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DR ISMAIL LAGARDIEN writes that fear is reshaping international journalism, forcing reporters into silence and complicity while Palestinians endure mass death in Gaza.
It has been said before, but journalism, as we have traditionally understood and practised the craft, is taking its final breaths. I should make a distinction. The reference here is to ‘international journalism’ – reportage and analysis of global affairs.
In this global context, there is a fear among journalists covering the ongoing war against Palestinians in Western Asia that is doing a lot of damage to the craft – and killing truth. This fear has turned some of us into cowards. This fear rises when truth has become the preserve of only one group of people, and anyone who disagrees (with their version of the truth) is necessarily wicked, filled with hatred and needs to lose their job or sources of income, and be stripped of the normal benefits and privileges that come with simply being part of society.
Let’s step back into some context. There are rarely single causes of crises. Individual crises are usually the outcome of earlier crises, but the main cause of the current state of international journalism is the unconstrained power and influence of Israel as it stretches across the world. In centres of power, stock phrases are used to dismiss all scrutiny of Zionist aggression and expansion, and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian lands, as anti-Semitic. The memory of historical somatic violence against Jews is weaponised. European senses of guilt have given Israelis and Zionists freedom to slaughter. How else does one describe the wanton cruelty and sadism that has caused the death of at least 70 000 adults, children and infants on the way to expanding lebensraum for Jewish settlers?
It is, however, fear that is destroying the ability to report on, analyse or deliver commentary on what is happening in Gaza, as it is about reporting on anti-genocide protests around the world. In the USA, pro-Israeli pressure groups reportedly prepared a list of ‘thousands’ of people which they submitted to President Donald Trump for deportation, according to the writer Alistair Kitchen. Newspapers, like The New York Times, and broadcast houses, like the BBC or CNN, tacitly follow only the Israeli script of the war on Palestinians. Former Israeli soldiers and civilians serve in editorial positions of newspapers, and teach journalism.
Independent journalists are forced to toe the line, and in the process, we become cowards and complicit in the killing of truth.
The violence and cruelty (and absurdity) of Israeli responses to the media is not always expressed with military savagery and brutality. The drift starts with telling journalists what they should wear. In October 2023, during a live interview on India’s Mirror Now news channel, an Israeli guest, Frederic Landau, suggested that the anchor, Shreya Dhoundial, change her clothes because the colours of her saree (green, red and black) resembled the Palestinian flag. It proceeds to having journalists deported, sanctioned or stripped of their sources of income, to targeted assassinations and outright murder. Al Jazeera reported last December that as many as 300 journalists may have been killed by Israel. Journalists are deported from the European world or fired from jobs. No independent writer wants to lose their income. This need makes us fearful, and cowardice.
I began to work as a journalist more than four decades ago and have never been as fearful of writing about anything as I am of writing about the depravity of Israeli soldiers, state and society. I have also never been cowardly. Until now…
The fear forces you to write around issues, to draw allusions or use euphemisms. The western media, even the most ‘liberal’ among them, would readily say that ‘Palestinians died’, but rarely that Israeli soldiers ‘killed’ Palestinians. The BBC (I started listening to the BBC World Service from the age of 10 or 11) has turned caution into cowardice, and was failing viewers with its Gaza coverage, Karishma Patel wrote in The Guardian last July.
After being told that I was necessarily biased and critical of Israel (‘Yes, but you’re a Muslim, so you hate Jews’), I have become increasingly fearful and increasingly turn to silence. This makes me a coward. Cowardice is what you do when you live on the edge of losing the ability to put food on the table, and to pay for shelter – and medical insurance. Cowardice is when you make decisions about your own need to survive during periods of extreme evil. Fear makes us cowards while Palestinians are dying. Actually, they are being tortured, raped and killed.
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In response to Nazi violence and cruelty, the Jewish writer Walter Benjamin, who died in 1940, appropriately wrote that the truth is constantly under threat of being co-opted by the ruling classes and their conformist narratives. It’s not just international journalism that’s dying in Gaza. The truth is being killed, and we’re all complicit in this killing.
Dr Ismail Lagardien is an internationally recognised political economist and writer. His main interests are in global political economy, global finance and historical capitalism. He has designed and taught a course in Islam and the Muslim world in international relations.
- This article was first published in the January 16, 2026 print edition of Muslim Views.
