Banner showing the members and contributors of MintPress News. Photo: MintPress News.
Message from Mnar Adley, founder-director of independent news outlet MintPress News:
Hey everyone, I’m Mnar Adley, founder and director of MintPress News and editor of our video project Behind the Headlines.
This decade has felt like a whirlwind, watching in real time the crackdown on independent journalism and alternative voices.
In the last year alone, MintPress was banned from PayPal with our balance seized, blocking donations to our website –and as leaked emails reveal, this took place with possible involvement of British intelligence and the US government.
At the same time, GoFundMe took down our fundraisers and banned us from their platform.
Our journalists have been detained, interrogated, surveilled, canceled and lobbied against by national security agencies and special interest groups, including directly by the Israel lobby. Our Wikipedia page has been written and managed by a mafia of pro-NATO editors and Israeli lobby groups. This, in addition to aggressive algorithmic blacklisting by Google’s Project Owl and Big Tech giants, shadowbanning from the likes of Twitter, Facebook & TikTok, all of whom we’ve exposed to have a deep relationship with the military-industrial complex to control your newsfeed and ensure a pro-war narrative is dominant.
We wear this as a badge of honor.
This is just a taste of what we’ve faced as an independent media outlet that has been at the forefront of exposing the profiteers of the permanent war state – holding the military class accountable, as every journalism outlet should be doing as protected by our first amendment.
Journalism is being criminalized.
This is why we’re turning to our readers and supporters to help us sustain our watchdog journalism. While Big Tech ramps up its efforts to make our journalism algorithmically disappear, we’re ramping up our efforts to circumvent this censorship and provide our readers with the most hard-hitting journalism that empowers ‘we the people.’
But to continue to do this and keep our investigative journalism free and accessible without a paywall, we’re appealing to our readers for their financial support. Suffice it to say big governments and corporations are not exactly banging down our door to support us.
We just launched our annual fundraiser to help sustain us, and I hope that you will join us as we continue to fight against the war machine in this information war.
MintPress is one of a handful of independent investigative news outlets left in the United States, featuring some of the most important journalists and activists of our time.
This includes investigative journalist, Ph.D. and author Alan MacLeod who co-hosts the MintCast podcast with me. His investigative work has exposed the deep relationship between NATO, weapons manufacturers and the national security state within Big Tech as well as US regime change operation mechanisms against the global south.
Rapper and activist for Palestinian human rights Lowkey hosts The Watchdog podcast on MintPress. His research and journalism have exposed how the Israel lobby, its intelligence and military have inserted themselves into Big Tech and NGOs to surveil and target pro-Palestine and antiwar dissent.
Kit Klarenberg is an investigative journalist whose work explores the role of intelligence services in shaping politics, perceptions and war policies in the US, UK and across NATO member nations.
Jessica Buxbaum is an investigative journalist based in Jerusalem. She is our Palestine correspondent who has spent the last five years uncovering how Israel works with Big Tech and NGOs to surveil and target Palestinian resistance to apartheid.
MintPress also features regular columns by renowned documentary filmmaker and investigative journalist John Pilger, Israeli peace activist Miko Peled, and Palestinian academic Dr. Ramzy Baroud.
As for myself, Mnar Adley–the founder and director of MintPress News, I founded MintPress over ten years ago in an effort to revive the fourth estate in a post 9/11 world, when our first amendment was put on life support by the ever-growing military-industrial complex and its connections to the media. Since 2001, we saw major news outlets beat the drums of war to drive public support for the disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that left millions dead and millions more as refugees.
Having lived under Israeli occupation and apartheid as a teenager, I witnessed firsthand the horrifying human rights abuses no child should have to see. From the New York Times to the Washington Post to MSNBC and CNN, every major news outlet has for decades whitewashed Israeli crimes and apartheid under the banner of “democracy and shared values” while dehumanizing Palestinians as mere terrorists, the same way our media dehumanizes the victims of our disastrous wars. This, of course, continues to this day.
Whether it’s war in Palestine, Yemen, Sudan or Somalia, economic sanctions against Iran, Venezuela or Cuba or the US proxy war with Russia in Ukraine–it is clear that corporate media act as PR for weapons manufacturers like Lockheed Martin and Raytheon to justify military adventurism and economic warfare to fuel the military-industrial complex that drives our war economy.
Thus MintPress was born out of this need to provide the public with investigative journalism that holds the ruling class and military accountable where corporate media has failed.
Our journalism gives a voice and spotlight to the people of the Global South ravaged by economic sanctions.
We’re continuously covering regime change operations, military coups and wars imposed by the US military, NATO and their proxies. Policies that line the pockets of the executives at Lockheed Martin and Raytheon.
We’ve been amplifying the voices of those who are silenced by the media, like government whistleblowers and publishers like Julian Assange and Daniel Hale.
This is exactly why we’ve been targeted and why we can’t take MintPress to the next level without your support.
With the conflict raging in Ukraine, we’ve entered wartime and are living in an intellectual no-fly zone where online censorship of dissenting journalism has become the new norm and the sanctions regime has come to target independent journalists–but it’s up to us to change that reality.
We’re proud to have broken through this censorship over the years, but it has only been possible through your continued support.
No matter the war waged against us, we refuse to be backed into a corner and bullied by tech giants who have a deep relationship with weapons manufacturers who work hand in hand with NATO to profit off of the blood of millions of people around the world.
The only way forward is for us all to unite on a broader front of non-partisanship and help fund our own media. There are no governments or corporations who will move in to save us. We are completely dependent on you.
Join us in reviving the fourth estate and protecting our First Amendment. Join our campaign today—live on Indiegogo.
Mnar Adley
Mnar Adley is founder, CEO and editor in chief of MintPress News, and is also a regular speaker on responsible journalism, sexism, neoconservativism within the media and journalism start-ups. She started her career as an independent multimedia journalist covering Midwest and national politics while focusing on civil liberties and social justice issues posting her reporting and exclusive interviews on her blog MintPress, which she later turned MintPress into the global news source it is today. In 2009, Adley also became the first American woman to wear the hijab to anchor/report the news in American media. Contact Mnar at mnar@mintpressnews.com. Follow Mnar on Twitter at @mnarmuh
