Just relistened to an interview with Mariam Barghouti from the end of October about media bias. Many interesting points. Many have been well discussed in the month since.
Western media is complicit in Israel's "slaughter" in the "blackout", the "active refusal" to feature Palestinian voices.
In Western media, Palestinians, if featured at all, are dehumanised as either "dead bodies or terrorists". We are only hearing about Palestinians at all now because of what happened to Israel, but the difficulties faced by Palestinians are longstanding.
No Western news agency sent their senior people to talk to Palestinians until after October 7, and even then the Israeli stories took priority. People should hear both sides of a story so they can make their own choices.
On social media censorship: platforms like Meta take down/ censor what Palestinians are saying about settler violence/ murders of Palestinians and there is no accountability for the settlers. These accounts of what is being done are being erased. Are these not part of ethnic cleansing? “I am on the street being shot at [while her posts were censored in real time]…if I die right now no-one’s going to hear anything, no-one's going to know.”
Because people are aware of the failures of mainstream media through this conflict, it will become less relevant.
Why is the world afraid of Palestine being free?
The history of western imperialism and colonialism is also about the control of information and knowledge. It's the rhetoric of “We are the children of light. We are civilising the 'savages'”.
The worldwide street protests have required people to go against what they have been taught, they have caused a dissonance with themselves. People have lost friends, families, jobs, because others don't have that same recognition.
Aid agencies from the Global North act as though Palestine has suffered some natural disaster. They keep them alive enough that they're not dying but weak enough that they're not really able to pursue life. So they are colonial in essence, complicit in keeping Palestinians entrapped. They receive funding to persuade themselves that they're helping but it's really just the alleviation of colonial guilt. They don't address the root problem [the politics].
Gaza is not a humanitarian crisis, as if it's a natural disaster. It's a political crisis, "a crisis of justice".
Interesting 2015 interview with the young Mariam Barghouti
About the family.
The New Humanitarian was founded by the United Nations in 1995 and became an independent non-profit news organization in January 2015. The organization is governed by Swiss law. It is left of centre with a good fact check record.
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