COMMENTARY: By Saige England
Every week, health prevailing, I march with our Palestinian friends and their supporters in Aotearoa New Zealand. And my country is one which — under Britain — was colonised.
Colonisation perpetrates injustices against indigenous people. This legacy is still felt by Indigenous people today.
All around the world we must dismantle our unfair systems. A fair system ensures that everyone has a flourishing start in life. But our systems are linked to Israel — and Israel demonstrates that colonisation is still practised.
Israel headed by megalomaniacs ruling with a muscular thug army is proof that the Empire has not stopped because the Western Empire has supported this.
Far too many Western journalists report from the perspective of the abuser rather than the victims. They need to ask, “what if it was my child, my wife, my mother, my brother, my grandfather, suffering like this? What if I was forced from my home?”
Journalists must report from the perspective of people who are pleading for the right to breathe rather than reporting from the perspective of the landlord killing people when they resist eviction.
They must use their imagination to exercise empathy in reporting. Only then will they report the truth and only then will the real narrative emerge.
Colonisation unchecked
Colonisation is not checked, rather it is supported by countries engaged in Empire building.
Like South Africa under apartheid, Indigenous people are oppressed and if they resist they are dispensed with, in other words, exterminated.
But this system is enabled rather than disabled. The rampant megalomania is enabled by the US, Britain, Germany, and other nations.
Tens of thousands of children, women, and men have been robbed of life and the journalists I once worked alongside in conflict zones are complicit if they do not report this as a human rights atrocity.
We — journalists — must report on the evil that is the expansion of empire and we must report on it from the perspective of the victims not the perpetrators.
The extermination of Palestinians and expansion of Israel is clearly supported by the legs of the octopus — the countries that make up this Western Empire.
Standing by and reporting from anything other than the perspective of the victims is akin to standing by and watching slaves being bound, gagged and shipped under the name of empire.
Journalists must stand up and report with the moral courage of abolitionists. They must have the gumption to attack the rotten policies practiced in our own time.
Saige England is an award-winning journalist and author of The Seasonwife, a novel exploring the brutal impacts of colonisation. She is also a contributor to Asia Pacific Report.
Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz
