Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to shut down news network Al Jazeera following the passage Monday of a sweeping law allowing the government to ban foreign networks perceived as posing a threat to national security.
Al Jazeera Media Network, which has produced dogged, on the ground reporting of Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza, slammed the decision in a statement, vowing it would not stop the network from continuing its “bold and professional coverage.”
Blocking Al Jazeera “marks an alarming escalation, and Israeli efforts restrict the freedom of the press and further limit the access that citizens of the world have to the daily realities in Israel and Palestine,” Human Rights Watch’s Israel and Palestine Director Omar Shakir told CNN.
The White House also called reports of the move to shutter Al Jazeera “concerning.”
I guess the protests were a bit much for Bibi, so if he can pretend they are winning hard in Gaza, maybe the protests will stop. And in order to do that you can’t have some media cover the danger you pose to the hostages, so banning the media is the only logical option of course… /s
Israelis aren’t watching Al-Jazeera and they aren’t protesting because of human rights abuses in Gaza. They’ve been largely insulated from that as their media focus on the hostages and what happened on October 7th.
It breaks my fucking heart that almost all Israeli protests I see are about “getting our loved ones out of HELL” rather than stopping said HELL that your government has created, and saving both your loved ones and everyone else’s loved ones.
But then again it seems that saying that the IDF is being genocidal will cost you your job in Israel (at least).
I feel like the dehumanizing and erasure of Palestinians is far more widespread in Israeli society than I’d hoped for.
They’ve also been fed dehumanizing propaganda about Palestinians for years. Easier to commit atrocities and not protest against them when you don’t see the victims as people.
It’s always hilarious how obvious it is to people, that foreign people are easily controlled by their local media, but the local one is totally honest guys.
This is more about denying Al-Jazeera and/or any ‘hostile’ media groups a location or office to station journalists. Qatar could broker a deal to set up high power broadcast towers along the border, plus there’s the internet, denying Israelis and Palestinians the ability to see Al-Jazeera content is not the goal.
The goal is to stop you and I from seeing what has been happening since Oct 7th, or make reporting with any hope of accuracy impossible. Without an office to base journalists to do fact-checks, interviews, on scene investigations, etc they are forced to rely on the same bad methods as someone overseas - public information and social media.
Bibi also working hard on the alternative strategy of murdering the journalists. Desperate to control the narrative but the cat’s already out of the bag, it’s genocide plain and simple.
Pretend?