The Watchdog
Israel Killed 21 Members Of My Family In Gaza - Lowkey meets Ahmed al-Naouq
The MintPress podcast "The Watchdog," hosted by British-Iraqi hip-hop artist Lowkey, closely examines organizations about which it is in the public interest to know-including intelligence, lobby and special interest groups influencing policies that infringe on free speech and target dissent. "The Watchdog" goes against the grain by casting a light on stories largely ignored by the mainstream, corporate media.
In less than one year, Israel has managed to turn Gaza into rubble. A recent estimate by a global health expert suggested that around 335,000 Gazans could have been killed as a result of the Israeli attacks.
Today, "Watchdog" host Lowkey speaks to one of the survivors of the Israeli bombing, Ahmed al-Naouq. Ahmed al-Naouq grew up in central Gaza and moved to the United Kingdom to attend Leeds University. In 2015, he co-founded We Are Not Numbers, a non-profit group that seeks to tell the stories of Palestinians to the world.
The grief began right away for al-Naouq. "On the 7th of October, my fiancé's house was bombed, and she lost her brother," he told Lowkey, adding:
We were lucky because, only two days before the war, she managed to escape Gaza and go to meet with me. And I know that if she did not travel with her parents, all of them would have been killed on the first day of the war."
For Lowkey, the Israeli attack on Gaza is of historic proportions. He compared it to the 13th-century Mongol invasion of Baghdad in its similarity in that it destroyed thousands of years of civilization. What has been done, he said, was so intensely violent, not just physically but culturally, that it is almost incomparable. On al-Naouq, Lowkey noted that his story:
Really tells us the wider way in which Palestinians have been stripped of their humanity and killed on an industrial scale in Gaza. And it stands as a testament to the will to survive, regardless of the bullying, gangsterism and intimidation from the Zionist project."
Al-Naouq, a journalist by training, lambasted the deceitful Western media coverage of the attacks, stating:
The media doesn't care about its own audiences. They don't care if they don't know the truth or not. They are seeking their own interests. And clearly, those interests do not correlate with the truth, so we are challenging that by writing our own stories."
After nearly twelve months of bombing, those attacks show little sign of slowing down, primarily because Western governments continue to supply Israel with the hi-tech weaponry it needs to continue and defend its actions in international bodies such as the United Nations.
Israel has recently stepped up its strikes on Lebanon and Syria, with Hezbollah and resistance forces in Iraq vowing to respond in kind. The United States, meanwhile, has increased its military capacity in the region, sending the aircraft carrier, the U.S.S. Harry S. Truman to the Mediterranean in a show of support for Israel. U.S. troops in the region now top 50,000.
Thus, the prospect of a wider war beckons, meaning that stories like al-Naouq's will, tragically, become even more common.
Make sure to watch the full interview to hear a unique, first-hand experience of a Gazan living through the Israeli onslaught.
Lowkey is a British-Iraqi hip-hop artist and academic and political campaigner. As a musician, he has collaborated with the Arctic Monkeys, Wretch 32, Immortal Technique and Akala. He is a patron of Stop The War Coalition, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the Racial Justice Network and The Peace and Justice Project, founded by Jeremy Corbyn. He has spoken and performed on platforms from the Oxford Union to the Royal Albert Hall and Glastonbury. His latest album, Soundtrack To The Struggle 2, featured Noam Chomsky and Frankie Boyle and has been streamed millions of times.