From Western Sydney to the witness stand: Why I’ll never stop speaking up

I became a journalist because I was tired of watching people like me get flattened into stereotypes. Growing up Lebanese in Australia, in a working-class family in the western suburbs, and attending a public school, I saw firsthand how the media treated communities like mine –  as threats, punchlines, or problems to be managed.

After September 11, the stories sharpened into something uglier. Headlines weren’t just reporting on terrorism; they were casting suspicion on every brown face or every person with an accent.

And when the Cronulla riots erupted, it wasn’t just a mob of drunken racists on a beach – it was sections of the press that gleefully pumped oxygen into the idea of the “Lebanese thug,” and fanned the flames of division until the violent day reared its head.

The media frenzy over the Skaf brothers sealed it. They were criminals – no doubt – but the relentless fixation on their ethnicity and religion turned the Lebanese and/or Muslim community into a shorthand for danger and depravity.

Meanwhile, the NSW Police Middle Eastern Organised Crime Squad was being touted as some kind of civil necessity, as though gang activity only comes with a flag and a family recipe.  This racialised policing was sold as “community protection,” but was it ever designed to make the public safer – or to merely make the target easier to blame when the headlines needed a villain and the cops needed a ‘win’?

These were the moments that sharpened my understanding that who tells the story shapes how the story is told, and whose interests are served. I didn’t just want a seat at the table, I wanted a pen.

After graduating from university in 2006, I worked in public broadcasting and commercial television for more than a decade before co-founding Media Diversity Australia in 2017, in a bid to increase cultural and linguistic diversity in the media.

The battle for representation felt like trying to turn a tanker with a teaspoon. I knew I was up against it. But I persisted nonetheless.

Yet nothing prepared me for what came after October 2023. The engineered backlash against culturally diverse perspectives in the media and public life-  especially Arab or Muslim ones –  wasn’t just a shift. It was a brutal rupture.

Yes, I was fired unlawfully from the ABC after sharing a Human Rights Watch post. Yes, the Federal court found that Zionist lobbyists targeted me for being openly critical of Israel’s ongoing war crimes in Gaza, for speaking up for children’s right to food instead of being systematically starved, for defending my Palestinian colleagues who were being killed for the crime of holding a camera.

But what even surprised me was the visceral hate –  not just generic online bile, but the surgical venom of anti-Palestinian racism, soaked in Islamophobia, directed at me: a Lebanese Australian of Christian faith.

The abuse was explicit and violent and it didn’t matter that I was the target – despite being neither Palestinian or Muslim.

One particularly threatening email forced me to escalate the matter to the Islamophobia Register Australia, who triaged it to police. The man behind it – a 61-year-old from Port Macquarie – was arrested and found guilty of using a carriage service to menace, harass, and cause offence. People talk a lot about the “threat of cancel culture.” I not only lost my ABC presenting job, I faced actual crime culture: threats to my life, my family, my safety –  all because I refused to sanitise suffering.

I look back at that young woman in western Sydney – the daughter of refugees, sharing a bedroom with two sisters, raised on public transport and community radio – and I feel two things: grief and pride. Grief for how much I endured for the crime of sharing human rights facts. Pride for refusing to break under it.

My name is now tied to a high-profile legal battle –  Lattouf v ABC – a public dissection of what happens when a journalist of colour refuses to stay in the lane assigned to her. Yes, I won. But it was still a grave injustice, live-streamed for public consumption, and I doubt I’ll ever fully recover from it.

That said, it gave me clarity. I did exactly what I came into this profession to do. I told the truth. I stood by the ethics I signed up for – the kind that make powerful people squirm when their wrongdoing is exposed. Journalism isn’t meant to soothe the comfortable. It’s meant to confront them.

I haven’t wavered in my belief that human rights are universal, that dignity isn’t something to be rationed according to your passport, your prayer, or your politics.

I became a journalist because marginalised voices needed a megaphone. I stayed because the stakes kept rising, and because the media itself needs scrutiny as much as any government.

And I’ll keep going. I’ve created my own media table by co-founding Ette Media with another Lebanese-Australian journalist Jan Fran.

The story isn’t finished. Neither am I.