It's a journocide
Targeting reporters and killing them with impunity isn't just a war crime, it's a bellwether of what's to come
A note on who I am: I’m an investigative journalist who’s spent a decade reporting on the collision of technology and democracy including exposing the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal for the Guardian and the New York Times. Two years ago, I called the alliance of Trump, Silicon Valley and a global axis of autocracy: a tech bro oligarchy, aka the Broligarchy. Please help me continue to expose it.
I wrote a post here in the odd, slowed-down time between Christmas and New Year and borrowed a friend’s description of that time, aka the “perineum” of the year. It struck me today that we’re in the perineum of this latest war, suspended between its arsehole - the first strikes on Tehran - and the full looming catastrophe.
There’s an atmosphere of suspended animation. The world still seems normal. War is far away. The people being bombed and killed are not our friends and neighbours or their soldier sons.
But it can’t last. There’s a Covid-like quality to the denial as if what happens abroad can’t affect us here. That the fuel protests in the Philippines which has declared a “national emergency” won’t come for us. Or the closing of factories in Gujarat that employ 400,000 people but can’t operate due to lack of gas. Or Egypt, where shops and restaurants have been ordered to shut by 9pm.
We can’t even hear the words that the head of the European Central Bank, Christine Lagarde, is saying: “We are in for a real shock that is probably beyond what we can imagine at the moment.”
What’s coming is the everything crisis. And Lagarde is right. We can’t imagine it because it’s too big, there are too many second-order effects, the markets and therefore the news cycle is pretending it isn’t happening and we continue to live in the cosseted ignorance that an impulsive, imperialist, irrational illegal act of war by the world’s (former?) superpower isn’t our problem.
But there’s no overnight fix for the destruction of the Gulf’s energy infrastructure. We’re already in an information crisis, a democracy crisis, a worldwide populist insurgency. Now add a global economic shock - the biggest one ever, according to the International Energy Agency - into the mix. To take just one example, of one cascading event, the AI bubble boom is dependent on chips which are dependent on helium and a third of the world’s supply from Qatar has just been taken offline.
And while, a lot of people would like to see Sam Altman’s business crash and burn, it’ll likely take down the global economy (and your pension) with it too.
Meanwhile, as we wait for what comes next and numb-scroll social media, I found myself captivated by a video posted by Iran’s embassy in South Africa. Do you remember the viral vid of the skateboarding TikToker cruising the freeway chugging Ocean Spray to the sound of Fleetwood Mac?
It’s from October 2020, remember then? When we tried to kid ourselves that a second wave wouldn’t come for us again. Well, this is what the Iranian government posted a couple of days ago and I can’t stop watching it (click to press play).
Who knows how or where any of this will end. But this video is a reminder that Iran is ruled by a truly terrible regime but it’s also a vast country of 92 million people, many of whom are highly educated and this is world class shitposting memetic warfare from a sophisticated adversary that’s been systematically, calamitously underestimated by Donald Trump.
First they came for the journalists…
On Friday, I published a long post about the global assault on the news and the oligarchic capture of news organisations. And I’ve decided to write again today because Israel has targeted and killed three more journalists, this time in Lebanon, adding to at least 260 it’s killed in Gaza.
There’s a moral responsibility for journalists in the rest of the world to speak up for journalists who are killed, especially when, as in this case, they are killed for being journalists.
It’s not even a “claim” to say that. The IDF has admitted it, details below. The killing of journalists in a conflict zone is a war crime. But then the line where war crimes begin and end in a series of illegal wars isn’t a line any more, so much as a crayon smeared across a wall by an out-of-control toddler. And the lack of uproar about the systematic targeting of journalists in Gaza and now Lebanon is the dog that didn’t bark.
Just as we’re in denial about the blowback that’s going to roar our way from the unfolding disaster in the Middle East, we fail to understand how the impunity with which Israel murders journalists will come for us too. Trump and Netanyahu are in an escalating game of chicken, stretching the boundaries of what’s possible, what’s normal, what we accept. It’s why we’re here. And it never stops with them, these new norms travel, like the Covid virus, to every other would-be demagogue around the world.
America is already at the arresting journalists stage. Israel has faced no accountability for the systematic targeting and murder of journalists. There’s been not a murmur about these latest killings from Israel’s allies, including Britain.
Ali Shoeib, a reporter for three decades with Al-Manar and a well-known face in Lebanon, was travelling in a car with another reporter for Al Mayadeen, Fatima Ftouni and her brother, cameraman Mohamed Ftouni. Four missiles hit their car on the highway near the town of Jezzine. Charred press vests were pulled from the ruins.
Al-Manar is a Hezbollah affiliated outlet but what you need to know about Hezbollah is that it is both an Iran-backed militia and one of the main sources of social services for the impoverished Shia population. President Joseph Aoun, a Christian and a vicious critic of everything Hezbollah-related has been unequivocal in describing the journalists as civilians and the killings as “a blatant crime that violates all the norms and treaties under which journalists enjoy international protection in wars.”
The IDF admitted the killing and justified it. They called Shoeib a “terrorist” who had “operated for years under the guise of a journalist”. The BBC reported: “The IDF provided no evidence to support its claim that Shoeib had a military role. It did not comment on the deaths of Fatima or Mohamed Ftouni.”
But the IDF did provide a visual. This post on X which showed Shoeib in a military uniform.
I’ll let Fox News take up the story of what happened next. Its correspondent asked the IDF’s press office where the photo of Shoeib in uniform had been taken.
In his broadcast report, he gave their response:
“When asked by Fox News about the origin of the photo, an IDF spokesman said, ‘Unfortunately there isn’t really a picture of it, it was photoshopped.’”
The “buffer zone”
Read any UK or US newspaper and you’d never know there was a war in Lebanon. You wouldn’t know that one nation state has embarked on a ground invasion of another nation state. That it has captured a vast portion of the country and driven more than a million people from their homes.
Words matter and the words I’ve seen to describe what’s happening in Lebanon are false and wrong. It’s a “ground campaign” in the same way that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a “ground campaign”. It’s a “buffer zone” in the same way Russia’s capture of Donetsk and Mariupol is a “buffer zone”. We don’t use that language to describe Putin’s war of terror on Ukraine, so why is it acceptable for newspapers to use it in Lebanon?
Israel’s terminology for the war has dominated what limited coverage there has been. Though mostly it hasn’t even made the front pages of the NY Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian, the BBC.
To refresh your memory over the timeline here: Israel attacked Iran. Days later, Iran’s allies, Hezbollah in Lebanon, attacked back. Israel then started bombing Beirut, dropping banned white phosphorous on South Lebanon, driving the entire population of the area from their homes and blowing up the bridges.
Last week, AP, which supplies news and reports to most international newsrooms, put out this statement:
“The Associated Press is now calling Israel’s military actions in southern Lebanon an invasion.
Israel has moved thousands of troops across the border into Lebanon, and Israeli forces and Iran-backed Hezbollah militants have been fighting on the ground for at least three weeks.”
I hope it makes a difference though this is the latest from the Times:
I leave you with a travel vid that I found on TikTok of Jezzine, the town where Al Shoeib and Fatima and Mohamed Ftouni were killed. They were real people. This is a real place, one that some claim is the most beautiful village in Lebanon. It was still under occupation by Israel’s proxies when I wrote a guidebook to the country in the early 90s; the invasion and occupation that first gave rise to Hezbollah. I read tantalising descriptions of a town ringed by waterfalls in a 1960s Blue Guide (our main reference to the country) but only finally got there in 2000, a few weeks after Israel pulled out of the south, with the Lebanese army still detonating mines by the sides of the road.
But it was a new beginning. Tourists would once again come. A quarter of a century on, it seems unbelievable that the whole cycle of violence could have begun again, so casually, so carelessly, under cover of the war on Iran, with the world barely even noticing or realising…
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Thank you again for another great piece. It seems like we’re in a cascade of failure unable to find a path to exit and peace. But perhaps that’s the point of it all. Control of the economy, politics, and media. With that, you have autonomy to control the narrative. Even if people see what’s happening, it’s just something else to watch happen. It’s a passive action. I am just as guilty. The only thing I can manage to do is educate myself. Outside of work, caring for patients, family life, and occasionally writing or posting, I see no path to exit other than buckling down and watching along with everyone else…
Again, thank you Carol for your work and journalists like you in exposing much of what we are bearing witness to.
When journalists can be targeted, killed, and then smeared after death with so little consequence, the assault is not only on individual lives but on reality itself. Cadwalladr is right to treat this as a warning. A world that normalizes the murder of reporters is a world preparing the ground for wider authoritarian impunity.