A reckoning is coming: My speech at the Amnesty Media Awards

I told Western journalists complicit in Israel's genocide that they will pay for what they have done

I was honoured yesterday to be awarded the People’s Choice Award at the Amnesty International Media Awards. Firstly, a huge thanks to those who voted for me.

I used the speech to hold the Western media to account for their criminal role in Israel’s genocide - and to call on journalists to keep their receipts for the coming reckoning.

Here’s my speech, and the text.

I want to express my eternal appreciation to Amnesty for their tireless, courageous work exposing the obscene treatment of our fellow humans, and their own work documenting Israel’s Western-facilitated genocide of the Palestinian people.

I want to thank those who voted for me and who put their trust in my work, who I know expect me to tell the truth, always.

I don’t say this to embarrass our hosts, who I know must work with a range of outlets, or to erase brilliant journalists who do crucial work for mainstream outlets, like my colleague Nesrine Malik and Alex Crawford at Sky News.

This evening must not become a festival of backslapping for the British mainstream media to whitewash their records.

Gaza is a crime scene. Dust it off, and you will find the fingerprints of British editors and British journalists amongst the apocalyptic rubble.

British media outlets, including those represented here today, have not been passive bystanders in one of the great crimes of our age, but active participants.

From the very beginning there was an avalanche of genocidal and criminal statements of intent by Israeli leaders, and yet the Western media buried these statements, or simply didn’t cover them at all, let alone framed their coverage around them, despite them offering the most accurate roadmap to what Israel in fact went on to do.

Even today, Western media outlets refuse to accurately reflect unambiguously genocidal official Israeli policy.

The Western media has continually amplified Israeli lies, despite overwhelming evidence of relentless deceit.

There hasn’t even been the slightest pretence that Palestinian life has any worth whatsoever. The lie of beheaded Israeli babies received infinitely more outrage and coverage than the actual mass butchery of Palestinian babies.

Palestinian voices have been systematically marginalised, or subjected to perverse show trials on the BBC and Sky News.

Atrocities have been ignored and whitewashed, Israeli guilt repeatedly erased. The facts of international law - suppressed.

Opponents of genocide have been systematically deplatformed or monstered or both.

And the vast majority of Western journalists couldn’t utter one sentence of solidarity with their Palestinian colleagues in Gaza as they suffered the worst slaughter of journalists ever recorded, like Hossam Shabat, like Hassan Eslayeh, like Hamza Al Dahdouh.

The Western media has no excuses, nowhere to hide. No crime in history has been so thoroughly documented as it happened. No crime in history has been so boasted about by its perpetrators - from politicians at the top, to soldiers on the ground - as it happened.

There must be a reckoning. The absence of consequences for Iraq paved the way to this catastrophe.

This time, those in the Western media who facilitated genocide must have their careers and reputations destroyed.

Not for vengeance, but because if this time there are no consequences, we condemn humanity to ever greater calamities.

So I say to my fellow journalists - keep every receipt of what editors and producers did and didn’t do. That’s what I’m doing.

Every relevant email, every relevant Whatsapp and text message. Note down every relevant conversation. One day there will be a reckoning: force your superiors to defend their decisions in front of the whole world.

This is the biggest scandal of Western journalism in modern history.

I know that those complicit in this genocide believe that they are protected in perpetuity by an iron dome of Israeli impunity, reinforced by anti-Palestinian racism. That is already crumbling in real time.

You gamble that in a year, two years, five years, ten years, twenty years, no consequences will ever arrive. You are wrong. A reckoning is coming, and to the guilty men and women of the Western media - you are going to pay for what you have done to the Palestinian people.