Distillations/Constellations #10: a loud death
This week, the Palestinian photojournalist Fatima Hassona was murdered, along with nine other members of her family. It was days before her wedding, just a day after finding out a film documenting her life in Gaza would debut at a film festival this year. She wrote just before her murder:
“If I die, I want a loud death. I don’t want to be just breaking news, or a number in a group, I want a death that the world will hear, an impact that will remain through time, and a timeless image that cannot be buried by time or place.
A loud death. She deserved so, so much better. And I've been asking myself all week: in this day and age, amidst the murders of so many thousands of people, what does a loud death actually look like? How can we possibly do justice to her wishes?
I've lost count of the number of people I've talked to here in Berlin about events that have either happened in Palestine, or related to it here in Germany, who have claimed total ignorance. The German journalists who knew nothing of the ban on speaking Arabic at Palestine protests, or the intentional and targeted massacre of paramedics in Gaza, or the brutal police violence here at protests here in Berlin, to name just a tiny fraction of the many horrific incidents which seem to be anything but loud, in the mainstream at least.
This brings me to two conclusions: first, the utter failure of Western media in covering this genocide. As journalist Omar Al Akkad writes in his fantastic, searing book, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This:
To watch the descriptions of Palestinian suffering in much of mainstream Western media is to watch language employed in the exact opposite of language's purpose – to watch the unmaking of meaning.
He refers to the ways in which events can be described in ways that ignore context, structural oppression, or even the actual facts of what happened – but technically still be written about. One example: in April 2024, a leaked memo from the NYT revealed that journalists covering Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip were instructed "to restrict the use of the terms “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” and to “avoid” using the phrase “occupied territory” when describing Palestinian land." The mental gymnastics those journalists and editors must have to go through to be able to write without using those words (and the lack of integrity that they must possess) is beyond me.
The consequences of this lack of journalistic integrity are widespread. There's the obvious: the mainstream remains misinformed about an important global issue. Deaths of thousands are being justified, and ongoing starvation and famine legitimised. But there's also the fact that – thanks to the ways in which the digital information ecosystem is structured – what appears in mainstream media has knock-on effects elsewhere.
News sites make up "half of the top 10 sites incorporated into one of Google’s datasets that is being used to train some of the most popular large language models." And even the news sites themselves don't (currently) get a say in that, though a number of news publishers are currently suing various AI companies over "unauthorised use of their content."
What this means in practice, is that ChatGPT and other large language models are incorporating the biases in mainstream (and other) news, and replicating these biases elsewhere, and it's unclear as of yet, to what extent people using LLMs actually understand how those biases show up in the information they're receiving.
My second conclusion: how we keep making the same mistakes in thinking that proof will lead to accountability. I’m reminded of Mimi Ọnụọha’s article, When Proof Is Not Enough, written in 2020, about how throughout history, “evidence of racism has failed to effect change.” She writes: “When confronted with something that does not fit the paradigm we know, we are likely to resist acknowledging the incongruity. This is because we see what we have been primed... to see... In other words, the higher the stakes, the greater the resistance.” This means that in order to effect real change on this issue, we have to go beyond 'showing' what's happening.
But in the case of Palestine, it’s not even ‘just’ that people refute the videos or the stories that they’re being shown: it’s that they’re not even being shown them. An investigation released last week by Drop Site News showed that “Meta has complied with 94% of takedown requests issued by Israel since October 7, 2023.” While government censorship requests typically focus on citizens within their own borders, in this case, only 1.3% of the requests pertained to Israeli users, their requests instead “overwhelmingly targeted users from Arab and Muslim-majority nations in a massive effort to silence criticism of Israel.”
People active on social media and posting about Palestine knew about this far before any official investigation, though – social media users have long been paying attention to what 'the algorithm' prioritises and what it doesn't. (Indeed: I wrote about an early example of this almost exactly 10 years ago.) In the case of Instagram, users have noticed that posts with faces are shown more than others; that posts with questions are prioritised, or that replacing certain letters with numbers lets captions with certain words (eg. P@l3st1ne) get through censorship filters.
So, in the face of this: what do we do, to make sure that these stories aren't lost? That deaths like Fatima's aren't lost to time or place, that in the future we remember and we don't repeat the same mistakes?
Community archiving. A source of resistance for the ages.
I've been so inspired by radical archival practices – like Whose Knowledge?'s Liberatory Archives and Memory program, seeking to "collectively reimagine “the archive” and “sites of memory” as powerful spaces and acts of resistance, healing, and transformation." Or the work of community archives like the Palästinensisches Feministisches Kollektiv (Palestinian Feminist Collective) based here in Berlin. They've been using a combination of oral archiving, photos, drawings, and community-led approaches to gather stories from the Palestinian community here in Berlin, and they share them back too via community gatherings. (Maybe see you at the next one?)
It can be easy to feel like we have no hope and there's nothing we can do, but that's so far from the truth. In fact, buying into that narrative is just doing the work of the oppressors for themselves.
Recommendations from around the internet
- A piece I wrote about grief got published this week in a wonderful publication, Muslim Futures: Weaving dreams beyond times and spaces. Grief is a topic that I've been thinking about a lot over the past months, and I hope to explore it more here soon.
- I recently finished this book, and have been recommending it to everyone since: One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, by Omar El Akkad. He puts into words so many of the feelings that I (and I'm sure others) have had over the past two years.
- This TikTok, reframing doom scrolling as 'people volunteering for Big Tech.' Genius.