Shireen dedicated her life to exposing Israeli military violence — and it is ultimately what killed her. She revealed Israel’s policy of letting its soldiers get away with murder — which is currently leading it to fabricate lies about her own targeted assassination. And she did all of this in an incredibly hostile, biased, dishonest media landscape that reports Israel’s lies as facts and erases Palestinians’ truths — now, including the truth of her own killing.
@nytimes, @apnews, and the entirety of Israeli and Western media: face facts. Multiple eyewitness accounts tell us an Israeli sniper directly targeted Shireen while she was covering an Israeli military raid in Jenin, a Palestinian refugee camp. She was wearing a press vest and a helmet, and the sniper shot her with extreme precision, near her ear, where the helmet didn’t cover (swipe left). This was a targeted assassination.
The sniper’s murder of Shireen is part of a larger pattern of Israel eliminating Palestinian journalists, the people who speak truth to power and expose Israel’s crimes to the world. Since 2000, the Israeli military has murdered 55 Palestinian journalists, whom it views as being “armed with cameras” (as military spokesperson Ran Kochav said of Shireen today). The Israeli sniper killed Shireen not despite her being a journalist, but precisely because she is one.
We call for justice for Shireen, as we do with ALL murdered Palestinians, by demanding the US government end its $3.8 billion in annual funding to the Israeli military. Like Omar Asad, an elderly Palestinian whose egregious murder by the Israeli military was gravely misreported by the same news outlets earlier this year, Shireen is an American citizen. The Biden administration cannot ignore this — and we won’t let them. As Congresswoman @Rashidatlaib said, “@POTUS, whether you’re Palestinian, American or not, being killed with U.S. funding must stop.”
“I chose journalism to be close to people. It may not be easy to change the reality, but at least I was able to make that voice heard in the world.” – Shireen Abu Akleh
