Aasif Sultan, a former editor of Kashmir Narrator magazine, has been re-arrested under ‘anti-terror’ law days, two days after his release following five years in jail.
A Kashmiri journalist, who was released after spending more than five years in jail earlier this week, has been re-arrested by police in another case under India’s stringent “anti-terror” law, according to his lawyer.
Aasif Sultan, 36, has been sent to a five-day police remand after he was produced in a court in the city of Srinagar on Friday, Adil Abdullah Pandit, Sultan’s lawyer, told Al Jazeera.
Pandit said that Sultan was arrested on Thursday in a 2019 case regarding violence inside the central jail in Srinagar under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA), which international rights groups have described as a “draconian” law. Srinagar is the largest city and summer capital of Indian-administered Kashmir.
Rights activists have said getting bail under a UAPA case is nearly impossible, which means Sultan could stay in jail without trial indefinitely.
The case is related to “the sections of rioting, unlawful assembly, endangering human life, attempt to murder under Indian Penal Code (IPC) and section 13 of UAPA for advocating, abetting or inciting unlawful activity”, according to the lawyer.
At the time of the violence, Sultan was already lodged in jail. The riots inside the jail had erupted over a move by authorities to shift prisoners to jails outside Indian-administered Kashmir. Hundreds of Kashmiris have been lodged in jails in other parts of India, making it difficult for families to meet their relatives.
‘Harbouring militants’
Sultan worked as an assistant editor for a Srinagar-based English magazine, Kashmir Narrator, which is now defunct, when he was arrested in September 2018 on allegations of “harbouring militants”.
His family has denied the allegations, saying he was being targeted for his work as a journalist.
On February 27 he was released from a jail in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh about 1,400km (870 miles) away.
But the brief joy for his family in Batamaloo locality in Srinagar turned into grief on Thursday when Sultan was re-arrested.
“He saw his five-and-half-year-old daughter for the first time since his 2018 arrest. His daughter is asking about him and we don’t know how long this fight can be,” one of Sultan’s relatives told Al Jazeera on the conditions of anonymity, referring to the difficulty in securing bail under the UAPA.
“He looked very weak and wanted to rest. His blood pressure was also unstable. When we asked the police, they said he was accused in another case.”
Sultan was able to secure bail in the 2018 case in April 2022, when a court said that investigation agencies had failed to establish his links with any armed group. There has been an armed rebellion in Kashmir against Indian rule since the 1980s.
But authorities immediately charged him under the Public Safety Act (PSA), a law under which a person can be jailed for up to two years, without a trial. Amnesty International has termed it a “lawless law”.
Sultan’s release on Tuesday came more than two months after the Jammu and Kashmir High Court quashed his detention order under the PSA.
Laxmi Murthy, co-founder of Free Speech Collective, an organisation that advocates freedom of expression, said, “The re-arrest of Aasif Sultan is another example of ‘lawfare’ or the (mis)use and overuse of draconian laws to harass journalists.”
“Since the process is punishment, Aasif Sultan will have to spend the next few years of his life proving his innocence.”
Since India scrapped Kashmir’s special status in 2019 and imposed central rule, authorities have cracked down on free speech under which multiple journalists and activists have been arrested — mostly under “anti-terror” laws such as the UAPA.
In January, a Chinese ultranationalist vlogger – video blogger – came across red circular stickers on the glass doors of a shopping mall in Nanjing featuring the words: “Happy 2024.”
The vlogger claimed that what appeared to be innocent New Year decorations were, in fact, nationalistic Japanese motifs since the red circles resembled the rising red sun in Japan’s national flag.
“This is Nanjing, not Tokyo! Why are you putting up junk like this?” he snarled at a manager at the mall.
Local police subsequently got involved and ordered staff at the mall to take down the decorations and gave the mall’s management an official warning.
“It is the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard,” 33-year-old noodle shop owner Alice Lu from Shanghai told Al Jazeera.
“If red circles are not allowed then there is no end to the things that must be removed,” Lu said.
Red souvenir plates with images of China’s Mao Zedong (right) and Chinese President Xi Jinping (left) in Beijing, China in 2017 [Tyrone Siu/Reuters]
Following the standard set by the local police in Nanjing, users on Chinese social media were quick to highlight the absurdity of all the red circular objects that would need to be banned, including the logo of China’s telecommunications giant Huawei, posters of China’s first Communist leader, Mao Zedong, featuring a rising sun in the background, and even traffic lights.
The fiasco drew in China’s state-run CCTV which chastised the vlogger in an article on its Weibo account, calling his actions “detrimental to individuals, companies and society as a whole”.
Shaoyu Yuan, a scholar of Chinese studies at Rutger’s University in the United States, said CCTV’s comments demonstrated an attempt by the Chinese government to maintain state control over the narrative surrounding nationalism.
“They want to ensure that nationalism serves as a unifying force rather than being misused,” Yuan told Al Jazeera.
The logo of the Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei Technologies is pictured next to a statue on top of a building in Copenhagen, Denmark, in 2021 [Wolfgang Rattay/Reuters]
Steering patriotism
Under the rule of Chinese President Xi Jinping, fervent patriotic sentiment has been encouraged among the public for years.
Xi said in June that “love of our country, the feeling of devotion and sense of attachment to our motherland is a duty and responsibility of every Chinese”, and that “the essence of patriotism is loving the country, the Party and socialism all at the same time”.
During Xi’s presidency, that patriotic fervour has been projected outward from China by its “wolf warrior” diplomats, including former foreign ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian who infamously floated the idea that the US military was responsible for the COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan.
Zhao also posted a fabricated image depicting an Australian soldier holding a bloody knife to the throat of an Afghan child in 2020, at a time when relations between Australia and China were in free fall.
While the CCP promotes its own version of patriotism, it also moderates nationalistic output at times, too.
Incessant bashing of the US online is a common pastime among active Chinese nationalists. But leading up to a highly anticipated summit between President Xi and US President Joe Biden in November, China’s media and nationalist commentators suddenly dialled down their anti-US rhetoric.
Beijing adjusts the volume on nationalistic rhetoric to serve its interests, according to Yuan, engaging in a balancing act of patriotic sentiment when necessary.
“While nationalism is encouraged as a means of fostering a strong national identity and loyalty, its excesses can lead to extremism and undermine international diplomacy, social harmony and public order,” Yuan said.
Nationalism turns violent
Lu from Shanghai said the Nanjing incident was an example of how the promotion of intense patriotic feelings in China has led to a toxic environment – particularly when it comes to Japan-related topics.
“It is a bit scary actually how anti-Japanese feelings can make some people react in China,” she said.
Chinese modern nationalism directed at Japan is deeply influenced by historical conflicts, most notably the events of the Second Sino-Japanese War during World War II, Yuan said.
“These have left a lasting imprint on the Chinese collective memory, fuelling sentiments of resentment and vigilance towards Japan,” he said.
Anti-Japanese sentiment was on display in 2022 when a known cosplayer was approached by police in Suzhou, a city not far from Shanghai, as she was taking pictures of herself on the street wearing a Japanese kimono. Before being taken away, a police officer was recorded shouting at the woman: “If you came here wearing hanfu (traditional Chinese clothing), I wouldn’t say this, but you are wearing a kimono as a Chinese. You are Chinese!”
A few days after the arrest, CCTV launched a social media topic promoting the wearing of hanfu-style clothing.
A protester holding a banner shouts slogans during an anti-Japan protest over disputed islands called Diaoyu in China and Senkaku in Japan, outside the Japanese Ito Yokado shopping mall at Chunxi Road business area in Chengdu in 2010 [Jason Lee/Reuters]
The Suzhou incident pales in comparison, however, to August 2012 when a dispute in the East China Sea over control of the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands, which are administered by Tokyo but claimed by Beijing, led to large anti-Japanese protests across urban China.
While protests are often swiftly broken up by the Chinese authorities, the anti-Japanese demonstrations in several cities saw no interference, and from there they turned increasingly violent.
In the central Chinese city of Xi’an, a Chinese man in a Japanese car was pulled out of his vehicle and severely beaten, sustaining life-changing injuries.
The government-controlled People’s Daily subsequently said in an editorial that it did not condone the violence, but attempted to explain it as a sign of Chinese people’s patriotism.
By the time police intervened and restored order at the end of September, Japanese shops, companies and restaurants had been vandalised and China-Japan relations were bruised.
Sales representative Simon Wan, 36, remembers the demonstrations in Beijing devolving into riots at that time.
“From our apartment window, we saw people smash my father’s Toyota (a Japanese car brand) which was parked on the street below,” he told Al Jazeera.
“My family and me stayed indoors most of the time those days to avoid trouble. It was quite frightening.”
Wan believes that the government does not want to see a repeat of the anti-Japan riots in 2012.
“So, I think they reacted to the nationalistic vlogger in Nanjing because they wanted to avoid any kind of escalation,” he said.
When ultranationalist fervour leads to property damage or becomes counterproductive to China’s diplomatic goals, it goes too far, according to Yuan, at which point the Chinese authorities will seek to contain it – as in Nanjing.
Making patriotism pay
The vlogger in Nanjing was not just chastised for being too nationalistic, however. He was pilloried for using patriotism to turn a profit from his video blogs.
“Patriotism is not a business,” CCTV stated in its rebuke of the vlogger.
But, patriotism can in fact be a lucrative business for many nationalistic bloggers and vloggers on Chinese social media.
According to Yuan, there are many ways to monetise patriotism for people such as Hu Xijin, a public figure and commentator who has leveraged his nationalistic stance to amass significant followings on social media.
“This business aspect of patriotism involves not only direct profits from social media platforms through advertisements and sponsored content but also endorsements and partnerships with brands that wish to align themselves with patriotic sentiments,” he said.
Chinese social media accounts with more than a million followers can earn their owners a few hundred thousand dollars a year, while nationalistic commentators such as Hu Xijin have tens of millions of followers. But as the vlogger in Nanjing discovered, the attention garnered by nationalistic tropes does not guarantee fame and fortune, and can instead lead to infamy and misfortune.
The logo of Chinese social media app Weibo is seen on a mobile phone in this illustration picture taken on December 7, 2021 [ Florence Lo/Illustration /Reuters]
In 2022, blogger Sima Nan had his social media accounts across Chinese platforms blocked after he engaged in a war of words with China’s tech firm Lenovo during which time it was revealed that he was a homeowner in the US state of California, despite his overt anti-Americanism.
Another nationalist, Kong Qingdong, was banned from Weibo in 2022 for undisclosed reasons. Kong was also temporarily banned in 2012 after he had sparked a public outcry when he referred to Hongkongers as “dogs” and other slurs.
“Navigating the waters of nationalistic content creation in China can be as perilous as it is profitable,” Yuan said.
“While the Chinese government often supports and promotes nationalistic sentiment that aligns with its policies and image, there are red lines that cannot be crossed, and content creators who venture too far, misinterpret the government’s stance or criticise its policies – even under the guise of nationalism – can find themselves facing swift repercussions,” he said.
Adding to the peril, China’s red lines are fluid and can quickly change depending on the situation.
The sudden shift in nationalistic rhetoric leading up to the Biden-Xi summit in November is an example of such a rapid change.
“A nationalistic stance that aligns with the government’s current diplomatic posture might be encouraged at one time but could become problematic if diplomatic priorities shift and the stance is no longer deemed appropriate,” Yuan explained.
Such fluidity is an element of the CCP’s balancing act regarding nationalism.
“It (the CCP) aims to promote a strong sense of national identity and pride among its citizens while avoiding the pitfalls of hypernationalism that could lead to xenophobia, regional tensions, or internal dissent,” Yuan added.
“Additionally, the Chinese government has always sought to prevent any single voice or group from becoming so influential in nationalist discourse that it could challenge the authority of the Communist Party or create factions within society.”
Looking back on his experience during the anti-Japan riots in 2012, Wan, the sales rep from Beijing, said he worried that the government’s promotion of patriotism and tolerance towards nationalism would endanger Chinese society in the long run.
“I think President Xi told American President Biden a few years ago that those who play with fire will get burned,” he said.
“I think that is also the case for anyone in China that plays too much with the flames of nationalism.”
India’s entertainment market is already one of the world’s biggest, with the merger expected to further shake up the multibillion-dollar industry.
India’s Reliance Industries and Walt Disney of the United States have announced the merger of their India TV and streaming media assets, creating an $8.5bn entertainment powerhouse far ahead of rivals in the world’s most populous nation.
Reliance, led by Asia’s richest man Mukesh Ambani, will inject $1.4bn in the merged entity, with the company and its affiliates holding a more than 63 percent stake. Disney will hold about 37 percent, the companies said in a joint statement late on Wednesday.
For Disney, the merger follows a long struggle to arrest a user exodus from its bleeding India streaming business and the financial strain caused by billions of dollars in Indian cricket rights payments, in another example of how foreign businesses can struggle to grow in India.
The merger values the India business of the US entertainment giant at just about a quarter of the $15bn valuation when Disney acquired it as part of its Fox deal in 2019, sources have told the Reuters news agency.
The companies said the transaction values the merged venture at about $8.5bn on a post-money basis. They did not explain how they arrived at such a valuation.
“This is a landmark agreement that heralds a new era in the Indian entertainment industry,” said Ambani, whose wife Nita Ambani will serve as the chairperson and former top Disney executive Uday Shankar will be the vice chair.
Together, the Reliance-Disney merged entity will have 120 TV channels and two streaming platforms, helping Ambani eclipse rivals in the country’s $28bn media and entertainment sector.
“The JV will be one of the leading TV and digital streaming platforms for entertainment and sports content in India, bringing together iconic media assets across entertainment,” the companies said in a joint statement.
The agreement will also help Reliance and Disney stave off competition from traditional rivals such as India’s Zee Entertainment and Japan’s Sony, as well as streaming competition from Amazon and Netflix.
The announcement comes less than a month after Sony and Zee called off a $10bn merger that would have been a formidable force against Reliance and Disney.
The deal also comes as Disney is facing pressure globally to streamline its businesses. Bob Iger returned as Disney’s chief executive in November 2022, less than a year after he retired, and has since restructured the company to make the business more cost-effective.
Still, Disney is up against activist billionaire investor Nelson Peltz who is pushing the home of Mickey Mouse to cut costs, create a profitable streaming business globally, improve the performance of its movie studio, and clean up its succession planning.
Iger in November said the company would like to stay in India, but it was considering its options.
“Reliance has a deep understanding of the Indian market and consumer,” Iger said in the statement on Wednesday, adding the deal will allow “us to better serve consumers with a broad portfolio of digital services and entertainment and sports.”
On Sunday, February 25, 25-year-old active duty member of the United States Air Force Aaron Bushnell set himself on fire outside the Israeli embassy in the US capital of Washington, DC, in a one-airman revolt against the US-backed slaughter currently being perpetrated by the Israeli military in the Gaza Strip.
Over the past 143 days, Israel has killed nearly 30,000 Palestinians in the besieged coastal enclave. In video footage recorded prior to and during his self-immolation, Bushnell states that he will “no longer be complicit in genocide” and that he is “about to engage in an extreme act of protest – but compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonisers is not extreme at all”.
To be sure, Palestinians have long been accustomed to, well, burning to death at the hands of Israeli weaponry, ever since the state of Israel undertook to lethally invent itself on Palestinian land in 1948. The Israeli military’s use of skin-incinerating white phosphorus munitions in more recent years has no doubt contributed to the whole Palestinian “experience”.
After pertinently observing that US complicity in the genocide of Palestinians is “what our ruling class has decided will be normal”, Bushnell plants himself directly in front of the Israeli embassy gate – in full US military fatigues – and proceeds to douse himself with flammable liquid. As he rapidly burns to death, he repeatedly shouts: “Free Palestine”, while security personnel order him to get “on the ground”. One particularly helpful individual points a gun at the blaze.
In the aftermath of Bushnell’s self-immolation, the New York Times announced: “Man Dies After Setting Himself on Fire Outside Israeli Embassy in Washington, Police Say” – a rather strong contender, perhaps, for the most diluted and decontextualised headline ever. One wonders what folks would have said in 1965 had the US newspaper of record run headlines like: “Octogenarian Detroit Woman Dies After Setting Herself on Fire, Police Say – An Event Having Nothing Potentially To Do With Said Woman’s Opposition To The Vietnam War Or Anything Like That”.
Speaking of Vietnam War-related self-immolations, recall renowned US historian and journalist David Halberstam’s account of the 1963 demise in Saigon, South Vietnam, of the Vietnamese monk Thich Quang Duc: “Flames were coming from a human being; his body was slowly withering and shriveling up, his head blackening and charring. In the air was the smell of burning flesh; human beings burn surprisingly quickly… I was too shocked to cry, too confused to take notes or ask questions, too bewildered even to think”.
And while such an intense and passionate form of suicide is no doubt bewildering to many, genocide should be all the more appalling; as Bushnell himself said, self-immolation is nothing “compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine”, where people know all too well how quickly human beings burn.
In Bushnell’s case, the US political-media establishment appears to be doing its best to not only decontextualise but also posthumously discredit him. Time Magazine’s write-up, for example, admonishes that the US “Defence Department policy states that service members on active duty should ‘not engage in partisan political activity’” – as though actively abetting a genocide weren’t politically “partisan”.
Furthermore, the magazine specifies, US military regulations “prohibit wearing the uniform during ‘unofficial public speeches, interviews’”, and other activities.
Perhaps Bushnell’s ashes can be tried in military court.
At the bottom of the Time article, readers are charitably given the following instructions: “If you or someone you know may be experiencing a mental-health crisis or contemplating suicide, call or text 988” – which naturally implies that Bushnell was simply the victim of a “mental-health crisis” rather than someone making a most cogent and defiant political point in response to an extremely mentally disturbing political reality.
At the end of the day, anyone who is not experiencing a serious “mental-health crisis” over the genocide going down in Gaza with full US backing can be safely filed under the category of psychologically disturbed.
Of course, the US also perpetrated its very own genocide against Native Americans – another bloody phenomenon that has not been deemed worthy of diagnosis as a severe collective mental disturbance or anything of the sort. As per the official narrative, if you think it’s crazy for the US or its Israeli partner in crime to commit genocide, you’re the crazy one.
Coming from a family of US Air Force veterans myself – both of my grandfathers participated in the carnage in Vietnam – I have personally witnessed the psychological fallout that can attend service as empire’s executioners. Aaron Bushnell was meant to be a cog in the killing machine, but his principles cost him his life.
Indeed, according to a former colleague of Bushnell’s who worked with him to support the homeless community in San Antonio, Texas, he was “one of the most principled comrades I’ve ever known”. And while we journalists are supposed to be the ones speaking truth to power, suffice it to say that Bushnell has put Western corporate media to shame.
Rest in power, Aaron Bushnell.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
New Delhi, India — For three generations of Indians, Bollywood and radio meant one name: Ameen Sayani. On Tuesday, the voice that entered the homes of hundreds of millions of people fell silent one final time.
Sayani, who began his career in the early 1950s with a weekly countdown show of Bollywood songs and dominated India’s airwaves for more than six decades, passed away in Mumbai following a cardiac arrest. He was 91.
To his audience, he was much more than a presenter – blessed with a warm, kind voice, he cultivated a joyous, inimitable style of broadcasting that conjured the image of a sincere friend speaking directly to each listener through their radio set. A friend who built a cult following who knew no generation gap and who nurtured a love affair between Bollywood songs and his listeners.
His original radio show, Binaca Geetmala, ran for 42 years, made several lyricists, composers and singers household names and even saved many films from oblivion.
“Radio was king in those days and he was the king of kings,” Anurag Chaturvedi, journalist and author, who knew Sayani well, told Al Jazeera.
Over a career that spanned much of independent India’s journey, Sayani recorded at least 50,000 radio programmes, lent his voice to 19,000 jingles, hosted TV shows, and did voiceovers and cameos in some Bollywood films, often as a radio presenter.
“If you see our radio history from 1927, the year radio was incorporated in India, till today, there’s only one voice, one name that is remembered – Ameen Sayani. He was a superstar, his voice was like a gift from heaven,” Pavan Jha, a musicologist, told Al Jazeera.
All India Radio (AIR), India’s state-owned radio broadcaster, is also called Akashvani, which in Hindi means celestial announcement or voice from the sky.
Hindi-Urdu, women first and a note of defiance
Ameen Sayani’s radio career began with a ban.
In the winter of 1952, Balakrishna Vishwanath Keskar, India’s federal minister for information and broadcasting, banished film songs from national airwaves, calling their lyrics irrational, vulgar, Westernised and a threat to Indian classical music.
On AIR, Hindustani and Carnatic classical music replaced film songs, as announcements and news bulletins became increasingly Sanskritised.
Radio Ceylon, a radio station set up during World War II in Colombo, Sri Lanka, to bring music and news to British soldiers stationed in South Asia, saw an opportunity.
It roped in a sponsor – Binaca Top, a toothpaste brand – and a studio owner-producer, Sayani’s older brother Hamid, who was based in what was then called Bombay, and is now Mumbai.
On December 3, 1952, a few months after Keshar’s ban, Radio Ceylon’s strong military transmitters pumped out Binaca Geetmala (garland of songs) into homes across India for the first time, with 20-year-old Ameen Sayani’s cheery, cheeky greeting: “Behno aur bhaiyon, aap ki khidmat me Ameen Sayani ka adaab (Sisters and brothers, Ameen Sayani is at your service with respectful greetings)”.
The show’s signature tune was from a silly but catchy Hindi film song – Pom-pom, Dhin-dhin Goes the Drum – and Sayani’s greeting was in Hindustani. A mix of Hindi-Urdu, Hindustani was the language of Bollywood films and songs, and it was the language of the people.
Sayani’s fresh, joyous style, his lilting note of defiance along with his choice to reverse the order of the traditional greetings of “brothers and sisters”, made the show an instant hit.
“There was gender sensitivity and Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb in that greeting,” Chaturvedi said, referring to India’s traditionally syncretic Hindu-Muslim culture.
He was a cultural ambassador and publicist of Hindi Bollywood music
Born in 1932 in an elite Mumbai family, Sayani’s mother Kulsum Patel was a Hindu and his father, Dr Jaan Mohamad Sayani, was a Muslim. Both were involved in India’s freedom movement.
Sayani attributed his fluency and ease in Hindustani to years spent assisting his mother to edit and print Rahber (which means a guide in Urdu), a fortnightly journal. In an interview, he once recalled a note Mahatma Gandhi had written to his mother: “I like the mission of ‘Rahber’ to unite Hindi and Urdu. May it succeed.”
Sayani and his brother would record the Binaca Geetmala show at their Bombay studio and send magnetic tapes by plane to Radio Ceylon, outside the Indian government’s jurisdiction.
The show’s format was simple: Based on listeners’ requests and record sales, Sayani played 16 Hindi film songs in ascending order of popularity. Sayani has been compared with iconic US presenter Casey Kasem, who ruled music radio in his country with his American Top 40 show. But while Sayani, in later interviews, mentioned his admiration of Kasem, his show preceded Kasem’s by almost two decades, setting a template the world would follow.
While the Indian government kept its airwaves clear of film songs, Sayani celebrated Bollywood songs and elevated them to a popular art form. He would introduce each song with the name of the writer, composer, and singer, and narrate an anecdote about them, their struggles and dedication.
According to Jha, in the late 1980s, when Amitabh Bachchan, a Congress MP, was facing allegations of his alleged involvement in a corrupt defence deal, the release of his film, Shehenshah, kept getting delayed. “Binaca Geetmala kept the film alive by playing the song, Andheri Raaton Mein (On Dark Nights,) over and over for months,” he said.
Sayani was a suave marketer too. At regular intervals, he would say, “Give me a Binaca Top smile,” promoting the sponsor’s toothpaste and connecting with his listeners.
“That timber in his voice, that immediate connect [he had] with listeners … He was more than a radio presenter. He was a cultural ambassador, an advertiser and publicist of Hindi Bollywood music,” said Jha who, like thousands of others, would sit in front of his radio set at 8pm every Wednesday with a notebook to jot down information about songs and their ranking.
“Everyone in the house would be listening to his show – women who were cooking in the kitchen, men in the living room, Bauji (grandfather) on the veranda,” Jha said.
Letters from Jhumri Telaiya to that voice from the heart
Ameen Sayani, whose career is synonymous with the golden era of radio in India, also hosted other popular shows, including the weekly Bournvita Quiz Contest, which he took over after his elder brother died.
He created hundreds of 15-minute film promos for radio and sold toothpaste and headache pills on radio and TV. But apart from Bollywood, it was the dusty, nondescript town called Jhumri Telaiya that he really popularised across India.
On Binaca Geetmala, Sayani would ask listeners to mail him their favourite songs and ranking: He would read some of the notes on air. This spawned zealous radio clubs and passionate letter writers nationwide, including in the mica mining town of Jhumri Telaiya, in the northern Indian state of Jharkhand.
Rameshwar Prasad Barnwal, a mining tycoon, was reportedly the first resident of Jhumri Telaiya to start mailing postcards with his farmaish (song request). Sayani, perhaps intrigued, read out his request and the town’s name in his sing-song style regularly on his show.
While many listeners thought Sayani had concocted this funny-sounding town as a joke, in Jhumri Telaiya letter-writing became a craze and an ego trip. Residents started sending several letters every week, reportedly even bribing postmen not to post others’ letters so that they’d have a better chance of being picked up by Sayani.
At its peak Binaca Geetmala, which eventually moved from Radio Ceylon to the All India Radio network and ran till 1994, had about 400 radio clubs and thousands of individuals writing to Sayani every day with their requests.
“He knew the art of radio announcement. He would use flowery language, play with his voice, words. But there was decency in his style … He had a lot of adab (refinement),” said Chaturvedi.
“Ameen Sayani was special. His voice stood out because it came from the heart.”
If you have been following Western media to try to make sense of the heartbreaking images and stories coming out of Gaza during Israel’s invasion, you are bound to be disappointed.
Since the beginning of the latest Israeli assault on the besieged Palestinian enclave – which is proving to be one of the swiftest ethnic cleansing efforts in history – Western news organisations have repeatedly published unsubstantiated claims, told one side of the story and glossed over violence selectively to justify Israel’s violations of international law and shield it from scrutiny.
In doing so, Western journalists have abandoned basic standards in their coverage of Israel’s conduct towards Palestinians. None of this is new. The failures of Western journalism have helped Israel justify its occupation and violence against Palestinians for over 75 years.
On August 6, 2022, more than a year before Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, in a particularly egregious break from good journalism, The New York Times buried the lede on the deaths of six Palestinian children in its report on a “flare” in “Israel-Gaza fighting”.
In the report, the journalists waited until the second paragraph to mention that six children were among those killed by Israeli strikes in the Jabalia refugee camp in Gaza and without even breaking the sentence added that “Israel said some civilian deaths were the result of militants stashing weapons in residential areas” and “in at least one case, a misfired Palestinian rocket killed civilians, including children, in northern Gaza”.
In journalism schools this is identified as “breathless” reporting. And it turned out to be wrong reporting too. Ten days later, the Israeli military finally admitted that it was behind the strikes that killed those children in Jabalia.
The New York Times did not report this bit as breathlessly.
I could call it unprofessional – which would be true as the coverage of this conflict in Western media has clearly been shaped by ideology rather than rigorous fact-checking. Such an assessment, however, would gloss over a deeper, more profound problem within Western journalism: coloniality.
Conflict reporting is one of the most hyper-colonised corners of the world’s largest newsrooms. Even in racially diverse newsrooms, reporting on conflicts can be tricky. But the egregious errors that appear to get past editorial filters in newsrooms that take pride in the accuracy of their conflict reporting needs to be accounted for. It also needs to be put on record that, with these consistent errors, Western journalists are “mediating” the conflict in Palestine, not simply reporting on it.
I would be mincing my words if I do not call it what it is: a textbook case of coloniser’s journalism. It is journalism done by practitioners from colonising countries who take pride in their imperial conquests and have an elevated sense of self, every fibre nurtured by centuries of predatory accumulation of wealth, knowledge and privilege. These journalists seem convinced that their countries have fought and defeated particularly immoral and powerful enemies throughout history, stopped evil in its tracks, protected civilisation, saved the day. This is the dominant story of the West and by extension, the story of Western journalism too.
However, the dominant story is often not the true story – it is merely the story of the victors.
And today, Western media are once again telling the story of the victors in Gaza, like they did countless times before in their coverage of conflicts, crises and human suffering in post-colonial nations.
I’ve seen this in the coverage of tropical diseases by reporters who know malaria, dengue or Ebola will never course through their veins or affect their communities. I’ve seen it after the Rohingya genocide when genocide survivors were asked whether they had been “held down by five men or seven” as they were gang-raped.
Western journalism is, at its very core, journalism of the victor – it never attempts to deconstruct stories, put them in the right order or add relevant context to speak truth to power and expose the continuing excesses, aggression and violence of the “victors” of history.
And when it comes to Palestine, it is journalism about occupation by people who will never know what it feels like living under occupation. It is voyeuristic reporting without a moral compass or a bedrock sense of decency.
In coloniser’s journalism, language is a weapon that is used to erase the humanity of the colonised. In The Wretched of the Earth, in which he analysed the dehumanising effects of colonisation, philosopher Frantz Fanon wrote of Algerian suffering (during France’s imperial conquest) as being depicted in media reports as “hordes of vital statistics” about “hysterical masses” with “children who seem to belong to nobody”. The book was written in 1961, but its inferences apply perfectly to the Western media coverage of Palestinian suffering today.
This dehumanising use of language has been most visible in the counting of deaths. In early November, The Times of London noted, “Israelis marked a month since Hamas killed 1,400 people and kidnapped 240, starting a war in which 10,300 Palestinians are said to have died”. In Western news, Israelis die in active voice – Hamas “killed” or “murdered” them – while Palestinians die passively. They “dehydrate to death as clean water runs out” as the Guardian once put it, as if this is not a wilful crime against humanity but a random act of God.
According to the propaganda machine of the West, Israel has the right to destroy Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Iran, Lebanon, Yemen and any other country in the region to keep Israelis safe. It can kill nearly every Muslim, Jews asking for a ceasefire, UN staff and physicians in Doctors Without Borders (Medecins Sans Frontieres, or MSF), journalists, ambulance drivers and even babies in the process of targeting Hamas. Yet few news organisations ever discuss what it means for Israel and the world, if the only way it can feel secure is by raining death and misery on millions of people. None of them – for there is now an “us” and “them”, a divided world of the colonised and the colonisers – ever meaningfully questioned whether a victory achieved at the expense of the lives of thousands of innocent children can ever be considered a victory in the first place.
In this slick propaganda of war, Western journalists are obscuring the true story we are faced with here – that Israel, backed by the most powerful military in the world, is waging war on a stateless people living under its occupation and pulverising innocent men, women and children in their thousands. The story that Western governments have been enabling this carnage while lecturing the world about their superior values, decency and love for democracy. Anyone living in the post colonial world knows that their talk of decency and love for democracy and exceptional journalism and decent politicians – it is all but a swindle.
At this late hour, as war rages and children starve and Israel is tried for “plausible genocide”, it is crucial to point at the blood in the hands of Western journalists. They have, in perfect coordination with their powerful governments, maligned and disempowered multilateral institutions like the United Nations, gave Israeli narratives of “self-defence” a veneer of respectability, and drove Palestinian stories and perspectives into irrelevance.
The few Palestinians who were given a platform – in the name of “balance” and good journalism – were discouraged from discussing the decades of oppression, occupation and abuse they endured at the hands of Israel. They were allowed merely to weep for their dead relatives and beg for more aid to feed their starving children – after condemning Hamas, of course.
Perhaps with this war, the game is finally up for Western journalism. As they watch Israel’s war on Gaza on their social media feeds and see what is happening with their own eyes through the reports and testimonies of Palestinians themselves, more and more people around the world are recognising Western media’s role in perpetuating colonial power, its language and ideologies.
These days there is growing criticism of how Western leaders have failed, but not nearly enough is being said about how the Western intelligentsia, and especially those leading the West’s most influential newsrooms, have also failed. It’s not just Western liberalism and rules-based order that has been reduced to rubble as a result of Israel’s war on Gaza, but the legitimacy of Western journalism.
In their coverage of the Gaza war, Western news organisations demonstrated clearly that they view mass death, starvation and limitless human misery as acceptable and even unavoidable when it is inflicted by their allies. They showed that conflict journalism, as practiced in Western newsrooms, is nothing but another form of colonial violence – one that is realised not with bombs and drones, but words.
In this moment of overwhelming barbarity, journalists of colour like me are whiplashed by the the monumental amorality of the newsrooms that we are told to look up to. The least Western journalists, with their significant power, could do at this moment is demand a permanent ceasefire and spare us yet another instalment of coloniser’s journalism.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
I was listening to a lecture at my local mosque when it suddenly felt like the imam was speaking directly to me. He was interpreting a few verses from the Quran. As he approached the sixth verse in the chapter and began to explain its meaning, my heart began to beat fast.
“O believers, if an evildoer brings you any news, verify it so you do not harm people unknowingly, becoming regretful for what you have done,” he translated.
I felt validated. God is telling us to fact-check. To avoid spreading rumours or misinformation. To question the source of information and to minimise harm. This was a command that I was following on an almost daily basis. I struggled to see how I was making a difference sometimes as a journalist, but in that moment, my faith reassured me that my efforts, no matter how small, were seen and rewarded by God Himself.
I had read the Quran a few times in Arabic, but I was delving into the English translation for the first time. I was getting closer to my religion and God as I grew further away from my career. I constantly reminded myself that my purpose in journalism is to share factual and important information and to put my best work forward. I hoped one day I would be a correspondent for a US media outlet and get sent to the Middle East to report instead of one of the white journalists I usually saw on television.
This was a lofty goal for someone who grew up in Dearborn, Michigan, the city with one of the largest Arab populations in the United States. Despite being surrounded by people like me, I felt isolated when I chose to study journalism, as the majority of my peers had gone into engineering and medicine.
I lived in a city where there was a deep mistrust of the news media because of years of inaccurate or faulty coverage of the Middle East and Muslim and Arab communities in the US. Most of the time, we would only see ourselves in the news portrayed in a negative light or accused of “terrorism”. The Arab families I grew up with did not tune into local news because the news did not serve them.
Most families moved to Dearborn to be near fresh pita and packed mosques, where you can take your time learning English because you can get by with just your mother tongue. My dad moved our family to Dearborn in 2000, and after the 9/11 attacks, it became a permanent stay. A man who lived in multiple countries and couldn’t sit still in one place, all of a sudden held his family closer and refused to move. He mentally built thick gates around the city that were rarely ever crossed.
I was only two years old, so I can’t tell you about any immediate effects of 9/11 that I experienced. But I can tell you that I grew up in a household that never travelled unless it was to Jordan and Palestine. While some families went up to Mackinac Island during the summers, I never set foot there until I was 21.
As a family, we visited the two closest Great Lakes, but never made the two-and-a-half-hour journey to Lake Michigan because it was passing through too many white Republican counties where my dad didn’t feel he could protect us against any possible hate speech or discrimination, especially since my mother and I wear hijabs.
I grew up angry at my community for being so insular, but I later understood the decisions my parents’ generation made. Their fears were partly fuelled by US media coverage of the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq and other post-9/11 policies like the demonisation of Muslims under the guise of “anti-terrorism” operations.
I wanted to become a journalist to correct the narrative. I wanted to accurately tell stories and hold people in power accountable.
I was taught in college that journalism can change policies, expose government secrets and lies and absolve the wrongfully convicted. It drew me in. I wanted to redirect that power to myself and the communities I belong to who had been vilified by the news industry and the government for decades.
I fell in love with storytelling and reported for the campus paper while studying, and interned at multiple outlets in Michigan. I even had an opportunity to spend two weeks interning at the New York Times.
My mom was sharing my stories on social media, my dad was reading my bylines and asking further reporting questions, and my brothers and sister would call me with “exclusive tips” about incidents that happened in the halls of their school. I saved hard copies of all my stories printed in newspapers.
In 2021, I landed my first full-time job after college at a local paper in Texas where I was the only Muslim and only Palestinian in the newsroom. I pumped out about 400 stories in a year on breaking news and trending topics.
Among them was one story that I hesitated to pitch, and later regretted ever writing. It was a news piece covering a local protest against an evangelical church raising money for Israel.
I took my own photos of the event, interviewed multiple protesters, most of whom were Palestinian, and included as much context as I could while staying concise. The story went through multiple editors in the newsroom before it was published. Usually, I got to look at the edits that were made, but this time I saw them after publication.
Instead of highlighting protesters’ concerns and informing readers of the conditions of Palestinians living under Israeli occupation, the article mischaracterised the demonstration as just “another protest” that happens every year at this event. Several paragraphs were cut and the headline was changed to a more attractive line that called the fundraiser for another country just an “annual event”.
The article quoted the church’s founder and the keynote speaker for the event who had called for an end to anti-Semitism, but featured none of the Palestinians I had originally interviewed.
I remember wanting to scream in my empty apartment when I saw the published piece. I felt like my voice was deleted. I felt shame as I faced direct backlash from the protest organisers who said the article lacked context and only gave space for the church’s point of view. I felt like I was part of the problem, and no longer a part of the solution.
What I took away from that experience was that I should steer clear of localising international affairs. But then a few months later, the Russia-Ukraine war started and we began publishing articles localising it.
I was assigned some of these stories: a local bar boycotting Russian vodka and a US journalist receiving treatment at a local hospital after getting injured in Ukraine. I tried to avoid bringing work troubles home, but I failed. My husband listened to my frustration and comforted me as I wept.
I saw the journalism that I wanted to be a part of and that was possible, but learned that its standards could not be applied to my people. I saw the efforts that were put into getting the facts right and centring local Ukrainian voices. I saw what was possible for others but not for the Palestinian people.
Despite my meeting with the editor-in-chief and voicing my concerns to try to create change “from the inside”, my efforts felt fruitless and exhausting. There were several moments like these, which piled up and left me deeply frustrated until I decided to quit.
My experience was no precedent. Palestinian voices rarely make it to print or the air in the US given the heavy pro-Israeli media bias. When they do, they often face censorship. Some publishers are fearful of the blowback from subscribers or advertisers because their pro-Israel sensibilities may be hurt by a pro-Palestinian perspective or an objective report about Israel. Others think the stories we want to tell are about issues that are “too complicated” and that won’t attract more viewers or clicks.
After my experience in Texas, I took up another reporting job in Michigan where I immersed myself in covering local government. I loved my new workplace, but it was asking a lot from me to stick to a profession that was too slow to listen, even when listening was one of the most valuable skills for someone practicing it.
In August, I went to Palestine to visit my relatives there and spent some time with my maternal grandfather.
He was born in 1946 in Beit Nabala, a village that was destroyed two years later during the ethnic cleansing of Palestine – what we call the Nakba – by Jewish militias as they laid the foundations of the new state of Israel.
My grandfather was exiled along with his parents to a refugee camp in the West Bank, where he lives until today.
When I was still in school, he hoped I would study law and make it to the International Court of Justice to advocate for Palestinians. He was not very excited when I chose journalism, as he didn’t understand the profession I thought I knew. He only knew that journalists in Palestine often put their lives on the line while reporting, and the West did not value their voices or even try to listen.
But I was in the West and as a young Arab-American, I was listening to journalists like Shireen Abu Akleh (may God rest her soul) and Wael Dahdouh, who reported from the occupied West Bank and Gaza. I saw Ayman Mohyeldin become an anchor for MSNBC and bring previously unheard stories to the screen. I was inspired by their bravery and their efforts. I believed the industry was changing for the better, and the world was starting to listen.
One night, towards the end of my stay, I was seated by my grandfather in his house. The TV was on at an insanely loud volume; an anchor was sharing news of protests going on in Idlib, Syria. My grandfather turned to me and inquired about the news I cover, asking me to pull up the website on his old Samsung phone. I could see how proud he was of my work as he zoomed into the English text and tried to pick out words from his limited English vocabulary.
It was at that moment when he was scrolling through my stories that I felt a deep sense of embarrassment and felt so naive for thinking one day I could make a positive difference for him and other Palestinians. I felt like I was wasting my time begging the industry to humanise people like him. Especially when he is still living in the same spot where his parents had set up a tent handed out by the United Nations some 75 years ago.
When I got back to Michigan, I had to take a break from reporting. I had tied my growth in the journalism industry to my ability to make meaningful changes in the accurate coverage of the communities I belong to. Looking ahead, I did not see a place for me in US media. It broke my heart. The same reason I became a journalist was the same reason I had to walk away from journalism.
I saw that my community in Dearborn was still suffering from misinformation and still did not trust the media or read much local or national news. Most outlets were unwilling to change and continued to neglect my community while patting themselves on the back for the few diversity hires they would make.
A week after I left the job I loved, Hamas launched an operation in southern Israel and that led to yet another brutal Israeli war on Gaza. The coverage in US media has been outrageous.
I have seen major US TV channels readily report claims by the Israeli army and government without verification. I have seen newsrooms disregard basic rules on fact-checking and credible attribution and embrace language that obfuscates and covers up Israeli crimes. I have seen outlets issue corrections weeks or months after flawed reporting, when the damage has already been done.
These disturbing practices continued even after scores of legal scholars came forward and called what is happening in Palestine a “textbook case of genocide” and a group of countries, led by South Africa, started proceedings against Israel for the charge of committing genocide at the International Court of Justice.
I feel we are back to 2001. The US media is yet again causing harm to communities that are afraid to share their stories because of one-sided, hostile coverage. It is failing again to hold to account those supporting and funding a genocidal war with our tax dollars.
Over the past three months, all I have been seeing are more reasons to stay away from journalism. A job that requires compassion, empathy and deep listening to produce impactful reporting has been hijacked by those who forget the true purpose of this profession. The news industry has neglected the basics of reporting, fact-checking and truth-seeking, repeating false and unverified claims with genocidal consequences.
The US media is asking its reporters to care less about the Palestinian people; it is asking me, a Palestinian journalist, not to care at all about the plight of my family and not to believe in their basic human rights to life, food, water, and human dignity; it is asking me to willingly dehumanise them. Journalists have been fired for sharing their indignation at the mounting number of civilians killed or for simply calling for a ceasefire to end the “hell on earth”, as the UN has called it.
I do not believe I can be valued as a journalist by a media industry that delegitimises and demonises Palestinian journalists, and allows for reporting that incites and justifies attacks against them. I do not believe this industry will truly hear me while it refuses to listen and centre Palestinian voices.
I have hope and I believe small efforts can create change, but I do not think this is possible in the news industry we have right now.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
A honeymoon in Western Tibet came to a tragic end in October when the newlyweds crashed their car on a mountain road after suffering altitude sickness.
Sitting in the passenger seat, 27-year-old Yu Yanyan from Shanghai was badly injured.
Despite being transferred to a local hospital, rapid haemorrhaging and a lack of adequate blood stocks meant that she was unlikely to make it.
But drawing on the couple’s network and connections, Yu’s husband was able to secure blood donations from local civil servants and members of the public in that area of Tibet that helped to stabilise his bride.
Yu’s father then arranged a chartered plane to fly her to a larger hospital for more advanced surgery.
The operation to save Yu’s life was a remarkable effort in China – where many lack access to quality healthcare – especially in remote regions, such as Tibet.
Some also said it was unbelievable.
Success stories meet a sceptical Chinese public
Bai Xinhui, who is also from Shanghai like Yu, began to follow the story after a now-recovering Yu posted a video about her near-death experience.
“It was really beautiful to hear how so many people worked together and contributed to saving her life,” Bai, a 26-year-old UX designer, told Al Jazeera.
At the same time though, Bai was left wondering whether ”a regular person could get so much help”.
“Maybe her husband and her have very good connections or come from very rich families,” Bai said.
“Maybe it’s all true, maybe it’s only half true,” she said, suspicious that some of the details of the rescue might have been altered to make public officials appear in a more positive light.
“It is sometimes difficult to know what to believe and who to believe in China these days,” she added.
Bai is not the only one who has pondered the circumstances and details of Yu’s ordeal.
When the story gained national media attention and went viral on Chinese social media in November and December, people started to ask questions.
“How were they able to involve so many people to help her and how were they able to do it so fast?” asked Li Xueqing, a 31-year-old marketing specialist from Suzhou.
“Chinese healthcare is very bad in many places, so I don’t think Yu’s story shows how patients in her situation are normally treated,” Li said to Al Jazeera.
Yu’s survival has shifted from the story of a dramatic rescue to symbolising entitlement and privilege in contemporary China, with some referring to her as the “Shanghai princess” in Tibet.
Lhasa in the Tibet Autonomous Region, China, in 2020 [File: Thomas Peter/Reuters]
The story became so prominent that it resulted in Chinese authorities and media looking into signs of wrongdoing regarding the resources mobilised to save Yu.
So far, there is little evidence suggesting that any abuse of positions or power played a role.
Around the same time that Yu’s rescue was being dissected by a sceptical online community in China, another story about overcoming incredible odds began trending on Chinese social media.
It too was met by equally cheerless responses.
A lottery player in the central Chinese city of Nanchang won the equivalent of almost $31m from the state-run Welfare Lottery in early December.
The winner had reportedly spent a sum of $14,000 on nearly 50,000 sets of identical lottery numbers that each won him approximately $625.
Additionally, his total winnings were tax-free due to the relatively small prize money on each individual bet.
The circumstances instantly raised suspicions.
“He probably had help from someone on the inside,” one user on the Chinese social media platform, Weibo, speculated.
Both China’s healthcare sector and the state lottery have previously been plagued by stories of embezzlement and corruption.
“There is a lot of money taken and bribes given in many sectors in China, so of course we are suspicious,” Li from Suzhou said about the incredulous effort to rescue Yu in Tibet and the unprecedented lottery win in Nanchang.
The outpouring of public scepticism also suggests a lack of alignment between successes in life and the experiences of everyday Chinese people, said Jodie Peng, a high school teacher from Shenzhen.
“Most people haven’t won big in the lottery or experienced a whole community helping them during a medical emergency,” she told Al Jazeera.
People buy scratch cards at an outlet of the China Welfare Lottery in Beijing, China [File Adrian Bradshaw/EPA]
Peng also had her own faith in China’s healthcare system tested in recent years.
Her grandfather died last year from COVID-19 in a crowded public hospital before overworked medical staff had a chance to properly tend to him. Peng also fell victim to medical fraud in connection with post-surgery treatment she received a few years back.
“So, of course, it was nice to hear about the lottery winner in Nanchang and the successful rescue of the Shanghai woman in Tibet. But those things don’t happen in the Chinese world that I live in,” she said.
China’s party-approved ‘positive energy’ stories
According to associate professor Yao-Yuan Yeh, who teaches Chinese studies at the University of St Thomas in the United States, stories that circulate in China’s media and online often reflect the desired narratives of the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) more so than the lived experiences of the public.
“The Chinese internet is filled with stories backed by the Chinese state,” Yeh told Al Jazeera.
China’s leaders have repeatedly called for the media to disseminate stories with “positive energy” to lift up and inspire people.
With the internet heavily surveilled and regulated in China, stories and commentary that do not support the mandates of the government can be quickly removed by censors without warning or explanation.
So, when public data showed that Chinese youth unemployment was hitting a record 21.3 percent in June, China’s censors shut down critical discussions about the figures online and removed negative comments about the state of the Chinese economy.
The following month, the publication of China’s youth jobless data was suspended.
Combatting ”negativity” has also resulted in the authorities targeting individuals.
When a Wuhan-based doctor, Li Wenliang, began to warn colleagues in early December 2019 about the emergence of a virulent respiratory illness that would later come to be known as COVID-19, he was arrested by police for “spreading rumours”.
Li would succumb to the virus a few months later.
A security guard tries to remove posters in memory of the late doctor Li Wenliang with other doctors at the Central Hospital of Wuhan on the anniversary of his death, in Wuhan, Hubei province, China, on February 7, 2021 [Aly Song/Reuters]
The lengths that some are willing to go to stifle bad news in China drew ridicule online last year when a student at a college in Nanchang discovered a rat’s head in his cafeteria rice meal, which canteen staff, the school and a local food supervision bureau all claimed was duck meat.
The catering company then threatened legal actions against anyone “spreading rumours” about their food, while students were told by school staff not to discuss the rodent’s head in the rice.
“When those in power even try to cover up a rat head, it is difficult to trust anything you hear or see in the media,” Li from Suzhou said.
Peng from Shenzhen concurred.
“There are so many problems in China right now with the economy, with corruption, and with many other things,” she said.
“You can’t hide it all behind some positive stories,” she added.
“We should be able to openly discuss China’s problems otherwise the lack of trust is just going to spread.”
Samer Abudaqa, Al Jazeera’s cameraman who was killed on December 15 in an Israeli air strike in Gaza, died despite an extensive network of humanitarian organisations and fellow journalists applying pressure on Israel to help rescue him, The Intercept has reported.
Abudaqa was left to bleed to death at the Farhana school in Khan Younis, where the air strike hit, as emergency workers were blocked by the Israeli military from reaching the site despite multiple contacts writing to the military for approval, according to the report published on Friday.
“The Israeli military were well aware that an Al Jazeera journalist was lying helpless, The Intercept’s reporting shows, yet it did not allow emergency teams to safely pass for nearly four hours and did not send a bulldozer for over an hour after that,” the report said.
“Much of the evidence points toward a targeted Israeli strike on the Al Jazeera journalists,” it said.
“I tried to get up in any way because I was sure that another missile would target us – from our experience that’s what usually happens,” Dahdouh told The Intercept.
The veteran journalist told the outlet that once he realised his arm was bleeding profusely, he knew he needed medical attention, and stumbled to an ambulance hundreds of metres away. He was then taken to a nearby hospital.
Abudaqa, however, was injured in the lower half of his body and could not walk to the ambulance.
“I couldn’t offer him anything,” Dahdouh told The Intercept, recalling the incident, saying that once he reached the ambulance, he told emergency workers to go and rescue his cameraman. The crew said they would first take Dahdouh to the hospital and send another ambulance to Abudaqa.
Yet, for hours, emergency workers were unable to reach the bleeding cameraman without approval from the Israeli military, with Israeli forces even firing in their proximity as the workers tried to get close.
‘Power in numbers’
Orly Halpern, a freelance reporter and producer based in Jerusalem, decided to share Abudaqa’s ordeal on a WhatsApp group with more than 140 journalists from the Foreign Press Association, a Jerusalem-based non-profit representing reporters from more than 30 countries, The Intercept reported.
Members of the group shared contacts of the Israeli military among one another, as they attempted to let the military know that Abudaqa needed medical help.
The journalists were trying to get a response from the army, just as various humanitarian organisations, from the Palestinian Red Crescent to the International Committee of the Red Cross, were doing the same.
“I thought that if many journalists contacted the army, along with the Foreign Press Association, then the army might be more pressed to act, particularly knowing that we were aware of the situation and that we would report on it,” Halpern told The Intercept.
“I believe there is power in numbers,” she said.
By the evening, Halpern updated the group to share that the Israeli military had approved a Palestinian bulldozer to come through.
But once the bulldozer cleared the path to reach Abudaqa, he was dead. About five hours had passed since he was injured in the strike.
Dahdouh, meanwhile, continues to hold steadfast in his reporting despite losing his colleague as well as his wife, two sons, daughter and grandson in other Israeli air raids since October 7.
“The targeting and destruction of offices, like Al Jazeera’s offices; the targeting of Palestinian families, such as is the case with my family; and the targeting of homes, like my home that was destroyed and where there are no houses around it in the first place, so they know they are targeting the house of the head of Al Jazeera,” the bureau chief told The Intercept.
“It is clear that this is all happening in the context of pressure and punishment of Palestinian journalists by the Israeli military.”
In this special edition, we compile three interviews with experts and a journalist who discuss how the media helped enable genocide in the Gaza Strip.
After three months of destruction, displacement and the killing of Palestinians, we take a deep dive into the way the Gaza story has been covered.
Since the attacks on October 7, The Listening Post has interviewed a range of experts on the news coverage – what’s missing in it, and how it has helped enable the crimes being waged on Palestinians in Gaza.
In this special edition, we’ve compiled three interviews – with one journalist, one expert on human rights and another on digital rights. They talk us through the way the media – through their news coverage – have helped pave the way to a genocide.
Contributors: Francesca Albanese – United Nations Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian Territories Marwa Fatafta – MENA Policy and Advocacy Director, Access Now Mariam Barghouti – Writer and journalist
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