Movement media must continue to fight for Palestinian liberation and against censorship

This story originally appeared in Prism and Truthout on Oct. 7, 2024 as part of the Movement Media Alliance’s Media Against Apartheid & Displacement (MAAD).

A bill currently making its way through Congress could kill independent media outlets like ours. 

HR 9495 is a bipartisan piece of legislation, ostensibly about allowing U.S. nationals wrongfully detained abroad to postpone their tax deadlines. The bill sounds relatively innocuous. But the legislation also includes the text of another bill that made it through the House earlier this spring that gives the Treasury secretary the ability to designate a nonprofit a “terrorist supporting organization” and strip them of their tax-exempt status.

That kind of sweeping jurisdiction should terrify anyone who cares about civil liberties. It should also especially concern readers of nonprofit media, since a bill like HR 9495 can have compounding effects. Some outlets might self-censor; organizations might spend limited funds and time defending themselves from any old hateful threat that comes their way; and donations might dry up as funders worry about whether they too could face penalties. The “terror” label is already all-powerful; it can freeze assets and spark investigations. And this bill creates a whole new category—that of the “terrorist supporting organization”—one that can poison by association alone.

HR 9495 treads on territory that’s all too familiar. It’s no secret that Muslim, Arab, and Middle Eastern groups are more likely to be painted as “terrorist supporters.” There are already indications that this bill targets specific organizations, such as American Muslims for Palestine, who have recently been on the receiving end of lawmaker vitriol and smears. Turning lawmakers’ hateful accusations into a legal framework to threaten nonprofits is unacceptable.

One could make any number of critiques of this bill. It puts a truly terrifying amount of power in the hands of a political appointee, who could easily weaponize it against any enemy of their choosing. It’s likely unconstitutional. It’s also redundant–providing material support to organizations on the U.S. list of foreign terror organizations is already illegal under existing legislation. 

When you look beyond this specific provision, it’s clear that HR 9495 is yet another piece of lawfare in the wider war to suffocate the Palestine solidarity movement, as well as any meaningful news coverage that could help sustain it. That movement has become more vocal as Israel’s current genocide reaches its one-year mark and more than 41,000 Palestinians are confirmed to have been killed by Israel in Gaza. (Some researchers estimate the death toll could end up being closer to 186,000.) This violence has been fueled by the U.S. political establishment. But rather than doing anything to cleanse their hands of the blood, members of Congress have instead tried to suppress information about the death count. 

Prism and Truthout have reported over the past year on the fascistic repression we have seen against both speech and collective action. Some of the ways mainstream media bosses quell dissent within their newsrooms is through the repression, firing, and systematic shunning of the journalists accurately reporting on the genocide and the marginalization of Palestinian-American and Muslim journalists who are censored or hindered from doing their jobs because of their identities. In an op-ed published across multiple movement media outlets, a collective of movement journalists wrote:

On U.S. soil, journalists and media makers are being fired or pushed out of the profession for their advocacy. Jewish journalist Emily Wilder was fired from the Associated Press (AP) in 2021 after conservative activists targeted her for pro-Palestinian social media posts written prior to her employment with the AP. In 2022, The New York Times fired Palestinian journalist Hosam Salem in Gaza, citing his personal Facebook page that he used to speak out against the occupation he lives under. Multiple journalists have also resigned or canceled contracts with The New York Times in part because of its Gaza coverage, and in late October, Artforum fired editor-in-chief David Velasco for his participation in an open letter supporting Palestinian liberation. eLife editor-in-chief Michael Eisen was fired in October for retweeting an article from the satirical paper The Onion. These acts go hand in hand with the recent cancellation of campus groups at Brandeis University and Columbia University that are critical of the Israeli occupation and siege in Gaza.

These threats of censorship are worldwide. Online, companies like Meta systematically suppress news from and about Palestinians. In Germany, chanting “from the river to the sea” can land you in court; anyone who uses the phrase on social media can be denied citizenship. In the U.K., journalists and activists already face charges under legislation known as the Terrorism Act 2000 that human rights groups call vague and overly broad. 

But nowhere is the threat to Palestinians—and anyone who wants to tell the truth about Israeli aggression—greater than in Palestine. Media workers make up a small fraction of the number of Palestinians killed in Israel’s genocide—at least 130 of them in Gaza since last October, but experts say they have been deliberately targeted alongside medical and aid workers. 

This includes several Al Jazeera journalists as Israel tries to stop one of the few media organizations willing and able to broadcast the truth about Palestine, from Palestine. Baseless “terror” accusations often accompany the killing of journalists. Earlier this year when Israel assassinated Ismail Al-Ghoul–one of the last to report from Gaza’s north–the drone strike was so severe that it decapitated the Al Jazeera journalist. Afterward, an official Israeli military social media account boasted about his death. “ELIMINATED,” the post said, while also baselessly smearing Al-Ghoul as a terrorist. 

Death is the most extreme consequence of this unfounded, wildly racist terror labeling. But it’s not the only way journalism is silenced. The Knesset justified kicking Al Jazeera out of Israel earlier this year by citing concerns over state security. Israel then expanded its reach into the occupied West Bank, raiding Al Jazeera’s offices there, too. Journalists continued to broadcast with guns trained on them, and bureau chief Walid al-Omari narrated the raid as an Israeli soldier’s hand covered the camera lens. According to al-Omari, the military order accused Al Jazeera of “incitement to and support of terrorism.”

This terror framing and the threat of censorship that accompanies it is nothing new. Its fever pitch was mostly during the early 2000s when the mainstream press happily marched along to the beat of war drums pounded by George W. Bush’s lackeys (some of whom now maintain plum positions in the crumbling journalism industry, a tragedy of its own). 

But the roots of this dangerous behavior go even further back. “Terrorism” made its first appearance in a federal statute back in 1969 when Congress required the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) that provides aid to Palestinian refugees to deny assistance to “any refugee who is receiving military training as a member of the so-called Palestine Liberation Army … or who has engaged in any act of terrorism.” The “terror” framing has always been steeped in anti-Palestinian racism. Now, decades later, it has spread to become a linchpin of our world order.

Where has this all-encompassing “terror” fiction taken us? Tens of millions of people have been displaced and around 4.5 million people have died, directly or indirectly, thanks to the post-9/11 wars. But the last year has unleashed unimaginable levels of violence.

In Gaza, Israel has killed 2,100 infants and toddlers in its genocide. Earlier this month when Israel dropped dozens of 2,000-pound bombs on a residential neighborhood in Lebanon, the U.S. framed the assassination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah as a “measure of justice.” In the West Bank, soldiers lay siege on entire cities and accompanied settlers on murderous rampages to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from their villages. And Israel kills international observers who dare demonstrate their solidarity. Military officials and members of the U.S. political establishment justify these actions by invoking a bogeyman of “terror.”

Universities in Gaza are reduced to rubble. Universities in the West Bank are subject to military raids while their scholars languish in solitary confinement. And universities in the U.S. purchase drones and rifles for police crackdowns on campus protests. 

As those protests continue, unbowed by guns and threats of expulsion or arrest, the state tries new methods to cast aspersions on students’ righteous indignation. Security officials make specious claims tying the protests to Iran. Elected officials say protesters are in the service of Russia and China. They can never imagine or admit that the actual threat to their violent status quo isn’t some foreign plot, but the determined empathy of the people they purportedly represent. 

When claims from the Biden administration aren’t baseless, they’re downright absurd. Israel is “escalating to de-escalate.” The mind-numbing phrase “defensive weaponry” has entered the lexicon. And when it comes to defense, Biden administration officials essentially say only one side has the right to it. 

And then, rather than questioning these claims, or doing anything else that might hold Israeli or American power to account, most Western corporate media outlets instead run cover for the state. The institutions doing the necessary, unsettling, and bureaucratic work of keeping count of the dead become “Hamas-run ministries.” Neighborhoods become “Hezbollah strongholds.” Invasions are “ground maneuvers,” while genocide, ethnic cleansing, and occupation are erased from style guides. 

A recent piece at In These Times republishing the work of June Jordan and Toni Morrison and featuring an introduction by In These Times print editor Sherell Barbee discusses the power of our voices and the need for coalition-building. As Barbee notes, “A freedom struggle is being waged, and fascism feeds on silence.” Systems of oppression are maintained by silence, the obfuscation of information, and the amplification of voices of occupation and imperialism. And as noted in an op-ed published by Prism, “The U.S. commits atrocities across the globe and calls it freedom. The rest of the Western world bows to the U.S., and together, these Western nation-states, with Israel as their creation, dictate who is worthy of humanity and who isn’t. And the U.S. media largely falls in line.” It’s up to movement journalists and Media Against Apartheid and Displacement to fight back against these injustices. 

It is not enough during such grave horrors to simply change the conversation. Nothing will ever be enough until we see real freedom for Palestine and beyond. As our colleagues in Palestine face down arrest, repression, and the barrels of many guns, they continue to hold power to account in service of liberation for their people. We’ll maintain our solidarity with them. No threat of censorship can change that. 

News organizations accept broad censorship guidelines from the Israeli government. Press embed with the Israeli military as they attack everywhere from Gaza to Yemen, in pitiful displays of access journalism. Debunked claims about babies beheaded on Oct. 7 are never corrected for the world to see, while real videos of decapitated Palestinian children in Gaza get little to no mention. The disingenuous Israeli claims about Hamas using “human shields” are repeated to no end, but when Israel is on the other end of a missile, reporters are quick to point out the military infrastructure located in densely populated Tel Aviv without a whiff of irony. The longstanding disregard for Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim life has never been so visible, open, and normalized.

From the earliest days of Israel’s genocide, it was clear that the media would manufacture consent for whatever would come next. Last November, the newly formed Movement Media Alliance convened and decided to build a crucial resource to push back against censorship of movements for liberation and how mainstream media manufactures consent for Israeli colonial expansion and genocide. 

We built Media Against Apartheid and Displacement (MAAD), a website to provide readers with articles from trustworthy, accurate, and independent sources reporting on the colonization and occupation of Palestine, the genocide in Gaza, the U.S. and Western backing of Israel, and the movements fighting for Palestinian liberation. As our work expanded this year so too did the number of organizations and outlets who joined MAAD, which now include Prism, Truthout, In These Times, Mondoweiss, Palestine Square, Haymarket Books, The Real News Network, The Forge, Waging Nonviolence, The Dig, The Kansas City Defender, Briarpatch magazine, Baltimore Beat, Hammer & Hope, Scalawag, Convergence Magazine, The Public Source, The Objective, The Polis Project, and Analyst News.

Coming together as a collective of media-makers under a common mission is unprecedented, but it is a necessary endeavor. As Truthout noted, corporate media has spent many decades denying Palestinians’ humanity, both implicitly and explicitly, by deploying the mainstream myth of “objectivity” to silence Palestinian journalists. 

While it seems like we’re on the precipice of some fresh, unimaginable horror each day, none of this is new–not Israel’s expansionist aggression that has lasted for more than 75 years, not the attacks on solidarity activists, and not the targeting of media outlets for performing the most basic functions of a free press. Those of us in Media Against Apartheid and Displacement have long known that our own freedom is intimately tied to the liberation of Palestine.