30 Nov 18 | Mapping Media Freedom, Media Freedom, media freedom featured, News and features
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Austrian chancellor Sebastian Kurz. Credit: European People’s Party/Flickr
In an email sent to all regional police departments on 24 September 2018, Austria’s Ministry of the Interior suggested limiting communication with “certain media outlets”, including the weekly news magazine Falter and the daily newspaper Der Standard.
The ministry was quick to clarify that Herbert Kickl of the far-right Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ), who heads the department, had nothing to do with the email, but that it was the work of a ministry spokesperson. It stressed that it supports “fair co-operation with all media outlets” and announced that new guidelines for media transparency are in the works.
Chancellor Sebastian Kurz and president Alexander Van der Bellen also immediately distanced themselves from the email, making it clear that any restrictions on press freedom are unacceptable. However, Austria is the last country in the European Union where official secrecy outweighs the right to know on a constitutional level. The Global Right to Information Rating ranks the country in the bottom 10 globally for the right to access information held by public authorities.
The country’s General Information Act, which regulates the right to apply for information, does not guarantee journalists and NGOs a general right of access. As a result, state bodies are free to refuse information without having to justify their decision.
Current regulation offers much room for interpretation, leaving public officials with scant guidance on deciding whether to make the requested information public. Despite a recommendation in 2008 by the Council of Europe’s anti-corruption monitoring body to introduce clearer criteria on what kind of information can be limited, reform has yet to materialise.
As any breach of official secrecy law could result in mandatory resignation, public officials seldom exercise their duty to inform. This leads to secrecy being the rule and informing the exception. Journalists also have no guaranteed right to access government documents.
Mathias Huter, secretary general of Forum Informationsfreiheit, a right-to-know NGO, told Index on Censorship that the lack of a freedom of information act undermines the ability of journalists to investigate, making it difficult to hold politicians accountable.
“Investigative reporting remains highly dependent on leaks from inside the administration,” he said. “These leaks, however, usually only tell one part of the story – and often support a government narrative.”
In 2013 Kurz, then State Secretary for Integration, endorsed a campaign to introduce a transparency act. While the campaign itself evolved into the establishment of Forum Informationsfreiheit, Kurz’s enthusiasm for the issue has since waned.
“Kurz has so far failed to deliver on his promise to advance government transparency,” Mathias Huter, secretary general of Forum Informationsfreiheit, told Index. “At the same time, his party has supported several initiatives that expand surveillance and reduce civic space. There is no indication that the ruling parties have any interest in abolishing the official secrecy provision in the Austrian constitution and to replace it with a right to information.”
Restrictions on access to information leave media outlets vulnerable to political attempts to influence news coverage. Florian Skrabal, co-founder and editor-in-chief of the investigative journalism platform Dossier, told Index: “This information asymmetry bears the risk of political alliances forming. Information becomes a good you can bargain with. Every now and then, the phenomenon of journalists with valuable contacts with high-ranking public officials, who suddenly get exclusive information, shows the existence of such political alliances.”
Even if a law granting access to information was in place, Skrabal says it would take years to change the existing culture of treating information as a public good rather than the property of a public body.
Speaking at Austria Österreichische Medientage, an annual conference for media, marketing, communications professionals, in September 2018, Christian Rainer, editor-in-chief of the weekly magazine Profil, described the Ministry of the Interior’s email as an exposure of a practice that usually happens silently, behind closed doors and is not publicly discussed.
But such practice isn’t limited to the current government. In 2016 former chancellor of the Austrian Social Democratic Party (SPÖ), Christian Kern, temporarily boycotted Österreichischer Rundfunk (ORF), the Austrian national public service broadcaster. In 2017 he refused to give interviews to or book ads in the daily tabloid Österreich during the election campaign after the paper published an article deemed too personal and offensive. The article included a leaked email which was sent to former SPÖ political adviser Tal Silberstein describing Kern as a “princess” and “insecure”.
Also speaking at Austria Österreichische Medientage was Wolfgang Fellner, founder and editor-in-chief of the daily newspaper Österreich, highlighted how existing relationships between political parties and certain media outlets — in particular Kronen Zeitung, the largest print media in Austria — affect journalistic practices: “The interior ministry feeds the Kronen Zeitung with exclusive stories, which, in return, is rewarded with positive news coverage.”
“The interior ministry’s email shows the attitude and culture prevalent in Austria regarding information as a negotiable good,” Skrabal told Index. “A journalist becomes a supplicant for information. The leaked email is simply a revelation of an existing mindset on how politicians communicate with the media. That is to distinguish between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ media and, on that basis, to weigh who is eligible to get informed and who does not.”[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_basic_grid post_type=”post” max_items=”4″ element_width=”6″ grid_id=”vc_gid:1543917445052-57c4ff25-a62a-6″ taxonomies=”6564″][/vc_column][/vc_row]
28 Jun 18 | Austria, Europe and Central Asia, Mapping Media Freedom, Media Freedom, media freedom featured, News and features
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ORF managing director Alexander Wrabetz. Credit: Franz Johann Morgenbesser
A month prior to his election as head of the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation (ORF) board of trustees in May 2018, Norbert Steger gave an interview to the daily conservative newspaper Salzburger Nachrichten, voicing his concern about the “objectivity” of the broadcaster and announcing his intention to “cut a third of foreign correspondents, should they not report correctly”.
Steger highlighted the coverage of the Hungarian elections as being particularly problematic, criticising the reports of Ernst Gelegs, ORF’s Hungary correspondent who criticised the human rights situation in the country, including the restrictions media freedom, as being “one-sided”. Steger also called for the dismissal of journalists who violate the broadcaster’s guidelines for ORF journalists.
Despite his criticism of the ORF, Steger’s election is hardly surprising given political nature of how positions are assigned: 24 of the board’s 35 members are directly appointed by Austria’s federal and state governments and political parties. An additional six are indirectly appointed by the Federal Chancellor.
When the Social Democratic Party of Austria lost to the populist-conservative Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP) and its far-right coalition partner FPÖ in October 2017, it became clear that Heinz Lederer, former head of the ORF board of trustees and a Social Democrat, would need to make room for a representative of the ruling parties. In the end, the government’s decision was made by Steger, a former FPÖ politician.
Responding to Steger’s comments that journalists cannot be “overly sensitive”, ORF journalist Stefan Kappacher, in his widely-shared acceptance speech for the country’s most prestigious journalism award, said: “As ORF journalists we are grateful to be able to produce independent journalism and we will continue to fight for this independence.”
This independence is in jeopardy. Steger’s election puts ORF managing director Alexander Wrabetz under particular pressure as his position is elected by the board by a simple majority and can vote him out of office with a two-thirds majority. Wrabetz, a Social Democrat and the first person to be elected to this position three times in a row, has survived four national elections. Bernhard Baumgartner, a journalist for the daily newspaper Wiener Zeitung, assumes that the board of trustees will not vote Wrabetz out in order to avoid a public outcry, but rather change the governance structure by law, for example, by replacing the managing director with a management board. According to the weekly magazine Profil, ÖVP and FPÖ agreed that Steger will push for a new ORF law and effectively hand the position over to the ÖVP.
The government plans an extensive reform of ORF. The government programme includes a “re-definition of the mandate of the public media” as well as “structural and financial reforms”, as Index on Censorship reported earlier this year. This also entails the replacement of the ORF public tax, its primary source of financing, which currently guarantees accountability to the public, serving as the most important guarantee of the broadcaster’s ability to maintain its watchdog function in society. “Financing public service broadcasting via the public budget” instead of direct public tax would “set the wrong incentives” and would make the ORF “vulnerable”, Austria’s president Van der Bellen warned. Kappacher predicts even more drastic consequences: “The allocation of political funding would then be based on the reporting behaviour of ORF journalists.”
This concern is widely shared by other journalists and NGOs. Udo Bachmair, a former ORF journalist and president of the Vereinigung für Medienkultur (Association for Media Culture), tells Index on Censorship that he considers the public tax indispensable and that its replacement risks making the ORF completely dependent on the government. “The replacement of objective reporting with conformity as we’ve seen in Hungary and Poland would be a logical consequence,” he says. “The ORF’s political independence is a key element to democracy in Austria. Together with other quality print media, it guarantees independent, high-quality journalism.”
Bachmair adds that as Austria has a particularly high concentration of tabloids, which have been promoting right-wing populist tendencies for many years, “it is even more important that the ORF fulfils its mission to inform the public and hold against the tendency to paint black and white pictures and promote hatred on the internet”.
The recent spate of direct attacks on the ORF and its journalists by representatives of the FPÖ causes ORF journalists to feel under increasing pressure, Bachmair says. “This reminds me of the first ÖVP-FPÖ coalition in Austria between 2000 and 2006, where an increasing number of TV broadcasting journalists complained about attempts of political intervention. However, the scale reached now is unprecedented.”
For now, it is not within the competence of the board of trustees to make management decisions. Wrabetz made this clear in his reaction to Stegers attempt to put the ORF and its foreign correspondents in line as he pushed back on Twitter and announced an extension of Gelegs’ contract, due to this “excellent reports”. Wrabetz also voiced his intention to further strengthen foreign correspondents and to expand by two more offices by 2020.
Steger did not apologise for his statements in the interview but told the left-wing daily newspaper Der Standard that he “misses the full explanation behind his statement”, insinuating that his statement was reported out of context. “It is not acceptable to have privileged, well-paid people [at the ORF] who think that differentiating between reports and opinion does not apply to them,” he said. “ORF foreign correspondents currently produce opinion rather than reports, which I strongly oppose.” It is the ORF managing-director who would need to intervene against “violations of objective reporting”. Wrabetz has not taken appropriate actions, according to Steger.
For now, ORF journalists such as Wrabetz and anchorman Armin Wolf push against these changes as much as possible, but support from the top slowly fades. In their last session in March 2018, the ORF Viewers’ and Listeners’ Council adopted a resolution. It states: “The ORF Viewers’ and Listeners’ Council strongly rejects the current attacks of a ruling party on public service broadcasting including ORF staff and the intention to abolish the ORF public tax.”
The Council also warned of any attempt to undermine press freedom, naming intimidation attempts against the media and in particular against ORF journalists as an example. On 3 May 2018 however, the Council’s latest elections took place and chancellor Sebastian Kurz replaced the majority of SPÖ members by affiliates of his own party, subjecting another body of the ORF’s top level entirely to the government’s will.
Increasingly, civil society organisations are speaking out against the government’s attempts to weaken the ORF’s independence. Several artists, media experts, publicists and writers founded the platform We, for the ORF. Its self-declared aim is “to fight against the ORF’s political absorption”. As the government’s long-promised media symposium took place on 6 and 7 June 2018, which should serve as the basis for an ORF reform, We, for the ORF organised a protest a day earlier called The Better Media Symposium, which garnered the support of over 40 organisations.
Bachmair, a member of the platform, tells Index: “While the platform’s public appearance in the media is limited, it is an important voice, which it will use to monitor and report on the media developments of the upcoming months. Moreover, the platform will fight for the future independence of the ORF and, in a broader sense, for media freedom and a media landscape characterised by plurality, diversity and critical, high-quality journalism.”[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_raw_html]JTNDaWZyYW1lJTIwd2lkdGglM0QlMjI3MDAlMjIlMjBoZWlnaHQlM0QlMjIzMTUlMjIlMjBzcmMlM0QlMjJodHRwcyUzQSUyRiUyRm1hcHBpbmdtZWRpYWZyZWVkb20udXNoYWhpZGkuaW8lMkZzYXZlZHNlYXJjaGVzJTJGNjklMkZtYXAlMjIlMjBmcmFtZWJvcmRlciUzRCUyMjAlMjIlMjBhbGxvd2Z1bGxzY3JlZW4lM0UlM0MlMkZpZnJhbWUlM0U=[/vc_raw_html][vc_basic_grid post_type=”post” max_items=”4″ element_width=”6″ grid_id=”vc_gid:1530108986023-3bfc44c5-d383-0″ taxonomies=”7592, 6564″][/vc_column][/vc_row]
22 Mar 18 | Austria, Europe and Central Asia, Mapping Media Freedom, Media Freedom, media freedom featured, News and features
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The new populist government wants to bring major change to Austrian society. Major shifts are expected in the country’s media landscape.
Many experts such as the president of the Austrian Journalism Club (ÖJC), Fred Turnheim, voiced their concerns and warned of the dangers of a democracy-hostile information policy: “This enforced conformity of information coming from the individual ministries and departments of the Federal Government is an authoritarian measure of the Federal Chancellery and contradicts pluralistic media work in a democratic society.”
Since the government’s inauguration in December 2018, journalists have been publicly attacked by politicians and media outlets defamed for critical journalism. Financial cuts on public media outlets are also on the government’s agenda. Hannes Tretter, co-founder of the think tank Boltzmann Institute of Human Rights, says: “According to Article 10 of the European Convention of Human Rights and Article 11 of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, governments must not only respect but guarantee the freedom of the media that is based on the principles of pluralism, diversity, tolerance and broadmindedness. Only these principles can enable citizens to have access to a variety of information and opinions which is essential for a living democratic society. Thus, any attacks against journalists have to be examined diligently on the basis of these measures.”
Changes in Austria’s media policy became apparent at the first joint press conference of Austrian chancellor Sebastian Kurz of the People’s Party (ÖVP) and vice-chancellor Heinz-Christian Strache of the far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ), when they announced they would no longer meet directly with the press, as has been the tradition in Austria. Instead, former diplomat Peter Launsky-Tieffenthal has been named an official government spokesperson. While this structure is not uncommon around the world, the Austrian arm of Reporters Without Borders and ÖJC raised concerns, saying that the decision could be a way for politicians to avoid questions and undermine the public’s right to information. ÖJC president Fred Turnheim addressed the chancellor directly in a press release: “As journalists, our work is based on first-hand information. If you want to avoid false interpretations, you need to dissolve the function of the governmental spokesperson.”
Concerns for restrictions on access to information for journalists intensified in February 2018 when Kurz declared the dissolution of the Federal Press Service (Bundespressedienst), which was founded in 1920 and serves as the focal point of communication between the Federal Chancellery and the press.
Concerning the former far-right opposition party, FPÖ has been well known for criticising the press for what it sees as a liberal bias and lack of objectivity. This criticism of the media came as the party has appointed the former editor-in-chief of online portal unzensuriert.at, Alexander Höferl, as head of communications at the interior ministry. Unzensuriert publishes a stream of manipulative and conspiracy-driven news pieces that mainly target migrants, Muslims and political opponents of the FPÖ, as an analysis of the magazine Profil shows.
Now, as a coalition partner, FPÖ threatens to use its clout in the government to significantly cut Austria’s public media as indicated in the government programme. President of Reporters Without Borders, Rubina Möhring, tells Media Mapping Freedom: “The established professionalised media policy hampers access to information and is as much concerning as the attacks of public media outlets. It is important to note that public media, which is not to be confused with state media, holds the mandate of political independence in service of informing the public and needs to be protected.”
Defaming media outlets and accusing them of manipulating information or suppressing the word of the state has become a tactic to diminish the public’s trust in the press. Several FPÖ ministers, including the infrastructure minister, have declared their dislike for government funding of the country’s public service broadcasting corporation ORF. The vice-chancellor has been most direct by calling the ORF “a place where lies become news”, as Index on Censorship’s Media Mapping Freedom project reported. Terms like “fake news” and “lügenpresse” (lying press) have been taken up not only by nationalist movements but have found their way into Austrian public debates and online forums.
ORF — Austria’s largest media outlet with up to four million viewers in a country of 8.7 million people — is primarily financed through a tax, which the government wants to scrap. While ÖVP has only confirmed plans to reform ORF as indicated in the government programme, Strache said: “We want to abolish the ORF excise tax. This is one of the major goals of this government”. ORF editor committee, as well as journalists such as Daniela Kittner, suspect that this is part of the government’s — in particular FPÖ’s — intention to gain political influence through the media sector. On 20 February 2018 the chairmanship of the new ORF supervisory board was consigned to the FPÖ. The current executive committee, which was put in place by the last government, is planned to be restructured as well. Some expect these structural changes of ORF to be part of an effort to weaken public-service broadcasting altogether as media minister Gernot Blümel publicly announced on several occasions that the government intends to strengthen private broadcasters while remaining vague on plans regarding ORF reforms.
Print media — the second biggest source of information in Austria — is also facing difficulties. Wiener Zeitung, the country’s oldest daily newspaper, derives most of its income from public notices that all companies must publish. The coalition government has announced that it intends to end the mandatory requirement. Additionally, the concentrated ownership of the existing 14 daily newspapers and strength of tabloid newspapers undermine the country’s media plurality. The dominant newspaper, tabloid Kronenzeitung, reaches about a third of Austrians. Along with many other print media outlets in Austria, it is reliant on government and political advertising. In 2016 around €16 million was spent by government ministries for advertisement in media outlets. In comparison, Germany spent slightly less despite its significant size difference. Altogether, government ministries, public institutions and enterprises invested around €177 million in political and economic media advertisements in 2016. On the top of the list of beneficiaries is Kronenzeitung. Between April and June 2017, they received €5 million, followed by ORF with €4.9 million. The other two other major tabloid newspapers Österreich and Heute received $3 million each. While concentrated ownership is a structural obstacle to a free and pluralistic media, the large-scale political and economic advertisement industry in Austria adds to the vulnerability of the press to influence by the interests of their donors.
Harald Fiedler, a journalist for Der Standard who regularly writes about the media, highly doubts that Wiener Zeitung will be able to survive. Wolfgang Riedler, the executive director of the newspaper, confirmed in an interview with the newspaper Der Standard that immediate restructuring would be necessary “should the mandatory announcements of companies be abolished. […] If you do not want to lose a quality medium that appears all over Austria, you have to look for a model that will ensure further funding”.
According to anonymous sources of the left-leaning weekly newspaper Der Falter, which itself is continually attacked for its investigative journalism and dismissed as “lügenpresse”, the government plans to close down the public national radio station FM4 due to its “failure to fulfil its educational mandate”. FM4 is well known as an alternative radio station to ORF for young people. While the alleged plans have been dismissed by the ORF and the government, the NGO #aufstehn and Reporters without Borders Austria have started a petition against FM4’s potential shutdown.
Aside from threats to the country’s public media outlets, individual journalists have been singled out for defamation, cyberbullying and restricted access to information.
In the first few weeks of 2018, FPÖ and affiliated youth organisations have published photos and contact details of journalists and actively encouraged its followers to target journalists online. The articles, which were mostly written by far-right media outlets such as Wochenblick, Info-Direkt and unzensuriert.at, were then shared on Facebook by high-ranking FPÖ politicians, including the vice chancellor. As a result, the journalists involved received numerous difficulties, including Colette Schmidt, a journalist at newspaper Der Standard, and Hanna Herbst, deputy editor-in-chief of the news outlet Vice in Austria, who were both subject to cyberbullying campaigns.
“It is clear to me that the intention is to silence journalists who are critical of the new government. FPÖ in particular has a strong network online which it uses systematically to intimidate journalists. This is the first time I have received threats of such an intensity,” Herbst told Mapping Media Freedom.
She characterised the harassment as gender specific. “Female journalists are more likely to be objectified and sexually harassed, but to me, it is important to show that those attacks won’t silence me. I have received a lot of solidarity and I plan to take legal action in order to show the illegitimacy of such acts.”
Tretter adds: “Uncovering anti-Semitic and racist statements and activities of fraternities is a legally required obligation of the State, which is based on the Austrian Prohibition Act of 1947 and the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. Since it is the media’s task in a democratic society to serve as a ‘public watchdog’, journalists shall not be hindered in fulfilling their role.”
In another troubling development, selected media outlets are being excluded from political meetings. Starting in October 2017, when ÖVP denied photographers access to proximity talks, the Social Democratic Party (SPÖ) has now denied two newspapers access to a background discussion regarding a topic which both newspapers have previously critically reported on.
Rubina Möhring, president of Reporters without Borders Austria, voices her concerns for the government’s new political direction, but hopes for a strong civil movement to hold against the new political wind. “Attacks on journalists and media outlets are attacks against the right to information and attempts of intimidation are the first steps to an enforced conformity of the media,” she tells Mapping Media Freedom. “During World War II, Austria was stripped of press freedom as the protection of censorship by law was repealed. Critical journalism was brutally silenced while the Nazis made excessive use of propaganda news. We don’t want history to repeat itself. This is why now, more than ever, it is important to stand up for our rights as journalists and citizens.”
This article was updated on 9 April 2018 to reflect the correct title of an FPO minister. [/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_basic_grid post_type=”post” max_items=”4″ element_width=”6″ grid_id=”vc_gid:1523273223680-be701832-3026-6″ taxonomies=”6564″][/vc_column][/vc_row]
01 Nov 23 | Israel, Middle East and North Africa, News and features, Palestine
Following the brutal attacks on Israel by Hamas on 7 October, violations of free speech have occurred at such pace and scale that it has made keeping track a challenge. The situation was already difficult before that date: Israel was in the grip of a huge crisis, the country stalled by endless protests in response to the government’s attempts to neuter the Supreme Court, while Amnesty International identified “a general climate of repression” in Gaza Strip under Hamas. Since the war started, the right to freedom of expression has gone from bad to worse in both Israel and Palestine, and indeed around the world. Whilst a degree of deterioration was predictable – conflict is never the arena in which rights improve – the current state could hardly be foreseen.
Starting with media freedom, on 7 October itself, of the 1,400 people who were murdered by Hamas several were Israeli reporters on duty. Following the massacre, Israel’s response has resulted in the death of at least 5,000 (according to the latest UN figures from 23 October), again including a number of journalists. Although none of the journalists from either side of the divide were killed for what they had written, they lost their lives though their line of work, making the media landscape all the poorer.
Others have, however, been punished for their work. Journalists from outlets including the BBC, Al-Jazeera, RT Arabic and Al-Araby TV have all reported obstructions to their reporting by the Israeli military, police and others since the conflict began. On 12 October, a team of BBC Arabic reporters were dragged from their vehicle, searched and held at gunpoint by police in the Israeli city of Tel Aviv, despite their vehicle being marked “TV” and the presentation of press cards, the BBC reported. On 26 October, Lama Khater, a freelance writer with Middle East Monitor and a political activist, was arrested by the IDF in the city of Hebron, West Bank, her husband Hazem Fakhoury told CPJ. Confrontational attacks have been coupled with subtle ones: On 9 October, for example, The Jerusalem Post reported that its website was down following a series of cyberattacks. The group Anonymous Sudan claimed responsibility for the attacks, reported Axios and Time magazine.
Media freedom could deteriorate further. On 16 October, Israel proposed new emergency regulations that would allow it to block broadcasts that harm “national morale”. Officials threatened to close Al-Jazeera’s local offices under the proposed rule and to stop the global news organisation from freely reporting on the war.
With the situation on the ground increasingly difficult and with limited media from Gaza itself, the internet more broadly, and social media specifically, is a lifeline. And yet getting information within and out of Gaza has become increasingly difficult. Internet services have been disrupted by the attacks, while Palestinians and their supporters allege that social media platforms, in particular Instagram, are “shadow-banning” their content. Instagram’s owner, Meta, has denied this, but they have admitted that they inserted the word “terrorist” automatically into translated bios of Palestinian users, something they apologised for on 19 October.
Social media giant X, which has had a tumultuous ride under owner Elon Musk over the last year to say the least, has also been flooded with misinformation, as we reported on 18 October. Images have been adopted from other conflicts, fake accounts created in a smorgasbord of lies intended to sow confusion, division and hate. At a time when it could be providing an essential role in the spread of crucial information, trust is low.
As those within Israel and Palestine struggle to access reliable news, international media outlets find themselves in the middle of claims of irresponsible reporting, such as jumping too fast to conclusions over who was behind the explosion at the Al-Ahli hospital, and accusations of bias. The latter can sometimes be unhelpful noise. To instantly shout “censorship” can be erroneous. There are a host of reasons why newspapers and broadcasters might run a story or interview a person (some being mundane, merely down to the availability of one person over another). Impartiality is not a prerequisite for outlets that are not funded by taxpayers. Nor does objectivity equate to equal weight for views. Still, with a conflict as complicated as that between Israel and Palestine, as longstanding, as heated and as volatile, a plurality of views and careful attention to how information is both interrogated and reported is crucial. It’s not clear that every outlet has adhered to these fundamental principles.
As for the actual red pen, one example of direct censorship came from Yale University’s campus newspaper, the Yale Daily News, which censored a pro-Israel opinion piece by removing references to Hamas atrocities. We suspect there are others. Alas the nature of censorship and self-censorship means we don’t always know about them.
Has criticising Israel become a punishable offence for the average person? A “McCarthyite backlash” against criticism of the country’s bombardment of Gaza has been claimed by civil rights groups in the USA, as people are fired, threatened with dismissal or blacklisted from future jobs, according to the Guardian. Take one example: Michael Eisen, editor of the scientific journal eLife, was forced out of his job after reposting an article from satirical magazine the Onion with the headline: “Dying Gazans Criticized for Not Using Last Words to Condemn Hamas”. In Germany, the journalist Michael Scott Moore noted that “the tendency in Berlin right now is to squelch as much criticism of Israel as possible”, citing the arrest of a Jewish Israeli protesting the war amongst others. In the UK, home secretary Suella Braverman suggested that waving Palestinian flags and using popular pro-Palestine slogans could be illegal and a ministerial aide was sacked from his government role following his letter to the prime minister calling for a ceasefire. In Switzerland, all demonstrations related to the conflict were banned in Zurich. In Australia, New South Wales authorities vowed to stop marches from proceeding. And in Israel, in one of the more unpleasant twists, the parents of hostages, who were protesting in Tel Aviv, were spat at and abused by supporters of current leader Benjamin Netanyahu. This in addition to police saying they’ve investigated and detained more than 100 people for their social media activity and, as we reported last week, activists being arrested in Jerusalem for putting up posters with the message: “Jews and Arabs, we will get through this together.”
Staying with Israel, human rights activists worry the detentions are due to the police adopting a wider interpretation than normal of what constitutes incitement to violence. A well-known singer and influencer, Dalal Abu Amneh, was held in police custody for two days. According to Abeer Baker, her lawyer, she was accused of “disruptive behaviour” by police officers, who said her posts could incite violence, in particular one featuring an image of the Palestinian flag with the Arabic motto: “There is no victor but God.” Baker said Abu Amneh was expressing a religious sentiment, while Israeli authorities interpreted the singer’s post as a call to arms for Palestinians. This example highlights a tension right now, the question of what defines hate speech and how we balance the rights for people to protest (be it online, in the streets or through petitions) versus the rights for people to live free from fear and persecution. Some of the banners and comments made at protests have been vile. They are clearly, irrefutably hate speech and given recent events – an Orthodox Jewish man assaulted in London, a mob storming Dagestan’s airport looking for people arriving from Israel, cemeteries and synagogues set alight in Tunisia and Austria, to name just a few – one could argue incitement. Still, it is clear that there has been huge overreach. Many who have been punished for what they’ve said have been peaceful, with views that – even if you disagree with them or find them uncomfortable – should be protected.
The above is far from an exhaustive list. It could go on and on. Consider Adania Shabli, the Palestinian writer whose event at Frankfurt Book Fair was called off. Consider the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen, whose appearance at 92NY, one of New York City’s leading cultural organisations, was pulled on the back of his criticism of Israel. Yet even this incomplete tally paints a grim picture. Free speech can be difficult and no more so than with Israel-Palestine, a conflict which is and always has been so deeply emotive and tribal. The knee-jerk response at present seems to be to silence. This is no solution. As George Orwell famously said, “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” This applies as much to those in Israel as it does to those in Gaza and to all of us outside. There have already been enough victims and casualties – let’s ensure free speech is not another.
