Killable Voices: Free Speech, Selective Mourning, and Gaza’s Journalists

How do our institutions decide which voices deserve to be grieved?

It is a foundational principle of democracy: the press must be free to report without fear of interference. As the eyes and ears of the public, journalists must cover matters of public interest without fear of reprisal. Yet in Gaza, journalists are not merely caught in the crossfire—they are systematically targeted, their elimination a deliberate assault on the very possibility of free speech. The deaths of journalists like Hossam Shabat and Anas al-Sharif expose this reality. Hossam Shabat was 21, a student who became a journalist to document the siege of northern Gaza. He left a final testament: “Do not stop speaking about Gaza. Do not let the world look away.” Anas al-Sharif signed his last message with a similar call, insisting his work was testimony, not propaganda: “Do not forget Gaza.” These are not elegies but instructions—witness made durable in words that compel us to ask uncomfortable questions about complicity and the narratives that render some deaths democratic catastrophes while others are dismissed as collateral. The response to the death of a political pundit like Charlie Kirk illustrates this contrast. His killing on a university stage produced an immediate script: politicians rushed to declare it an attack on democracy and free expression. The spectacle was so potent it provoked debates on the limits of speech in America, with individuals investigated for “insensitive” comments. What matters is not Kirk himself but the narrative his death generated—a narrative that automatically framed him as a civic martyr. This reaction makes sense once we recall how white nationalist ideas, once disguised as ‘respectable’ free speech, have become the common sense of conservative identity. Kirk’s elevation to democratic martyrdom is not a contradiction but the logical outcome of that mainstreaming.

What emerges are two distinct regimes of value. Arab and Muslim journalists are rendered killable because their race reduces journalism to militancy and makes their bodies an extension of the battlefield. Meanwhile a white Western pundit who peddled racist, homophobic, misogynistic, transphobic hate speech, was grieved as the embodiment of civic speech itself. His death was presented as a wound to democracy, ignoring his literal message of dehumanisation. This asymmetry reveals that “principles” are contingent on race. The right’s defence of free speech is not about principle. It’s about normalising white nationalism. Freedom and protection are not universal categories, but rationed entitlements distributed along colonial lines of worth. What does it mean for a political order to reserve the vocabulary of  “democracy” for certain speech while denying it to others? When a bigoted pundit is mourned as a martyr of free speech whilst countless journalists are eliminated the message becomes clear: protection is conditional, and the right to be heard is rationed.

This double standard reveals the calculus by which voices are made killable. It exposes who is deemed deserving of public grief and whose silence can be engineered without introspection. When states declare a journalist an “operative” or conflate their reporting with combat, they erase them of the neutrality which is a key tenet of protecting press freedom. After killing Al Jazeera’s Anas al-Sharif, for instance, the Israeli military publicly described him as a Hamas terrorist “posing” as a journalist, insisting that “a press badge isn’t a shield for terrorism.” Such portrayals collapse the category of journalist into combatant, and—drawing on racist tropes that equate Arabs and Muslims with terrorism—make it easier for the public to accept their deaths as legitimate and unworthy of outrage. Smear campaigns spread faster than facts, with a single official line dominating headlines. Even if corrected later, the damage persists. 

In theory, international law protects journalists. In practice, we have seen endless examples of its inability to do so. In the same week as Kirk’s murder, 31 Yemeni journalists were killed by Israeli airstrikes, with barely a headline in the international press. Their erasure illustrates how quickly Arab reporters are consigned to invisibility. Their deaths are treated as peripheral rather than democratic emergencies. Hossam and Anas were denied not only physical protection but also the recognition that would have made their deaths matters of collective urgency. Western institutions interpret the death of a white Western man as an assault on liberty, because we are trained to see their words as reflective of a shared consciousness. We do not listen as quickly, or at all, to those whom dominant narratives cast as threats or disposable. Imperial habits of thought continue to structure sympathy and, by extension, policy. This is why Hossam’s command “Do not stop speaking about Gaza” must be understood as political instruction. It calls for a civic practice that extends recognition to voices disrupting comfortable narratives of power. It asks readers to carry testimony forward when those who bear witness locally can no longer. To heed this call is to resist the pattern in which communities expend moral energy on spectacles of domestic tragedy while rationalising structural violence abroad. If democracy is to be more than a slogan, it must be willing to be unsettled. “Protecting free speech” cannot mean only defending established narratives. It must involve taking seriously those who document suffering, even when their records indict our allies. This requires structural change: different editorial practices, slower reflexes in the face of official claims, and the cultivation of listening as a political obligation.

Hossam and Anas asked for the simplest thing a democracy can grant: attention that turns into memory, and records that outlast their killers. That is the radical demand at the heart of press freedom. The real test for any polity that calls itself democratic is not whether it mourns the death of a domestic provocateur, but whether it grants equal moral weight to those who die making visible the crimes that sustain those provocateurs’ platforms. We can begin where Hossam asked us to: not with ritual declarations about free speech, but with deliberate acts of listening. Read the letters they left. Preserve their footage. Repeat their names. Let remembrance itself be an active refusal to discard testimony when power feels threatened. Only then will the claim of being a free society mean more than words stitched into a slogan.

Article by Tamara Alfarisi