The haunting silence of the Namibian media as Israel systematically exterminates reporters in Palestine
The stunning silence of the Namibian press regarding the ongoing mass killing of journalists in Gaza raises serious questions about the integrity of editorial policy in a country that has itself suffered genocide at the hands of their German colonizers.
The news that over 140 media workers have been killed by Israeli Occupation Forces over the past six months, with many others injured and missing, should make any self-respecting reporter shudder with outrage and shock, but these killings have been met by perfect silence on the part of the Namibian media fraternity and Media Institute of Southern Africa (MISA), despite the near-daily assassination of Palestinian reporters.
The fact is that in living memory we’ve rarely witnessed such courageous and death-defying reporting from journalists and citizen reporters anywhere as we have seen from the Palestinian reporters, who — unlike the Namibian press — have not relented on their duty to inform the public and to get the facts out to the world, even when faced with the prospect of imminent death for relaying the painful facts about their tragic situation.
Since October 7 Israel has deliberately targeted Palestinian reporters and their families, as in the well-known — but by no means isolated — case of Al Jazeera reporter Wael El Dahdoud, whose entire family was wiped out by missile strikes in an attempt to silence him. Many of his colleagues have been wounded or killed or had their families targeted for assassination.
Thus Israel, to prevent the world from knowing the facts on the ground, have openly resorted to killing the messengers to suppress the truth. Silence on the part of the local media can only aid the cause of the genocidal regime in Tel Aviv.
Long hailed by Western powers as “the only democracy in the Middle East”, Israel and its media backers have for decades been able to control the narrative and present the native Palestinians as “animals”, as “savages” and “barbarians” in an attempt to dehumanize the colonized population, but due to the intensive coverage of credible news agencies like AJ, the world has been able to see the humanity, the courage, compassion and immense suffering of the Gazans under fire.
In its latest move to silence critical reporting that dealt a mortal blow to its democratic pretensions, the Israeli Knesset last week passed a law that allows the government to ban any foreign news agencies that it considers hostile to its war aims. Yet there is not even a whisper of protest from the Namibian media fraternity, who are content to palm off their mediocre client journalism as the real thing. They should hang their heads in shame.
Due to its indiscriminate killing of many thousands of defenseless children in Gaza, Israel has steadily lost control of the narrative and is consequently losing global support. It is no longer seen as the victim but as the perpetrator, and is increasingly isolated as a rogue state and a pariah on the world stage, as witnessed in the recent United Nations General Assembly resolutions, and in the unprecedented scale of anti-war protests.
Their generous sponsorship of the war — that has already claimed more than 100,000 casualties, with around 34,000 killed — has also exposed the utter hypocrisy and complicity of the United States, Britain and Germany in the genocidal crimes being committed. There is a tectonic shift taking place in geopolitics, as the Western powers can no longer pose as the defenders of human rights when the whole world sees their unconditional support for Israel — as enablers of the Palestinian holocaust.
Who is going to listen to these people when they come to teach us about democracy and human rights? We are simultaneously witnessing the demise of the hegemony of the Anglo-American empire, which has been totally unmasked by their role in perpetuating this travesty of justice.
So what can we say of the myopic Namibian press, which has given such scant coverage to this humanitarian crisis and even less analysis of this decisive turning point in world history? This silence in the local press reigns, despite the fact that the Namibian government has joined the case against Israel at the International Court of Justice. To ignore — as the local press is doing — the historic significance of these developments is precisely what it means to be ignorant of them.
Surely, in light of the unforgivable crimes being committed against the starving, wounded, heartbroken and displaced children of Gaza, media silence and failure to inform the public amounts to consent and complicity in the crimes being committed by covering them with a blanket of silence, for there is no neutral position in times of genocide.
When media analysts and future historians compare the level and depth of coverage given, for example, to trivial events such as the English Premier League games, in the Namibian press with the scant coverage given to the earth-shattering events in Gaza, in South Sudan or the blood-soaked eastern Congo — where more than 7 million people have been killed — they will surely be left with many difficult questions. Surely readers must conclude that in suppressing the news, the untouchable press barons have failed in their duty to inform, and thereby have aided and abetted genocide through sheer neglect of the awful truth.
