Sumud flotilla activist Yusuf Omar speaks to Alif in exclusive interview
Before joining the flotilla, he rose to prominence as a mobile journalist, aka 'mojo'
When Yusuf Omar, a former CNN reporter and award-winning mobile journalist from Australia, joined the Sumud flotilla sailing toward Gaza, he knew the risks. The voyage was meant for him to deliver aid, but also, to challenge how the world sees Palestinians.
“I think Gaza has really highlighted that for us,” Omar said in an Oct. 12 interview with Alif founder Omar Waseem in San Francisco. “Islamophobia, more broadly, has highlighted that for us. We have no control over the narrative.”
Alif is an incubator in California’s Bay Area aimed at helping Muslim founders launch startups.
Omar’s interview came weeks after a mission that made global headlines.
The Sumud flotilla — a civilian aid convoy with hundreds of activists, including environmental activist Greta Thunberg — set sail Barcelona for Gaza in August. The mission carried supplies and broadcast its journey on social media to raise awareness about the ongoing blockade.
Omar described the trip as both hopeful and harrowing.
“On the first night, we have this massive storm,” he said. “It’s crazy — big waves, boats rocking. Everybody’s feeling really sick. Out of 20 boats that left Barcelona, seven of them had to get rescued or turn back.”
Despite the challenges, he explained that morale remained high. “People were more motivated than ever before,” Omar said. “All Israel has is aggression, weapons and violence. What did we have? We had the rest of the world. We had global solidarity.”
That solidarity, he explained, came from 44 countries represented on the flotilla. “Despite people watched two years of livestream genocide, rubble and amputated children, people across the globe came together, and represented hope, optimism, global solidarity.”
But that hope was tested at sea with Israeli war weapons multiple times.
“Drones are scary,” Omar said. “On the fourth night, it was Maghrib time. We just finished dinner, and in the corner of our eyes, we spotted a light in the sky.” The crew, trained in nonviolent de-escalation, realized it was an Israeli drone attack.
“You feel so helpless,” he said. “You’re this tiny boat in the ocean.”
According to Omar, the activist had trained for scenarios such as this, including nonviolent deescalation which proved useful some days later.
“You’ve been hit by a drone,” he recalled telling himself. “You’ve been trained for this scenario, but you’re never ready for it.”
The blast, later confirmed by CBS as an Israeli attack launched from a submarine, hit the boat’s front section near a diesel container, according to Omar.
“Luckily, we were able to get fire extinguishers and get the flames out,” he said. “It was terrifying.”
The attack and its aftermath underscored the very issue Omar has spent his career fighting — the control of narrative and truth in the media.
“What was really disturbing,” he said, “is that even though we had CCTV footage from multiple angles of this drone attack, even though we had multiple eyewitnesses, traditional Western media gaslit the whole situation. They lied about it.”
Years before Omar join the Sumud flotilla, he was a journalist for mainstream news outlets. He covered conflicts in Syria, Congo, Sudan and Egypt. He explained that in his view, this gatekeeping is not new.
“I was a war correspondent for many years before CNN,” he said. “There is a difference in value for life. If there’s a listeria outbreak here in the U.S. and nobody dies, CNN and BBC will cover that before they’ll cover 200 people killed in Syria or Ethiopia.”
He recalled pitching stories from the field that were repeatedly dismissed.
“You’d have the most compelling story, and you’d send it back to the newsroom, and they’d be like, ‘No, not so interested,’” he said. “You were being gate-kept at the distribution layer.”
That realization pushed him to experiment with new forms of storytelling.
“When they didn’t take my stories, I used to publish them anyway on social media,” Omar said. “That’s when I realized — wow, this stuff’s going viral. I don’t need your infrastructure. I don’t need your cable station to reach large audiences.”
He built an entire career around that discovery. From training 750 journalists in India to later editing for CNN International in London, Omar became a pioneer in mobile journalism — or “mojo.”
“I could go with a mobile phone and bring back high-quality footage from conflict zones,” he said. “Then I learned to train other journalists to do the same.”
Still, his experience at CNN made him question Muslim participation in journalism. “In 2016 in London, there were 200 staff,” he said. “Guess how many Muslims? Only one: me.”
To Omar, the crisis in Gaza and the silence of many media institutions reflect their reporting, even going to far as to say they justified the relentless bombing for two years.
“When they see all these hospitals and schools getting bombed in Gaza, in the back of their mind, they are legitimizing it,” he said. “They’re saying, ‘Yeah, but there’s Hamas underneath that.’ They do it all the time.”
Omar believes that journalistic storytelling does not lie in these outlets anymore. Rather, he sees a future where younger generations do the storytelling themselves.
“What does every young person under 15 want to do for a living? Influencer, YouTuber, content creator, TikToker,” he said. “You have a generation completely disenfranchised by existing media properties and another that wants to be creators but doesn’t know how. That’s a massive opportunity.”
While Omar is an Arab Muslim, his views on reclaiming narrative power is not just for people like him.
“I’m talking about the entire Global South,” he said. “Anybody from a migrant background is disenfranchised by traditional media right now. There’s a huge once-in-a-generation opportunity to run into that.”
Even amid chaos at sea, Omar said the mission’s purpose never wavered.
“We strategized around all these things and how we would deal with them, but you only have limited defense,” he said. “To be honest, there’s not much you can do. It’s just visibility and awareness.”
Omar sees storytelling — from Gaza to San Francisco — as an act of resistance. “We went to Palestine, went to Cuba, went everywhere around the world,” he said. “We trained people how to tell stories with mobile phones.”
As he looked back on the flotilla experience and forward to the next generation of journalists, Omar expressed gratitude and determination.
“Alhamdulillah,” he said. Despite what him and fellow activists went through, he focused on Palestinian suffering.
“That’s nothing in comparison to what the Palestinians go through every single day,” he said.