MELBOURNE, 9 January 2022: The release of a 25-minutes controversial documentary ‘Kashmir: Palestine in the Making’, made by the Berlin-based Redfish digital media portal, has been postponed. The Russian Embassy in India has distanced itself from it and said Russia’s position has been that the Kashmir issue is a bilateral issue between India and Pakistan.
Redfish media had said the documentary will release on 11 February 2022 at 9.30 pm Indian time. Now a media release today from Redfish media posted on its website says, ” In response to the security concerns of journalists and contributors involved in our documentary on Kashmir, we have taken the difficult decision to remove the trailer of this documentary and postpone its release.
Earlier, The Print reports ” In the tweet releasing the trailer, Redfish Media said, “Indian Kashmir is fast becoming a settler-colonial state.”
Twitter has labeled Redfish Media as “Russia state-affiliated”, but in a media release, The Russian Embassy in New Delhi has clarified Russia has nothing to do with the editorial decisions of Redfish Media.
“But in the past week we have witnessed how these defamatory labels can have dangerously stark consequences, and today we are forced to take the terrible decision to suspend our publication of a documentary we produced from Kashmir as a result.
The angle of our documentary, called “Kashmir: Palestine in the Making” has previously been reported on in the Washington Post and Al Jazeera, neither of which are labelled Jeff Bezos or Qatar affiliated media, despite the links to these immensely wealthy financiers. If Silicon Valley would ever dare to apply these labels fairly, next time Al Jazeera reports on Kashmir, it could be seized upon as a sign that Qatar and India’s strong ties are in danger. It may seem like an absurd conclusion to draw, but it’s a fair comparison, except that more is perceived to be at stake in the relations between Russia and India, ” the media release says.
It concludes, ” The excitement of those involved in the documentary, both the crew and those we filmed from all sides of the political spectrum, soon turned to terror, and our documentary went from being a passionate effort to break journalistic ground to an example of how Silicon Valley’s false labelling of media has so much power over public opinion that at it’s worst, results in the above mentioned intimidation and threats of violence and death. Thanks to the consequences of this label, we have been left with no choice but to postpone the publication of our documentary in the interests of the safety of both crew and participants.
The hypocrisy and opaqueness of how the misinformative “state-affiliated” label is applied by Twitter, Facebook and Google has been highlighted elsewhere. But this is the first time the dangers it poses to press freedom has been so starkly laid bare.”
Western countries have long been alleging Redfish Media being a Russian propaganda vehicle. Most stories on its site are sourced from Europe and America. One can see three stories about India on its site – Modi’s Neoliberalism: Oligarchy vs. India’s Working Class, Culinary Colonisation: Fast Food and Big Pharma in India and Saffron Terror: Hindu Fascism in Modi’s India.
