{"id":6577,"date":"2022-05-18T07:00:32","date_gmt":"2022-05-18T11:00:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.tempestmag.org\/v01_2020\/staging\/?p=6577"},"modified":"2022-05-25T14:30:06","modified_gmt":"2022-05-25T18:30:06","slug":"israels-murder-of-shireen-abu-akleh","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/2022\/05\/israels-murder-of-shireen-abu-akleh\/","title":{"rendered":"Israel\u2019s murder of Shireen Abu Akleh"},"content":{"rendered":"

T<\/span>empest<\/em> readers will have read by now about Israel\u2019s assassination of the Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh. Her murder by Israeli forces has been followed by the usual lies not only from Israel, but its international enablers, with another round of hollow condemnation from the U.S.-led \u201cinternational community.\u201d For capitalists in the United States, Israel remains a valuable outpost of U.S. power. Building an independent movement to boycott, divest from and sanction Israel<\/a> is the only way to cut off U.S. support for the apartheid regime, and make possible its final defeat.<\/p>\n

An assassination<\/h4>\n

The renowned Al Jazeera<\/em> journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, a household name in Arabic-speaking countries, was with a group of reporters covering an Israeli raid in the occupied town of Jenin on Wednesday morning. Israeli soldiers had allowed them entry to a quiet area, where Palestinian fighters weren\u2019t present, before Israeli snipers shot Abu Akleh in the head. Video<\/a> shows her colleagues being shot at as they tried to retrieve her body; Abu Akleh\u2019s producer Ali al-Samoudi was also wounded and survived a shot in the back.<\/p>\n

Following its usual playbook, Israel\u2019s regime lied and blamed Palestinians for the murder it committed. The head of the regime Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, who famously boasted about having killed \u201clots of Arabs,\u201d<\/a> claimed that Palestinian fighters had accidentally killed Abu Akleh. That lie was exposed<\/a> in short order<\/a>, and Israel had to retreat to another lie, that it wasn\u2019t sure whether its soldiers or Palestinians had accidentally killed her; an Israeli army mouthpiece described Abu Akleh and her colleagues as being \u201carmed with cameras, if you\u2019ll permit me to say so<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Capitalist news outlets in the U.S. and Europe dutifully reported on the \u201cdispute,\u201d careful not to say anything that might impugn Israel. The New York Times<\/em> headline read that Abu Akleh \u201cdied at 51,\u201d as if she had succumbed to an illness or been in an accident. That headline was so farcically cruel that the Times<\/em> couldn\u2019t pretend it was honest; it was promptly changed<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Most major western outlets deprived their readers of basic facts about the case, such as the testimony of eyewitnesses who said that Israeli snipers killed Abu Akleh. They instead gave prominent placing at the top of their articles to Israel\u2019s professional liars in government, as if they were trustworthy authorities and not accomplices to the crime.<\/p>\n

Left out of most of their reporting was the fact that Israel\u2019s counter-claims were immediately disproven, or the fact that Israel has a well-established record of killing and beating Palestinian journalists: Reporters Without Borders describes 144 cases of Israeli soldiers shooting or beating Palestinian journalists<\/a> in the last four years alone; Palestine\u2019s information ministry maintains 45 Palestinian journalists have been killed by Israeli forces<\/a> since 2000.<\/p>\n