Journalism schools must raise the alarm. Western media companies have made themselves a part of the mechanism of genocide in Palestine. There is a deafening breach of accountability, responsibility, objectivity, rationality and conscience. The teaching of journalism must be alert in their corpus; failing which journalism schools are complicit to corporate silencing.

Should/must free speech guarantee and protect incitement to war crimes, crimes against humanity; and genocide? The media, in acting against humanity, must be subject to war criminal accountability. We see this in the Nuremberg and Rwanda tribunals. Translating the court of public opinion into legal accountability is terribly urgent.

For a start, what we as individuals, corporate and state actors should do is to unsubscribe from these outlets, both print and broadcast, switch to independent media sources, and encourage others to do the same. To quote International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) Judge Navi Pillay in the Rwanda decision: “The power of the media to create and destroy fundamental human values comes with great responsibility.” Those who control such media are accountable for its consequences.”

In a commentary in a recent issue of Mondoweiss, a website about developments in Palestine and related U.S. foreign policy titled “Western media can be held legally accountable for its role in the Gaza genocide”, Craig Mokhiber, an international human rights lawyer and former senior United Nations Official, identified what he calls a third pillar in the perpetuation of the genocide in Gaza. And that ‘essential third pillar’ is the complicity of the Western media. What this implies is that Western media corporations knowingly disseminate Israeli disinformation and propaganda, justifying war crimes, and crimes against humanity, dehumanize Palestinians, and blacking out information on the genocide in the West.

From the perspective of international human rights law, such actions could and should be subject to sanctions. And there are historical precedents. The other two pillars on the carnage in Gaza are the Israel genocide machine in Palestine; and the direct complicity of the U.S., UK. And other Western governments. The horrors also include attacking human rights defenders around the globe.

Seventy-six years ago, in the newly established United Nations, delegates gathered to draft the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). The importance of protecting freedom of expression was front and center. And this was what was declared: “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”

But, in the wake of a half-century of horrific atrocities, driven in significant part by the dehumanization of millions on the basis of their race, ethnicity, religion, and other status, they were all too well aware that speech could also be used as a powerful weapon to destroy the right of others, including the right to life itself. In the same document, Mokhiber clarifies, the UN made clear that freedom of expression does not grant the media or anyone else a right “to engage in any activity or to perform any act aimed at the destruction of any of the other rights and freedoms.”

At the same time, Mokhiber tells us, in another UN conference room, delegates were gathered to create a new Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. There too, drafters were aware of the danger of speech that dehumanizes and incites. The final convention would criminalize not just genocide, but also incitement to genocide and complicity in genocide-prohibitions that apply not only to states but to private actors as well.

Fifty years later, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) would convict three media personalities for their role in inciting the Rwanda genocide – two workers for the Mille Collines television and radio company and one for the Kanguni newspaper. All three were found guilty of incitement to genocide (among other crimes).

The power of speech and the media was well illustrated during the sentencing by the Judge Pillay (now a commissioner on the UN’s international commission of enquiry investigating Israel’s crimes): Sending a strong message, she remarked: “You were fully aware of the power of words, and you used the…medium of communication with the widest public read to disseminate hatred and violence…Without a firearm, machete or any physical weapon, you cause the death of thousands of innocent civilians.”

Today, BBC, CNN. Fox, the New York Times and Wall Street Journal know what they are doing. The three convicted media personalities also knew what they were doing. While Mokhiber was quick to to argue that the western media outlets were not equivalent to the Rwandan media, they have nevertheless “recklessly crossed the boundaries of ethical journalism, and in some cases, may find themselves legally exposed as well.”

For the first time in history, we are confronted with live-streamed, unmediated genocide in history. The carnage unfolding on the screens from Jakarta to Moscow, from Seattle to Lagos defy the logic of the innocence of objectivity and impartiality. Conscious choices were made to hide the genocide from their audiences.

The totality of the western culture and politics has systematically dehumanized Palestinian victims, and “insulate the Israeli perpetrators from accountability.” Western media outlets have suppressed information on the World Court findings of the plausibility of genocide. Mokhiber points out that the target audience of the media outlets “is not limited to uninvolved bystanders. It includes as well Western government officials and policy makers directly complicit in the genocide, through the provision of military, economic, intelligence, and diplomatic support to Israeli, as well as the voting public that enables this support.”

Indeed, if our only source of information is the mainstream western media, we may have no idea that Israel is on trial for genocide in the World Court or that Israel’s leaders are the subject of arrest warrant request for crimes against humanity at the international criminal court.

Mokhiber further reminds that we may not even know that Israel now holds the world record for the murder of journalists, of aid workers, of UN officials, and of healthcare workers. Instead what we find are transparently false Israeli information and propaganda which are regularly and uncritically published in Western media to justify war crimes, dehumanize Palestinians and distract the public from the daily atrocities committed in Israeli’s campaign of extermination. The voices of the other are murdered.

We are told that reporters are instructed not to mention ‘occupied territory,’ ‘Palestinians’ or ‘refugee camps.’ In massacre after massacre, Palestinians in headlines are not killed by Israel, they simply ‘die.’ Mokhiber who had penned a widely read letter that warned of genocide in Gaza, left the UN in October of 2023. He criticized the international response and called for a new approach to Palestine and Israel based on equality, human rights and international law. In the rule book for Western corporate media, there is no genocide, only a war of self defence, and history that started on October 7, 2023.

Absent in the Western media (and from Western academics and scholars) is the 76 years of context, ethnic cleansing, persecution, mass imprisonment, gross violation of human rights and apartheid.

Rethinking Journalism? Pushing for another charter and sanctioning mechanism is urgent. The recent 2019 International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) Charter needs a thorough revamp. The IFJ Global Charter for Ethics for Journalists adopted in Tunis, Tunisia on that year declared “…the right of the public to truth” as the first duty of the journalist; and “shall report only in accordance with facts of which he/she knows the origin.”

“Apa khabar?” as we always ask when meeting friends – expecting facts? truth? Or the habitual pretension of asking? Time to ask again on the professional scribe; and to cultivate the value of human life in our journalism schools.

Ahmad Murad Merican
Professor of Social and Intellectual History
International Institute of Islamic Thought and Civilization
International Islamic University Malaysia