‘Gaza was the deadliest conflict for journalists ever recorded. Israel has killed 232 Palestinian journalists since October 2023, more than in both world wars, the Vietnam War, the wars in Yugoslavia, and the United States war in Afghanistan combined.
But what’s happened to journalists in Gaza didn’t happen in a vacuum. It’s just the tip of the spear. A report, just published by Reporters Sans Frontieres (RSF), reveals that press freedom is at a 25-year low. It’s diminishing almost everywhere at an astonishing rate. The report includes a press freedom index that shows America is now a shocking 64th on its list behind Namibia, Timor-Leste, Montenegro, Tonga, Cote d’Ivoire, Liberia, Samoa, Panama, Botswana, Gabon and Ghana…
Trump’s attack on Iran is a cognitive weapon he’s turned on his own people. Us. We are numbed to it all. That’s what’s changed in a year. It has all come to pass but our shock and outrage has run out. The abnormal is the new normal. We’ve had to accept that.
Except it’s not normal. None of it it is. And that’s what Wael [Al-Dahdouh]… brought home to me… His family were killed by a country that my country arms and supports, a country whose prime minister who’s a close ally of the tech leaders whose products are integrated into our daily lives, who hold government contracts, who are knitted into the very fabric of our state.
How is that normal? It isn’t. It’s an affront. And Wael was right to call out the catastrophic moral failure of journalism on the biggest stage in front of the world’s journalists at what is the world’s biggest journalism conference. And he’s also right to understand how what’s happened to journalists in Gaza, the impunity with which they’ve been targeted and murdered, won’t end there.’ (from her Substack)
Shundo David Haye - Zen Priest 
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