The journalists who stayed silent over genocide should never be forgiven - with Mehdi Hasan

Complicity isn't just overt cheerleading

I’m very fortunate to work with the brilliant Mehdi Hasan on his crucial media venture

Team Zeteo

- which celebrates its 1 year anniversary.

He was in London to mark that important milestone, and we chatted in front of a live studio audience. One of the things we talked about was media complicity in Israel’s genocide. A point I was keen to stress was it’s not just active cheerleading which needs to be called out - it’s silence.

You can watch the video by clicking through below. I’d love your thoughts on the conversation:

‘The Journalists Who Stayed Silent Should Never Be Forgiven’

I’ll let you into a secret. Multiple public figures and journalists have approached me to thank me for my work and to make clear that they are repulsed by Israel’s genocide. They haven’t spoken out publicly. That’s clearly because they fear the consequences.

That’s not to say there aren’t consequences. We are in the midst of the biggest assault on free speech in the Western world since the ‘Second Red Scare’ - better known as McCarthyism. ‘McCarthyism’ is now almost universally used as a pejorative, including by those who clearly would have been the most ardent red hunters at the time. Speaking out may entail being smeared, deplatformed, threatened, harassed, abused, fired, arrested - even imprisoned and deported.

Alas, this has been true for injustices and crimes throughout history. We all like to think we’d have spoken out at the time, whatever sacrifice that might entail. And yet over and over again, few do. If that silence was broken, then these crimes would never be possible.

Shaming silence is not simply a moral question, about calling out immoral complicity. It is about trying to compel the powerful and the influential to cease their complicity.

The title of the book by Egyptian-Canadian novelist and journalist Omar El Akkad - ‘One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This’ - brilliantly sums up this phenomenon.

Sorry to depress you, but it’s not a given. Two timelines are before us. In one, Israel’s genocide is recognised for what it is - one of the great crimes of our age - and there is accountability. In the other, outright fascist barbarism awaits us, helped by the normalisation of this depravity.

This alone is why calling out silent complicity is an imperative - for the future survival of our species, certainly in a form which would make life worth living.