The Other Girl in Red

Friends and the free press. Two unforeseen victims of the genocide.

I watched Schindlers List on February 23, 1997 when NBC aired the film uninterrupted and commercial-free, a rare event in network television. I remember being motionless as the final credits rolled—Holocaust survivors honouring Oscar Schindler's resting place with flowers, as mournful strains of violin captured the weight of their collective memory. To a 17 year old me, the film was an examination of the brutality of the world, yet I also felt solace because what I was watching was the past. Something that was so morally reprehensible, unjustifiable, universally condemnable that as a species we had acknowledged the wrong and vowed not to repeat it. This was a review of history, not a prophecy of the future. In that, there was some reprieve.

A particular storyline in the movie was the girl in the red coat. It was the only colour motif in the black-and-white film, which showed a 4-year old girl in a red dress walking amongst the crowds as the Nazis waged their genocide, holding someones hand or just strolling around aimlessly. She didn't have a line or even a scene where she was a character, just a red blip in the background that you saw two or three times. Towards the end of the movie you saw her one last time: a red dot on a pile of corpses being taken to the incinerator. It was haunting and highlighted the specific humanity of an individual amongst the violence inflicted on the masses. You felt it because a human being was both highlighted and diminished. Highlighted because I saw that they were once just like me, and diminished because their death meant nothing in the wider scheme of things. Even at that unseasoned age, I told myself that we could not allow this to happen again, and that her death reminded us not to repeat the wrongs of a regretful era.

Fast forward to today, and amongst the countless videos of the killings of actual and not fictionalized children, there is this:

A girl. The same age. The same scene. The same death. Even the same coloured clothing. Yet, not a moment of reflection or pause as we scroll to the next video, normalizing her killing, justifying the crime, implicitly taking the side of the criminal in the name of impartiality, all fuelled by a feigned ignorance. It turns out that the age-old adage of history repeating itself remains true. Intuitively, I perhaps sensed this reality, but the jarring contradiction of our society's solemn vow, never again, toward the Holocaust while simultaneously enabling a genocide in Palestine through collective silence and inaction has shaken me.

Those are strong words because not too many things shake anyone, so it's worth being more specific. It is not government actions that have been shocking. After all, I was witness to their interventions post-9/11, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and now Palestine. Killing Muslims comes easy to the West because they don't view Muslims as people but violations of Western norms, however vaguely and contradictorily they are defined. Bigotry against Muslims is normalized and codified, and many Muslim including myself has experienced it multiple times. The degree to which governments have intervened (and not intervened) is more disappointing than shocking. At times the hypocrisy between professed values and actions is so over-bearing that it's akin to a star's supernova: a system collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions.

It is not that has shaken me, it’s two other things: the role the media has played in promoting the genocide, and the response from people who were close to me, perhaps even my friends. The two are intertwined because the latter has fallen prey to the former, yet their morally repugnant silence cannot be blamed on their media consumption because that would be attributing to them a role of victim, and implying that they have no agency in the matter. It is true, they have been propagandized, but they have consciously chosen to relinquish their critical thinking, the very faculty they proudly exercise on less consequential matters. Their deafening silence reveals a profound inconsistency: these self-proclaimed independent thinkers, who typically pride themselves on seeing through manipulation in other contexts, suddenly accept narratives without scrutiny when it serves their comfort.

We should not attribute their silence on Palestine to fear of repercussions, as doing so would grant them an undeserved moral alibi, suggesting they would have spoken truth to power if not for personal risk. Their deliberate choice to remain silent is not a neutral position but an active moral statement that values personal comfort over moral courage. This calculated inaction, this conscious decision not to speak, reveals a deeply ingrained bigotry about whose lives they deem worthy of defense and whose suffering they consider acceptable to ignore. Their silence exposes not just cowardice in a moment that demands fortitude, but a fundamental prejudice that has always lurked beneath their self-image as principled individuals. This calculated inaction, this conscious decision not to speak, is nothing short of complicity with genocide. At some point the world will ask questions of your character and you will have to answer instead of formulating an elaborate excuse on why you can't, while conveniently pointing to the media, cultural and political landscape as the reason for your silence.

The responsibility of the press is to prosecute those who yield power. This is required for a democracy to function since representative democracy by its nature results in a consolidation of power at its apex- it is a physical attribute. An independent and free press is the counterweight to this power, and if it relinquishes this responsibility, it becomes a tool for the powerful to use against the powerless. Even worse, if it is duplicitous and only claims to hold the powerful to account, it actively harms the public good through deceit. Presently, the press has abdicated its responsibility and made the grave sin of choosing access to power over the prosecution of power. Today, the proliferation of public data, leaked documents, and digital records provides unprecedented resources to investigate those in power without relying on their cooperation. Yet paradoxically, as access to official sources becomes less necessary, many self-proclaimed journalists pursue it more desperately than ever, trading their independence for proximity to power while neglecting the wealth of evidence available outside these privileged channels.

A reliable indicator of a democracy's health is the degree of separation between media narratives and government messaging. When these align, it signals an Orwellian environment where dissent faces systematic suppression. This control mechanism operates through a calculated two-pronged strategy: first, by slashing public media funding, forcing news organizations into market-driven models; and second, by enabling corporate consolidation of media ownership. The consequences are predictable. Media outlets become beholden to corporate interests and must tow the company line no matter where the truth lies. The story becomes less important than how to generate advertising revenue from the story, which in turn changes what the story should be. This market dependency creates perverse incentives where sensationalism and manufactured outrage generate more profit than substantive reporting. The end product is a degraded information system dominated by performative "debates" featuring theatrical confrontations designed for social media distribution. These spectacles with their viral potential and emotional triggers represent not journalism but entertainment packaged as news, more comparable to scripted reality television than genuine public discourse.

The culprits of journalistic malpractice reach far and wide—from television networks to "prestigious" newspapers—but concrete examples are necessary to ground our critique in reality. The evidence is abundant and damning: the New York Times publishing fabricated stories about beheaded babies and mass rapes, while CNN and Jake Tapper deliberately mischaracterizing pro-Palestine protests. The mass suppression of documented Israeli sexual violence in prisons while amplifying unverified rape claims about October 7. When universities witnessed peaceful protests, media outlets dedicated astronomical amounts of coverage to manufacturing an antisemitism crisis, while conveniently omitting that Jewish students and faculty were disproportionately represented among the protesters themselves. Brutal violence against anti-genocide demonstrators at UCLA and in New York was systematically erased from mainstream US coverage. The press gave a free pass to explicitly genocidal statements from Israel's prime minister and cabinet ministers, while countering criticism with infantile "what about Hamas" deflections to justify mass starvation and indiscriminate killing. This represents merely the surface of how shamelessly one-sided the coverage has been. The systematic disappearing of pro-Palestinian voices—accelerated by government suppression—further reveals the coordinated effort to silence dissent. All these tactics serve one purpose: manufacturing consent for genocide, a campaign that has successfully manipulated those who consider themselves the "intellectual" class. The hypocrisy is staggering—it turned out that these self-proclaimed critical thinkers and free speech absolutists didn't actually care about critical thinking or free speech at all. They abandoned their supposed principles the moment they faced atrocities that challenged their comfortable worldview.

Steve Bannon's media manipulation strategy is devastatingly effective in its simplicity: overwhelm the media with an endless barrage of controversies, preventing them from maintaining focus on substantive issues. This "flood the zone" approach exploits a fundamental weakness of modern media—the industry's obsession with future speculation rather than rigorous historical analysis. What he's taking advantage of is the laziness of the media which refuses to undertake the tedious and cumbersome work of researching and analyzing the past, so it can be framed in the context of what's relevant today. Instead, focusing on a hypothetical future rife with conjecture and speculation is far easier. It is easy to make predictions and baseless assessments of the future knowing nobody will come back to hold you accountable when you're wrong. Why perform the grunt work in a mission to inform when you can inflame and enrage on-demand with little preparation, feeding on ingrained biases, short attention spans and people looking to otherize than look inward? Why develop expertise on complex issues when you can simply present "both sides" without evaluating their factual merit? Why take a position rooted in facts, no matter how uncomfortable, when you can hide behind impartiality, especially when doing so also means less leg work?

Jerry Seinfeld once quipped, "It's amazing that the amount of news that happens in the world every day always just exactly fits the newspaper". This aphorism was relevant a hundred years and is so today. We cannot expect the news to tell us everything, in fact, a discerning citizen should ask the question of what the news is leaving out. As power consolidates in the hands of an ever-shrinking group, the Overton Window, i.e. the set of opinions and ideas that it is possible for a politician to have without losing any chance of ever winning an election again, is shrinking. The sad part is that people, many who I used to consider friends, have applied an even smaller Overton Window to themselves. I hesitate to call this self-censorship because that would imply they want to say something and choose not to. That would be too kind of a conclusion. At some point you have to take people at their word. Or their silence.