“Don't shoot the messenger” no longer applies. Journalists are now being targeted and killed in Gaza.
This article first appeared in German at Freischwebende Intelligenz. You can find all the articles by Free-floating Intelligence in English here – subscribe now, to get the articles by e-mail! This article has been written with the Pareto client.
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“The author is dependent on the wild and must tolerate the dangers. He cannot feel comfortable in the nature reserve — even if he belongs to the animals that are not permitted to be shot.”
– Ernst Jünger “Autor und Autorschaft”
Almost five years ago, I left print journalism to broaden the debate. At the time, I didn’t know exactly what that meant. I just sensed that two types of journalism were meeting head-on out there — and without any safety zone.
On the one hand, there was the journalism I had in mind: curious, rebellious, unafraid of ugly realities. A profession that doesn’t ask whether the truth fits nicely into the living room, but whether it is true. On the other side: cheerleader journalism. Propaganda in a chic layout. Editorial offices that pre-cook reality like a ready meal and serve it in bite-sized chunks. The reader wants to know what happened — and instead is told what to believe.
In the summer of 2020, I escaped Corona on a motorcycle tour through Croatia to Dubrovnik and Montenegro. In my luggage: Walter Lippmann’s Liberty and the Press. Lippmann, himself no paragon of journalistic neutrality, drummed up support for wars, but made a clear diagnosis: objectivity is something for idealists. Especially in war, where reporters prefer to listen to generals rather than eyewitnesses, the portrayal of reality becomes a matter of faith.
From Riga to Gaza – the information war
Last weekend, it felt like everything came together: I traveled to Riga for one of the oldest Bitcoin conferences, a meeting place for the children of the Cypherpunks — the digital dissidents who have been fighting for privacy and freedom of speech since the 1980s. There, I presented Pareto, our uncensorable platform for bloggers and publications, which I have been working on with a team for two years — financed in part by this readership. A crowbar for the debate room.
At a hackathon (coding competition), we developed the next idea: a decentralized network of correspondents via Nostr and Bitcoin. Citizen journalists could use their cell phone cameras to document what is happening in war and crisis zones — events that we have only experienced in a filtered or second-hand way until now. Hardly any journalists go to Gaza, where more than 170 have already died — more than in any conflict since World War II.
Reality caught up with the idea: on Sunday night, the Israeli army bombed an Al Jazeera journalists’ tent, deliberately killing reporters, including Anas Al Sharif, who had openly cheered Hamas actions, among other things. Nevertheless, “don’t shoot the messenger” no longer applies. The targeted killing of members of the press is a violation of international humanitarian law — and a signal: images have become a weapon of war.
If there is no image, there is no perception. The disappearance of information is strategically a kind of territorial gain. Journalists are treated like enemy combatants. Are they now among the “animals that it is permitted to be shot at?”
PR instead of freedom of the press
Israel recently allocated $150 million for PR. How much of that goes to Germany? With that kind of money, you can make blockbuster movies — or try to whitewash accusations of genocide. Genocide and its denial are historical twins. There is no genocide without mnemocide, the murder of memory.
In the vacuum of objective reporting, the machine of the “Ten Commandments of War Propaganda” rolls on — from “Our side fights nobly” to “Anyone who doubts our propaganda is a traitor.” Anne Morelli listed them after Lord Ponsonby, and today they read like script notes for talk shows and editorials.
Anyone who expresses doubts about Israel’s war policy quickly ends up being labeled “ antisemitic, Islamist, or a cross-front activist.”Debate thrives on doubt. Loyalty thrives on switching off doubt. The journalist becomes a press spokesman in civilian clothes. And then there is Netanyahu: a man with a Pfizer syringe as a trophy in his office, politically dependent on the myth of the savior of Israel. For him to survive, Gaza must perish. The “humanist” is someone who does not recognize this mechanism. Netanyahu is not a puppeteer, but a prisoner of his own narrative. Bibi the hero must save Israel, and if there is no reason to do so, one will be created. Escalation is not an accident, but systematic.
Debate thrives on doubt. Loyalty thrives on switching off doubt. The journalist becomes a press spokesman in civilian clothes. And then there is Netanyahu: a man with a Pfizer syringe as a trophy in his office, politically dependent on the myth of the savior of Israel. For him to survive, Gaza must perish. The “humanist” is someone who does not recognize this mechanism. Netanyahu is not a puppeteer, but a prisoner of his own narrative. Bibi the hero must save Israel, and if there is no reason to do so, one will be created. Escalation is not an accident, but systematic.
The Bibi Files – Die Akte Netanjahu / NDR, 2025
In war, belief is poison. Those who believe do not question. What remains is trench warfare logic: “You’re an agitator!” “You’re blind!” “You’re anti-Semitic!” – moral self-assurance on a continuous loop. That’s not journalism, that’s a barroom discussion with an internet connection.
Real journalism names taboos – it doesn’t create them. It trusts neither politicians nor the military nor fact checkers. It builds its own database: unadulterated images, reports from the field, perspectives outside the press offices. How is the world supposed to judge something it doesn’t see?
The ugly words
“Genocide,” “concentration camp,” and “ethnic cleansing” are ugly words. They don’t just appear in the usual suspects. David Grossman, Ehud Olmert, and Gideon Levy use them. These are not antisemitic codes, but internal warning signals. No state, no religion justifies starving, destroying, and wiping out an entire region.
The war in Gaza is also a war for the right to define the narrative. Whoever controls the images controls history. In a few years, the numbers of victims will fade, but the narratives will remain.
The truth is dead — long live the truth. But how? We can end censorship now. With the power of the many, we can document reality, make mnemocide impossible — and thus make genocide in the future less likely.
The gathering of information in the future will probably not fail because of technical means, but because at some point the truth will no longer find anyone brave enough to risk their life for it.
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