International human rights lawyer and former senior United Nations Official Craig Mokhiber explains why Western media can (and should) be held legally accountable for its role in the Gaza genocide.
Craig explains: “Western corporate media reporting on the genocide in Palestine is, nothing short of shocking. Plenty of people have said that it is unethical from a journalistic point of view. Some of it may also be unlawful. There are precedents in international law in particular for holding media companies and personalities accountable for things like incitement to genocide, incitement to violence more generally. Incitement to genocide, if it's direct and public, are international crimes, defined very clearly as international crimes. In legal terms, the acts that they're perpetrating, they're perpetrating knowingly. This is not just mere negligence or a lack of journalistic ethics. They know very well how they are misrepresenting what's happening on the ground. They are publicly and systematically disseminating propaganda for genocide, including disinformation, dehumanization of the Palestinians.”
And, Craig points out, there is legal precedent for holding media figures accountable for their words. There’s a long tradition going all the way back to Nuremberg of holding media accountable for incitement to genocide or complicity in crimes against humanity. And when it came time then to draft a genocide convention, a separate crime of incitement to genocide was included in that convention. That applies not just to states and state actors, but to private actors as well.
The infamous case of the Nazi publisher Julius Streicher for incitement and persecution on political and racial grounds, because his publication, Der Stürmer, during the genocide against European Jews, was broadcasting inciting material. And he was in fact found guilty at Nuremberg for incitement to murder and extermination.
That trend of looking at the role of media was very important when the International Tribunal for Rwanda covering the Rwanda genocide found a number of media, people accountable. Three different people were, were found guilty of incitement to genocide in that case by the tribunal. Judge Pele famously said, ‘without a firearm, machete, or any physical weapon, you caused the death of thousands of innocent civilians’.”
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