Assal Rad discusses Don't Say Palestine

Join Brookline Booksmith at United Parish of Brookline to celebrate the release of Don't Say Palestine with author Assal Rad.

This event is ticketed. Tickets include a general admission seat at the event and a copy of Don't Say Palestine.

Don't Say Palestine: How the Media Manufactured Consent for Genocide

A searing indictment of Western media that lays bare how the "free press," long tasked with speaking truth to power, instead became a vital part of the machinery that enabled the genocide in Palestine

If you’re not writing the truth about crimes against humanity, you’re culpable in them.

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.

Assal Rad is an activist, historian of the modern Middle East, and a fellow at the Arab Center Washington DC and DAWN. Her first book, The State of Resistance: Politics, Culture, and Identity in Modern Iran, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2022. Her writing has appeared in Newsweek, The National Interest, The Independent, Foreign Policy, and other publications, and she has appeared as a commentator on BBC World, Al Jazeera, CNN, NPR, and elsewhere.

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