Israel is mass murdering journalists and Aussie media loves that shit

Isn’t it insane that not wanting Palestinian children to be blown up with impunity can leave you feeling alienated from mainstream Australian society? 

It’s fucked up. Like, really fucked up. Fucked up to the point I’m pining for a dose of the more traditional garden variety of alienation triggered by lame celebrities, celebrated thinkers that can barely think, and popular music with the depth of Coca-Cola commercials. It is depraved to be alienated for maintaining the capacity to feel empathy towards the victims of the most well documented and livestreamed genocide in history. 

Here, in the colony, standing against land-theft and the mechanised slaughter of brown people is still outside the Overton Window of acceptable opinion, somehow, more than 230 years after Australia began the process Israel is speedrunning through right now. 

Globally, support for a free Palestine is the dominant perspective – just look at any UN vote on the matter – and yet here this is still an unacceptable position to espouse on Australian television. At the symphony orchestra. In a newspaper. On the radio. At an art show. In a major political party. At a university. Establishment spaces are clearly for Zionists, their shills, the willfully oblivious and an ever-massive throng of cowards. This is unnatural, anti-democratic, and at odds with the popular will. And it is consistently reinforced by hyper-wealthy self-interested assholes that pull the levers of Australian politics, media, and culture. 

Kim Williams, former CEO of NewsCorp (then News Limited), is the Chair of the ABC and a self-confessed Zionist. In 2013, Williams told the Australia-Israel Chamber of Commerce that he is a ‘lifelong dedicated supporter of the State of Israel’ and that it was an ‘honour’ to be speaking (to a room full of genocidal psychopaths – my words, not his). Ita Buttrose, Williams’ predecessor, in court this month said that Antoinette Lattouf was an ‘activist’, not a journalist, because she retweeted factual information about Israel cutting food and water to Gaza. (Something Israel seems to have a kink for.) 

All of this matters, because, simply, in this world of captured democracies and authoritarian oligarchs, it’s dangerous for the ABC to suck this badly. We don’t have much else. 

If an Australian seeking a clear, honest, context-rich understanding of what is occurring in the world today made the mistake of switching on ABC News, their mind would be decimated with 2000 pound bombs of ‘Israel says’, ‘the IDF says’, ‘Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry’, ‘Two-state solution’, ‘war’, ‘October 7’ and ‘hostages’. You will hear little to no mention of genocide, and certainly not a single utterance of colonisation. No anchor would dare acknowledge the reality that Israel has never actually sought a two-state solution and has instead used the proposal as a rhetorical smokescreen to buy time for a Greater Israel to emerge. All of these deliberate framing choices are designed to distort the barbarity of Israel’s theft and erasure of Palestine. 

The ABC, like all mainstream news, pretends you haven’t all seen fathers cradling decapitated heads and refugee tents burning, carpet bombed to oblivion, hospitals being incinerated, and masses of children sniped. It bothsides genocide – just as it bothsided climate change – as Palestine dispears and Israel emerges soaked in infant blood. I don’t think it’s inappropriate to ask, at this point, whether 18 months into World War II, the present day ABC editorial team would uncritically repeat ‘Hitler says’ or the ‘Nazis say’, without editorialising about how much the Nazis lie all the fucking time, when reporting on all the innocent people mysteriously being murdered in Western Europe.  

Whether these chairpeople shape or mirror the culture of the ABC, it is an unholy shitshow illustrative of the true contours of the relationship between media and power in the West. Whether by edict from above or self-censorship as survival, the Zionist allegiance from the Chairs goes a decent way to explaining the ABC’s horrifically apologetic coverage of Israel’s bloodlust.

This week, after what was always going to be a breather in the genocide, the IDF slaughtered more than 800 people, 300 of them children. Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported this week’s atrocities as the ‘largest massacre of children in Israel’s history’. This is not uncontested territory; Israel has quite the history of child massacres. 

Hossam Shabat was among the 800 martyred. A 23-year-old journalist for Al-Jazeera, Hossam spent the last 18 months of his life journaling the end of his world. He would have preferred to be covering football. 

It’s surprising what still hits you after a year and a half of this. You can’t always cry; sometimes there aren’t any tears left. But Hossam was one of the more visible journalists and souls trapped inside Gaza. His humanity shined. And his commitment to the craft, which tragically meant documenting his own doom, never waivered. 

‘If you’re reading this, it means I have been killed—most likely targeted—by the Israeli occupation forces,’ his final published work begins. ‘By God, I fulfilled my duty as a journalist. I risked everything to report the truth, and now, I am finally at rest—something I haven’t known in the past 18 months. I did all this because I believe in the Palestinian cause.’

‘I ask you now: do not stop speaking about Gaza. Do not let the world look away. Keep fighting, keep telling our stories—until Palestine is free.’

On Wednesday, outside the ABC in Southbank, activists inspired by Hossam’s words held a vigil for the 209 journalists murdered in Gaza in 18 months. Their names, ages, and a short description of their deaths – many of them targeted with their families present – were printed out and affixed to paper poppies and ‘PRESS’ flak jackets, the small vigil telling their stories in a way an ABC broadcast wouldn’t dare. 

A security guard and someone from the MSO expressed solidarity, quietly. Journalists leaving the building just tried to avoid eye contact. If I had to guess, I’d pin that reaction on shame, but anyone from the ABC is welcome to contact me and explain their internal world, because fuck me dead, you’re not explaining the external one remotely adequately. 

Sure, NewsCorp’s excrement is more openly ‘Let’s feast on the blood of brown babies’ in its editorial direction. Just this week, submarine and pedophile-clergy-enthusiast Greg Sheridan wrote a truly upside down and deranged piece that almost speaks for itself. 

Greg’s piece is one faulty illogical presumption stacked on top of another – like stating that the death toll is overplayed when it is clearly a gross underestimate and that it’s moral to slaughter real people to save hypothetical lives – until the whole thing ends up being wobbly bullshit. Various lies, dogmas and hawkish blood calculus are used to justify the slaughter of a people and its babies. His ideas are not seriously worth unpacking because his premise only makes sense in the bullshit realm that the Bearded Cardigan has cobbled together for himself out of scripture and old war movies, but it is worth highlighting in that it represents the broader soup of hasbara served to Australians on a daily basis.  

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Still, the ABC’s coverage is in many ways more insidious. Its subtler reinforcement of these exact same narrative tropes, anti-Palestinian racism and dehumanisation myths, is more of a disservice to the truth because we still credit the ABC with more seriousness and credibility than Murdoch (though this distinction is rapidly waning). We are at a point where Australian media is only fit to comment on the make-believe world it conjures into existence. As a collective, they are uniquely unqualified to pass judgment on reality, it no longer being their purview.

And the rot clearly starts at the top. 

During the 20 years of French and American wars in Vietnam, 63 journalists were killed. Over the seven years of World War II, 67 journalists were killed. In just 18 months, Israel has murdered 209 journalists. This is a journalist murderfest more grotesquely deliberate than any other conflict in history. 

So how can the Chair of Australia’s public broadcaster swear life-long allegiance to a regime systematically murdering journalists and perpetually lying about its genocide? How does that make sense? 209 journalists have been murdered and it is impossible to support Israel’s slaughter without needing to lie about it. I would have thought concern for journalist lives and a commitment to the truth would have been prerequisites for this job, but in Williams, and indeed the entire landscape of Australian media executives, we find the opposite: allegiance to an apartheid death cult mass murdering journalists and lying out their arses about it.