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They’ve arrested another pro-Palestinian journalist, this time in Switzerland.
The Electronic Intifada’s executive director Ali Abunimah has reportedly been detained by Swiss police in Zurich, after having been interrogated for an hour and released the previous day when entering the country. Abunimah, who is Palestinian-American, has played a leading role in exposing and critiquing the apartheid abuses of Israel for many years.
In October of last year, Electronic Intifada’s associate editor Asa Winstanley saw his home raided by British “counterterrorism” police in response to his social media posts about Israel’s western-backed abuses in the middle east. Multiple electronic devices were seized. No charges were ever filed.
In August of last year, journalist Richard Medhurst was arrested by British counterterrorism police and held for nearly 24 hours under section 12 of the UK’s Terrorism Act of 2000. Later that month, a human rights activist named Sarah Wilkinson was detained by police and had her home raided for online speech crimes. Both cases appear to have been the result of expressions of opinion deemed too sympathetic to resistance groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, which have been designated as “terrorist” organizations by the British government. Activists Mick Napier, Tony Greenstein, and Richard Barnard have been similarly persecuted in the UK.
In the United States speech rights have been getting stomped out in different ways since October 2023, ranging from violent police crackdowns on college campus demonstrations against Israel’s genocidal atrocities in Gaza to banning TikTok in order to suppress pro-Palestinian speech. Silicon Valley tech platforms which are intimately intertwined with the US government have been censoring speech that is critical of Israel with increasing aggression, and President Trump has just signed an executive order which appears to be geared toward deporting visitors to the United States who participate in pro-Palestinian activism.
Here in Australia, government leaders from both parties pushed hard for a ban on people protesting this past October 7, and police investigated protesters for waving Hezbollah flags at a demonstration in Melbourne under a new law banning the public display of symbols of designated “terrorist” groups. Zionists have been using the Australian courts to bully prominent journalist Mary Kostakidis on accusations of unlawful hate speech for sharing video footage of the now-deceased Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.
Suppression of dissident speech is becoming more and more overt throughout the west as the empire becomes more violent and tyrannical in its efforts to suppress revolutionary sentiments at home and the emergence of a multipolar world abroad. The facade of an enlightened society where ideas and information are freely exchanged for the enrichment of liberal democracy has been rapidly giving way to iron-fisted authoritarianism as our historically unprecedented democratization of information allows ordinary people to cast a critical eye on their rulers in ways they never used to be able to.
The world’s first live-streamed genocide has seen the western empire scramble into panic mode as raw video footage circulating on social media opened people’s eyes in ways no propaganda spinmeister could possibly reframe. That’s why we are seeing police forces increasingly deployed against journalists and activists whose sole crime consists of voicing wrongthink about the empire and its actions.
The empire managers need to be cautious about how rapidly they reveal to the public that we do not live in a free society, however. The best way to keep us all mindlessly marching along to the beat of this capitalist dystopia is to deceive us into thinking that we are free. The more they expose their hand, the more they risk awakening a real revolutionary response to their tyranny by showing everyone how locked down our society really is.
It will be interesting to see how this tightrope walk plays out. It seems like we’re essentially watching a race between the awakening of human consciousness to reality on one side, and the efforts of our rulers to shore up total control of this civilization via AI and automated security systems on the other. We either awaken from our propaganda-induced coma in sufficient numbers to rise up and force the creation of a healthy world, or we get trapped in the status quo by empire managers armed with drone swarms, militarized robots, and total control of our information and financial systems until we are annihilated by ecocidal capitalism or omnicidal nuclear brinkmanship.
Either way, the world is getting more and more dangerous for truth-tellers everywhere. We should probably do something about that before it’s too late.
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