20 Feb 2025 | Israel, Middle East and North Africa, News and features
Following the grotesque scenes of Hamas celebrations in Gaza, we pay tribute to the journalist and human rights activist Oded Lifshitz, whose body has been identified by his family.
Although the grandfather was long retired, he was remembered by colleagues around the world as one of the first journalists to report on the notorious 1982 massacre of Palestinians at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Lebanon.
Lifshitz worked for many years on the left-wing Israeli daily paper Al HaMishmar, which closed in 1995. Its slogan was “For Zionism, Socialism and Brotherhood Amongst Nations” and was often criticised by the religious right in Israel for its liberal stance.
Lifshitz, aged 83 at the time of his capture, was known as a campaigner for Israel’s Bedouin Arab community and was reported to be responsible for a high court case that returned some of their land. In retirement he worked for the organisation Road to Recovery, which helped Palestinians cross the Erez border from Gaza into Israel to receive medical treatment. He and his wife Yocheved, who was also kidnapped by Hamas but released in October 2023, were lifelong peace activists.
Lifshitz was one of the founders of Kibbutz Nir Oz, a village less than seven kilometres from the Gaza border. The kibbutz was destroyed in the attacks of 7 October 2023 and it is thought that nearly half of its 400 residents were kidnapped, killed or injured.
The National Union of Journalists general secretary Laura Davidson today paid tribute: “Our sincere thoughts are with Oded Lifshitz’s family at this difficult time. Like many, we had hoped for the safe release of the journalist committed to peace. Journalists worldwide will no doubt share their deepest condolences with his loved ones today.”
In a statement, the Lifshitz family said: “We received with deep sorrow the official and bitter news confirming the identification of our beloved Oded’s body. 503 agonising days of uncertainty have come to an end.
“We had hoped and prayed so much for a different outcome. Now we can mourn the husband, father, grandfather, and great-grandfather who has been missing from us since October 7.
“Our family’s healing process will begin now and will not end until the last hostage is returned.”
At Index on Censorship, we join in offering our condolences to the family of this exemplary journalist and campaigner. Sadly, he never contributed to Index. Tragically, he never will.
18 Feb 2025 | Americas, News and features, United States
In the blizzard of announcements, statements and threats made by President Donald Trump’s administration over the past few weeks, those concerning public broadcasters should have a particular resonance for readers of Index on Censorship.
On 9 February, Richard Grenell, the U.S. presidential envoy for special missions, wrote on X that Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Voice of America are “state-owned media” and “are a relic of the past.”
The billionaire Elon Musk, appointed by Trump to oversee the new advisory body, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), agreed: “Yes, shut them down. Europe is free now (not counting stifling bureaucracy). Nobody listens to them anymore. It’s just radical left crazy people talking to themselves while torching $1B/year of US taxpayer money.”
These Cold War institutions have been symbolic of American soft power since their inception. Each, in its way, was designed to counter authoritarian propaganda: Voice of America was founded in 1942 to counter Nazi ideology and Radio Free Europe in 1950 as a response to the Soviet equivalent. Radio Liberty had the specific task of broadcasting inside Russia.
These barely-veiled threats to foreign-facing broadcasters mirror similar announcements on the defunding of American broadcasters, including National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). DOGE subcommittee chair Majorie Taylor Greene has called on executives from the two organisations to give evidence to DOGE, which has accused them of “systemically biased news coverage”.
This may seem like small beer compared to the geopolitical earthquake represented by the US administration’s proclamations on the Ukraine war and the Gaza conflict, or its sabre-rattling on Greenland or Canada. But these moves are part of the same epochal shift in American foreign policy. There is much to criticise about America’s record in the post-war period. But even the worst abuses were driven, at least rhetorically, by an opposition to authoritarianism. It is no exaggeration to say that Trump and Musk are now increasingly aligned with the authoritarian heir to Stalin in the shape of Vladimir Putin, and the heirs of Hitler in the AfD (Alternative for Germany).
The irony of Musk categorising Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Voice of America as the “radical left” will not be lost on those of the European left who traditionally saw these outlets as the ideological wing of the American government or even the CIA. Indeed, they are often credited with playing a key role in providing the propaganda underpinnings that led to the dismantling of the Iron Curtain and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union.
Index has always felt a close affinity with Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty due to its origins fighting for dissidents in the former Soviet Union. The role of these twin broadcasters took on a renewed significance after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, something we covered in summer 2022. At the time Patrick Boehler, head of digital strategy for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty told me: “We have 23 news rooms. They are in Afghanistan and Pakistan, up to Hungary… We have fantastic teams serving Russia. And I think it’s really one of those moments where you see our journalists living up to the task and the challenge that they face. And it’s really inspiring.” His words have a sombre resonance today.
An added poignancy to the attacks on Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Voice of America is given by the fact that Musk and other American authoritarians seem to be learning from the so-called “hybrid democracies” of central Europe. As we reported in November, state broadcasters were one of the first targets of the ultra-right governments of Viktor Orbán in Hungary and Robert Fico in Slovakia.
In 2017, my colleague Sally Gimson also looked at attacks on Radio Free Europe from the government in Georgia and asked what role it would have in the future.
She remarked that as a young actor, future US President Ronald Reagan was proud to promote the work of the broadcaster in the early 1950s, fronting up an advertisement for it. “This station daily pierces the Iron Curtain with the truth, answering the lies of the Kremlin and bringing a message of hope to millions trapped behind the Iron Curtain,” he said.
The position the present US government takes towards such a venerated institution is a sign of how far it has drifted from what was once considered patriotic. That old cold warrior Ronald Reagan will be turning in his grave.
1 May 2024 | Belarus, China, Greece, Iran, News and features, Palestine, Russia
In my work as a journalism lecturer, I am increasingly struck by the fact that many students don’t read books. By this I don’t mean they don’t read – they read all the time, constantly scrolling on their phones, laptops and devices. I mean physical books. As for newspapers: forget it. For this reason, I have taken to reading to them. I tell them to put their phones away (which some find almost impossible), to close their laptops and… listen. I don’t ask them to sit in a circle on the carpet, but it’s not far short of that… it is a moment for meditation, what some have come to call mindfulness. I have read them all sorts of authors: Orwell, Conrad, the great Dutch journalist Geert Mak, Joan Didion. They wriggle and fidget, but in the end their breathing calms down, their faces relax, and they sit and listen.
And I am going to do the same with you today. You are all busy people so I won’t ask you to put away your phones and devices, but I will ask you to listen as I read to you from one of the most celebrated authors of the 20th century, Arthur Koestler. Perhaps not so widely read today, Koestler was best known for his anti-totalitarian novel Darkness at Noon, but was also a prolific journalist and essay writer. This essay, On Disbelieving Atrocities, is from a collection of essays called the Yogi and the Commissar, published in 1944. The essay itself was originally published in the New York Times under the title The Nightmare That is a Reality. He describes the “mania” he feels when telling the world about Nazi atrocities. “We, the screamers, have been at it now for about ten years,” he says. But the screamers are struggling to be heard.
“We said that if you don’t quench those flames at once, they will spread all over the world; you thought we were maniacs. At present we have the mania of trying to tell you about the killing, by hot steam, mass-electrocution and live burial of the total Jewish population of Europe. So far three million have died. It is the greatest mass-killing in recorded history; and it goes on daily, hourly, as regularly as the ticking of your watch. I have photographs before me on the desk while I am writing this, and that accounts for my emotion and bitterness. People died to smuggle them out of Poland; they thought it was worthwhile. The facts have been published in pamphlets, White Books, newspapers, magazines and what not.
But the other day I met one of the best-known American journalists over here. He told me that in the course of some recent public opinion survey nine out of ten average American citizens, when asked whether they believed that the Nazis commit atrocities, answered that it was all propaganda lies, and that they didn’t believe a word of it. As to this country, I have been lecturing now for three years to the troops and their attitude is the same. They don’t believe in concentration camps, they don’t believe in the starved children of Greece, in the shot hostages of France, in the mass-graves of Poland; they have never heard of Lidice, Treblinka or Belzec; you can convince them for an hour, then they shake themselves, their mental self-defence begins to work and in a week the shrug of incredulity has returned like a reflex temporarily weakened by a shock.”
Koestler’s words still have the power to shock 80 years later…
I have been proud over the years to be something of a screamer — for the Observer, the New Statesman and most prominently as the journalist portrayed in the Hollywood film Official Secrets (dir. Gavin Hood 2019).
I now work as editor-at-large for Index on Censorship, initially set up in 1972 to publish and promote the work of dissident writers from behind the Iron Curtain. There has never been more for us to scream about. The atrocity deniers are everywhere: suggesting that outrages committed by Iran, Russia, Belarus, China are mere Western propaganda. We saw it on October 7th and we see it in Gaza.
My favourite screamer (and Koestler’s heir in some ways) is the journalist and academic Peter Pomerantsev. His second book, This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality (2019), should be required reading on all journalism (and public relations) courses. Pomerantsev comes from the same tradition as Index — his parents were Soviet dissidents arrested for “distributing harmful literature”. He warns that Putin’s Russia has ushered in a new age of atrocity denial driven by the troll farms of St Petersburg.
His family’s experience gives Pomerantsev a personal, visceral respect for objective truth, facts, reality. He tells the story of the legendary dissident publication The Chronicle of Current events.
“The Chronicle was how Soviet dissidents documented suppressed facts about political arrests, interrogations, searches, trials, beatings, abuses in prison. Information was gathered via word of mouth or smuggled out of labour camps in tiny self-made polythene capsules that were swallowed and then shat out, their contents typed up and photographed in dark rooms. It was then passed from person to person, hidden in the pages of books and diplomatic pouches, until it could reach the West and be delivered to Amnesty International, or broadcast on the BBC World Service, Voice of America or Radio Free Europe.” (This Is Not Propaganda, p 2)
Where does this leave us? We who are committed to telling the truth. We who respect facts. Are we listening to the screamers?
On the plane to Zurich, I was given my complimentary copies of Forbes and Vanity Fair and the answer was right there. Vanity Fair carried an article about Alexei Navalny, who grew to prominence through his exposure of corruption in Putin’s Russia, while the cover of Forbes was devoted to the Boeing whistleblower John Barnett. We perhaps need to start thinking about whistleblowers as corporate dissidents, as truthtellers, not subversives to be closed down.
Because Navalny and Barnett are both, in their way, screamers.
This is the transcript of a speech made to a meeting of chief communications officers from leading global companies in Zurich
27 Mar 2024 | News and features, Russia
This Friday, 29 March, marks the one-year anniversary of Russia’s arrest and unlawful detention of my colleague, Evan Gershkovich, of The Wall Street Journal. That’s one year that Evan has been deprived of his basic rights and confined to a cell 23 hours a day, held on a charge of espionage which he, the US government and the Journal vehemently deny. One year that his parents and his sister have been deprived of their son and brother. And one year since a mass chilling effect descended on the foreign press corps in Russia because of this brazen assault on the freedom of the press.
Evan’s detention is a singular outrage but also part of a much broader pattern. Last year and this year have been brutal for the safety of journalists working to get the facts from dangerous places across the globe, as chronicled by the Committee to Protect Journalists, Reporters Without Borders and others.
Even within Russia, Evan is not alone: Alsu Kurmasheva, a Russian-American reporter for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty was seized by Russian authorities on a trip to visit her mother and has been in prison since October. Paul Whelan, of course, has been detained there for five years.
After Evan’s arrest, many news outlets withdrew to cover Russia from Berlin, Warsaw and elsewhere given that Vladimir Putin’s regime has made what you and I understand to be fair and independent reporting effectively a crime.
So we are deprived of fact-based news from a country that is central in defining the future for the USA and other democracies. If we don’t stand up and protest against the silencing of the media on such a vital story, when will we decide the time is right to be loud?
We have been making noise for a year now, to ensure we are drawing as much attention as possible to Evan’s predicament and this broader outrage. We did so in part because journalists run at the story. But we also did so because, in the very early days after Evan’s arrest, we received advice from a trusted source that there will be times to be loud and times to be quiet and this was a time to be loud. Put another way, until there is reason to be quiet – which might suggest a sensitive breakthrough is near at hand – be loud.
We also didn’t have a choice. There may be times when quiet diplomacy can be effective to resolve such hostage issues. In our case, the Russian government had publicly accused our innocent colleague of spying, a message we had to counter as forcefully and as quickly as we could.
In that, as in so many other things over the course of the past year, we were greatly aided by outside help.
The White House, the State Department and the US Senate Intelligence Committee immediately made clear Evan – an accredited reporter in Russia – is not a spy. And in the days, weeks and months that followed, we have benefitted hugely from the interest and support of other news organisations, the international community of journalists and well-wishers the world over to keep awareness of Evan’s situation high.
We know that The Wall Street Journal won’t directly negotiate his release – that is the responsibility of governments. But we are convinced keeping Evan in the spotlight will help set the stage for successful negotiations at the right time. We hope that time is very soon.
Within the Journal, we have learned that being loud is a companywide effort. I don’t think there is a department at Dow Jones & Co., the Journal’s parent, that hasn’t in some way been involved.
The company’s leadership, legal team, the newsroom and communications department would be obvious. Less so, maybe, the marketing team, which we rely on to create ads that we and other newspapers have run on milestones such as 100 days of Evan’s incarceration. Or the advertising department, which has used barter ads to push Evan’s cause on social media. Or government affairs, which has launched a campaign of awareness on Capitol Hill in Washington. Or technology and circulation, which have built a page outside of our paywall on WSJ.com so readers can learn about Evan free of charge. Or our Standards team, which ensures that our advocacy work and our news reporting are kept appropriately apart. Or our individual reporters, who have taken it upon themselves to organise runs, swims, read-a-thons and letter-writing campaigns to highlight Evan’s work and interests.
Yet we also realise all this has yet to pay the one dividend that matters: Evan’s safe return.
So on his one-year anniversary we also ask that you take the time to think of Evan, to talk about him, to amplify stories about him with the hashtag #IStandWithEvan, to explore his work at WSJ.com/evan, and to dig in with us so that the light we shine on Evan and the broader cause of press freedom is brighter than ever.
