This year’s commencement speaker at Harvard University, Maria Ressa, compared Israel to Nazi Germany and accused the Jewish state of committing genocide against the Palestinians.
Ressa made her comments a month after Hamas’ assault against Israel in an editorial on her Philippines-based news site Rappler (which, allegedly, “fights for facts” ).
According to The Washington Free Beacon, Ressa (pictured) wrote that Israel’s counter-attack to Hamas’ October 7 assault which killed over 1,000 Israelis was (is) “disproportionate” and not merely retaliation but “all-out war.”
An English translation of the editorial reads in part “It is a great irony that the [Jewish] race that suffered centuries of oppression, even genocide at the hands of Adolf Hitler, is now [denying] the same aspirations [for] the Palestinians. We like to think that our world is more modern, more aware, and more compassionate, compared for example to the time of Adolf Hitler, or the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.”
Ressa had also signed on to a letter which accused Israel of deliberately targeting journalists covering the current conflict. In addition, Rappler has consistently avoided “terrorist” when referring to Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, instead using the term “militants.”
According to her Amazon.com bio, 2021 Nobel Peace Prize recipient Ressa previously taught at her alma mater Princeton (politics and media; her own degree was in English with a certificate in theater and dance), and had “a front-row seat chronicling Southeast Asia’s transition from authoritarian rule to democracy.” Most of that time was spent at CNN in Manila and Jakarta, Indonesia.
Ressa hopes to “redefine journalism by combining traditional broadcast, new media and mobile phone technology for social change.”
Her book “How to Stand Up to a Dictator” ironically chronicles how governments’ “creep towards authoritarianism […] has been aided and abetted by the social media companies.”
Last September, Ressa asked an audience at Princeton “If you don’t have integrity of facts, how can you have integrity of elections?” She accused tech companies of “abdicat[ing] their responsibility to protect the public sphere, which requires all of us to be aware of how we are being manipulated.”
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IMAGE: Global Reporting Centre/X
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