Decolonise How? | Lessons on media ethics from the Middle East

Sana Saeed

The rupture happens because, for the first time, since the image, since footage, since the video, and film has been possible, that we see victims of a genocide, of an occupation, of eight decades of ethnic cleansing and forced displacement, actually document in real time, what is happening to them. And so, when two truths, quote unquote, are being presented to you, one that you can see with your own eyes, where children are being killed and slaughtered, and then your news media is essentially obfuscating and denying, or justifying everything that you’re witnessing, that creates not just a political rupture, and an information rupture, it creates a moral rupture.

 

Frederica Boswell

Hello listeners. Today, we bring you a recent Decolonise How? live webinar Patrick Gathara hosted on the ethics of covering crises in 2026. This lightly edited discussion is focused on the Middle East. Is the way language is used – and situations framed – a mistake, or systemic? Where does that come from? And what does it tell us about covering crises elsewhere?

 

Assal Rad

I think it’s important to bring in the fact that so much of this is just rooted in racism, like the easiest way of saying it for everyone to understand is what justified the savagery of colonialism for centuries, slavery, the occupation and genocide of the Americas; I mean all of these things have been historically justified through the lens of racism.

 

Boswell

Patrick was joined by Assal Rad, a historian of the modern Middle East, and author of The State of Resistance: Politics, Culture, and Identity in Modern Iran. And Sana Saeed, an independent journalist, media critic, and commentator, who spent a decade at AJ plus, where her show Backspace analysed how headlines and news stories are framed. And if you’d like to attend our future events live, subscribe to our newsletter at thenewhumanitarian.org/subscribe

 

I’ll now hand over to Patrick.

 

Patrick Gathara

Let me start with where we are. For many people, especially audiences outside the West, the last 32 months have seemed like something of a rupture, I would say an epistemic rupture. It's not just a political crisis, but a credibility crisis, especially when you speak about media. It's kind of like a moment where what we see on our screens and on our social media is not matched by the reporting that we get from mainstream press or the statements we get from from government, so I want to just find out whether you guys think this rapture is real, and why it feels like - at least from our perspective - Western media has basically deliberately abandoned the sort of pedestal that it had as essentially a chronicler of the world. So, my first question, Sana, in your Backspace series, you spoke about the historical bias of the Western media, and especially the American press, in favor of Israel and the demonisation and dehumanisation of Muslims and Arabs. Do you see the current coverage as a continuance of past trends, or is this something new?

 

Saeed  

Thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited for this conversation, and I think the more avenues and moments that we have to have this conversation, the better, because one of the reasons why this has happened is because of a collective failure for us to hold accountable our news media for the egregious similar behaviors that it's carried out previously, for instance, in the early 2000s with regards to the Iraq war. Now, I think this is one of those rare cases where, I don't like when people say, like, two things can be true at once, but this is actually one of those cases where there are two things that are certainly true at once, in that there has been a rupture, and that this is another instance that is… it's part of a continuum, right? I mean, if a book I always recommend to people is Edward Said’s Covering Islam. Covering Islam was written, I believe, in 1981. It was following the Islamic Revolution in Iran, and he really gives an incredible kind of breakdown of the architecture of Western, specifically American, but Western overall, coverage of Muslims, Arabs, and, you know, populations that kind of fall under the Orient, and what he describes, if I were to read you any passage from that book, it would be indistinguishable from anything that we see and understand today in 2026. Something that he wrote in 1981. So, there is a continuum here. The rupture comes in purely because of the Palestinians. The rupture happens because for the first time in our history, since the image, since footage, since the video, and you know, film has been possible, that we see victims of a genocide, of an occupation, of eight decades of ethnic cleansing, and forced displacement, actually document in in real time what is happening to them, and so when we as a population - I focus primarily on US news media - and so when we, especially here in the United States, as an American population, for decades have only ever seen a creation of a narrative, whether it's on Palestinians or really any other population, and I do think the way, of course, that we treat Palestinians is pathological, and we can talk about that, but when we see a creation of a narrative for decades that way, even if you were born in 2001 whatever images and narratives you're being fed about Palestinians or about any groups are actually rooted right in decades that, like, all those images don't just emerge out of nowhere. So, when people who have always understood a population or a situation, or whatever, or even their own institutions to be one way, and then they're given undeniable hour by hour evidence of something else, and so you have two truths, quote unquote, are being presented to you, one that you can see with your own eyes, where children are being killed and slaughtered, you know, an open air prison of what was originally 2.2 million people, you know, turned into essentially a slaughterhouse, and then your news media is saying what it's saying, like: Oh, well, you know, they essentially obfuscating and denying or justifying everything that you're witnessing, that creates not just a political rupture, and an information rupture, it creates a moral rupture, which is something that I think is consuming this country right now, here in the United States, of course, we talk about the UK as well, and it's something that no one has really come to terms with what's happening, and will continue to happen in this country,

 

Gathara  

Right. Assal, do you think we are in a period of rupture? I'm thinking really more around the gatekeepers and who propagates media? I mean, we're used to essentially mainstream press setting agendas, setting out narratives, telling us essentially what's happening, but we've seen this rise of social media as a challenge to the hegemony of mainstream press and actually, in a way, undermining the narratives that the mainstream press has been pushing. So, do you see this as a rupture in itself? And if so, do you think it's temporary or it's permanent? Is this the new world we live in?

 

Rad

Well, I don't, you know, want to…I think everything Sana said is perfect. It encapsulates the fact that, and I would even take it further back. I mean, we're talking about a history of colonialism, right? Like this is a century old, like the way I think it's important to bring in the fact that so much of this is just rooted in racism. Like, the easiest way of saying it for everyone to understand is what justified the savagery of colonialism for centuries, slavery, the occupation, and genocide of the Americas. I mean, all of these things have been historically justified through the lens of racism, and that's… that is exactly what's happening today. It's just a continuation of that, but there, you know, the language of the world has changed. You can't as easily go in and just say: these people are savages, we're going to kill them all and take their land and exploit them. So, there has to be updated ways of justifying that same form of exploitation, but in a newspeak that resonates with people who start to grapple with ideas like racism or colonialism, because we live in that world now. The reality of it is, when you say, is it a rupture? We've had these types of ruptures many times in that long history as well, because what I think happens is, I think when people, the nature of... the ordinary nature of people, when they're not indoctrinated to hate others, to other groups of people, and say, and believe that they are somehow lesser than themselves, when they see just the indiscriminate slaughter of human beings, and especially when it happens to children, and it's not to, in any way, discount Palestinian men and women who have been killed - adults are innocent too, and have the right to life - but I think something happens viscerally when we see it happening to children, because there's just no natural justification for that, that, that can work, even though, by the way, Israel has tried to justify it. Israel has tried to justify the mass slaughter of children, and we've had, you know, Israeli officials talking about how there's no innocent people, including the children, that it's perfectly moral to kill children, because those are quote future terrorists, so that language is used, but for the ordinary person, and I think if you lived in the Western world, if you are in the United States, if you're in Europe, and you have been indoctrinated for this long to believe that Palestinians are always the aggressors, that Palestinians are terrorists, and that Israel, you know, what do you hear over and over again? Israel has the right to exist, Israel has the right to self-defense. When you start to see these images that directly opposes your sort of natural reaction, because it doesn't make any sense, and when you ask about social media, I mean propaganda has existed before there was social media, before there was the internet, before there was anything, so the idea that large segments of a population have been dehumanised through propaganda is something that has been part of this story for centuries as well, we just have a newer, updated version of that, and so the other thing I would say is there's also always been opposition to it. There's always been abolitionists. There's always been the people who, who saw it and said this is wrong. And now, I do think that with the rise of, not just social media but independent media, independent journalism, there is a challenge to that narrative that has become so mainstream that we've ingrained it so deeply that even someone like myself, and I don't know, Sana, if this is true of you, I'm a critic that sees it, and yet sometimes I find myself having to re-educate myself in how I use certain language because it's been so deeply ingrained.

 

Gathara  

I'm so glad that you mentioned the sort of colonial history behind this, because I mean, I come from Kenya, and there's a lot of how the genocide Gaza is reported that harkens back to the narratives that were told about the Mau Mau in 1950s Kenya, during our own fight for independence against the British, you know, the idea of this atavistic violence that has no, no sense in it, a rejection of modernity in a sense, you know, and a refusal to acknowledge that there is a real grievance that it exists, you know, that this is a political fight, you know, that they're going for, so, yeah, so I do think that there's a long route to it, but one of the things was even at the time, and also to a bit of what you said, even my use of the term Mau Mau, a lot of the people who were within the Mau Mau essentially, they called themselves the Kenya Land and Freedom Army, and Mo Mau was a brand that was put on them by the British that they rejected, but because it kept being essentially forced to use it to adopt it, but now we have this new phenomenon called social media, where it's not just the people in power who can speak, and that's what I was asking, is doesn't that, like, sort of fundamentally change this equation, so it's not just narratives that we hear from the top, but now the very people at the bottom can show their own realities. They can speak to their own realities. Sana, I don't know where you think this actually changes, you know the way narratives are constructed about these spaces?

 

Saeed  

I think social media presents like a really mixed bag, so for those, for anyone who's like a Millennial or Gen X, you know that the early days of the internet in the late ‘90s, early 2000s before we enter the 2010s, there was all this incredible, maybe not so incredible, freedom on the internet, where there wasn't a curation of even your experience on the internet. We were all kind of in different corners. There was crazy stuff that was allowed to even be seen and put on all these type of websites and whatnot. And it was, I mean, you were seeing things like, I remember as like a 14, 15, year old, there were things that I was seeing that were happening in Iraq, for instance, that I should not have been seeing as a teenager on random websites. I'm sure a lot of people remember, like Live Leak and whatnot, but yes, social media, as it is today, does provide opportunities for people who are coming from, and I think it especially did in the early days, especially Twitter, back in like 2000 - I think I joined in 2008 right? - so, 2008, 2009, 10, 11, etc., it was able to kind of provide a space for people coming from under-covered or uncovered, you know, communities of people whose voices have always been kind of kept out of mainstream narratives about themselves, about their countries, etc. It does allow people to really kind of come to the forefront and take back certain narratives or push back even, against like the narratives about them and their peoples or their whatever situation they're going through. That being said, I think we want to be careful with how much also credit we want to give social media in this moment, because as much I think Palestinians were able to do what they did not because of social media, but in spite of it, right, because as we know, all the major platforms were working overtime to also suppress, not only the speech of Palestinians, but anyone who spoke against the genocide, right, and that's not like by accident, it is by design. We know that the major tech companies whether it's, you know, especially across Silicon Valley, like we know there's a huge, huge, huge influence of Israeli tech entrepreneurs, right. We know this. It’s not like conspiratorial or anything of that sort. We also know how much of our social media companies or tech companies are ingratiated, not just with foreign governments, but also with the government here itself as well. So, not only do we see that there's been a repression of speech that's been anti-genocide, anti-occupation, anti-Zionist, but we also have to be aware that social media now is also a very dangerous, quote unquote, playground, because there is a lot of curation of ideas happening, and you don't know to what extent those ideas are also authentic. Are they being organically, you know, fomented, or are they being kind of, again, curated for us to... so, we want to be careful with what role social media is playing, which is why I also worry about - one of the things you mentioned was, earlier when you were asking Assal the question was about, like, breaking the hegemony of mainstream news media, right? And I agree, I think that's been completely broken. In 2020 right before Covid came, in the United States, only 36% of Americans had any trust in the news media. That's already really, really low. That was historically the lowest it's ever been, that was according to Gallup, and that's the lowest it's ever been since it's been recorded, American trust in the media institution. Since then, it's only plummeted further. Now we know that there's something, a conversation we talk about a lot in the journalism industry, which is about the journalist entrepreneur, right? The individual journalist people are flocking, not to networks, but they're flocking instead to the individual because they're like, I can trust this person because of ABCD reason, I trust this person. There's also an element of like parasocial, like you know, dynamics there. Now that's great in many ways, but it's also dangerous, because again, the idea of putting all your trust in one or two people to tell you the whole story also creates a crisis of, you know, media literacy. It does do that. In one way, you are being media literate and being like, you know, critical of mainstream news media, and of course the corporate and governmental role that's being played there, but also now if we're only having: oh, I like these two or three podcasters or streamers, we've completely, you know, narrowed our view of understanding what's happening

 

Gathara  

Right, Assal, I mean, lots of times people say journalism is the first draft of history, and as a historian, how do you see this? Do you see this as a turning point? I know it's kind of like linking to what I'd asked before, but with what Sana has just articulated, do you think we're in a space where essentially the old world is dead, but the new one is yet to be born? The time of monsters, in essence.

 

Rad  

It does feel like a transitional stage in many ways, and you know, the I agree with the idea that social media is a mixed bag, because also we have to acknowledge that it's a space in which any, not just social media, but the internet, is a space in which a lot of people, especially over the last 10 years, have become radicalised in different directions, right, like far-right radicalization is also part of what has happened when people are in these sort of like silos, exactly as Sana described, because what you do is you end up with I like these three people, they seem to say the things I want, then you have an algorithm that just positive feedbacks everything that you already think, and so you have that confirmation bias within it. It's just another place where these conversations are taking place. These conversations have been taking place basically forever, since, since we've had the ideas of settled, civilised societies, and what that's supposed to look like, and what that's supposed to mean, especially in the modern era, right, especially in a… and I think it's important to talk about this, because when we talk about colonialism, we talk about the idea of being indigenous to land, because that's so important within the discussion of Palestine. A lot of these concepts are modern. The nation state is modern, right? Human beings have been around for a very, very long time. Nation states have not. So, a lot of times when we are talking about things, and I say this as a historian, right, there there is an anachronistic way of trying to apply language that doesn't actually fit the modern times, so when you talk about empires of past, and you try to apply it to colonialism of the modern era, they're not the same thing, because we live in completely different eras. You can't talk about, for instance, like women's rights in a contemporary society in the same way that you would 1000 years ago, it doesn't make any sense, right? So, we have to try to understand what context we're having these conversations in. In an era that we supposedly were in a post-colonial era, right? We were supposed to be in an era in which we have something called international law and sovereignty, and these nation states have rights, or at least peoples have rights to self-determination. It's within that language that we're having these conversations. So, when you try to bring back things from 1000 years ago, it doesn't actually make sense to the current conversation. So, it's within this that we're trying to frame things, and that's what I mean when I say social media is just another - the internet is just another platform where these conversations are taking place, and so you'll have... there's a lot of good that comes with that, because it creates larger spaces for more people to participate, but there's also bad that comes with that, because people will manipulate those spaces in the same way that they've done every other space, so you know, in terms of a transitional period, I mean, we're living through what now with introduction of AI, a third existential crisis, all created by human beings, so, yes, I mean, it would be impossible not to sort of look at the moment that we're in, and understand that we are, we are adapting as we go, things that we don't fully understand. In terms of the politics, the very, like, you know, the more everyday, not the, not the bird's eye view, but the more narrow view, yeah, we're also living through a transition. Because I think after the fall of the Soviet Union, you had this period, you know, this so-called end of history. You had this narrative from the liberal Western countries that made it seem like we had reached, you know, this was it, we, they were successful. This was a model of how societies would operate, of course, it hid the dark part, which was the exploitation of the masses, mass wealth inequality, whether that's within our narrow societies, and why you see so much anger, and sort of like distrust, not just of the media that Sana pointed out, distrust of the government, distrust of everything. People don't trust things because what they, what we agree on as a society is that something is wrong, like that's what people agree on. There's this feeling in the sense that something is wrong within our society, and it's not just within the media. The media, remember, is a conduit. It's getting its language from the top. It's getting its language from the elite. The politics, the political discourse, the fact that just politicians in the United States so openly talk about, who was it Federman said something like: I'll always vote for what's good for Israel. It's so bizarre that we live in a country where you have this notion of sort of like America First politics, but then within that very discourse you have people who talk as if Israel is an extension of the United States. It's a very bizarre space that we exist in, and so I think the… just to bring it back to the war that just happened in Iran, I also think that is a, maybe not a rupture is too dramatic a way of describing it, but it does highlight that transition, and the fact that what is presented as, you know, American dominance through pure force is not a model that is sustainable for the foreseeable future.

 

Gathara  

Right, I mean, there's quite a lot to unpick there, but one of the things you mentioned that really strikes me is this… within this transition, within the way things are changing, is how kind of the portrayal of things itself becomes contested, you know, and how things are sort of in the past, I guess we'd point them out as these are problems, may not be the same problems that we are dealing with at the moment, so in that sense, I'm really interested in this idea of the ubiquity of Palestinian suffering. So, for a long time the problem was framed essentially as the absence of Palestinians in Western press, that they are not seen, they are not heard, their suffering is not recognised. It seems now we have the opposite, where they are essentially ubiquitous. They're there, everywhere you turn, there's the images that you see, there's the discussion of what's happening in Gaza. I think it's undeniable, but what has seemed to go missing is the people who are responsible for that suffering, and Assal, this harks back to the headline correcting that you've been doing, so there is an acknowledgement that there is suffering, but there is then the erasure of the person of Israel as the cause of it. Is this just a continuation also of what has happened before, is this just a new way of erasure, a new way of changing, of turning around narratives, or is it a different way of telling stories now?  

 

Rad  

I think when you know when the images start streaming in and Palestinian suffering becomes undeniable, the way of presenting it is to present it as if it's, it's a, it's a tragedy, right? It's a consequence of…it's collateral damage. It's the natural consequence of warfare, without actually recognizing what makes it a genocide. What makes it genocidal? Like, the main thing that makes it genocidal is intent. The fact that it was all deliberate. It wasn't, you know, the winter that was killing Palestinians and making babies freeze to death. It was the fact that Israel deliberately destroyed their homes, refuses to allow aid or reconstruction to occur. It is a manufactured crisis. It's engineered deliberately to destroy Palestinian life, and that's what makes it a genocide, and that's obviously what has been absent within, within that narrative. The other thing I would say, though, is, and I think Mohamed el-Kurd's book, Perfect Victims, is really important in this kind of conversation, is Palestinian suffering should not be the way, like valourising the idea of Palestinian suffering, because that is what makes them human, is also a form of racism, because it's… Palestinians, whether you know, whether they suffer graciously is not what endows them with rights, like they had those rights before, they should not have to go through such suffering to, in order for that, it just... I don't know how to say it. It highlights how deeply they've been dehumanised. That the only way to sort of highlight what is happening to them is if they are suffering in such egregious ways. The occupation that has been going on for decades, the colonisation of their land, should have been enough for people to understand that Palestinians have a right to resist, but Palestinian resistance has been treated in any form always as problematic, and so it's like they're only allowed to suffer, and that's when their plight or their struggle can be highlighted, not through their agency, but through their suffering.

 

Gathara  

Right, yeah, I mean, the resistance is pathologised in a sense, but you're right. Yafa El Masri, Palestinian academic, has mentioned how the impact of seeing of this way of seeing people, that the only vantage point, the only way you encounter them is as victims. There's never anything, any other context that you're seeing, and that's how, and how that then strips them, or strips the world of the idea that these are people who can have agency, who can actually be participants in their own stories, and have, be able to develop solutions, for example, you know, because all we see is people in tents. Sana, this ubiquity of it, you know, I'm interested in how what it means to be able to tell that story of suffering without being a without pointing to what's causing it and what that actually means, where that takes us, and I'm also sort of, I draw kind of like a link to the coverage, for example, of the way back famine in Ethiopia, which was kind of what's at the middle of the model of how crises are covered, you know, this idea of always portraying, you know, the suffering, and then you know putting that front and centre, and then appealing for people, then to respond to that, and not necessarily to respond to the people, as you know, full human beings with agencies, more as objects of pity. Sana, do you think this, what we are seeing in media, in social media, especially about Palestinians, is harmful in a sense, it can be problematic?

 

Saeed

Yeah, absolutely. I think what's really interesting, you know - Assal mentioned this as well, you mentioned this - about how, we'll see not only are Palestinians, you know, constantly… they're presented in two primary ways, right. They're presented as kind of these pathetic victims who are always subject to pathetic circumstances and violence, and this and that, as though it is a catastrophe that's befallen them, like a natural disaster, as opposed to something that is actually systematic, and so, it's either that way, or whenever their agency is even discussed, it's only ever in the context of, as you mentioned, right, this pathologised violence, which is actually their resistance, a part of their resistance. Palestinian resistance looks like a multitude of things, and I think it would - it's a misnomer for us to ignore the fact that armed resistance has been a huge part of that, and not just for the Palestinians, but even the Lebanese, and so Palestinians have been traditionally presented in these two ways: pathetic victims, or as like quote unquote agents of terror, right. This kind of like they are inflicting violence against like the poor Jews of Israel who've done nothing wrong, etc. like that's kind of the narrative as though it's presented. I think it's important to also know that, so after the establishment of the state of Israel and Palestine, there was a lot of like propaganda that was done at the time leading up to it, but also during. Americans weren't initially very supportive, like the US government was not necessarily super supportive of Israel in the same way that we see kind of come up in the ‘70s and ‘80s and ‘90s, and so on and so forth, and that really is a byproduct of changing American interests, especially in the Cold War and post Cold War - I actually have a series coming out about this - but what we see is that in the 1980s when Israel starts bombing Lebanon, and of course, then goes on to occupy southern Lebanon, and then you have, of course, the Sabra and Shatila massacre. That was the first time that Americans were seeing Arabs - I'm just going to say, right, like that's how they were viewing them - it was the first time that they were seeing Arabs as victims of specifically, and what was named at the time, Israeli violence. The Israeli commando, which is kind of like this very famous, you know, categorising of Israeli war criminals, but the Israeli commando comes out of the 1967 war, 1973, as like this incredible hero for the Americans to look up to: Moshe Dayan, his posters were in like the bedrooms of American liberals, and then you know, and that was your Israeli commando, and then we start seeing footage from the 1980s bombings of Beirut, and Americans were like: Hold on a second, that little country, you know, the one that survived the Nazis, you know, because that's the narrative again that everyone has, they're doing what to refugees? They're doing what to like kids? And I mean it's that same political context, that same media context, in which you know Ronald Reagan very famously, and listen, I'm not a fan of Reagan, but one thing he did that was very interesting was in a letter to Menachem Begin, he explicitly told him, like: you need to stop this Holocaust. And that is the language he used, and used it purposely. That's unfathomable today, because at that time it was still this idea that the Israeli… there wasn't this idea that the Israelis were untouchable, that they could not be blamed for the violence that they were inflicting. However, that particular moment and that media moment is what gives birth to two major things. It changes… it doesn't give birth to AIPAC, but it changes the role fundamentally of AIPAC, because AIPAC realises: Oh my God, we can't lose Americans. We need Americans to support Israel if we need it, if we want to keep expanding our power. The second is that you have the creation of CAMERA. CAMERA is an organisation which specifically focuses on ensuring pro-Israel bias in US news media. I mean, that's not what they say. They're like: we're holding the media accountable, but that is what they do. And so, there's so many journalists that I've known over the years who even talked about being bullied by members of CAMERA because, you know, being told, like: Don't use this language, etcetera, etcetera. And so, even Joseph Kahn, who is a senior executive editor at the New York Times, his father sits on - sat on - the board of CAMERA, right, and so, we see that we're allowed to talk about Palestinian suffering, but the parameters of that are now very specific. If you talk about Palestinian suffering and you talk about Palestinians as victims, you will rarely mention Israelis. I remember reading a devastating piece in NPR, which was following a young girl - young Palestinian girl - from Gaza, who had become an amputee, and of course, she was an amputee as a result of Israeli air strikes. It took eight paragraphs for there to be any mention that the reason why she had lost her legs was because of an Israeli airstrike on her home, right. And that is what we see. So, even sympathetic coverage, I see a lot of people saying: oh, look at this sympathetic coverage, it's like the tide is changing. It's like, no, it's still controlled opposition, if we want to understand it that way, right, and even then the Israelis and their culpability, and also American culpability, like let's not obviously lose sight of that, American governmental and military culpability, as well as Israeli culpability, is completely erased, or at best it's really minimised, and kind of made as this passing, like: Oh yeah, by the way, was like an airstrike by the Israelis, anyways, look, how tragic this is.

 

Gathara 

Yeah, but isn’t it striking that I mean, if you look at Israeli media, they're not shy about essentially mentioning the things that they're doing. They're quite explicit about it in a way that Western media is, and I'm asking why, why do you think that is?

 

Saeed 

It's because, well, the Israelis are… Israeli media, if you've never watched Israeli media, and there's… God bless the people who do the translations of Hebrew media, because it is shocking, and they very readily admit to everything, like: oh yeah, we want to go and do this, we want to go kill, and, yeah, you know, the fact that they had one of the Israeli soldiers, war criminals, who had had raped Palestinian prisoners inside of Sde Teimen. The fact that he went, he was brought onto national television, like prime time television, and was boasting about it. That's completely normal in Israeli society, and our news media is so... I think it's important, a lot of times, we see that the conversation becomes like: Oh, the US news media is trying to protect Israel. What it's doing is not necessarily protect Israel, it's protecting American interests. Israel is so important to many American interests. I do think, like - and a lot of people argue this as well - that it's its centrality to American geopolitical interests is like slightly leaving, and I think we're going to see in the next 10 years, like Israel, like the Americans are going to see that Israel has become much more of a liability, and you don't really need them when you have all these Gulf countries ready to do exactly what Israel has been providing America for the last, you know, especially during from the 1960s onwards, but you know, what our US, what our media does is, despite it being free, it voluntarily enmeshes itself with the interest of our government, and so by doing that, it's not protecting Israel per se, it's protect… and that's not to say we do have individual instances where editors who themselves identify as Zionist, etc. or they're, you know, people who have racist, you know, ideation about Arabs and Muslims. Absolutely, that individual level bias, 100% plays a role, but at a more systemic level, which I think is really important for us to look at, we find that our news media is much more anchored in protecting the American government and its interests as a whole, right, which is why you'll find that even the same news media that will be critical of Donald Trump on almost anything, right, domestic, when it comes to foreign policy, it's a little bit quieter. It's a little bit quieter, usually, and it's because it's on foreign policy where our news media, especially, kind of like, you know, gets, gets instead,

 

Rad  

I'm so sorry, can I add something to that? 

 

Gathara  

Yeah, go ahead, go ahead. 

 

Rad  

I want to say, I'm like, well, the, because I agree that it's, it's looking out for American interests, right? Like, all medias are basically looking out for their own government's interests, I mean, if you look at the Western media models, but what I would add to that is that, that is the role of sort of like Zionist propaganda and groups like AIPAC that you mentioned, and CAMERA, and all of these entities that try to enmesh the two and say they're the same, right? That's the constant language, and so it's so interesting sometimes when you see these like AIPAC posts of, you know, we're this is this is an American organisation that cares about Americans and Americans and Americans and Americans, but it's like, no, you don't, that's nothing to do with it. It's just that you've intertwined these two things in such a way that the lines and the distinctions are now blurred, and that is what becomes ingrained, and that's what people are starting to question, like they're just starting to question: wait, but why does this make sense? This is still a foreign country. Why do we give it so much money? Why must we give so much money? It's not a poor country by any means. In many ways, the citizens of Israel are provided with more, you know, things like Universal Health Care that we don't have in the United States. So, why are we providing these things to this country? And it's especially worse now when you see the genocide happening in Gaza. So, all of this is coming, coming out because of Gaza, you know that that's the rupture we were talking about earlier, but there is this attempt to say that essentially the interests are the same. That's the kind of language that you hear from Israeli officials. This is the narrative amongst Israeli officials that really, their interests are the same, and what they've done, we've sort of gone full circle colonialism, right, because now they don't hide that colonial language anymore. You have Israeli officials very openly saying things like this is a war for Western civilisation, which is so ironic to be a country in the Middle East, right, to be a country that's in West Asia, that you claim to be indigenous to, but then claim to be…

 

Gathara   

Essentially an outpost of the West, yeah.

 

Rad  

All of that kind of language is very much part of why there has been this attempt over the decades to intertwine those two things and make it truth, right, propagandise to the point where it becomes truth in the American psyche. The fact that it's now being questioned is why you see the panic. It's why you see excessive budgets. I think the budget now for the hasbara budget in Israel is something close to a billion dollars, right? It's like hundreds of millions of dollars. Why you see the kinds of, like, really actually unsophisticated propaganda, by the way, but you see posted by the Israeli Foreign Ministry on social media, because they're constantly trying to change this narrative, because they see that they're losing it, and the way to do it is to intertwine these two things together, and now you're seeing it, by the way, with this, the bill to sort of intertwine the militaries, right? If you see that you're losing the public, how can you use the US government and officials within that government to maintain basically this codependency?

 

Gathara  

Go ahead, Sana.

 

Saeed  

I would argue that they're already quite intertwined, so if we look at how the U.S. military functions, how our defense industry functions. I live in the heart of Defence Central here. The Israelis are an inseparable part of how American defence functions, right? So, even the billions of dollars that we give to Israel, it comes right back here, right? They're buying… the weapons that they're buying are weapons from Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, all the defence contractors we have here, but also Israeli intelligence is intimately tied with American intelligence as well. Israeli tech, I mean, even actually, some of the border security technology that's been used is coming from the Israelis as well, right? So, there's like, I would say, there's already quite a bit of integration, and the I agree that, you know, groups like AIPAC and J Street, and so on and so forth, for them it is very important that the idea that Americans and Israelis are one is an idea that continues to be propagated. I will say, though, there's truth to an extent to that as well, because a lot of Israelis are Americans too, right? At the heart of also the settler project, at the active settler project, it's all active settler, but specifically, like in the West Bank, a lot of those settlers are Americans themselves, right? Instead of, and I think we tend to also kind of characterise them as Israeli, they're Americans. So, I think the Israelis and the Americans are actually quite tied far more than just in a rhetorical way that's propagated by AIPAC and whatnot. I think historically the same thing that this country has done to its indigenous populations, the way it talks about coming here and creating a frontier and pioneering and manifest destiny. All of that was copy pasted in rhetoric used by Zionist, by Jewish Zionists in the United States and in Israel, right before and following 1948. So, I think, like, yes, there is a lot of it is just propaganda, but there's also, and I think Americans are going to start seeing that of how intertwined their country really is at a systematic level with Israel, and it's very, very like unnerving when we start realising that.

 

Gathara   

Right. It brings me to the question of whether this is really just a media problem. In a sense, the late American professor of journalism, John Calhoun Merrill, essentially said that a nation's journalism cannot exceed the limits permitted by its society, you know, and in a sense he was suggesting that when you look at the journalism, he's telling you something about the society, about where the society itself stands. So, is this just a problem of just media going rogue, media being bad, or is this a societal problem? And if it's a societal problem, how do we actually fix it? You know, Assal, do you want to take a stab at that?

 

Rad  

Well, to you know, to the point of your question, of course, no, it's not just the media. Like I said, the media is just one branch of how this narrative and how the sort of intertwining, and Sana talked about it a little bit, right, the way that whether it's within different institutions, whether it's within different industries, the amount to which Israel and the US have sort of intertwined those interests, but also when you're looking at it from a narrative point of view, I mean, what about our education system? It happens all the time, and people don't even… like a lot of people are not privy to the fact that, you know, there are... I'll give you an example, I live in California, and in California, there's been, you know, an attempt to expand the curriculum on how West Asia is taught, how certain histories are taught, and guess what happens when, when you try to introduce ideas like talk about Iranians and talk about Palestinians and talk about Arabs and Muslims? You get a lot of Zionist pushback that basically says these subjects should be erased, because somehow they're detrimental to Israel. So, even on an educational level, the way that we are… on top of that, we're basically not taught to think critically, right? There's, there's, it's happening at every level, it's happening in the political discourse. It's happening in the media culture. It's happening in our education system, and I'll give you another one. It's also in our popular culture, not just the media culture, but you cannot discount the way that popular culture, film, television, have depicted Arabs and Muslims for, for just, you know, decades and decades, and this goes back to things like, if you look at Orientalism by Edward Said, I think it was, is it Jack Sheehan, Reel [Bad] Arabs, where he looks at, you know, the way that Arabs are portrayed in films, and it becomes, and it feels like it's innocuous, right? It shows up everywhere, but it's so pervasive that, again, we stop challenging it, and it goes back to sort of the original point that I was making, is that so much of this is rooted in racism, but it's not, you know, the media is just one offshoot of the fact that there is an entire system that operates to maintain the status quo, and in order to do so, at every level, you have to be told the same story over and over. Certain histories are important to teach, other histories are not important to teach. How those histories are taught is curated, and then this moves into every level of the society.

 

Gathara  

I guess that raises the question about then, the utility of sort of, what you Assal are doing, and even what Sana is doing, with the critiques of media. If the problem isn't resting on media, can we really expect them to change? If the societies that they come from, the societies that they represent, the societies that they reflect, contain the very narratives and the very ideas that the media is pushing forward. Can we expect journalists to step out of that?

 

Rad 

The role of the media, all of that is not…what I just said, is not to undermine the role of media. The role of media is crucial. Once you leave the education system, which is your entire life, basically, right? You spend a portion of your life in school learning things, and then after that, where do we get information? I mean, if you're an avid reader, if you're, everybody's trying to go after information, that's not the reality of the daily life of an average person of an average American worker, that's not what we're doing, nor should they be expected to do so. So, where are they getting their information? That's the media. That's why it's so important. And it's not just why, for instance, I focus so much on headlines specifically, because people are not following, people are not reading newspapers anymore, right? That's not the way that information is being consumed. When you're consuming sound bites, that sound bite is extremely important, and that's how information starts to become passively consumed. So, none of what I said earlier was to undermine the critical role of media. It's just that it is one node within an entire machine.

 

Gathara  

Right, Sana, what do you think? Can we change media without changing society?

 

Saeed  

So, I have a slightly hot take here. So, prior to October 2023, I did a lot of… I've been doing media critique, especially with regards to US coverage of Palestine, Palestinians, Arabs, Muslims for quite a while now, and I believed, like, it was like reform was possible within the media industry, being within it, talking to individual journalists. So many of us are like-minded, you know? I was like: oh, it's totally possible. So, my purpose in doing the kind of critique that I was doing was not just simply to kind of create critical media literacy for audiences, but also for journalists themselves to kind of have the tools, and you know, I have - I've had journalists right, reach out and say: hey, I used your series on the Israeli Occupation Style, like Style Guide, and I used it in my, you know, mainstream news media newsroom, and my editor actually agreed with this, so we're going to use this terminology, you know. I'm like: oh, that's great, but after October 2023 and especially the first three months of coverage, I always say that the first three months of coverage of the genocide of the Palestinians were, in my opinion, as someone who lived through both and has revisited the early 2000s, the first three months were worse in terms of the unabashed racism and the warmongering and the the complete bloodlust. I mean, that's really what it was from Americans. I'm not even talking about the Israelis. I'm talking about bloodlust from Americans and journalists, in particular. I still remember, you know, CNN and others spreading the lies about the 40 beheaded Israeli babies. I remember Abby Phillip sitting there, CNN anchor sitting there as an Israeli commando tells her that there are no innocents in Gaza, that we are at war with all of them, in October of 2023, and she just sat there nodding, right? Like, I remember that so vividly, and how there was no... there was a complete surrender, a complete acquiescence to, to, to whatever the Israelis were saying, and whatever American politicians were saying as well, about what needs to be done. Those three months to me were worse than what I remember from the early 2000s of the Iraq war. It was bad. It was really bad. It was horrendous, but what we saw in the first just three months alone of the coverage of the Gaza genocide, to me was, I mean, it's still like, it's so like traumatising to think about, because it was shocking, and because of that, I do not believe that reform is possible within an industry that, again, voluntarily - again, I'm talking about systematically, I'm not talking about individual journalists. There are incredible journalists that I know and I love, who work within this industry, and I also know the struggles they have, which are systemic, right. They are pushing back against a machine that is actually working exactly the way it was designed to work. If we understand the United States to be an imperialist power, which it is, right? It is, and it's also the greatest, I mean, greatest in a pejorative, right, the greatest imperialist power that we have seen, and we, and we do currently have, and just in terms of its power and influence, and I don't think anything shows American imperial power as well as the last three years, like everything, the entire… all of the world's major institutions came to their knees, and it essentially dissipated completely, because the United States – and not because of Israel, because of the United States, right – refuse to back down on this genocide. So, for me, the work that I do is not about, let me reform the news media, because it's become very clear that's not going to happen. So, my interest, as someone who's been talking about our narratives and news coverage of domestic and international stories, is creating or helping create a toolbox of language and theoretical frameworks that people can use so that when they're engaging with information, whether it's from social media or it's from mainstream news media, they can look at all of it and say: okay, I see the overarching narrative. I understand the way that power is being mediated in this conversation. I understand this, that, or the other. I see how this dehumanisation works. The goal should always be to, in my opinion, right, to educate the reader. I think that's so important, because we're being inundated with so much information constantly, right. We spend how many hours? I mean, I'm not going to reveal my phone time, but we spend a lot of time on the phone, right. We spend a lot of time on our phones, whether it's ordering food, checking social media, the news, whether we're buying something or you're looking for love, whatever you're doing, you're spending so much of our life is online right now, and because of that, it is more important than ever that we as consumers of information are also critically engaging with all information that we are consuming, so that's what my focus is now, as opposed to reforming an industry that again is working as it was designed to work.

 

Gathara   

I mean, you mentioned the capability, I mean, the, that about this singular individual journalist, you know, and the struggles that they go through, you know, to try and do the right thing, but at some point, being part of a system that constantly dehumanises, that constantly misrepresents what's happening, doesn't that become complicity, you know, and even though they might disagree with it, if they stay in there, they don't resign, they don't get out, wouldn't they be complicit with what's going on? What do you think?

 

Saeed

I mean, again, hot take, not always a very popular position to take as a journalist within this industry, but yeah, I do. And I think that's especially the case if you're working for the New York Times, you're working for the Wall Street Journal, you're working for CBS, you're working for ABC news organizations that actively, actively carried water for the genocide and continue to as well. I've had these conversations with friends and colleagues, and the question I always ask, and they're like… well, it's very similar to when you talk to people who worked within the Biden administration. I knew a lot of Muslims and Arabs who were there, and I would ask them, like: why are you still working in the State Department, why are you still working, you know, within this department, or whatever, or Defence, right? I mean, I'm like, you shouldn't have been there before, but you know, especially now during this genocide, why are you still there? And it always comes back to this very individualised, and I think it's a coping mechanism, and I don't even mean that in a negative way, but I think it's, you know, this like: well, if I'm not here, at least I'm able to push on this. I'm able to push a little bit on this story. We were able to, like, you know, change the wording on this. I remember talking to people who were talking about how they were able to successfully change language in a Biden speech, because I'm like: oh, okay, well, I'm sure Palestinians really appreciate that, but, but my point being is that, like, there are a lot of people though, at the same time who've also left. In 2024, in 2023 and 2024, there were a lot of Arab and Muslim journalists who left mainstream US news media, and they left not simply because they were, they were so sick and tired of the complicity, which they were sick and tired of, but they were also pushed out, right? They were like they were taken off, because if you're Arab or Muslim or any kind of shade of brown, you can't be put on Palestine, right? You're very much…The same thing happens, like we saw during the height of, like, BLM in 2020, a lot of black journalists were taken off of stories regarding police violence against Black communities. So, I agree, like, if you are working for a news institution, and especially on, like, you know that, like, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, I think there is a complicity there, and I think it's very hard to argue that there isn't, because the history of international law, when we look at the Nuremberg laws, right, the New York Times is Radio Rwanda, right?

 

Gathara  

Right, Radio Mille Collines, that's the radio station that was complicit in Rwandan genocide.

 

Saeed 

Yes, but it’s also - looking back - it’s also Der Stürmer, which was a Nazi paper, and I, and it almost kind of makes people go like: oh my God, but I'm like, no, if we look at the foundation of international law, right, the Nuremberg laws, media absolutely is held culpable for its role in war crimes, so when I look at our news industry, I look at an industry which is directly culpable in war crimes. I don't look at it from an angle of like misinformation anymore or disinformation. I look at it as something that has actively participated in war crimes, and so, yes, I agree that, like, there are journalists who I also, I respect them, but I'm like, leave. Like, I understand, but it's like, or create something, and I know I say this as someone who also understands it's hard to create independent news media because the money isn't there. People need to eat, people need to pay their bills, and audiences are just consuming news media also in a very different way, so there is that struggle there, but I don't know, I'm still, I'm still an idealist when it comes to building independent media, because we need to. I don't think we have a choice, we can't be relying on like three or four different news organisations to tell us the truth about what's happening in the world.

 

Gathara

Right, I’ll come to the questions and comments, we've got quite a bunch in the in the chat, so I'll come to those in a minute, but Assal, you've written that, or said that: if you're not writing about the truth about crimes against humanity, then you're culpable in them. I mean, that's a pretty strong statement, and so for these journalists who are within these spaces, I mean, what do you say to them? Do they stay or do they come out? How do you see their situation with regard to essentially their capability for staying within there, not deciding being the people who are ordering the articles?

 

Rad  

I think one of the, one of the arguments that I've often made is, is my… because I'm not within the industry, right, I'm coming from a very different lens, from an academic, historical lens, and so, as someone who's not within that industry, I feel less comfortable judging the individual journalist. My argument is more institutional, because, for instance, like journalists don't often - the reporter on the ground is not the editor, they're not selecting final words, especially not the way that stories are framed, and a lot of times, a lot of them are doing very, very good work. At the same time, Palestinians aren't reporting on Palestine, but if your kid is in the Israeli military, you can, for some reason, and that's not seen as an inherent bias. So, there's, there's that. There are definitely like problematic individuals within within this field as well, but in terms of culpability and complicity, if you look at the case of the Gaza genocide, you have a media system that basically actively cast doubt on every institution, right. They still frame it, if you look at the way that they're talking about Gaza right now, they still talk about it like it's a war. They will not call it a genocide, which is unbelievable, given that every important institution in the world has concluded, not, you know, we started out in 2020, you know, three with experts coming out at the very beginning saying things like this is a textbook case of genocide. In 2024, you had reports from organisations and groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. By 2025, by September of 2025, the UN - and multiple reports, by the way, there's multiple things that are happening in 2024. By September 2025, the UN is not using any equivocation. Israel has committed genocide in Gaza, that is what the UN Committee says after multiple reports, and when you look at the definition of genocide, it's, you know, if it fits within one of five categories where ultimately you're trying to destroy Palestinian or destroy the life of a of an ethnic or religious group that qualifies a genocide. There are multiple reports that basically say that Israel is carrying out not just one, but many of these things, whether it's gender-based violence, reproductive violence, whether it's starvation as a tool, whether it's the destruction of homes. I mean, they're committing herbicide, domicide, scholasticide, anything that exists, and yet it's still framed  – not only are those reports often framed as accusations, right, casting doubt on the institutions, but also now it is still being framed as a war – that is genocide denial. There's nothing else to call it. I mean, the entire point of genocide prevention, or laws, or international law is not to adjudicate genocide after it's been committed, it's to prevent it from happening. When, when you have all of these institutions, the very institutions that were built in order to prevent genocide, when those not only do they do that, not only do they call it an accusation, but in the same breath, in the same headline, you'll often see an Israeli rejection, Israel denial. As if the genocider, the one committing the genocide, it stands on equal footing as the institutions meant to prevent it. So, this is not just a question of, you know, when I, when I say yes, you're culpable, of course, because you are creating the space in which people can cast doubt on that genocide. You are lending legitimacy to the statements of war criminals as if they are on equal footing as the institutions that were supposed to prevent them or hold them accountable. So, in that sense, this whole, they're just presenting what both sides say, they're supposed to present the truth. The truth is that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza, but they still refuse to use that language, and that to me is nothing but complicity.

 

Gathara 

So just a few questions from the chat: what are your thoughts in terms of the global south and its inability to drive the fight against Western imperialism. Does so-called South-South solidarity offer any hope? Sana, do you want to take that?

 

Saeed  

My favourite question, I wouldn't say that there… the global south has been unable to kind of create a fight against American or even broader than that, Western, like European imperialism. We've seen it, and I mean, we've seen people, whether it's in Lebanon, Iran, in Yemen, in Palestine, of course, as well, who've put their bodies on the line to also stop the expansionist war and genocide of the Israelis and Americans in the region. The problem is all, and they have a lot of support internationally. Those groups, those countries have a lot of support in their fight. The problem is in from in the countries where we live, those are groups of people who are so dehumanised, and their violence is so pathologised as always, only ever evil. We can go and literally shred, and I use - I'm not - I'm using the word shred literally. We have weapons that are shredding children, babies. We're beheading babies. We're killing little girls and boys, blowing up schools like hospitals. We can do all of that, and there is always a framework of legitimacy and justification for it. An entire… in our society here in the United States, every institution will come out in some way to either protect that violence, or to mitigate critique of it, right? It's bad, it's tragic, and then have kind of this controlled opposition to it. But that violence does exist, violence that is that is trying to offset American and Israeli violence and European violence is happening and unfortunately, the way that American imperialism itself works is that most of our countries in the global south have been rendered into vassal states for American imperial power, right, because of the resources they have. I mean, look at the Gulf countries, each one of those Gulf countries, right, has no sovereignty. Their entire function, from Qatar, my former employer, right, from Qatar to Bahrain to Kuwait to - Saudi, a little less so, but still - Saudi, but like I would say a little less so. Those countries are what their function is to be American bases, which is why when they were, you know, caught, like, they were like: oh my God, why are we being bombed by Iran? It's like: well, why do you have US bases? That's exactly why. And so, a lot of our countries in the global south do not have sovereignty in any real sense, and so it's not a matter of, like, why hasn't the global south been able to like that because of a lack of will? I think if you were to talk to a lot of the populations in many countries and in the widely-defined global south, I think a lot of the people are ready, they're sick and tired of the of the conditions that they find their country in, right. Corruption is not a just natural thing that happens. Wealth inequality is not just a fact of life. All of these things are manufactured, and when we look at, especially the last 100 years, but especially let's say the last 50 years of human history, we find that so much of the misery that billions of people in this world live in is manufactured, so there is, I think, a lot of desire there to push back against that system, and that same system that was put on display through the genocide in Gaza, and also in the West Bank, like, we can't forget it's across the Palestinian territories, there is a desire, but we do not have sovereign countries. We have, you know, I would say we have maybe one or two that are remaining sovereign, but we don't, because if you try sovereignty, they come in and either arrest your leader and throw them into Rikers, or they, or some other prison, or they kill all of your leadership,

 

Gathara  

Sana, this idea of South-South, I think Palestine has kind of sometimes been presented, I think we had said earlier as an exception, if you will, and I'm wondering whether by recognising that a lot of what is of how that's covered, how the genocide has been covered is really reflective of how other genocides are being covered, so if you think about Rwanda, for example, there was massive denial that there was a genocide going on in the West, essentially because they didn't want to do anything about it, you know. Do you think like having a historical view that looks at coverage of genocides and then takes the linkages between the coverage we see in Palestine, and what we've seen in these other spaces, would then generate this sort of solidarity that the question is asking about.

 

Saeed  

I'm sure Assal will agree with me on this, but history, reading history, and reading many different kinds of history, not just the one that's written by the victors, so to speak, but history is really, I would say, the most radicalising force, and I mean that in a positive radicalising in the original definition of that word, right? Because even for me, like my background, even though I did Islamic Studies, was History, and specifically I focused on Palestinian refugees in Lebanon during the Oslo interim period, so, and for me, I always talk about how that was such a radicalising experience, because when you read history, then all of a sudden it becomes so easy to see the threads that tie in the things that may seem a little disparate in front of you in the present. I think history is so important. I think the Rwandan genocide, that was a genocide that I, you know, got to study in depth, because I went to school in the early 2000s and so, of course, like that was still fresh, so to speak, and so we were talking about it a lot, and I remember the thing that always got me with the Rwandan genocide was the fact that the Clinton administration, because here's the thing with all of these administrations, they know what's happening on the ground better than sometimes even people themselves on the ground might know, right? So they, because they get all the intelligence reports, they get everything. The Clinton administration, during the time of the Rwandan genocide, knew where they were getting daily intelligence reports about what was happening on the ground. They knew it was a genocide. However, President Bill Clinton himself and other senior officials sent out a memo to everyone in the administration that you will not use the word genocide or anything close to it, very similar to kind of the language control we saw by the Biden administration in the State Department in October 2023 and November 2024 when we saw the memo spread, so it is important because…

 

Gathara  

And then that gets reflected in media reporting, you know, because the journalist, I won't use the word, because the government isn't using it.

 

Saeed 

And I don't…. Also, for the record, I don't expect the US government or the US media to call the American genocide of a people to a genocide, right? Like, there's also that on the State Department that was overseeing the starvation, right. We know Anthony Blinken went in front of Congress and lied. Stacey Gilbert, who worked at the State Department, who helped write the report showing how the Israelis were starving Palestinians intentionally, takes that to Blinken. Blinken reads the report, goes in front of Congress, and says: no, no, that nothing like that's happening. We know that all these things were happening, and so they're of course they're not going to be like: oh, we should call this ethnic cleansing or forced displacement, or what? No, we have to use language like evacuations, right? It's so sterile, and so this, and so, yes.

 

Gathara  

Assal, what do you think? The sort of taking the historical view of the coverage itself, I mean, would that be useful?

 

Rad 

I mean, absolutely. And just to get to other questions, because I think Sana really answered it well. You can, you can see the solidarity across movements and across peoples, because they can, what they identify with is being exploited by the same people essentially, in different ways, in different circumstances, but and I would say all of this, like even when you look at the Rwandan genocide, right, the Rwandan genocide, if you actually knew the history of colonialism, it would help to explain certain things and phenomenon that happened during this period, the divisions, you know, the notion of divide and conquer that was used by Europeans in order to, you know, subdue populations, but also through violence, but violence that was always benevolent, right? The language, and I keep emphasising this, because we're talking about the historical perspective, but the language is the same. Violence, just think about during the early stages of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, you had journalists coming out and just very openly being racist, like it wasn't even subtle. It was: I can't believe this is happening in a civilised place like Europe, you know. This isn't, you know, I remember, I think I forgot what station it was on, but you know, journalists saying: this isn't this isn't Iraq or Afghanistan. And that language is meant to make you think, as the public in the Western world, that violence is natural to these populations, that their savagery is what makes them violent, and it's completely absent of the violence that has been imposed on them for centuries, for centuries. So, there's this, this really disturbing irony in the way that history is presented, where the genociders and the colonisers and the enslavers are presented as the civilised benevolent ones, and the ones being genocided are the savages. Like this is the narrative. This is the way the story is told. And when we look at it from a historical perspective, people often get it. It's kind of like: oh yeah, that was bad. I can't believe we let that happen. And yet, here we are, using that exact same language with some updated wording, and it is incredible from a historical perspective to look at it, because people think it's different, and it's not. It's the exact same thing. We're seeing the exact same mechanisms that justify genocides of the past happening right now.

 

Gathara  

Sana, we have a question on the linkages or the impacts of essentially the funding ownership of newspapers we've seen, and I guess of platforms as well by this, I guess, Zionist billionaires, really wealthy individuals, who are taking over these spaces and trying to change them, you know, and to dictate editorial lines that are going to be taken, or the sorts of voices that are going to be allowed on them. I guess the question is, whether we can do anything about this in terms of exposing them, would that change anything? And then, secondly, about what is the way for creating this sort of alternative media or independent media, you know, is there a path towards that?

 

Saeed  

Yeah, I mean, it's such a tough question, because we're talking about, I'm a big believer, of course, in people power. I think that's obviously the thing that changes entire systems, and you can absolutely bring it down to its knees, but the thing is, is that if you're going to take on the billionaires. If you're going to take on this entire system, it's like there are just things that we need to do in terms of sacrifices that need to be made and I think that needs to be not individualised, but rather as a movement, and what does that look like? And unfortunately, I think in the United States, I saw someone asked a question in the chat as well regarding organising in the United States, and I think there has been a really successful way of co-opting and placating and diffusing anti-war, anti-genocide, anti-billionaire organising in the United States, where it's always just kind of funneled back into the Democratic Party, all that energy, everything, and made into like elections, but I think, like, it is imperative that we fight against this, like, we can't just put up our hands and defeat and be like: oh, well, everything sucks, and that's just the system, then, oh, well. No, that's that's not it, like, we, no matter what the outcome at the end of the day is going to be, we cannot just be, we cannot allow ourselves to just be swooped in by it. We have to fight against it, and that looks different for everyone, but I think there needs to be some more cohesive, cohesive organizing around it. I'm part of, like, WAWOG, which is the Writers Against the War on Gaza, and we do a lot of small, but sometimes big actions. It's something small, but we see the impact of it day in and day out. We've been able to do some incredible work with, like, American literary writers and pushing back within that industry, because the focus, of course, is journalism and in the literary community. So, we're able to kind of push back a bit, force people to, like, you know, we led the boycott of the New York Times opinion section. I boycott all the New York Times, but you know, and we got incredible American writers to sign on to that boycott that they were going to refuse to... I mean, there are things that we can do, and they might seem small, you know, in front of the behemoth of American institutional power, but it's necessary. Second thing I'll say is, find the journalists you want to support and support them, like that is the old… There's so many incredible journalists, you know, buy Assal’s book is coming out in September 2026 right? Inshallah. Like buy her book, right. Subscribe to my Substack, subscribe. Look at the people that you guys are interested in listening to and support them, that is the only way that we can at least start pushing back in a way that is meaningful, because for a lot of us, what becomes difficult is we, we don't fit, we don't fit into the mainstream, and so there are a lot of incredible journalists who, and thinkers and writers who are not fitting into the mainstream, so they fall in between the cracks, and at the end of the day, all of us are also just trying to make a living and pay the bills as well, so that we can do the work we want to do. So, if there are journalists, writers, thinkers, historians that you support, support them with more than just like a thumbs up on a story or something like that, and I know that we're all struggling in different ways, but that is like again some of the sacrifices we all have to make in order to begin to create the world we want to see.

 

Gathara  

Assal, we're coming to the end of this, but I'd like to get your thoughts on this. If indeed media does represent, or just does reflect general attitude within society, we've seen, or we are, I think we're beginning to see a sea-change, especially in the U.S. in attitudes towards, I mean, amongst the youth, you know, amongst the left, or what counts for the left in the US, and, and even, you know, amongst the right, as well, even within the MAGA movement, you know. Do you think that this in itself will, in the end, be reflected in the coverage, that the coverage will start to moderate and not be so pro-Israel as society itself shifts?

 

Rad 

I think it's sort of a chicken-and-egg question, right? When you say, is the media a reflection of our society, it's hard to tell. Is it a reflection of our society or is it meant to shape the way our society thinks? And I would argue that it tends to be the latter. It's an elite institution that is actually trying to shape the way that people think, because for instance, on foreign policy, a lot of times it goes against what the majority of Americans actually believe or think, or it shapes the way that they think. Going back to 2003 the invasion of Iraq, when Americans were polled around, because the majority of Americans overwhelmingly actually supported the war in Iraq at the beginning. This is, of course, sort of in the early years, still in the wake of 9/11, there's different attitudes in the country, but also what happens is you look at polling a majority of Americans believed that Saddam Hussein and Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and a majority of Americans believed they had a role in 9/11, neither of which are true. So, how do they end up with absolutely false beliefs? Because of the way that the media is portraying this information, and so you know, I tend to think that it is less so about the media reflecting what the society thinks, and more so the media reflecting what the status quo of the elites is. In terms of that sort of changing, I mean, I think there are, I'd like to believe idealistically that there are, and there are, there are journalists, even at these institutions, many of which, some not many, but some of which, who actually, you know, quit or resigned over Gaza, the coverage, the horrible coverage of their institutions because of Gaza, who you know signed letters, who protested internally, who pushed back, because I think that, you know, someone becomes a journalist because they want to tell the truth. I don't think you know, a young person who goes into studying journalism is thinking: I can't wait to be a propagandist for the state. I don't think that's like the ordinary journey of a journalist, and so you know, maybe I'm a little bit too idealistic, but I do think that there is, and we're seeing that happen in different ways with independent journalism, with the way that social media, Substack, all of these things are used in order for these people, for journalists to be able to do what they actually want to do without those same limitations, so, if it was ever to function the way that it's supposed to, according to the ethos of journalism, then yes, it would reflect the will of the society, especially you know, the will of the oppressed. It would highlight and challenge state narratives that are meant to oppress people. That would be the ethos of journalism. That's simply not the way that the media, and that's why, you know, calling it journalism, that's a question and of itself. Is it journalism? Is media the same thing as journalism? Not necessarily. And so, the part of it where it's just propagating the narratives of the state, you know, that's not going to change because they are tied to elites. I do think that to Sana's point, and I agree with it so much, we still have to do the work, like we have to do the work. These conversations are the work. We have to do the work, and I appreciate the plug, by the way, for the book, but supporting the especially independent journalists, I cannot emphasise how important that is, because they are trying to take on these massive institutions, and they cannot do it without the support of the public.

 

Gathara  

All right, I think that's a pretty good point to end it. Thanks a lot for this. Assal, the book comes out in September?

 

Rad  

Yes, yeah, early September,

 

Gathara 

Right. What's it called again?

 

Rad   

Don't Say Palestine, but the don't is crossed off, so hopefully we’ll actually say Palestine. 

 

Gathara   

Excellent. So, you guys watch out for it in September, Assal Rad, Sana Saeed, it's been fantastic having you on. Time has just flown. I've really enjoyed it, and learnt a lot. Thanks a lot for being part of the Decolonise How? webinar Series.

 

Saeed   

Thank you for having us.

 

Rad 

Thank you.