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How has the media distorted Israel's response to the October 7 Hamas attacks? In this powerful conversation from AJC Global Forum 2025, award-winning journalist and former AP correspondent Matti Friedman breaks down the media bias, misinformation, and double standards shaping global coverage of Israel. Moderated by AJC Chief Communications and Strategy Officer Belle Etra Yoeli, this episode explores how skewed narratives have taken hold in the media, in a climate of activist journalism. A must-listen for anyone concerned with truth in journalism, Israel advocacy, and combating disinformation in today's media landscape. Take Action: Take 15 seconds and urge your elected leaders to send a clear, united message: We stand with Israel. Take action now. Resources: Global Forum 2025 session with Matti Friedman:: Watch the full video. Listen – AJC Podcasts: The Forgotten Exodus: Untold stories of Jews who left or were driven from Arab nations and Iran People of the Pod:  Latest Episodes:  John Spencer's Key Takeaways After the 12-Day War: Air Supremacy, Intelligence, and Deterrence Iran's Secret Nuclear Program and What Comes Next in the Iranian Regime vs. Israel War Why Israel Had No Choice: Inside the Defensive Strike That Shook Iran's Nuclear Program Follow People of the Pod on your favorite podcast app, and learn more at AJC.org/PeopleofthePod You can reach us at: peopleofthepod@ajc.org If you've appreciated this episode, please be sure to tell your friends, and rate and review us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Transcript of the Interview: Manya Brachear Pashman: I've had the privilege of interviewing journalism colleague Matti Friedman: twice on this podcast. In 2022, Matti took listeners behind the scenes of Jerusalem's AP bureau where he had worked between 2006 and 2011 and shared some insight on what happens when news outlets try to oversimplify the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Then in 2023, I got to sit down with Matti in Jerusalem to talk about his latest book on Leonard Cohen and how the 1973 Yom Kippur War was a turning point both for the singer and for Israel.  Earlier this year, Matti came to New York for AJC Global Forum 2025, and sat down with Belle Yoeli, AJC Chief Strategy and Communications Officer. They rehashed some of what we discussed before, but against an entirely different backdrop: post-October 7. For this week's episode, we bring you a portion of that conversation.  Belle Yoeli:   Hi, everyone. Great to see all of you. Thank you so much for being here. Matti, thank you for being here.  Matti Friedman:   Thanks for having me.  Belle Yoeli:   As you can tell by zero empty seats in this room, you have a lot of fans, and unless you want to open with anything, I'm going to jump right in. Okay, great.  So for those of you who don't know, in September 2024 Matti wrote a piece in The Free Press that is a really great foundation for today's discussion. In When We Started to Lie, Matti, you reflect on two pieces that you had written in 2015 about issues of media coverage of Israel during Operation Protective Edge in 2014. And this piece basically talked about the conclusions you drew and how they've evolved since October 7. We're gonna get to those conclusions, but first, I'm hoping you can describe for everyone what were the issues of media coverage of Israel that you first identified based on the experience in 2014? Matti Friedman:   First of all, thanks so much for having me here, and thanks for all of the amazing work that you guys are doing. So it's a real honor for me. I was a reporter for the AP, between 2006 and the very end of 2011, in Jerusalem. I was a reporter and editor. The AP, of course, as you know, is the American news agency. It's the world's largest news organization, according to the AP, according to Reuters, it's Reuters. One of them is probably right, but it's a big deal in the news world.  And I had an inside view inside one of the biggest AP bureaus. In fact, the AP's biggest International Bureau, which was in Jerusalem. So I can try to sketch the problems that I saw as a reporter there. It would take me seven or eight hours, and apparently we only have four or five hours for this lunch, so I have to keep it short. But I would say there are two main problems. We often get very involved. When we talk about problems with coverage of Israel. We get involved with very micro issues like, you call it a settlement. I call it a neighborhood. Rockets, you know, the Nakba, issues of terminology. But in fact, there are two major problems that are much bigger, and because they're bigger, they're often harder to see. One of the things that I noticed at the Bureau was the scale of coverage of Israel. So at the time that I was at the AP, again, between 2006 and the very end of 2011 we had about 40 full time staffers covering Israel. That's print reporters like me, stills photographers, TV crews. Israel, as most of you probably know, is a very small country. As a percentage of the world's surface, Israel is 1/100 of 1% of the surface of the world, and as a percentage of the land mass of the Arab world, Israel is 1/5 of 1%. 0.2%.  And we had 40 people covering it.  And just as a point of comparison, that was dramatically more people than we had at the time covering China. There are about 10 million people today in Israel proper, in China, there are 1.3 billion. We had more people in Israel than we had in China. We had more people in Israel than we had in India, which is another country of about 1.3 billion people. We had more people in Israel than we had in all of the countries of Sub-Saharan Africa. That's 50 something countries. So we had more people in Israel than we had in all of those countries combined. And sometimes I say that to Jews, I say we covered Israel more than we covered China, and people just stare at me blankly, because it's Israel. So of course, that makes perfect sense.  I happen to think Israel is the most important country in the world because I live there. But if the news is meant to be a rational analysis of events on planet Earth, you cannot cover Israel more than you cover the continent of Africa. It just doesn't make any sense. So one of the things that first jumped out at me– actually, that's making me sound smarter than I am. It didn't jump out at me at first. It took a couple of years. And I just started realizing that it was very strange that the world's largest organization had its largest international bureau in the State of Israel, which is a very small country, very small conflict in numeric terms. And yet there was this intense global focus on it that made people think that it was the most important story in the world. And it definitely occupies a place in the American political imagination that is not comparable to any other international conflict.  So that's one part of the problem. That was the scope, the other part was the context. And it took me a while to figure this out, but the coverage of Israel is framed as an Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The conflict is defined in those terms, the Israeli Palestinian conflict, and everyone in this room has heard it discussed in those terms. Sometimes we discuss it in those terms, and that is because the news folks have framed the conflict in those terms. So at the AP bureau in Jerusalem, every single day, we had to write a story that was called, in the jargon of the Bureau, Is-Pals, Israelis, Palestinians. And it was the daily wrap of the Israeli Palestinian conflict. So what Netanyahu said, what Abbas said, rockets, settlers, Hamas, you know, whatever, the problem is that there isn't an Israeli=Palestinian conflict. And I know that sounds crazy, because everyone thinks there is.  And of course, we're seeing conflicts play out in the most tragic way right now in Gaza. But most of Israel's wars have not been fought against Palestinians. Israel has unfortunately fought wars against Egyptians and Jordanians and Lebanese and Iraqis. And Israel's most important enemy at the moment, is Iran, right? The Iranians are not Palestinian. The Iranians are not Arab. They're Muslim, but they're not Arab. So clearly, there is a broader regional conflict that's going on that is not an Israeli Palestinian conflict, and we've seen it in the past year. If we had a satellite in space looking down and just following the paths of ballistic missiles and rockets fired at Israel. Like a photograph of these red trails of rockets fired at Israel. You'd see rockets being fired from Iraq and from Yemen and from Lebanon and from Gaza and from Iran. You'd see the contours of a regional conflict.  And if you understand it's a regional conflict, then you understand the way Israelis see it. There are in the Arab world, 300 million people, almost all of them Muslim. And in one corner of that world, there are 7 million Jews, who are Israelis. And if we zoom out even farther to the level of the Islamic world, we'll see that there are 2 billion people in the Islamic world. There's some argument about the numbers, but it's roughly a quarter of the world's population. And in one corner of that world there, there are 7 million Israeli Jews. The entire Jewish population on planet Earth is a lot smaller than the population of Cairo.  So the idea that this is an Israeli-Palestinian conflict, where Israelis are the stronger side, where Israelis are the dominant actor, and where Israelis are, let's face it, the bad guy in the story, that's a fictional presentation of a story that actually works in a completely different way. So if you take a small story and make it seem big. If you take a complicated regional story and you make it seem like a very small local story involving only Israelis and Palestinians, then you get the highly simplified but very emotive narrative that everyone is being subjected to now. And you get this portrayal of a villainous country called Israel that really looms in the liberal imagination of the West as an embodiment of the worst possible qualities of the age. Belle Yoeli:   Wow. So already you were seeing these issues when you were reporter, earlier on. But like this, some of this was before and since, since productive edge. This is over 10 years ago, and here we are. So October 7 happens. You already know these issues exist. You've identified them. How would you describe because obviously we have a lot of feelings about this, but like, strictly as a journalist, how would you describe the coverage that you've seen since during October 7, in its aftermath? Is it just these issues? Have they? Have they expanded? Are there new issues in play? What's your analysis? Matti Friedman:   The coverage has been great. I really have very I have no criticism of it. I think it's very accurate. I think that I, in a way, I was lucky to have been through what I went through 10 or 15 years ago, and I wasn't blindsided on October 7, as many people were, many people, quite naturally, don't pay close attention to this. And even people who are sympathetic to Israel, I think, were not necessarily convinced that my argument about the press was right. And I think many people thought it was overstated.  And you can read those articles from 2014 one was in tablet and one was in the Atlantic, but it's basically the two chapters of the same argument. And unfortunately, I think that those the essays, they stand up. In fact, if you don't really look at the date of the essays, they kind of seem that they could have been written in the past year and a half. And I'm not happy about that. I think that's and I certainly wrote them in hopes that they would somehow make things better. But the issues that I saw in the press 15 years ago have only been exacerbated since then. And October seven didn't invent the wheel. The issues were pre existing, but it took everything that I saw and kind of supercharged it.  So if I talked about ideological conformity in the bureaus that has been that has become much more extreme. A guy like me, I was hired in 2006 at the AP. I'm an Israeli of center left political leanings. Hiring me was not a problem in 22,006 by the time I left the AP, at the end of 2011 I'm pretty sure someone like me would not have been hired because my views, which are again, very centrist Israeli views, were really beyond the pale by the time that I left the AP, and certainly, and certainly today, the thing has really moved what I saw happening at the AP. And I hate picking on the AP because they were just unfortunate enough to hire me. That was their only error, but what I'm saying about them is true of a whole new. Was heard. It's true of the Times and CNN and the BBC, the news industry really works kind of as a it has a herd mentality. What happened was that news decisions were increasingly being made by people who are not interested in explanatory journalism. They were activists. Activists had moved into the key positions in the Bureau, and they had a very different idea of what press coverage was supposed to do. I would say, and I tried to explain it in that article for the free press, when I approach a news story, when I approach the profession of journalism, the question that I'm asking is, what's going on? That's the question I think you're supposed to ask, what's going on? How can I explain it in a way that's as accurate as as possible? The question that was increasingly being asked was not what's going on. The question was, who does this serve? That's an activist question. So when you look at a story, you don't ask, is it true, or is it not true? You ask, who's it going to help? Is it going to help the good guys, or is it going to help the bad guys?  So if Israel in the story is the villain, then a story that makes Israel seem reasonable, reasonable or rational or sympathetic needs to be played down to the extent possible or made to disappear. And I can give you an example from my own experience.  At the very end of 2008 two reporters in my bureau, people who I know, learned of a very dramatic peace offer that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert had made to the Palestinians. So Olmert, who was the prime minister at the time, had made a very far reaching offer that was supposed to see a Palestinian state in all of Gaza, most of the West Bank, with land swaps for territory that Israel was going to retain, and a very far reaching international consortium agreement to run the Old City of Jerusalem. Was a very dramatic. It was so far reaching, I think that Israelis probably wouldn't have supported it. But it was offered to the Palestinian side, and the Palestinians rejected it as insufficient. And two of our reporters knew about this, and they'd seen a map of the offer. And this was obviously a pretty big story for a bureau that had as the thrust of its coverage the peace process.  The two reporters who had the story were ordered to drop it, they were not allowed to cover the story. And there were different explanations. And they didn't, by the way, AP did not publish the story at the time, even though we were the first to have it. Eventually, it kind of came out and in other ways, through other news organizations. But we knew at first. Why were we not allowed to cover it? Because it would have made the Israelis who we were trying to villainize and demonize, it would have made Israel seem like it was trying to solve the conflict on kind of reasonable lines, which, of course, was true at that time. So that story would have upended the thrust of our news coverage. So it had to be made to go away, even though it was true, it would have helped the wrong people. And that question of who does this serve has destroyed, I want to say all, but much, of what used to be mainstream news coverage, and it's not just where Israel is concerned.  You can look at a story like the mental health of President Biden, right. Something's going on with Biden at the end of his term. It's a huge global news story, and the press, by and large, won't touch it, because why? I mean, it's true, right? We're all seeing that it's true, but why can't you touch it? Because it would help the wrong people. It would help the Republicans who in the press are the people who you are not supposed to help.  The origins of COVID, right? We heard one story about that. The true story seems to be a different story. And there are many other examples of stories that are reported because they help the right people, or not reported because they would help the wrong people. And I saw this thinking really come into action in Israel 10 or 15 years ago, and unfortunately, it's really spread to include the whole mainstream press scene and really kill it.  I mean, essentially, anyone interested in trying to get a solid sense of what's going on, we have very few options. There's not a lot, there's not a lot out there. So that's the broader conclusion that I drew from what I thought at the time was just a very small malfunction involving Israel coverage. But Israel coverage ends up being a symptom of something much bigger, as Jews often are the symptom of something much bigger that's going on.  So my problems in the AP bureau 15 years ago were really a kind of maybe a canary in the coal mine, or a whiff of something much bigger that we were all going to see happen, which is the transformation of the important liberal institutions of the west into kind of activist arms of a very radical ideology that has as its goal the transformation of the west into something else. And that's true of the press, and it's true of NGO world, places like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, which were one thing 30 years ago and are something very different today. And it's also true of big parts of the academy. It's true of places like Columbia and places like Harvard, they still have the logo, they still have the name, but they serve a different purpose, and I just happen to be on the ground floor of it as a reporter. Belle Yoeli:   So obviously, this concept of who does this serve, and this activist journalism is deeply concerning, and you actually mentioned a couple other areas, academia, obviously we're in that a lot right now in terms of what's going on campus. So I guess a couple of questions on that. First of all, think about this very practically, tachlis, in the day to day.  I'm a journalist, and I go to write about what's happening in Gaza. What would you say is, if you had to throw out a percentage, are all of them aware of this activist journalist tendency? Or you think it's like, like intentional for many of them, or it's sort of they've been educated that way, and it's their worldview in such a way that they don't even know that they're not reporting the news in a very biased way. Does that make sense? Matti Friedman:   Totally. I think that many people in the journalism world today view their job as not as explaining a complicated situation, but as swaying people toward the correct political conclusion. Journalism is power, and the power has to be wielded in support of justice. Now, justice is very slippery, and, you know, choosing who's in the right is very, very slippery, and that's how journalism gets into a lot of trouble. Instead of just trying to explain what's going on and then leave, you're supposed to leave the politics and the activism to other people. Politics and activism are very important.  But unless everyone can agree on what is going on, it's impossible to choose the kind of act, the kind of activism that would be useful. So when the journalists become activists, then no one can understand what's what's going on, because the story itself is fake, and there are many, many examples of it. But you know, returning to what you asked about, about October 7, and reporting post October 7, you can really see it happen. The massacres of October 7 were very problematic for the ideological strain that now controls a lot of the press, because it's counterintuitive. You're not supposed to sympathize with Israelis.  And yet, there were a few weeks after October 7 when they were forced to because the nature of the atrocities were so heinous that they could not be ignored. So you had the press covering what happened on October 7, but you could feel it. As someone who knows that scene, you could feel there was a lot of discomfort. There was a lot of discomfort. It wasn't their comfort zone, and you knew that within a few weeks, maybe a month, it was gonna snap back at the first opportunity.  When did it snap back? In the story of the Al Ahli hospital strike. If you remember that a few weeks in, there's a massive global story that Israel has rocketed Hospital in Gaza and killed about 500 people and and then you can see the kind of the comfort the comfort zone return, because the story that the press is primed to cover is a story about villainous Israelis victimizing innocent Palestinians, and now, now we're back. Okay. Now Israel's rocketing hospital. The problem was that it hadn't happened, and it was that a lot of stories don't happen, and they're allowed to stand.  But this story was so far from the truth that even the people involved couldn't make it work, and it had to be retracted, but it was basically too late. And then as soon as the Israeli ground offensive got into swing in Gaza, then the story really becomes the same old story, which is a story of Israel victimizing Palestinians for no reason. And you'll never see Hamas militants in uniform in Gaza. You just see dead civilians, and you'll see the aftermath of a rocket strike when the, you know, when an Israeli F16 takes out the launcher, but you will never see the strike. Which is the way it's worked in Gaza since the very end of 2008 which is when the first really bad round of violence in Gaza happens, which is when I'm at the AP.  As far as I know, I was the first staffer to erase information from the story, because we were threatened by Hamas, which happened at the very end of 2008. We had a great reporter in Gaza, a Palestinian who had always been really an excellent reporter. We had a detail in a story. The detail was a crucial one. It was that Hamas fighters were dressed as civilians and were being counted as civilians in the death toll, an important thing to know, that went out in an AP story. The reporter called me a few hours later. It was clear that someone had spoken to him, and he told me, I was on the desk in Jerusalem, so I was kind of writing the story from the main bureau in Jerusalem. And he said, Matti, you have to take that detail out of the story. And it was clear that someone had threatened him. I took the detail out of the story. I suggested to our editors that we note in an Editor's Note that we were now complying with Hamas censorship. I was overruled, and from that point in time, the AP, like all of its sister organizations, collaborates with Hamas censorship in Gaza.  What does that mean? You'll see a lot of dead civilians, and you won't see dead militants. You won't have a clear idea of what the Hamas military strategy is. And this is the kicker, the center of the coverage will be a number, a casualty number, that is provided to the press by something called the Gaza health ministry, which is Hamas. And we've been doing that since 2008, and it's a way of basically settling the story before you get into any other information. Because when you put, you know, when you say 50 Palestinians were killed, and one Israeli on a given day, it doesn't matter what else you say. The numbers kind of tell their own story, and it's a way of settling the story with something that sounds like a concrete statistic. And the statistic is being, you know, given to us by one of the combatant sides. But because the reporters sympathize with that side, they're happy to play along. So since 2008, certainly since 2014 when we had another serious war in Gaza, the press has not been covering Gaza, the press has been essentially an amplifier for one of the most poisonous ideologies on Earth. Hamas has figured out how to make the press amplify its messaging rather than covering Hamas. There are no Western reporters in Gaza. All of the reporters in Gaza are Palestinians, and those people fall into three categories. Some of them identify with Hamas. Some of them are intimidated by Hamas and won't cross Hamas, which makes a lot of sense. I wouldn't want to cross Hamas either. So either. And the third category is people who actually belong to Hamas. That's where the information from Gaza is coming from. And if you're credulous, then of course, you're going to get a story that makes Israel look pretty bad. Belle Yoeli:   So this is very depressing. That's okay. It's very helpful, very depressing. But on that note, I would ask you so whether, because you spoke about this problem in terms, of, of course, the coverage of Israel, but that it's it's also more widespread you talk, you spoke about President Biden in your article, you name other examples of how this sort of activist journalism is affecting everything we read. So what should everyone in this room be reading, truly, from your opinion. This is Matti's opinion. But if you want to you want to get information from our news and not activist journalism, obviously The Free Press, perhaps. But are there other sites or outlets that you think are getting this more down the line, or at least better than some, some better than others?  Matti Friedman:   No, it's just The Free Press. No. I mean, it's a question that I also wrestle with. I haven't given up on everyone, and even in publications that have, I think, largely lost the plot, you'll still find good stuff on occasion. So I try to keep my eye on certain reporters whose name I know. I often ask not just on Israel, but on anything, does this reporter speak the language of the country that they're covering? You'd be shocked at how rare that is for Americans. A lot of the people covering Ukraine have no idea what language they speak in Ukraine, and just as someone who covers Israel, I'm aware of the low level of knowledge that many of the Western reporters have. You'll find really good stuff still in the Atlantic. The Atlantic has managed, against steep odds, to maintain its equilibrium amid all this. The New Yorker, unfortunately, less so, but you'll still see, on occasion, things that are good. And there are certain reporters who are, you know, you can trust. Isabel Kirchner, who writes for The New York Times, is an old colleague of mine from the Jerusalem report. She's excellent, and they're just people who are doing their job. But by and large, you have to be very, very suspicious of absolutely everything that you read and see. And I'm not saying that as someone who I'm not happy to say that, and I certainly don't identify with, you know, the term fake news, as it has been pushed by President Trump.  I think that fake news is, you know, for those guys, is an attempt to avoid scrutiny. They're trying to, you know, neuter the watchdog so that they can get away with whatever they want. I don't think that crowd is interested in good press coverage. Unfortunately, the term fake news sticks because it's true. That's why it has worked. And the press, instead of helping people navigate the blizzard of disinformation that we're all in, they've joined it. People who are confused about what's going on, should be able to open up the New York Times or go to the AP and figure out what's going on, but because, and I saw it happen, instead of covering the circus, the reporters became dancing bears in the circus. So no one can make heads or tails of anything. So we need to be very careful.  Most headlines that are out there are out there to generate outrage, because that's the most predictable generator of clicks, which is the, we're in a click economy. So I actually think that the less time you spend following headlines and daily news, the better off you'll be. Because you can follow the daily news for a year, and by the end of the year, you'll just be deranged. You'll just be crazy and very angry.  If you take that time and use it to read books about, you know, bitten by people who are knowledgeable, or read longer form essays that are, you know, that are obviously less likely to be very simplistic, although not, you know, it's not completely impossible that they will be. I think that's time, that's time better spent. Unfortunately, much of the industry is kind of gone. And we're in an interesting kind of interim moment where it's clear that the old news industry is basically dead and that something new has to happen. And those new things are happening. I mean, The Free Press is part of a new thing that's happening. It's not big enough to really move the needle in a dramatic way yet, but it might be, and I think we all have to hope that new institutions emerge to fill the vacuum.  The old institutions, and I say this with sorrow, and I think that this also might be true of a lot of the academic institutions. They can't be saved. They can't be saved. So if people think that writing an editor, a letter to the editor of the New York Times is going to help. It's not going to help. Sometimes people say, Why don't we just get the top people in the news industry and bring them to Israel and show them the truth? Doesn't help. It's not about knowing or not knowing. They define the profession differently.  So it's not about a lack of information. The institutions have changed, and it's kind of irrevocable at this point, and we need new institutions, and one of them is The Free Press, and it's a great model of what to do when faced with fading institutions. By the way, the greatest model of all time in that regard is Zionism. That's what Zionism is. There's a guy in Vienna in 1890 something, and his moment is incredibly contemporary. There's an amazing biography of Herzl called Herzl by Amos Elon. It's an amazing book. If you haven't read it, you should read it, because his moment in cosmopolitan Vienna sounds exactly like now. It's shockingly current. He's in this friendly city. He's a reporter for the New York Times, basically of the Austro Hungarian empire, and he's assimilated, and he's got a Christmas tree in his house, and his son isn't circumcised, and he thinks everything is basically great. And then the light changes.  He notices that something has changed in Vienna, and the discourse about Jews changes, and like in a Hollywood movie, the light changes. And he doesn't try to he doesn't start a campaign against antisemitism. He doesn't get on social media and kind of rail against unfair coverage. He sits down in a hotel room in Paris and he writes this pamphlet called the Jewish state, and I literally flew from that state yesterday. So there's a Zionist model where you look at a failing world and you think about radical solutions that involve creation. And I think we're there. And I think Herzl's model is a good one at a dark time you need real creativity. Belle Yoeli:   Thank God you found the inspiration there, because I was really, I was really starting to worry. No, in all seriousness, Matti, the saying that these institutions can't be saved. I mean the consequences of this, not just for us as pro-Israel, pro-Jewish advocates, but for our country, for the world, the countries that we come from are tremendous.  And the way we've been dealing with this issue and thinking about how, how can you change hearts and minds of individuals about Israel, about the Jewish people, if everything that they're reading is so damaging and most of what they're reading is so damaging and basically saying there's very little that we can do about that. So I am going to push you to dream big with us. We're an advocacy organization. AJC is an advocacy organization. So if you had unlimited resources, right, if you really wanted to make change in this area, to me, it sounds like you're saying we basically need 15 Free Presses or the new institutions to really take on this way. What would you do? What would you do to try to make it so that news media were more like the old days? Matti Friedman:   Anyone who wants unlimited resources should not go into journalism. I have found that my resources remain limited. I'll give you an answer that is probably not what you're expecting or not what you want here. I think that the fight can't be won. I think that antisemitism can't be defeated. And I think that resources that are poured into it are resources wasted. And of course, I think that people need legal protection, and they need, you know, lawyers who can protect people from discrimination and from defamation. That's very important. But I know that when people are presented with a problem like antisemitism, which is so disturbing and it's really rocking the world of everyone in this room, and certainly, you know, children and grandchildren, you have a problem and you want to address it, right? You have a really bad rash on your arm. You want the rash to go away, and you're willing to do almost anything to make it go away. This has always been with us. It's always been with us.  And you know, we recently celebrated the Seder, and we read in the Seder, in the Haggadah, l'chol dor vador, omdim aleinu l'chaloteinu. Which is, in every generation, they come at us to destroy us. And it's an incredibly depressing worldview. Okay, it's not the way I wanted to see the world when I grew up in Toronto in the 1990s. But in our tradition, we have this idea that this is always gonna be around. And the question is, what do you do? Do you let other people define you? Do you make your identity the fight against the people who hate you? And I think that's a dead end.  This crisis is hitting the Jewish people at a moment when many of us don't know who we are, and I think that's why it's hitting so hard. For my grandfather, who was a standard New York Jew, garment industry, Lower East Side, poor union guy. This would not have shaken him, because he just assumed that this was the world like this. The term Jewish identity was not one he ever heard, because it wasn't an issue or something that had to be taught. So if I had unlimited resources, what I would do is I would make sure that young Jewish people have access to the riches of Jewish civilization, I would, you know, institute a program that would allow any young Jewish person to be fluent in Hebrew by the time they finish college. Why is that so important? Why is that such an amazing key?  Because if you're fluent in Hebrew, you can open a Tanakh, or you can open a prayer book if you want. Or you can watch Fauda or you can get on a plane to Israel and hit on Israeli guys. Hebrew is the key to Jewish life, and if you have it, a whole world will open up. And it's not one that antisemites can interfere with. It does not depend on the goodwill of our neighbors. It's all about us and what we're doing with ourselves. And I think that if you're rooted in Jewish tradition, and I'm not saying becoming religious, I'm just saying, diving into the riches of Jewish tradition, whether it's history or gemara or Israel, or whatever, if you're if you're deep in there enough, then the other stuff doesn't go away, but it becomes less important.  It won't be solved because it can't be solved, but it will fade into the background. And if we make the center of identity the fight against antisemitism, they've won. Why should they be the center of our identity? For a young person who's looking for some way of living or some deep kind of guide to life, the fight against antisemitism is not going to do it, and philanthropy is not going to do it. We come from the wisest and one of the oldest civilizations in the world, and many of us don't know how to open the door to that civilization, and that's in our hands. And if we're not doing it, it's not the fault of the antisemites. It's our own fault. So if I had unlimited resources, which, again, it's not, it's not going to happen unless I make a career change, that's where I would be putting my effort. Internally and not externally.  Belle Yoeli:   You did find the inspiration, though, again, by pushing Jewish identity, and we appreciate that. It's come up a lot in this conversation, this question about how we fight antisemitism, investing in Jewish identity and who we are, and at the same time, what do we do about it? And I think all of you heard Ted in a different context last night, say, we can hold two things, two thoughts at the same time, right? Two things can be true at the same time. And I think for me, what I took out of this, in addition to your excellent insights, is that that's exactly what we have to be doing.  At AJC, we have to be engaging in this advocacy to stand up for the Jewish people and the State of Israel. But that's not the only piece of the puzzle. Of course, we have to be investing in Jewish identity. That's why we bring so many young people to this conference. Of course, we need to be investing in Jewish education. That's not necessarily what AJC is doing, the bulk of our work, but it's a lot of what the Jewish community is doing, and these pieces have to go together. And I want to thank you for raising that up for us, and again, for everything that you said. Thank you all so much for being here. Thank you. Manya Brachear Pashman: If you missed last week's episode, be sure to tune in as John Spencer, Chair of Urban Warfare Studies at West Point, breaks down Israel's high-stakes strike on Iran's nuclear infrastructure and the U.S. decision to enter the fight. 

In this episode of Occupied Thoughts, FMEP Fellow Hilary Rantisi speaks with author & architect Suad Amiry and film & TV director/actor/producer Cherien Dabis. They discuss Cherien's latest film, All That's Left of You, an intergenerational story that goes back to the 1948 Nakba and arrives at the present and premiered at Sundance in early 2025. They talk about one of Suad's most famous books, Sharon and My Mother-in-Law, about life under Israeli occupation on the West Bank, and its upcoming adaptation to the screen, which Cherien will direct. Along the way, they discuss the effect of humor in storytelling, the role of diaspora Palestinians and relationship to the broader Palestinian collective, and the urgency of telling Palestinian stories.  Suad Amiry is an award-winning conservation architect and writer. She is Professor of Architecture at Jordan University and Birzeit University, Palestine and a cultural heritage specialist focusing on conservation of historic buildings and revitalization of historic centers. Amiry is the founding director of Riwaq, which endeavors to protect and develop architectural heritage in Palestine and took a major role in the revitalization of the most significant 50 historic centers in rural Palestine. She is widely published and has authored many architectural books and other non-fiction books, including Sharon and My Mother-in-Law (2003, translated into 18 languages); If this is a Life? (2005); Nothing to Lose but Your Life: An 18 Hour Journey with Murad (2010); Golda Slept Here (2014); My Damascus (2016); and Mother of Strangers (2022). On Cherien Dabis is a trailblazing Palestinian American filmmaker and actress who has established herself as a creative force across a variety of mediums. She forged a new genre of Arab American storytelling with her critically acclaimed first feature “Amreeka.” The film world-premiered at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival and won the coveted FIPRESCI International Critics Prize at the Cannes Film Festival. Dabis wrote, directed and starred in her highly anticipated third feature film “All That's Left of You,” which world-premiered to critical acclaim at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. Dabis has directed standout episodes of hit television series such as Hulu's “Ramy” and Netflix's “Ozark." In 2022, she became the first Palestinian Emmy nominee for her groundbreaking, dialogue-free episode of Hulu's comedy “Only Murders in the Building.” Her acting credits include Netflix's “Mo,” Amazon Prime's “Fallout” and Tarek Saleh's “Eagles of the Republic,” which was in competition at this year's Cannes Film Festival. Hilary Rantisi grew up in Palestine and has been involved with education and advocacy on the Middle East since her move to the US. She is a 2025 Fellow at FMEP and was most recently the Associate Director of the Religion, Conflict and Peace Initiative (RCPI) and co-instructor of Learning in Context: Narratives of Displacement and Belonging in Israel/Palestine at Harvard Divinity School. Original music by Jalal Yaquob.

Donate to our charity partner Baitulmaal here: http://btml.us/thinkingmuslim Help us expand our Muslim media project here: https://www.thinkingmuslim.com/membershipThe Nakba Never Ended. The Nakba, the “Catastrophe”. It wasn't just a moment in 1948 — it is a reality that has lived on for 77 years. It's in the bulldozed homes of Gaza. It's the children laying underneath the rubble. It's in the olive trees ripped from the West Bank. It's in the silence of classrooms where students are told not to speak the word “Nakba” out loud. It's in every grave of a journalist, every mother's scream, every child who's asking– where is the world? Today, we're joined by none other than Leanne Mohammad, British Palestinian activist who ran as an independent candidate for Ilford North in the British general elections, came just 500 votes within toppling the current Health Secretary of Kier Starmer's cabinet. Tipped by some to be the next Prime Minister. We will be talking about the Nakbah of yesterday, and how the legacy of the Nakbah inspires us today.You can find Leanne Mohamad here:X: https://x.com/LeanneMohamadIG: https://www.instagram.com/leannemohamad/?hl=enFind the host here:X: https://x.com/ArhaamMukatiIG: https://www.instagram.com/momukati17Become a member here:https://www.thinkingmuslim.com/membershipOr give your one-off donation: https://www.thinkingmuslim.com/donateYou can also support The Thinking Muslim through a one-time donation: https://www.thinkingmuslim.com/DonateListen to the audio version of the podcast:Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7vXiAjVFnhNI3T9Gkw636aApple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-thinking-muslim/id1471798762Purchase our Thinking Muslim mug: https://www.thinkingmuslim.com/merchFind us on:X: https://x.com/thinking_muslimLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-thinking-muslim/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/The-Thinking-Muslim-Podcast-105790781361490Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thinkingmuslimpodcast/Telegram: https://t.me/thinkingmuslimBlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/thinkingmuslim.bsky.socialThreads: https://www.threads.com/@thinkingmuslimpodcastFind Muhammad Jalal here:X: https://twitter.com/jalalaynInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/jalalayns/Sign up to Muhammad Jalal's newsletter: https://jalalayn.substack.comWebsite Archive: https://www.thinkingmuslim.comDisclaimer:The views expressed in this video are those of the individual speaker(s) and do not represent the views of the host, producers, platform, or any affiliated organisation. This content is provided for lawful, informational, and analytical purposes only, and should not be taken as professional advice. Viewer discretion is advised.Timestamps:0:00 - Introduction Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Après «Palestine, le discours historique de Yasser Arafat à l'ONU», La Marche du monde vous invite à découvrir cette semaine «Palestine, filmer pour exister», un nouvel épisode documentaire signé Maxime Grember.  Entre 1968 et 1982, le cinéaste palestinien Mustafa Abu Ali et d'autres professionnels du cinéma vont réaliser des dizaines de films sous l'égide de l'Unité cinéma, une structure de production audiovisuelle liée au Fatah. Passant du fusil à la caméra, ils vont raconter en images la lutte du peuple palestinien, diffuser leurs films dans les camps de réfugiés et tenter ainsi de construire une mémoire visuelle palestinienne. Mais quelle histoire se cache derrière cette filmographie militante née dans les mois qui ont suivi la guerre des six jours de 1967 ? Qu'est-ce que ces films nous racontent du mouvement révolutionnaire palestinien et de la guerre contre l'État d'Israël ? Et enfin, que nous disent-ils du rapport que le peuple palestinien entretient avec sa propre histoire ? Le 15 juin 1969, dans une interview accordée au journal britannique The Sunday Times, Golda Meir, alors cheffe du gouvernement israélien, déclare, deux ans après la guerre des Six jours qui avait donné à son pays le contrôle de l'ensemble des territoires palestiniens : « Les Palestiniens n'ont jamais existé. Comment pourrions-nous rendre les territoires occupés ? Il n'y a personne à qui les rendre ». En réponse à cette provocation, le cinéaste palestinien Mustafa Abu Ali réalise en 1974 le documentaire They do not exist, pour insister sur le manque de soutien et de visibilité de la part de la communauté internationale. L'histoire du cinéma palestinien pourrait véritablement prendre sa source dans ce déni d'existence car c'est bel et bien à partir de 1968 qu'une Unité cinéma va se créer et que des hommes et des femmes vont documenter en images les luttes, les souffrances et les multiples déplacements que le peuple palestinien connait depuis la Nakba de 1948. «Il n'y avait plus de rues, plus de magasins, plus d'écoles. Tout avait été détruit. Donc, l'idée était de construire un film à partir de cette phrase de Golda Meir «They do not exist». Alors Mustafa s'est dit : s'ils n'existent pas, ceux que vous bombardez, ce sont des fantômes ?». Khadijeh Habashneh, cinéaste et archiviste du cinéma palestinien, s'exprime au sujet du film They do not exist que Mustafa Abu Ali réalise en 1974. En 1973, Mustafa Abu Ali réalise Scène d'occupations à Gaza, un film emblématique de l'Unité cinéma. Ne pouvant pas se rendre dans la bande de Gaza, sous contrôle israélien depuis 1967, il va réaliser son film à partir d'un reportage fait pour la télévision française et pour lequel il arrive à se procurer les images. Avec son nouveau montage, il veut attester en images de la souffrance endurée par le peuple gazaoui. «Mustafa Abu Ali va utiliser les moyens que le cinéma met à sa disposition, c'est-à-dire qu'il va transformer la bande son, ajouter une voix off, de la musique. Il va figer l'image sur le regard d'un des hommes palestiniens qui est contrôlé, et rajouter en insert une image d'une grenade sur un fond rouge. À travers cela, il essaye de signifier que ce jeune homme porte en lui toutes les marques de la lutte.». Hugo Darroman, docteur en études cinématographiques, s'exprime au sujet du film Scènes d'occupation à Gaza que Mustafa Abu Ali réalise en 1973. L'ensemble de ces films seront montrés dans les camps de réfugiés palestiniens, mais aussi à l'étranger, dans des festivals ou dans des réseaux de solidarité, afin de faire connaître la cause palestinienne et aussi mettre en place des coproductions, comme ce sera le cas en 1977 avec l'Italie pour le documentaire Tall-al-Zaatar consacré aux massacres ayant eu lieu dans le camp de réfugiés palestiniens dans l'est de Beyrouth. Au total, près d'une centaine de reportages et de documentaires seront produits par l'unité cinéma du Fatah, d'abord installé à Amman jusqu'en 1970, puis à Beyrouth jusqu'en 1982 où une cinémathèque s'était constituée autour de cette collection. Mais, en 1982, lors de l'invasion israélienne au Liban, une partie du patrimoine culturel palestinien va être spolié, et les archives filmiques, un temps cachées dans Beyrouth, vont également disparaître au milieu des années 80. Depuis les années 2000, Khadijeh Habashneh, déjà à l'œuvre à Beyrouth entre 1976 et 1982 aux côtés de son mari Mustafa Abu Ali, tente de remettre la main sur des copies de ces films, et de trouver les partenariats et les conditions nécessaires pour qu'ils puissent être conservés et à nouveau montrés au public. C'est finalement à la Cinémathèque de Toulouse, l'une des plus importantes de France, connue pour la richesse de ses collections venant du monde entier, qu'une partie des films palestiniens vont trouver refuge en 2023. Retour sur une production cinématographique méconnue, une histoire d'archives en exil, d'images manquantes, et d'une certaine idée du cinéma comme moyen de résistance et de représentation d'un peuple par lui-même. «Palestine, filmer pour exister», un nouvel épisode documentaire de La marche du monde, signé Maxime Grember, produit par Valérie Nivelon, réalisé par Sophie Janin, aux sons des archives filmiques palestiniennes. Avec les témoignages de : Samir Arabi, programmateur du festival Ciné-Palestine Toulouse-Occitanie, Hugo Darroman, docteur en études cinématographiques, auteur d'une thèse sur le cinéma de la révolution palestinienne, Khadijeh Habashneh, archiviste, cinéaste et psychologue, Franck Loiret, directeur de la Cinémathèque de Toulouse. Rona Sela, chercheuse en histoire visuelle à l'Université de Tel Aviv. Remerciements à : Francesca Bozzano, Nicolas Damon, Victor Jouanneau et Franck Loiret de La Cinémathèque de Toulouse ainsi que leurs partenaires dans le projet de sauvegarde et de numérisation des films palestiniens : le ministère de la Culture palestinien, le Palestinian Cultural Fund, la Fondation Art Jameel et le Consulat Général de France à Jérusalem. Samir Arabi, Hugo Darroman, Khadijeh Habashneh, Rona Sela, Guilhem Delteil et Vanadis Feuille de RFI, Tarik Hamdan de MCD, Colette Berthès et Monica Maurer. Ainsi que Nathalie Laporte, Joe Farmer et Sophie Janin pour la voice-over. Musiques : The urgent call of Palestine, Zeinab Shaat Ounadikom, Ahmad Kaabour From Gaza with love, Saint Levant. Films : Scène d'occupations à Gaza, Mustafa Abu Ali, 1973 They do not exist, Mustafa Abu Ali, 1974 Tall el-Zaatar, Mustafa Abu Ali, Adriano Pino et Jean Chamoun, 1977. Documentaires : Looted and Hidden - Palestinian Archives in Israel, Rona Sela, 2017 Ouvrages : « La Palestine et le cinéma », de Guy Hennebelle et Khemaïs Khayati, Édition du Centenaire, 1977 « Knights of Cinema» Documentary Narrative Book on the story of Palestine Film Unit. From its beginning 1967 till 1982 », de Khadijeh Habashneh, Alahlia Publishing house, 2020. Article : Toulouse, refuge des archives palestiniennes, sur Orient XXI. Table ronde : Films palestiniens, archives en exil, organisée par la Cinémathèque de Toulouse et le festival Ciné-Palestine Toulouse-Occitanie en 2024. Diaporama

Nakba is Arabic for the 1948 catastrophe. where 750,000 Palestinians were forcibly expelled and driven from their ancestral homes and lands. Today, 77 years later, the Nakba continues. This time, aided and abetted by the U.S., Israel declares it has "the most moral army in the world, which does everything to avoid harming non-combatants.” Watch Al Jazeera or read the reports from Amnesty International, B'Tselem or Gush Shalom and other human rights organizations to verify the Israeli claim.  Netanyahu has declared that there will be no Palestinian state and that Israel will control Gaza. Will there ever be a viable Palestinian state? The keyword is viable, not just a collection of Bantustans crisscrossed by Israeli-only roads, walls, barriers and checkpoints. What will be the fate of millions of Palestinians? Is the Nakba permanent?

Ein Staat wird gegründet – und ein anderer zerbricht, noch bevor er entstehen kann. In der dritten Folge unserer Nahost-Serie erzählen wir, wie 1948 der Staat Israel ausgerufen wird – und warum dieser Moment für die Palästinenser als „Nakba“, als Katastrophe, in die Geschichte eingeht. Was genau geschah im Dorf Deir Yassin? Warum mussten Hunderttausende Palästinenser ihre Heimat verlassen? Wer waren die großen Gewinner und Verlierer des Palästinakriegs? Und wie erklärt ein israelischer General das alles – mit einer der radikalsten Trauerreden der Geschichte? Wir erzählen von Flucht und Vertreibung, von Gewalt und Gegengewalt – und davon, wie Israels spektakulärster Sieg zugleich die Grundlage für Jahrzehnte neuen Unfriedens legt.Du hast Feedback oder einen Themenvorschlag für Joachim und Nils? Dann melde dich gerne bei Instagram: @wasbishergeschah.podcastQuellen:Martin Bunton: The Palestinian-Israeli ConflictMuriel Asseburg, Jan Busse: Der NahostkonfliktMuriel Asseburg, Palästina und die Palästinenser Benny Morris, Righteous VictimsMichael Brenner, IsraelUnsere allgemeinen Datenschutzrichtlinien finden Sie unter https://art19.com/privacy. Die Datenschutzrichtlinien für Kalifornien sind unter https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info abrufbar.

Eine der Folgen, die sich in den letzten Jahren am meisten Menschen gewünscht haben: Was ist da in Palästina eigentlich los? Muriel Asseburg erklärt Palästina vom osmanischen Reich bis heute. Warum man mit Schwarz-Weiß-Denken nicht weit kommt – und warum trotzdem klar ist, wer hier wen unterdrückt.

G'day friends & comrades,Welcome back to another episode of the Radio Reversal Podcast. Late last week, I shared an episode called “Refusing to pinkwash a genocide” which looked at some inspiring examples of local, autonomous organising against the normalisation of Zionist settler colonialism and genocide in Gaza. Today, I'm coming back to the core of this series on crisis, disaster & collective futures to ask: how can we think about the crisis when the crisis is permanent? As of today, it's 610 days since the Israeli Occupation Forces began their most recent genocidal siege on Gaza. It's more than 76 years since the Zionist occupation of Palestine began with the events of the Nakba: massacres, displacements and the ethnic cleansing of huge swathes of Palestinian land. It's 237 years since the first British penal colonies - prisons - were established on the homelands of the Gadigal, Dharug and Dharawal peoples of the Eora Nation. And it's just over a week since Kumanjayi White, a young Walpiri man who lived with complex disabilities, was killed after being restrained by off-duty cops in Mparrtwe, Alice Springs. And then, just a few days ago, we heard reports of a second Aboriginal death in police custody in the Northern Territory in as many weeks. Kumanjayi White's death in police custody is the 597th Aboriginal death in custody since the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody handed down its findings in the 1990s - many of which, as Senator Lidia Thorpe has consistently pointed out in Parliament, are yet to be implemented. So as we look back at the unending crisis conditions of colonialism, what does it mean for how we look ahead? What does it ask of us - to think about these current atrocities in the context of a much longer, ongoing crisis?To dig into this, we'll begin by sharing an interview between Han and our dear friend and intellectual guiding light, Dr. Jamal Nabulsi, who provides a bit more historical and political context for the events of the Nakba and their continuation into the present. We then turn to two speeches from the recent Nakba commemoration here in Magan-djin, including Remah Naji and Binil K. Mohideen. We then turn towards this continent, to think about the significance of commemorating the 76th anniversary of the Zionist occupation of Palestine from the vantage point of 237 years of ongoing colonial occupation of this continent. To help us see the linkages between colonialism in Palestine and on this continent, we turn (as we so often do!) to Darumbal and South Sea Islander writer and academic, Dr. Amy McQuire. We're so excited to be sharing a sneak peak of Amy's opening remarks from the plenary panel discussion of the Activism for Palestine conference, hosted by Justice for Palestine Magan-djin over the weekend. We were lucky enough to head along to record a couple of the conversations that happened as part of the conference to share with anyone who couldn't attend in person, to help inform our collective struggle going forwards. We'll be packaging those up and releasing them here in the coming weeks, as part of a community resource pack coming out of the conference. For now, we just wanted to share this short excerpt from Amy as a way to understand the deep linkages that connect the current genocidal violence in Palestine with the ongoing war against Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people on this continent. For more content drawing these links, check out these brilliant Blackfulla-Palestinian solidarity resources compiled by Anna Cerreto and the Institute for Collaborative Race Research. I want to quote a section from Amy's speech at length here, because it really helps to clarify the connections between colonial violence on this continent and in Palestine: (In an article I was reading recently) the author mentioned that the Mt Morgan mine was once the largest gold mine in the world. Mt Morgan, as many of you would know, is on the land of the Gangalu, and is just outside Rockhampton, near my own Darumbal homelands.So I went down a bit of a rabbit hole in reading about this – and it led me to another fact. By 1907, the mine had produced $60 million worth of gold. And so one of the original owners of that mine, and the largest shareholder, a man by the name of William D'Arcy, was made enormously rich on the stolen resources of Gangulu people. He then used some of that money to invest in the oil fields in Persia, where his company – which was at the time called the Anglo-Persian Oil Company - struck oil in 1908.Now why am I telling you this history?Because that Anglo-Persian Oil Company later become a company by the name of British Petroleum, which we know today as BP. And so when I found this out, the first instinct I had was to google the words BP and Israel.BP owns and operates the Baku-Tbilsi-Cehan pipline, which Azerbaijan uses to supply Israel with crude oil. And this oil is used to fuel Israel's military operations. This oil is sent through this pipeline to produce JET FUEL for the f-35 planes that are dropping bombs on the men, women and children in Gaza. The pipeline supplies 28% of Israel's crude oil imports.Not only that, BP operates in West Papua. This is from the Global Atlas of Environmental Justice: “In Bintuni Bay of West Papua, BP's Tangguh LNG project has been under public scrutiny for alleged connections with excessive surveillance and violence enacted by security forces. Indigenous Papuans have been relocated, and selective compensation has led to tensions and divisions among Papuan residents…” And this is just some of the horrific things BP has been accused of doing in occupied West Papua.So the genocide of Gangulu, and of First Nations tribes in Queensland (because the gold mine brought in waves of settlers to neighbouring lands, like my Darumbal homelands) is intrinsically connected to the current day atrocities not just in Gaza, but in West Papua.And it is not just these extractive and exploitative industries, this outright GREED and WEALTH and FORCES OF ENVIRONMENTAL DISTRACTION are connected to each other, but also that they have BENEFITED ENORMOUSLY from these connections. If we wonder why some people can look at these images of horror and terror enacted upon the bodies of Palestinian people and are comfortable with it, it is because they look with their eyes blinded by their own wealth, their own greed.Their version of humanity is tied to the pursuit of profit; their version of humanity is a process of gardening; a cultivating of space in which Palestinians, West Papuans and Indigenous peoples are made to disappear, or as we know happened in this country, are made to become less than human, are seen as FLORA and FAUNA.But in thinking about these connections of imperialism, and greed, I also thought about what these connections tell us about both why and how we fight for Palestine, and West Papua.We fight because not only are these colonial violences connected, and not just in the past, but very much in the present, but also because are connections are Indigenous peoples are much more powerful than any connections that they have. If their networks of violence and greed are connected, then the opportunity to rupture those connections in one part of the world, means a HUGE BLOW for imperialism everywhere.Which is why solidarity – the building and grounding of connections – is so threatening to them. As Amy explains, the connections between Indigenous peoples globally form a rich ecosystem, with roots intertwining across the globe. Colonial, capitalist, patriarchal states try to prune this unruly mass; weeding out dissent and resistance wherever they find it. Our work as activists is not to try to cultivate or control or regulate this vast ecosystem, but rather to learn to understand ourselves as part of it; to allow our struggles to grow and flourish together. We have been reminded of these deep connections this week in a particularly devastating way. On the anniversary of the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020, many of us heard the tragic news that a young Walpiri man from the community of Yuendumu had been killed in an interaction with off-duty police officers in a supermarket in Mparntwe, Alice Springs. Kumanjayi White was a vulnerable young man who is mourned by his family and community. He died after being restrained by off-duty police officers in an interaction that is eerily similar to the murder of George Floyd. The police officers who restrained him have yet to be stood down by the NT Police, and no announcements have been made regarding an inquiry into his death. All across the continent, communities are mobilising to demand that the institutions and individuals who are responsible for his death face accountability. Kumanjayi White's family, include his Grandfather, the venerable Elder and activist Uncle Ned Hardgraves, have renewed their calls to disarm police across the Northern Territory. Almost four years ago, the Yuendumu community began the karrinjarla muwajarri campaign to demand a police ceasefire across the Northern Territory in response to the fatal shooting of Kumanjayi Walker by Constable Zachary Rolfe in 2019. They wrote:We do not want any more reports or inquiries that are not acted on. We already hold the answers and strategies we need. We do not want any more consultations with governments who do not listen to us. We demand our self determination, our rightful decision making authority, and our resources to be restored to us. This is a list of our demands. What we are calling for is karrinjarla muwajarri, a police ceasefire. Indefinitely.To get across the ongoing campaign to disarm, defund and dismantle the police across the continent, in the last part of this episode, I catch up with Wanjiriburra and Birri Gubba activist and film-maker Sam Watson to talk about some of the demands made by Kumanjayi White's family, and how Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities around the country are mobilising in response to his death. Gatherings like this are happening all over the country, so if you're not based in Magan-djin, check out this post for links to events happening all across the country. The community of Yuendumu and the family of Kumanjayi White are also looking for financial support so that family can travel from Yuendumu to Mparntwe to demand answers and mourn their loss. Please give generously to this fund so that the family and community can mourn the loss of Kumanjayi White with dignity. We're ending this week's episode with a devastating and vital speech at this Saturday's rally from Gungarri woman and academic Dr. Raylene Nixon. Raylene shares some of her own family's experiences navigating the coronial inquest into the death in police custody of her beloved son, Stevie-Lee Nixon McKellar. We'll be returning to the rest of the speeches from this protest in a future series, but we wanted to finish with Raylene's words this week because they offer a vital and timely reminder to push as hard as we can for the family of Kumanjayi White right now, and to take this opportunity to put as much pressure as possible on all of the institutions and individuals who are responsible for his death. All in all, there's some very big and heavy content today, so please take care of yourselves in the midst of listening through it all. For me, what I'm holding onto amid the horror and grief of this moment is the shimmering reminder that just as the threads of violence and repression criss-cross the globe, shared by colonial powers and capitalist forces internationally, so too do lines of resistance and dissent. Families from so-called Australia to Gaza, from Tamil Eelam to Kashmir, from West Papua to Sudan find common ground in the knowledge that the state acts with violent impunity; that all we have is one another. Mothers of those disappeared by repressive state forces come together to organise and strategise for truth and justice; finding common cause in prison waiting rooms and at community protests and in the futility and violence of official inquiries. There are whole constellations of people across the globe who will not forget those who have been disappeared, maligned, incarcerated, or disbelieved. As always, our work is to find each other and build a network strong enough to dismantle the regimes of repression bit by bit, place by place, until these empires, like all before them, eventually fall.Yours in solidarity,Anna(Radio Reversal Collective) This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit radioreversal.substack.com

In 1948, Palestinians were subjected to what became known as the ‘Nakba' – the violent displacement of Palestinians and dispossession of their lands and belongings. Author Fintan Drury argues that what we are witnessing today is the second Nakba and joined Pat to discuss his new book ‘Catastrophe – Nakba II'.

The Nakba, also known as 'Catastrophe', occurred between 1947 and 1949, and saw 15,000 Palestinians killed and more than 700,000 displaced from their homes by Israel. On Tuesday, Matt was joined by author Fintan Drury to discuss his new book ‘Catastrophe: Nakba II'.The book is an analysis of the oppression that Palestinians have faced for decades, and argues that Israel's retaliation to the Hamas attack in October 2023 has been disproportionate.Hit the ‘Play' button on this page to hear the conversation.

Without a doubt, Palestinian humanity deserves more than it has been given. Listen as Aaron and Damien discuss the book Perfect Victims: And the Politics of Appeal by Mohammed El-Kurd (and published by Haymarket Books), which examines and analyzes the concepts of humanity and perfect victimhood in regards to Palestine and the Palestinian people throughout history and in all aspects of our society, and what we learn and take away from this outstanding and moving book in our continued learning and unlearning work and fight for collective liberation.Follow us on social media and visit our website! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Patreon⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠,⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Website⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠,⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠,⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Bluesky⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ TikTok⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠,⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Threads⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Facebook⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ YouTube⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Leave us a voice message⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Merch store⁠⁠⁠

San Francisco – A Ballymurphy Man/A Work in ProgressIf you live in the San Francisco area go along to the Vogue Theatre on 1st June to see a sneak preview of Trisha Ziff's film – A Ballymurphy Man.It's me telling my story, talking about the influences in my life and of our efforts to build the peace process. Trisha is still working on the final cut and The World Premier of her documentary film will take place in the Galway Film Festival on 12 July. But this is an opportunity for people in San Francisco to see the current work in progress.Tickets are available through the San Francisco Documentary Film Festival at sfdocfest2025.eventive.org/schedule or you can pay in person.The film begins at 7.30 pm and Trisha Ziff, the Director will be there for a Question and Answer.Verbal DisorderWhen I was younger I used to have a stammer. I don't know what age I was. Somewhere between seven and ten perhaps. A youngster! I grew out of my speech impediment, and I have very little recollection of my stammering phase but I was reminded of it when I was on the phone to a friend in Ard Oifig in Dublin last week.The Floodgates of HorrorUachtarán na hÉireann, Michael D Higgins does not mince his words when it comes to Israel's genocidal war against the Palestinian people. Last weekend he addressed the annual commemoration of Ireland's An Gorta Mór – The Great Hunger - of the 1840s. The commemoration is a reminder of our colonial experience and of a potato plight which became a genocide because of the policies of the British government. Over a million died and millions more fled. The Catastrophe – NakbaLast week Palestinians across the world commemorated the Nakba – The Catastrophe. In 1948 almost a million Palestinians fled as refugees from their homes as the Israeli state was forcibly carved out of Palestine. 

In the midst of the terrible Trump tax bill moving through Congress, Ralph invites Sarah Anderson who directs the Global Economy Project at the Institute for Policy Studies to discuss the massive tax loopholes huge companies like Amazon get that allow them to pay far less in taxes than ordinary working people. Then, Greg LeRoy from Good Jobs First joins us to discuss how state taxpayers are footing the bill for these massive data centers companies like Google are building all over the country. Plus, Ralph has some choice words for passive unions and responds to listener feedback about our guest last week, Nadav Wieman.Sarah Anderson directs the Global Economy Project at the Institute for Policy Studies and is a co-editor of the IPS website Inequality.org. Her research covers a wide range of international and domestic economic issues, including inequality, CEO pay, taxes, labor, and Wall Street reform.They're (Congress is) planning to give huge new tax giveaways to large corporations like Amazon and wealthy people like Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. And partially paying for those tax cuts for the wealthy by slashing programs that mean so much to so many Americans like Medicaid and food assistance.”Sarah AndersonWe're not going to have a healthy, thriving society and economy as long as we have the extreme levels of inequality that we have today.Sarah AndersonDubbed “the leading national watchdog of state and local economic development subsidies,” “an encyclopedia of information regarding subsidies,” “God's witness to corporate welfare,” and “the OG of ensuring that state and local tax policy actually supports good jobs, sustainability, and equity,”* Greg founded Good Jobs First in 1998 upon winning the Public Interest Pioneer Award. He has trained and consulted for state and local governments, associations of public officials, labor-management committees, unions, community groups, tax and budget watchdogs, environmentalists, and smart growth advocates more than 30 years.Public education and public health are the two biggest losers in every state giving away money to data centers right now.Greg Le RoyWe know of no other form of state spending that is so out of control. Therefore, we recommend that states cancel their data center tax exemptions. Such subsidies are absolutely unnecessary for an extremely profitable industry dominated by some of the most valuable corporations on earth such as Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, and Google.Good Jobs First report: “Cloudy With a Loss of Spending Control”They've (Congress has) known for years that the ordinary worker pays a higher tax rate than these loophole-ridden corporations.Ralph NaderIn my message to Trump, I ask him, "Why is he afraid of Netanyahu? And doesn't he want to come to the rescue of these innocent babies by saying, ‘Mr. Netanyahu, the taxpayers in this country are paying for thousands of trucks stalled at the border of Gaza full of medicine, food, water, electricity, fuel, and other critical necessities? We're going to put a little American flag on each one of these trucks, and don't you dare block them.'”…No answer.Ralph NaderNews 5/23/251. It seems as though the dam in Israeli politics against acknowledging the horrors in Gaza is beginning to break. In an interview with the BBC this week, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert stated that what Israel "is currently doing in Gaza is very close to a war crime. Thousands of innocent Palestinians are being killed.” He went on to say, “the war has no objective and has no chance of achieving anything that could save the lives of the hostages.” These quotes come from the Jerusalem Post. And on May 21st, Haaretz reported that opposition party leader Yair Golan warned that Israel could become a “pariah state, like South Africa once was,” based on its actions in Gaza. Speaking a truth that American politicians appear incapable of articulating, he added, a “sane state does not wage war against civilians, does not kill babies as a hobby, and does not set goals for itself like the expulsion of a population.”2. Confirming this prognosis, the Cradle reports “The Israeli military has admitted that more than 80 percent of the people killed in the attacks on Gaza since Israel breached the ceasefire two months ago are…civilians.” This fact was confirmed by the IDF in response to a request from Hebrew magazine Hamakom, wherein “the military's spokesperson stated that 500 of the 2,780 killed in the Gaza Strip as of Tuesday are ‘terrorists.'” Leaving the remaining 2,280 people killed classified as “not suspected terrorists.” The Cradle compares this ratio, approximately 4.5 civilians killed for every combatant, to the Russia-Ukraine war – a ratio of approximate 2.8 to one. Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu has “claimed that the ratio is just one civilian killed for each combatant killed.” At the same time, AP reports that while Israel has allowed a minimum of humanitarian aid to enter Gaza, under immense international pressure, “none of that aid actually reached Palestinians,” according to the United Nations spokesperson Stéphane Dujarric. The renewed offensive coupled with the barring of humanitarian aid has raised the alarm about mass starvation in Gaza.3. Developments on the ground in Gaza have triggered a new wave of international outcry. On May 19th, leaders of the United Kingdom, France and Canada issued a joint statement, reading in part, “We strongly oppose the expansion of Israel's military operations in Gaza. The level of human suffering in Gaza is intolerable… The Israeli Government's denial of essential humanitarian assistance to the civilian population is unacceptable and risks breaching International Humanitarian Law…We will not stand by while the Netanyahu Government pursues these egregious actions. If Israel does not cease the renewed military offensive and lift its restrictions on humanitarian aid, we will take further concrete actions in response.” The Parliament of Spain meanwhile, “passed a non-binding motion calling on the government to impose an arms embargo on Israel,” per Anadolu Ajansı. This potential ban, supported by all parties except the conservative People's Party and the far-right Vox, would “ban the exports of any material that could strengthen the Israeli military, including helmets, vests, and fuel with potential military use.” Left-wing parties in Spain are now pushing for an emergency session to impose a binding decree to this effect.4. The United States however seems to be moving backwards. Drop Site news reports Trump's Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff made a deal with Hamas ensuring that, “the Trump administration would compel Israel to lift the Gaza blockade and allow humanitarian aid to enter the territory…[and] make a public call for an immediate ceasefire,” in exchange for the release of Edan Alexander. Of course, once Alexander was released Trump reneged completely. Basem Naim, a member of Hamas's political bureau, told Drop Site, “He did nothing of this…They didn't violate the deal. They threw it in the trash.” Besides prolonging further the charnel house in Gaza, this duplicity undermines American credibility in the region, particularly with Iran at a time when Trump is seeking a new deal to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons.5. Democrats in Congress are inching towards action as well. On May 13th, Senator Peter Welch introduced Senate Resolution 224, calling for “the urgent delivery of humanitarian aid to address the needs of civilians in Gaza.” Along with Welch, 45 Democrats and Independents signed on to this resolution, that is the entire Democratic caucus except for John Fetterman. On May 14th, Rashida Tlaib introduced House Resolution 409, commemorating the Nakba and calling on Congress to “reinstate support for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which provides life-saving humanitarian assistance to Palestinians.” This was cosponsored by AOC and Reps. Carson, Lee, Omar, Pressley, Ramirez, Simon, and Coleman. And, on May 21st, a group of eight senators – Welch, Sanders, Kaine, Merkley, Murray, Van Hollen, Schatz, and Warnock – sent a letter urging Secretary of State Rubio to reopen the investigation into the death of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu-Akleh, per Prem Thakker. The Biden administration ruled the death “unintentional,” but a new documentary by Zeteo News reveals a “Biden cover-up.”6. More action is occurring on college campuses as well, as students go into graduation season. At NYU, a student named Logan Rozos said in his graduation speech, “As I search my heart today in addressing you all…the only thing that is appropriate to say in this time and to a group this large is a recognition of the atrocities currently happening in Palestine,” per CNN. NYU announced that they are now withholding his diploma. At George Washington University, the Guardian reports student Cecilia Culver said in her graduation speech, “I am ashamed to know my tuition [fee] is being used to fund…genocide…I call upon the class of 2025 to withhold donations and continue advocating for disclosure and divestment.” GWU issued a statement declaring Culver “has been barred from all GW's campuses and sponsored events elsewhere.” The moral clarity of these students is remarkable, given the increasingly harsh measures these schools have taken to silence those who speak up.7. Moving on, several major stories about the failing DOGE initiative have surfaced in recent days. First, Social Security. Listeners may recall that a DOGE engineer said “40% of phone calls made to [the Social Security Administration] to change direct deposit information come from fraudsters.” Yet, a new report by NextGov.com found that since DOGE mandated the SSA install new anti-fraud checks on claims made over the phone, “only two claims out of over 110,000 were found to likely be fraudulent,” or 0.0018%. What the policy has done however, is slow down payments. According to this piece, retirement claim processing is down 25%. Meanwhile, at the VA, DOGE engineer Sahil Lavingia, “found…a machine that largely functions, though it doesn't make decisions as fast as a startup might.” Lavingia added “honestly, it's kind of fine—because the government works. It's not as inefficient as I was expecting, to be honest. I was hoping for more easy wins.” This from Fast Company. Finally, CBS reports, “leaders of the United States Institute for Peace regained control of their offices Wednesday…after they were ejected from their positions by the Trump administration and [DOGE] in March.” This piece explains that On February 19th, President Trump issued Executive Order 14217 declaring USIP "unnecessary" and terminating its leadership, most of its 300 staff members, its entire board, installing a DOGE functionary at the top and transferring ownership of the building to the federal government. This set off a court battle that ended Monday, when U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell ruled that the takeover was “unlawful” and therefore “null and void.” These DOGE setbacks might help explain Elon Musk's reported retreat from the political spotlight and political spending.8. On May 21st, Congressman Gerry Connolly passed away, following his battle with esophageal cancer. Connolly's death however is just the latest in a disturbing trend – Ken Klippenstein reports, “Connolly joins five other members of Congress who also died in office over the past 13 months…Rep. Raúl Grijalva…Rep. Sylvester Turner…Rep. Bill Pascrell…Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee…[and] Rep. Donald Payne Jr.” All of these representatives were Democrats and their deaths have chipped away at the close margin between Democrats and Republicans in the House – allowing the Republicans to pass Trump's “Big Beautiful Bill” by a single vote. Connolly himself prevailed over AOC in a much-publicized intra-party battle for the Ranking Member seat on the House Oversight committee. It speaks volumes that Connolly was only able to hold onto that seat for a few short months before becoming too sick to stay on. This is of course part and parcel with the recent revelations about Biden's declining mental acuity during his presidency and the efforts to oust David Hogg from the DNC for backing primaries against what he calls “asleep-at-the-wheel” Democrats.9. Speaking of “asleep-at-the-wheel” Democrats, Bloomberg Government reports Senator John Fetterman “didn't attend a single committee hearing in 2025 until…May 8, about a week after an explosive New York Magazine story raised questions about his mental health and dedication to his job.” Fetterman, who represents Pennsylvania on the Commerce, Agriculture, and Homeland Security committees skipped the confirmation hearings for Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Budget Director Russ Vought, some of the most high-profile and controversial Trump appointments. Fetterman still has yet to attend a single Agriculture committee hearing in 2025.10. Finally, in more Pennsylvania news, the state held its Democratic primaries this week, yielding mixed results. In Pittsburgh, progressives suffered a setback with the ouster of Mayor Ed Gainey – the first Black mayor of the city. Gainey lost to Allegheny County Controller Corey O'Connor, the son of former Mayor Bob O'Connor, the Hill reports. In Philadelphia however, voters approved three ballot measures – including expanding affordable housing and adding more oversight to the prison system – and reelected for a third term progressive reform District Attorney Larry Krasner, per AP. Krasner has long been a target of conservatives in both parties, but has adroitly maneuvered to maintain his position – and dramatically reduced homicide rates in Philly. The Wall Street Journal reports Philadelphia homicides declined by 34% between 2023 and 2024, part of substantial decline in urban homicides nationwide. Kudos to Krasner.This has been Francesco DeSantis, with In Case You Haven't Heard. Get full access to Ralph Nader Radio Hour at www.ralphnaderradiohour.com/subscribe

For episode 194, Elia Ayoub is joined by Amos Goldberg, Professor of Holocaust History at the Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Goldberg is among the most vocal Israeli historians of the Holocaust to have called Israel's actions in Gaza genocide. In 2024, he wrote a paper for the Journal of Genocide Research on the question of intent, which we explored in part 1. In this episode, the second part of their conversation, they get into the crisis within Holocaust and Genocide Studies since the start of the Gaza genocide. In the last segment, they spoke about “The Holocaust and the Nakba: A New Grammar of Trauma and History”, which Goldberg co-edited, and argue for the necessity of new horizons in our imaginaries. The full, uninterrupted episode is available for free on Patreon. Articles by Goldberg: Le Monde: 'What is happening in Gaza is a genocide because Gaza does not exist anymore'Led By Donkeys: Yes it's a genocideHaaretz: There's No Auschwitz in Gaza. But It's Still Genocide. Books by Goldberg:The Holocaust and the Nakba: A New Grammar of Trauma and History (with Bashir Bashir)Trauma in First Person: Diary Writing During the HolocaustMarking Evil: Holocaust Memory in the Global AgeOther Links:Elia's newsletter Hauntologies includes articles on “the Ghosts of Israel's Futures” Lee Mordechai: Witnessing the Gaza War The Fire These Times: The Holocaust, the Nakba and Reparative Memory with Daniel Voskoboynik The Fire These Times: Remembering the Nakba, Imagining the Future w/ Dana El Kurd Read Abubaker Abed's “The Unbearable Pain of Leaving Gaza”Follow Bisan Owda on Instagram For more:Elia Ayoub is on ⁠⁠Bluesky⁠⁠, ⁠Mastodon⁠, ⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠ and blogs at ⁠Hauntologies.net⁠ The Fire These Times is on Bluesky,⁠ Instagram⁠ and has a⁠ ⁠website⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠From The Periphery is on⁠ ⁠Patreon⁠⁠, ⁠Bluesky⁠, ⁠⁠YouTube⁠⁠,⁠ Instagram⁠, and has a⁠ website⁠⁠Credits:Elia Ayoub (host, producer, sound editor, episode design), ⁠⁠Rap and Revenge⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ (Music), ⁠⁠Wenyi Geng⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ (TFTT theme design), ⁠⁠Hisham Rifai⁠⁠⁠⁠ (FTP theme design) and ⁠⁠Molly Crabapple⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ (FTP team profile pics).

Naomi Shihab Nye opens the talk reading a new, recently penned poem, Current Affairs. Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish then introduces himself and segways into the realities of his experiences growing up in Gaza, the Jabalia Camp, what he has seen and witnessed, the loss of his three daugthers and niece in 2009 from an Israeli tank shell (i.e., I Shall Not Hate) and his pride in his Palestinan heritage, family, and community. He shares his deep belief and conviction 'nothing is impossible in life.' He also expresses: Medicine as a great human equalizer Toward human rights, once people step away from the border of the hospitals, they become categorized and labeled 'Palestinian' or 'Israeli' If you believe in Humanity, we must all stand for all Human Rights is deeply tested in Gaza, people must stand up for human rights Advocate not for peace but for dignity, justice, freedom, and human rights for all: peace will follow when these conditions are cultivated Naomi shares her family history and the experiences of relocating after the Nakba. Naomi also shares: As a poet, every voice is important in the world, every voice represents humanity. Regarding Gaza, this is an overwhelming tragedy of sorrow The importance of actions based on one's convictions The power of the military industry complex to overide the voice of the majority and humanity's collective voice How can we be heard, how can we be listened to? Who is listening? The idea, our obligation is to our humanity, looking within our selves we recognize our humanity Dr Abuelaish shares his experiences as an author. The priority of Palestinians toward education. Human Rights, respect and dignity for all. What is our modern sense of responsibility and obligation toward our fellow humans, what is our modern sense of meaning, mission, and purpose. A human being is a human being [only] through another person. Truth telling as means of healing. The situation is Gaza and West Bank harms Israel deeply as well. Naomi shares Hibu Abu Nabab's poem, Not Just Passing. The political power and politics contrbuting to the crisis in Gaza and the West Bank. Dr. Abuelaish reviews the history of Gaza since 2000. And, Naomi closes with her poem, For Gaza The children are still singing They need & want to sing They are carrying cats to safe places Holding what they can hold Red hair brown hair yellow They will wear the sweater Someone threw away They will hope for something tasty You won't be able to own them Their spirits fly to safer worlds They planted seashells in the sand They never committed a crime A president pardons turkeys He pardons his own son He doesn't pardon children The children are still singing. Naomi Shihab Nye was born in St. Louis, Missouri. Her father was a Palestinian refugee and her mother an American of German and Swiss descent, and Nye spent her adolescence in both Jerusalem and San Antonio, Texas. She earned her BA from Trinity University in San Antonio. Nye is the recipient of numerous honors and awards for her work, including the Ivan Sandrof Award for Lifetime Achievement from the National Book Critics Circle, the Lavan Award, the Paterson Poetry Prize, the Carity Randall Prize, the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award, the Lee Bennett Hopkins Poetry award, the Robert Creeley Prize, and many Pushcart Prizes. She has received fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and she was a Witter Bynner Fellow. From 2010 to 2015 she served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. In 2018 she was awarded the Lon Tinkle Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Texas Institute of Letters. Nye was the Poetry Foundation's Young People's Poet Laureate from 2019-2022. Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish, MD, MPH, is a Palestinian medical doctor who was born and raised in Jabalia Refugee Camp in the Gaza Strip. He is a passionate and eloquent proponent of peace between Palestinians and Israelis and has dedicated his life to using health as a vehicle for peace. He has succeeded despite all odds through a great determination of spirit, a strong faith, and a stalwart belief in hope and family. He has received a number of awards and nominations in recognition of his promotion of peace through health, and has been given seven honorary degrees. He has been nominated three years consecutively for the Nobel Peace Prize, and support for his candidacy keeps growing exponentially every year. He is the recipient of the Stavros Niarchos Prize for Survivorship, and was also nominated for the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought. Since 2010 Dr. Abuelaish has also been named one of the 500 Most Influential Muslims by the Royal Islamic Strategic Studies Centre in Amman, Jordan for three consecutive years, and was the first ever recipient of the Mahatma Gandhi Peace Prize. Dr. Abuelaish's book, I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor's Journey, an autobiography inspired by the loss of his three daughters Bessan, Mayar, and Aya and his niece Noor to Israeli shelling on January 16, 2009, has achieved critical acclaim. Published in 2010, it has become an international best-seller and has been translated into 23 languages. The book has become a testament to his commitment to forgiveness as the solution to conflict, and the catalyst towards peace. Naomi Shihab Nye's poem Current Affairs I don't want to be one of those modern people who reads about Gazans being crushed wholesale entire blocks extended families invisible kitchens then continues scrolling. We will not delete you. We would give you anything we have. Your pain is not money. Feel us from a far place. Howling in darkness. What are you supposed to? No one should have to bear. I love you so much I can smell the garlic in your shirt, the dirt on your shoes, the smoke in your air.

Nasser speaks with Sarah Wehbe, a Palestinian student and writer living in Naarm (Melbourne), currently pursuing an Honours degree in microbiology. They discuss Sarah's Nakba story, her article 'Plant hatred in our hearts', her experience as a university student and the growing solidarity with Palestinian students, and the parallels between Palestinian liberation and other Indigenous and land justice struggles. Read Sarah's article 'Plant hatred in our hearts' via overland.org.au.Naksa rally, Sun 8 June, State Library Victoria, from 12 PM. More info.Join the Free Palestine rally every Sunday at the State Library Victoria, from 12 PM.For info on upcoming events and actions, follow APAN and Free Palestine Melbourne.Catch daily broadcast updates via Let's Talk Palestine. Image: Courtesy of Sarah Wehbe, used with permission. 

Order Jason's book, The Great Campaign Against the Great Reset on Amazon https://a.co/d/6yiOk5sand on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/osu4491Visit Movie to Movement @ www.MovieToMovement.comAnd the Vulnerable People Project: www.vulnerablepeopleproject.com

Most mainstream media are missing the mass global solidarity movement rising up in support of Palestinians.

For episode 193, Elia Ayoub is joined by Amos Goldberg, Professor of Holocaust History at the Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Goldberg is among the most vocal Israeli historians of the Holocaust to have called Israel's actions in Gaza genocide. In 2024, he wrote a paper for the Journal of Genocide Research exploring how the question of ‘intent' is used in discussions around genocides, including the Gaza one. They also get into how genocide is often preceded by claims of self-defense. The combined two-parter episode is already available on our Patreon for free. Articles by Goldberg: Amos Goldberg: 'What is happening in Gaza is a genocide because Gaza does not exist anymore'Led By Donkeys: Yes it's a genocideHaaretz: There's No Auschwitz in Gaza. But It's Still Genocide. Books by Goldberg:The Holocaust and the Nakba: A New Grammar of Trauma and History (with Bashir Bashir)Trauma in First Person: Diary Writing During the HolocaustMarking Evil: Holocaust Memory in the Global AgeOther Links:Elia's newsletter Hauntologies includes articles on “the Ghosts of Israel's Futures” Lee Mordechai: Witnessing the Gaza War The Fire These Times: The Holocaust, the Nakba and Reparative Memory with Daniel Voskoboynik The Fire These Times: Remembering the Nakba, Imagining the Future w/ Dana El Kurd Read Abubaker Abed's “The Unbearable Pain of Leaving Gaza”Follow Bisan Owda on Instagram The Fire These Times is a proud member of⁠ ⁠From The Periphery (FTP) Media Collective⁠⁠. Check out other projects in our media ecosystem: Syria: The Inconvenient Revolution, From The Periphery Podcast, The Mutual Aid Podcast⁠, ⁠Politically Depressed⁠, ⁠Obscuristan⁠, and ⁠Antidote Zine⁠.To support our work and get access to all kinds of perks, please join our Patreon on Patreon.com/fromtheperipheryFor more:Elia Ayoub is on ⁠⁠Bluesky⁠⁠, ⁠Mastodon⁠, ⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠ and blogs at ⁠Hauntologies.net⁠ The Fire These Times is on Bluesky,⁠ Instagram⁠ and has a⁠ ⁠website⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠From The Periphery is on⁠ ⁠Patreon⁠⁠, ⁠Bluesky⁠, ⁠⁠YouTube⁠⁠,⁠ Instagram⁠, and has a⁠ website⁠⁠Credits:Elia Ayoub (host, producer, sound editor, episode design), ⁠⁠Rap and Revenge⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ (Music), ⁠⁠Wenyi Geng⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ (TFTT theme design), ⁠⁠Hisham Rifai⁠⁠⁠⁠ (FTP theme design) and ⁠⁠Molly Crabapple⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ (FTP team profile pics).

En libros hoy invitamos a José Conde, autor de '7X7. 49+1 canciones para entender y amar a Dylan' . Nieves Concostrina  habla sobre el “Nakba”, el día de luto nacional en Palestina, que se celebra cada 15 de mayo. Terminamos con 'Lo que queda del día' con Isaías Lafuente

En libros hoy invitamos a José Conde, autor de '7X7. 49+1 canciones para entender y amar a Dylan' . Nieves Concostrina  habla sobre el “Nakba”, el día de luto nacional en Palestina, que se celebra cada 15 de mayo. Terminamos con 'Lo que queda del día' con Isaías Lafuente

This episode of Doin' Time contains audio images of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who have died, and discussion of Deaths in Custody.First up on the show we will be joined by Arif Hussein Senior Lawyer at the Human Rights Law Centre. We will bring you an interview about how the South Australian Government must take historic opportunity and adopt Human Rights Act after Parliamentary inquiry recommendation.  Then we will hear from Renuga Renuga Inpakumar, Tamil Refugee Council spokesperson about the genocide Sixteen Years Since Mullivaikkal: The Tamil Genocide Continues. A debrief of the Free Palestine 77th anniversary of the Nakba rally from the Monday Breakfast was also played in which presenters Rob and Edmi give accounts of the rally, its coverage in the mainstream media, and lessons learned of resilience from Palestine and the Free Palestine Naarm rally's organisers.

NAKBA 77 https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/half-million-march-downing-street-urge-end-uk-israel-ties https://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/news/north-east-news/police-attend-pro-palestine-protest-31654091 https://flipboard.com/@movingtrain/people-are-revolting-9mp6ipe2z/israel-pro-palestinian-demonstrators-rally-in-tel-aviv-to-mark-77th-nakba-day/a-JZbtt5XyQTS188_NIgZw6Q%3Aa%3A48017518-c988194c4c%2Fflipboard.com https://flipboard.com/@movingtrain/people-are-revolting-9mp6ipe2z/belgium-pro-palestinian-protest-held-outside-israeli-embassy-in-brussels-agains/a-4cAmkXdjRPyRBZpHWK_Ujg%3Aa%3A48017518-3fc886a6f9%2Fflipboard.com https://en.safa.news/post/4375/Brussels-Sees-Historic-March-as-Palestinians-Mark-Ongoing-Nakba #peoplearerevolting twitter.com/peoplerevolting Peoplearerevolting.com movingtrainradio.com

C'était il y a 77 ans : la création de l'État d'Israël. Joie et fierté pour les juifs qui voient leur rêve d'État se concrétiser. Accablement pour les populations arabes sur place. La semaine dernière, les Palestiniens commémoraient ce qu'ils appellent la « Nakba », la « catastrophe » en français, en référence à l'exode et à l'expulsion de plus de 800 000 Palestiniens de leurs terres après la création de l'État d'Israël. Ce fut le cas hier, notamment dans le camp de réfugiés d'Askar aux abords de la ville de Naplouse, dans le nord de la Cisjordanie occupée. Pour les Palestiniens rencontrés sur place par RFI, la situation à Gaza est une continuation de cette histoire tragique. De notre envoyée spéciale à Naplouse,Jusqu'à la dernière minute, un doute planait sur la tenue des commémorations de la Nakba. Le matin même, les forces spéciales israéliennes ont investi le camp de réfugiés voisin de Balata. Elles viennent de se retirer. La fanfare démarre. Des centaines de personnes défilent dans les rues du camp d'Askar. Parmi eux, de nombreux enfants et de jeunes habillés en tenue d'époque. « On est habillés comme nos ancêtres qui ont été déracinés en 1948 pendant la Nakba. Quand on les a fait sortir de leurs terres, ils étaient habillés comme ça. Mes grands-parents vivaient leurs vies normalement dans la ville de Lod quand des milices sionistes leur ont demandé de partir trois jours seulement. Ils avaient promis de les faire revenir. Mes grands-parents sont partis et, 77 ans plus tard, ils ne sont toujours pas rentrés », témoigne Jamil, un grand adolescent qui arbore une longue jellaba et un keffieh. Un petit train arrive plein à craquer. « Ce train symbolise la Nakba et le fait qu'on veut rentrer chez nous. C'est aussi pour que les enfants puissent s'amuser et qu'ils n'oublient pas nos villes, Jaffa et Haïfa. On ne doit pas les oublier. Mes grands-parents m'ont raconté que ce sont de belles villes et qu'on a une maison là-bas. J'espère qu'on pourra y retourner un jour », explique Qacem, 15 ans. Jaffa et Haïfa se situent désormais en Israël. Dans la foule, certains enfants brandissent aussi des armes ou des clefs en cartons. Le message est clair et assumé ici : le « droit au retour » se fera coûte que coûte. Pour Samer Al Jamal, qui supervise les programmes scolaires au ministère palestinien de l'Éducation nationale, transmettre la mémoire de la Nakba est crucial. « Au sein du ministère de l'Éducation nationale, nous faisons en sorte que le récit palestinien des événements soit présent dans les programmes scolaires. On organise aussi des évènements dans nos écoles. Des activités, des festivals, tout ce qui est en notre pouvoir pour que ces élèves continuent d'être attachés à cette terre. Les Israéliens ont cru que les anciens allaient mourir et que les plus jeunes allaient oublier. Cette génération n'oubliera pas la terre de ses grands-parents et de ses ancêtres. Chaque génération se passera le flambeau du souvenir », estime-t-il.Sur les banderoles ou dans les discours, une phrase revient sans cesse : la « Nakba continue ». Ghassan Daghlas, gouverneur de Naplouse en explique la signification : « La Nakba continue, oui. Tant que l'occupation perdure, la Nakba continue. Tant que l'injustice se maintient vis-à-vis du peuple palestinien, alors la Nakba continue. On espère que cette injustice cessera et que le peuple palestinien pourra accéder à son rêve d'État indépendant avec Jérusalem comme capitale. » Quelques heures après cette cérémonie, on apprenait qu'Israël lançait sa vaste offensive terrestre sur Gaza. À lire aussiEn Cisjordanie occupée, la mémoire de la Nakba perpétuée

C'est la photo d'un homme debout au milieu d'un champ de ruines, qui fait la Une du Nouvel Obs, avec ces mots : « le spectre de l'annexion ».  « Dix-neuf mois après les massacres commis par le Hamas, les destructions systématiques menées par le régime de Benyamin Netanyahou ont presque anéanti la Bande de Gaza », écrit le Nouvel Obs, « destructions qui font planer la menace d'un exode forcé sur ses deux millions d'habitants ». « Un spectre hante les Palestiniens de Gaza », poursuit l'hebdomadaire : « la Nakba, la catastrophe en arabe, référence à l'expulsion d'une partie des populations arabes de Palestine lors de la naissance d'Israël en 1948. Depuis les massacres du 7 octobre, les Palestiniens ont la certitude de vivre une nouvelle Nakba, à Gaza sous les bombes, mais aussi en Cisjordanie, de manière plus rampante et insidieuse, sous l'action souvent conjointe de l'armée et des colons israéliens ».Crime de guerre et génocideFaut-il alors parler de génocide ? interroge le Nouvel Obs. Le débat est ouvert et parfois violent. En préambule, la juriste Mathilde Philip-Gay spécialisée dans le droit pénal international, explique que « parmi les grands crimes en droit pénal international, on peut déjà dire que deux sont certainement commis à Gaza. » « Il y a, dit-elle, incontestablement des crimes de guerre, puisque des dizaines de milliers de civils ont été tués, ce qui n'est pas un objectif militaire. La liste est longue, poursuit Mathilde Philip-Gay : blocus de l'aide humanitaire, utilisation de la faim comme arme, interdiction aux journalistes occidentaux de se rendre à Gaza, ciblage délibéré des reporters palestiniens. On assiste aussi très probablement à des crimes contre l'humanité », ajoute-t-elle.Mais qu'en est-il du génocide ? Pour l'historien Vincent Lemire, il faut distinguer « les deux significations du mot ».  « D'abord, la signification politique, tombée dans le sens commun, celle que tout le monde a en tête, l'atteinte, de manière atroce, à une population, le ' pire ' des crimes ». Or « juridiquement, précise l'historien, ce n'est pas vraiment cela. Selon le droit international, le génocide correspond à l'intention de détruire un groupe national, ethnique ou religieux. Pour être établi, il nécessite donc de prouver qu'Israël a comme unique intention de détruire la population de Gaza (…) Il doit aussi être démontré que les victimes sont ciblées de manière délibérées et non aléatoire ».  Le débat reste ouvert…L'ordination des femmesDans la presse hebdomadaire également cette semaine, les réactions à l'élection du pape Léon XIV. Le Point y consacre d'ailleurs sa Une, avec ce titre : « Léon XIV, le pape d'un nouveau monde ».  « Le premier Américain du Nord (…) mais qui vient aussi du Sud, il a longtemps été missionnaire au Pérou ». Un pape jeune et moderne. Mais jusqu'où ira-t-il ? Le Point s'interroge notamment sur les femmes diacres et prêtres : « le sujet de leur ordination va-t-il rester éternellement tabou dans l'Église ? »On serait tenté de dire oui, à lire l'article de l'hebdomadaire. Car, nous explique l'historien Alberto Melloni, au-delà « d'une affaire de parité ou d'égalité des sexes » « la question des femmes touche à des enjeux théologiques fondamentaux ». « Problème, ajoute-t-il : ouvrir la prêtrise aux femmes ou même rétablir le diaconat féminin nécessiterait un concile. Ce n'est pas une décision qu'un pape peut prendre seul ». Autrement dit, l'attente risque d'être longue…L'Express, lui aussi, s'intéresse au nouveau pape. Et plus précisément à son « face à face », avec Donald Trump. « Si le pape et le président des États-Unis partagent la même nationalité, ils risquent de s'opposer sur la question des migrants et de l'aide internationale » estime l'Express, d'autant que « pour les ultra-trumpistes, le successeur de François est un gauchiste. »À 300 kilomètres de CayenneEnfin, le Journal du Dimanche se fait l'écho des nouvelles intentions du ministre français de la justice, Gérald Darmanin, en matière pénitentiaire. « Gérald Darmanin va enfermer les narcotrafiquants dans la jungle amazonienne », clame le JDD, qui parle d'une « forteresse isolée, conçue pour enfermer les criminels les plus dangereux du narcotrafic et les islamistes ». Une annonce faite alors que le ministre est en visite en Guyane. Gérald Darmanin qui multiplie les annonces sur les prisons et qui déclare ainsi : « j'ai décidé d'implanter en Guyane la troisième prison de haute sécurité de France. Soixante places, un régime carcéral extrêmement strict et un objectif : mettre hors d'état de nuire les profils les plus dangereux du narcotrafic. »Le Journal du dimanche nous donne un aperçu de l'implantation de la nouvelle prison : « au bout du monde : à Saint-Laurent du Maroni, aux confins du fleuve, à 300 kilomètres de Cayenne, à des jours des premiers hameaux accessibles uniquement en pirogue ou par avion ». « Une forteresse volontairement isolée, comme un écho au bagne d'autrefois, mais avec les codes du 21ème siècle », ajoute le JDD, qui semble séduit par cette vision, alors qu'aux États-Unis, Donald Trump, lui, rêve de rouvrir Alcatraz. Autant de projets qui pourraient nourrir l'imagination de bien des scénaristes.

  This interview was recorded with Anas Arafat in Gaza and Laura Schleifer in the US on May 17, 2025. We are very grateful for their time and their work, and the unimaginable hardship that Anas is enduring in Gaza. We thank them for this interview. Our conversation starts with the formation of Plant the Land Team Gaza as a grassroot collaboration between local Gazan community activists and international solidarity activists within the vegan community and beyond to provide life-sustaining foods and services in a way that respects and sustains all life.  Anas shares details of the situation in Gaza since the blockaid of all aid including food, water and medical supplies since March 2. Palestinians are suffering immense hardship with ongoing violence under the illegal occupation of their land and the genocide and ethnic cleansing being committed by the state of Israel.  We discuss the Nakba: both in it's remembrance this week and the ongoing Nakba being perpetrated in Gaza and the West Bank. Anas and Laura talk about Palestinian solidarity and what people can do to support Palestine.  Please follow Plant the Land Team Gaza here:  https://www.planttheland.org/  https://www.facebook.com/PlantTheLandTeamGaza  Anas on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100008448283358  Laura on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100008448283358 Also the BDS Movement https://bdsmovement.net/ Vegan BDS https://www.instagram.com/veganbds/   Links to fundraisers that will get dontions directly to Anas in Gaza to continue this work: - GoFundMe: Support Mutual aid in Gaza fundraiser (AUD) https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-mutual-aid-in-gaza - Muslim Giving: Help for Gaza fundraiser (Pounds Stirling) https://www.muslimgiving.org/g4za2025?fbclid=IwY2xjawKV-PVleHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETEycm5BQnB5c0Y2MlVFYzkzAR5IolTSUK4DGseF8PgoHe_e6XCyU2N2RcAuMoa9ibUHLj3MXlKg006lNTB__Q_aem_fEs35cZScBkRLsHgbw6N1w  - Bonfire Plant the Land Team Gaza t-shirt fundraiser (USD) https://www.bonfire.com/plant-the-land-team-gaza-1/  Music we played on the show:  - Falstini Ana by Zain Daqqa  - Ya Tal3een by Dana Salah Please note that due to copyright legislation we are not able to include the songs in our podcast. You can find the songs on the Freedom of Species Spotify playlist here:  https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3TJQujKYjGFoFP6LhBbaTS?si=6ghUWmzkQpyv...  

In this episode, we commemorate Al Nakba for the 77th year. We trace the story of one Palestinian family displaced from the al-Baqa‘a neighborhood in West Jerusalem during the 1948 Nakba. From Victoria's memories of fleeing her rose-filled home to her grandson Majdi's search for what was lost, we explore how memory, loss, and resilience are passed down through generations. Through personal testimony and historical context, this episode reflects on what it means to reclaim narratives, and why Palestinians continue to remember, resist, and return.Thank you for tuning into This is Palestine, the official podcast of The IMEU! For more stories and resources, visit us at imeu.org. Stay connected with us:  Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theimeu/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/theIMEU Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/theIMEU/ For more insights, follow our host, Diana Buttu, on:  Twitter: https://twitter.com/dianabuttu     

This episode of Speaking Out of Place is being recorded on May 15, 2025, the 77th anniversary of the 1948 Nakba, which began the ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their land. We talk with Lara Elborno, Richard Falk, and Penny Green, three members of the Gaza Tribunal, which is set to convene in Saravejo in a few days.  This will set in motion the process of creating an archive of Israel's genocide of the Palestinian people with an aim to give global civil society the tools and inspiration it needs to further delegitimize Israel, end its genocidal acts, help bring about liberation for the Palestinian people.Lara Elborno is a Palestinian-American lawyer specialized in international disputes, qualified to practice in the US and France. She has worked for over 10 years as counsel acting for individuals, private entities, and States in international commercial and investment arbitrations. She dedicates a large part of her legal practice to pro-bono work including the representation of asylum seekers in France and advising clients on matters related to IHRL and the business and human rights framework. She previously taught US and UK constitutional law at the Université de Paris II - Panthéon Assas. She currently serves as a board member of ARDD-Europe and sits on the Steering Committee of the Gaza Tribunal. She has moreover appeared as a commentator on Al Jazeera, TRTWorld, DoubleDown News, and George Galloway's MOAT speaking about the Palestinian liberation struggle, offering analysis and critiques of international law.Richard Falk is Albert G. Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University (1961-2001) and Chair of Global Law, Faculty of Law, Queen Mary University London. Since 2002 has been a Research Fellow at the Orfalea Center of Global and International Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Between 2008 and 2014 he served as UN Special Rapporteur on Israeli Violations of Human Rights in Occupied Palestine.Falk has advocated and written widely about ‘nations' that are captive within existing states, including Palestine, Kashmir, Western Sahara, Catalonia, Dombas.He is Senior Vice President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, having served for seven years as Chair of its Board. He is Chair of the Board of Trustees of Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor. He is co-director of the Centre of Climate Crime, QMUL.Falk has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize several times since 2008.His recent books include (Re)Imagining Humane Global Governance (2014), Power Shift: The New Global Order (2016), Palestine Horizon: Toward a Just Peace (2017), Revisiting the Vietnam War (ed. Stefan Andersson, 2017), On Nuclear Weapons: Denuclearization, Demilitarization and Disarmament (ed. Stefan Andersson & Curt Dahlgren, 2019.Penny Green is Professor of Law and Globalisation at QMUL and Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. She has published extensively on state crime theory, resistance to state violence and the Rohingya genocide, (including with Tony Ward, State Crime: Governments, Violence and Corruption, 2004 and State Crime and Civil Activism 2019). She has a long track record of researching in hostile environments and has conducted fieldwork in the UK, Turkey, Kurdistan, the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Israel, Tunisia, Myanmar and Bangladesh. In 2015 she and her colleagues published ‘Countdown to Annihilation: Genocide in Myanmar' and in March 2018 

The Trump administration challenges birthright citizenship at the Supreme Court the same week it grants refugee status to white South Africans fleeing the post-apartheid state.And even as the horror of the Nakba is remembered, there is a victory as a federal judge orders that Georgetown University scholar, Badar Khan Suri, be released from an ICE detention facility in Texas. We go outside the Virginia courthouse where the case was heard, and hear from Suris wife and attorney. Plus headlines on the 77th anniversary of the Nakba and more.  The show is made possible only by our volunteer energy, our resolve to keep the people's voices on the air, and by support from our listeners. In this new era of fake corporate news, we have to be and support our own media! Please click here or click on the Support-Donate tab on this website to subscribe for as little as $3 a month. We are so grateful for this small but growing amount of monthly crowdsource funding on Patreon. PATREON NOW HAS A ONE-TIME, ANNUAL DONATION FUNCTION! You can also give a one-time or recurring donation on PayPal. Thank you! “On the Ground: Voices of Resistance from the Nation's Capital” gives a voice to the voiceless 99 percent at the heart of American empire. The award-winning, weekly hour, produced and hosted by Esther Iverem, covers social justice activism about local, national and international issues, with a special emphasis on militarization and war, the police state, the corporate state, environmental justice and the left edge of culture and media. The show is heard on three dozen stations across the United States, on podcast, and is archived on the world wide web at https://onthegroundshow.org/  Please support us on Patreon or Paypal. Links for all ways to support are on our website or at Esther Iverem's Linktree: https://linktr.ee/esther_iverem

Deze week werd de Nakba herdacht, de verdrijving van Palestijnen in 1948. Maarten en Tom praten over de situatie nu in Gaza. Palestijnen worden op grote schaal gedood en uitgehongerd.

Nasser provides commentary on the history of the 1948 Nakba and current news headlines, including reports of Trump's plan to relocate one million Palestinians from Gaza to Libya, and the recent release of a U.S-Israeli captive.Nasser then unpacks and debunks some of the most common myths surrounding the Nakba, looking at the mass displacement and dispossession of Palestinians during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. He also discusses the significance of the BDS movement in challenging international support for Israel's oppression of Palestinians and in pressuring Israel to comply with international law. Nakba Day rally, May 18, State Library Victoria, from 12 PM. More info.Join the Free Palestine rally every Sunday at the State Library Victoria, from 12 PM.For info on upcoming events and actions, follow APAN and Free Palestine Melbourne.Catch daily broadcast updates via Let's Talk Palestine. Image: @freepalestinemelb 

Palestinians in Gaza say they are facing another Nakba on the anniversary of their "catastrophe". Also: President Zelensky calls Russian peace talks delegates "stand-in props" and the lost Magna Carta found at Harvard.

Gaza is starving. As Palestinians mark 77 years since the Nakba, families are still under bombardment, cut off from aid and struggling to survive. With US President Donald Trump touring the Gulf, what will it take to bring relief to Palestinians? In this episode: Youmna ElSayed (@YoumnaElSayed17), Al Jazeera correspondent Episode credits: This episode was produced by Sarí el-Khalili, Sonia Bhagat, and Tamara Khandaker, with Phillip Lanos, Spencer Cline, Kisaa Zehra, Remas Alhawari, Mariana Navarrete, and our guest host, Natasha del Toro. It was edited by Alexandra Locke. Our sound designer is Alex Roldan. Our video editor is Hisham Abu Salah. Alexandra Locke is The Take’s executive producer. Ney Alvarez is Al Jazeera’s head of audio. Connect with us: @AJEPodcasts on Instagram, X, Facebook, Threads and YouTube

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In this Nakba Day episode, we begin with a powerful teach-in from Nour, our Palestine Campaigner, on the history of Palestine and the origins of the Nakba. Then, Aaron sits down with Nour to discuss how this history shapes the present and why remembering it is essential to our struggles today.

This week on the Sumud Podcast, in commemoration of Nakba, we're joined by Ahmad Abuznaid, the Executive Director of the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights & USCPR Action. Prior to joining USCPR, Ahmad co-founded the Florida-based Dream Defenders after the killing of Trayvon Martin, serving as Legal & Policy Director and COO during his time there. Ahmad went on to lead the National Network for Arab American Communities as the Executive Director from 2017 to 2019. Ahmad shares his insights on the intersection of Palestinian liberation and global justice movements in this thought-provoking conversation. He reflects on the role of youth in reshaping the narrative of resistance, the importance of international solidarity, and the profound impact of grassroots organizing in challenging imperialism and colonialism. Ahmad also discusses the moral imperative of resisting injustice and why standing for Palestinian freedom is crucial to the broader struggle for human rights.

Hii leo jaridani tunakuletea mada kwa kina inayoturejesha katika mkutano wa CSW68 kumsikia Christina Kamili Ruhinda, Mkurugenzi Mtendaji wa Mtandao wa Mashirika yanayotoa huduma ya msaada wa kisheria nchini Tanzania, TANLAP. Pia tunakuletea muhtasari wa habari na uchambuzi wa neno la wiki.Wakati dunia ikiadhimisha miaka 77 tangu Nakba ambapo zaidi ya wapalestina 700,000 walifurushwa kutoka vijiji na miji yao mwaka 1948, shirika la Umoja wa Mataifa la msaada kwa Wakimbizi wa Kipalestina UNRWA limetoa onyo kali kuhusu sura mpya ya mateso na ufurushwaji wa lazima uonaoendele Gaza.Akiwa na wasiwasi kutokana na ripoti za kuaminika kwamba wakimbizi wa Rohingya kutoka Myanmar walilazimishwa kushuka kutoka kwenye meli ya jeshi la wanamaji la India na kutoswa katika bahari ya Andaman wiki iliyopita, Mtaalamu wa UN wa Haki za Binadamu kuhusu wakimbizi wa Myanmar, ameanzisha uchunguzi kuhusu kitendo hicho alichoeleza kuwa ni cha kushangaza na kisichokubalika.Na baada ya muda mrefu kuonekana kama mchangiaji mkubwa wa utoaji wa hewa chafuzi duniani, sekta ya usafirishaji majini sasa iko mstari wa mbele katika kuonesha ushirikiano wa kipekee wa kimataifa wa kupunguza hewa hizo zitolewazo na meli za usafirishaji majini.Na katika kujifunza lugha ya Kiswahili mtaalam wetu ni Onni Sigalla, Mhariri Mwandamizi Baraza la Kiswahili la Taifa nchini Tanzania, BAKITA anafafanua maana ya neno "KIANGO".Mwenyeji wako ni Leah Mushi, karibu!

Israel has killed more than 100 people on the anniversary of the Nakba – when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were violently displaced from their land. Plus: Keir Starmer's plan to send asylum seekers overseas; and a Ben & Jerry's co-founder is arrested for protesting in the US Capitol. With Dalia Gebrial, Kieran Andrieu and […]

Deze week wordt de Nakba van 1948 herdacht. Dit is de periode nadat de staat Israël werd opgericht en veel Palestijnen uit hun huizen werden verdreven.  Steef legt uit wat de Nakba is en waarom de herdenking dit jaar extra beladen is. 

Featuring the latest in activist campaigns and struggles against oppression fighting for a better world with anti-capitalist analysis on current affairs and international politics. Presenters: Jacob Andrewartha, Mary Merkenich, Stephanie Mierisch.NewsreportsDiscussion about Trump's ongoing trade deals with the Middle-east and how they reinforce their dominant role in the Middle-east.News from the pages of Green LeftNT gov't targets First Nations people with punishing bail laws, more funds to police, prisonsNSW Parliament agrees to strengthen abortion accessInterviews and DiscussionsDrew Pendergrass, climate scientist, ecosocialist and co-author of Half-Earth Socialism: A Plan to save the future from extinction joins the program to discuss the main ideas of his book and how we can win a democratic future that sustains the earth. You can listen to the individual interview here.Muayad Ali, Palestinian activist joins the program to reflect on the 77 years of Nakba (known as catastrophe) it's legacy and why the right of return is such a important demand for palestinians all over the world. You can listen to the individual interview here.Songs playedReady to fall - Rise AgainstSongs for Gaza by David Rovics

This week on the Global Research News Hour we mark both the 19th month of Israel's continued assaults on Gaza since October 7th, and we also mark the 77th anniversary of the NAKBA, the displacement and expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians which started the Arab-Israeli War. We will first hear from Louay Alghoul, a Winnipeg lawyer with over a hundred relatives killed over the past year and a half and he will inform us regarding the situation as he encountered the fleeing and dying from his trips to Egypt in recent months. Later on we hear from radio station CFCR in Saskatoon regarding their guest Deirdre Nunan an orthopedic surgeon who talks about what she encountered through her practice of medicine in this unending Middle East war.

 Las agencias de la ONU desmienten que la ayuda en Gaza haya sufrido desvíos. Estamos presenciando lo que podría ser otra Nakba, dice Comité Especial.ACNUR reduce la atención a refugiados nicaragüenses en Costa Rica por falta de fondos

Nasser provides commentary on the latest news headlines, including: Gaza receiving no aid for 68 days due to Israeli blockade, activist Hash Tayeh facing court for allegedly using an insulting chant at a recent rally, former Eurovision contestants demanding Israel's exclusion from the contest, and the 77th anniversary of the 1948 Nakba.Nasser then speaks with Fernanda Trecenti of Free Palestine Melbourne and the Vote Palestine for Wills campaign about the federal election results in the seat of Wills, including the achievement of a 6.8% swing away from Labor MP Peter Khalil, the key learnings from the campaign, and the importance of diversifying activism. Nakba Day rally, May 18, State Library Victoria, from 12 PM. More info.Join the Free Palestine rally every Sunday at the State Library Victoria, from 12 PM.For info on upcoming events and actions, follow APAN and Free Palestine Melbourne.Catch daily broadcast updates via Let's Talk Palestine. Image: @votepalestinewills 

Semana curta…. Dias de memória. De fazer memória, de construir memória ,de debater memória. Mas, principalmente, lembrar de todos que caíram e construir um futuro diferente para que suas mortes não tenham sido em vão.Bloco 1- Tragédia humanitária se agrava com continuidade da guerra e Egito alega haver avanços nas negociações.- Mahmmoud Abbas nomeia Hussein al-Sheikh para vice-presidencia da AP.- Ataque israelense em Beirute. - Irã diz ter parado ataque cibernético sem precedentes enquanto avança na discussão sobre projeto nuclear.Bloco 2- Netanyahu protocola no Supremo resposta ao documento apresentado por Ronen Bar que fica no cargo por mais 45 dias. - Datas de memória: Yom Hazikaron, Yom Haatzmaut, Dia da Nakba.- Incêndios cancelam eventos de IndependênciaBloco 3- Hapoel Tel Aviv volta à série A de futebol.- Palavra da semana.- Dica cultural da semana - Descobrindo AshkenazApoio pontual ao projeto que chega ao episódio 300!!!!!https://apoia.se/ladoesquerdo300Para quem puder colaborar com o desenvolvimento do nosso projeto para podermos continuar trazendo informação de qualidade, esse é o link para a nossa campanha de financiamento coletivo. No Brasil - ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠apoia.se/doladoesquerdodomuro⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠No exterior - ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠patreon.com/doladoesquerdodomuro⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Nós nas redes:bluesky - @doladoesquerdo.bsky.social e @joaokm.bsky.socialsite - ladoesquerdo.comtwitter - ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@doladoesquerdo⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ e ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@joaokm⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠instagram - ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@doladoesquerdodomuro⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠youtube - ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠youtube.com/@doladoesquerdodomuro⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Tiktok - @esquerdomuroPlaylist do Spotify - Do Lado Esquerdo do Muro MusicalSite com tradução de letras de músicas - https://shirimemportugues.blogspot.com/Episódio #298 do podcast "Do Lado Esquerdo do Muro", com Marcos Gorinstein e João Miragaya.

Ralph welcomes journalist Chris Hedges to talk about his new book "A Genocide Foretold: Reporting on Survival and Resistance in Occupied Palestine." Then, Ralph speaks to David Swanson of World BEYOND War about what his organization is doing to resist this country's casual acceptance of being constantly at war. Finally, Ralph checks in with our resident constitutional scholar Bruce Fein.Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, who spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He is the host of The Chris Hedges Report, and he is a prolific author— his latest book is A Genocide Foretold: Reporting on Survival and Resistance in Occupied Palestine.We not only blocked the effort by most countries on the globe to halt the genocide or at least censure Israel to the genocide, but of course have continued to sendbillions of dollars in weapons and to shut down critics within the United States… And that sends a very, very ominous message to the global south, especiallyas the climate breaks down, that these are the kind of draconian murderous measuresthat we will employ.Chris HedgesIt's a very, very ominous chapter in the history of historic Palestine. In some ways, far worse even than the 1948 Nakba (or “Catastrophe”) that saw massacres carried out against Palestinians in their villages and 750,000 Palestinians displaced. What we're watching now is probably the worst catastrophe to ever beset the Palestinian people.Chris HedgesIt's a bit like attacking somebody for writing about Auschwitz and not giving the SS guards enough play to voice their side. We're writing about a genocide and, frankly, there isn't a lot of nuance. There's a lot of context (which is in the book). But I expect either to be blanked out or attacked because lifting up the voices of Palestinians is something at this point within American society that is considered by the dominant media platforms and those within positions of power to be unacceptable.Chris HedgesIt eventually comes down to us, the American people. And it's not just the Middle East. It's a sprawling empire with hundreds of military bases, sapping the energy of our public budgets and of our ability to relate in an empathetic and humanitarian way to the rest of the world.Ralph NaderDavid Swanson is an author, activist, journalist, radio host and Nobel Peace Prize nominee. He is executive director of World BEYOND War and campaign coordinator for RootsAction. His books include War Is A Lie and When the World Outlawed War.The biggest scandal of the past two days in the United States is not government officials secretly discussing plans for mass killing, for war making, but how they did it on a group chat. You can imagine if they were talking about blowing up buildings in the United States, at least the victims would get a little mention in there.David SwansonThe Democrats are the least popular they've been. They're way less popular than the Republicans because some of the Republicans' supporters actually support the horrendous behavior they're engaged in. Whereas Democrats want somebody to try anything, anything at all, and you're not getting it.David SwansonYou know how many cases across the world across the decades in every hospital and health center there are of PTSD or any sort of injury from war deprivation? Not a one. Not a single one, ever. People survive just fine. And people do their damnedest to stay out of it, even in the most warmongering nations in the world. People try their very hardest to stay out of war personally, because it does great damage.David SwansonBruce Fein is a Constitutional scholar and an expert on international law. Mr. Fein was Associate Deputy Attorney General under Ronald Reagan and he is the author of Constitutional Peril: The Life and Death Struggle for Our Constitution and Democracy, and American Empire: Before the Fall.If there were really an attorney general who was independent, they would advise the President, “You can't make these threats. They are the equivalent of extortion.”Bruce FeinVigorous Public Interest Law DayApril 1, 2025 12:00 pm - 4:00 pm at Harvard Law School the Harvard Plaintiffs' Law Association is hosting Vigorous Public Interest Law Day with opening remarks by Ralph Nader. The program will feature highly relevant presentations and group discussions with some of the nation's most courageous public interest lawyers including Sam Levine, Bruce Fein, Robert Weissman, Joan Claybrook, and Pete Davis, to name a few. More information here.News 3/26/251. Starting off this week with some good news, Families for Safe Streets reports the Viriginia Assembly has passed HB2096, also known as the Stop Super Speeders bill. If enacted, this bill would allow would judges to “require drivers convicted of extreme speeding offenses to install Intelligent Speed Assistance (ISA) technology in their vehicles, automatically limiting their speed to the posted limit.” According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration or NHTSA, established by Ralph Nader, speeding was responsible for 12,151 deaths in 2022 and is a contributing factor in the skyrocketing number of pedestrians killed by automobiles which hit a 40-year high in 2023, per NPR.2. In more troubling auto safety news AP reports NHTSA has ordered a new recall on nearly all Cybertrucks. This recall centers on an exterior panel that can “detach while driving, creating a dangerous road hazard for other drivers, [and] increasing the risk of a crash.” This panel, called a “cant rail assembly,” is attached with a glue that is vulnerable to “environmental embrittlement,” per NHTSA. This is the eighth recall of the vehicles since they hit the road just one year ago.3. At the same time, the Democratic-controlled Delaware state legislature has passed a bill to “award…Musk $56 billion, shield corporate executives from liability, and strip away voting power from shareholders,” reports the Lever. According to this report, written before the law passed, the bill would “set an extremely high bar for plaintiffs to obtain internal company documents, records, and communications — the core pieces of evidence needed to build a lawsuit against a company.” On the other hand, “Corporate executives and investors with a controlling stake in a firm would no longer be required to hold full shareholder votes on various transactions in which management has a direct conflict of interest.” As this piece notes, this bill was backed by a pressure campaign led by Musk and his lawyers that began with a Delaware Chancery Court ruling that jeopardized his $56 billion compensation package. In retaliation, Musk threatened to lead a mass exodus of corporations from the state. Instead of calling his bluff, the state legislature folded, likely beginning a race to the bottom among other corporate-friendly states that will strip anyone but the largest shareholders of any remaining influence on corporate decision making.4. Speaking of folding under pressure, Reuters reports Columbia University will “acquiesce” to the outrageous and unprecedented demands of the Trump administration. These include a new mask ban on campus, and placing the school's Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies department – along with the Center for Palestine Studies –under academic receivership for at least five years. By caving to these demands, the University hopes the administration will unfreeze $400 million in NIH grants they threatened to withhold. Reuters quotes historian of education, Professor Jonathan Zimmerman, who decried this as “The government…using the money as a cudgel to micromanage a university,” and Todd Wolfson, president of the American Association of University Professors, who called the administration's demands “arguably the greatest incursion into academic freedom, freedom of speech and institutional autonomy that we've seen since the McCarthy era.”5. The authoritarianism creeping through higher education doesn't end there. Following the chilling disappearing of Mahmoud Khalil, the Trump administration has begun deploying the same tactic against more students for increasingly minor supposed offenses. First there was Georgetown post-doc student Badar Khan Suri, originally from India, who “had been living in Virginia for nearly three years when the police knocked on his door on the evening of 17 March and arrested him,” per the BBC. His crime? Being married to the daughter of a former advisor to Ismail Haniyeh, who in 2010 left the Gaza government and “started the House of Wisdom…to encourage peace and conflict resolution in Gaza.” A court has blocked Suri's deportation. Then there is Rumeysa Ozturk, a PhD student at Tufts who was on her way home from an Iftar dinner when she was surrounded and physically restrained by plainclothes agents on the street, CNN reports. Video of this incident has been shared widely. Secretary of State Marco Rubio supposedly “determined” that Ozturk's alleged activities would have “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences and would compromise a compelling U.S. foreign policy interest.” These activities? Co-writing a March 2024 op-ed in the school paper which stated “Credible accusations against Israel include accounts of deliberate starvation and indiscriminate slaughter of Palestinian civilians and plausible genocide.” The U.S. has long decried regimes that use secret police to suppress dissident speech. Now it seems it has become one.6. Yet the Trump administration is not only using deportations as a blunt object to punish pro-Palestine speech, it is also using it to go after labor rights activists. Seattle public radio station KUOW reports “Farmworker activist and union leader Alfredo Juarez Zeferino, known…as ‘Lelo,' was taken into custody by [ICE].” A farmworker and fellow activist Rosalinda Guillén is quoted saying “[Lelo] doesn't have a criminal record…they stopped him because of his leadership, because of his activism.” She added “I think that this is a political attack.” Simultaneously, the Washington Post reports “John Clark, a Trump-appointed Labor Department official, directed the agency's Bureau of International Labor Affairs…to end all of its grants.” These cuts are “expected to end 69 programs that have allocated more than $500 million to combat child labor, forced labor and human trafficking, and to enforce labor standards in more than 40 countries.”7. All of these moves by the Trump administration are despicable and largely unprecedented, but even they are not as brazen as the assault on the twin pillars of the American social welfare system: Social Security and Medicare. Social Security is bearing the brunt of the attacks at the moment. First, AP reported that Elon Musk's DOGE planned to cut up to 50% of the Social Security Administration staff. Then, the Washington Post reported that the administration planned to force millions of seniors to submit claims in person rather than via phone. Now the administration is announcing that they are shifting Social Security payments from paper checks to prepaid debit cards, per Axios. Nearly half a million seniors still receive their payments via physical checks. These massive disruptions in Social Security have roiled seniors across the nation, many of whom are Republican Trump supporters, and they are voicing their frustration to their Republican elected officials – who in turn are chafing at being cut out of the loop by Musk. NBC reports Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, chairman of the Senate Finance subcommittee on Social Security, said “he had not been told ahead of time about DOGE's moves at the agency.” Senators Steve Daines and Bill Cassidy have echoed this sentiment. And, while Social Security takes center stage, Medicare is next in line. Drop Site is out with a new report on how Trump's nominee to oversee the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services – Dr. Oz – could shift millions of seniors from traditional Medicare to the insurer-controlled Medicare Advantage system. Medicare and Social Security have long been seen as the “third rail” of American politics, meaning politicians who try to tamper with those programs meet their political demise. This is the toughest test yet of whether that remains true.8. The impact of Oscar winning documentary No Other Land continues to reverberate, a testament to the power of its message. In Miami Beach, Mayor Steven Meiner issued a draft resolution calling for the city to terminate its lease agreement with O Cinema, located at Old City Hall, simply for screening the film. Deadline reports however that he was forced to back down. And just this week, co-director of the film Hamdan Ballal was reportedly “lynched” by Israeli settlers in his West Bank village, according to co-director Yuval Abraham, an anti-occupation Jewish Israeli journalist. The Guardian reports “the settlers beat him in front of his home and filmed the assault…he was held at an army base, blindfolded, for 24 hours and forced to sleep under a freezing air conditioner.” Another co-director, Basel Adra of Masafer Yatta, told the AP “We came back from the Oscars and every day since there is an attack on us…This might be their revenge on us for making the movie. It feels like a punishment.” Stunningly, it took days for the Academy of Motion Pictures to issue a statement decrying the violence and even then, the statement was remarkably tepid with no mention of Palestine at all, only condemning “harming or suppressing artists for their work or their viewpoints.”9. In some more positive news, Zohran Mamdani – the Democratic Socialist candidate for Mayor of New York City – has maxed out donations, per Gothamist. Mamdani says he has raised “more than $8 million with projected matching funds from about 18,000 donors citywide and has done so at a faster rate than any campaign in city history.” Having hit the public financing cap this early, Mamdani promised to not spend any more of the campaign raising money and instead plans to “build the single largest volunteer operation we've ever seen in the New York City's mayor's race.” Witnessing a politician asking supporters not to send more money is a truly one-of-a-kind moment. Recent polling shows Mamdani in second place, well behind disgraced former Governor Andrew Cuomo and well ahead of his other rivals, including incumbent Mayor Eric Adams, per CBS. However, Mamdani remains unknown to large numbers of New Yorkers, meaning his ceiling could be much higher. Plenty of time remains before the June mayoral election.10. Finally, in an extremely bizarre story, Columbia Professor Anthony Zenkus reports “Robert Ehrlich, millionaire founder of snack food giant Pirate's Booty…tried to take over the sleepy Long Island town of Sea Cliff.” Zenkus relays that Ehrlich waged a “last minute write-in campaign for mayor in which he only received 62 votes - then declared himself mayor anyway.” Though Ehrlich only received 5% of the vote, he “stormed the village hall with an entourage, declaring himself the duly-elected mayor, screaming that he was there to dissolve the entire town government and that he alone had the power to form a new government.” Ehrlich claimed the election was “rigged” and thus invalid, citing as evidence “One of my supporters voted three times. Another one voted four times…” which constitutes a confession to election fraud. Zenkus ends this story by noting that Ehrlich was “escorted out by police.” It's hard to make heads or tails of this story, but if nothing else it indicates that these petty robber barons are simply out of control – believing they can stage their own mini coup d'etats. And after all, why shouldn't they think so, when one of their ilk occupies perhaps the most powerful office in the history of the world. Bad omens all around.This has been Francesco DeSantis, with In Case You Haven't Heard. Get full access to Ralph Nader Radio Hour at www.ralphnaderradiohour.com/subscribe

What happens when a proud American, native Gazan, and pro-peace advocate joins Unpacking Israeli History? In this groundbreaking episode, Noam Weissman sits down with Ahmed Fouad Alkatib for a deeply honest and nuanced conversation about Palestinian history, identity, and lived experience. From Gaza in the 1990s to the legacy of Hajj Amin al-Husseini, Sykes-Picot, and the Nakba, Ahmed offers a powerful, personal perspective. In part 1 of a two part series, Ahmed and Noam discuss everything from the failures of pan-Arabism and missed opportunities for peace, to the challenges of anti-normalization, Zionism, and the road ahead. Follow Unpacking Israeli History on Instagram and check us out on youtube. Please note that our email address has changed. You can now email noam@unpacked.media. This podcast was brought to you by Unpacked, a division of OpenDor Media. ------------------- For other podcasts from Unpacked, check out: Jewish History Nerds Soulful Jewish Living Stars of David with Elon Gold Wondering Jews

This week Lara and Michael sit down with the acclaimed Palestinian researcher, Dr. Salman Abu Sitta, a Nakba survivor who has dedicated his life to the Palestinian cause. Dr. Salman Abu Sitta is the founder and President of Palestine Land Society in London, dedicated to the documentation of Palestine's land and people. He is most known for mapping Palestine and developing a practical plan for implementing the right of return for Palestinian refugees. His work also includes the compendium Atlas of Palestine 1917-1966.

Every Saturday, we revisit a story from the archives. This originally aired on May 15, 2023. None of the dates, titles, or other references from that time have been changed. May 15th is when Palestinians mark ‘the catastrophe’, or their forced expulsion from the land that became the state of Israel. Those living in Gaza say every day is an ongoing catastrophe. About 70% of Gazans are Palestinian refugees. For the last 16 years, Israel and Egypt have imposed a blockade on Gaza. Travel is heavily controlled, jobs are scarce and the threat of escalation of violence is constant. While the older generations still dream of a return to their homeland, the younger generations say their futures have been stolen. In this episode: Maram Humaid (@MaramGaza) Al Jazeera Journalist Episode credits: This episode was updated by Sarí el-Khalili. The original production team was Miranda Lin, Khaled Soltan, and our host, Malika Bilal. Our sound designer is Alex Roldan. Our engagement producers are Adam Abou-Gad and Vienna Maglio. Aya Elmileik is lead of audience engagement. Alexandra Locke is The Take’s executive producer, and Ney Alvarez is Al Jazeera’s head of audio. Connect with us: @AJEPodcasts on Instagram, X, Facebook, Threads and YouTube