Freedom of Expression Under Attack Amid Israel's Genocide in Gaza: UN Official

We have been reporting on the crackdown in the U.S. on college protesters and anyone who speaks out against the atrocities playing out in Gaza

A newly released UN report raises the alarm about the risks of freedom of expression around the world as Israel carries out its effort to ethnically cleanse Gaza.

The report should come as no surprise to subscribers to The Trends Journal.

We have been reporting on the crackdown in the U.S. on college protesters and anyone who speaks out against the atrocities playing out in Gaza. There is only one position accepted in Washington and in the mainstream news, which could be summed up in the phrase: Israel has the right to defend itself.

@geraldcelenteTop Israelis hold conference on stealing #Gaza ....as the U.S. continues its support #FYP

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But Israel’s rights have trumped individual freedoms across the world, Irene Khan, the UN’s special rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression, said in the report, which was, predictably, largely ignored in the media.

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Khan told reporters at the UN headquarters in New York Friday that there is no conflict in recent times that comes close to the threat that Israel’s war in Gaza has on freedom of expression.

“Rarely have we seen – and this is what bothers me - extensive patterns of unlawful, discriminatory and disproportionate restriction by States and private actors on freedom of expression,” she said.

The extensive report could be distilled into three parts:

1. Attacks on journalists and media, endangering access to information about the conflict globally.

2. The suppression of Palestinian voices and views in a discriminatory and disproportionate manner, undermining academic and artistic freedom as well as freedom of expression more generally.

3. The blurring of the boundaries between protected and prohibited speech.

She wrote that none of these challenges are new “but have become more intense over the past year.”

Attacks on Journalists: Khan noted in her report that Israel has killed more journalists in Gaza than in any other conflict in recent memory. (The Committee to Protect Journalists said at least 128 journalists and media workers have died in Gaza since the start of the war as of 10 October.)

Israel has also banned Western journalists from entering the enclave and has shut down the Al Jazeera bureau in Israel. Khan wrote that the lack of reporting from inside the enclave has affected the quality of information being produced for people inside Gaza and the rest of the world.

The U.S. media has been fully in Israel’s pocket, and one needs to look no further than how author Ta-Nehisi Coates was treated during an interview on CBS News when he spoke about life as a Palestinian in the occupied territory.

The Western media protects the IDF and refuses to cover issues even the Israeli media can’t avoid, like the Israeli military’s decision to order the Hannibal Directive on 7 October, which means the world may never know how many Israelis were killed by friendly fire or by Hamas.

Suppression of Palestinian Voices: Khan noted how some countries banned pro-Palestinian protests and other countries — like the U.S. — ordered a major police crackdown on these demonstrations. Her report said the U.S. alone had 10,000 protests in favor of the Palestinian cause from October 2023 to June 2024.

She wrote that the authorities “resorted to repressive measures, including widespread police action against the demonstrators and stigmatization of Palestinian advocacy as inherently dangerous. In addition, State and federal lawmakers have proposed over 45 pieces of legislation aimed at restricting street protests in support of Palestine, punishing student protestors and stigmatizing their Palestinian advocacy as ‘terrorism.’”

Rep. Steve Scalise, R-La., met with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) earlier this month and told the lobby group that Republicans plan to cancel universities that allow protests that are critical of Israel as it carries out a genocide in Gaza, bombs Lebanon, and provokes war with Iran.

The Guardian reported that it viewed some of Scalise’s address to the lobby group and the Republican said the plan is to withhold billions in federal funding from schools that allow these anti-genocide protests.

“Your accreditation is on the line,” Scalise said on 1 October, according to the report. “You’re not playing games anymore, or else you should not be a school anymore.”

The paper reported that the AIPAC event was billed as a meeting opposed to the rise of antisemitism in the U.S. The paper wrote that most of the meeting focused on how to best punish universities that criticize Israel.

Social Media: Khan wrote that there is a perverse trend that punishes those who speak out in defense of the Palestinians.

She wrote: Social media platforms “have removed Palestinian content excessively, inadequately addressed hate speech against both sides and enabled information manipulation, disinformation and misinformation. The large platforms have tended to be more lenient regarding Israel and more restrictive about Palestinian expression and content about Gaza, as compared with their policies and practices relating to the invasion by the Russian Federation of Ukraine and Ukrainian expression.”

The Intercept reported on Monday that a former Israeli government official now working as Meta’s [Facebook’s] Israel policy chief and has “personally pushed for the censorship of Instagram accounts belonging to Students for Justice in Palestine.”

Jordana Cutler, Meta’s Israel & the Jewish Diaspora policy chief, worked as a senior Israeli government official and an adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, according to the report.

Sam Biddle, the Intercept report, posted on X: “Internal records I reviewed show she has regularly used the company's internal escalation channel to flag pro-Palestinian content/accounts under Meta's Dangerous Organizations and Individuals policy. Meta declined to comment on the outcome of these requests.”

Khan wrote that a Human Rights Watch study in December 2023 found that of 1,050 English-language takedowns by Meta, “1,049 involved peaceful content in support of Palestine that was censored or otherwise unduly suppressed, while only one case involved the removal of content in support of Israel.”

Khan concluded the report by stating that the “discriminatory and disproportionate responses by State and private actors to protect human rights, including freedom of expression, of the Palestinian people and those who support them raise serious concerns about anti-Palestinian racism that cut across the mandates of several Special Procedures and engage a wide range of stakeholders. The Human Rights Council should consider a cross-mandate, multistakeholder discussion to strengthen the equal protection of human rights for vulnerable groups in this highly polarized environment.”