In this important conversation and dossier about ways to enact transnational feminist solidarity with Palestinians from the perspective of women scholars from the Middle East and Asia, I share my insights on war and imperialism in Afghanistan. I comparatively explore the effects of showing and viewing war-related imagery and images of violence enacted on subaltern and marginalized people and whether there is a correlation between the viewing of such media and a generating of empathy, solidarity, and action in the viewer. As a feminist media ethnographer, I share my research into the hegemony of the US media industry with regards to the War on Terror and Afghan media worlds to make connections with the current media environment of censorship, disinformation, and violence in and surrounding the coverage of the Israeli war in Gaza. I also share lessons from my years of anti-war and human rights activism and my lived experiences as an Afghan American refugee of war.
Despite intense media censorship and control in the aftermath of the October 7th attacks, thanks to brave frontline journalists and people on the ground, images of Israel’s war on Gaza, of death and destruction, was livestreamed or—perhaps more appropriately—deadstreamed into our digital devices. For over a year, we were flooded with horrific and frantic mobile images of people being pulled from under the rubble and of deceased and injured babies and children, of drone-assisted wide aerial shots of entire neighborhoods decimated, with skeletons of shelled buildings barely standing and all signs of life extinguished. In fact, the Israeli war on Gaza is being referred to as the “first livestreamed genocide.” Similarly, the Vietnam War was called the “first televised war” because the then-new technology of smaller video cameras allowed images of its brutalities to be beamed directly into the living rooms of Americans. Media scholars have argued that the Vietnam War became increasingly and incredibly unpopular as reporters brought its horrors home to American television sets. Calling the Israeli war in Gaza “the first livestreamed genocide” is also in reference to the fact that many global leaders did not have the moral conscience to stop the Holocaust, shirking accountability and responsibility for allowing the deaths of an estimated six million Jews and other vulnerable populations by claiming that they and the global public were unaware of its atrocities and scale. And yet, despite that in this twenty-first century case of genocide the overwhelming visual evidence of violence has been beamed almost instantaneously and simultaneously to digitally connected global metropoles, global leaders have not acted swiftly now, either.
Many of the egregious media strategies deployed by the Israeli government and the US mainstream media to represent its war in a favorable light and to censor critiques of its war were already developed during the War on Terror. As I have demonstrated elsewhere: 1) the targeting of frontline journalists, citizen reporters, and media organizations and 2) the controlling of the movement of media makers, technologies of viewing, optics of violence, and quarantining areas, and 3) the sanctioning of embedded journalists were all deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq during the War on Terror and, therefore, are not unprecedented. (You can read my prior work on this here, here, and here.) The so-called fog of war and a variety of disinformation strategies are routinely used to delimit free media. However, what is unprecedented in the current war is the scale and scope of representational and real violence against media makers and the flagrant bias and censorship of legacy media, especially when compared to their coverage of Putin’s war on Ukraine.
In fact 2024 was the deadliest year for journalists, with almost 70% killed by Israel. International media monitoring organizations such as Reporters Without Borders and the Committee to Protect Journalists have been documenting the proliferation of this violence and sounding the alarm. Media and communication scholars and journalists have also been decrying representational violence and violence against media makers and have put out collective statements and op-eds with hundreds of signatories, for example: “Palestine/Israel Scholars Open Letter to US Media,” a statement by journalists, and “Statement on the Ongoing Genocide in Gaza” in Communication, Culture, and Critique, the flagship journal of the International Communication Association.
In 1999, during the height of the Taliban regime in their first incarnation, I (a young filmmaker and journalist at the time) was subcontracted to go to Afghanistan to secretly film the Taliban’s violence against women. My footage was used in a launch video for the Feminist Majority Foundation’s “Stop Gender Apartheid” campaign. I also documented Afghan women teachers running underground schools for girls who were banned from education, women doctors and healthcare professionals practicing clandestinely in defiance of the Taliban, and the work of women activists, like members of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, who themselves also documented the injustices of the Taliban. It is important to note that in the pre-9/11 years, when there was little media attention on the situation of Afghan women, the FMF and RAWA were applauded for raising awareness. However, after the 9/11 attacks, they were critiqued for drumming up war. (For more on this, see articles by Iris Marion Young, miriam cooke, and Sonali Kolhatkar and Mariam Rawi.) When I returned to the States, I showcased the footage as a short film or long trailer and pitched it to corporate television producers in the hopes of securing funding to develop and produce a documentary for broadcasting and distribution. They were not interested.
Once the 9/11 attacks happened, the Western media spotlight immediately turned to the plight of Afghan women under the Taliban in order to justify the US military attack on the Taliban and the launching of what became known as the US “forever war.” Only then did I receive calls from those same television producers. However, even after the 9/11 attacks, my mainstream media contacts were only interested in raw footage that showed violence against women and not in footage that showed the agency and resistance of Afghan women, or footage where I or other Afghans or hyphenated Afghans editorialized and provided historical, cultural, or political context and analysis. In my interviews with Afghan women teachers, doctors, and activists and in my own voice-over commentary, we provided historical analysis of women’s rights in Afghanistan and situated the rise of the Taliban and Islamism in Afghanistan within the broader context of Cold War (and now War on Terror) politicking. Our goal was to counter the dominant academic and media narrative of Afghanistan as “stuck in time” and perpetually backwards–to counter the narratives that all Afghan men are virulent misogynists, that the country is incapable of modernizing, and that the country never had progressive social movements for reform and for the human rights of women and other marginalized people. Moreover, we linked the rise of warlordism and Islamism in the region to clandestine and overt support and funding of the most conservative elements of Afghan society by superpowers and regional Islamists.
Long before the #OscarsSoWhite and #MeToo movements and their academic equivalent #CommunicationSoWhite, this formative experience taught me about the racism and sexism embedded in the US media industry. I learned firsthand that corporate media are beholden to what is politically aligned with the government position and usually mobilized in the service of their interests and, conversely, that they do not value on-the-ground media makers and perspectives that challenge top-down narratives. Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky’s schema “The Five Filters of the Propaganda Model,” first introduced in their influential book, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, meticulously outlines and demonstrates this. See for example how, in the aftermath of the October 7th attacks, cable television networks have cancelled the shows of a number of their anchors and commentators who are critical of the Israeli war and/or in favor of a ceasefire, including Hasan Minhaj, Joy Reid, Mehdi Hasan, and Ayman Moheldin.
Relatedly, this experience was also an important lesson about how rhetoric about “saving Muslim women” (and the rhetoric of human rights campaigns more generally) is used by Western nation-states and their communication apparatus in the service of empire. (For more on this, see work by Lila Abu-Lughod, Charles Hirschkind and Saba Mahmood, and me.) And now, with hindsight, after twenty years of the US “forever war” in Afghanistan and billions of dollars spent on human rights and humanitarian interventions (including on mismanaged women’s development projects in Afghanistan), the Taliban are back in power and the situation of Afghan women is worse than before. It is clear that women’s rights were never the priority. This is why, post-US withdrawal, there is very little media coverage of the abysmal state of Afghan women’s rights or of protests against gender apartheid. Many Western academics, celebrities, politicians, media pundits, and selective feminists who clamored on behalf of Muslim and Afghan women are now eerily silent.
Gruesome images of violence enacted on Afghan women, including images of women being beaten, stoned, and shot by the Taliban, were welcome and circulated widely on all the mainstream US networks in the lead up to the US war in Afghanistan to drum up support for war. (See my work on this here.) At the same time, during the US war and interventions, news and images of civilian casualties in Afghanistan were actively censored by legacy media to hide the true cost of the devastation, destruction, and death. (See more here, here, and here.) Relatedly, ever since the Vietnam War, the US government has repeatedly banned (after brief moments of reinstatement) the news media from showing the flag-drapped coffins of its soldiers killed in wars, so as to not stir anti-war public sentiment. (See my work on this here.) Likewise, in the case of the Israeli war in the occupied territories of Palestine, as numerous leaked reports and investigations into falsified “investigative reports” of “beheaded babies” and “Hamas rapes” have emerged and revealed, the Israeli and US media industries, heeding the status quo of their governments, are deflecting their own abuses. After internal and external criticism mounted over the credibility and process of the New York Times’s October 7th front page investigative report, in an editorial published in the Washington Post, over fifty prominent journalism professors called on the newspaper to allow for an independent review of sources. Ironically, in the second term of Donald Trump, Jeff Bezos, the billionaire owner of the Washington Post, is stripping the newspaper of its independent status by changing the opinion section to support “free markets” and the newspaper more generally to be supportive of the Trump administration.
The fact that Israeli war is being livestreamed around the world is to the credit of many brave everyday people on the ground, as well as frontline journalists who put their lives on the line to document—many paying the ultimate price. The credit also belongs to other brave voices and alternative and independent media outlets on and offline, who, at great personal risk to themselves, amplified those frontline voices and images.
Returning to the critical question of whether the livestreaming of the violence has been effective in curtailing it, coalescing public opinion, and/or building movements for justice, the answer is yes and no. The media definitely generated massive global protests and encampments on university campuses across the US, with students and faculty demanding divestment of their institutions and governments from sponsorship of the war and many countries demanding a ceasefire. Yet the power elite, including many politicians and the legacy media who do their bidding, have once again also demonstrated their sheer power to completely disregard their own citizenry and the global public sphere, by continuing and extending their relentless onslaught and escalating body count for fifteen months.
I, as well as other scholars, have argued that there is a correlation between showing/viewing images of violence inflicted on marginalized groups, including those subjected to war and police violence, and inducing empathy and bolstering social justice movements in the US, like the anti-war movement during the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights Movement, movements that resisted the War on Terror, Black Live Matter, and MeToo. (For more, see “#Hashtag Activism: Networks of Race and Gender Justice,” my 2019 article “Racialized Agents and Villains of the Security State,” Lynn Spigel and Michael Curtin’s 1997 book “The Revolution Wasn’t Televised,” and Keeanga Yamahtta-Taylor’s From Black Lives Matter to Black Liberation.) Others have argued that, on the contrary, some Americans can take a voyeuristic pleasure in watching the pain and suffering of others. Viewing images of violence, be it anti-Black violence at home or imperial violence abroad, reinforces their antipathy and xenophobia towards communities they feel superior to and/or threatened or wronged by, therefore aggrandizing their sense of entitlement and power to enact violence. (See Saidiya Hartman’s work, W.J.T. Mitchell’s Cloning Terror, Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric, and Shawn Michelle Smith’s At the Edge of Sight.) The key thing that most scholars agree on is that the effects of the mass circulation of images of violence directed at marginalized communities via the news and entertainment industry—and whether the images induce empathy or antipathy, action or inaction–are contingent on a number of factors, including the type of violence and the context, framing, and production elements of the images as well as the subjectivity and identity position of the viewers. (See Ahmed Kabel’s essay in this dossier, Allisa V. Richardson’s “Bearing Witness while Black,” and Barbie Zelizer’s About to Die.) For example, we see this in the dehumanizing representations of Middle Eastern and Muslim people in Hollywood. (See my own work, Edward W. Said’s Covering Islam, and Jack G. Shaheen’s “Reel Bad Arabs.”) Likewise, the over-circulation of discourse about Afghan women’s victimhood in the media in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks made Afghan women a joke and further robbed them of their agency. Moreover, for those who already hold strong antipathy towards a group of people, visual evidence is unlikely to sway them or induce empathy in them. As the Israeli filmmaker Ra’anan Alexandrowicz shows in his documentary The Viewing Booth (2019) and anthropologist Rebecca L. Stein shows in her book Screen Shots: State Violence on Camera in Israel and Palestine (2021), for Israelis and Palestinians who already feel justified in committing violence against one another, images of the suffering of the Other only serve to reinforce their antipathy. With regards to the violence that African Americans have been subjected to and its afterlives, Ruha Benjamin and Tonia Sutherland have shown how the archive itself is fraught, whitewashed, and imbued with racism.
Yet ultimately, uncensored and unfiltered media and images from the front lines are crucial and necessary for understanding how the imperial governments operate in the name of global security. Alternative and people-powered media have risen to the challenge and are revealing the on-the-ground horrors of the Israeli war on Gaza and its aftermath via US corporate platforms, independent platforms, and/or international platforms. They are being subjected to varying degrees of clandestine and overt censoring via rigged algorithms, shadow banning of critical posts, and outright banning of platforms, as in the case of TikTok in the US and Al Jazeera in Israel. Arab, Iranian, Turkish, Russian, and Chinese state media among others, which are highly censored at home, have also been showing the true human carnage and destruction of the war.
In response to the Israeli government banning Al Jazeera from reporting and broadcasting in Israel and Palestinian territories, the Biden White House spokesman Matthew Miller said in May of 2024 that the US government opposes the decision and that “we support media freedom all over the world” and that “journalists and media workers are an essential part of any democracy.” Yet during the 2003 Iraq Invasion, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld tried to ban Al Jazeera’s coverage and called it “vicious, inaccurate, and inexcusable.” Al Jazeera defended its frontline reporting as desperately needed coverage of civilian casualties. Al Jazeera offices were also targeted and hit in both Kabul and Baghdad during first offensives there.
In a scenario similar to that of Al Jazeera America, which ultimately went out of business as a result of fighting numerous corporate and political battles to get a foothold in the insular US media market, currently US tech billionaires and Donald Trump, who issued a temporary lift of the TikTok ban, are negotiating to partially or fully buy the app. In the techno-capitalist authoritarian state, the media is just another corporate commodity for sale to the highest bidder, as long as the highest bidder is not a foreign entity. The separation of corporations and politics keeps eroding, with alt-right tech billionaires and political elites having empowered each others’ rise to the highest political positions in Donald Trump’s second administration. They are working together to further strip anti-monopoly and net neutrality laws and paving the way for massive consolidation of social media and digital platforms into the hands of the few, just as the broadcast networks and legacy media were allowed to do in the 1920s, 1950s, 1980s, and 1990s, thereby giving them more power to control the narrative and censor public opinion. We must renew calls to protect free and open media and independent voices who speak truth to power. After all, in a democracy, the media—our telecommunication towers and studios, our wires and wireless, our airwaves and ether—are ours. The media is a public resource, and access to it is a human right. Free media is crucial to understanding how a security state operates domestically and globally and for a citizenry to see what is being done with their taxes and in their name.
This essay is part of the series “Feminists for a Free Palestine: Voices from Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Kashmir, Iran, and Beyond.” Read the introduction here. Read Zahra Ali’s essay “Transnational Feminism from Iraq to Palestine” here; Manijeh Moradian’s essay “Iranian Feminist Solidarity with Palestine” here; and Ather Zia’s essay “Intifada: From Palestine to Kashmir” here.
