‘Complicity’ is an insufficient word: the violence of western media

The story of Mona Zahed

This article was co-written by Amy McQuire and Matt Chun

Follow Amy’s work at Black Justice Journalism

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This week, Herald Sun ‘journalist’ Carly Douglas was tasked with fabricating a hit piece on Mona Zahed, a Palestinian mother, chef, and author in Gaza. Douglas's sole project was to target, misrepresent, and demonise Mona. Her end goal was unambiguous: to have the family’s Australian visas cancelled, and put them in further danger.

On 7 August, from her position of safety, comfort, privilege, and intellectual dishonesty, Douglas sent a message to Mona, the victim-survivor of an ongoing genocide. The message did not contain a single word of care, or pose a single question about the experience of living through a campaign of extermination. Instead, Douglas interrogated Mona about two social media posts from 2023, based on a mangled and erroneous AI translation of the Arabic in these posts.

Following Douglas’s message, Mona said in a statement for her publisher:

For many months, every moment of my waking energy has been spent finding enough food to keep my children alive. The greatest fear for any mother is finding your family suffering before your eyes from the lack of their basic rights, like a loaf of bread, water, medicine, and education.

The message I received this morning from a journalist in Australia made me very fearful. After everything we have seen and survived all we hope for is a safe and simple life — and survival for our children.

When we talk about the violence of the media, we are not being hyperbolic or rhetorical. First Nations people have long known and felt how media reporting has enacted violence upon their lives, bodies, communities, and countries. They have seen how journalists and media outlets shelter behind obscure definitions of ethics that serve their own purposes; how they hide their direct complicity in these colonial crimes through distance. They deny accountability and then wash their hands of the consequences. But their role in the apparatus is both hidden and highly visible; it sanitises and justifies the machine’s very existence. They help decide which bodies are marked for killing, while marking others with the right to live.

Mona Zahed, who has survived through 672 days of continuous genocide, is currently living amongst the rubble with her husband Osama, her four children, and their community. In 2023, Israel destroyed Mona’s catering business and her husband’s pharmacy business. They are now suffering under the Zionist-made conditions of starvation, deprivation, repeated displacement, and the ever-present threat of massacre by the IOF. Mona is an intelligent, resourceful, caring mother, working against the odds to nourish and protect her hungry children, while generously sharing every scrap of available sustenance with her extended community.

In 2023–24, from her eighth displacement location — a tent in Khan Younis — under the precarity of continuous Zionist siege and bombardment, and using a sporadic internet connection, Mona wrote a cookbook on her mobile phone in an attempt to raise funds for the survival of her family and community.

Tess Cullity of Slingshot Books immediately agreed to help publish the book as a 100% mutual aid title, with all funds supporting the survival of Mona, her family, and a number of other families. Tabkha: recipes from under the rubble is now in its second edition. Cullity then went through the arduous process of organising Mona’s safe passage from Gaza to Wurundjeri land. Mona and her family were finally granted Australian visas. Their journey to safety was to have occurred this week.

In ‘researching’ her article, Douglas did not contact Cullity or Slingshot Books for comment. Cullity has spent many months advocating for Mona’s visas and safe passage, organising Mona’s book tour, securing accommodation, essentials, and community support for the family, fundraising, and researching the best practice for refeeding after famine. Douglas did not contact any of the bookstores or venues awaiting Mona’s tour. Douglas did not contact any of the civil society organisations who had enthusiastically endorsed and promoted Mona’s visit. These would have unravelled the Herald Sun’s agenda.

Instead, the only other person Douglas contacted was Matt Chun, whose role in Mona’s story is merely that of Cullity’s supportive romantic partner. However, The Herald Sun knew that centring Chun in its article would be red meat for its Zionist readership.

The article was full of inaccuracies large and small. ‘Journalism’ was never the point.

On 8 August, this threadbare and disingenuous article was made the cover story of the Herald Sun’s Friday print edition under the headline: ‘FROM HATE TO G’DAY MATE’ — with ‘political editor’ James Campbell added to the by-line. The ‘story’ was immediately replicated and amplified in a coordinated frenzy by The Australian, Sky News, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Courier Mail, The Daily Mail, and other pro-Israel outlets, with the by-lines of Joseph Olbrycht-Palmer, Conor Breslin, Holly Fishlock, Danica De Giorgio, Steve Price, Kimberley Braddish, Caitlyn Rintoul, Brittany Busch, Nick Wilson, Max Aitchison, and others.

Within hours, Tony Burke cancelled the visas of Mona, Osama, and their four children. Australian media sabotaged this family’s safety and Tony Burke doubled down. A number of these same news outlets immediately published triumphant follow-up articles announcing the cancellation of the visas. Zionist trolls and ‘influencers’ across social media erupted in gleeful bloodlust.

The department of home affairs did not contact Mona or Slingshot Books with an enquiry. No clarification was sought and there was no investigation into the Herald Sun’s claims. There was no communication with the civil society groups who had supported Zahed’s application. There was barely an hour in which any due bureaucratic diligence could conceivably have been undertaken. That Burke would take action without so much as a fact-check or the employment of a registered interpreter is not only professionally incompetent but immeasurably injurious to the family concerned.

This direct targeting, trial, and verdict by right-wing media, with the uncritical deference of politicians, was supported and upheld by the silent cowardice of supposedly ‘progressive’ media. The Guardian had originally planned to publish a counter-piece in anticipation of the Herald Sun's campaign, but later killed the piece. They have instead remained silent despite knowing the consequences of the media’s attack on Mona and her family.

Not only do the events of the last 48 hours demonstrate collusion between those in power and the many imperialist media outlets, but also the coordination between the news outlets themselves. These outlets refuse to see Mona and her family as humans worthy of justice and protection. For them this is a game. For Mona, as with so many Palestinians, this is her life; her very right to exist hinges on the whim of western media.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people know of these collusions between the powerful, the right-wing media, and even supposedly ‘progressive’ media, because these are the very same tactics employed to dehumanise them. On the frontier, the colonial media was used as a tool to ‘settle’ or ‘clear’ the land and ‘disperse’ the ‘natives’. There was never a Black voice; instead the story of genocide was told through the words of those who benefited from the slaughter. Little has changed: Australian media continues this legacy.

Australian journalists tell certain stories about themselves as fearless truthtellers. They hold themselves to standards of objectivity, of impartiality, of ‘fact’. And yet we have seen over the past two years, and even the past 250 years, how they work: rather than challenging those in power, they are a critical part of the apparatus that secures it. Like a 'non-lethal' F-35 part, they are an essential component of a machine that inflicts violence upon the most vulnerable.

Journalists continue to claim innocence, they say they are just doing their job. They claim they are undertaking due diligence. They hide behind murky conceptions of the public interest. But they fail even to live up to their own low standards. Often, the best we can hope for is an ‘apology’ and a ‘correction’ printed in small type. But in Mona’s case, the consequences are devastating. An apology is not sufficient. Mona and her family’s lives have been put at risk due to irresponsible and violent reporting that goes far beyond complicity.

We’ve seen that since 2023, the media’s role in facilitating genocide has become increasingly clear to the growing majority of non-Indigenous people. But with this growing awareness comes the knowledge that ‘complicity’ is now an insufficient term. It does not accurately describe what we are seeing. What Mona’s story shows us is that the Australian media is not just complicit in genocide, it is a foot soldier. In fact, it is an essential component of the machine.

And like any sadistic imperialist soldier, the media strategises and co-ordinates, chooses its targets with impunity, and devastates lives. It enacts violence. And it must be stopped.

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Tabkha: recipes from under the rubble by Mona Zahed

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Contact Tony Burke to demand that Mona’s and her family’s visas be reinstated:

Electorate Office:

Shop 29, Broadway Plaza
Punchbowl, NSW, 2196

Telephone:

(02) 9750 9088

Parliament Office

Telephone:

(02) 6277 7860

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