11 Oct 2024 | Brazil, Israel, Mexico, News, Newsletters, Palestine, United States
Hello, readers. This is Sarah Dawood here, the new editor of Index on Censorship. Every week, we bring the most pertinent global free speech stories to your inbox.
This week, headlines have been dominated by the ongoing devastation of the war in the Middle East, where the death toll is now more than 42,000 in Gaza, and more than 2,100 in Lebanon. Monday also marked a painful milestone for Israelis and Jewish people everywhere, as the first anniversary of Hamas’s attacks, which killed 1,200 people. You can read Jerusalem correspondent Ben Lynfield’s forensic analysis on the region’s risks to journalists and press freedom below.
Attention has also been on the destructive Hurricane Milton in Florida, which has killed at least 16 people. The climate event has resulted in human tragedy, physical damage and the distortion of truth, with false information and AI-generated images accumulating millions of views on social media, including a fabricated flooding of Disney World in Orlando. Such imagery has been seized upon by hostile states, far-right groups, and even US politicians to advance their own aims: Russian state-owned news agency RIA Novosti reposted the fake Disney World photos to its Telegram channel, whilst Republican members of Congress have proclaimed conspiracy theories of government-led “storm manufacturing”. This emphasises how crises can be manipulated and monopolised to stir up division.
But while disinformation can undermine democracy, so too can information blockades. This brings us to some important stories coming out of Latin America. In Brazil, the social media platform X is now back online after a shutdown in September. The platform was banned by a top judge during the country’s presidential election campaign, in an attempt to prevent the spread of misinformation. But as Mateus Netzel, the executive director of Brazil-based digital news platform Poder360 told Reuters, social media bans not only restrict public access to information, but can undermine journalists’ ability to gather and report on news. Elon Musk himself was using X to post about the development of the ban, but this was inaccessible to Brazilian journalists. “In theory, there are journalists and outlets who do not have access to that right now and this is a very important restriction because they need to report on this issue and they will have to rely on indirect sources,” said Netzel.
We also heard frightening news from Mexico, where a local politician was murdered and beheaded just days after being sworn in as city mayor of Chilpancingo. Whilst we don’t yet know the reason that Alejandro Arcos Catalán was killed, his murder is yet another example of journalists, politicians, and other public figures being routinely targeted by criminal gangs. Bar active war zones, Mexico has consistently been the most dangerous country in the world for journalists, topping Reporters Without Borders’ list in 2022.
Meanwhile, in El Salvador, climate activists are being silenced through false imprisonment. Five protesters, who fronted a 13-year grassroots campaign to ban metal mining due to its devastating environmental impacts are now facing life in prison for the alleged killing of an army informant in 1989. The charge has been condemned by the UN and international lawyers as baseless and politically motivated, and echoes heavy-handed prison sentences being handed to climate protesters globally, including in democratic countries. As Index’s Mackenzie Argent reported last month, human rights lawyers have called out the UK’s hypocrisy in claiming egalitarianism whilst disproportionately punishing environmental activists, pointing specifically to the sentencing of Just Stop Oil’s Roger Hallam to five years in prison in July. These two stories, although taking place 5,000 miles away from each other, underline how climate defenders are currently on the front line of attempts to be silenced.
10 Oct 2024 | Israel, Middle East and North Africa, News, Palestine
Israel’s closure of Al Jazeera’s offices in the occupied West Bank is harming the Qatari network’s coverage in the territory and heightening fears for its journalists, says the news bureau’s chief Walid al-Omari.
The closure, which happened on 22 September, was labelled an essential security step by Israeli officials, against what they describe as a Hamas mouthpiece. It has widely been seen among Palestinians as a means of limiting information coming from the West Bank in advance of an expected escalation of military moves. The initial closure period is 45 days.
And in fact, following the closure of the news centre, the Israeli air force carried out the deadliest single attack in the occupied West Bank in more than two decades, killing at least 18 people in the bombing of a cafe in Tulkarm Refugee Camp, according to Palestinian security services.
“The main goal of this closure and of increasing the pressure on journalists is to prevent the transmission of the picture of what’s happening in the West Bank so that there won’t be knowledge of what Israel is doing and the crimes it is committing,” said political analyst Jehad Harb, a former researcher on Palestinian politics at the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PSR) in Ramallah.
Israel has already blocked free access to Gaza for foreign journalists. This is suggested to be to limit international exposure of its year-long assault on Gaza, triggered by Hamas’s brutal incursion on 7 October 2023. Israel also faces allegations that it is actively targeting Palestinian media personnel.
According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, as of 9 October 2024, 128 journalists and media personnel have been killed in Gaza since the war began. It has documented five cases in which journalists were directly targeted and killed. Israel denies targeting journalists and says most of those being counted were actually operatives of Hamas and other militant groups.
In a phone interview, Walid al-Omari told me that Al Jazeera staff feel displaced and worried. “We are refugees now,” he said. “We don’t have a place. Sometimes we meet in a cafe, a restaurant, our homes or in hotels.”
The closure has heightened concerns for the station’s journalists that they could become targets, he said, thus Al Jazeera employees are not venturing out to the flashpoints they usually cover. “It’s harder,” he said. “We can’t send our correspondents. The situation is not clear. If they appear as Al Jazeera correspondents, the army might arrest them.
“We continue covering everything, but it’s not the same as before. We cannot send footage from here so they take other sources.”
He said the West Bank coverage is now being directed out of Qatar, which relies on freelancers, guests and news agencies. Most of the 30 Ramallah employees, from both the Arabic and English outlets, are considered on vacation for now, he added.
Al-Omari dismissed Israeli allegations that the Ramallah offices were used for incitement and encouraging terrorism, and said such statements could spark attacks on staff. “We are not lying, inciting or provoking. We are trying to do our professional duty.”
In the view of Daoud Kuttab, a veteran Palestinian-American journalist based in Amman, Jordan, news from the West Bank can still get out, but clamping down on Al Jazeera is having an impact: “Now, Al Jazeera is more limited,” he said. “The facts will still come out but they won’t be able to synchronise and have multiple journalists and editors working on the equipment they own. The closure hobbles their work, but it doesn’t stop it.”
While the closure is reverberating in the West Bank, it should also be seen within the context of parallel steps being taken by Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right coalition inside Israel itself. These steps are also billed as anti-incitement steps needed during war but they could markedly limit freedom of expression, especially among Palestinian citizens of Israel, who are already being singled out often with no basis, according to human rights lawyers.
The coalition recently advanced a bill that would enable rapid dismissal of teachers and school budgets to be cut by the education ministry if they support terrorism. It is also trying to enable police to make what critics say would be “political arrests” on a large scale by broadening the definition of incitement and removing a requirement that state attorneys have to approve arrests for suspicion of incitement.
Such crackdowns as the Al Jazeera closure are popular with the coalition’s right-wing base. “The government of Israel does not allow a media outlet that broadcasts propaganda for a terrorist organisation and endangers IDF soldiers to operate, especially in times of war, based on principles of protecting the state and its citizens,” read a statement from the office of Shlomo Karhi, the communications minister.
Zvi Sukkot, a far-right legislator who chairs a Knesset subcommittee dealing with the West Bank, told Index: “There is a difference between media freedom and freedom to incite to murder Jews. Any station that incites to murder Jews should be closed.”
Al Jazeera could definitely be perceived to be a pro-Hamas station, even sometimes airing unedited videos of Hamas fighters released by the militant group’s media offices. But some Israeli specialists question if the office closure was warranted.
Israel could be more concerned about the network’s ability to cover scenes of people in Gaza lifting rubble to find the remains of their family members after airstrikes, rather than its ability to give a platform to Hamas supporters. Al-Omari also said that Al Jazeera live streams press conferences of Israeli leaders and the IDF’s spokesperson.
Matti Steinberg, an Israeli academic and author specialising in Palestinians and the former senior adviser to the Shin Bet security service, criticised the closure: “I follow Al Jazeera tirelessly for my work and I can’t understand this decision,” he said. “I haven’t seen any indication it poses a security threat.”
In practical terms, the 22 September raid marked the extension of a law that was passed in April in Israel, to the West Bank; this allows the government to close foreign outlets that are deemed to pose a substantive threat to state security. That law was first applied to Al Jazeera operations within Israel, forcing the network to move its Jerusalem office staff to Ramallah and closing its Israel-based cable and satellite transmissions.
Now, with international attention focused on Israel’s incursion into Lebanon and the Gaza death toll continuing to mount, Israel has also been intensifying its military activity in the West Bank, which it says is aimed at targeting terrorists or are planning attacks on Israel.
But the raids leave broad destruction and displace residents, scenes usually captured by Al Jazeera, as one of the region’s most resourced and largest news outlets. Harb sees Al Jazeera as a double threat to Israel’s effort to control the West Bank information flow, with its Arabic station, the most popular in the Middle East, and its English channel, which reaches the international community (and which also worked out of the Ramallah offices).
The English language station has a different editorial team than the Arabic one and, according to Kuttab, offers a “softer presentation of the same issue”. This is because the international audience that Al Jazeera English targets would switch channels if it is too bombastic and also because its presenters have worked in the Western media, he said.
Al Omari said that roughly 70 soldiers, some of them masked, participated in the action in and around Al Jazeera’s offices. He said troops tore down a banner of Shireen Abu Akleh, the Al Jazeera journalist killed by the Israeli army while she covered a raid in the West Bank in May 2022.
Al-Omari alleged the closure was an Israeli violation of self-rule agreements, since it took place in an area designated as being under full control of the Palestinian Authority. The heavy-handed raid may have been a deliberate effort to frighten other outlets, he added.
The Union of Journalists in Israel condemned the raid, saying the closure lacked transparency and that it could help pave the way for the closure of Israeli news outlets that the government dislikes. But the group’s announcement elicited a tide of criticism by journalists and others that it is taking Hamas’s side, and some threatened to stop paying dues. “Some of our journalists don’t understand that the moment is drawing near when the knock will come to their door also,” said Anat Saragusti, press freedom director for the union.
4 Oct 2024 | Israel, News, Newsletters, Palestine, Sudan
If a tree falls in a forest, and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? This well-known philosophical question most likely stems from the work of 18th century philosopher George Berkeley, who questioned the possibility of “unperceived existence”. In other words – did something really happen if no one is around to witness or perceive it?
This might seem a lofty and pretentious way to start this week’s Index newsletter. But the first-hand observance and subsequent documentation of events is the fundamental basis of rigorous journalism, and enables injustices to be accurately reported around the world. It provides us with the ability to understand truth from falsehood. And it is being increasingly undermined.
Journalistic “black holes” are appearing in conflicts globally, stopping the world from being able to witness what is happening on the ground, and therefore causing us to question reality.
Since the start of the Israel-Hamas war, triggered by Hamas’s incursion into Israel on 7 October 2023, Israel has banned foreign media access in Gaza. Only very limited international news crews are allowed in under strict conditions. This has left the world reliant on press statements, the words of government officials, and individual Palestinian journalists, who have risked their lives to showcase the brutality of the war on social media.
And many have lost their lives in the process. According to investigations by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), as of 4 October 2024, at least 127 journalists and media workers are among the more than 42,000 Palestinians and 1,200 Israelis killed since the war began, making it the deadliest period for journalists since the organisation started gathering data in 1992. The CPJ has determined that at least five of these journalists were directly targeted.
Major broadcasters have also been targeted. Last month, Al Jazeera’s office in the West Bank was raided and shut down for 45 days by Israeli soldiers, following the closure of the channel’s East Jerusalem office in May, on claims that they are a threat to Israel’s national security. But as Al Jazeera English’s Gaza correspondent Youmna El Sayed writes for Index this week, such shutdowns of legitimate news providers prevent global audiences from being able to see the pain and suffering that is being endured by both Palestinians and Israelis, encouraging misinformation to propagate.
As hostilities escalate across the Middle East, news channels continue to be curtailed. This week, an air strike destroyed the headquarters of the religious al-Sirat TV station in Beirut, Lebanon, on grounds that it was being used to store Hezbollah weapons, a claim which Hezbollah denies. Foreign correspondents are, however, still allowed in Lebanon – but in Iran all broadcasting is controlled by the state, with foreign journalists barred, meaning access to objective reporting is essentially impossible.
Outside of the region, other countries’ severe reporting restrictions and intimidation of journalists have made it difficult for global audiences to comprehend what is happening in conflicts. This includes Kashmir, the disputed mountainous region between India and Pakistan, and Sudan, where it is estimated that 90% of the country’s media infrastructure has been wiped out by the civil war.
What is the impact of this? The worrying rise in press suppression not only creates huge risks for journalists, but severely curtails people’s ability to understand geopolitics, conflict, and in future, historical events. It stops us from being able to weigh things up and form opinions based on what we have perceived.
Ultimately, it is impossible for any news producer, whether they be an individual correspondent or a major broadcaster, to be truly “objective”. People are driven by motives, both emotional and financial, and their own lived experiences. A news organisation, backed by a particular country or group, will appear truthful to some and severely biased to others.
But the only way to ensure some level of objectivity is to retain access to a broad range of sources, from the BBC to Al Jazeera, helping us form a more rounded world view. To go back to Berkeley’s philosophical analysis, the only way to verify the truth is to have the privilege of witnessing the evidence. Without this, it becomes virtually impossible to be able to tell fact from fiction.
30 Sep 2024 | Egypt, Middle East and North Africa, News
In his book You have not yet been defeated, the 42-year-old British-Egyptian imprisoned activist, software engineer, and writer, Alaa Abd el-Fattah writes: “I am in prison because the regime wants to make an example of us.” Yesterday, 29 September 2024, was due to be the end of his five-year sentence – but as this milestone passes with him still behind bars, his words remain true.
“[Alaa] is extremely nervous that this unprecedented move takes him beyond even arbitrary detention into something worse and that he may never be released,” Omar Hamilton, Abd el-Fattah’s cousin told Index on Censorship.
Abd el-Fattah has been imprisoned in Egypt for most of the last decade, aside from a brief period of release in 2019.
During President Hosni Mubarak’s regime, he became a vocal pro-democracy campaigner via his blog, Manalaa, which he ran with his wife, Manal Hassan. This increased during the 2011 Egyptian Revolution where he rose to prominence for his on-the-ground activism and political discourse.
Abd el-Fattah was arrested in November 2013, following the military coup led by now-President Abdel-Fattah el Sisi. He was sentenced to five years in prison for organising a protest.
After briefly being released, on 29 September 2019, he was once again detained along with his lawyer, Mohamed Baker, on several charges including “joining a terrorist group”, “funding a terrorist group”, “disseminating false news”, and using social media “to commit a publishing offence”. The pair were subjected to a grossly unfair trial and held in pretrial detention for 31 months. Yesterday, Abd el-Fattah completed his five-year sentence, which included his pretrial detention. However, the authorities show no signs of letting him go.
“I’m in detention as a preventative measure because of a state of political crisis – and a fear that I will engage with it,” said Abd el-Fattah in his statement to the prosecutor in January 2020.
During his time behind bars, Abd el-Fattah has been subjected to both physical and psychological torture. In 2022, the activist underwent an extended hunger strike and then refused water as COP27 began in Egypt. The strike was ended by force after prison authorities intervened.
In an interview with Index on Censorship in 2022, Abd el-Fattah’s sister, Mona Seif said: “In the eyes of the Egyptian regime Alaa is one of the symbols of [the] 25th January [2011 revolution] and therefore one of those calling for an end to the leadership of the military regime.
This much is true. While a few political prisoners in Egypt have been released over the years, Abd el-Fattah and Baker continue to be held with no sign of release. After all, it was President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi who personally ratified their verdicts in January 2022.
Abd el-Fattah is a British citizen and his family, also British citizens, have dedicated much of their campaign for his release to encouraging the UK government to take action.
“The Labour Government needs to show that it is not a continuation of the Conservatives, and David Lammy needs to prove that he did not make strident statements and promises to Alaa’s family when he was in opposition that he can just drop once in power,” Hamilton explained.
The Free Alaa campaign is calling on the British government to take real action to secure the release of one of its citizens. They are encouraging UK nationals to write to their MPs demanding that Abd el-Fattah is released.
The campaign claims that despite Foreign Minister David Lammy pledging his support for Abd el-Fattah’s release prior to the Labour government coming into power earlier this year, he has done little to secure his release.
“Alaa is a British citizen, and it is urgent that the UK government intervene now to stop this new violation of his human rights. The Foreign Secretary David Lammy has spoken up for Alaa in the past, but he must now turn those words into action,” Laila Soueif, Abd el-Fattah’s mother, wrote today via the Free Alaa campaign.
Soueif also announced that she will begin a hunger strike until Abd el-Fattah is free.
“My son had hope that the British government would secure his release. If they do not I fear he will spend his entire life in prison. So I am going on hunger strike for him, and I would rather die than allow Alaa to continue to be mistreated in this way.”
With international attention intensely focused on Israel, Gaza, and Lebanon, and Egypt’s Western allies content on overlooking el-Sisi’s human rights abuses to ensure security and stability within the region, it is hard to imagine that Abd el-Fattah’s case will be at the top of their agendas.
However, after 10 years of near-constant campaigning for his release, Abd el-Fattah’s family are not giving up and neither should we.
