 years. 

    This pattern of impunity may be repeated in the current war, where it could become a playbook for repressive behavior in the Israel-Gaza region and elsewhere – endangering journalists and suppressing information needed to hold accountable those who kill, attack and imprison them for their work. 

    To help curb the threats to journalists and press for more information attacks against them, CPJ continues to conduct methodical research and to press both regional and global authorities to act on journalists’ behalf. Said Daoud: “We are keeping in mind that the road to accountability, to justice, to all of these court hearings and rulings and lawsuits is through our accurate documentation.”


    This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Why the media have failed Gaza

    [This is a transcript of my full speech for the Bristol Palestine Alliance’s March Against Media Bias at College Green, Bristol, on Saturday May 4.]

    Yesterday was World Press Freedom Day, and it is fitting we mark it by highlighting two things.

    First, we should honour the brave journalists of Gaza who have paid a horrifying price for making the Palestinian experience of genocide visible to western audiences over the past seven months.

    Israel has killed a tenth of their number – some 100 journalists – as it tries to prevent the truth of its atrocities from getting out. Israel’s has been most deadly eruption of violence against journalists ever recorded.

    Second, we must shame the western media – not least the BBC – who have so utterly betrayed their Palestinian colleagues by failing to properly report the destruction of Gaza, or name it as a genocide.

    The BBC aired only the briefest coverage of South Africa’s devastating case against Israel at the International Court of Justice in January – a case so powerful the court has put Israel on trial for genocide. A fact you would barely know from the BBC’s reporting.

    By contrast, the corporation cleared the schedules to present in full Israel’s hollow legal response.

    The BBC’s double standards are all the more glaring if we recall how it reported Ukraine, also invaded by a hostile army – Russia’s.

    Only two years ago the BBC dedicated its main news headlines to Kyiv’s citizens mass-producing molotov cocktails with which to greet Russian soldiers closing in on their city.

    BBC Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen felt emboldened to post – apparently approvingly – a diagram showing weak points where the improvised explosives would do most damage to Russian tanks, and the soldiers inside.

    Two years later, in its coverage of Israel’s assault on Gaza, the same BBC has performed a 180-degree turn.

    It is quite impossible to imagine Bowen or any other British journalist posting instructions on how Palestinians might burn alive Israeli soldiers in their tanks – even though those soldiers, unlike Russia’s, have been occupying and stealing Palestinian lands for decades, not two years.

    Israeli soldiers, unlike Russian soldiers, are now actively enforcing a genocidal policy of starvation.

    But the double standards of establishment media like the BBC aren’t directed only towards the people of Gaza. They are directed at us, the public, too.

    The same media that celebrated families taking in Ukrainian refugees has willingly conspired in the smearing of those whose only crime is that they wish to stop the slaughter of 15,000-plus Palestinian children in Gaza.

    There is apparently nothing heroic about opposing Israel’s genocide, even if opposing Russia’s invasion is still treated as a badge of honour.

    The media give politicians a free pass to vilify as an antisemite anyone outraged that UK weapons are being used to help kill, maim and orphan many, many tens of thousands of Palestinian children. That accusation assumes that every Jew supports this slaughter, and erases all those Jews standing alongside us today at this protest.

    In the US, police forces are beating and arresting students who have peacefully called on their universities to stop investing in the arming of Israel’s genocide. When the police pulled back at UCLA, it was only to allow pro-Israel thugs to assault the students – again many of them Jews.

    A clear war is being waged against the right to protest against a genocide. And in tandem, the media has declared a war on the English language.

    The roles of aggressor and victim have been reversed. The BBC accused the students, encamped on university grounds, of “clashing” with pro-Israel groups that invaded the campus to violently attack them.

    What explains these glaring inconsistencies, this gigantic failure by a media that’s supposed to act as a watchdog on the abuse of power.

    Part of the answer is old-school racism. Ukrainains look like us, as some reporters let slip, and therefore deserve our solidarity. Palestinians, it seems, do not.

    But there is another, more important answer. The establishment media isn’t really a watchdog on the abuse of power. It never was. It is a narrative factory, there to create stories that make those abuses of power possible.

    State and billionaire-owned media achieve this goal through various sleights of hand.

    First, they omit stories that might disrupt the core narrative.

    The media’s script is a simple one:

    What the West and its allies do is always well-meant, however horrific the outcomes.

    And what the West does, however provocative or foolhardy, can never be cited as an explanation for what our “enemies” do.

    No cause and no effect. They, whoever we select, are simply savage. They are evil. Theyare out to destroy civilisation. They must be stopped.

    Nightly for weeks, I have watched the BBC news. If it were all I relied on, I would barely know that Israel is daily bombing the refugee camps of Rafah that are supposedly a “safe zone”.

    Or that Israel continues to engineer a famine by blocking aid, and that Palestinians continue to die of hunger.

    Or that the UK has actively assisted the creation of that famine by denying UNRWA funding.

    Or that the protests to end the Gaza genocide – painted as terror-supporting and antisemitic – are backed by many, many Jews, some of them here today.

    And of course, I would have little idea that Israel’s imprisonment and slaughter of Palestinians did not begin on October 7 with Hamas’ attack.

    That’s because the BBC continues to ignore the siege of Gaza as the context for October 7 – just as it and the rest of the media largely ignored the 17-year siege throughout the years Israel was enforcing it.

    If I relied on the BBC, I would not understand that what Israel is doing can be neither “retaliation”, nor a “war”. You can’t go to war, or retaliate, against a people whose territory you have been belligerently occupying and stealing for decades.

    And when the media can no longer omit, it distracts – through strategies of deflection, misdirection and minimisation.

    So when Gaza makes the news, as it rarely does now, it is invariably filtered through other lenses.

    The focus is on interminable negotiations, on Israel’s plans for the “day after”, on the agonies of the hostages’ families, on the fears evoked by protest chants, on where to draw the line on free speech.

    Anything to avoid addressing a genocide that’s been carried out in broad daylight for seven months.

    In their defence, establishment journalists tell us that they have a duty to be impartial. Their critics, they say, do not understand how news operations work.

    As a journalist who spent years working in major newsrooms, I can assure you this is a self-serving lie.

    Just this week, an interview went viral of the Norway Broadcasting Corporation interviewing Israeli government spokesman David Mencer. Unlike on the BBC, Mencer’s lies did not pass unchallenged.

    The Norwegian journalist spent 25 minutes unpicking his falsehoods and deceptions, one by one. It was revelatory to see an Israeli spokesperson’s claims stripped away, layer by layer, until he stood there naked, his lies exposed.

    It can be done – if there is a will to do it.

    Journalists at the BBC and the rest of the establishment media understand, however implicitly, that their job is to fail. It is to fail to investigate the genocide in Gaza. It is to fail to give voice to the powerless. It is to fail to provide context and aid understanding. It is to fail to show solidarity with their colleagues in Gaza being killed for their journalism.

    Rather, the BBC’s role is to protect the political establishment from ever being held to account for their complicity in genocide.

    The establishment media’s job is to create the impression of uncertainty, of doubt, of confusion – even when what is happening is crystal clear.

    When one day, the World Court finally gets round to issuing a ruling on Israel’s genocide, our politicians and media will claim they could not have known, that they were misled, that they could not see clearly because events were shrouded by the “fog of war”.

    Our job is to explode that lie, to deny them an alibi. It is to keep pointing out that the information was there from the start. They knew, if only because we told them.

    And one day, if there is any justice, they will stand in the dock – at the Hague – their excuses stripped away.

    The post Why the media have failed Gaza first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Don’t Buy the Right-Wing Disinformation Campaign on “From the River to the Sea”

    The wave of pro-Palestinian protests sweeping American campuses was triggered by Columbia University President Minouche Shafik’s order to forcibly clear a peaceful encampment on April 18. Her decision came as a direct result of her grilling the previous day before a House committee in Washington investigating alleged antisemitism on U.S. campuses: At the hearing, she pledged to take action against…

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    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Number of writers jailed in China exceeds 100 for first time, says report

    Freedom to Write index says there are 107 people in prison for published content in China, with many accused of ‘picking quarrels’

    The number of writers jailed in China has surpassed 100, with nearly half imprisoned for online expression.

    The grim milestone is revealed in the 2023 Freedom to Write index, a report compiled by Pen America, published on Wednesday.

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Students Sue After CUNY Folds to Backlash Against Muslim Commencement Speakers

    In May 2023, months before the October 7 Hamas attacks would spark Israel’s gruesome retaliation against Gaza, Fatima Mousa Mohammed gave a fiery commencement speech at the graduation ceremony for the famously progressive law school at the City University of New York (CUNY). An immigrant from Yemen and the second Muslim woman elected by fellow students to speak at commencement…

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    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Warring Against Encryption: Australia is Coming for Your Communications

    On April 16, Australia’s eSafety commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, issued with authoritarian glee legal notices to X Corp and Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, to remove material within 24 hours depicting what her office declared to be “gratuitous or offensive violence with a high degree of impact and detail”.  The relevant material featured a livestreamed video of a stabbing attack by a 16-year-old youth at Sydney’s Assyrian Orthodox Christ the Good Shepherd Church the previous day.  Two churchmen, Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel and Rev. Isaac Royel, were injured.

    Those at X, and its executive, Elon Musk, begged to differ, choosing to restrict general access to the graphic details of the video in Australia alone.  Those outside Australia, and those with a virtual private network (VPN), would be able to access the video unimpeded.  Ruffled and irritated by this, Grant rushed to the Australian Federal Court to secure an interim injunction requiring X to hide the posts from global users with a hygiene notice of warning pending final determination of the issue.  While his feet and mind are rarely grounded, Musk was far from insensible in calling Grant a “censorship commissar” in “demanding *global* content bans”.  In court, the company will argue that Grant’s office has no authority to dictate what the online platform posts for global users.

    This war of grinding, nannying censorship – which is what it is – was the prelude for other agents of information control and paranoia to join the fray.  The Labour Albanese government, for instance, with support from the conservative opposition, have rounded on Musk, blurring issues of expression with matters of personality.  “This is an egotist,” fumed Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, “someone who’s totally out of touch with the values that Australian families have, and this is causing great distress.”

    The values game, always suspicious and meretricious, is also being played by law enforcement authorities.  It is precisely their newfound presence in this debate that should get members of the general public worried.  You are to be lectured to, deemed immature and incapable of exercising your rights or abide by your obligations as citizens of Australian society.

    We have the spluttering worries of Australian Police Commissioner Reece Kershaw in claiming that children (always handy to throw them in) and vulnerable groups (again, a convenient reference) are “being bewitched online by a cauldron of extremist poison on the open and dark web”.  These muddled words in his address to the National Press Club in Canberra are shots across the bow.  “The very nature of social media allows that extremist poison to spray across the globe almost instantaneously.”

    Importantly, Kershaw’s April 24 address has all the worrying signs of a heavy assault, not just on the content to be consumed on the internet, but on the way communications are shared.  And what better way to do so by using children as a policy crutch?  “We used to warn our children about stranger danger, but now we need to teach our kids about the digital-world deceivers.”  A matronly, slightly unhinged tone is unmistakable.  “We need to constantly reinforce that people are not always who they claim to be online; and that also applies to images and information.”  True, but the same goes for government officials and front-line politicians who make mendacity their stock and trade.

    Another sign of gathering storm clouds against the free sharing of information on technology platforms is the appearance of Australia’s domestic espionage agency, ASIO.  Alongside Kershaw at the National Press Club, the agency’s chief, Mike Burgess, is also full of grave words about the dangerous imperium of encrypted chatter.  There are a number of Australians, warns Burgess, who are using chat platforms “to communicate with offshore extremists, sharing vile propaganda, posting tips about homemade weapons and discussing how to provoke a race war”.

    The inevitable lament about obstacles and restrictions – the sorts of things to guard the general citizenry against encroachments of the police state – follows.  “ASIO’s ability to investigate is seriously compromised.  Obviously, we and our partners will do everything we can to prevent terrorism and sabotage, so we are expending significant resources to monitor the Australians involved.”  You may count yourselves amongst them, dear reader.

    Kershaw is likewise not a fan of the encrypted platform.  In the timeless language of paternal policing, anything that enables messages to be communicated in a public sense must first receive the state’s approval.  “We recognise the role that technologies like end-to-end encryption play in protecting personal data, privacy and cyber-security, but there is no absolute right to privacy.”

    To make that very point, Burgess declares that “having lawful and targeted access to extremist communications” would make matters so much easier for the intelligence and security community.  Naturally, it will be up to the government to designate what it deems to be extremist and appropriate, a task it is often ill-suited for.  Once the encryption key is broken, all communications will be fair game.

    When it comes to governments, authoritarian regimes do not have a monopoly on suspicion and the fixation on keeping populations in check.  In an idyll of ignorance, peace can reign among the docile, the unquestioning, the cerebrally inactive.  The Australian approach to censorship and control, stemming from its origins as a tortured penal outpost of the British Empire, is drearily lengthy.  Its attitude to the Internet has been one of suspicion, concern, and complexes.

    Government ministers in the antipodes see a world, not of mature participants searching for information, but inspired terrorists, active paedophiles and noisy extremists carousing in shadows and catching the unsuspecting.  Such officialdom is represented by such figures as former Labor Communications Minister Stephen Conroy, who thankfully failed to introduce a mandatory internet filter when in office, or such nasty products of regulatory intrusion as the Commonwealth Online Safety Act of 2021, zealously overseen by Commissar Grant and the subject of Musk’s ire.

    The age of the internet and the world wide web is something to admire and loathe.  Surveillance capitalism is very much of the loathsome, sinister variety.  But ASIO, the Australian Federal Police, and the Australian government and other agencies do not give a fig about that.  The tech giants have actually corroded privacy in commodifying data but many still retain stubborn residual reminders of liberty in the form of encrypted communications and platforms for discussion.  To have access to these means of public endeavour remains the holy grail of law enforcement officers, government bureaucrats and fearful politicians the world over.

    The post Warring Against Encryption: Australia is Coming for Your Communications first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Australian journalist Avani Dias leaves India over visa delay, censorship

    New Delhi, April 23, 2024—Indian authorities should safeguard press freedom and stop using visa regulations to prevent foreign journalists covering sensitive subjects, the Committee to Protect Journalists said Tuesday.

    Avani Dias, South Asia bureau chief for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), left India on April 19, the first day of India’s election, after being told by a Ministry of External Affairs official that her visa extension would be denied because her reporting had “crossed a line,” according to multiple news reports.

    “We were also told my election accreditation would not come through because of an Indian ministry directive,” Dias, who had been based in India since 2022, posted on X, formerly Twitter, on Tuesday.

    Dias said that she was granted a two-month visa extension, following an Australian government intervention, less than 24 hours before her flight was due to leave.

    In March, ABC broadcast a documentary by Dias on the June 2023 killing in Canada of Sikh separatist Hardeep Singh Nijjar, who was a Canadian citizen. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said there were “credible allegations” that India was involved in the Sikh leader’s shooting, which India dismissed as “absurd.”

    After receiving a demand from India’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, YouTube blocked access in India to Dias’ report, as well as an ABC news segment about Australian national security agents meeting with Sikh activists in Australia regarding Nijjar’s death, ABC said.

    “The case of ABC journalist Avani Dias is not an isolated incident. Foreign correspondents in India have faced increasing pressure and harassment from authorities, particularly when reporting on topics deemed unfavorable to the administration. Such actions not only infringe upon the rights of journalists but also deprive the public of access to important information and diverse perspectives,” said Kunāl Majumder, CPJ’s India representative.

    “The Indian government must respect the fundamental principles of press freedom, refrain from retaliating against journalists for their reporting, and foster an environment for independent journalism. Visa regulations should not be used to censor or intimidate the media.”  

    Late Tuesday, an unnamed government source told NDTV that Dias’ account of her departure was “not correct, misleading and mischievous.” The official was quoted as saying, “Dias was found to have violated visa rules while undertaking her professional pursuits,” without providing further details. 

    Dias’ reports were blocked under India’s Information Technology Act, which was also used in March to block access on YouTube in India to a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation documentary featuring footage of Nijjar’s killing and in April to block prominent Hindi language news channels Bolta Hindustan and National Dastak without explanation.

    In the last decade, journalists in India have faced an increasingly difficult environment, with critical websites censored, the departure of prominent editors, and independent outlets bought by politically-connected conglomerates, while divisive content has grown in popularity. India had the most video takedowns globally from October to December 2023, with over 2 million YouTube videos removed. 

    From April 19 until June 1, Indians are voting in a general election, which the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who has been in power since 2014, is expected to win. Journalists told CPJ they were concerned about political violence, trolling, and device hacking.

    Dias is the second foreign correspondent to leave India this year due to visa problems, following French journalist Vanessa Dougnac.

    India’s Ministry of External Affairs did not immediately respond to CPJ’s email seeking comment on Dias’ departure.


    This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Censorship Wars: Elon Musk, Safety Commissioners and Violent Content

    The attitudes down under towards social media have turned barmy.  While there is much to take Elon Musk to task for his wrecking ball antics at the platform formerly known as Twitter, not to mention his highly developed sense of sociopathy, the hysteria regarding the refusal to remove images of a man in holy orders being attacked by his assailant in Sydney suggests a lengthy couch session is in order.  But more than that, it suggests that the censoring types are trying, more than ever, to tell users what to see and under what conditions for fear that we will all reach for a weapon and go on the rampage.

    It all stems from the April 15 incident that took place at an Assyrian Orthodox service conducted by Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel and the Rev. Isaac Royel at Christ the Good Shepherd Church in Wakeley, Sydney.  A 16-year-old youth, captured on the livestream of the surface, is shown heading to the bishop before feverishly stabbing him, speaking Arabic about insults to the Prophet Muhammed as he does so.  Rev. Royel also received injuries.

    Up to 600 people subsequently gathered around the church.  A number demanded that police surrender the boy.  In the hours of rioting that followed, 51 police officers were injured.  Various Sydney mosques received death threats.

    The matter – dramatic, violent, raging – rattled the authorities.  For the sake of appearance, the heavies, including counter-terrorism personnel, New South Wales police and members of the Australian domestic spy agency, ASIO, were brought in.  The pudding was ready for a severe overegging.  On April 16, the NSW Police Commissioner Karen Webb deemed the stabbing a “terrorist incident”.  NSW Premier Chris Minns stated that the incident was being investigated as a “terrorist incident” given the “religiously motivated” language used during the alleged attack.

    After conducting interviews with the boy while still in his hospital bed on April 18, the decision was made to charge him with the commission of an alleged act of terrorism.  This, despite a behavioural history consistent with, as The Guardian reports, “mental illness or intellectual disability.”  For their part, the boy’s family noted “anger management and behavioural issues” along with his “short fuse”, none of which lent themselves to a conclusion that he had been radicalised.  He did, however, have a past with knife crime.

    Assuming the general public to be a hive of incipient terrorism easily stimulated by images of violence, networks and media outlets across the country chose to crop the video stream.  The youth is merely shown approaching the bishop, at which point he raises his hand and is editorially frozen in suspended time.

    Taking this approach implied a certain mystification that arises from tampering and redacting material in the name of decency and inoffensiveness; to refuse to reveal such details and edit others, the authorities and information guardians were making their moralistic mark.  They were also, ironically enough, lending themselves to accusations of the very problems they seek to combat: misinformation and its more sinister sibling, disinformation.

    Another telling point was the broader omission in most press reporting to detail the general background of the bishop in question.  Emmanuel is an almost comically conservative churchman, a figure excommunicated for his theological differences with orthodoxy.  He has also adopted fire and brimstone views against homosexuality, seeing it as a “crime in the eyes of God”, attacked other religions of the book, including Judaism and Islam, and sees global conspiracies behind the transmission of COVID-19.  Hardly, it would seem, the paragon of mild tolerance and calm acceptance in a cosmopolitan society.

    On April 16, Australia’s eSafety commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, got busy, announcing that X Corp and Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, had been issued with legal notices to remove material within 24 hours depicting “gratuitous or offensive violence with a high degree of impact and detail”.  The material in question featured the attack at the Good Shepherd Church.

    Under the Online Safety Act 2021 (Cth), the commissioner is granted various powers to make sure the sheep do not stray.  Internet service providers can be requested or required to block access to material that promotes abhorrent violent conduct, incites such conduct, instructs in abhorrent violent conduct or depicts abhorrent violent conduct.  Removal of material promoting, instructing, or depicting such “abhorrent violent conduct”, including “terrorist acts” can be ordered for removal if it risks going “viral” and causing “significant harm to the Australian community”.

    X took a different route, preferring to “geoblock” the content.  Those in Australia, in other words, would not be able to access the content except via such alternative means as a virtual private network (VPN).  The measure was regarded as insufficient by the commissioner.  In response, a shirty Musk dubbed Grant Australia’s “censorship commissar” who was “demanding *global* content bans”.  On April 21, a spokesperson for X stated that the commissioner lacked “the authority to dictate what content X’s users can see globally.  We will robustly challenge this unlawful and dangerous approach in court.”

    In court, the commissioner argued that X’s interim measure not to delete the material but “geoblock” it failed to comply with the Online Safety Act.  Siding with her at first instance, the court’s interim injunction requires X to hide the posts in question from all users globally.  A warning notice is to cover them. The two-day injunction gives X the opportunity to respond.

    There is something risible in all of this.  From the side of the authorities, Grant berates and intrudes, treating the common citizenry as malleable, immature and easily led.  Spare them the graphic images – she and members of her office decide what is “abhorrent” and “offensive” to general sensibilities.

    Platforms such as Meta and X engage in their own forms of censorship and information curation, their agenda algorithmically driven towards noise, shock and indignation.  All the time, they continue to indulge in surveillance capitalism, a corporate phenomenon the Australian government shows little interest in battling.  On both sides of this coin, from the bratty, petulant Musk, to the teacherly manners of the eSafety Commissioner, the great public is being mocked and infantilised.

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  • Students Sue Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders for Silencing Black History

    Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, is perhaps best known for the “Little Rock Nine,” the first Black students to walk through the school’s grand front doors. The year was 1957, three years after the Supreme Court declared racial segregation of public schools unconstitutional, and the gears of change were grinding to a halt. After the Supreme Court’s 1954 ruling in Brown v.

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    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • CPJ, others warn against censorship attempt from former Brazilian attorney general

    The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) joined eight other press freedom organizations in an April 19 statement urging the Brazilian Supreme Court to dismiss the case against journalist André Barrocal filed by former attorney general Augusto Aras.

    Aras filed a defamation case against Barrocal in response to the reporter’s July 2020 article about Aras’s performance, which was published in Carta Capital Magazine. The Superior Court of Justice (STJ) rejected the case, and Aras has now appealed to the Federal Supreme Court (STF).

    The signatory press freedom organizations trust that the Federal Supreme Court will reject this unfounded attempt to silence public criticism and criminalize journalism in Brazil.

    Read the joint statement here.


    This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Israeli Police Arrest Renowned Feminist Scholar Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian

    Israeli police arrested the internationally renowned feminist Palestinian academic Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian at her home in Jerusalem on Thursday on charges of incitement to violence. Shalhoub-Kevorkian, who holds both Israeli and U.S. citizenship, was suspended by Hebrew University last month after saying in an interview Israel was committing genocide in Gaza, though the university later…

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  • Germany buries the evidence of complicity in genocide: Nicaragua exposes it

    Last Thursday, Dr Ghassan Abu-Sittah, the British-Palestinian war surgeon, gave his first address as the newly-appointed rector of Glasgow University, chosen in recognition of his work at al-Shifa hospital in Gaza. The following day he flew to Berlin, where he had been invited to address a major conference about Palestine. On arrival he was taken away by police, interrogated for several hours and eventually told he had to leave Germany and wouldn’t be allowed to return until at least the end of April. Any attempt to speak to the conference via Zoom could result in a fine or even a year’s prison sentence. By the time he was released he couldn’t have taken part in the conference anyway, since it had been already invaded by at least 900 police and closed down. Berlin’s mayor said that it was ‘intolerable’ that the conference was taking place at all.

    Speaking about his experience afterwards, Dr Abu-Sittah referred to the fact that Germany had – also last week – been defending itself at the International Court of Justice against charges by Nicaragua that it is an accomplice to genocidal war. ‘This is exactly what accomplices to a crime do’ he said. ‘They bury the evidence and they silence or harass or intimidate the witnesses’.

    Watching the live feed of Germany’s lawyers at the Hague a few days earlier had been an odd experience. They gave the impression of being affronted that Germany had been accused of such crimes, especially by a small country which, they argued, had no stake in the case. Also, Israel could not yet be said to be committing genocide, because the ICJ has not yet determined the case brought against it by South Africa, which Germany had supported Israel in contesting. Because Israel was not party to the new case, it should simply be thrown out.

    Some research might have given them a better appreciation of Nicaragua’s credentials to bring the case. Its mutual solidarity with Palestine goes back a long way. It also has more experience at the Hague than Germany, including its pioneer action against the US in 1984, when it won compensation of £17 billion (that was never paid) for the damage done to Nicaragua by the US-funded Contra war and the mining of its ports. Carlos Argüello, who led the case last week and many of its previous cases, said that Nicaragua offered its expertise to Palestine and it had already joined in with South Africa’s action. It had decided to target Germany, the second biggest supplier of arms to Israel, because the US, the biggest supplier, is outside the court’s jurisdiction on this issue.

    Argüello explains that the object is to create a precedent with wider application – that countries must take responsibility for the consequences of their arms sales to avoid them being used in breach of international law. Germany’s argument that legal action cannot proceed before South Africa’s earlier case is resolved is nonsense, since countries have an obligation to prevent genocide, not merely wait until it is proven to be happening. In any case, Germany must have been aware of the numerous warnings from senior UN officials of the imminence of genocide in Gaza, which began as early as October 9th.

    Germany claimed that it has a “robust legal framework” in place to ensure its arms exports are not misused, and that sales to Israel are now restricted to non-lethal equipment. But any supplies being sent to a genocidal army are helping to sustain its criminal actions, Nicaragua replied.

    Much was made of Germany’s historic obligations due to its Nazi history, but Argüello argues that these should relate to the Jewish people, not the Israeli state. He adds that Germany’s past might also oblige it to help prevent genocide wherever it might occur. Its government spokesman on the South Africa case had claimed that Germany is ‘particularly committed to the Genocide Convention’.

    The economist Yanis Varoufakis was also banned from speaking in Berlin. He planned to conclude his speech by telling German politicians that ‘they have covered themselves in shame’ through their unflinching support for Israel’s atrocities. Carlos Argüello echoes this point when asked whether a decision by the ICJ can actually be enforced: we have to mobilise shame, he says, ‘…that’s the hope with this. Perhaps being too idealistic, but it’s the only weapon we have’.

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  • University of Southern California Cancels Muslim Valedictorian’s Speech

    In a decision that the largest U.S. Muslim civil rights organization called “cowardly,” the University of Southern California announced Monday that it would not allow a Muslim valedictorian to speak at its commencement ceremony, citing safety concerns. USC’s 2024 valedictorian, Asna Tabassum, is a first-generation South Asian Muslim student majoring in biomedical engineering with a minor in…

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    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.