Why Israel Bans AlJazeera & U.S. Bans TikTok
"What the two laws have in common is desire to silence Israel-Gaza war critics
Like Israel’s Al Jazeera ban, that law [against TikTok] relies on unsubstantiated assertions of national security concerns, ignoring Justice Hugo Black’s prescient warning in the Pentagon papers case that “the word ‘security’ is a broad, vague generality whose contours should not be invoked to abrogate the fundamental law embodied in the first amendment”.
Another thing the two laws have in common is that it’s an open secret that those concerns are pretexts for silencing the growing backlash against the Israel-Gaza war. Senator Mitt Romney essentially acknowledged as much in a recent conversation with Antony Blinken, the secretary of state. He wasn’t the first to say the quiet part out loud.
It doesn’t stop there. Biden also signed into law the Reforming Intelligence and Securing America Act (Risaa). That legislation allows the government to conscript any “service provider who has access to equipment that is being or may be used to transmit or store wire or electronic communications” to help it surveil foreign targets.
And that office could be a newsroom. Risaa is, after all, an amendment of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which had been abused to spy on journalists before Congress expanded it. It’s a safe bet foreign sources will hesitate to speak to US journalists if they think the newsroom may be bugged.
Another bill recently passed by the House of Representatives would give the secretary of the treasury unchecked power to revoke the tax exempt status of any non-profit – including non-profit news outlets – that the secretary deems a “terrorist-supporting organization”.
Some commentators have even called for the bill to be expanded to delist non-profits that meet the controversial International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism. The definition, also recently adopted by the House, is widely criticized for conflating disparagement of Israel with antisemitism – a tactic also employed by proponents of the Al Jazeera ban.
That would give the US government far greater power to silence news outlets – at least increasingly common non-profit ones – than Benjamin Netanyahu could dream of.
Biden and many other Democrats constantly warn that Donald Trump would behave like an authoritarian in a potential second term. Yet they insist on continuing to hand him new powers to abuse, particularly against his favorite scapegoat: the press."
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/may/07/israel-al-jazeera-us-tiktok-ban