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00:00However, at the same time, when you talk about ordinary people contributing to the acts of,
00:07you know, if we use the word mass extermination, you know, with a clear conscience, and as
00:12you say, even with fristons of virtue, could we pick this thought of yours and say it applies
00:18to the way a part of world is behaving, you know, vis-a-vis the current war in Palestine?
00:25Well, certainly, I think the people who had set themselves up, set themselves up as arbiters of
00:30international morality, and I mean by this, the nations of Western Europe and North America,
00:39they are certainly exposing to the world how shallow their sense of morality was,
00:47and how, you know, they can easily become complicit in these acts of mass extermination,
00:57and actually crack down on people who are pointing to those acts of mass extermination,
01:02whether these are students or academics or journalists. So, ironically, it's a sort of
01:12smaller, less powerful countries like South Africa today, or Ireland, or Spain, or Bolivia,
01:21that are now speaking up for international law and international morality today. An extraordinary,
01:28extraordinary reversal where, you know, the countries that claim the right to lecture
01:34others about human rights and individual dignity have all collaborated in an act of
01:43extermination, and it's a sort of, you know, countries who have been lectured to in the past,
01:51who have come forward to uphold certain norms of international justice and morality.
01:58Right. I also wanted to talk about this issue that is very, I have been following it as well,
02:05and actually, I have been experiencing it, is how this, this war has been reported. You know,
02:12some prestigious news outlets, how they deploy the passive voice, while reporting the massacres
02:20reporting the massacres happening in Gaza. And, you know, Israelis, while Israelis are killed,
02:26or they die in active voice, Palestinians die passively, they are not killed, you know,
02:33they dehydrate to death. I read one of the Guardian headlines. Do you think language
02:40is being used as a weapon, you know, to erase the humanity of the oppressed?
02:44Oh, yeah. I mean, I think, you know, that's been one of the most shocking and demoralizing aspects
02:51of the last year or so. Obviously, you know, human beings have been, have known themselves,
03:00have revealed themselves to be full of, you know, all kinds of nasty and evil traits.
03:08And nation states have behaved badly over, over, over the long course of human history.
03:17But I think there's never been a time when democracies or the free press in, in, in,
03:26in democracies have colluded to the extent they have colluded in the last year or so,
03:31to obscure the very plain and simple facts of atrocity. And I think that has shocked a lot of
03:40people who had invested faith, naively, perhaps, in modern journalism, who had thought that it's
03:50the role of journalism, to speak truth to power, to bring to lights, to bring to lights, you know,
03:57to bring to light, you know, the abuses of, of, of power. They've been, you know,
04:05really incredibly rudely surprised by the way some of the most prestigious periodicals
04:12in the Western world have covered, or not covered, really, this, this, this war in Gaza.
04:22I don't really know where we go from here, whether, again, you know, what we've seen in
04:27the geopolitical realm, whether it's media or institutions, media institutions of the
04:36non-Western world that will rise to the challenge and, and sort of, you know, save
04:43some of the norms of journalism. Is this going to happen, or is journalism also now going to
04:51be universally discredited, like many governments and many, many, many sort of, you know, politicians
04:58and political movements?