FORBIDDEN REPORTING: Global Outrage as Israel BANS Al Jazeera!

Right, so Israel is supposedly the only democracy in the Middle East then is it? That’s what we keep getting told is it not? That is what the pro Israel crowd, the Zionists on social media and mainstream media always tell us, our politicians, that Israel are the advanced, civilised and reasonable nation akin to our Western values, that is the point they all try to sell us and of course for an awful long time well past the point we should have known better we believed this, thought the last 7 months have been an eye opener for many and any belief that those Western narratives were ever being honest with us have now well and truly been exposed as rancid lies, made all the worse as those same media outlets and those same politicians continue to try and tell us we should be backing Israel still and that 40,000 dead Gazans and so many more tens of thousands injured, many with life changing injuries for some reason don’t matter. That is a genie that is never going back in the bottle.
Of course for as much as we’ve relied on social media to be informed about the realities of Israeli barbarism and oppression, much of that has been channelled from foreign media doing a damn sight better job than any Western media have, risking their lives and too often losing them to the Israeli regime, who have had zero respect for the Press during this conflict, to inform us via those same social media outlets, even though in some instances, we have access to the likes of Al Jazeera as a TV Channel here too, but in a move that does nothing but reinforce the fact that Israel is anything but a democracy, they’ve just banned Al Jazeera, from being able to report and broadcast to the country.
Right, so it seems Benjamin Netanyahu has had enough of all these people telling the truth about what he’s doing and these massive protests that keep happening in his country demanding that he resign and call elections and he’s decided to take it out on Qatar based media outlet Al Jazeera, who have been one of the shining examples of real wartime journalism on the ground in Gaza, having reported on the situation in Gaza from the start, having been targeted by Israeli forces themselves on numerous occasions, many of their journalists having lost their lives. This war in Gaza, as much as Israel like to call it that and as much as they have called it a war against Hamas, has instead been shown, by media outlets like Al Jazeera, to instead be a war on children, a war on journalists, a war on aid workers a war of mass graves and instead of being anything remotely about Israel’s right to defend itself, has been a real time display of genocide and ethnic cleansing.
So much of what we’ve seen, what we’ve observed, how the minds of people who though they knew the craic of what the truth of the Israel and Palestine dynamic was, have been jolted into reality by the scenes we’ve witnessed for the last 7 months, the acts committed by the Israeli Defence Forces, the rhetoric from the insane parliamentarians of the Knesset that Netanyahu did a deal with to take power, people so far right, that they believe the people they have been slaughtering in the tens of thousands are a price worth paying to eliminate Hamas, a resistance movement, that you can absolutely criticise for their actions, but who probably would never have come into existence either, if not for Israeli occupation and the way they mistreat the people who’s lands they occupy and who have every right under international law, to resist their occupation. This means nothing to Netanyahu, nothing to Israel, these people are less than human anyway in their view, such is the way with apartheid regimes, as this Israeli one absolutely is, no matter how much our shameless politicians, so heavily lobbied by Israel and Israeli interests, we no longer are sure any more which country they are most loyal to, as we ourselves head into a General Election this year, seemingly with a choice of one Zionist or another to lead the country and so still, we won’t get a leadership who will do the right thing here.
And we know all of this in no small part because of the bravery of the journalists on the ground in Gaza and it is because of that, that Netanyahu, now seeks to blind the eyes of the world, as if that will now making any difference at all and as such, one of the key outlets reporting on all of this, Al Jazeera, has now been banned from Israel.
In a vote today, Netanyahu’s hard right cabinet voted unanimously, to shut down Al Jazeera following on from a previous vote where the Israeli parliament passed a law to temporarily shut down any foreign media who were perceived to be a threat to Israel’s national security, which is just code for any outlet reporting the truth about what Israel are doing, which is committing out and out genocide. How temporary this shut down of Al-Jazeera will be, we will have to see, as we will have to see if any condemnation of this completely anti-democratic move comes from any of our leaders, or whether they’ll support the move instead. It’s no stretch of the imagination to envisage Sunak or Starmer sending Al Jazeera the same way as Press TV or RT after all is it?
Netanyahu put out a gloating tweet saying:
‘The government headed by me unanimously decided: the incitement channel Al Jazeera will be closed in Israel’
They reported the truth, they exposed your lies, you couldn’t handle it, it’s made you into a global pariah state as a result of the revelations that have come from Al Jazeera and indeed a good many other credible news outlets too.
They haven’t just banned Al-Jazeera from broadcasting in Israel though, they’ve seized their equipment too. Editing and routing equipment, cameras, servers, laptops, microphones, transmission equipment, mobile phones, you name it, Israel have taken it.
Where does this leave those in Palestine then? That is occupied territory after all. Well Israel’s ban doesn’t extend to them at least not quite yet, but certainly the fear is, that it will come. Certainly that is the view of one of Al Jazeera’s reporters in the occupied West Bank, Zain Basravi has said in response to the ban:
‘So to have our journalists, our operations, threatened in this way … Definitely, the worry here in the occupied West Bank is that we will be next.’
But as much as this is blatantly censorship and an attempt to supress what Israel is up to, even though that ship sailed I’d venture to suggest, there’s a political motivation here as well, because Al Jazeera is in part state sponsored by Qatar and Qatar have been a leading nation in trying to act as mediators to bring about an end to the genocide and an actual ceasefire that is permanent and not another humanitarian pause, as is the current deal Israel are trying to sell, snake oil as it is, but which David Cameron is currently crowing as something Hamas should accept because it is a very generous offer. It isn’t, it’s just a pause and you take us for fools if you think we’ll believe that, because thankfully, we in this country are not yet solely reliant on mainstream media opinion passed off as news, there are credible journalists left in this world that are delivering for us and putting UK media to absolute shame, too many of them frankly have a neck to call themselves journalists, when they are little more than stenographers offering client journalism and not actually reporting actual events.
To upset Qatar therefore, coming back to them, is in Israel’s view I would think a way to upset them and allow the victim card to once again be played, claiming they are biased towards Hamas, and no doubt they’re antisemitic and all the rest of the tired, worn out attack lines the professional victims of the Israeli government like to play. Fundamentally this move can be seen quite easily as an intentional damaging of the peace process because Israel do not actually want peace.
They are blocking an investigation into what actually happened on October 7th, so what does Israel have to hide there? They are now gagging the media who insist on reporting the truth, they are sabotaging peace processes and refusing to put hostage rescue before taking out Hamas, much to the disgust of the Israeli people who will now be denied information. They are threatening still more violence as they are poised to launch an attack on a tent city as Rafah has become, now home to some 1.6m Palestinians, who are living in famine and squalor as aid continues to be denied to them. Nothing Israel are doing precludes me from coming to the conclusion they want the Palestinian people gone and gaza for themselves and the world just sits on its hands and watches. For now, Al-Jazeera can still report from within Palestine, but for how much longer remains to be seen. If Israel can scupper the media, the entire world will be running blind, but if anyone continues to claim Israel is in any kind of way, shape or form a democracy now, then you deserve every ounce of the derision you get in return. If Netanyahu thinks gagging the press now will help salvage Israel’s reputation, he’s a deluded fool and his sorry backside now deserves that ICC arrest warrant to be served more than ever. We’re still waiting for that to happen at time of writing despite it looking very promising it would come this week, with Genocide Joe Biden having issued threats to the ICC over this, because nothing seems to force his support for Israel to waver. They ICC have pushed back though, catch up with that story in this video recommendation here, perhaps the arrest warrant will drop this week, my God it needs to and I’ll hopefully catch you on the next vid. Cheers folks.