“Journacide” and the Settler Colonial Assault on Reality

Such acts of aggression are a manifestation of Israel’s “necropenological” violence against Palestinians, as feminist Palestinian scholar Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s writes: “The colonial state…operates over the flesh of the dead to further evict the native … strip[ping] the colonised from their humanity by depriving them the right to mourn their beloved ones.” THE FABRIC OF COLONIAL VIOLENCE Almo. [...] WHO HAS THE RIGHT TO LOOK? The real, basic “crime” of journalism is in breaching the settler state’s self-granted prerogative to surveil and scrutinize, but not be surveilled or scrutinized in return; to render the colonized transparent to the colonial gaze – whether through the surveyor’s census or the sniper’s rifle sights – while its own operations of power remain opaque, hidden behind walls of. [...] We are here to examine the Indians,” as the chairman of the 1912 McKenna-McBride Commission on the “Indian land question” in BC proclaimed, in refusing to respond to Indigenous nations’ questions about their impending dispossession at the hands of the Canadian state. [...] In Israel’s response to Abu Akleh’s death, and in the media coverage of her killing in allied colonial states such as Canada and the US, several classic varieties of settler bullshit were on display: • Projection – blaming the colonized for violence perpetrated by the colonizers themselves (“there is a good chance that armed Palestinians, firing wildly, brought about the tragic death of the journa. [...] The blank spaces on maps showing where ethnically cleansed and destroyed Palestinian villages or razed Uyghur historical and holy sites once used to be; the unmarked graves concealing the bodies of the “disappeared,” from Tk’emlups to Kashmir; the silenced voices of critical journalists, whether targeted by the covert violence of censorship and secret detention or the overt violence of a bullet to.