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Rachel Corrie: Parents & Friend Remember U.S. Activist Crushed by Israeli Bulldozer in Rafah in 2003
This post was originally published on this site
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.
Saturday marked the 21st anniversary of the death of U.S. peace activist Rachel Corrie. She was crushed to death by an Israeli military bulldozer in Rafah on March 16th, 2003, three few days before the U.S. attacked Iraq. Rachel was 23 years old. She was an Evergreen College student from Olympia, Washington. She went to Gaza with the International Solidarity Movement, which formed after Israel and the United States rejected a proposal by then-U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson to place international human rights monitors in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
Rachel Corrie was crushed to death by a U.S. Caterpillar bulldozer that was run by the Israeli military. She had been trying to prevent the demolition of the home of a Palestinian pharmacist in Rafah near the border with Egypt. Eyewitnesses say she was wearing a fluorescent orange vest. She was in full view of the bulldozer’s driver, as photographs show.
In June 2003, the Israeli military concluded her death was, quote, “an accident.” Human rights groups condemned the Israeli’s army investigation as a sham. A year later, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, former Secretary of State Colin Powell’s chief of staff, told Rachel’s parents he did not consider the Israeli investigation credible, thorough or transparent.
Rachel’s parents initiated lawsuits against Israel, the Israeli military and the Caterpillar corporation, but a U.S. federal appeals court ruled they could not sue the company because that would force the judiciary to rule on a foreign policy issue decided by the White House. In its ruling, the three-judge panel said the case could not go to court without implicitly questioning, and even condemning, U.S. foreign policy towards Israel. In 2015, the Israeli Supreme Court rejected an appeal from Rachel Corrie’s parents after they had sued the Israeli Ministry of Defense for a symbolic $1 in damages, and upheld a lower court’s ruling that cleared the military of responsibility, saying Rachel’s death had taken place in a, quote, “war zone.”
In a minute, we’ll be joined by Rachel’s parents and one of her colleagues with the International Solidarity Movement. But first, this is Rachel Corrie in her own words, from a documentary about her by Concord Media called Death of an Idealist.
RACHEL CORRIE: I’ve been here for about a month and a half now, and this is definitely the most difficult situation that I have ever seen. In the time that I’ve been here, children have been shot and killed. On the 30th of January, the Israeli military bulldozed the two largest water wells, destroying over half of Rafah’s water supply. Every few days, if not every day, houses are demolished here.
AMY GOODMAN: For more, we’re joined in Olympia, Washington, by Rachel’s parents, Cindy and Craig Corrie. After she was killed, they devoted their lives to what Rachel Corrie lived and died for, and founded the nonprofit Rachel Corrie Foundation for Peace and Justice. Cindy is the foundation’s president; Craig, the treasurer. They’ve also gone on interfaith peace missions to Israel, Gaza, the West Bank. Also with us in London is Tom Dale, a writer who’s worked in civilian protection, conflict analysis and journalism in the Middle East. His new piece for Jacobin is headlined “Rachel Corrie Gave Her Life for Palestine.” In 2002 and ’03, he, too, volunteered in Rafah with the International Solidarity Movement, alongside Rachel. On March 16th, 2003, a little after 5 p.m. in Rafah, he witnessed this U.S.-made bulldozer run over Rachel. He held her hand as she lay dying on a gurney in the ambulance taking her to the hospital.
Welcome to all of you. I want to begin with Tom. Describe that day. What motivated you both? And what motivated Rachel to stand there in front of this bulldozer with that fluorescent vest on as it came forward and crushed her?
TOM DALE: So, to give some context and background, the International Solidarity Movement group in Rafah at that time were mostly concerned to protest against the and oppose the demolition of homes that were being carried out on the border with Rafah and Egypt. And there was no allegation, in the overwhelming majority of cases, that these homes were being demolished due to anything that the people who lived in them had done. They were being demolished simply because Israel had decided that its soldiers based along that border strip wanted a tactical advantage, and that involved clearing a 300-meter strip full of family homes, the overwhelming majority of which were refugees.
Now, at the particular time Rachel was killed, a bulldozer turned toward one of those homes, the home of Dr. Samir Nasrallah. And Dr. Samir and his young family were friends of Rachel. She had stayed with them. She had lived with them. She knew them intimately. And she placed herself in between the bulldozer and the home, as we had done so many times before and, indeed, as we had done earlier in that day. And what we had learned, over the course of several months, is that the bulldozer drivers were able to see us, were able to recognize what would be too far, and they were able to stop or withdraw at an appropriate moment.
But on this case, the bulldozer driver just kept on going. Rachel was sort of forced to climb up a kind of roiling mound of earth in front of the bulldozer. I think you heard earlier Cindy quoted saying that her head was above the top of the bulldozer blade. That’s absolutely accurate. It’s almost as if the driver would have been able to look her in the eye. But as he kept going, ultimately, she lost her footing, and she was sucked down into the earth and terribly, horrifically died. At that point, I ran to call for an ambulance. I learned then that Dr. Samir himself had seen the incident, too, and had called the ambulance.
And we had been living with these families. As I say, Rachel had been living with the Nasrallahs. I had been living with other families along the border. And that was an expression of a really deep commitment to the principle of shared humanity. And Rachel took on the cause of those families as if that cause was her own, and she made that cause her own. And that’s what motivated us to take that stand.
AMY GOODMAN: You quote Rachel’s diary. It’s absolutely amazing. She wrote this, of course, before her death, and she said she had a dream. Do you have it in front of you? Or I’ll read it.
TOM DALE: Please do read it. Thank you.
AMY GOODMAN: Rachel wrote she dreamed that she was falling — quote, “falling to my death off of something dusty and smooth and crumbling like the cliffs in Utah, but I kept holding on, and when each new foothold or handle of rock broke, I reached out as I fell and grabbed a new one. I didn’t have time to think about anything — just react … And I heard, ‘I can’t die, I can’t die,’ again and again in my head.” If you can talk about what it means to hear Mohammed right now talking about how Rachel is remembered, Tom, and what happened to you as — you went in the ambulance with her to the hospital?
TOM DALE: Yeah, that’s correct. So, I mean, regrettably, by the time we got to the hospital, Rachel was dead. As I say, like, on the way, I had been sort of just steadying her hands on her abdomen. You know, of course, it was, like, a terrible moment. We were all distraught. We knew Rachel. We cared for her greatly. She was one of us. And then, immediately, of course, we were pushed into the cycle of responding to the series of bizarre lies that were being told by the Israeli Defense Forces.
And in terms of what it means to hear Mohammed say that right now, well, of course, you know, I’m very grateful. It means a lot, given that, of course, the situation that Mohammed and his family and all of Rafah are in now is so terrible, that he even has a thought for someone who was standing there 20 years ago is really remarkable and speaks to sort of the power of Rachel’s message. And I really hope we can sort of repay that in the international community and use this just as an opportunity, as another spur to direct attention back to Rafah, direct our energies back toward putting the pressure on politically to protect Rafah, and Gaza, in general, from a future onslaught.
AMY GOODMAN: Tom, I want to bring in Rachel’s parents, Cindy and Craig Corrie, speaking from Olympia, Washington. That’s where Rachel went to college. In fact, I think I met both of you for the first time back in 2003. I just happened to be giving the graduation address at Evergreen College that year. It was the largest graduation class ever. But it was missing one student who was supposed to be graduating, and it was your daughter Rachel. And so, Cindy, you gave an address to the graduating class, as well. Twenty-one years later, I offer my condolences again to you. And I’m wondering your thoughts as you listen to Mohammed, on the ground in Rafah, talking about your daughter and what she has meant for the people of Rafah, Gaza and beyond?
CINDY CORRIE: Thank you, Amy.
I had a bit of difficulty hearing Mohammed, but what I know from our experience this past 21 years is that for Palestinians everywhere, Rachel’s story has been very important. They tell us over and over again how much it meant that someone from Olympia, Washington, that had no reason to be in Gaza, except that she had learned about the situation and knew that they were greatly in need, that she came to them, and that she stood to try to prevent the demolition of the — the many demolitions of Palestinian homes that were happening at the time.
And Rachel connected with the community. That was important to her. She worked with women’s groups, with children’s groups. Not only were homes threatened, but wells were threatened. She slept at the wells with other activists. Rachel was there with Tom and with others from the U.K., from the U.S., and people from other countries during the early time that she spent in Gaza.
We’re also often approached by younger people who have heard the story, some when they were children that remember it, and tell us that it changed their lives, changed the course of the direction of their lives, that they then felt that there were meaningful things that they needed to look for, meaningful ways to contribute in this world.
AMY GOODMAN: And, Craig, your thoughts, as well, 21 years later, with Rafah once again in the news, with President Biden saying that an Israeli invasion of Rafah is a red line, but not saying there would be consequences if the Israeli military went over that line?
CRAIG CORRIE: Yes, when I was listening today, I was thinking that, for me — and it’s different for other members of the family, but we were using Rachel’s memory and what she was doing as a portal for people to understand — from the United States, to understand what was going on in Gaza, what was happening to her friends, and, partially, the horror that’s going on now. And I think at this point we have to be looking directly at the Palestinians and hearing their voices, as you allowed today.
There’s never been a red line that any American president has — well, that’s not quite true — but, recently, enforced against Israel. And to me, as long as Israel is coveting the lands and the homes of Palestinian people, there will not be peace in Israel and Palestine, and neither the Israeli people nor the Palestinian people will be safe.
So, I think, really, the difference between Rachel, Tom, the rest of the ISM, the difference between them and the rest of us, is that they refused to look away when all of this was going on, and the rest of the world did look away.
AMY GOODMAN: You know, one of the ways Rachel’s words have been preserved was because of Alan Rickman. And, Craig, I just read a piece you wrote after the actor and director Alan Rickman died. You wrote it in The Guardian. And you talked about what a difference he made in making those words into that play, My Name Is Rachel Corrie, based on her diaries and her emails. I’m looking at a piece — six weeks before opening night, the theater announced it was indefinitely postponing the production, the move that was widely criticized as an act of censorship, finally opened in October 2006. And if either of you could comment on the canceling of people in this country and around the world now who express concern about what’s happening in Gaza, and also talk about your trip to meet with the Nasrallahs, the Palestinian pharmacist’s family, whose home Rachel was protecting?
CRAIG CORRIE: That’s a lot to talk about.
AMY GOODMAN: Yeah.
CRAIG CORRIE: I’ll start with Alan and the play. And I guess in that article, what I thought of is that that play, what people won’t understand about it is that it’s actually funny. He managed to get Rachel’s sense of humor. And he edited those words along with Katharine Viner, and we’re grateful to both of them. But he managed to get Rachel’s humor into the play, and I think that brought her personality. It made her human. And I’m grateful forever for that.
The play has been seen on every continent in the world, except Antarctica. And we, Cindy and I, have seen that, I think, in maybe six countries, in seven different languages. So, it was delayed in opening in the United States, but it had two runs in Great Britain, in London, before that. And it did eventually open in New York City. And since then, it’s been also all over the United States. And actually, there’s going to be a reading in a few days in Seattle again. So, I’ll let Cindy talk, I think, more about the other.
CINDY CORRIE: We visited the Nasrallah family in September of 2003. It was our first trip to the region. It was very important for Craig and me to see the place where Rachel had stayed and where her life ended. We traveled to Rafah with the help of our Palestinian friends, who met us at Erez Crossing. And we were taken — the very first day that we were there, we were taken to the area where the Nasrallah home still stood. And it was the only home left in that entire area. What I remember saying and feeling at the time was that house was sitting in a sea of rubble, because the Israeli military was destroying homes wholesale. Later, Human Rights Watch said that happened in the absence of military necessity. And over 16,000 people, I think, from 2000 to 2004, lost their homes at the time.
That day, we sat on the floor in the Nasrallah family’s home and ate a wonderful lunch meal with Umm Kareem, with Abu Kareem and with their very young children at the time. We were taken to the spot by Abu Kareem, showing us exactly where Rachel had been when she was killed. It was a very emotional day. We hugged. We saw the rooms in the house where Rachel had spent time with the children and the family. They pulled off their Arabic-English dictionary from the shelf and had me read, try to pronounce the words in Arabic, and they told me how Rachel was so much better at it than I was. And we saw also the space at the foot of the Nasrallah parents’ bed, which was at the backside of the house, where Rachel would sleep, she said, in a puddle of blankets with the children, because military people and machines would drive through that border area at night, and they would shoot into the houses. And there were bullet holes marking the entire home.
AMY GOODMAN: We just have 30 seconds, and I just wanted to get your final comment, either Cindy or Craig, on what is happening today.
CRAIG CORRIE: Amy, that family did everything they could to hold onto that house. They were eventually forced out of that house, and some of them went through seven other houses. Now we hear that they want out of Gaza. After 21 years of trying to hold onto their homes and their lives and their futures and their pasts in Gaza, like so many people, they want to survive, and they want out. I can’t imagine what drives them to do that, but that’s the situation in Gaza.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you both for being with us, again, Craig and Cindy Corrie, speaking to us from Olympia, Washington, and Tom Dale — we’ll link to your piece in Jacobin, “Rachel Corrie Gave Her Life for Palestine” — joining us from London. That does it for our show. I’m Amy Goodman. This is Democracy Now! Check out our website at democracynow.org.
“Anti-Zionism Is Not Antisemitism”: Palestinian Prof. Shalhoub-Kevorkian on Hebrew Univ. Suspension
This post was originally published on this site
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.
Over a hundred leading European academics have signed a petition condemning what they call “Israel’s [systematic] annihilation,” unquote, of the educational system in the Gaza Strip. The petition, which was led by the group Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, condemns Israel’s targeting of academics, educational institutions and cultural heritage sites in Gaza. As The Intercept recently reported, within the first hundred days of its war on Gaza, the Israeli military systematically destroyed every single university in the Gaza Strip. Nearly 100 university deans and professors and three university presidents in Gaza have been killed in the Israeli assault. Meanwhile, over 4,300 students and more than 230 teachers, professors and administrators have been killed.
Meanwhile, Hebrew University in Jerusalem is coming under criticism for suspending an internationally renowned Palestinian professor for saying Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian is a world-renowned feminist scholar whose extensive work has focused on the impacts of militarization, surveillance and violence on the lives of Palestinian women and children. She made the remarks in an interview on Israel’s Channel 12 on Monday, where she also said it was time to, quote, “abolish Zionism.”
The next day, the university issued a statement saying, quote, “As a proud Israeli, public, and Zionist institution, the Hebrew University strongly condemns Professor Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s recent shocking and outrageous statements. … To ensure a safe and conducive environment for our students on campus, the university has decided to suspend Professor Shalhoub-Kevorkian from teaching activities, effective immediately,” they wrote.
Professor Shalhoub-Kevorkian had been under pressure to resign from the university since late October, when she joined over 1,000 academics around the world in signing a petition calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. Following her signature, the leadership of Hebrew University sent her a formal letter denouncing her and pressuring her to resign. Yesterday, Palestinian students on the Hebrew University campus demonstrated against professor Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s suspension on campus and chanted the Palestinian national song “Mawtini” in protest.
Well, professor Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian joins us now on the program, academic, feminist, author and activist, based in Jerusalem. Up until her suspension, she was chair at the Faculty of Law, Institute of Criminology and the School of Social Work and Public Welfare at Hebrew University. She’s also the chair in global law at Queen Mary University of London. She’s the author of several books, including Security Theology, Surveillance and the Politics of Fear, as well as Militarization and Violence Against Women in Conflict Zones in the Middle East: The Palestinian Case Study. Today she’s joining us from London, where she just flew to.
Professor Shalhoub-Kevorkian, welcome to Democracy Now! Explain your decision to leave and what exactly happened.
NADERA SHALHOUB–KEVORKIAN: Yes. Hi, Amy. Thank you for having me at Democracy Now!
Actually, I’m not the chair of the Faculty of Law. I’m a member of the faculty, and I’m a researcher that studies state crime and genocide and victims of abuse of power. The decision was made by the university to suspend me after a podcast that happened that asked me about my field of expertise. Let me remind you, I’m a scholar that studies state crime. I’m a scholar that studies genocide. I’m a scholar that really looks at the mundane, at the effect of what goes on, and that studies antiracism from a feminist perspective.
So, what happened is that I — actually, the letter was publicized before I read it, and nobody have contacted me. And this is not the first time that the Hebrew University, you know, publicized. They did it in October, when I said that what is happening in Gaza is a genocide. Of course, two months afterward, the ICJ is looking at it, and they even issued provisional measures against the state of Israel.
But I also need to remind us all that the academic space is a space that’s supposed to be a space whereby we share our ideas, the multiplicity of ideas. And then the Hebrew University is sending me a letter saying — telling me that this academic institution, which is the Hebrew University, is a Zionist institution, which means if my narrative is an anti-Zionist — and my narrative is clearly anti-Zionist, and I am calling for abolishing Zionism, because I see it as very violent towards the people and as causing criminalities, and, therefore, I look at state criminality. And the fact that the university is not only sending me a letter, it’s — the dean of the School of Social Work actually called my students, and he told them, in a very forceful manner, that I’m out, that I have no place at the Hebrew University, which was my academic institution for the past 30 years. This is a place where I taught, where I did the research.
The question remains whether — what is teachable, what is what should be written, what is publishable, what is what we can speak as scholars that are studying state criminality, as opposing to what is going on, as opposing to what the state is doing — is not accepted, so they throw us out of the university. And this is the same policy that the state of Israel is doing outside. So, it’s silencing. It’s preventing people from speaking. It’s threatening. It’s punishing. And it’s also done in a very degraded and undignifying manner. Calling my students a day before the end of the first semester and telling me, “You’re suspended,” is something that is beyond any expectations. But this is — and stressing it’s a Zionist institution. “You can’t abide by these rules, you’re out.”
My only concern, Amy, today is the safety of students, the safety of my students, Jewish and Palestinian, that are standing against genocide, standing against the war, refusing to see the continous and ongoing atrocities. My really concern is the silencing of dissent all over the world, because we see it in academic institutions. The question: If we think that academic institutions should work according and by the orders from the state, I don’t know why we’re having academic institutions. Academia and research requires that we’re attentive to details, to what goes on to the life of women, men, children. And I am really concerned today. And, of course, I must clearly state that the behavior of the university is a behavior that is threatening the safety of our students, the safety of colleagues that are speaking against the genocide, and my own personal safety as a person who lives in Jerusalem and the safety of my family.
AMY GOODMAN: Professor, can you tell us what you mean by your call for abolishing Zionism?
NADERA SHALHOUB–KEVORKIAN: Yes. Well, I see that the Zionist entity started by displacing people, by causing major harms, by massacres that were documented by historians, by sociologists, by political scientists and international relations. I see Zionism that have used the law and ruled by law, and not the rule of law. I have seen the Zionists causing major harm since 1948, since the Palestinian Nakba, in relation to what goes on. And it’s not only my position, the position of many scholars that see it, see Zionism, as a very racialized and racist ideology, that is about the life and the viability of one group and the exclusion and the marginalization and death of the other group.
I think we can definitely live together without the Zionist ideology, if we can talk more in terms and in concepts of justice, of equality, of fairness, of multiplicity of ideas, and not using one ideology to claim that we are here and the rest should be excluded. And I think, Amy, you see it today clearly in Gaza, what is going on today in Gaza, when babies are dying, decomposed in incubators. And I write about unchilding. I write about the attacks on children. I write about the attacks on communities. What we see in Gaza, turning it into a collective grave, is really very telling. It’s really the culmination of a very, very, very violent ideology. So I guess it’s time to reconsider the Zionist ideology, because it started, since the early ’90s, with violence, with dispossession and with lots of massacres, and to call for a discussion that is away from that very racist and very unfair and inhumane ideology.
AMY GOODMAN: Professor Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, can you talk about the concept you put forward of unchilding?
NADERA SHALHOUB–KEVORKIAN: Yes. You know, working for years with children, watching them, watching them interacting in a space that is so militarized like East Jerusalem — I live, I reside in East Jerusalem; I raised my three beautiful daughters in Jerusalem — and the effect of the system looks at Palestinian children as others, but looking at children as unchilded. And I see it today. Only two days ago, Rami, a 12-year-old from mukhayam Shuafat, was shot and killed without even a reason. He was playing. It’s Ramadan.
So, what I explain in my book on unchilding is that, number one, our children are political capital in the hands of the state. The state looks at them and clearly defines them as nonchildren. They can be killed. They can be incarcerated. You can prevent them from studying. And you see, again, the culmination of unchilding, you see it today in Gaza. But look at occupied East Jerusalem, occupied East Jerusalem, the number of children that were arrested, that were incarcerated, the number of children in the West Bank, in Hebron, and so on. So, childhood in Palestine requires a different political lens. Childhood in Palestine, as in other settler-colonial contexts — and I need to remind the viewers that this is a settler-colonial entity. There’s structure, and it’s not an event here and an event there. It’s built about the indiginization of the settler and the eviction of the native. And it’s embedded in the logic of elimination, so the elimination of our kids in various modes, whether by incarcerating them — and you see the necro-carceral machinery against them in every place — or by controlling their way of living, of moving, or controlling — and these are — again, these are topics that I have discussed, I have covered for over 30 years as a professor at the Hebrew University at both the Faculty of Law and School of Social Work.
And my question always, and especially now, when they decided — when they took this decision, is: How can a scholar of state crime, a scholar that is studying victims of abuse of power, that is talking to them, listening to the voices of the kids, listening to the voices of fathers that are trying to safeguard, parents that are also being unparented — how can a scholar like me, who’s doing and researching, sit and be silent in times of genocide? How can you silence the voices of dissent all over the world? And I think that, as an academic institution, they really need to rethink their steps.
And until now, Amy, nobody have talked to me, not the president nor director. All they do is they send letter, and the letters are sent to the media, and then I learn about it. And I must tell you that, you know, this time, sending the letter to the media, and all of a sudden everybody is talking about me, my photo, my pictures, is very scary, in an area that is heavily militarized.
And maybe I should stress one thing that is important. The Hebrew University is highly militarized. Our students — I mean, Jewish students are walking around with rifles, with guns. And Palestinian students are extremely worried and fearful. And as a Palestinian professor, I talk about those things. I study. I’m running a major study, funded by the Israeli Science Foundation, on the issue of the effect of enrolling in a university that speaks and thinks in a specific way. But I thought that they will be open to multiplicity of ideas, since I was writing about those issues for year. And this is me. This is my career. This is my analysis for year.
But let me again stress that I’m really worried today, because yesterday one of the students that participated in the demonstration was arrested. I’m very worried. They were taking pictures of the different students that were there. And mind you, there were professors. There were Jewish and Palestinian professors. There were Jewish and Palestinian students demonstrating against the decision. And framing them and shaming them and attacking them, the way they’re doing to me, and trying to punish is something that should not be done in an academic institution.
AMY GOODMAN: And how do you answer the charge from Prime Minister Netanyahu on down that to be anti-Zionist is to be antisemitic, Professor Shalhoub-Kevorkian?
NADERA SHALHOUB–KEVORKIAN: Well, anti-Zionism is totally not antisemitism. Anti-Zionism is to refuse to accept violence, and this is not antisemitism. Anti-Zionism is to refuse to accept continuous dispossession, is to refuse to accept this ideology of supremacy, is to refuse to accept the securitized ideas of one group against the other — the opposite, totally opposite, actually, to think through the lens of antisemitism — is to remember never to frame any group or anybody as ontologically below being, below human. And that’s exactly what Netanyahu, what Zionism is doing to the Palestinian. It’s actually anti-Palestinianism and antisemitism are very close. I guess that I think that we need to always remember that abuses of power is antisemitism, that framing one group as nonhuman is antisemitism, and this is what Zionism is doing to us.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to break, but I’m going to ask you to stay on, as well, as we go to an Israeli scholar, Maya Wind, who has written the book Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom. We’ve been talking with the renowned Palestinian academic, professor Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, who is a feminist author and activist, usually based in Jerusalem, recently suspended by Hebrew University after teaching there for decades. She’s the author of a number of books, including Security Theology, Surveillance and the Politics of Fear and Militarization and Violence Against Women in Conflict Zones in the Middle East: The Palestinian Case Study. Stay with us.
“Island of Access”: VP Harris Visits MN Abortion Clinic in Historic First Amid Growing Restrictions
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This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: Vice President Kamala Harris visited a Planned Parenthood clinic in Saint Paul, Minnesota, Thursday, believed to be the first time a president or a vice president has publicly toured an abortion clinic. The visit was the latest in a nationwide tour by Harris to highlight reproductive rights. Minnesota has been a haven for women seeking abortion since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, ushering in restrictive laws and outright bans in more than a dozen states. Last year, Minnesota passed legislation that enshrined abortion rights into state law.
In her remarks outside the Planned Parenthood clinic yesterday, Harris referred to the attacks on reproductive health as a “very serious health crisis” and lauded Minnesota’s efforts to protect abortion rights.
VICE PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS: Right now in our country we are facing a very serious health crisis. And the crisis is affecting many, many people in our country, most of whom are, frankly, silently suffering after the United States Supreme Court took a constitutional right that had been recognized from the people of America, from the women of America.
In states around our country, extremists have proposed and passed laws that have denied women access to reproductive healthcare. And the stories abound. I have heard stories of and have met with women who had miscarriages in toilets, women who were being denied emergency care because the healthcare providers there, at an emergency room, were afraid that because of the laws in their state, that they could be criminalized, sent to prison for providing healthcare.
So, I’m here at this healthcare clinic to uplift the work that is happening in Minnesota as an example of what true leadership looks like.
AMY GOODMAN: For more, we’re joined by two guests. In Minneapolis, Megan Peterson is with us, executive director of Gender Justice Action, a reproductive rights group working in Minnesota and North Dakota. She’s joining us from Minneapolis. We’re also joined by Michele Goodwin, a professor of constitutional law and global health policy at Georgetown University, founding director of the Center for Biotechnology and Global Health Policy, author of Policing the Womb: Invisible Women and the Criminalization of Motherhood. She’s joining us from Marrakech, Morocco.
We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Megan, let’s begin with you. You were invited to yesterday’s event, though you weren’t there. It is historic, believed to be the first time a vice president or president publicly toured through an abortion clinic. Talk about its significance and the fact that it’s happening in Minnesota, how important Minnesota is when it comes to abortion rights in this country.
MEGAN PETERSON: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me.
Yeah, it was a historic day and a historic visit and a really important opportunity to highlight the role Minnesota plays, especially in our region. We’re an island of access. We’re surrounded by states that have either banned abortion or severely limited access to abortion. And Minnesota has gone in the opposite direction.
Following the Dobbs decision, a district court judge made a decision in a lawsuit that Gender Justice, our (c)(3) organization, filed, removing all of the restrictions on abortion in the state, enjoining those laws just weeks after the Dobbs decision came down. And then voters delivered the first-ever reproductive freedom trifecta to our state Legislature that following November. And that Legislature and the governor took action swiftly, with a lot of momentum, to both remove those restrictions off the books but really undo, you know, over 50 years’ worth of anti-abortion chipping away at abortion rights from our state laws. And that included removing abortion from the criminal code, you know, defunding anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers, passing a shield law that would protect patients and providers who were providing care in the state to people coming from out of state. And so, we really have been able to kind of reset, reset the table, in a way, on putting abortion back where it belongs, in the context of part of the full spectrum of pregnancy-related care.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about how many — I mean, you don’t have to give us, obviously, an exact number — the fact that so many people are coming in from around the country to get abortions in Minnesota, and the incredible efforts of grassroots groups, like Gender Justice Action, to help people get that kind of access?
MEGAN PETERSON: Yeah, it has been a tremendous effort and, frankly, a big strain on the healthcare system here. We only have, I think, about seven abortion clinics right now, and some of those only provide medication abortion. We have a virtual provider who only provides medication abortion across the state, and then a handful of brick-and-mortar clinics. And their capacity has really been strained by the number of people needing to travel to the state. And, you know, although we acknowledge our role in the region, the reality is that regions really rely on where there are direct flights. So, very often people are flying into Minneapolis, which is a hub airport, and so we’re seeing people from across the country. Clinics are reporting anywhere from 25% increases to, I think, yesterday, the medical director of Planned Parenthood said they’ve seen a 100% increase at their clinic. And so, we are absolutely having to absorb, you know, patients who have nowhere else to go, who are fleeing the repressive laws and restrictions in their own states to get necessary, time-sensitive, critical healthcare.
AMY GOODMAN: And can you talk about your lawsuit, Gender Justice Action, which happened before Roe v. Wade was overturned, though you, well, pretty much predicted it?
MEGAN PETERSON: Yeah. So, in 2019, we filed a lawsuit called Doe v. Minnesota. It challenged altogether, basically, all of the restrictions that had built up over the years, everything from a 24-hour waiting period to parental notification, a mandated biased script that doctors had to read to patients, a restriction on who could provide abortions. We were limited only to physicians, even though advanced practice clinicians, registered nurses, you know, are perfectly capable of providing especially first-trimester abortion. So, we challenged all those laws when we filed the lawsuit in May of 2019.
We also at the same time brought together a broad cross-movement coalition of now over 30 organizations and advocates, who helped to raise public awareness about the laws. We found that most Minnesotans were completely unaware of the number of restrictions on abortion at that time. They really believed that Minnesota was an access state, a healthcare values state and a place where they really couldn’t imagine that there had been this chipping away of rights for so long.
And so, by both bringing the lawsuit and working in coalition to help raise public awareness, we did end up winning that lawsuit, just weeks after the Dobbs decision came down in mid-July of 2022. And that really then, you know, set the stage, I think, for the way that we were able to both engage in the midterm elections and move right into the following session in January of 2023. So, that foundation that we laid, starting in 2019, and really kind of ringing the bell that Roe was on the chopping block — Roe, we absolutely anticipated and expected that it was going to go down. It was only a matter of time. And it was critical to do the work to undo the barriers and the restrictions that had built up over time, in preparation for knowing Minnesota was going to need to serve a broader swath of the country.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to bring professor Michele Goodwin into this conversation, professor of constitutional law and global health policy at Georgetown University, founding director of the Center for Biotechnology and Global Health Policy. If you can talk about the president and the vice president — it’s interesting that the first female vice president is the one, the highest elected leader in this land, to do this kind of public tour of an abortion clinic — of them elevating the discussion, particularly of abortion, President Biden also focusing on it in the State of the Union address, and go from abortion care to the whole controversy around IVF and the connections you see?
MICHELE GOODWIN: Well, it’s a pleasure to be on with you again, Amy. Thank you for the invitation.
So, what we see now is a response to something that is tragic in the United States. And it’s worth remembering that Roe v. Wade in 1973 was a seven-to-two opinion. Five of those seven justices were Republican-appointed. And I mention that, and the fact that Justice Blackmun, who wrote the opinion in Roe v. Wade, was appointed by Nixon, as just giving a sense of just how dramatic it is that this Supreme Court gutted Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, being a case that affirmed Roe, being affirmed by Justices O’Connor, Justice Kennedy, also Republican appointees. It really gives a sense of just how dramatic it is, what the Supreme Court did in 2022, and also what it looks like in terms of the political backdrop.
So, that the vice president visited a Planned Parenthood and that we have the president of the United States articulating that this is fundamental healthcare is no different than it was 50 years ago, where that was understood in Roe v. Wade, and what we’ve understood since that time. Even the United States Supreme Court in 2016, in a case called Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, acknowledged that a woman is 14 times more likely to die carrying a pregnancy to term than by having an abortion. So, when the vice president went to Minnesota, emphasized this is healthcare, she’s absolutely right. When she spoke to the tragedies unfolding in the United States since the Dobbs decision, she is right. I mean, there are states that have now proposed the death penalty against women and girls that would have an abortion. Those proposals have not come to fruition. But in Louisiana and South Carolina, there are bills that have been proposed for that. Already in Texas, for doctors, they risk 99 years’ incarceration, $100,000 fine, losing their medical license, if they help patients who are near death trying to obtain abortion, because we know in that state, even though there are exceptions, those exceptions are incredibly hard to overcome. So, by visiting Minnesota, it was urgent.
And you mentioned Alabama, the Alabama Supreme Court, which recently ruled that embryos have the same status as children and that those who harm embryos, such as the demise of an embryo, could in fact face wrongful death charges. This is — some would say that this is insane. This is a level of the United States going in a direction that is antithetical to science, antithetical to health, antithetical to human rights.
In this backdrop, we’ve seen a woman in Ohio who was being prosecuted in the wake of having a miscarriage, her toilet busted open, the search for fecal remains to find fetal remains. You know, I could just lay out across the country a trail of horrors, of parents being prosecuted by helping their children who have wanted to have an abortion, a trail of horrors that includes girls going into elementary and middle school now as mothers because they live in states that ban abortion.
And just thinking about Minnesota itself, where it’s really important to understand what’s taking place is not only that there are people who are coming in for this necessary healthcare, this is a backdrop like Jim Crow, a backdrop like American slavery. And I’m not being hyperbolic in saying that. People are literally having — women are having to leave, flee states where they risk death, where they risk bodily harm in order to get healthcare that will save their lives. And I think that’s really important that we emphasize over and over again, because there’s a rhetoric that suggests something other than that.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to ask you, Professor Goodwin, about that federal court, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, decision upholding a Texas law that prevents young people from confidentially accessing birth control from clinics. The court ruled clinics can be required to notify and get consent from parents. Planned Parenthood criticized the ruling, saying it marks a “significant and dangerous departure from decades of precedent that has allowed all young people to confidentially get basic health care like birth control through Title X.” Explain the significance. It came right before this visit of Vice President Harris.
MICHELE GOODWIN: Again, to understand what this means in historical context, Title X was pushed into law by George H.W. Bush. He championed Title X. George H.W. Bush, that being the first of the Bush presidents. His father, Prescott Bush, was the treasurer at Planned Parenthood. So, when we’re talking about decades of a standard of recognizing that this is healthcare — and, in fact, George H.W. Bush, when championing Title X, which has been decimated in Texas and also decimated, we see, by the 5th Circuit — but when George H.W. Bush, decades ago, was confronted about the question about access to reproductive healthcare for the poorest of Americans, he said this is fundamental healthcare, this is public health. Nixon said the same thing.
And so, part of what we’re seeing now is something that is a dramatic — really dramatic step away from what we understood as basic care for human beings in the United States. We are so far from that principle in these days, and a principle of understanding that teenagers, too, deserve healthcare. To give you some example about how strange it is, how chilling it is, we would have the 5th Circuit having no problem with seeing a teenager become pregnant and become a parent at 13 and 14 and 15 years old. And yet, at the same time, protecting their health through what could help prevent a pregnancy, we see obstacles in those ways. And this is something that is completely disconnected to what has been a tradition of understanding healthcare access over the last half-century in the United States.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to end by asking Megan Peterson about a connection to what’s going on in Minnesota right now, from Hawaii to Michigan to Minnesota, the issue of the “uncommitted” vote. People might not necessarily make this connection, but the “uncommitted” vote, Democrats voting “uncommitted” in the primaries to show their objection to the Biden administration and President Biden not directly calling for a permanent ceasefire. What do you see as that connection, as executive director of the Gender Justice Action?
MEGAN PETERSON: Yeah, well, I see that the voters in Minnesota, the voters turned out on the primary election day to register. Just under 19%, over 45,000 Democrats in the state, voted “uncommitted” in our presidential primary. And, you know, those are a core part of the Democratic base, and they’re very much many of the very same people who delivered the reproductive freedom trifecta in 2022. And I think that it’s really important that the campaign not take those voters for granted and also not consider that Minnesota voters are very educated and sophisticated and able to make the connections between the importance of bodily autonomy and reproductive justice here at home, as well as recognize the reproductive injustices happening in Gaza with, you know, the death of over 12,000 children, with pregnant women and people facing a shortage of healthcare, experiencing stillbirths and having cesarean sections and deliveries without anesthesia. You know, these are grave injustices and incompatible with the values of reproductive justice, which not only include the ability to decide not to become a parent or to end a pregnancy, but also the ability and the right to parent the children you have and to have children in safe and thriving communities.
And so, you know, I’m hoping and I believe that the administration and the campaign is really paying attention to those votes and to those voters. In 2016, Hillary Clinton only won the state by just over 1.5%. And, you know, we are going to need to work hard. And I am hoping that the campaign will change course and the administration will change course to really recognize that they need to walk the talk both domestically and in their foreign policy.
AMY GOODMAN: Megan Peterson, executive director of Gender Justice Action, speaking to us from Minneapolis, and Michele Goodwin, professor of constitutional law and global health policy at Georgetown University and the founding director of the Center for Biotechnology and Global Health Policy, author of Policing the Womb: Invisible Women and the Criminalization of Motherhood.
Next up, we will speak with the Israeli author Maya Wind. Her new book, Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom. But first, we’ll go to Palestinian professor Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, who was just suspended by Hebrew University. Stay with us.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: “ballad of a homeschooled girl” by Olivia Rodrigo, who last month launched the Fund4Good campaign to support reproductive health freedom. This week, Rodrigo collaborated with reproductive rights groups to hand out free emergency contraceptives, abortion access resources and contraceptives at her show in St. Louis, Missouri.
Headlines for March 15, 2024
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Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer offered his most scathing condemnation yet of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his far-right government, calling for new elections in Israel. He spoke from the Senate floor.
Majority Leader Chuck Schumer: “If President — Prime Minister Netanyahu’s current coalition remains in power after the war begins to wind down, and continues to pursue dangerous and inflammatory policies that test existing U.S. standards for assistance, then the United States will have no choice but to play a more active role in shaping Israeli policy by using our leverage to change the present course.”
Schumer is a staunch defender of Israel and the highest-ranking elected Jewish American lawmaker.
Meanwhile, the Biden administration imposed sanctions on two Israeli settler outposts and three individual settlers in the occupied West Bank who have harassed and attacked Palestinians.
In South Africa, Naledi Pandor, minister of international relations and cooperation, warned South African citizens they will face prosecution if they serve in the Israeli military as it commits war crimes in Gaza. “When you come home, we’re going to arrest you,” Pandor said.
Ramesh Srinivasan: TikTok Crackdown, Fueled by Anti-China Sentiment, Misses Real Threat of Big Tech
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This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: In a rare show of bipartisanship, House lawmakers overwhelmingly voted Wednesday to force the social media app TikTok’s Chinese owner, ByteDance, to either sell the app or face a ban in the United States.
REP. BETH VAN DUYNE: On this vote, the yeas are 352, the nays are 65, one present. Two-thirds being in the affirmative, the rules are suspended. The bill is passed.
AMY GOODMAN: TikTok has more than 170 million users in the United States alone, the largest TikTok audience in the world. This is Republican — this is Congressmember Raja Krishnamoorthi, but first, Republican Mike Gallagher.
REP. MIKE GALLAGHER: TikTok is a threat to our national security because it is owned by ByteDance, which does the bidding of the Chinese Communist Party. … This bill, therefore, forces TikTok to break up with the Chinese Communist Party. It does not apply to American companies.
REP. RAJA KRISHNAMOORTHI: Unfortunately, when TikTok has appeared before Congress, whether it’s before the House Energy and Commerce Committee or otherwise, it has not been candid, my friends. It has not been candid. First, TikTok said its data is not accessible to China-based ByteDance employees. False. China-based employees routinely access this data.
AMY GOODMAN: Last voice is Democrat Congress — the Democratic Congressmember Raja Krishnamoorthi.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: The bill that could lead to a TikTok ban was also backed by Democrats. This is House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.
MINORITY LEADER HAKEEM JEFFRIES: I don’t support a ban on TikTok. The legislation did not ban TikTok. It’s simply a divestiture of TikTok so that this social media platform can be owned by an American company that would protect the data and the privacy of the American consumer from malignant foreign interests like the Chinese Communist Party.
AMY GOODMAN: Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson Wednesday said he’ll, quote, “push” for the Senate to approve the bill, which President Joe Biden has said he would sign. But other Republicans oppose the bill. This is Georgia Congressmember Marjorie Taylor Greene.
REP. MARJORIE TAYLOR GREENE: There are dangers that lie ahead in this. This is really about controlling Americans’ data. And if we cared about Americans’ data, then we would stop the sale of Americans’ data universally, not just with China.
AMY GOODMAN: The bill is the greatest threat to TikTok since the Trump administration, when Trump tried to implement a TikTok crackdown, that was struck down in the federal courts. But he did flip his position, Trump did, last week after he met with the billionaire investor, GOP megadonor Jeff Yass, who has a 15% stake in TikTok’s parent company, has spent a fortune paying for lobbyists to preserve TikTok.
Meanwhile, rights groups like the ACLU say such a ban would violate the right to free speech.
For more, we’re joined by Ramesh Srinivasan, professor of information studies at UCLA, host of the podcast Utopias, author of Beyond the Valley: How Innovators Around the World Are Overcoming Inequality and Creating the Technologies of Tomorrow, joining us from Oaxaca, Mexico.
Ramesh, thanks so much for being back with us. We only have a few minutes. You do not approve of this ban. Can you talk about your concerns with it?
RAMESH SRINIVASAN: Absolutely not. It’s disenfranchising to many young people in the United States. It is alienating to them. And it is singling out TikTok and China without any evidence whatsoever that they are engaging in any nefarious or spying activity or are any more extreme in their algorithms and their ways in which they polarize American users than any of the Big Tech companies, you know, which we’ve discussed before. So, it’s absurd and it’s theatrical for people like Mark Zuckerberg, etc., to be paraded in front of Congress multiple times, and even publicly shamed, while the actual legislation that takes roots is one that singles out TikTok, primarily because it’s a Chinese company, and possibly because it’s so prominent amongst Americans and young people in general in this country.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Ramesh, could you talk about how this fits into the way that other countries have responded to TikTok? India was the first one to ban it. And when India did, it had the highest number of TikTok users in the world. And the fact that so many European governments, the EU, Britain and other countries, Australia, as well, Canada have placed severe restrictions on the use of TikTok on their private mobile devices? Have they done the same thing for Facebook or Twitter, now X?
RAMESH SRINIVASAN: I mean, in the Indian case, it seemed to play directly to geopolitical tensions with China. China is being set up, as you all report, all the time, as some sort of antagonist, a sort of folly for whatever actions the state would wish to take at this point. That does nothing good to deal with the real issues. If we look at most abuses that Big Tech corporations, and specifically social media platforms, have laid upon the world, we’re primarily talking about companies like Facebook, Google and so on. So, there’s really little to no evidence of this. It’s incredible that a bipartisan group of lawmakers would want to take a major instrument of free speech, but also of conversation and discussion, especially amongst young people, who feel so, again, alienated and out of touch with the political apparatuses of the United States, to just sort of take them off the platform altogether. There’s really no evidence to back that up. What we need is expansive, comprehensive digital rights legislation that really applies to every social media company and gives Americans power over their own data.
AMY GOODMAN: You know, one of the things that Trump said — I mean, he switched his position after meeting with the billionaire TikTok investor, and so he’s now against the ban. But he said, you know, it will give more power to what he calls the enemy of the people, Facebook.
RAMESH SRINIVASAN: Right.
AMY GOODMAN: But, in fact, talk about that and how it then privileges U.S. and other companies, but they still can invade the privacy of people, sell off all of our data, and what exactly a privacy bill would look like that you, Professor Srinivasan, would approve of.
RAMESH SRINIVASAN: Thank you for asking that question. So, it’s politically astute for Trump, and it’s sort of such a strange and surreal world, as Mehdi Hasan was just discussing with you all, when we see sort of right-wingers take on — I wouldn’t really say antiwar positions, but more isolationist positions. Trump recognizes that younger people are on this platform, and he recognizes that now with more and more alienated young people, that he could potentially gain their support. Facebook, in particular, but many Big Tech platforms have committed repeated abuses around the world, from labor practices to the hiring of exploited content moderators, to mass-scale disinformation that has been directly tied to genocides in other parts of the world, to support of authoritarian leaders and so on. So, Trump’s critique of Facebook is merely based upon it not supporting his voice writ large all the time and the extreme content that he always puts out.
But what we really need is to recognize that everything we do in our lives — and this is not just true in the United States or here in Oaxaca, Mexico, but all around the world — almost everything we do is turned into data, into what we call digital footprints. But that data is being harvested by private corporations and states, right? Basically everybody but ourselves. It’s basically a taking away of democratic power. So what we need to do is to really have power ourselves and have constituencies have power over controlling what data is being collected about us, how it’s being retained, how it’s being aggregated, how it’s being bought and sold.
And what we really need is expansive legislation, again, that deals with the economic outcomes of digital rights. You know, we need to support data unions, paying people so people have even equity in data-grabbing corporations. Note: Many of these corporations started on the backs of an internet that all of us paid for, American taxpayers, and use our roads, our infrastructures, without paying taxes. So what we need are economic rights. We need personal rights, so we control what is datafied about us. We need to ask big questions about what should not be datafied and what should not be in the hands of these shady corporations, recognizing that our data are bought and sold, and that can be very, very much a violation of free competition. We’ve seen a lot of Federal Trade Commission acts.
And, basically, what this has been doing is to wield us. It’s influencing our behavior. It’s influencing our lives. It’s constructing our consumption. It’s even constructing our sense of desire. And as we’ve talked about, it’s reinforcing discrimination through discriminatory algorithms and discriminatory practices. So, what we need are rights-based legislation that are not just about individual rights or privacy, but really bleed into the question of the economic rights we all have and need to have around the planet in our digital lives.
AMY GOODMAN: We want to thank you so much for being with us, Ramesh Srinivasan, professor of information studies at UCLA, host of the podcast Utopias, author of Beyond the Valley, speaking to us from Oaxaca, Mexico. A hilarious side note is so many young people were calling into Congress saying, “What’s Congress? What’s a senator?” because TikTok said they should call. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.
Mehdi Hasan on the Risk of the Media Normalizing Trump’s Fascism & Dangers of TikTok Ban
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This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, Mehdi, let’s go to another issue that is, of course, a pressing one this year — namely, the U.S. elections. You’ve said that the problem with the media here is that it’s singularly unable to cover Trump properly — Trump, of course, who is now the nominee. If you could explain what you mean by that, and what the effects of that are going to be this year?
MEHDI HASAN: Phew, yeah, good question, Nermeen. Well, I would say three quick things. Number one, as I mentioned at the start, one of the reasons I set up Zeteo is because I believe there is a fascist threat to the United States from the modern Republican Party, and including its standard-bearer, its now official candidate, Donald J. Trump, and we need to speak very clearly about what that fascist threat is. We need to be able to say the F-word, not dance around it, not pretend Donald Trump is a normal candidate, not normalize his extremism and racism and bigotry and authoritarianism. And what we’re seeing right now, Nermeen, after 2020, when we saw some improvement in our coverage of Trump, I feel like we’ve regressed back to 2016 in many ways, in treating Trump as a spectacle, in benefiting from whatever ratings he gives media organizations, in asking him softball questions. He recently did an interview on CNBC. It was embarrassing to watch. That is a huge problem. So that’s number one.
Number two, you know, there is this issue right now, for example, where, look, we have this issue of access journalism, where a lot of journalists still need to be able to get guests on air from both parties, and there is this both-sidesism, which is very frustrating. And the media needs to really think long and hard about how we do journalism. The old conventions, the old norms cannot apply. There are not two sides to every story. There are not two sides to Holocaust denial or climate change or elections. You know, there’s not two sides to whether Joe Biden won the last election or not. We need to be clear-eyed about what’s in front of us, and, again, have some respect for our viewers and our readers and tell them what is going on, that one of our two major parties has been fully radicalized and is now in bed with white supremacists and is spreading some of the worst QAnon conspiracy theories out there. Let’s be plain about that.
And number three, in terms of the dangers, I mean, we have skin in the game. This idea that the media should be impartial, no, we should have a bias towards truth. We should have a bias towards free press, because the media’s survival is at stake here. If Donald Trump wins the election, what do you think is going to happen to our free press? He’s not hiding it. He has talked openly about wanting to come after NBC and MSNBC for treason. His allies, like Kash Patel, have talked about going after the media criminally and civilly. One of his allies, Mike Davis, says if Trump makes him AG, he’s going to put me in Guantánamo Bay. This is the kind of open authoritarian rhetoric that we’re hearing from the Republican side. And the media cannot pretend that this is normal or not a threat to our very freedoms.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to finally ask you about what we’re taking up in our next segment, the bill to ban TikTok. The measure is going to now be taken up by the Senate. But I wanted to ask you about a particular aspect of it. Palestinian rights activists say Israel’s war on Gaza has galvanized anti-TikTok sentiment in conservative and centrist lawmakers. In a leaked post-October 7th audio recording, Jonathan Greenblatt, head of the Anti-Defamation League, can be heard saying, quote, “We have a TikTok problem,” referencing declining public support for Israel among younger people. The progressive group RootsAction also noted that AIPAC is the top donor to Congressmember Mike Gallagher, who authored the TikTok ban bill. And this is coming as Donald Trump flip-flopped. He flipped his position on the bill within the last week, now opposing the ban, after recently meeting with Republican megadonor billionaire Jeff Yass, whose company holds a 15% stake in ByteDance, interestingly, a major donor to right-wing Israeli think tanks. Mehdi, just your take on that aspect of this?
MEHDI HASAN: Well, first off, Donald Trump doesn’t believe in anything other than himself, so he should really be supporting this bill. It aligns with his anti-China positions. But he’s not, because he might be making money out of not supporting this bill. So that’s just a reminder that Donald Trump believes in nothing but himself.
In terms of the TikTok problem, clearly it’s a problem. We discussed earlier, if you have a sanitized war on mainstream media, but you have TikTok showing younger Americans exactly what’s going on, in terms of the barbarism, the brutality, the mass killing, the starvation, the war crimes, then, of course, that’s a problem for the Israeli PR machine, clearly, and for the pro-Israel factions in the United States.
And it’s ironic when we say, “Oh, well, it’s actually not to do with Israel. It’s to do with China. It’s to do with not knowing what’s going on inside of this company.” Come on. Look, I have an issue with Chinese ownership of TikTok. Of course I do, like anyone else. I’m no fan of China. But the idea that other social media companies are somehow transparent or doing a better job on moderation, come on. I mean, look at Elon Musk, just this week, canceled Don Lemon’s new show on his platform, on Twitter, on X, because he was asked some moderately tough questions by Don Lemon. This is the kind of — you know, this is the power of Big Tech in America and billionaires who are controlling our public squares. The idea that dealing with TikTok will help us challenge misinformation or extremism online is just a complete lie.
AMY GOODMAN: Mehdi Hasan, we want to thank you so much for being with us, and we’re going to continue this discussion about TikTok in our next segment. Mehdi Hasan, journalist, author, editor-in-chief, now CEO of the new media company Zeteo, until January was a host on MSNBC and Peacock. All the best to you, Mehdi.
MEHDI HASAN: Thank you, Amy.
AMY GOODMAN: Next up, the U.S. House has passed a bill that could ban TikTok. Back in 15 seconds.
Mehdi Hasan on Genocide in Gaza, the Silencing of Palestinian Voices in U.S. Media & Why He Left MSNBC
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NERMEEN SHAIKH: The death toll in Gaza has topped 31,300. At least five people were killed on Wednesday when Israel bombed an UNRWA aid distribution center in Rafah — one of the U.N. agency’s last remaining aid sites in Gaza. The head of UNRWA called the attack a, quote, “blatant disregard to international humanitarian law.”
This comes as much of Gaza is on the brink of famine as Israel continues to limit the amount of aid allowed into the besieged territory. At least 27 Palestinians have died of starvation, including 23 children.
Meanwhile, Al Jazeera is reporting six Palestinians were killed in Gaza City when Israeli forces opened fire again on crowds waiting for food aid. Over 80 people were injured.
In other news from Gaza, Politico reports the Biden administration has privately told Israel that the U.S. would support Israel attacking Rafah as long as it did not carry out a large-scale invasion.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, we begin today’s show looking at how the U.S. media is covering Israel’s assault on Gaza with the acclaimed TV broadcaster Mehdi Hasan. In January, he announced he was leaving MSNBC after his shows were canceled. Mehdi was one of the most prominent Muslim voices on American television. In October, the news outlet Semafor reported MSNBC had reduced the roles of Hasan and two other Muslim broadcasters on the network, Ayman Mohyeldin and Ali Velshi, following the October 7th Hamas attack on Israel. Then, in November, MSNBC announced it was canceling Hasan’s show shortly after he conducted this interview with Mark Regev, an adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. This is an excerpt.
MEHDI HASAN: You say Hamas’s numbers — I should point out, just pull up on the screen, in the last two major Gaza conflicts, 2009 and 2014, the Israeli military’s death tolls matched Hamas’s Health Ministry death tolls, so — and the U.N., human rights groups all agree that those numbers are credible. But look, your wider point is true.
MARK REGEV: Can I challenge that?
MEHDI HASAN: We shouldn’t —
MARK REGEV: Will you allow me —
MEHDI HASAN: We shouldn’t —
MARK REGEV: — to challenge that, please? Can I just challenge that?
MEHDI HASAN: Briefly, if you can.
MARK REGEV: I’d like to challenge that.
MEHDI HASAN: Briefly.
MARK REGEV: I’ll try to be as brief as you are, sir. Those numbers are provided by Hamas. There’s no independent verification. And secondly, more importantly, you have no idea how many of them are Hamas terrorists, combatants, and how many are civilians. Hamas would have you believe that they’re all civilians, that they’re all children.
And here we have to say something that isn’t said enough. Hamas, until now, we’re destroying their military machine, and with that, we’re eroding their control. But up until now, they’ve been in control of the Gaza Strip. And as a result, they control all the images coming out of Gaza. Have you seen one picture of a single dead Hamas terrorist in the fighting in Gaza? Not one.
MEHDI HASAN: Yeah, but I have —
MARK REGEV: Is that by accident, or is that —
MEHDI HASAN: But I have, Mark —
MARK REGEV: — because Hamas can control — Hamas can control the information coming out of Gaza?
MEHDI HASAN: Mark, but you asked me a question, and you said you would be brief. I haven’t. You’re right. But I have seen lots of children with my own lying eyes being pulled from the rubble. So —
MARK REGEV: Now, because they’re the pictures Hamas wants you to see. Exactly my point, Mehdi.
MEHDI HASAN: And also because they’re dead, Mark. Also —
MARK REGEV: They’re the pictures Hamas wants — no.
MEHDI HASAN: But they’re also people your government has killed. You accept that, right? You’ve killed children? Or do you deny that?
MARK REGEV: No, I do not. I do not. I do not. First of all, you don’t know how those people died, those children.
MEHDI HASAN: Oh wow.
AMY GOODMAN: “Oh wow,” Mehdi Hasan responded, interviewing Netanyahu adviser Mark Regev on MSNBC. Soon after, MSNBC announced that he was losing his shows. Since leaving the network, Mehdi Hasan has launched a new digital media company named Zeteo.
Mehdi, welcome back to Democracy Now! It’s great to have you with us. I want to start with that interview you did with Regev. After, you lost your two shows, soon after. Do you think that’s the reason those shows were canceled? Interviews like that?
MEHDI HASAN: You would have to ask MSNBC, Amy. And, Amy and Nermeen, thank you for having me on. It’s great to be back here after a few years away. Look, the advantage of not being at MSNBC anymore is I get to come on shows like this and talk to you all. You should get someone from MSNBC on and ask them why they canceled the shows, because I can’t answer that question. I wish I knew. But there we go.
The shows were canceled at the end of November. I quit at the beginning of January, because I wanted to have a platform of my own. I couldn’t really spend 2024, one of the most important news years of our lives — genocide in Gaza, fascism at the door here in America with elections — couldn’t really spend that being a guest anchor and a political analyst, which is what I was offered at MSNBC while I was staying there. I wanted to leave. I wanted to get my voice back. And that’s why I launched my own media company, as you mentioned, called Zeteo, which we’ve done a soft launch on and we’re going to launch properly next month. But I’m excited about all the opportunities ahead, the opportunity to do more interviews like the one I did with Mark Regev.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, Mehdi, could you explain Zeteo? First of all, what does it mean? And what is the gap in the U.S. media landscape that you hope to fill? You’ve been extremely critical of the U.S. media’s coverage of Gaza, saying, quite correctly, that the coverage has not been as consistent or clear as the last time we saw an invasion of this kind, though far less brutal, which was the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
MEHDI HASAN: Yeah, it’s a great question. So, on Zeteo, it’s an ancient Greek word, going back to Socrates and Plato, which means to seek out, to search, to inquire for the truth. And at a time when we live in a, some would say, post-truth society — or people on the right are attempting to turn it into a post-truth society — I thought that was an important endeavor to embark upon as a journalist, to go back to our roots.
In terms of why I launch it and the media space, look, there is a gap in the market, first of all, on the left for a company like this one. Not many progressives have pulled off a for-profit, subscription-based business, media business. We’ve seen it on the right, Nermeen, with, you know, Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire and Bari Weiss’s The Free Press, and even Tucker Carlson has launched his own subscription-based platform since leaving Fox. And on the progressive space, we haven’t really done it. Now, of course, there are wonderful shows like Democracy Now! which are doing important, invaluable journalism on subjects like Gaza, on subjects like the climate. But across the media industry as a whole, sadly, in the U.S., the massive gap is there are not enough — I don’t know how to put it — bluntly, truth tellers, people who are willing to say — and when I say “truth tellers,” I don’t just mean, you know, truth in a conventional sense of saying what is true and what is false; I’m saying the language in which we talk about what is happening in the world today.
Too many of my colleagues in the media, unfortunately, hide behind lazy euphemisms, a both-sides journalism, the idea that you can’t say Donald Trump is racist because you don’t know what’s in his heart; you can’t say the Republican Party is going full fascist, even as they proclaim that they don’t believe in democracy as we conventionally understand it; we can’t say there’s a genocide in Gaza, even though the International Court of Justice says such a thing is plausible. You know, we run away from very blunt terms which help us understand world. And I want to treat American consumers of news, global consumers of news — it’s a global news organization which I’m founding — with some respect. Stop patronizing them. Tell them what is happening in the world, in a blunt way.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, Mehdi, talk about this. I mean, in your criticism of the U.S. media’s coverage, in particular, of Israel’s assault on Gaza — I mean, of course, you have condemned what happened, the Hamas attack in Israel on October 7th. You’ve also situated the attack in a broader historical frame, and you’ve received criticism for doing that. And in response, you’ve said, “Context is not causation,” and “Context is not justification.” So, could you explain why you think context, history, is so important, and the way in which this question is kind of elided in U.S. media coverage, not just of the Gaza crisis, but especially so now?
MEHDI HASAN: So, I did an interview with Piers Morgan this week. And if you watch Piers Morgan’s shows, he always asks his pro-Palestinian guests or anyone criticizing Israel, you know, “Condemn what happened on October 7th.” It’s all about October the 7th. And what happened on October 7th was barbarism. It was a tragedy. It was a terror attack. Civilians were killed. War crimes were carried out. Hostages were taken. And we should condemn it. Of course we should, as human beings, if nothing else.
But the world did not begin on October the 7th. The idea that the entire Middle East conflict, Israel-Palestine, the occupation, apartheid, can be reduced to October 7th is madness. And it’s not just me saying that. You talk to, you know, leading Israeli peace campaigners, even some leading Israeli generals, people like Shlomo Brom, who talk about having to understand the root causes of a people under occupation fighting for freedom. And it’s absurd to me that in our media industry people should try and run away from context. My former colleagues Ali Velshi and Ayman Mohyeldin, who Amy mentioned in the introduction, they were on air on October the 7th as news was coming in of the attacks, and they provided context, because they’re two anchors who really understand that part of the world. Ayman Mohyeldin is perhaps the only U.S. anchor who’s ever lived in Gaza. And they came under attack online from certain pro-Israel people for providing context. This idea that we should be embarrassed or ashamed or apologetic as journalists for providing context on one of the biggest stories in the world is madness. You cannot understand what is happening in the world unless we, unless you and I, unless journalists, broadcasters, are explaining to our viewers and our listeners and our readers why things are happening, where forces are coming from, why people are behaving the way they do. And I know America is a country of amnesiacs, but we cannot keep acting as if the world just began yesterday.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to ask you about a piece in The Intercept — you also used to report for The Intercept — the headline, “In Internal Meeting, Christiane Amanpour Confronts CNN Brass About ‘Double Standards’ on Israel Coverage.” It’s a really interesting piece. They were confronting the executives, and “One issue that came up,” says The Intercept, “repeatedly is CNN’s longtime process for routing almost all coverage relating to Israel and Palestine through the network’s Jerusalem bureau. As The Intercept reported in January, the protocol — which has existed for years but was expanded and rebranded as SecondEyes last summer — slows down reporting on Gaza and filters news about the war through journalists in Jerusalem who operate under the shadow of Israel’s military censor.” And then it quotes Christiane Amanpour, identified in a recording of that meeting. She said, “You’ve heard from me, you’ve heard my, you know, real distress with SecondEyes — changing copy, double standards, and all the rest,” Amanpour said. The significance of this and what we see, Mehdi? You know, I’m not talking Fox right now. On MSNBC —
MEHDI HASAN: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: — and on CNN, you rarely see Palestinians interviewed in extended discussions.
MEHDI HASAN: So, I think there’s a few issues there, Amy. Number one, first of all, we should recognize that Christiane Amanpour has done some very excellent coverage of Gaza for CNN in this conflict. She’s had some very powerful interviews and very important guests on. So, credit to Christiane during this conflict. Number two —
AMY GOODMAN: International —
MEHDI HASAN: — I think U.S. media organizations —
AMY GOODMAN: — I just wanted to say, particularly on CNN International, which is often not seen —
MEHDI HASAN: Very good point.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: — on CNN domestic.
MEHDI HASAN: Very good — very good point, Amy. Touché.
The second point, I would say, is U.S. media organizations, as a whole, are engaging in journalistic malpractice by not informing viewers, listeners, readers that a lot of their coverage out of Israel and the Occupied Territories is coming under the shadow of an Israeli military censor. How many Americans understand or even know about the Israeli military censor, about how much information is controlled? We barely understand that Western journalists are kept out of Gaza, or if when they go in, they’re embedded with Israeli military forces and limited to what they can say and do. So I think we should talk about that in a country which kind of prides itself on the First Amendment and free speech and a free press. We should understand the way in which information comes out of the Occupied Territories, in particular from Gaza.
And the third point, I would say, is, yeah, Palestinian voices not being on American television or in American print is one of the biggest problems when it comes to our coverage of this conflict. When we talk about why the media is structurally biased towards one party in this conflict, the more powerful party, the occupier, we have to remember that this is one of the reasons. Why are Palestinians dehumanized in our media? This is one of the reasons. We don’t let people speak. That’s what leads to dehumanization. That’s what leads to bias.
We understand it at home when it comes to, for example, Black voices. In recent years, media organizations have tried to take steps to improve diversity on air, when it comes to on-air talent, when it comes to on-air guests, when it comes to balancing panels. We get that we need underrepresented communities to be able to speak. But when it comes to foreign conflicts, we still don’t seem to have made that calculation.
There was a study done a few years ago of op-eds in The New York Times and The Washington Post on the subject of Israel-Palestine from 1970 to, I think it was, 2000-and-something, and it was like 2% of all op-eds in the Times and 1% in the Post were written by Palestinians, which is a shocking statistic. We deny these people a voice, and then we wonder why people don’t sympathize with their plight or don’t — aren’t, you know, marching in the street — well, they are marching in the streets — but in bigger numbers. Why America is OK and kind of, you know, blind to the fact that we are complicit in a genocide of these people? Because we don’t hear from these people.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, Mehdi, I mean, explain why that’s especially relevant in this instance, because journalists have not been permitted access to Gaza, so there is no reporting going on on the ground that’s being shown here. I mean, dozens and dozens of journalists have signed a letter asking Israel and Egypt to allow journalists access into Gaza. So, if you could talk about that, why it’s especially important to hear from Palestinian voices here?
MEHDI HASAN: Well, for a start, Nermeen, much of the imagery we see on our screens here or in our newspapers are sanitized images. We don’t see the full level of the destruction. And when we try and understand, well, why are young people — why is there such a generational gap when it comes to the polling on Gaza, on ceasefire, why are young people so much more antiwar than their elder peers, part of the reason is that young people are on TikTok or Instagram and seeing a much less sanitized version of this war, of Israel’s bombardment. They are seeing babies being pulled from the rubble, limbs missing. They are seeing hospitals being — you know, hospitals carrying out procedures without anesthetic. They are seeing just absolute brutality, the kind of stuff that U.N. humanitarian chiefs are saying we haven’t seen in this world for 50 years.
And that’s the problem, right? If we’re sanitizing the coverage, Americans aren’t being told, really, aren’t being informed, are, again, missing context on what is happening on the ground. And, of course, Israel, by keeping Western journalists out, makes it even easier for those images to be blocked, and therefore you have Palestinian — brave Palestinian journalists on the ground trying to film, trying to document their own genocide, streaming it to our phones. And we’ve seen over a hundred of them killed over the last five months. That is not an accident. That is not a coincidence. Israel wants to stamp out independent voices, stamp out any kind of coverage of its own genocidal behavior.
And therefore, again, you’re able to have a debate in this country where the political debate is completely disconnected to the public debate, and the public debate is completely misinformed. I’m amazed, Nermeen, when you look at the polling, that there’s a majority in favor of a ceasefire, that half of all Democrats say this is a genocide. Americans are saying that to pollsters despite not even getting the full picture. Can you imagine what those numbers would look like if they actually saw what was happening on the ground?
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, I want to go to what is unfolding right now in Gaza. You said in a recent interview that in the past Israel was, quote, “mowing the lawn,” but now the Netanyahu government’s intention is to erase the population of Gaza. So let’s go to what Prime Minister Netanyahu said about the invasion of Rafah, saying it would go ahead and would last weeks, not months. He was speaking to Politico on Sunday.
PRIME MINISTER BENJAMIN NETANYAHU: We’re not going to leave them. You know, I have a red line. You know what the red line is? That October 7th doesn’t happen again, never happens again. And to do that, we have to complete the destruction of the Hamas terrorist army. … We’re very close to victory. It’s close at hand. We’ve destroyed three-quarters of Hamas fighting terrorist battalions, and we’re close to finishing the last part in Rafah, and we’re not going to give it up. … Once we begin the intense action of eradicating the Hamas terrorist battalions in Rafah, it’s a matter of weeks and not months.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, Mehdi, your response to what Netanyahu said and what the Israelis have proposed as a safe place for Gazans to go — namely, humanitarian islands?
MEHDI HASAN: So, number one, when you hear Netanyahu speak, Nermeen, doesn’t it remind you of George Bush in kind of 2002, 2003? It’s very — you know, invoking 9/11 to justify every atrocity, claiming that you’re trying to protect the country, when you, yourself, your idiocy and your incompetency, is what led to the attacks. You know, George Bush was unable to prevent 9/11, and then used 9/11 to justify every atrocity, even though his incompetence helped allow 9/11 to happen. And I feel the same way: Netanyahu allowed the worst terror attack, the worst massacre in Israel to happen on his watch. Many of his own, you know, generals, many of his own people blame him for this. And so, it’s rich to hear him saying, “My aim is to stop this from happening again.” Well, you couldn’t stop it from happening the first time, and now you’re killing innocent Palestinians under the pretense that this is national security.
Number two, again George Bush-like, claiming that the war is nearly done, mission is nearly accomplished, that’s nonsense. No serious observer believes that Hamas is finished or that Israel has won some total victory. A member of Netanyahu’s own war cabinet said recently, “Anyone who says you can absolutely defeat Hamas is telling tall tales, is lying.” That was a colleague of Netanyahu’s, in government, who said that.
And number three, the red line on Rafah that Biden suppposedly set down and that Netanyahu is now mocking, saying, “My own red line is to do the opposite,” what on Earth is Joe Biden doing in allowing Benjamin Netanyahu to humiliate him in this way with this invasion of Rafah, even after he said he opposes it? I mean, it’s one thing to leak stuff —
AMY GOODMAN: Mehdi —
MEHDI HASAN: — over a few months —
AMY GOODMAN: — let’s go to Biden speaking on MSNBC. He’s being interviewed by your former colleague Jonathan Capehart, as he was being questioned about Benjamin Netanyahu and saying he’s hurting Israel more than helping Israel.
PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: He has a right to defend Israel, a right to continue to pursue Hamas. But he must, he must, he must pay more attention to the innocent lives being lost as a consequence of the actions taken. He’s hurting — in my view, he’s hurting Israel more than helping Israel by making the rest of the world — it’s contrary to what Israel stands for. And I think it’s a big mistake. So I want to see a ceasefire.
AMY GOODMAN: And he talked about a, well, kind of a red line. If you can address what Biden is saying and what he proposed in the State of the Union, this pier, to get more aid in, and also the dropping — the airdropping of food, which recently killed five Palestinians because it crushed them to death, and the humanitarian groups, United Nations saying these airdrops, the pier come nowhere near being able to provide the aid that’s needed, at the same time, and the reason they’re doing all of this, is because Israel is using U.S. bombs and artillery to attack the Palestinians and these aid trucks?
MEHDI HASAN: Yeah, it’s just so bizarre, the idea that you could drop bombs, on the one hand, and then drop aid, on the other, and you’re paying for both, and then your aid ends up killing people, too. It’s like some kind of dark Onion headline. It’s just beyond parody. It’s beyond belief.
And as for the pier, as you say, it does not come anywhere near to adequately addressing the needs of the Palestinian people, in terms of the sheer scale of the suffering, half a million people on the brink of famine, over a million people displaced. Four out of five of the hungriest people in the world, according to the World Food Programme, are in Gaza right now. The idea that this pier would, A, address the scale of the suffering, and, B, in time — I mean, it’s going to take time to do this. What happens to the Palestinians who literally starve to death, including children, while this pier is being built? Finally, I would say, there’s reporting in the Israeli press, Amy, that I’ve seen that suggests that the pier idea comes from Netanyahu, that the Israeli government are totally fine with this pier, because it allows them still to control land and air access into Gaza, which is what they’ve always controlled and which in this war they’ve monopolized.
The idea that the United States of America, the world’s only superpower, cannot tell its ally, “You know what? We’re going to put aid into Gaza because we want to, and you’re not going to stop us, especially since we’re the ones arming you,” is bizarre. It’s something I think Biden will never be able to get past or live down. It’s a stain on his record, on America’s conscience. The idea that we’re arming a country that’s engaged in a “plausible genocide,” to quote the ICJ, is bad enough. That we can’t even get our own aid in, while they’re bombing with our bombs, is just madness. And by the way, it’s also illegal. Under U.S. law, you cannot provide weaponry to a country which is blocking U.S. aid. And by the way, it’s not me saying they’re blocking U.S. aid. U.S. government officials have said, “Yes, the Israeli government blocked us from sending flour in,” for example.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, Mehdi, let’s go to the regional response to this assault on Gaza that’s been unfolding with the kind of violence and tens of thousands of deaths of Palestinians, as we’ve reported. Now, what has — how has the Arab and Muslim world responded to what’s going on? Egypt, of course, has repeatedly said that it does not want displaced Palestinians crossing its border. The most powerful Muslim countries, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the Emirates, if you can talk about how they’ve responded? And then the Axis — the so-called Axis of Resistance — Houthis, Hezbollah, etc. — how they have been trying to disrupt this war, or at least make the backers of Israel pay a price for it?
MEHDI HASAN: So, I hear people saying, “Oh, we’re disappointed in the response from the Arab countries.” The problem with the word “disappointment” is it implies you had any expectations to begin with. I certainly didn’t. Arab countries have never had the Palestinians’ backs. The Arab — quote-unquote, “Arab street” has always been very pro-Palestinian. But the autocratic, the despotic, the dictatorial rulers of much of the Arab world have never really had the interests of the Palestinian people at their heart, going back right to 1948, when, you know, Arab countries attacked Israel to push it into the sea, but, actually, as we know from historians like Avi Shlaim, were not doing that at all, and that some of them, like Jordan, had done deals with Israel behind the scenes. So, look, Arab countries have never really prioritized the Palestinian people or their needs or their freedom. And so, when you see some of these statements that come out of the Arab world at times like this, you know, you have to take them with a shovel of salt, not just a grain.
Also, I would point out the hypocrisy here on all sides in the region. You have countries like Saudi Arabia and the UAE, which were involved in a brutal assault on Yemen for many years, carried out very similar acts to Israel in Gaza in terms of blockades, starvation, malnourishment of the Yemeni children, in terms of bombing of refugee camps and hospitals and kids and school buses. That all happened in Yemen. Arab countries did that, let’s just be clear about that, things that they criticize Israel for doing now. And, of course, Iran, which sets itself up as a champion of the Palestinan people, when Bashar al-Assad was killing many of his own people, including Palestinian refugees, in places like the al-Yarmouk refugee camp, Iran and Russia, by the way, were both perfectly happy to help arm and support Assad as he did that. So, you know, spare me some of the grandiose statements from Middle East countries, from Arab nations to Iran, on all of it. There’s a lot of hypocrisy to go around.
Very few countries in the world, especially in that region, actually have Palestinian interests at heart. If they did, we would have a very different geopolitical scene. There is reporting, Nermeen, that a lot of these governments, like Saudi Arabia, privately are telling Israel, “Finish the job. Get rid of them. We don’t like Hamas, either. Get rid of them,” and that Saudis actually want to do a deal with Israel once this war is over, just as they were on course to do, apparently, according to the Biden administration. We know that other Arab countries already signed the, quote-unquote, “Abraham Accords” with Israel on Trump’s watch.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to ask you about the number of dead Palestinian journalists and also the new U.N. investigation that just accused Israel of breaking international law over the killing of the Reuters video journalist Issam Abdallah in southern Lebanon. On October 13th, an Israeli tank opened fire on him and a group of other journalists. He had just set up a live stream on the border in southern Lebanon, so that all his colleagues at Reuters and others saw him blown up. The report stating, quote, “The firing at civilians, in this instance clearly identifiable journalists, constitutes a violation of … international law.” And it’s not just Issam in southern Lebanon. Well over a hundred Palestinian journalists in Gaza have died. We’ve never seen anything like the concentration of numbers of journalists killed in any other conflict or conflicts combined recently. Can you talk about the lack of outrage of other major news organizations and what Israel is doing here? Do you think they’re being directly targeted, one after another, wearing those well-known “press” flak jackets? It looks like we just lost audio to Mehdi Hasan.
MEHDI HASAN: Amy, I can — I can hear you, Amy, very faintly.
AMY GOODMAN: Oh, OK. So —
MEHDI HASAN: I’m going to answer your question, if you can still hear me.
AMY GOODMAN: Great. We can hear you perfectly.
MEHDI HASAN: So, you’re very faint to me. So, while I speak, if someone want to fix the volume in my ear. Let me answer your question about journalists.
It is an absolute tragedy and a scandal, what has happened to journalists in Gaza, that we have seen so many deaths in Gaza. And the real scandal, Amy, is that Western media, a lot of my colleagues here in the U.S. media, have not sounded the alarm, have not called out Israel for what it’s done. It’s outrageous that so many of our fellow colleagues can be killed in Gaza while reporting, while at home, losing family members, and yet there’s not a huge global outcry. When Wael al-Dahdouh, who we just saw on the screen, from Al Jazeera, loses his immediate family members and carries on reporting for Al Jazeera Arabic, why is he not on every front page in the world? Why is he not a hero? Why is he not sitting down with Oprah Winfrey? I feel like, you know, when Evan Gershkovich from The Wall Street Journal is wrongly imprisoned in Russia, we all campaign for Evan to be released. When Ukrainian journalists are killed, we all speak out and are angry about it. But when Palestinian journalists are killed on a level we’ve never seen before, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, where is the outcry here in the West over the killing of them? We claim to care about a free press. We claim to oppose countries that crack down on a free press, on journalism. We say journalism is not a crime. But then I don’t hear the outrage from my colleagues here at this barbarism in Gaza, where journalists are being killed in record numbers.
Headlines for March 14, 2024
This post was originally published on this site
The House overwhelmingly voted Wednesday in favor of a bill that would force TikTok’s Chinese owner ByteDance to either sell the social media app or face a ban in the U.S. Backers of the bill claim TikTok poses a national security threat and could be used for surveillance by the Chinese government. Rights groups like the ACLU say such a ban would violate the right to free speech. There are around 150 million TikTok users in the U.S. alone. After voting, two of the lawmakers who voted against the measure, Democrats Ro Khanna and Pramila Jayapal, laid out some of the bill’s issues.
Rep. Ro Khanna: “It’s an overly broad bill that I don’t think would stand First Amendment scrutiny. The other issue is that there are a lot of people who make their livelihoods on this.”
Rep. Pramila Jayapal: “There are timeline questions. A hundred and eighty days to sell a company this size is very difficult. What happens to antitrust law? Does it still apply? Does it not apply? And I think, you know, the questions of if this is a de facto ban, I think that is a real problem. And so — but I also have problems — by the way, four countries are named, but if Saudi Arabia buys it, is that fine?”
The measure will now be taken up by the Senate.
Meanwhile, Palestinian rights activists say Israel’s war on Gaza has galvanized anti-TikTok sentiment in conservative and centrist lawmakers. In a leaked post-October 7 audio recording, Jonathan Greenblatt, head of the Anti-Defamation League, can be heard saying, “We have a TikTok problem,” referencing declining public support for Israel among younger people. The progressive group RootsAction also noted that AIPAC is the top donor to Congressmember Mike Gallagher, who authored the TikTok ban bill. This comes as Donald Trump flipped his position on the bill within the last week, now opposing the ban, after recently meeting with GOP megadonor Jeff Yass. Yass’s company holds a 15% stake in ByteDance.
Britfield Counters the Creativity Crisis
For Immediate Release
Rancho Santa Fe, CA 7/5/2023. While America is engulfed in a Creativity Crisis, the Britfield & the Lost Crown series has been countering this trend by offering fast-paced adventure novels that inspire the creative mind, promote critical thinking, encourage collaboration, and foster communication. The writing is active and the vocabulary stimulating, with family and friendship as the narrative drivers. This fresh approach not only entertains readers but educates them by weaving accurate history, geography, and culture into every exciting story. Already in thousands of schools across the nation, Britfield is redefining literature and becoming this generation’s book series.
“It is our belief that all children are gifted and have creative talents which are often dismissed or squandered, because they are not recognized or nurtured. Our schools stigmatize mistakes, censure independent thinking, and criticize individualism. Creative opportunities and programs must be introduced and fostered, because everything flows and flourishes from creativity,”
Author C. R. Stewart
Meanwhile, American Creativity Scores Are Declining: After analyzing 300,000 Torrance results of children and adults, researcher Dr. Kyung Hee Kim discovered that creativity scores have been steadily declining (just like IQ scores) since the 1990s. The scores of younger children, from kindergarten through sixth grade, show the most serious decline. While the consequences are sweeping, the critical necessity of human ingenuity is undisputed: children who were offered more creative ideas on Torrance’s tasks grew up to be entrepreneurs, inventors, doctors, authors, diplomats, and software developers.
Since the 1990s, Schools have:
1. Killed curiosities and passions
2. Narrowed visions and minds
3. Lowered expectations
4. Stifled risk-taking
5. Destroyed collaboration
6. Killed deep thoughts and imagination
7. Forced conformity
8. Solidified hierarchy
Founded on outdated models, most current schools are promoting a “dumbed-down” curriculum where creativity is irrelevant, literacy is deplorable, history is misguided, and geography is abandoned. Instead of nurturing future leaders, our educational system is fostering mindless complacency. Conformity is preferred over ingenuity. Meanwhile, parents are aware of a concerted effort to criticize independent thinking and discourage creativity. They are in search of cultural enrichment and educational opportunities. This has opened the door to alternative options, such as homeschooling, which has grown from 5 million to over 15 million in the last three years.
Educator Roger Schank stated,
“I am horrified by what schools are doing to children. From elementary to college, educational systems drive the love of learning out of kids. They produce students who seem smart because they receive top grades and honors but are in learning’s neutral gear. Some grow up and never find their true calling. While they may become adept at working hard and memorizing facts, they never develop a passion for a subject or follow their own idiosyncratic interest in a topic. Just as alarming, these top students deny themselves the pleasure of play and don’t know how to have fun with their schoolwork.”
George Land conducted a research study to test the creativity of 1,600 children ranging from ages three to five who were enrolled in a Head Start program. The assessment worked so well that he retested the same children at age 10 and again at age 15, with the results published in his book Breakpoint and Beyond: Mastering the Future Today. The proportion of people who scored at the creative Genius Level:
- Among 5-year-olds: 98%
- Among 10-year-olds: 30%
- Among 15-year-olds: 12%
- Same test given to 280,000 adults (average age of 31): 2%
However, Creativity is the #1 most important skill in the world. An IBM poll of 1,500 CEOs identified creativity as the number one leadership competency of the future. According to the World Economic Forum Report, the top three skills in 2022 will be creativity, critical thinking, and complex problem solving. A 2021 LinkedIn report ranked creativity as the #1 most desired skill among hiring managers. An Adobe Survey based on Creativity and Education revealed that 85% of professionals agree creative thinking is essential in their careers, 82% of professionals wish they had more exposure to creative thinking as students, and creative applicants are preferred 5 to 1. Jonathan Plucker of Indiana University reanalyzed Torrance’s data. He found that the correlation to lifetime creative accomplishment was more than three times stronger for childhood creativity than childhood IQ.
As Sir Ken Robinson said,
“We know three things about intelligence. One, it’s diverse. We think about the world in all the ways that we experience it. We think visually, we think in sound, and we think kinesthetically. We think in abstract terms; we think in movement. Secondly, intelligence is dynamic. If you look at the interactions of a human brain, intelligence is wonderfully interactive. The brain isn’t divided into compartments. And three, we can all agree that children have extraordinary capacities for innovation. In fact, creativity often comes about through the interaction of different disciplinary ways of seeing things.”
Our entire educational system is predicated on a questionable hierarchy that places conformity above creativity, and the consequences are that many brilliant, talented, and imaginative students never discover their gifts and therefore fail to realize their true potential. To prepare students for future challenges, education and literature must help children achieve their full potential by learning skills that foster creativity, critical thinking, and independence. The Britfield series is bridging this gap and fulfilling this need.
Lauren Hunter
Devonfield Publishing
Director of Media
[email protected]
www.Britfield.com
Republican prosecutors can subpoena phone data to hunt down 'evidence' of possible abortions
This post was originally published on this site
We are about to see a new wave of anti-abortion terrorism and violence, thanks to a Supreme Court majority that believes individual rights not only ought to flip around according to the whims of each new election but that if the U.S. Constitution makes things awkward, the states can designate private-citizen bounty hunters and evade whatever else the courts might say about it.
Sen. Ron Wyden is dead right when he warns that we’re about to see a new era in which women who seek abortions or who might seek abortions are going to have their digital data hunted down. Much of the hunting will be by Republican-state prosecutors looking to convict women who cross state lines into better, less trashy states to seek abortions that are now illegal in New Gilead. But in states like Texas, it’s likely to be private anti-abortion groups gathering up that data—not just to target women seeking abortion, but as potential source of cash. The $10,000 bounty on Texas women who get abortions after six weeks turns such stalking into a potentially lucrative career.
Sen. Wyden to Gizmodo: “The simple act of searching for ‘pregnancy test’ could cause a woman to be stalked, harassed and attacked. With Texas style bounty laws, and laws being proposed in Missouri to limit people’s ability to travel to obtain abortion care, there could even be a profit motive for this outsourced persecution.”
It’s not just that Republican prosecutors can subpoena data records of pregnant women looking for, for example, evidence that they might have looked up “pregnancy test” or “abortion pills” or “my remaining civil rights.” All of those would constitute “evidence” that woman who had a miscarriage might not have “wanted” her pregnancy—thus paving the way for criminal charges. It’s happened before, despite Roe, and after Roe falls will likely become a rote fixture of red-state prosecutions.
We’re likely to to see such subpoenas become a primary way for conservative state prosecutors to “prove” that American women crossing state lines did so to obtain now-criminalized abortions. “Even a search for information about a clinic could become illegal under some state laws, or an effort to travel to a clinic with an intent to obtain an abortion,” Electronic Privacy Information Center president Alan Butler told The Washington Post.
Republican states have already been examining ways to criminalize such travel. It’s coming, and American women will find that the phones they use to look up reproductive health questions can also be used by prosecutors to hunt them down for asking the wrong questions.
Bounty hunters looking for women to target may not have those same subpoena powers—though heaven knows what the future will bring, in a theocratic state that finds its best legal wisdom from colonial era witch hunters—but they will have the power of extremely amoral data tracking companies on their side. It was revealed just days ago that data broker SafeGraph, slivers of which may be hidden on your own phone inside apps that quietly collect and sell the information they gather on you, specifically offers tracking data for phones visiting Planned Parenthood providers—including the census tracks visitors came from and returned to.
For just $160, SafeGraph has been selling that data to anyone willing to buy it. It’s a trivial investment for bounty hunters eager to cross-reference such clues to find who to next target. It’s also a valuable tool for would-be domestic terrorists, of the sort that are going to be once again emboldened by a Supreme Court nod to their beliefs that not only should abortion be banned, but that activists are justified in attacking those that think otherwise. Nobody can plausibly think far-right violence will decrease, in the bizarre landscape in which they have finally achieved victory in half the states while being rebuffed by the others. It has never happened that way. It never will.
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Another data miner, Placer, tracks Planned Parenthood visitors to their homes and provides the routes they took. Among the apps mining data for Placer is popular tracking app “Life360.”