WTF 5/8/2024

Al Jazeera Media Network’s operations in Israel shut down…

Al Jazeera Media Network was created in 1996 and includes English- and Arabic-language news channels, as well as news websites and a large social media presence. Once Al Jazeera began operations it earned a reputation for hosting freewheeling debates on delicate topics, which beforehand had never had voice within state-run Arab media. With the news channel’s coverage of the U.S.-led military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the Arab Spring uprisings that began in late 2010, its popularity and audience grew by leaps and bounds.

In recent years, the Arabic-language channels have earned the ire of regional governments for giving space to Islamist groups, including militant organizations like Hamas, which frequently provides the network with exclusives.  Al Jazeera provides a side of Middle East news that few, if any other, news outlets have credible access.

In fact Al Jazeera is one of the few international news outlets reporting news about the Israeli invasion into Gaza and its ongoing war in that land which was ostensibly launched in retaliation for an Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023   which saw a minimum of 1,139 largely non-combatant individuals killed, along with over 200 hostages taken. However since the Israeli offensive began into Gaza more than 31,000 Palestinians have been killed… a number that includes  more than 13,000 children and 9,000 women, with over another 7,000 people missing and presumed dead under the rubble of a land decimated by some extremely indiscrete military actions that have left destroyed buildings and devastation and in its wake. Simply put the scale and pace of destruction in Gaza is among the severest in the recent history of mankind.

As a result a humanitarian crises of untold proportions has developed within Gaza with the area’s healthcare in a state of complete collapse as well as dire shortages of food, clean water, medicine and fuel due to an ongoing Israeli blockade that includes the blacking out of electricity and communications.  

By early 2024, media reports claim that Israeli forces have destroyed more than half of Gaza’s private homes, nearly 33% of its forest and farm lands, almost all of its schools, along with a minimum of 12 universities plus hundreds of cultural landmarks and desecrated dozens of cemeteries.  

Various media reports and videos have emanated from the Israeli invasion into Gaza that show Israeli troops committing acts that violate internationally accepted rules of armed conflict that were developed from the 1949 Geneva Conventions, which have been ratified by all United Nations.  

A growing number of countries have begun accusing Israel of waging a genocidal action upon the Palestinians that reside in Gaza. In March the UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories said there are clear indications that Israel has violated three of the five acts listed under the UN Genocide Convention.

In all of this Al Jazeera’s reporters have been in the forefront of the reporting the news from Gaza/… they have been on the ground giving eyewitness news regarding what is ongoing in Gaza and as would be expected many of the reports have not been very kind to the government of Israel or the Israeli troops that are waging the war in Gaza.

 Now…

The state of Israel claims to be a democratic country.

Yet this past weekend the presiding Israeli government… aka Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu… shut down Al Jazeera Media Network’s operations in Israel essentially applying a muzzle on and stifling the voice of one of the international broadcasters providing largely uninterrupted coverage of the Gaza war. And maybe more important news and opinion of the war that Netanyahu doesn’t want people, including the people of Israel, to hear.

The Washington Post has upon its masthead the following credo… or slogan as some have called it…

“Democracy Dies in Darkness”

Netanyahu’s move to shutter Al Jazeera is a beginning of the dimming of the light of any semblance of democracy in Israel and the edging ever closer to its death in Israel as well.

And shows the true mind and the intent of the Netanyahu regime towards the people of Palestine.

Which bears no good for either the people that reside in Gaza, and ultimately the state of Palestine in its entirety, as well as the people who live under an autocratic Zionist government who is bent upon taking Israel in the darkness of dictatorship.  

Another thousand words…