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.”
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.