Israel shuts down local Al Jazeera offices

Maybe I'm not looking in the right places, but I don't see widespread condemnation for current EU and US censorship of the Russian propaganda outlet RT, and to be quite frank, I think it should be censored. The right to free speech does not extend to people who are not subject to a countries laws, and I don't see why it should.

I'm not condoning all past actions of the US or EU, but censoring fake news and propaganda that is controlled by groups or nations that want to destroy you seems like something that is reasonable to do.

It's complicated.

Germany has pretty strict laws against "incitement of hatred". Additionally it's illegal to deface, damage or destroy a foreign flag. Also demonstrations and protests need to be registered in advance with proof of proper security and safety measures. Germany is also very biased in favor of Israel and has (like the US) adopted the stance that an attack on Israel is an attack on Judaism. This has led to Jewish anti-Israel protestors being arrested.

In theory it is possible to have a "spontaneous" protest without leaders but in practice this means the police will designate the loudest persons in the crowd as leaders and claim that they organized a protest without a permit and arrest them for that. Also the political bias favoring Israel means pro-Israel counter-protestors are likely to be tolerated more than anti-Israel protests.

And of course anti-genocide is conflated with anti-Israel and pro-Hamas, again like in the US. But yes, most political protests are illegal because they are not formally organized with the authorities (and even with organized protests you often have break-out protests deviating from the permitted route/location or overstaying). From personal experience I can tell you though that unless the police can pin anything on you (e.g. trespassing, resisting arrest, "attacking a police officer"[0]) this usually only ends up with the police roughing you up a bit maybe and then recording your identity before dropping you off somewhere else with a temporary restraining order.

[0]: This is worth mentioning because it explains the low police numbers for injured protestors in Lüzerath compared with the video evidence of police charging unarmed protestors: being injured by a police officer is considered evidence for attacking a police officer as unless there is evidence for the police officer doing anything wrong the assumption is that they followed the guidelines for escalating force, i.e. they must have had a good reason. It's also worth mentioning that in many places riot cops do not have any visible unique identification so reporting any claim of police brutality at a protest is usually fruitless as the alleged perp can not uniquely be identified and you need an individual person to accuse. Protest medics thus have stopped giving detailed statistics as merely keeping a tally would help the police in tracking down "suspects" by visiting the nearby hospitals (which they did e.g. after Lüzerath).

So tl;dr: depending on your demographic, your cause and which police you end up being surrounded by, it's relatively safe to take part in an illegal protest in Germany as long as they can't prove you did anything illegal and don't get hurt.

You forgot the United States who provides the weapons to Israel.

> And if foreign journalists want to get into Palestine, they have other options...

First, they don't. All crossings are controlled by Israel. There's a reason why you have a lot of foreign reporting on the ground from Syria civil war and nothing from Gaza. (I noted your switch from Gaza to Palestine, btw) And journalistic agencies complain about this repeatedly.

10% of journalists killed (against 2% of total population killed) and ratios of killed/injured certainly suggest special targeting.

So here, have a blast and count for yourself based on your definition of collateral damage: https://cpj.org/2024/05/journalist-casualties-in-the-israel-... there's a story/sources there for every single killing that is known/documented.

To me, it looks like majority were killed intentionally based on that list. Things like sniper and other direct fire killings, being killed in their homes along with their families when doing nothing but dinning or sleeping, or at assignments, or in front of hospitals near journalist tents, or being denied medevac after critical injuries, is not how I'd define collateral damage.

Freedom of the press is typically considered one of the tenets of a democracy. The vote becomes meaningless if voters cannot be informed, which includes having access to all possible points of view.