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| Assal Rad, headline fixer & author of DON'T SAY PALESTINE How the Media Manufactured Consent for Genocide |
Activist and Middle East historian Assal Rad is known as the “headline fixer” for her powerful posts that illustrate how mainstream Western media’s coverage of the Gaza Genocide is filled with double standards. Israelis are described as “children” and “civilians,” while Palestinians are “people under 18” and “collateral damage”; Israelis are killed; Palestinians die. Even in the wake of the so-called ceasefire, major Western media continually obfuscates Israeli violence in Palestine: For example, the Associated Press reported that “Gaza’s living conditions worsen as strong winds and hypothermia kill 5.” No, Rad corrects: Gaza’s living conditions worsen as Israel blocks aid.
In Don’t Say Palestine, Rad reveals a pattern of dehumanizing language—in outlets from CNN and the AP to the BBC and The New York Times—so consistently employed throughout the Palestinian genocide that it amounts to a policy. Mainstream Western media consistently downplays Israeli responsibility, “others” Palestinians, and casts doubt on inviolable tenets of international law like the sanctity of hospitals and journalists in war zones. This groundbreaking, eye-opening exposé offers both a moral reckoning and an urgent call to action, mapping with devastating clarity the media’s complicity in whitewashing a human rights crisis.
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/834977/dont-say-palestine-by-assal-rad/
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| "A vital work... Rad's intellectual rigor and moral clarity are unwavering" |
PRAISE
“Amidst some of the worst journalistic failures of this century, Assal Rad has consistently done vital work to point out the myriad ways institutional hypocrisy, cowardice, and willful obliviousness work hand-in-hand with state violence to justify and normalize any manner of atrocity. Her intellectual rigor and moral clarity—not only on the journalistic malpractice that so often marks Western media coverage of the ongoing genocide in Gaza, but on how this malpractice eventually seeps into all coverage—are unwavering. At a time when it would have been so much more convenient to stay silent, I and so many others are grateful for her willingness to speak.” —Omar El Akkad, National Book Award–winning author of One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
“Eighty years ago,
George Orwell wrote that ‘In our time, political speech and writing are largely
the defense of the indefensible.’ Assal Rad shows, in painful detail, that in
the case of Israel-Palestine, this remains true.” —Peter Beinart, author of Being
Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza
“Throughout the course of the Gaza Genocide, historian Assal Rad has been a
beacon of clarity in a media landscape clouded by lies. In this important new
work of media criticism, Rad dissects the biases, distortions, and falsehoods
by which press institutions conceal the atrocities of empire—as well as
delivering a powerful call for accountability, justice, and truth.” —Molly
Crabapple, author of Here Where We Live Is Our Country
“Assal Rad brilliantly exposes how, for the past
years, reality itself had been distorted to fit a political ecosystem. Western
media does not simply omit or distort reality, but actively launders it.
Language reframes and ultimately erases both violence and responsibility.
‘Self-defense’ replaces the naming of genocide. These linguistic choices reveal
intentionality in complicity: not neutral but political, shaping whose lives
are grievable and whose deaths are rendered acceptable. In Don’t Say
Palestine, Rad demonstrates how media narratives create permissive
conditions for genocide through strategic omission, selective visibility,
euphemism, and the erasing of Palestinian voices. When those same institutions
dictate what can and cannot be said, this is not press freedom but censorship.
And when they uncritically repeat the claims of a state responsible for
unprecedented violence, in ways that obscure or diminish its gravity, this is
not reporting—it is complicity.” —Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur
on the Occupied Palestinian Territories and author of When the World Sleeps
