A blind eye and a blood stain: Western media's complicity from Iraq to Gaza

On April 8 2003, Palestinian reporter Tareq Ayyoub was reporting for Al Jazeera on the US invasion of Iraq when he was killed by two US missiles which struck the network headquarters in Baghdad.

The station was clearly marked as a media centre, and the US military had been informed of its location.

On the same day, the Abu Dhabi TV station was also hit in a different area of Baghdad, and a US tank fired shells at the Palestine Hotel, where most of the foreign journalists were staying. Journalists Taras Protsyuk of Reuters and Jose Couso of the Spanish network Telecinco were killed.

A total of three locations housing journalists in Baghdad were targeted and fired upon by US forces that day.

Echoing recent Israeli army statements in light of the mass murder of Palestinian journalists in Gaza, which have stated that "Gaza is not a safe place. You should not be there," at the end of that bloody day in Iraq, then-Pentagon spokesperson Victoria Clarke warned that Baghdad "is not a safe place. You should not be there."

The assault on Gaza since October 7 2023 has the dubious record of being the deadliest for media professionals since the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) began keeping records more than thirty years ago, deadlier even than Iraq which had set its own macabre record.

A report from July 2024 by the Gaza government media office puts the number of Palestinian journalists killed at 165.

By way of comparison, 68 journalists and media workers were killed worldwide in all of 2022.

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) have said that media workers are being deliberately targeted, a concern echoed by the CPJ, The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), and the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate (PJS). Let there be no confusion — this is an assault on journalism. This is a war on truth.

And it isn’t just journalists. Poets, writers, influencers, and medical professionals have been targeted in an attempt to control the narrative and erase the reality of enduring decades-old Palestinian ethnic cleansing.

Manufacturing consent

In The Question of Palestine (1979), Palestinian intellectual Edward Said wrote, "The creation of Israel was not merely a geopolitical manoeuvre but a calculated effort to ensure Western dominance in the Middle East, with Israel serving as a strategic base for American interests."

Once Israel is resituated as a US outpost in the Middle East, we are freed from the charade of US accountability of Israel and can interpret Israeli actions in line with the norms that America has previously set in the region, most notably in Iraq, but also in Syria where the arming of rogue gangs, currently underway in Gaza, served as a reckless and ultimately dangerous strategy for destabilising the Assad regime.

The parallels with the US attacks on journalists in Iraq are striking. Then as now, journalists are targeted for providing information which runs counter to official propaganda by the US and its satellite.

As ever, Western journalists, often the first to — rightfully — question official narratives in the Global South, seem at best incapable of deciphering their own government’s spin, or wilfully complicity in its reproduction.

Either way, the mass failure to report fairly, accurately or contextually on the latest chapter in the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians is perhaps the final nail in the coffin for younger audiences’s trust in the mainstream media (MSM), which has long been waning. Who needs a 'counter voice' to months of videos of injured children screaming out from under the rubble?

As each red line is crossed, from international law to human rights, the protection of health workers and journalists, the free pass being offered to Israel has simultaneously eroded not only the US standing in the world but trust in an international system of laws and cooperation designed to avoid the reproduction of some of the worst chapters of global history.

We have degraded the entire system of international law and order for Israel. Surely the question every journalist must be asking is, why? And yet.

As journalists, our failure to speak up for our colleagues and protect them in their times of need has ensured that the very profession has become more dangerous for us all, especially for those in frontline reporting situations. What to say to terrorists who kidnap and torture journalists now? It’s what America’s greatest ally does – and the most 'moral' army on earth.

A former colleague of mine, Al Jazeera English correspondent from Gaza Youmna el Sayed has spoken out about the cowardice of so many Western colleagues to speak up about the truth on the ground. 

As she points out, international journalists and media organisations have not fought enough for access to Gaza.

The BBC has often called the ongoing conflict ‘complex’. But as some of my braver colleagues have pointed out, it is no more complex than any other conflict.

It is our job as journalists to cut through rhetoric and misinformation; to explain what is happening and what has led to this — that is literally the mandate. In no other conflict have I personally witnessed the levels of deliberate obfuscation of the truth as I have seen on the Israeli assault on Gaza by colleagues, by journalists whose literal job is to cut through the spin. 

It is a shameful indictment of the deep corruption of our institutions of accountability and a key pillar of any functioning democracy that only a few in the press observe the enduring failure to report on Gaza accurately.

For the rare colleagues who have dared to confront Israeli spin, swift and severe penalties have ensued.

Belle Donati at Sky disappeared from screen after her interview with Israeli propagandist Danny Danon. Sangita Myska was taken off air at LBC, Mehdi Hasan off MSNBC and in newsrooms across the Western world, lesser-known figures — less visible, and more vulnerable journalists, primarily of colour, have also been side-lined or removed from newsrooms, which were already overwhelmingly white in their makeup and output.

And it's not just Western media outlets who are suppressing journalists who dare question the Israeli narrative. Over the last few weeks in the UK, prominent pro-Palestinian journalists and activists have been arrested under spurious 'terrorism' charges. The message is clear: if you speak up for Palestine, expect to be silenced.  

Mainstream media: A 'mechanism' of Gaza genocide

The disease of unaccountable, pro-Israeli brown-nosing is spreading at pace. Saudi outlets also now regurgitate Israeli lines, as the Emiratis pay influencers to propagate the absurd notion that the Israeli occupation is somehow religiously justified — normalisation through disinformation is fully underway. 

I’ve had the great honour of working for a network – Al Jazeera English — which has done a fantastic job in its coverage and continues to do so. But it is so often isolated, and it does so under immense duress, both in the undue pressure placed on it from external, including regional powers and from the attacks on Al Jazeera journalists including some of the network's most recognisable and most senior correspondents and their families.

Palestinian journalists are paying to cover the livestream of their mass murder in blood — and the cost of our failure, as mainstream news organisations to hold power to account, and report fairly, is not only complicity in the said mass murder but the demise of one of the key pillars of any democratic institutions, a free press.

Former UN official Craig Mokhiber points out that Western media companies have made themselves a part of the mechanism of genocide in Palestine, and there are historical precedents for holding them accountable.

He points out that the genocide convention not only criminalises genocide itself, but also "incitement to genocide and complicity in genocide — prohibitions that apply not only to states but to private actors as well." At the Nuremberg tribunal following the Holocaust, the court concluded that Julius Streicher’s media outlet Der Sturmer published articles that included “incitement to murder and extermination” even while he was aware of the horrors being perpetrated against European Jews by Nazi Germany.

Fifty years later, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) convicted three media personalities for their role in inciting the Rwanda genocide.

Seventy-six years after the Nakba, who will speak up for photojournalist Momen Faiz who had both his legs amputated after the 2008 bombing of Gaza? Or Sami Shehada, whose right leg was recently amputated and is now struggling in a tent in Gaza without adequate medical follow-up? Or Farah Ammar, a media studies student before the war who has lost her leg, her eye and all hope for the future? Or the hundreds of others. 

There must be accountability for the complicity of our media in the dehumanisation of Palestinians and the lubrication of the Israeli genocide — and a clean-up of the deep corruption within our institutions which has allowed it. The truth is, as the one year anniversary of the ongoing onslaught looms, there are no more excuses, only the necessary accountability of those we once thought of as our colleagues.

Dr. Myriam Francois is an award-winning Franco-Irish documentary filmmaker, journalist and writer. Her writing has been featured widely in British and international press, including the Guardian, TIME, Foreign Policy, the Telegraph, CNN online, and New Statesman, among others.

Myriam's award-winning, directorial debut documentary Finding Alaa (BBC/CBC 2023), under her production company MPWR Productions, won the “Special Mention” Award at Doc Fest’23 and “Best Short” at the Independent Shorts Festival, So-Cal, USA Film Awards. The film has been BAFTA Longlisted as “Best Short Film” in 2024. She is also the host of the podcast "We Need to Talk About Whiteness".

Follow her on X: @MyriamFrancoisC

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Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or its staff.