Welcome everybody to an edition of Millennials Are Killing Capitalism Live.

It is great to be with you today.

We're doing this at a little bit of an unusual time for us.

We usually do stuff in the morning on East Coast time.

So make sure to share this with folks, get it out there so people know that we're having this conversation today, which I am really looking forward to.

very excited to welcome nora barrows friedman to the show we have not had her on before and I'm a big fan as I know that many of the folks who listen to or watch millennials are killing capitalism are as well and we have a lot of things we're going to talk about we'll talk about you know some of the current current events kind of thing a little bit of analysis and we'll also talk a little bit about nora's like background and history because I think Many people know her.

She's been doing media work for decades at this point.

But, you know, the live streams that Electronic Inifada has every Thursday, I think, have become such a staple for folks, especially over the last twenty two months or so.

And, you know, I think that has obviously introduced her to new people who may not know her background as well.

And so we're going to talk a little bit about that, talk about the book that she wrote, In Our Power, and just also discuss some, we'll have some fun too along the way, I'm sure.

You know, we both are now members.

She was from the beginning with Tanki Group Therapy, but I'm a newer member.

And so I'm sure it'll have a little bit of a tanky group therapy vibe at some point in this conversation.

So anyway, look forward to it.

Make sure to, again, like, share, subscribe.

Also, there is a discount code, I believe, I'll double check in a second, in the YouTube show description for Patreon for this month, are not supporting us on Patreon yet, it's a great way to do so.

And of course, support Samir Project and other mutual aid efforts in Palestine, please.

All right.

With that, I'll just say quickly, and Nora will correct me on any of this if it's dated, but Nora Barrows-Friedman is a staff writer and associate editor at The Electronic Intifada.

and is the author of In Our Power, U.S.

Students Organized for Justice in Palestine.

She hosts, along with her other associate editors and comrades, the electronic Intifada live streams that we all watch on Thursdays at noon Eastern time.

So yeah, so Nora, welcome to Millennials Are Killing Capitalism.

It's good to be with you.

Oh my God, it's so, so good to be here.

Thank you for inviting me.

I'm a longtime listener, first time caller.

And I just, yeah, it's a big honor.

Thank you so much.

Well, the honor is mine, totally.

I mean, I'm really excited to have you look forward to this and really, really appreciate the work that you've been doing for a long time.

And so it's long overdue and yeah, glad to have you.

And thank you for the kind words about our platform too.

So let's see, where do we start?

I have to pull up my notes.

I think what we wanted to start with is talking a little bit about like kind of how you got involved in kind of media work.

I know that I think you referenced that.

I don't remember what this was.

Maybe it was even actually on a tanky group therapy session recently.

You talked about like doing, starting at like or something like that as some kind of internship.

I know that you, uh, worked at KPFA, which is a big outlet in the Bay area.

Um, and obviously you've been with Electronic Intifada for a long time now.

Also, just reading a little bit of your book, you've been doing Palestine organizing since undergrad, it sounds like.

So just maybe share a little bit of that kind of journey for you into left media work, Palestine solidarity, and so on.

I always get so talking about myself.

But yeah, like you said, I was born and raised in Berkeley, California.

I still live in the Bay Area.

And when I was a sophomore in high school, These ultra cool older kids came to do a presentation on a budding new media training project called Youth Radio that was being kind of formed out of public radio people in the Bay Area and affiliated with KPFA.

And so I thought it would be pretty cool.

And I joined and I was trained as a, you know, radio producer and editor and news reporter.

We, you know, we'd take our little like back then, nothing was digital because it was the early nineties.

And we had our big, you know, tape recorders and we'd go out and interview people and kind of, you know, come back and learn how to, edit and produce radio stories.

And I just I loved it.

And I became a peer teacher after my training and was at youth radio for a couple of years.

And then I was an intern at a big hip hop radio station here in the Bay Area when I was about a senior in high school.

And Um, so I was just kind of like around the radio, uh, world here and I loved it.

I loved, um, being able to, you know, call anybody, you know, you, you wanted, uh, you know, and, and, and ask them about what was going on in the world.

And then in in two thousand three, I got an internship at KPFA after taking a few years off to have a kid and do some, you know, kind of random work just to pay rent and pay the bills and put my kid through preschool, yada yada.

So, in two thousand three, I walked into KPFA and I managed to persuade Dennis Bernstein at Flashpoints, the investigative news magazine there, to give me an internship.

And my internship was March two thousand three.

which was the first day, I think the day after Rachel Corey was murdered in Gaza.

And it was also the first day of the Bush administration's shock and awe campaign during the first few phases of the invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq.

That's kind of where I started.

I grew up in an anti-war, radical, left-wing, bohemian household.

Luckily, my parents, they split when I was little, but they had both been very um just anti-Zionist and so I I didn't grow up around a lot of Zionism at all um which I think is really lucky like you know it was just very um I don't know it it could have been a lot worse for sure uh and so it just kind of informed my anti-war leanings.

And, you know, I was in my early twenties when the Iraq war started and, um, I was just livid that this was happening.

And, and at the same time, you know, the second Intifada in Palestine was in full swing and it just felt like, um, Yeah, we were entering a new world, one that I didn't want my baby daughter at that point to have to deal with.

And so, yeah, I was at KPFA for almost nine years.

I guess, yeah, eight years.

And then in two thousand ten, I got a job as an editor at the Electronic Intifada.

And that is where I've been ever since.

So this is my sixteenth year at EI, which is an incredible privilege.

Yeah, no, it's wonderful.

And you do great work there, as do your colleagues.

So I mentioned you published your book.

Raise it up for folks to look at.

It's called In Our Power, US Students Organized for Justice in Palestine.

And you wrote this in twenty fourteen.

So, you know, this is eleven years ago at this point.

We've had, obviously, a lot of organizing around Palestine since that movement has grown a lot.

Then, of course, Tufan Al Aqsa in twenty twenty three, there's necessarily all this new energy that has been infused within the student movement for Palestine.

It's interesting, I wanted you to just reflect a little, if you would, about what it was like in those phases that you were looking at it versus now.

One of the things that was interesting just looking at the book is how a lot of the tactics used to repress it were the same as what we see now.

You write in the book about the use of the civil rights acts and stuff like that to say that these students are doing anti-Semitism basically and that this can't go on because it's creating an unsafe or hostile environment for Jewish students.

And so I, I found that interesting to see, like, oh, like, that argument was already there in, like, twenty twelve, twenty thirteen or whatever.

But yeah, just talk a little bit about kind of the then and now and what you're I know that you continue to follow this also with EI.

So, yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, you're right.

I mean, not a lot has changed in terms of what students have been and still are up against in terms of administrative repression, repression by outside Israel lobby organizations, this attempt to brand any and all criticism of not just Israel and its crimes, but the administration's ties to those crimes through research grants and investments and whatever, trying to brand all of that as hostile to Jewish students or Judaism in general.

It's, you know, it's always been a very boring attempt.

You know, it's just it's it's so insidious and it's so it's so cynical.

But this is this is a tried and tested method of trying to silence dissent on college campuses.

You know, it's the the measures of repression I think you know were were just as bad um but but it's just been um I think more amplified in the last couple of years um since uh since the genocide began in october where these administrations or these lobby groups or politicians at the very, very top are now paying more attention to what's happening on college campus, what has been happening on college campuses.

And not in a, oh, we should protect students' right to free speech way, but we should crack down on these students as brutally as possible.

And so that, you know, the repression has escalated and it has really kind of revealed everything that students have been saying for decades about the prioritizing by administrations of their, you know, precious research grants of the, you know, the interests of their board of trustees members, of their donors.

You know, these are all things students were saying way back in two thousand ten when I kind of first started reporting on the student movement.

But, you know, it's just it's got I mean, just what's happening at Columbia.

you know lately um is is really I mean it's it's uh it's everything that the students there had been saying for so long where it's more colombia is acting more like a hedge fund than it is a you know an institution for higher education And they are so, so willing and so ready and so enthusiastic about throwing their students and their members of faculty under the bus in order to placate or please their donors or in order to placate or please the White House, that they're even okay with sharing information about their students to ICE and more than happy to see their students being kidnapped, abducted and detained by ICE.

It is incredibly revolting and it is also incredibly revealing.

And yeah, I mean, the way that these administrations are just rolling over, it's kind of extraordinary to see, but it's not shocking because this is what administrations have been doing for a very long time.

Yeah, I mean, I think the hedge fund comment is so apt because I think that's essentially what universities are at this point is that they're, you know, the leadership of universities are placed and controlled to sort of manage a portfolio of assets essentially and try to increase kind of, I mean, it's wild because, you know, that shouldn't be the case.

You know, I mean, what does managing a portfolio of assets really have to do with higher education doesn't have anything to do with it.

You know, and you can understand, I guess, on some level, you know, something like, you know, there's the whole debate around, you know, like Columbia has been interesting for a long time because of the relationship to gentrification and, uh, real estate, you know, and all of this and the encroachment into Harlem basically in the gentrification.

Um, and a lot of universities have that kind of relationship, which is a quite a nefarious aspect of universities on some level.

You say, well, universities need nice buildings and they need...

So there's a certain aspect of the logic that you could kind of understand to some extent, but the way that it has become so over-determining in the way that these universities operate, not just in a kind of unethical relationship to the cities and the surrounding residents, but also to just, yeah, not...

Like, really...

regulating Fred Moten talks about universities as sites of the regulation of thought rather than the proliferation of thought and I think that that we see that so clearly right now all the work that the university is doing uh and and the government is doing and the way that they're they're kind of dovetailing there to regulate the thought to say you you actually can't you can't think these things you can't study about these things like you know and uh yeah I mean it's it's fascistic for sure uh and it's really it is very revealing in this time yeah and and it's wrapped in this you know again this like liberal or neoliberal veneer of like you know all the brochures at columbia or even uc berkeley or you know rutgers whatever they're all you know they all have this this language that they use of like a place where you know students of all backgrounds can come and, you know, feel safe and learn and debate and, you know, challenge assumptions and all of this, you know, kind of very appropriated language.

And then when the students actually, you know, have the privilege of being enrolled in a four-year college and they're about to be, you know, what is it, three hundred thousand dollars in debt for a bachelor's degree, right?

They have the privilege of going in debt for these places.

They are it's it's entrapment.

I mean, they are they're sanctioned.

They're punished.

They are you know, there's like a chilling effect, essentially, especially in these like Ivy League places where, you know, now at Columbia and Barnard and NYU and you can't even say Zionist or Zionism.

You can't even like in a critical way because they're now codifying this like definition of Zionism, which is like a protected identity sort of class.

You know, it's not like it, like it should be, which is a choice.

It's a choice to be Zionist.

It's a choice to be a racist.

It's a choice to be, a supremacist, but they've been working, they've been working very closely with these Israel lobby and Zionist lobby organizations to really codify this definition of Zionism as like a victimized, protected identifier.

which is, it just throws all academic inquiry and critical reasoning and everything that these students are supposed to be able to like inhibit and express completely out the window.

And so students come into these universities thinking that they're gonna learn things and instead they're being told that they can't even think about criticizing the perpetrators of the greatest crime of our generation because people's feelings might get hurt.

It's absolutely astounding that this is happening.

But again, this is what liberalism has gotten us.

It's really, yeah, that's so interesting, and you're right.

One of the things you made me think about when you were talking about that, you know the whole idea of like debate and the free speech because of course these so the same groups who were promoting that when like you know there was the big thing of like all these white supremacists that would come to campuses a few years ago right and people would get together and anti-fascists would try to stop them from being able to speak you know these like kind of like shock jock anti-trans type speakers like all this kind of stuff and that a lot of the institutions that were behind that movement were also deeply zionist and it made sense because they were it was sort of like this coalition of people who were sharing ideas that nobody likes like nobody likes zionism nobody likes fascism people hate that like and and especially they're not popular on college campuses like let's say that for sure um maybe they have more quarter with like Fox news or something like that, but not it's, it's never been really, those ideas have been super prominent on college campuses.

And it's interesting in some ways, because this is one of the areas where I think Zionists are even isolating themselves because some of the other parts of that coalition, you know, like I think about Tucker Carlson in this moment, who's like, you know, I hate and disagree with on ninety nine percent of things.

Right.

I'm not I'm not saying this to like say, hey, great.

You know, Tucker's a great guy, but it's really interesting to watch him like he platformed Aguilar last week.

And I watched that whole interview was like an hour and a half and it was pretty good.

And actually, there's a moment in it where he's like trying to take it a step further to say, like, Trucker is, I think, trying to take it a step further to say the U.S.

has to stop this, stop funding Israel in any capacity because it is complicit in war crimes and you're laying all this out.

And Aguilar actually like kind of vacillates at that point in the interview to be like, well, you know, I have worked with the IDF other times.

I think there's good people there kind of thing.

There it is.

Right.

Yeah.

You know, but it was it was interesting, right, to see these that there are people within that because Tucker is very much like he's the ultimate debate, bro.

Right.

He loves that.

Like, we need free speech on campus.

I want to become he just recently was on a college campus saying that.

giving a huge like anti-immigrant spiel and then like yelling at students for asking him questions about protections for immigrants and stuff like that.

Right.

So like he on the agenda is there on like so many things.

But I think it's like for some of those folks, they don't like being told that they can't, like talk about something, you know, or that they can't critique something or, you know, say that a, and so, and even in the, in the interview, I'm sorry, I'm going off on this tangent, but in the interview, like he did with Ted Cruz, where they were like, kind of debating about this.

Again, like two of the worst people in the world.

But at one point, Cruz doesn't call him an anti-Semite, but it's sort of implied.

And Tucker gets so pissed off in the interview and just becomes like a child from then on out, like mocking him, basically.

And so anyways...

I'm just saying that to say that like there's, I do think that this is another area where Zionism is even becoming isolated within some of the quarter that it is held within the right that would kind of defend it around these sort of issues of like, you know, well, this is just, this is their viewpoint.

They have a right to share it.

And, you know, the anti-Zionists are oppressing their free speech or whatever, you know, kind of argument that they would make.

Yeah, it's kind of crazy.

I mean, it's, you know, I think, and we've talked about this in our Tinky Group therapy, you know, sessions over the last few months, but like the isolation of Zionism is, how Zionism, it's kind of like an Ouroboros, right?

It kind of eats itself into a deeper and deeper isolation.

It feeds off of isolation and isolation and isolation, being isolated, isolationism, there we go.

Because it's a self-perpetuating like prophecy.

It's like, they're all against us, you know, in order to sell Zionism to the public.

They have to invent this victimization narrative.

Everybody hates us, the world is against us.

We have to band together and we have this super fantastic idea of this impenetrable state built on this ideology.

That's highly militarized, the most weaponized state outside of the US.

We're going to have secret nuclear program.

Anyone who dares to tap us on the shoulder will get obliterated.

It's this kind of thing.

it also reacts that way in terms of any critique, even from its allies, right?

So, you know, you have Tucker Carlson, like, why can't I criticize the, you know, the Zionist project or, you know, the state of Israel, then they'll just, they'll, they'll, it works in its own favor again.

Everyone's against us, even our allies.

That's why we have to be stronger and be more isolationist.

It's kind of this really interesting and brightening like kind of uh mode of fascism um that's that's both you know very very different but also like extremely normal for for fascist states and fascist ideologies um but it also points to this is their end game like they you know they're just gonna kind of shrink it's like you know as a supernova or whatever like it just kind of like collapses into itself at a certain point um and that's I think you know people have been saying this elan pepe the historian um who you know has documented the rise of zionism is now documenting the the collapse of Zionism.

This is the beginning of the collapse of Zionism.

So it's interesting that that's kind of like working itself out in those very public ways.

Yeah.

yeah I definitely want to recommend to folks if they haven't seen it um you were part of a forum on the east as a podcast which our friend cena hosts as well as he hosts most of the tank tanky group therapy conversations um but it was called fascism has no ethnicity a forum on zio fash ascendancy and um is really good and really interesting discussion about you know kind of from you know for anti-zionist perspectives it was cool yeah so thanks um all right so let's talk a little bit more about your work with ei so um you know I and kind of one of the things I'm interested in is like how you all kind of do what you do in terms of your methodology, looking through, sifting through these different media environments.

And part of what I wanted to talk to you is about some of these differences in the media environments, because I find that really fascinating because I think you and I agree that like, know the united states and israel are like lockstep in terms of like objectives at least right they they united states knows that it needs israel israel knows that it needs united states maybe that's the best way to say it um but um but there are these real differences too between so you have on the one hand um like u.s mainstream media and the way that it has, and obviously this is going back a long time, but I'm thinking about mainly since October seventh, because, you know, I, I mean, I, it's, it's a wild thing from the U S mainstream media where we all can turn on our computers or our phones and get direct information from people in Palestine, from, you know, there's all kinds.

And I get that social media is different for everybody.

So not everybody is in the kind of like, following a bunch of anti Zionists or Palestinians and they may be in their little echo chamber where you know it looks totally different than when you and I log on and see you know babies and starving people and just like horror you know plus Kasam videos or whatever else we see right but Within corporate media, there's like such a tight in the United States, such a tight regulation where almost none of that gets through, like almost none of it registers at all.

They do have stories occasionally, but these are like very filtered, usually like authored or co-authored or heavily featuring like some Israeli stories.

state actor or close to state actor, right, like NGO person or whatever.

And You just don't get much that's not from that perspective.

If you do, maybe it's concern from some Western NGO around starvation that's, again, tightly filtered to not place a lot of blame on who is doing the starving.

It just naturally is occurring within this besieged strip of land.

But so you have that on one hand, and then you have two kind of layers.

I mean, there's, this is, I'm doing broad categories here because I know there's like difference and nuance within these, but two, you have English language, Israeli media, which we can all log in and read for ourselves, which goes into way more detail and is also way more honest in the amount of fascism that they're willing to just sort of talk about comfortably in terms of their own outlook on things.

Like, I think if a lot of Americans just read even Israeli English news, they would be like, just like, what the fuck?

But then you have...

It's pretty out there, yeah.

But then you have...

Then you have Israeli Hebrew media too, which is like another layer, which most of us don't read.

But again, like things like Google Translate exist.

I know that you have multiple people who also know how to translate, right?

And so just talk a little bit about that and maybe a little bit about how you approach it at EI, but also like some of the differences that you see.

Yeah.

Yeah, it really is.

I mean, there's like a Time magazine cover story this week.

It was like, you know, a picture of a Palestinian mother in Gaza with her starving children.

And it's like, you know, Gaza's starvation or whatever, like, and nowhere.

Yeah.

Nowhere on the cover does it mention who is doing the starving, like you said.

And like, you can really see that mainstream media, corporate media has, you know, has kind of like collectively decided in the last couple of weeks that we, you know, we got to cover what's happening in Gaza because all of these world bodies are saying that people are dying of starvation.

But because they're still beholden to their shareholders, and that includes people, you know, who are, you know, involved in defense contracts or, you know, the Israeli government themselves, you know, they have to couch it as they always do in terms of like, oh, isn't that just awful?

Oh, God, well, you know, if only the Palestinians hadn't A, B and C.

And in every single, you know, article, essay, whatever about Gaza, you know, it'll be even in Reuters, you know, maybe I should say, especially in places like Reuters, where, you know, they're covering what's happening.

They have people on the ground in Gaza, you know, stringing for them, you know, feeding them information about what's really going on.

And these journalists are Palestinian, obviously, and they're doing incredible work.

But even at the bottom of like, you know, of their of their articles about, you know, aid trucks being looted by Israel backed gangs and whatever, like they'll say, well, since October seventh, when Hamas militants, you know, invaded uh israel um you know and launched a deadly attack or whatever like that that paragraph is there's always that one sentence or that paragraph that that follows every story um and it's not just coincidence it's because they're trying to kind of complete the circle of a narrative that that it this is hamas's fault this is you know everything that's happened in gaza over the last is a natural and predictable response, you know, very normal response from Israel because it was invaded and history started on October seventh and this is what Palestinians deserve if they wanted to do this and You know, and then they'll always, always, always, you know, include a quote from an Israeli source.

Most of the time, it's a high-level government official who will not be named.

You know, it's someone in the government, someone in the army who says, you know, oh, no, we didn't.

We let in a hundred and nine trucks yesterday.

You know, and there will be no pushback, no actual analysis.

You know, this is the story where truth goes to die if you're the corporate media, where Israel gets a pass for the last eighty years to have every excuse in the book or not even provide one at all.

And it still gets, you know, the benefit of the doubt in American corporate media.

And so at EI, you know, we've been around now for almost twenty five years, which is incredible.

And it's because of the quality of the work that we do.

You know, Ali and the other co-founders started the electronic intifada because there was a need that needed to be filled in terms of the void, the vacuum of truth about what was happening in Palestine.

And not just like what was happening in the moment, but but always weaving historical context through every news item, analysis piece, first person narrative, interview, to try and restore the foundation of the reality for Palestinians, which is a history, a century of dispossession, ethnic cleansing, genocide, colonialism, you know, settlement and expulsion and, you know, these crimes of humanity and war crimes.

And along with that, the, you know, propping up the the international legal foundations for Palestinians' legitimate right to resist these things, you know, whatever value international law has these days anymore.

But it's important.

It's important to be the counterweight to the just like deluge of racist and, colonialist, you know, news items on Palestine.

And so in the last, you know, almost two years, I can't believe it's been almost two fucking years, we have, you know, kind of doubled, tripled our efforts in platforming Palestinians in Gaza who are writing about what they see, what they experience, what they taste, what they smell, what they hear.

you know, in their full dignity, without any caveats.

We are able to, you know, I mean, we try to get people on the ground in Gaza as often as we can on our weekly live streams.

And, you know, I think we're all just compelled by this idea very core principle belief that Palestinians have the right to exist and seeing just the gargantuan vacuum that corporate media has produced in the last, you know, twenty five years that has been around, where it is it is requiring the audience to dehumanize Palestinians, to make their genocide and ethnic cleansing palatable, to, you know, manufacture consent for what we're seeing on the ground in Gaza.

And so.

you know as I I don't know but we have you know we have our features editors who are working literally day and night to edit these pieces that are coming out of gaza um our own staff editors uh you know we all write our own kind of analyses in in little kind of news posts um i You know, my task is to gather news from on the ground, you know, within like a six, seven day period since the previous live stream and compile them into a report that I deliver on Thursdays.

I have a system that I feel like I'm always kind of tweaking and perfecting.

I rely heavily on first primary sources, which is the Ministry of Health in Gaza.

the Government Media Office, the Civil Defence Corps, the Ministry of the Interior, the Education Ministry, and then, you know, officers in the, you know, in the UN programs, so like the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs and UNRWA, the Agency for Palestine Refugees, people who are on the ground in medical capacities, doctors, nurses, physicians, midwives, people who are feeding and serving people.

Those are the primary sources that I work with, that we all work with.

And every once in a while, I do have to go through a Reuters report or a Guardian article.

Sometimes I have to see how something, some incident, some horrific incident is being reported.

is being talked about in order to to figure out what what really happened and I have to go through these like yeah these news reports on these corporate channels and It's like night and day.

I don't know.

I'm rarely pulled into corporate media context.

I don't seek it out.

It doesn't even occur to me to ever turn on CNN or Fox News.

But it's always so jarring when I see it because it's so obvious.

How they are trying to feed a narrative into into the language that they use to talk about, you know, a child starving to death and places like the New York Times, I think, are it's an object lesson in that kind of manufacturing of a certain narrative using the language of, you know, posh intellectual liberalism.

You know, New York Times is like the peak for Western journalism.

It's somewhat untouchable, you know, if the New York Times says it, then it is, you know, from God's mouth to your ears sort of thing.

And the way that they have not only manufactured consent for the genocide itself, but laundered the just atrocious, dehumanizing lies of the Israeli military and of people being genocided is just, it's astonishing.

It will never not shock me.

I have a special place in my bitter heart of hatred.

The New York Times, because of its absolute nefarious systematic dehumanization of Palestinians.

It's truly awful.

And I appreciate you talking about you know, your methodology and all of the, the primary source work you do with folks in Gaza.

And that's like, I mean, I think that's one of the, there's so many reasons I'm sure why people tune into what you do on Thursday, but that's certainly one of them is to hear those different, um, very, you know, harrowing, heartbreaking stories.

Um, but also stories of people that are like, you know, we're still here.

We're still, you know, struggling, like don't give up, you know?

Um, And telling people that all of us that are not there need to be doing more ourselves too.

But I think one of the fascinating things, to go back to the times for a minute, is like so it's there's a I mean some of this is just corporate journalism in america which is like basically just public relations like it's just somebody sends you a pitch you know and I hilariously I get them on millennials like we get people who like want to have some ceo come on I think that they think we hate millennials and like capitalism so they're like You know, like, oh, you know, let me send you this like libertarian to talk to, you know.

But but anyways, I mean, they come pre-packaged with like, this is the story.

Right.

And ask this person this, this and this, you know, and.

that is a lot, unfortunately at like all levels from local news to, um, which really doesn't exist that much anymore.

It's mostly just like these national firms that have bought up the remaining properties of local newspapers and so on.

Um, but it is mostly PR and like, and then state propaganda, which is another form of PR.

And, you know, like, folks like Alex, you know, okay, I'm not going to try to pronounce his last name, but he did a book about propaganda, which is something people have been talking about a long time, right?

You know, and it's the same kind of thing in that realm where it's like a police shoot somebody and like, what does the reporter do?

Well, they ask for a statement from the police department on what happened and then you do nothing else.

Like they don't try to interview people at the scene or talk to the family or like, you know, it's just like, okay, what did, you know, what did the, what is the police's PR department say happened, you know?

And of course, we see this too.

This is so much of the war reporting.

Whenever we have a big war in the United States, it's just like this.

What does Matt Miller say at the podium for the State Department or whatever?

But The fascinating part, and I think this comes out a lot in maybe some of Asa and Ali's work because they're also breaking down some of these propaganda and atrocity propaganda stuff that comes out, is that these reports that you get in The Times, will not even acknowledge things that are being said in the israeli media like it would take somebody thirty minutes to spend a little bit of time to figure out like oh We have all these people talking about the Hannibal directive, or we have all these people that are like questioning the or all these like countervailing narratives about the mass rape claims, even from Israelis.

Right.

And so on and so forth.

And so it's it's fascinating to me also at that level of just.

They really rely on us to be quite stupid and not to be willing to like spend any time at all looking at multiple sources.

It actually makes me think a little bit like Cedric Robinson and Elizabeth Robinson used to run this local news show that they did.

that was, I can't remember the name, but it was like a world news show.

And what they did is they just bought like newspapers from all over the world.

And then they would just, eventually they developed like correspondence and people within different parts of the world.

But they just read newspapers from other places in the world to get to like find world news.

Because to get world news, it's not like you could watch Dan Rather and know what the world news is, right?

You'd actually have to see what people are talking about in other contexts, right?

But it's so interesting to me to have this pro-Zionist propaganda in the United States that is more tightly censored and regulated than...

pro-Zionist propaganda in the Zionist entity that is under military censorship like it's yeah no it's wild I mean yeah you're right like you know you look at a a an article kind of going back to what you were saying earlier about looking at an article in like Times of Israel or the Jerusalem Post and like you know every Palestinian is not even Palestinian, but an Arab and not only an Arab, but a terrorist, right?

Like that's kind of like their, their style guide is like every Palestinian is an Arab or an Arab terrorist or just terrorist.

Um, that's just kind of across the board there's, you know, there's never any, um, There's never any contact.

Jerusalem Post and Times of Israel exist to prop up the narrative of the state, which is an isolationist, Zionist, very violent pro-war, pro-genocide settler colony entity.

Fine.

But in some of the reporting in those newspapers or in places like Haaretz, which is kind of like the New York Times of Tel Aviv, you'll find these investigations.

which debunk a lot of the state's narratives um about like as you said uh israel's use of the hannibal directive on october seventh where you know they they shot up and and firebombed you know hundreds of cars at the you know at the the festival the lollapalooza outside auschwitz And, you know, anyone looking at those photos can see that there's no way that, you know, a couple hundred Fight, you know, Palestinian fighters from Gaza armed with like rifles and a couple of RPGs could have destroyed hundreds of cars, right?

Like anybody, even the New York Times could probably tell, but they will never, they'll never even talk about it in American corporate media.

because it destroys the narrative that they were so eager to help build for Israel in those first few weeks of the genocide.

And with the mass rapes, hoax story, I mean, the New York Times screams before silence or whatever it was, screams without words.

They like, you know, using screams a lot.

You know, this like absolutely like terrific piece of propaganda that they served to the Israeli narrative on the silver platter was debunked by the electronic intifada and by Mondo Weiss and by journalists uh all over who were who actually had receipts and were talking to the family members that um you know were mentioned in the article the the entire premise of the article and all of the so-called you know survivors or witnesses they were all it was all debunked the whole thing came apart it was like a plate of noodles you know at the end and the times has till now This was over a year ago.

Time is conceptual.

I can't even remember when it was actually published.

But they have never issued a retraction.

I mean, Jeffrey Gettleman, the lead journalist for this hoax article, was completely debunked.

He should have...

said, Oh, God, you know, maybe I should go back and talk to the people that I spoke with and ask them corroborating questions and ask for evidence.

He never did any of that.

You know, this is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, of course, and he went on to, you know, continue to sell his grift everywhere.

And, you know, it, I don't know.

I mean, it used to be that, like, the New York Times used to love a scoop.

I mean, here's the scoop, right?

The scoop is sitting right there in your own editorial office that, you know, this story never happened.

These witnesses don't exist.

These stories are completely made up.

And, you know, I mean, this is...

In any other context, the New York Times would do its basic due diligence as the New York Times, you know, to figure out what actually happened and what didn't.

But I think it got a lot of clicks.

It got a lot of praise.

It got a lot of awards.

That kind of journalism, that sensationalist, made-up journalism earned them a lot of money.

And there's no way that they could bear to retract any of it.

So they just keep perpetuating it.

They keep doubling down on it.

Um, it is, it is just absolutely insane to watch how the New York Times continues to peddle, you know, these, these lies and, um, and, and people, you know, keep subscribing and keep reading and, and, uh, it's, it's just, it's so, I don't know, it's, it's, it's pathetic and it's sad and it says a lot about where our journalism is right now.

Yeah, it really does.

It really does.

And I think, unfortunately, it says a lot to...

I wish that it didn't, but media literacy is not a great...

It's kind of a sort of liberal, limited frame even itself.

But there's just...

I just wish that so many people had more...

of a desire to even seek the truth.

And I think it, you know, it's also this, especially around things that are like so obvious.

I mean, this is the thing is all falling apart.

Like they, they can't, I think the reason that they go back to that story is because it's the only thing that they have found that is that they're able to affect a portion of the population on an emotional level.

Yeah.

Right.

Like I've talked to people about this, are like ministers who you know are anti-zionist and are trying to like work with their congregations and they're like you know once that gets brought up then they really struggle to you know because they'll be like oh no look at electronic intifada look at this other stuff like it's been debunked it's not real and the people look at them like You're one of those crazy people, right?

Like, you're a conspiracy theorist.

And it's funny, too, because I remember when it first came up, and I thought, nobody's going to believe this.

Like, I just didn't.

I actually, like, when the very first time that I think Ali and Asa were, like, entering into kind of, like, debunking it, I was still sort of in the mindset of, like, why does this matter so much?

Like, why do people care?

Like, you know, I mean...

it just seemed, you know, obviously I would care if people were mass raped.

Right.

But like, it just, it was an outlandish idea.

It didn't, it didn't seem the least bit believable or plausible.

And there just wasn't enough to like, from the beginning, it just was nonsensical to me.

Completely.

I mean, the stories that they came up with were like, you know, a woman having her breast chopped off and then people, Hamas fighters were playing football with it.

I'm like, do you, I mean, that's a gruesome story that a six-year-old would come up with.

If people just stopped for a second and listened to the amount of just absurd stories that were invented around them yeah I was like you I was like there's no way that people are gonna believe like that's insane come on like come on but they believed it because that level of dehumanization of especially of Palestinian men Muslim men in general the Palestinian men in particular had already been like the groundwork for that had been laid over the last twenty years where you know Arab men are are savage and they're like you know sexual deviants and they they hate women they don't respect women you know it's the same you know they they want to um rape Israeli women because they're Because they're Jews and they hate Jews, but they also are sexually repressed.

And so they, you know, like all of these like insanely racist, disgusting, Orientalist tropes about Arab men and Palestinian men in particular were all kind of bubbling up.

And so I think people...

like turned off the skeptical and cynical and critical thought part of their brain and let the like, you know, the propaganda consumption brain kind of take over because they had been primed.

to see Muslim men as subhuman, as these savages, as barbarians.

I mean, this is the, and we've talked about this too on Tangy Therapy, you know, like this is what white Europeans always have perpetuated, this idea that men of the global south, you know, in countries that they were colonizing, were barbarians were savages wanted to you know take and rape their you know pure white women and you know this was the same logic uh that you know white clansmen were were trying to perpetuate against black men in this country um you know it's just like we see this pattern and you know people who read the new york times and you know have like a black lives matter flag in their front lawn and you know they drive a tesla with like I got one before elon was crazy you know all these bumper stickers they think of themselves as like Smart, skeptical, critical people.

But when it came to these lies that were being fed in the media about Palestinian men, they grabbed onto it and they haven't allowed themselves to be deprogrammed.

So it's just it's remarkable to see on like a sociological level about how how propaganda can be fed by sustained kind of, you know, low level or high level racism through the media as an apparatus to dehumanize a certain population.

It's just it's kind of it's fascinating and it's terrifying.

It is.

It is.

And it's, you know, somebody raised in the chat, like the Ukraine flags and the Biden stickers in the Berkeley Hills, you know, and it's like, I mean, and I'm in an area too, where there's like a lot of this and where there was like this huge outpouring of I don't want to use the word solidarity because I don't even think it is.

It was just like this performance.

Like, yeah, my kids will districts like doing like, you know, canned soup fundraisers and stuff like this for Ukraine, like immediately Ukrainian flags everywhere.

And like a lot of it still Ukrainian flags everywhere in my neighborhood.

There's they're everywhere.

These people are like I just I'm like, you know, anyway.

Yeah.

But it's connected, I think, to this dehumanization, too, because they also there was also so much propaganda, too, about Russia, evil Russia, monster Putin, bad, bad, you know, and I'm not like I'm not sitting here saying like, oh, you know, whatever, like I'm not trying to excuse certain policies or people.

But the point being that, like, they were just so primed to jump right on this bandwagon.

And then when the actual, like, thing that, you know, it's like, oh, my gosh, there's a genocide unfolding in Gaza.

Like, will any of you people do any of the same things?

And it's like...

I had so many conversations where people just like stop talking to me or like walk away you know because it's just like they their brains like can't yeah like you said it's like the same thing it's like this dehumanization and they're just not seeing people um anyway um let's be insane yeah no it's totally nuts um Let's talk about, so you wrote this recent piece.

And you cover, I mean, one of your beats really seems to be kind of covering obviously students, but also children and children in Gaza.

You've been covering that quite a bit in the genocide, through the genocide.

And I certainly don't, I mean, I appreciate your role there immensely.

I don't necessarily envy it because I know how difficult that has to be, but I'm glad that you're doing it.

So as part of your media roundup for last week's live stream, you published a piece and you talked in it about this abduction of these ten children from one of the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation kill zones, I'll just call them that because that's what they are, that are supposed to be distribution centers.

Yeah.

So talk a little bit about this story.

I'm sure many folks have seen the video with the kids like, you know, tearfully talking about what's been done to them, but I don't want to assume everybody has.

But maybe you could just talk a little bit about that and kind of also just some of the stuff you feel being normalized and, you know, the importance of continuing to kind of report on these things that are happening with children in Gaza.

Yeah.

Thanks.

Yeah, I don't know.

Like I and I mean, even when I was at KPFA and in the early two thousands, you know, because because of my status as a mother and someone who, you know, loves children, and knows intimately the just the horror of, you know, thinking about your child being harmed in any way or anything like I just I kind of, I kind of gravitated toward toward those stories.

I mean, I remember being reporting in the West Bank in And I interviewed a mother and her child and the child had, had gone selectively mute, like he wouldn't talk anymore, because he had been so traumatized.

Because his just like a week before Israeli soldiers invaded his house, and they held the parents at gunpoint, while one soldier brutally beat this child underneath a stairwell and the parents couldn't do anything and the child couldn't fight back he was a child um you know he was I don't know maybe nine or ten years old and I remember you know talking with the mom and and both of us were just you know in tears, um, you know, and, and, and, and, you know, there's no way I just I there's no way that that I could have understood that kind of pain um but I was I I have been you know throughout my journalism career like just very drawn to trying to amplify these stories because you know you think as a journalist like if I'm gonna if I have you know these skills I wanna I want to do something that will change something like this child, this child should be a child.

He should be free.

He shouldn't be terrorized, you know, to fall asleep every night because last week soldiers broke in and beat him almost to death.

You know, like there's, there's some sort, I think I started out as like, I don't know, with some sort of like altruism, you know, in terms of like what what I can do as a journalist.

And that has slowly faded over time.

But or maybe like morphed into a different sort of like.

you know, we're all doing what we can.

I have these certain skills and now what we're doing is documenting.

We're documenting history.

We are naming the perpetrators who are doing this.

We are documenting what they are doing so that the world can't say that they didn't know and children can have documentation um you know in order to go and and find their perpetrators of this violence like that's I think what for for a lot of us and you know sort of like movement journalism um are are doing um anyway that's all to say that the torture of Palestinian children has been a core tenant of policy by the Israeli military um since the inception of Israel You know, the just absolute unrestrained, brutal violence that Israel meets out, you know, against families and children in particular, is not just...

you know because children are easy targets and and israelis are terrible soldiers but because um it is meant to break the back of a society it's meant to break the spirit it's meant to terrorize you know when you hurt a child the entire family um feels it and and those those traumas reverberate generationally.

So now you have four or five generations of traumatized, tortured people.

And so, you know, here, I mean, we have seen, I mean, there's Children, I think right now, who have lost one or more limbs in Gaza since October, twenty twenty three.

Right.

That's a that's a trauma.

Those those children are all traumatized.

Every single child in Gaza is traumatized.

I mean, there are tens of thousands of children who have seen their parents, their loved ones, their brothers, their sisters murdered in front of their eyes in brutal ways who have you know, we all have seen that the the videos of children you know picking through rubble to find the body parts of their baby sister or their mother or their father right like and carrying them in plastic bags like these what what our comrade lara shihai talks about is psychic intrusions where we can't unsee that we will always see that and that is an affirmation of our own humanity that we haven't gone numb to it And that we will, it's a commitment to keep fighting to make sure that this doesn't happen to anybody.

And so, and children throughout Israel's colonial project have been tortured in prisons, they've been kidnapped, they've been sexually assaulted, they have been beaten, they have been severely injured and put into solitary confinement.

And this happens every day.

So at the beginning, at the end of June, I believe, children who are trying to help find sustenance for their starving family members have been going to these GHF killing field sites.

And for whatever reason, ten boys were snatched by Israeli soldiers at one of these sites in southern Gaza.

and detained in the hot sun, beaten, stripped naked, put into metal cages, like one by one meter square cages, and then taken to places like Sidi Tayman, which is a torture camp, a concentration camp.

And there they were interrogated for weeks, every day for weeks, questioned, intimidated, threatened.

Some of the soldiers would show these children pictures of their family members and say, you know, if you don't tell us where the tunnels are, you know, we're going to kill your family.

These are, you know, these are children.

I mean, Sometimes when I take a breath, I get a little...

I understand.

No, no, you're fine.

Anyway, so...

I'll just keep talking really fast.

So these children were tortured.

They were put into places that one of the children said was kind of like an incubator.

You know how you have like these...

like chicken farms and they're like these big kind of concrete structures you know no no windows just walls and a roof and then there's like huge like uh like heat lamps everywhere So a child said that he and some of the others were put into these concrete rooms with heat lamps and kind of tortured because it's the middle of summer.

They're in the desert and there's heat lamps.

They were given rotten food.

They were taken to a place that they called the disco room, which is another form of torture where the Israelis would play this loud Hebrew pop music, which would nauseate anybody.

But under these circumstances, it's a form of torture.

They would just play these songs over and over again at ear-splitting volume.

And when the children, when they were done with the children, they dropped them back off at one of the crossings and they were, you know, taken back by the hospital administration and checked out and treated.

However, the hospitals can treat them because there's no medicine and there's no, you know, there's no saline in some of the hospitals.

There's no electricity.

And then their families came.

But like, During this month, I was seeing news reports of some of these family members, these mothers who were like, my son, he's twelve years old and he volunteered to go get us a bag of flour and he never came back.

Then it turned out that there were ten families who had had their sons disappear.

and you know I was like that's you know that's that's insane that's what israel does but like you know I mean I I didn't know that that these that these kids were ever going to be returned and then they were returned and in any other context I mean you think about like if um you know, if Russian soldiers had abducted ten, you know, Ukrainian children and tortured them in those ways for a month, the entire world would be up in arms.

There's no way, there's no way that that could happen and not have, you know, Russia be punished.

Or if it was, I just, I'm like, but because it's Palestinian children, It's normalized.

Israel has a reason.

They can get away with it.

Israel, you know, must have done it for some reason.

And it was not picked up.

I'm still waiting.

We're still waiting for, you know, the story of Hind Rajab to be picked up by any, you know, mainstream media source.

I mean, there are tens of thousands of children who have been killed by this monster.

And they don't...

They don't get front page headlines except for every once in a while when like, you know, this week the Washington Post decides to run the names of all the children.

Who killed them?

Which weapons killed them?

Who made the weapons?

You know, Washington Post is owned by Bezos.

Like I'm just, I feel like I'm always going crazy.

And stories like what happened to these children, it's just, it's one story.

You know, there are plenty of children who have been disappeared, who are still missing from these GHF sites.

People who are finding the desiccated corpses of children at these crossings, you know, at these so-called aid sites who have no identification.

um and it's this this so that was just one of many stories that you know I I wanted to amplify um the palestinian center for human rights does incredible work And that's the human rights organization that documented these stories from these children, these stories of torture and detention and abuse and beatings.

Because it's a part of the wider scope of documenting these crimes so that we can have retribution, so that we can have prosecution of the perpetrators of them.

Yeah, no, it's incredibly important.

And I want to get back to retribution with you in a little bit.

But yeah, I mean, you know, I mean, it's like it, it recalls to me, I mean, what you describe, right?

It sounds like when you get the full revelations of like Abu Ghraib, or you get like these, you know, Guantanamo Bay, like kind of stories.

And I mean, even with Abu Ghraib, it was hideous and the United States did it.

But there was at least some coverage of it because it was revealed to the world and they're like, we have to at least talk about this and play some kind of accountability charade and whatever.

It's amazing to me the amount of stuff that U.S.

corporate media is just working overtime to filter out in terms of stories like this.

I mean, we're talking about Abu Ghraib for, like, you know, twelve-year-olds or something like that, you know.

And, I mean, the prison you're talking about, I mispronounce it all the time, but Sdey Teman?

Sdey Teman, yeah.

Yeah, I mean, this is the same one that had the rape scandal where you get the government having video of it.

And then there's public discussion within, like, the Knesset or whatever other weird, you know, government councils and stuff that Israel had.

And then these people are on Israeli media.

And there's, like, a whole movement to say that this is allowed and, you know.

Yeah.

The right to rape protests, yeah.

Yeah, absolutely insane stuff where, again, like if you talk about this with some person who doesn't pay any attention to this stuff, they'd be like, oh, you're making that up.

It can't possibly be real what you're talking about right now.

Yeah.

You know, and it's like, no, like he admits it.

Like the meme.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

Yeah.

They not only admit it, but they're proud of it.

You know, the the the Israeli, you know, prison guard who led the, you know, the gang rape of this one Palestinian man in Sedeh Teman.

He was interviewed on Israeli media.

And at first he had like a face mask because he didn't wanna be identified.

But then after he kind of tested the waters because he didn't really get much pushback, he literally took his mask off.

And then he was on like national television programs for weeks.

He was like a national celebrity.

People were so proud of the work that he did to sexually assault a man.

I mean, it was just like and then you had and then you had protests, you know, because the Knesset was was weighing, you know, should should rape be, you know, allowed and in prisons, you know, because they're.

Yeah.

And some judge at some point, I think, was like thinking about doing putting them on administrative leave or something like that.

Yeah.

House arrest or something.

Right.

Yeah.

And people were like, oh, we need to like break them out of the barracks.

They're being held in.

Right.

It is like this is societal rot.

You know, like this is this is not an aberration.

This isn't just some of the Israeli public.

This is an overwhelming majority.

And this is what this is what this is what we're we're trying to fight.

I mean, we can't.

We can't let them win, and we're not.

But the people at the forefront of that retribution is the resistance.

And that's another part of the story that is being conveniently left out, is the audacity of the Palestinian resistance forces.

that are continuing to exact a heavy military cost on Israel for its genocide.

absolutely I mean I was joking with you before we started that I've re so we're doing red dawn tomorrow on our imperial eighties series and like so I've been re-watching it and just a horrible unhinged movie but like one of the things that is fascinating within it and I've talked to cena about this at a certain point too is that adam you know as americans in some ways like we're indoctrinated in a lot of really weird ways right but we're indoctrinated to to like see ourselves as the underdogs right and to think because this is part of sort of the national under you know the national origin story of this idea of the american revolution is like resistance to tyranny or whatever right which of course is like a whole propaganda operation in itself right it's massive but the um But like you watch this movie and the heroes of this are a high school football team and members of the student body like council and president that become guerrilla fighters taking on the USSR, Cuba, Mexico, Nicaragua, El Salvador, as they've all collectively invaded and.

The thing about it, though, is part of why it is effective is because you're identifying with these high school students who are attacking soldiers in tanks, who are throwing IEDs, who are taking what they can from these oppressive troops that are in their land, this occupying army, and they're going on the offensive and they're beating them at their own game.

Yeah.

you think, well, that's, this is why they can't show the Kassam brigades on mainstream media, right?

Because people would immediately see those images of the guy in like sweats and flip-flops or whatever, you know, going and, or track pants and, you know, going and dropping an IED in a tank and say like, that's the hero.

Those are the people that we should be getting behind.

And So they can't have that imagery be, you know, that's why it's so heavily suppressed.

I mean, I also think about like during the first and second Intifada, I mean, there's been forty years of, you know, of corporate media, you know, opportunities to show I mean, and they used to.

I think back in the first Intifada, CNN would actually show children throwing stones at tanks.

I think there was more of at least some sort of attention, however meager it was, to Palestinians fighting occupation.

By the second Intifada, a lot less, for sure.

Mostly because it was more overtly an armed resistance.

And yeah, I mean, you know, kind of like the...

you know, the marching orders, if you will, of the corporate media has been to portray Palestinians either as savages or as victims, never as valiant, heroic, you know, leaders of a legitimate resistance force.

And so it was kind of like, you know, in the second Intifada, I think it was, it was also, you know, the time of like the occupation invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan.

And so the media was very much swinging heavily towards manufacturing consent for those invasions and occupations and less so on what was happening in Palestine, especially if they were going to show what Palestinians were really up against.

And by that time, of course, also Israel and the US were completely merged as one.

And so, yeah, I mean, like there have been opportunities um but yeah yeah but yeah that's that I mean that period was really essential I think in there what you're absolutely right there was a shift that happened in mainstream corporate media with you know post-nine eleven with you know afghanistan and the iraq war and you know obviously the the the language, the all encompassing language of the war on terrorism was able to scoop up so many different types of movements into one kind of bucket.

Right.

And, um, you know, unfortunately that's like a huge ideological soup that we have to like wade through or whatever.

I don't know.

I'm mixing metaphors, but, um, But yeah, it's true that like even in the I think very early days of the Iraq war, there was like some allowance for anti-war voices within some of these media outlets, like put somebody on for a few minutes and kind of like it was never wasn't like an equal thing of like, hey, here's, you know.

whatever, thirty minutes of Cornel West and thirty minutes of Tucker Carlson or something like I don't know.

But, you know, like it wasn't like that, but it was like a little bit of a OK, we'll have a panel with four guys and one of them will get five minutes to not even like two minutes to talk about something.

Right.

And they just they figured out somewhere in that war that.

they weren't gonna do that and they haven't gone back like since then the there's just no alliance allowance for like critical dissenting voices around u.s imperialism within the media at all and it was always just to be clear it was always marginalized it was like always an approach that was designed to get people to a pro-empire kind of output but but there was like this phase where they're like well we need to have some dissent in it in order to seem real to people in order to seem like a conversation or a debate or something and they just let go of that they were like no we can have like we can have the cia guy the like you know um heritage foundation person the fbi general yeah and like yeah a general and like some horrible congressperson and let's just put them all up here you know right um and that's what like right that's what sunday news is like every day now every time now like the those those weekly shows it's like here are all of your shades of fed um all right um so So I do want to talk about this other – so there was this New York Times thing.

Again, they set the bar for the depravity and the capitulation to Zionism and imperialism.

But they ran this piece, I guess, about a week ago.

about a child in Gaza who had died of starvation right which is happening every freaking day it's not just one it's like you know multiple almost a hundred children now in the last uh few weeks yeah yeah um and that's just recorded deaths those are the bodies that are brought to the hospital right right um and and you Never mind how difficult that is at this point and how limited the capacity of those things are.

But the...

You know, they issued this correction around this child that was saying that the child had a pre-existing medical condition.

And so basically it was trying to insinuate that the child didn't die of starvation, that it was a medical condition that they had that caused them to die, basically.

I didn't pay enough attention to figure out what their rationale was here.

But I thought it was such an interesting thing because it was like, to me it's such an American framing too of like nowhere in the world.

I don't, I'm not aware at least of anywhere else in the world where the term like preexisting medical condition has any kind of meaning.

Right.

Right.

Because in America you're like, Oh, well that means your health insurance might not cover it.

Like that's where that term comes from.

It's a, it's a private insurance terminology.

Um, That Obamacare was supposed to fix, right?

Right.

Yeah, exactly.

Like there's that and the insinuation that disabled children are, it's okay to starve them.

Right.

And and then people in Gaza talked with the parents after that, like just disgusting, you know, so-called correction came out and the parents said, no, the baby was perfectly fine and healthy.

And then, you know, got I can't remember what it was, something because of the occupation, the siege.

That's the thing, too, is it's like.

Where do the pre-existing health conditions come from in Gaza, right?

Like, it's not like Gaza is some, like, nice, you know, plush suburb.

Oh, it was seventeen years of siege before the genocide.

Seventeen years of people saying that they didn't have chemotherapy medications and dialysis machines.

You know, like, there were medications on the list that were banned from Gaza.

Gaza.

That's part of Israel's siege.

That is part of genocidal system.

And then you starve them.

So people who weren't able to get chemotherapy medication and then got starved, you can't say that it was just because of cancer.

um I mean I don't and and the new york times I mean they got a lot of backlash from you know people who can see through the lines there um obviously but I haven't seen any Any sort of correction to the correction or any sort of mea culpa.

Of course there, you know, as I said, like they still haven't retracted the completely and thoroughly debunked stories about mass rapes on October seventh.

Why would they debunk or, you know, issue a correction to their correction on this one?

It's just like insidious.

Yeah, like sick children, they don't get sick in Gaza just because of some natural phenomenon.

They're predisposed to it.

It's generations of siege and trauma and the poisoning of the water.

I mean, before the genocide, the water in Gaza was something like, ninety-six percent non-potable because Israel had destroyed the underground water aquifers during the decades of settlement inside Gaza.

It's just it's like, again, like there's no there's no other people on Earth.

Who have been so thoroughly dehumanized and battered and tortured and then mocked by by places like The New York Times.

I mean, how disgusting.

Yeah, no, absolutely.

It's totally revolting.

We'll get to we'll get to them in a minute and what we're going to do with them.

But So I like it is a very interesting moment right now, like in terms of watching, as I think you said it on Tangy Therapy, like the memo went out, you know, and so you're watching.

I mean, I think even Richie Torres, who's like come after us and Laura Sheehy, like horrible, horrible human being, like such a strong Zionist.

But I think he even said something about like, let the let the food in.

Right.

Let the aid in.

Right.

Something like that.

So just watching all of these people who have been cheerleading this genocide for almost two years now, who are now either coming out, some cases even calling it a genocide, in some cases...

it's much more limited.

It's like, you know, it, and this is the interesting thing is like, there's some people who are just not comfortable with starvation, you know, which is an interesting, I don't quite know what to make.

I mean, I'm certainly not comfortable with starvation, but I don't understand quite like what, that trigger is in people's brain that differentiates like oh you know bombing every building in this entire place and doing this and this you know bombing all the hospitals bombing all the schools taking out all the like all of this was okay um you know killing x tens of thousands of people probably you know hundreds I don't we don't know how many um that that was all okay but like now that there's starvation happening.

I mean, yes, I'm with you.

We need to do something about it.

So like there, yes.

But I'm so skeptical and like, as I think everybody should be about all of these people who are jumping on this bandwagon now.

And I think it like, for me, I'm sort of trying to sort out like where there's there's something there's a logic going on here um it's either this is sort of where I'm at like either this is just another psyop which I'm like you know or propaganda like They're trying to shift the narrative in certain ways because they're like, okay, we need to get the aid in, but we're going to continue with the ethnic cleansing because this is like a, we need to make this look a little bit better.

Or, you know, like, and so that's like a way of genocide through other means, you know, looking for a narrative that kind of enables that because they feel like the pressure is on them right now around this.

There's another part of me that's like, some of these people may be starting to worry, I hope, that they'll be held accountable for this stuff um and so they're like well we need to make a shift now because this thing is going down and you know at least if we start to to to say we're not with this and we're against this then you know when the trials come we can have some kind of plausible dying deniability or whatever um I mean that also relies on me having a little bit more faith I mean I look I do believe in the accountability thing and we'll get to that in a minute but I'm also like do they really think like I don't know it's like you thought you could get away with all this shit and then now right now like what is going on so yeah what are your thoughts on this yeah I think I think it's a mixture of both I think it's it's definitely um like uh reputation management at this point where yeah maybe some of the smarter ones like the more liberal fence writers um who love israel love everything israel does and is about are kind of seeing the writing on the wall and, you know, the optics are like, ew.

I mean, it's one thing, you know, to have to see photos of, you know, babies with their heads blown off.

Like, well, obviously, like, you know, that's Israeli policy.

They're going to bomb who they're going to bomb.

But I think it's another to see, like, a slow starvation of children.

I mean, this is so gruesome and grim.

And you're so right that like, I don't understand why two years of seeing children's bodies being blown to bits didn't move anybody with any modicum of power.

But this is, I'm still trying to figure out what the difference is.

I think, you know, I think there's something in the language You know, bombing is.

It's you know, that's people can write it off as like, well, this is just the spoils of war.

These are collateral damage.

Right.

There's like this calculation of like.

And so it's like even if you're right, even if you miscalculate, you tried to calculate and you can have some kind of plausible deniability.

That's exactly it.

Right.

Yeah, there's that.

And then but starvation.

You know, I mean, they're using, and it's a term, it's an actual like term, famine is the term, the IPC classification, which, you know, IPC is like an international body that monitors starvation levels.

And, you know, right now, Gaza is in phase five.

So it's famine phase five.

And it's that's like irreversible, catastrophic famine.

But I think there's a way in which the language around famine or even starvation or hunger is like more, it's like a passive, it's something that happens.

It's something that just happens naturally.

you know in in the minds of the colonizers and the and the imperial court right like famine is it's so god that's just so horrible it's more like a natural disaster than anything that's structurally engineered that I might be culpable for So there's a, there's a, it's so, I am like, just like even trying to think about the calculations that are being made by these people, where like, oh, I can, I can speak out against, you know, famine, but I can't, I can't really speak out against, you know, children's bodies being shredded by bombs.

I think there's like, it's safer for someone, some like complete asshole, like Richie Torres, um, to come out and say, let aid into Gaza now, because it's it's a little bit of plausible deniability it's better optics and it also kind of then um they can they could like people like richie torres can say uh you know we then we have to pour more money into the gaza humanitarian foundation We have to fund the State Department request for, you know, it was a fifty billion dollars for the, you know, for the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.

That's a way we can get it in.

Or we can do we can do aid drops.

How about we do airdropped parcels of aid that yesterday killed a nurse in his displacement tent.

Right.

These are dangerous.

These are just there.

Oh, hey.

You know, any opportunity the U.S.

has to waste money, kill people and not solve a problem that it created they'll take right so so the airdropped aid is you know exponentially more expensive it's it's completely unsustainable the aid inside these airdropped parcels is rotten right it's just like humiliation on top of humiliation on top of danger on top of death And but Richie Torres can say, well, I support the aid drops.

Therefore, I am against famine.

He can't say, you know, I, I, I support, you know, Yemen's humanitarian intervention against the bombing of children in Gaza, right?

So I think it's safer for these absolute monsters to say something like, we support the aid, but not be specific about opening the land crossings, about stopping Israel from besieging Gaza, and about holding those people accountable.

I mean, if people wanted to really end the starvation in Gaza, the famine, or whatever they want to call it, they would move heaven and earth and a huge military fleet to you know to tel aviv um to militarily materially force israel to stop the siege on gaza that's the only way you know so anyway I think it's just optics I think it's opportunism yeah no I think that's right um And the famine point that you raise is an important one.

I mean, my mother's family's Irish and, you know, we like talking with Irish scholars and stuff like that, you know, and it's like they're, you know, they're like, look, it wasn't.

It wasn't like we didn't have food.

We were exporting food to England as we were starving to death.

And then England exported that policy to India and starved tens of millions of people to death.

I mean, this is the hallmark of the colonizer, to create a crisis in order to subjugate and kill off the indigenous people.

and then present it as like a natural disaster.

Yeah, the Irish potato famine, right?

It sounds like in order to try and portray the Irish as like bumbling, you know, country hicks who didn't know how to feed themselves.

And then there was like a disease in the potatoes and they all starved to death, like so dumb.

right like that's how it was yeah manufactured it is totally and there was yeah yeah anyway but no I it's a it's an important no that's good I mean it's an important point because It is true that, I mean, I completely agree as we see, like, we need to be super critical of people.

It's also like, I mean, I thought Ali did a great job of breaking down the state recognition thing last week, you know, which is another one of these schemes right now.

And it, I mean, on some level, these things are interesting, right?

But at the same time, it's like as he breaks down, like what is actually in these proposals?

What are they saying would be the context of this so-called state, you know?

And it's really important that people understand that.

it is, you know, it is just a form of surrender, essentially masked as a state recognition, which Israel is not going to agree to anyway.

So, you know, then the question becomes, okay, is anybody going to militarily intervene to support this state?

Like, if we haven't seen that in the, you know, I mean, Yemen will like, you know, but, uh, You know, yeah.

It's tough.

All right.

On that note, we can move to accountability.

And, like, this has been a thing for me, too, that has been, like, kind of a journey.

And I think – I mean, actually, I'll say some of it has to do with – I spent a lot of time, especially during the Black Lives Matter movement and all of that, reading these books on abolition and so on.

And to be clear, most of the people in that world, they do have some notions of accountability frameworks.

So I don't want to suggest that they don't.

But there is a lot of kind of the accountability framework stuff within that world that it's kind of like, okay, well, we can all get together as a community and, you know, we can like hear both sides of these things and we can come up with what the consequence could be, which like, you know, actually that doesn't sound so bad.

Right.

Even in this case, like we could, we could probably agree with that.

But I think like the problem, a lot of the accountability rhetoric was always about, you know, we need to hold police accountable and so on.

And a lot of what that meant was that like, And I don't mean that activists or organizers meant this.

And I think I understand their approach to it even better now.

But what the state meant by it was like, okay, we'll have the internal affairs look into it.

Or in this context, it's like all those Biden administration briefings where they would cite some horrendous war crimes, Hindra job, all of them.

And they would say, well...

You know, I don't know if that happened, if it did, uh, you know, we trust that Israel will look into it and like investigate and that's, that's their responsibility kind of thing.

Right.

Um, and we trust that they will do that.

They're our ally and our partner, like that kind of shit.

Um, and so like the language of accountability is something that I.

I had been kind of allergic to in some senses not I mean partly because I'm like okay you know I come I'm also interested in revolutionary politics and all of this and I'm like okay well we actually have to have power to enforce accountability like we have to have you know a structure that we control where we can produce accountability I still think that way but I'm not one of the things that actually I think was the first I was at like an out conference and, you know, people were like, no, like like we want to prosecute Israelis for war crimes.

And what do you think about that?

And I mean, I was like, yeah, like I wasn't against it, but it was interesting to me because I was like, there's a there's an organizing orientation towards systems of justice that they know are stacked against them, but they're also like, we have to out organize these other forces in this realm.

And I, you know, like, I think I've kind of like fully sort of come around on this perspective of, I want the, highest degree and I don't care how carceral it is or how violent it is to people like you know there were hangings at nuremberg and rightfully so and there should have been more right and like we could talk about all the ways that that structure which was kind of like the basis of a lot of things you know, in this kind of international law and, you know, how do we deal with the aftermath of genocide and these horrific wrongs?

Like, we could talk about all the ways that it fell short because so many Nazis ended up, right, working in the West German state afterwards.

Or at NASA.

Yeah, or NASA, right, or the CIA.

Yeah.

Or in all of our universities.

Yeah.

Yeah, and so on, right?

So, like, there was not enough accountability for all of that.

Right.

And I am just, like, there's so many people who...

are involved in this who you know, that we have to be able to hold accountable.

And so it's one of the things that I do think is super important about the work that you all are doing, documenting, too, because there's so many crimes that these people are committing that are real crimes.

This is not somebody stole a loaf of bread in order to eat, right?

Like, we're not talking about that kind of thing.

It's not a capitalistic, like, orientation of...

like where we're producing a certain amount of criminality in order to enforce our crack class rule against poor and working class people.

Like that's not what we're talking about.

We're talking about like, what are we going to do collectively to build the structures and systems of accountability?

Even if it's like very clandestine or something like it, Because this is a part of the world building, right?

Like, it is.

We can't allow this stuff to just go unpunished.

And I don't mind.

I don't like a language of punishment.

I have all these issues with it.

But they need punishment.

These people, like, yeah.

Yeah.

So...

I don't know.

I know this is a bit of a thank you group therapy conversation.

Yeah, a little bit.

I know.

But it's good.

It's good.

I think we should all be thinking about this.

I think it is, like you said, really important in terms of world building, in terms of revolutionary optimism, in terms of working toward the world that we want to be in, which is a far cry from this one.

And, you know, it's funny, like my spouse is an abolitionist and like he's worked in prisons before, like doing writing workshops, especially for kids in the kid jails.

around here and um you know he's he's been a part of abolition networks and and activist circles for a long time and uh like early on in the genocide I was like um I don't think I'm an abolitionist and and he was like what do you mean and I was like well all these people have to go somewhere they all have to they all have to be in like a dungeon they have to be like we have they have to go we can't we can't live in a world where these people get to just walk free and we have some sort of like community you know restorative justice sort of framework applied to these genocidal freaks and he's like oh yeah don't worry about this it's like abolition you know most most and this is I mean I'm totally gonna butcher what he said but he was like you know when when abolitionists talk about um no more prisons or abolishing the police um it it's it's you know that's like that's like when when socialists talk about communism right it's like that's the end goal that's the A hundred percent.

We live in the world that we are in now.

And, um, and the people who are doing the crimes against humanity will be dealt with.

They will be put in the most, you know, horrific conditioned prison because this is, you know, this is their, this is what they, um, what they have brought upon themselves.

You know, these people will not go scot-free.

Don't worry.

Like we'll still have the Hague.

Like, okay, good.

Um, But I yeah, I know I, you know, in talking about like, What does accountability mean?

I mean, there's like the AOC accountability idea where she's like, I'm going to be in Congress to hold the centers of power accountable.

And what does that mean?

That means like capitulating and becoming like Pelosi herself.

Accountability, I think, has become kind of like just an empty word.

I want accountability for AOC.

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

We all do.

And we deserve it.

But I think when we talk about accountability in real practical terms, we don't have to reinvent the wheel.

We don't have to start a new foundation.

There's the Hind Rajab Foundation.

This is a very sophisticated group of lawyers and legal experts and computer experts who are doing the work of tracking down every Israeli military personnel who is involved in this genocide.

and submitting dossiers to higher legal bodies.

And I think that's what real accountability is, that there are people who are already doing the work of creating files on these Nazis in the hopes, not hope, but in the belief, in the knowledge, that they will be prosecuted for these crimes.

And, you know, we had we had Nuremberg.

Justin, I think, talked about this.

Well, he wrote about it in an essay, but we talked about it again on taking group therapy.

I think we're like, you know, the the Nuremberg Nuremberg trials that will come for the Israelis will be will be held in Hodeidah right in Yemen.

we have to keep creating, you know, the image of the world that we want to be in.

And that means, you know, also creating the conditions for rightfully punishing those who are perpetrating this.

So the Hind Rajab Foundation, I mean, there's all these like internet sleuths putting together dossiers of these individual Israeli soldiers.

Some of them are like so scared now to go back to Canada after sniping children in the head in Gaza for, you know, three hundred days of the Israeli army.

They should be afraid.

They should be very afraid.

And and I think the more that we can support those kinds of organizations and do the work of helping to document these people who are going to, you know, come back after sniping children in the head or torturing them to death.

You know, we're gonna try and like live normal lives.

That's not that's not the world I want to live in.

So yeah, I mean, I think that's what accountability can mean.

No, Inshallah, right, yeah.

I would love to see the Hodeidah Nuremberg or the Hodeidah trials.

yeah yeah and uh they would be broadcast on a big screen too you know yeah um so good all right this has been wonderful thank you so much um I have a couple comments I'll pull up from the chat but is there anything else that you wanted to to talk about or whatever that's been great No, this, yeah, I feel like I got a lot out that I needed to get out.

I'm just so grateful for your show and for all the, I mean, you know, it's been a lifeline to be able to listen to this show in some of the, you know, darkest times of life.

the last two years just to hear comrades, you know, really holding a mirror up to reality and and, you know, just kind of helping us all articulate what's what we've all been feeling.

And so thank you to millennials.

And yeah, I and thank you to you, Jay, for being you and being a phenomenal host and carrier of these conversations.

I'm just I'm just really grateful for this community.

Well, yeah, I mean, that makes me feel wonderful.

So thank you.

Um, but I just would say, you know, and not being whatever, like, I don't know, uh, ungrateful or whatever, but it is very much reciprocal in terms of the work that you do and that your colleagues do.

Um, you know, and, and also because you're one of the you're one of the creators of tanky group therapy, you're one of the the original the founders, right.

And so, and so, so thank you for that, too, because that's been been huge.

So yeah, I mean, it's, it's, I'm glad that we have outlets, like the ones that you're involved in, and this one, because I don't know, truly, what I would do without them as well as as well as others many others um but yeah exactly um I mean I don't even listen to like chapo trap house but I listened to like six minutes of it the other day and they were talking about the need for the democrats to arm the hoothies and I was like This is great that we're in this position.

And they were slamming Bernie and AOC for being so...

I was like, wow, what's going on over there?

It's a good barometer for where we're at.

Yeah.

All right.

So somebody put a quote from Alex Karp on Palantir, which, by the way, check out if you didn't see it.

um the conversation that jared ball has been having some discussions about palantir recently that are really good on black liberation media and I think actually on I mix what I like on his youtube page there but um this is interesting just from one of our enemies saying that student protests are not a side show this is a whole show if we lose the intellectual battle we will not be able to deploy armies anywhere in the west and wouldn't it be wonderful if we could not deploy armies anywhere in the west um or anywhere in the world I guess he means anywhere from the west yeah um all right yeah so somebody mentioned this is yeah the the zionists are putting out billboard campaigns that the starving children are actually people with cystic cystic fibrosis again like I don't know how this is a w for them like you know like oh well People are dying of, you know, treatable conditions because they can't get medical care because we've blockaded it.

Right.

Yeah, it doesn't help your case.

Very happy to see Nora on Mac.

Bring on John Elmer next.

We'll have to do that.

I really want to do, like, yeah, a conversation with, like, John and Justin at some point.

Great.

Just another shout out to you.

Somebody also mentioned this.

this was when I mentioned cedric and elizabeth robinson their new show was called the third world news review the one where they read like papers from all over the world to develop their stories and stuff like that which is pretty cool yeah yeah um yeah so this they so they referenced this that I just listened to like chapo puts out because I don't I'm not a subscriber but they put out like short clips to try to get people to subscribe to their patreon And it was like six minutes.

And they referenced this as well.

They were like the Pod Save America guys who are Obama speechwriters and like Biden folks are now like calling it a genocide at this point, I guess.

Isn't that interesting?

You know, yeah.

If only we had been here, you know, nineteen months ago.

Yeah, exactly.

Saying the same shit we were saying.

Oh, God.

But hey, I'm glad that they're saying it.

That's good.

People need to hear it.

All right.

Thank you so much.

This has been, you know, this has been great.

And I'm sure that I would love to have you on again.

I would love to come on again.

And I won't wait nine years next or eight years until next time.

You're doing great.

All right.

All right.

Thank you, Nora.