Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 38

Episode Date: June 11, 2022

All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode.

So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. Greetings! This is It Could Happen Here. I'm Garrison Davis, and this episode I will once again be talking about the Defendi Atlanta Forest Project. Last month, I released two episodes totaling like three hours in content discussing the movement from its inception up until the current state of affairs at time of recording, which was like early May.

If you want background on this really interesting and vital piece of resistance that's happening in Atlanta, Georgia, then I would recommend you at least attempt to check out the Juggernaut of Audio, which is that two-parter. Long story short, there's this police training facility that the Atlanta Police Foundation and other corporate interests in the city are trying to build on one of the city's last remaining like massive swaths of a continuous forested land. On an adjacent piece of forested land, a movie studio called Black Hall is trying to expand their soundstage onto a whole other section of the woods. The joint projects of the police training facility dubbed Cop City and the Black Hall Studio's soundstage expansion threaten hundreds of acres of the largest continuous piece of the Atlanta forest located in southwest Dicabbe County. The area is often referred to as the Lungs of Atlanta and produces a massive amount of tree canopy in the city and is a wonderful little ecological spot.

I was lucky enough to visit in late April to help in putting together those two episodes. A lot has happened since then. Coming off the success of getting Reeves Young to cease work on the Cop City project, I felt like there was this sense of renewed optimism regarding the potential of actually winning. On the other hand, just during the week before the Week of Action, attempts by cops to enter the forest increased, and there was talk of increasing crackdowns against the forest defenders by local law enforcement, who also announced that they called in the FBI to assist them, which leads us to the Week of Action. On the morning of May 9th, which was a Monday, barely a day into the Week of Action, a bulldozer was brought into the Atlanta forest.

This is based on reporting by the great folks at the Atlanta Community Press and other on-the-ground reports from forest defenders posted by the Defend the Atlanta Forest account and Scenes.no blogs. So around 9.30 a.m. Monday morning, people inhabiting the Wallani Forest woke up to the sounds of trees going down and metal machinery. A bulldozer marked with Dodd Drilling LLC, accompanied by two DeKalb County cops, had bulldozed a path through the forested Entrenchment Creek Park, directly adjacent to the old Atlanta prison farm. The parkland is currently under threat by the Blackhall Studio's soundstage development. The Dodd Drilling bulldozer destroyed a significant swath of forests, injuring plants and animals in its path. When people learned about this, around 40 folks quickly mobilized and gathered around the bulldozer,

confronting the project managers and the police officers on the scene. Those gathered shouted at the workers and cops to go home and declared that this is a public park. When the two DeKalb County police who were protecting the bulldozer were confronted, it was revealed that they were actually working as off-duty, uniformed private security, seemingly taking orders from the construction management. The management, who wore vests labeled Contour Engineering and Dodd Phillips, claimed that they were not working for Blackhall Studios. Who knows if that's true or who they might be working for then?

Georgia State Law does permit off-duty police officers to be hired, along with their uniforms, service weapons and vehicles, by private companies for their own purposes. The police expressed that they were not aware that they were in a public park, along with the bulldozer they were protecting, and faced with a confident group of responders intent on defending the forest from further destruction. Police and the construction management quickly made the decision to retreat from the woods. The off-duty cops had called in reinforcements from DeKalb County. Seven more DeKalb County vehicles showed up,

but by the time the extra police arrived, workers were driving the bulldozers back into the parking lot. The police were persuaded to leave by the actions of intelligent people acting quickly and collectively in defense of the land. The force defenders then escorted the cops and the workers out of the park and made sure the destruction of the woods had truly ceased. Police scanners reported that vehicles transporting the bulldozer faced a barrage of rocks and had their windshield smashed. Entrenchment Creek Park is still a public park and property of DeKalb County under a civil court injunction.

The pending case prevents construction or clearing by Blackhall Studios. Later that same day, a group of around 40 people marched to the home of Shepard Long, the principal of Long Engineering, an engineering firm subcontracted to do surveying and other pre-construction work on the Atlanta Police Foundation's Public Safety Training Center, which we call Cop City. The group rallied for about 10 minutes outside Shepard Long's home and was demanding that Long Engineering sever its contract with the Cop City project. One of the group members read a loud statement directed to Shepard Long,

which I will play the audio of here. Atlanta is a city in a forest with the most tree coverage of any urban city in America. If you continue to work with blasphemy and gory, the entire city will experience worse floods, higher temperatures, and small filled afternoons. You have the power to stop that! Your proposed military training compound is in the nucleus of a culturally rich black community full of churches, preschools, and community centers. Dozens of children and grandparents have lived there for years.

If you continue to work with blasphemy and gory, our streets and backyards will be filled with shootings, explosions, and tear gas. We want our children and neighbors to be able to breathe clean air and experience the vastness of the Atlanta Forest, not to be victims of a domestic war zone. We have the power to stop that! We are here to fight for the future of our city, our children, our neighbors, and our planet. We hold no ill will towards you personally.

We just want you to make this one right decision. We know Long Engineering has many other contracts with many other companies. We are only here to ask you to drop this one company, Brassfield and Gory, until they drop their contracts with the Atlanta Police Foundation. The group distributed flyers, alerting neighbors to the work of Shepherd Long and what his company was doing in DeKalb County. After about 10 minutes, the group quickly dispersed without incident. The next day, there's a lot of other events related to the week of action.

There was a security culture workshop, an activist primer about building a collective understanding of ways to keep us all safe from imprisonment and government repression. There was a night of hip-hop and punk at a local radical venue that served as a benefit show for the Forest Defense. Other random events throughout the week of action included stuff like clothing swaps, bike rides through the forest, yoga in the park, plus daily breakfast and dinners, history talks, art parties, wood walks, skill shares, and a sick night rave,

along with, you know, forest tours and much more. So that's just two days of the week of action, the Monday and the Tuesday. When we get back from this ad break, I will get into what happened on Wednesday and then Thursday, you know, we're going to go through it linearly. Despite my criticisms of linear time, we will go through this in a linear fashion because that's how formatting this episode was easiest. Anyway, here's some ads. And we are back talking about the Defend the Atlanta Forest week of action.

So just after 10 a.m. on Wednesday, May 11th, two DeKalb County Park police entered the forest to inspect the path created by the bulldozer that previous Monday. As they were exiting the forest, forest defenders ambushed them by throwing rocks and bottles at their vehicles and smashing the car's windows. At noon, like two hours later, a van marked Law Enforcement Department of Juvenile Justice pulled up into the parking lot of Entrenchment Creek Park. It's worth noting that the area of Entrenchment Creek Park and the forested area on the Atlanta Prison Farm

has like two child prisons on it. We talked more about those in the two-part series from last month. But anyway, so this van marked Department of Juvenile Justice pulled up into the parking lot inside Entrenchment Creek Park. But an hour later, the van was attacked suddenly by a barrage of rocks and multiple tires were slashed. The van attempted to escape but was left stranded in the parking lot until DeKalb police were able to escort it out. Police were nervously walking backwards in order to keep their eyes on the tree line where they knew forest defenders would be watching them at every moment. Multiple police vehicles were damaged, nobody was detained or arrested.

Portions of that report came from scenes.noblogs.org. Earlier, that same day, like early in the morning, around 40 people visited the home of Keith Lanier Johnson Jr. in Kensaw, Georgia. Keith is the Eastern Regional President of Brassfield and Gory. Brassfield and Gory are the current general contractor on the Atlanta Police Foundation's COPSITY project. Flyers were posted around the neighborhood, passed the low barrier fencing around the gated community. An anonymous statement released online at scenes.noblogs read, He's also overseeing the destruction of gravesites, levelling of a vital tree canopy, and the militarization of the American police force. It is for those reasons that community members went to his home at 6am.

We hope that Keith is able to convince the two owners, currently sitting comfortably back at home in Birmingham, that the current Atlanta Police Foundation contract is untenable and there is an urgent need to cancel it. It could turn out that Keith personally is carrying to Brunt the pressure for his boss's decisions. Brassfield and Gory will eventually drop the COPSITY project. Anonymous groups are developing new methods for disincentivizing the project. The next day, on May 12th, a tightly packed crowd of around 80 masked protesters converged on the Brassfield and Gory Atlanta office. In broad daylight, people holding banners and launching fireworks arrived at the building, and force defenders covered the side of the office with stop COPSITY graffiti,

and chanting will be back as they left. Unicorn Riot reported that five people were arrested following the action and booked on several charges, including some felonies. Charges were including riot and criminal damage to property, and quote, terroristic threats and acts. I know that some, but possibly not all, people's charges got dropped, and the listed bond amount for some individuals was extremely high, getting up to around $50,000 just for an individual. Nearing the end of the week of action on Saturday, May 11th,

a march to defend the forest took the streets in East Atlanta Village, led by local preschoolers. There were some really nice signs and artwork done by kids. The Defend the Forest Twitter account posted some beautiful photos of kids' protest signs that says, Forest is life and love you trees, stop, never cut down the trees, along with very, very good art. It was very, very pleasant to see. A few hours later, another march through Atlanta to stop COPSITY drew around 200 protesters. After about an hour of marching, the crowd returned to Freedom Park, where they were then attacked by police without warning.

Decends of cop cars pulled up and police helicopters loomed overhead. Armored cops were arresting people on the sidewalks for marching on the streets, for playing drums, or for just standing in the wrong place. Atlanta police and Georgia State Patrol officers assaulted, shoved, and tackled multiple people, deployed tasers, and threatened neighbors who filmed the arrests. One person violently arrested was taken to the hospital for treatment. The Defend the Forest Twitter account posted, quote, At least 17 arrests tonight by Atlanta Police Department.

Spirits high as the forest raves and the encampment grows. Outside the forest, many stand vigil at the jail, welcoming arrestees as they are released. We are strong together, the forest unites us, the cops cannot divide us. Atlanta police say that the march was in violation of pedestrian laws, which is why they charged and assaulted people on the sidewalk. And that wraps up some of the Week of Action stuff. I know there was a lot more things that happened, but trying to cram it all into a tight package was challenging. So that was the general Week of Action vibes, but there is more. We still, we still have like half the episode to go because a lot, a lot else has happened in, in the days since then.

In the early morning on Monday, May 16th, a week after the bulldozer descended on the forest, accompanied by off-duty cops acting as security, a home associated with Dodd drilling LLC was painted with slogans, including Dodd drilling, Stay Out, Stop Copsity, and Drop APD. A message for the homeowner associated with Dodd drilling was released, which you can read the full version of online at scenes.noblogs.org. I'll read some portions of it here. Last Monday, a bulldozer with your logo forced its way into the Wallani Forest and left a 100 foot trail of destruction in its wake. Forced offenders responded quickly with rocks and rage, but some damage was already done. Despite having no permit, you allowed Atlanta police to use your equipment to intimidate and injure the forest and its residents.

Today, you know what it's like to have your space invaded. You came into our home, so we came to yours. Your private property is not as private as you may think. We demand that you stay out of the Wallani Forest and stop working with the Atlanta police and cop city contractors. To all others who would support cop city, it might have more costs than you anticipate. Financial and otherwise. Many creatures care deeply about this forest and are prepared to defend it. Any partner of the APD or contractor for cop city is our enemy and a potential target.

The Wallani Forest is not dying. It is being killed and those who are killing it have names and addresses. A list of local Atlanta evildoers is available at stopreevesyoung.com. The next day, on Tuesday, May 17th, Atlanta police backed by other state and federal enforcement, including DeKalb Police, Georgia State Patrol, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, and the FBI raided the South Atlanta Forest. The raid came just days after the week of action, which brought hundreds to the Atlanta Forest to participate in workshops, plant gardens, watch films, and protest at the homes of developers plotting the forest's destruction.

Shortly after the scheduled events ended, police gathered their forces to raid the forest encampment. Police started staging at around 9am on Tuesday, May 17th, and started coming in at around 10am. Forest defenders started mobilizing and calling for support. Cops blocked off the roads leading to the forest access points and told drivers stuck at the blockade that, quote, were opening up the site for construction. Soon, cops started arresting protesters that gathered in Entrenchment Creek Park and towed any car on the streets outside of the park. A helicopter circled the forest trying to track the movement of forest defenders under the cover of the tree canopy.

Police near occupied trees were heard talking about, quote, flushing out people inside treehouses. In the face of militant resistance, police did manage to cut down trees and destroyed multiple treehouses, destroyed forest defenders' personal belongings, and other protest infrastructure set up by the land defenders, all in an effort to allow contractors to begin development of the $90 million cop city project. On Twitter, the Defend the Atlanta Forest account posted, quote, reports that the Atlanta Police and Georgia State Patrol are chainsawing in an area of the old Atlanta prison farm where people have occupied trees to defend the forest. Dozens of forest defenders moving in groups all over the woods throughout the raid. No arrests inside the forest reported so far, only from the perimeter at the public park.

Police seem unwilling to pursue people through the forest. SWAT rifles trained on forest defenders occupying a treehouse to stop cop city. The Defend the Forest Twitter account also posted a video of a semi truck packed full of building supplies headed into the north boundary of the proposed cop city site where police were raiding the forest defense occupation. I'm going to do a little quote from Unicorn Riot who reported on the police raid, quote, According to police, those committed to defending the forest put up a fight, pelting the officers with rocks and what appeared to be a Molotov cocktail was deployed along a fence line. In the wake of the raid, a truck barricade constructed months ago to protect those occupying the forest from police incursions showed signs of heaven being set on fire.

Flaming barricades are a common tactic used by protesters around the world to push back against police, unquote. Eventually, police let media enter a small contained area on the other side of the blockade. Police wanted to talk with the multiple press outlets that had gathered near the site in an attempt to gain control of the media narrative. Atlanta Police Deputy Chief Sheerbaum, and yes, that's how I'm pronouncing it, I have no idea how it's actually said, but I think it's Sheerbaum, held an interview staged by the Public Affairs Office. Overall, the goal seemed to be to control the media narrative by painting police as the heroes and the protesters as a very small group of outside agitators. After getting the statement from police, most media left the scene while the blockades were still up on both sides of the forest access road. Deputy Chief Sheerbaum said that police escorted contractors into the forest and preliminary work was being done.

Police later specified that they were at the site to accompany contractors tasked with removing some temporary illegal structures that were set up by protesters and that, quote, no one was hurt. Media framed the raid and subsequent arrests as the police cracking down on a group of violent outside agitators. Cops giving statements like, quote, we will not be deterred by the acts of a few that do not represent our community. And with local news covering the incident like, quote, several protesters were arrested after they threw a Molotov cocktail at police as officers raided a camp on the grounds of the planned Atlanta Police Department's training facility, I'd quote, even though the arrests took place in a completely different section of the woods where protesters were gathered openly in a public park and actually happened before the cocktail was thrown. Yet there was a lot of attempts to link the arrests to the Molotov cocktail. But, you know, media media just do that.

And they gobbled up the story of the cocktail and of the outside agitators attacking Atlanta police and it's not representing our community. Eight people were arrested and face charges ranging from criminal trespassing to police obstruction. Despite attempts by police to paint the movement as the work of, quote, outside agitators, while also working alongside a growing list of out of town law enforcement organizations, the movement to oppose Cop City has been directly rooted within a broad localized opposition, whether that be with Atlanta based organizations fighting against gentrification, local chapters of climate change protest organizations, or just anonymous individuals that reside across Atlanta, or the indigenous people who have ancestral connections to the land. Hours after the raid, there was a Atlanta Community Press Conference put on at Entrenchment Creek Park. And I'm going to read a statement that somebody gave at the press conference, quote,

This is an attempt to demoralize a vibrant and diverse movement led by local community members against the replacement of the largest urban tree canopy in the United States with the largest police training compound in the United States. The police will attempt to depict this movement as a small group of hardline activists. We are all neighbors of the forest. We are intelligent people who know that the future of the world is on fire. And who are determined to act and to defend what remains to sustain life in this city and on this planet. The city is only going to get hotter. Ranch is only going to get more expensive. Food and gas prices are only rising.

The city has no answers for this except for a more militarized police force. You can't prop up a free society with violence alone. The next day, protesters from Saturday's Stop Cop City March had court and all of their charges were dropped. Atlanta police is just desperate to get a good boogeyman to blame any potential uprising on. And they're not being super successful in letting any of these charges stick. There was this really great point made by this person named Adi Kali. I'm just going to quote from a thread they posted, quote, 37 arrests were made in relation to the decentralized Defend the Atlanta Force movement over the past weeks,

mostly for made up jaywalking charges. But only 12 had their legal identities revealed to corporate media and right wing doxers. Why? All 12 protesters who were doxed these past couple of weeks were said to be from out of state. When journalists asked if other protesters had Georgia residences, answers were denied. The answer to why is simple. These 12 currently possessed out of state IDs and appeared white passing. The other 24 resties might not necessarily fit these categories.

Notice that right wing troll Andy Know admitted the ages of the arrestees who are not in their 20s as well. This has yet another iteration of the outside agitator narrative and an attempt to delegitimize resistance while denying local agency. Unquote police are continuing to target stop cops to protesters with extremely high bails. Just getting nine protesters released during one week cost over $100,000. So please, if you're able to consider donating to the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, there will be links in the description. So that was the raid that took place a few weeks ago. Six tree houses were destroyed. And those tree houses weren't just like tree sets to defend the forest. Those were also like people's homes.

That's where people were living. So six of those were destroyed. Multiple force defenders, personal belongings were stolen or just dismantled and decimated by the cops. And overall, the raid was pretty bad. I mean, it kind of sucked. We will talk about what has happened since the raid when we come back from a little outbreak. All right, we are back. After the raid, officers from Atlanta Police Department's zone three field investigations team discussed using deadly force against protesters if they used Molotov cocktails to defend themselves from a raid.

According to scanner audio publicized by activists. Listen closely for like 30 seconds to hear their conversation discussing deadly force. The good thing we didn't get our credentials today. I don't do well with fire. Oh yeah, right? Told you deadly force encounter. Wait, what, what are you doing with fire? That's why I brought it up.

I was saying as long as we're on the same page, Molotov cocktails, deadly force encounter. You liar. They were throwing rocks and cocktails at him at the on key road. I saw the picture of the tree house they had up there. They had cars like on its side. Stop people coming in. Pretty serious. That is crazy.

Is this the protest against cops city? Sure is. So I'm just going to reread one little section in case it was hard to hear. Quote, I told you deadly force encounter, that's why I brought it up as long as we're on the same page. A Molotov cocktail is a deadly force encounter. Unquote. So a deadly force encounter is a situation where officers are legally allowed to shoot to kill. Basically what this scanner audio insinuates is that police are preparing or thinking about just killing people when Molotov cocktails are deployed.

So that's a thing. So it's a little interesting that police themselves refer to the project as cop city. But yeah, keeping track of scanner audio has been a big part of the not on the ground portion of the movement being all to track police communications, police locations, all using open source information. And cops are really scared and paranoid when it comes to stuff around the forest and just don't seem to be able to grasp the idea of a decentralized resistance movement that is capable of a diversity of tactics, including militant ones. There's this other scanner audio that was released displaying Atlanta police's ignorance, cowardice and paranoia related to what they believe is a group dubbed Black Flag Atlanta. Hey, you guys got to be careful. They had two of the cab guys are sitting in a van and they attacked the van or knocked the windows out and flattened the tires and stuff. But there's supposed to be a group called Black Flag Atlanta that are targeting police and they have an app and stuff that can monitor our vehicles and shows where patrol cars are sitting at with live updates. You know, you know, you know, they can be jumping the fence point something or, you know, set a trap or damaged property inside the range.

You said they got to have what's the name of that? Just go back to find it. But the group is called Black Flag Atlanta. So the so-called group that police refer to as Black Flag Atlanta is likely just referring to a hobbyist website that simply collects on the ground reports and open source police scanner information. The website's an open resource for anyone to use. It's not a group of people. It's just a random online tool that lets you listen to scanner audio. The cops mentioned that they're afraid because of the actions of some anonymous individuals who surrounded a law enforcement vehicle and damaged it while officers were inside just sitting terrified. And then did the same to a juvenile detention facility van. I discussed the details of that direct action earlier in this episode when anonymous people threw rocks and slash tires of those law enforcement vehicles.

Quoting from an anonymous statement on scenes.no blogs, quote, the cops believe that Black Flag Atlanta is a group that tracks and monitors cops and their locations around the forest and works to attack them. This is laughably wrong. Rather than understanding that our power comes from open source intelligence, horizontal organizing and transparency, they have conjured up a shadowy organization that organizes hits on police officers and publishes their targets right beforehand, unquote. Cops really just don't seem to have a clue on what's what's actually going on or how any types of decentralized infrastructure works or how movements are really operated. It is an interesting thing to see, but scared cops are also dangerous cops, as we just mentioned about them planning to use lethal force. If there's a Molotov cocktail in the area, right? When cops are scared. That's not necessarily always a good thing. It just, you know, a lot of police training is based on being afraid and then using deadly force if you are afraid. So it's just a thing to think about. I'm not I'm not I'm not making any like commentary here. I'm just saying, yeah, cops seem really scared and that can be good. It also can be dangerous. I'm now going to talk a bit about solidarity actions, because, you know, not everyone's able to go to Atlanta, even if even if they would like to go to Atlanta to help to help participate.

Some people just aren't able to. But that doesn't mean people are unable to assist in the movement. I'm going to do a little quote from Unicorn Riot, quote, in recent weeks, autonomous attacks in solidarity with efforts to defend the Atlanta forest have occurred throughout the country, according to a website that tracks such actions. One repeated target has been Atlas Technical Consultants, the parent company of Long Engineering, a subcontractor of the Cop City project, which had its windows of its office smashed in Albany, New York, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and its building tag with the graffiti in Highland, Indiana. The website also received reports of attacks on Bank of America, which donates money to the police foundations across the country, including the Atlanta Police Foundation, attacks were reported in Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Portland, and Minneapolis, unquote. And I'm going to just go through a list of solidarity actions that have happened in May and now up into June. Most of these were posted on scenes.no blogs. That seems to be the main site for anonymously posting, communicates or report backs. You can find guidance to how to do so with more internet security on websites like scenes and websites like Warrior Up. So anyway, here's just a list of little communicates that have been released related to solidarity actions that have taken place in the past month, quote,

On the evening of May 10th, I smashed seven windows at the office building where the northeast offices of Atlas are located in Albany, New York. I also tagged Atlas Stop Destroying the Atlanta Forest. Destroying hundreds of acres of forest during the sixth greatest mass extinction of species to build a police training facility following one of the largest anti-police uprisings in decades is fucking disgusting. With this vandalism, I urge Atlas to do the right thing and to drop any contracts with Brassfield and Gory and the Cop City project. During the week of action, the Brassfield and Gory Corporate HQ in Birmingham, Alabama was targeted, according to a strongly worded anonymous statement published on scenes. The report back reads, quote, On the morning of the 13th, the windows and glass doors to the Brassfield and Gory Corporate HQ were smashed. The words Drop Cop City or Else were spray painted on the windows. Paint was applied to the front sign.

Let it serve as a warning to the executives at Brassfield and Gory. We know where you work and we know where you sleep. Your houses could be next. Keith Johnson, Miller George, James Gory, you will drop this contract eventually. Why wait to see how far we'll go? In solidarity with the struggle in Atlanta, unquote. And then just a few days ago, a construction offices in Pennsylvania were hit. The communique was short and sweet, just reads, quote, Door window smashed and building tagged at the Northeast Office of Atlas Technical Consultants at 2126 Fillmore Avenue in Erie, Pennsylvania.

Stop Cop City, defend the Atlanta forest and forests everywhere. A few days ago on May 31st, there was a massive police mobilization involving helicopters and a road checkpoint around the Atlanta forest at the proposed Cop City site. According to reports, Atlanta Police Department accompanied long engineering who seemingly were surveying for a perimeter fence. No arrests were reported. Long engineering, as we've stated, is owned by Atlas Technical Consultants and is currently being contracted by Brassfield and Gory, the Atlanta Police Foundation's general contractor. The Stop Reeves Young campaign released a statement discussing the events of the past few days, quote. On May 31st and June 1st, Brassfield and Gory Subcontractor Long Engineering entered the old Atlanta prison farm with chainsaws and heavy machinery. They are cutting down trees in order to build a fence around the zone.

This is where the police foundation believes they will build the Cop City training compound. They hope to prevent the community from seeing what they are doing. Long engineering, owned by a man named Shepard Long of Kensaw, Georgia, has already participated in destructive acts in the South River forest. For this, they have become the object of a nationwide pressure campaign by activists and communities organizing to oppose police militarization and climate change. Long is a subsidy of Atlas Technical Consultants. Activists and community members can convince Brassfield and Gory to drop their contract with the Atlanta Police Foundation, the project could lose funding and fall apart. Brassfield and Gory uses many subcontractors to do their projects, including Atlas Technical Consultants, Subsidy, Long Engineering. By encouraging Long Engineering to drop the contract with Brassfield and Gory, we encourage Brassfield and Gory to drop their contract with Cop City.

Climate collapse and police militarization are not abstract processes so that nobody can stop. They happen because of observable and preventable reasons. If you care about police brutality, if you want to stop climate change, this is your chance to do something." And I do think there are a lot of signs that people actually can make actual impacts. At the last Community Stakeholder Advisory Meeting, Atlanta Assistant Police Chief Darren Schneerbaum said that construction plans could be, quote, delayed or deferred because of the actions of very few, unquote, and said that this is why police agencies are working to, quote, address criminal protests very quickly so it doesn't get into that realm, unquote. And on the day I record this, which is June 2nd, earlier this morning, two police chased force defenders into the woods near a work site and found a camp. Ten force defenders confronted and surrounded a bulldozer that was in the woods, resulting in a work stoppage.

On a communique released online at scenes, read, quote, work stopped today, Thursday, June 2nd, as a group of ten force defenders confronted a bulldozer in the forest just west of the juvie today. Force defenders launched rocks and fireworks, yelling, get the fuck out of the woods as the machine was attacked. Four to five workers, likely with long engineering, hid behind the bulldozer while one Atlanta police officer stood idly with his hands on his hips. Force defenders retreated into the woods, howling, no arrests were made. We call upon anyone who wants to defend the forest and stop Cop City to support the struggle by sowing chaos along the perimeter. Plan a slow moving car caravan on Constitution Road or a rally at the juvie. Workers and pigs, we repeat, stay the fuck out of the woods, unquote. And also today, a new timeline was released detailing the construction plans for Cop City.

The Atlanta police foundation plans to begin cutting down massive swaths of trees in about two weeks. The clearing is planned for nearly 90% of the 400 acre property. So deforestation seems to be just two weeks away now based on the full site plans that are viewable online. I will link the plans in the show notes along with the stop Reeves Young campaign, which details ways to assist like Colin campaigns and random stuff that is maybe more possible from afar. But the stop Cops City project is going to continue all throughout the summer and seems to have no sign of cooling down. It is only it is only heating up as the summer gets hotter. So will the stuff in the forest in more ways than one. But anyway, that does it for us today.

You can check out stop Reeves Young dot com for the calling campaign and for the list of quote evil doers that are working to deforest sections of the Atlanta south river forest. You can go to scenes dot no blogs dot org to read, communicate and report backs and I'll put links for the Atlanta Solidarity Fund in the description as well. See you on the other side. Welcome to it could happen here. It's the show where things fall apart and we put it back together again and there may or may not be enormously loud lawnmowers in the background. Yeah, this is this is this is a podcast also about abolishing lawns, although I guess I guess not. Today is only about abolishing lawns because I'm extremely annoyed at my neighbors. But we can we can do an anti lawn episode in the near future.

Yeah, one day one day. But but it is on a more serious note is I have Garrison with me and I have Tanya with me who is a abortion clinic escort and has been doing this for a very, very long time. Tanya, thank you for joining us. Thank you for having me. Yeah, I'm really excited to talk with you about this because this is well, this is something we've been wanting to do for a while because I think not enough people know what this is. So I guess I guess the first thing is because yeah, can you explain to people who aren't familiar with this what clinic escorting is? Absolutely. So there are a number of volunteer clinic exports across the country and many are they're not necessarily organized nationwide, but many metro areas do have organizations where you can volunteer to be a clinic escort.

And what that means is that you are essentially someone who goes to a clinic that performs abortion services. And you stand outside that clinic and you help the patients get into the clinic, hopefully free of harassment from protesters outside and just ensure that protesters don't block access to the clinic and that the patients are able to get inside, you know, know where they're going and get in safely. Yeah, and that seems like a really hard job in a couple of ways, but both in the sense that like there's a bunch of extremely angry and very weird people with really disturbing signs. Yeah, and very sincerely held beliefs in a different side where they do want to stop people from going and convince them not to go in. You know, and it is interesting as a clinic escort, you know, you're really, you don't have an opinion. Like, I don't have an opinion on whether someone goes in, someone can go in, someone cannot go in. The people who do the clinic escorting are there because we believe that women and their partners should have a choice about what to do. And so if a woman chooses that she doesn't want to go into the clinic, you know, that's fine by me. I'm just there to ensure that she has the choice to go into the clinic and get whatever services she needs, whether it's whether it's prenatal care or contraception or abortion services. So it's fascinating because, yeah, there are a lot of people, you know, the protesters on the other side can really run the gamut. Some of them are very angry and have very interesting signs, but some of them, you know, they also range to those who are just standing there saying the rosary,

walking up and down and carrying crucifixes. And, you know, if it was just people saying the rosary and then going, coming, saying the rosary and going, I probably wouldn't do what I do because that's neither here nor there from me. It's the people who are, you know, they will try to get in the window of a car when a car pulls up if they happen to have the windows down and, you know, get in the like put their heads in the car to try to talk to the people or hand them literature. And I've seen some of the literature that, you know, people have shared with us after it's been given to them, you know, and it's a lot of it is full of misinformation. And kind of also, you know, as someone who was raised Catholic, and it's coming from people, many, many of the people who are protesting are Catholic, it's very emotionally manipulative and not factual information on some of them. I remember seeing one once around Christmas time that was like a whole cartoon about how excited Mary was to be Jesus' mom and how therefore that means that you should not have your pregnancy terminated because you should be more like Mary and be excited to have this child. Yeah, yeah, pretty fascinating. Yeah, and I guess that's another thing that I was wondering about to what extent, like, so obviously there's a physical component of this, right, is, okay, trying to make sure that people aren't physically interfering. How much of it also is sort of like providing emotional support to the people you're with?

Sure. Because this seems really stressful. It can be. I mean, the clinic where I'm an escort is has a little bit of a perimeter where there's a parking lot in between the people where they can actually protest out on the sidewalk, which is public property, obviously, and the actual entrance to the clinic. But there are people who come in off of public transport, too, and not necessarily aren't necessarily coming in a car where they can get sort of beyond where the protesters are to the clinic. And so I actually have a vivid memory. I've been doing this for 16 years, and I have a vivid memory of a woman who came off the bus. She got down off the bus at the bus stop, like, and the protesters really got up in her face. And one of them in particular was a guy who is, I'm not a small person. I'm about 510 and pretty decent size, but he's definitely over six feet tall and he was just like looming over her.

I had to physically insert myself in between her and him and say, Hey, you want to go to the clinic? This is how you get there. You don't have to listen to these people. If you want to talk to them, you can. But, you know, you don't have to. And, you know, and really, you know, they're in such a fragile moment, most of them. Interestingly, that that particular individual come to find out wasn't even coming for termination services. She was coming to get an ultrasound. She was having twins, and it was the lowest cost place that she could go to actually find an ultrasound to make sure that her twins were okay. And so, and she even came out afterwards with the ultrasound and like shoved it in the guy's face and was like, you know, you know, go take a flying leak. So, but yeah, I mean, part of it is just showing that there are people who believe that you have the right to make the choice you're making and that we're not judging. We're not here.

You know, I think a lot of women in the position of who feel that the need to terminate a pregnancy, they feel very judged. It's society is very judgmental. And I think, you know, being there, we have so many people who come up to us and just say, hey, thanks for being just thanks for being right. It's just helpful to know that someone is here and believes that I have the right to make this decision and that I'm the best person to make this decision about me and my body and my family. It's really, it makes it that much, it makes it better and people will come up and tell the most personal stories as well. I've had someone who came up to me once and said, hey, you know, 10 years ago, my wife was pregnant and we had been trying for so long to have a baby. And we found out that there was this massive, you know, genetic defect that was not really compatible with life. And we had, we had, we faced the tough decision about, do we go ahead and terminate this pregnancy and try to start again and how it and get pregnant again, or do we carry this to term knowing that this child isn't going to live for very long.

And that individual, you know, and his wife decided to terminate the existing pregnancy knowing that the baby wasn't going to live. And he said, and when we went to actually have the abortion, we had to run the gauntlet of all of those people outside. All those people like this telling us how we were killing our baby, a wanted baby, you know, that we were killing our child and we were murderers and all of that. And so he was just like, just thank you for being here. Thank you for being here and show because you don't know what what's going on in the lives of all of these people who are coming in here. And they don't know all what's going on. And so and he said, I really wish we had had someone like, you know, you standing here to let us know that it was okay, you know, in that moment of time to do this. So yeah, it's interesting.

People will tell very, very personal stories. The next thing I was wondering is about how this has changed over time. I mean, yeah, you've been in this for like longer than I've been like very seriously a conscious person. Indeed. Yeah. So I'm wondering what has it been like, how has this changed over the past sort of like decade and a half? And has there been a change, like, very, very recently as in the sort of like as as Ro looks like it's dying. And what do you think that's going to mean going forward for this?

Yeah. So, yes, it has changed over time. And, and yes, it has changed very recently as well. And I can say, you know, when I first started doing this, it was really just kind of, you know, the same hand and it still is the same handful of usual suspects who show up at least at the clinic I escort at. But it was really it was it was a small handful. And it was the same people every week, week after week after week. And, you know, on the clinic, escort side, you know, we're volunteers. So, you know, we need people to come and be sort of energized. And so, you know, we have a cadre of people who've been doing it. Yes, I've been doing it for 16 years, but there's a woman that I escort with there are several women that I asked for with who've been doing it, decades longer than I.

Right. And yeah, I mean, really amazing, really amazing women and who probably have even more interesting stories than I do. But, you know, in the, you know, we, and we would see after after something happened, like when George tiller was murder. We had an influx of volunteers who came in, people who were angry and said, you know, I was so upset and I realized I needed to do something about it. So periodically there have been, you know, obviously, you know, the murder of George tiller was a tragedy. But we've had things like that that have energized people and brought them in to actually doing clinic escorting. And there's been a little bit of a pickup recently in the number of escorts, but it's nothing like the pickup that I think I've seen in terms of anties. And it's, you know, and it's important because, you know, if you really believe that people should have the right to bodily autonomy and the right to make this choice, that that requires people to actually make it happen for them.

And there are a lot of people trying to make it not happen. And I actually, I was actually escorting, because the clinic escorts, they, you know, we actually change off, we have a schedule, we don't all go every week, at least at the clinic where I am, because, you know, we also want to have our own lives and not just be standing at this clinic every, every weekend. But I was escorting the weekend after Ruth Bader Ginsburg died. And I was standing by myself, kind of at one end, well, another person went and just, I think, picked up a sign or took a bathroom break or something. And one of the newer anties stood across from me and yelled at me that Ruth Bader Ginsburg was, was burning in hell now. And that if I didn't repent, you know, that the same thing would happen to me. That that's just God's plan, that, you know, people who, who believe in killing babies just are going to rot in hell for eternity.

And so that was an interesting, you know, and it was the first time, you know, most of the time they don't really try to engage us in conversation, but it was the first time someone was really just saying super, super, like, sort of inflammatory stuff to me as an personally as an escort. We certainly had heard, you know, they'll, they'll say things to patients where they say, you know, don't go in there. It's not safe. Be a good mom to your baby and that kind of stuff, which is also, you know, obviously incredibly emotional. To women going through what they're going through when they feel that they have no better choice than to terminate a pregnancy. But yeah, the actual sort of the vitriol towards, towards the escort has is a little is increasing. And I would say around the time Ruth Bader Ginsburg died, we also have seen an enormous uptick in the number of protesters outside the clinic.

Each, each week, as well as the length of time that they will stay. They actually about doubled the length of time that they say. And so, you know, it's, it's been a challenge. It's been a challenge for us on the escorting side to actually cover the ships because, you know, we are, again, we're all volunteers who have lives and want to live our lives. You know, we're women who are mothers, grandmothers, men who are, you know, fathers, grandfathers who just, you know, want, want to do something good and help out. And, you know, more and more of the time we were having to stay later, come earlier, stay later to ensure that there's someone there that there's a there's a friendly or at least protective presence for the women coming into the clinic. Have they gotten like, have they gotten more violent? You know, like I said, there's actually, so for us, it's where we are in the clinic where I work are in kind of a privileged position, so to speak, and that where they are stationed, you know, out on the sidewalk is, is far enough away.

You know, across a parking lot from the clinic that, you know, the physical alter, you know, interactions are relatively rare. I'm sure, you know, that would really be better, a question better placed to a clinic escort who's on a clinic at a clinic where, you know, the entrance to the clinic is right on a public sidewalk, right, where I think, you know, they definitely do have significantly more physical interactions. I guess it's hard to say. It depends on how you define that is it. There for a long time, the one of the signs outside the clinic was a photo of the doctor who provided the termination services, a photo of him, and his name, and it said retire this person, you know, his name. And the retire abortionist, and then his name. And that that showed up, I think, as I vaguely recall around the time George Schiller was was murdered. So what does that mean, right, so that's, that's violent in and of itself it's a suggestion there.

You know, I won't pretend that it's not, you know, it doesn't sometimes go through my head, like, you know, because there are clinic experts who have been murdered. And, and so it doesn't, it sometimes does go through my head, especially like, you know, a certain times of year when we're bundled up and it's cool. And, you know, someone could come up behind me and I, you know, wouldn't necessarily always hear them or see them. And so it is, it's, it, you know, there's definitely always a an undercurrent and a feeling of, you know, something could escalate. We're fortunate at my clinic that it, it hasn't too much recently but we, you know, I would say, you know, again, as Rose dying, you know, they're getting more bold. They're not supposed to trespass, they're not supposed to come on into the parking lot. And yet there are some who are really trying to test that boundary now who will go to their car, not in the clinic parking lot and then as they leave, drive into the parking lot and around the, by the clinic, just to sort of intimidate people. And to make the escorts concerned, because obviously, you know, when we're on foot, it's very hard to get physically between them and something when they're, when they're driving.

Yeah. And so, yeah, it's, it's, there's definitely an escalation in that front and an escalation in, in the rhetoric. You know, there are more, I would say kind of pointed signs that, that are used to try to intimidate the women into not going into the clinic. There was actually, there's a sign that had been used for, that actually has been used for a little bit longer, but it basically, it had the names of two women who according to the anti's had died under the care of the services of the doctor at our clinic, which in the end, when I actually did my own research wasn't true, one, one just very unfortunately had an allergic reaction to the anesthetic, which is not something you know, unless you've been under anesthesia. And the other, and it wasn't, and neither of them was it actually the provider at our clinic, who was performing the service at the time those, those individuals died, but it said, you know, dead and it had these two women's names, and 150,000 babies. And, which is a little bit inflammatory. And then it's, and also misleading when you think about it, because, you know, the maternal mortality rate in the United States is like, over 23 women per 100,000. So I was like, well, even if this is accurate, even if this sign was accurate, which it's not, you know, two women out of 150,000, that's way safer than actual pregnancy. And, you know, so it's those kinds of things, it's the mind games. And, you know, as someone who, you know, has seen this for a while, like, you know, to me, the mind game is part of the violence, even though it's not physical, it's really, you know, trying to make people feel ashamed and feel that they shouldn't come out.

And I think that, you know, as, as we're looking at Roe possibly being overturned, you know, you're suddenly seeing all these people coming out of the woodwork, because, you know, so many women in this country actually do abort a pregnancy at some point in time, do terminate a pregnancy. And yet, it's not something anyone talks about, because it's, it's still because of the dialogue in this country and because of the way it is portrayed. It is something that most people, you know, like, don't want to be public about, not just because of the, you know, politics of it, but because, you know, there are people who are made to feel ashamed. And as opposed to, you know, this, this was the right choice for me at this point in time. And maybe under different circumstances, it might have been a different choice. But yeah, so I think it's hard to say whether violence has increased, because it's always had that undercurrent. I mean, ever since I've been starting ever since I started doing. One of the things that we've talked to a few other people, we talked to someone who was doing security for security plans for clinics. And one of the things they were talking about was, like, a shift in the kinds of people who were getting involved in these clinics.

And I'm wondering, in these clinic protests, like, I wonder, have you seen, like, I don't know, they were talking about, like, there'd been specifically fascist groups getting involved. And I was wondering if, like, the kinds of people you've seen have been like that, or like, you know, in terms of the new people who are getting involved, are they closer to, like, the kinds of people you usually see outside these clinics? So that's actually an interesting point that I hadn't thought too much about. But I think, you know, the previously, you know, when I first started doing this, it tended to be kind of your older Catholic folks who are, you know, coming and saying the rosary, you know, standing there with the Statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary, like, in front of the clinic. And, you know, some could be pushy. But I think it is accurate to say there is actually a younger element of anti-abortion protester or anti-choice, really, because in the end it's really about the choice, not, and so I think, yes, I'm seeing younger and younger people. And it's interesting that you mentioned that because a lot of them are men. They're young, almost entirely white.

There is a handful of people of color, but they tend to come very, very rarely. And, you know, it's interesting. So it was largely older white men and women previously, and now I would say there are many more younger men getting involved, a few women. But for most of the young, and when I say young, I would say, you know, well, for the clinic I'm at, I would say anyone under probably the age of 40, but also, you know, really, even under the age of 30 or 25, with the exception of one, it's men. It is white men. And, yeah, so that's interesting. It's quite possible. Certainly there are some that, but, you know, we as clinic escorts are not actually engaging these individuals in conversation. That's not something that, you know, in fact, we have to sign pledges that we're, you know, at least for the organization that we volunteer with, that we're not going to engage in conversation with them, that we're not, you know, because no one, you know, and I guess this is sort of the whole point of your podcast. No one's going to change each other's minds on this issue, right? And, you know, over the parking lot and one, you know, sort of interaction. So we actually, we don't, and we actively don't, because we just, you know, it's not worth it. We're there. The point of being there is not to try to get to know the other people, the anti-choice demonstrators. It's not to try to, you know, change their minds.

It's just to ensure that the women who have made their decision are able to freely access the healthcare services that they have made the decision to access. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. That's definitely seems like the, like, it definitely seems like the best strategy for this and seems like something that, like, other people could learn from as like a tactic to deal with this kind of stuff, because, yeah, and engaging with those people doesn't, I have limited experience with this, but they showed up to my, well, okay, they showed up to my high school, but then they also showed up to my college, and we just like, they were trying to like get news footage. And so we wound up just like sitting down in front of the, like just sitting down in front of their sign so people couldn't see them, and then just like refusing to talk to them. And that, I think, worked a lot better than, like, I don't know, a lot of the other stuff that I've seen, because, yeah, like, you're definitely right. It's like, yeah, like, you're not going to, those people, like, yeah, like, there's no way you're going to change the mind of like someone who's holding a sign there. And I guess that's also another thing that is interesting about this, which is, yeah, like, it's, like, your emphasis on, it's not about the ideological debate as much as it is, like, it's not about, like, you going to confront these people, it's about making sure that the people who need these services are safe and are able to do it. And that, that seems like a very powerful way to sort of like bypass this, like, I don't know, bypass this weird like discourse circuit that everyone gets in.

Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, what I, what I can tell you, I mean, listen, I would love to sleep in on my Saturday morning. Yeah, I don't like to get up on and give up, you know, you know, two to four hours of my Saturday, you know, in the freezing rain, or the, you know, wind and colder on a really hot summer day, and get up out of bed to do that. But, you know, on those, you know, there are cold winter mornings, I'm like, Oh, gosh, it's it's early, I'm that that alarms awfully early and it's really cold outside. But I always just in my mind, the thing that I tell myself is, you never know who's coming in today who just needs to see you. And just needs to see someone there to, you know, whether it's to give her the direction because she's so distraught after having to drive or walk by a number of protesters telling her how she's, you know, going to regret her decision and how she's a terrible human being and she's a killer and she's a this, she's a slut she's a whore later whatever you know whatever the message that someone in that situation gets by walking past those protesters. You know, I never know who needs to just see me there. And whether it's that she just needs directions because she's so distraught after going through, you know, running that gauntlet that she's kind of lost her bearings and she's like, Okay, which door do I need to go in? How do I do this? Or actually just needs to see, you know, a friendly face, or, you know, have someone tell her that it's okay to not listen to what they have to say to her. And it's okay to not internalize that, which, you know, I think is probably very, very hard when you're already in a somewhat emotionally fraught state. And people who want to start escorting what would be the best ways that they could go about doing that or learning more information about how to do it and the different places that that allow it and well not just not allowed like the different places where different groups that help facilitate this type of work.

Yeah, so I mean, I think there, there isn't necessarily that I'm aware of one sort of national site but I think a lot of individual sort of local providers have clinic escorts. I know that if you most like most if not many planned parent foods will have, you know, a clinic escort program. And so I think, you know, sometimes you're best that maybe just to Google, you know, clinic escort in my area or contact a provider in your area to say, Hey, how do I get involved? Because, you know, at least in my area where I where I live, there is one that sort of covers the area but it is by no means nationwide and there definitely are sort of localized groups that do it so I think it may be just a matter of reaching, you know, Googling the clinic escorts or reaching out to your local Planned Parenthood or if there's another abortion provider in your community that isn't Planned Parenthood because there are still many that are not Planned Parenthood that, you know, they may know. And I guess my other thing is so for people who for whatever reason can't to escorting but want to help support. I mean, basically, people who want to support the providers and the people who need these services is like, yeah, what would you recommend that they do. So there are also similarly to to those those groups there's there's abortion funds throughout the country that whether you know, many of them are you know sort of dedicated to individual areas like local areas. But you can look up the abortion fund in your area. And that is a, you know, an organization that will actually take donations from from individuals who want to help and provide, you know, provide financial support to women who are seeking abortion whether they it's because they have to travel out of state, and or to somewhere, even within their state but not where they live in order to actually obtain an abortion. And, you know, because many women who are seeking seeking termination

services can't always pay for them, you know, especially if they're publicly insured, you know, a lot of public insurance, you know, federal dollars cannot be spent on abortion services. And so they can also help pay for the abortion for those individuals. And you, it's, it's a little bit tougher now that we're in, you know, sort of in the midst of coronavirus pandemic. There are some organizations that also if you live in an area that where there are providers and there are people potentially traveling out of state, especially if you're in an area where there is a provider who provides, you know, what they call, you know, later term services for people who, you know, find out that there's a major genetic abnormality along far into the pregnancy or whatever and they need to terminate their pregnancy. You know, there are organizations that will actually help you volunteer to house them or provide even transportation services to and from appointments, if if you so choose. But then, you know, there's also all of the sort of national if you're looking to kind of get more, you know, involved at the sort of overarching national legal level. Certainly, there are a number of organizations, whether it's, you know, the Planned Parenthood Federation or NARAL or any of those organizations that you could certainly donate to as well. Yeah, we will put some of the links in the set description. And I'm sure that there are many things I forgot, but those are the ones that jump to mind right now. If people listening to this, please, like, go help in whatever way you can, because, like, if, like, if abortion services continue to be a thing where them existing is a small number of volunteers, they're not going to. So, yeah, please, please do that. Yeah, Tonya, Tonya, thank you. Thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you for having me. Yeah, and yeah, this has been it could happen here. Yeah, it's happening here, do the things that you can do to make sure it doesn't. Oh, yeah, it could happen here. It being a podcast hosted by myself, Christopher Wong and the minute inimitable. And Andrew, Andrew, hi, you're in charge. Hi. Thank you. Thank you. I almost stuck that landing. I was so close to not fucking it up. Are you guys proud? I'm proud of you for being consistent and by consistent, I mean that you fucked it up again. I'm proud. Yeah, I shouldn't have tried to say inimitable. That was that that was always going to be a disaster. Yeah, it was it was it was it was like one of those gymnastics landings where it's like they land it and the both your feet go in the ground and they jump and they fall. Yeah, it's very impressive stuff like that. Yeah, I'll give you a beef about that when I yeah. Well, all right, Andrew, what do you what do you what do you what do you what do you what do you what do you got for us today? Right. So for this, this, this episode's topic. The story begins with Reddit. Oh, God, no. I saw that's not a great sign. Well, Reddit and Twitter. Yeah, the the the two horsemen and the discourse that occurred on those sites a while ago, particularly related to like infrastructure and infrastructure and anarchism.

Right. I mean, we all know the basic principles like a society related to autonomy, allowing people to define themselves and organize themselves on their own terms. Horizontalism, you know, people able to organize so that no one dominates anyone else, and no one exercises power over others. Mutual aid, so people able to help one another voluntarily, their bonds of solidarity and networks of generosity that keep the social fabric together. You know, free association allows people to cooperate with who they want to and how they see fit and also conversely, you know, refuse and disassociate when it's be. Yeah, that's a key one that people don't emphasize it. Yeah, the free disassociation. Yeah, definitely not be associated with certain people. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, because you can't freely associate if you don't have the option to freely disassociate is like running into a cage and then you can't exit. Everyone should be able to move freely as well.

So I can emphasize which is I think one of the things that radicalized me most was the existence of borders, because to me at least like when you're born, you know, you have this spawn point and it seems absurd to me that your spawn point should have so much control over, you know, the outcome of your life. You know what rights and stuff you enjoy and where you can and can't go freely because none of us have a choice in that matter, you know, you can't exactly choose our parents or choose or, you know, neighborhood or where we grew up, whatever. And of course, borders of the national kind are the only ones I guess suppose, you know, you also pose borders related to gender and race and citizenship and well that relates to borders but yeah. And so how anarchist proposed we get to this society is first and foremost, the people liberating themselves the concept of self liberation. So people are not even speaking just in terms of workers, you know, speaking in terms of gender and sexual minorities speaking to terms of racial groups, speaking in terms of disabled people, you know, they must be at the forefront of their own liberation freedom cannot be given. It has to be taken. And so through direct action, which is when we directly act without the middle channels of you know, authorities representatives, we make those changes for ourselves, and through other methods, we pursue the world that we wish to live in which is the whole prefigurative process of building a new in the show the old. And so I think part of the issue when it comes to discussions of anarchism and infrastructure and supply lines and all these different things is that I think people have this misconception.

There's this real strange idea of what anarchist revolution looks like, where, you know, we flip a switch just overnight and boom, anarchist society, we have nothing in place we have no organizations or systems or networks in places just boom, we snap our fingers and all of a sudden we all living under anarchy. But in reality, you know, as Kropotkin expressed, there's no fallacy as harmful as the fallacy the one day revolution. Obviously, there's going to be a transition. In fact, a lot of people like to define anarchism as an ongoing process moving further and further towards the ideal of anarchy. The whole idea is not whether or not there will be a transitional society, or what kind of transition that will be. And so in this period of transition is when we will be engaging in the different forms of social experimentation to manifest, you know, anarchist principles in every facet of life. And of course, this is a process will involve engaging with local conditions and local people and allowing those communities, those individuals to determine for themselves what structures and systems are put in place. Part of the struggle is going to involve mirroring the society that we wish to create. If our final goal is, you know, a communistic and anarchistic society, then our methods must be as communistic as anarchistic as possible, basic, you know, duality of means and ends.

So when we speak of supply lines, when we speak of infrastructure, the reality is that existing infrastructure is not going to disappear overnight. When I'm starting from complete scratch, this isn't a new, you know, Minecraft world that we have to go and punch some trees and start society all over again. Revolution is destructive, but it is also constructive and transformative. So I mean, we're not going to get rid of all experts and all expertise. We're not going to be floundering to figure out how to make penicillin. People in all fields and all industries and all layers and all, you know, backgrounds are going to be involved in the process, you know, adapting their workplaces, adapting their industries towards sustainable and anarchic ends. And it's a process that's going on now and will continue. Because if, you know, we look at at revolution as a combination of, I think, Eric Olin, right, he had in his book, Envisioning Real Utopias, three basic concepts of transformation.

You add ruptural transformation, interstitial transformation and symbiotic transformation. And so interstitial revolution is basically the idea, it's basically a mirror of, you know, prefigurative politics. It's a theoretical means of societal transformation through progressively and strategically enlarging spaces of social empowerment. And ruptural transformation is, of course, I guess the dichotomy between the insurrectionists and everybody else, you know, where you have these moments of social outputs, these moments of rupture, where social forms and social developments are, you know, undertaken. And we sort of figure out how we are, or rather we directly fight back against, you know, the systems that are in place. I think rupture is one of the more exciting forms. It's the kind of form of revolution people tend to think of when they think of the term revolution, this idea of, you know, all these, this mass of people, this crowd of people storming, the Bastille or whatever.

But the real work of transformation is the stuff that occurs, you know, prior to and post those moments of rupture. Well, one of the terms I tend to like that I've been thinking and reading about a lot is shatter zones. And these are, this is like the post rupture, right? These are the areas where state power kind of collapses, or at least pieces of state power collapse. And it's, you know, these shatter zones where kind of you see the state retreat in the wake of a rupture are where very terrible things tend to happen. But there are also these zones of possibility, you know, it's the places, it's the kind of place where you, you can get an ethnic cleansing and it's the kind of place where you can get Rojava, you know, like it's, it's, they're these kind of zones of possibility in the wake of, of rupture. And I think that's, you know, a lot of the, a lot of the revolutionary kind of imagery focuses on, on the rupture, but the future is decided in the shatter zones, you know. Yeah. And I think what people miss as well is the stuff that builds up to those, you know, shatter zones, which is that their organizations, their affinity groups, their networks and structures in place are able to support those zones, they're able to, you know, when those ruptures occur, support the people taking part in those fights and expand, you know, those zones of possibility.

Yeah. I mean, this is the kind of thing where like, if you're looking at what, what causes the difference between, you know, these disastrous, like disasters that happen kind of in the wake of a rupture, horrible crimes against humanity and situations where something better gets built. Like, again, to use the example of Rojava, the reason why that happened there and why ISIS didn't win in that terrain is that groups of activists had been organizing in a variety of ways for years in that area. And so when the state collapsed, there were armed groups and those armed groups were supported by farming cooperatives and groups of people who had been organizing to provide supplies to each other and like community organizations like focused on social, like, development and aid, like there was, it's, it's, yeah. There was an existing net in place. Exactly, exactly. And that's, that's what. So when, you know, things fall down, you could catch, you could catch, yeah. Yeah.

And I think that's also, because there's another way this can go to where it's like, you get a lot of moments where, you know, like, like, May 68 in France looks like this, right? Where like, like, the, like, the, was it the prime minister or the president? I forget what DeGal was at that time. That's like, you, like, literally, like, the country's leaders are flying out of the country on helicopters because they think everything's going to collapse and it just sort of doesn't. And I think one of, one of the ways you get, you get this period that looks like rupture, but then everything sort of closes back up in on itself is if those networks aren't strong enough. And you don't have some kind of sufficient level of organization. Like there isn't, there isn't anything, it's like, it's like, you get these moments where the state is discredited, but there's nothing to replace it. And then the, and the, the sort of void, the void isn't strong enough to just sort of like have the state collapse entirely.

And so what you get is this moment where it looks like everything is going to change and then just nothing happens. And I think that's also a product of essentially the same thing. It's just depending on the strength of the state, you can get very different sort of outcomes from these moments where sometimes it's able to restabilize itself. Sometimes it isn't. Right. Yeah. And I think we kind of saw that in a way with the 2020 protests. Yeah. Where you had this massive, massive rupture, probably the largest, one of the largest in American history.

You had people in the streets and cities all over the country. Of course, the vast majority of them were just peaceful marches, but you also did have some like serious moments of rupture, like in Minneapolis and stuff. And I mean, look at us, you know, two years later. And while there are, you know, more community organizations, I think there are more people who are a bit more conscious with more whale, who are, you know, radicalized. And expanded their knowledge through that rupture. Things basically went back to the way they were in a lot of ways. And then other ways, you know, police budgets were just increased. I think there was a current with the analogy, but I'll just go with the analogy of like a hydro where, you know, the state, whenever it's attacked and stuff, it's able to just restore itself, just able to recover itself and able to like adapt to those sorts of attacks.

I remember reading in Dawn of Everything where the Davids were talking about how the state, they're using the example of the American state. They were saying, you know, the American state of 1900, right, is completely different in a lot of ways from the American state of the 2000. You know, because the state and state crafters is constantly evolving, constantly expanding, constantly responding to, you know, the conditions that they face. If you saw what happened in 20th century, you know, the different movements that occurred in that time, the state was able to respond to those movements and adjust itself accordingly. And so, obviously, when we have these ruptures, we have these, you know, moments of struggle, and obviously the times in between where we are prefiguring robust systems and alternative institutions that can support people, those moments of rupture. Part of that isn't going to involve, you know, defense. And the SU is not, oh, well, how do you defend revolution? Not because they want to defend revolution, they don't know how to defend revolution, but rather part of defending it is defending it from people's attempts to seize power away from the masses, from the working class, to, you know, siphon that energy and use it for the ends of a smaller group, a smaller class of, you know, whether it be parties or whatever the case may be. Yeah, and there's something there, I think, going back to, like, thinking about borders and freedom of movement, because if you look at, like, both the USSR and China do this very quickly, which is that, okay, so you have the communist revolution, okay, and theoretically class and power, and then, like, the first thing they do is set up internal border controls.

And these, like, like, I mean, in China, they're technically, like, the prohibition on movement is, like, technically over, but the, like, the household registration system still exists and it still determines where you can get benefits and how you get benefits and whether you can live in a city and, like, what, like, what social security you can access, can you buy houses, things like that. And, like, that kind of stuff, if you're not, if what you're doing is just putting a group of people in power and not actually putting, you know, like, if you want to talk about it in class terms, right, it's like, okay, either the actual working class governs itself, like, the class in the entirety collectively makes decisions, or you've just created a new, like, bureaucrat class, and if you wind up with a new bureaucrat class, it's like, yeah, immediately look at what happens, it's like, oh, hey, a bunch of people have now decided that you, like, you can't leave your home province because you don't have the right registration. Right. And it's like, okay. Right. And that kind of reminds me what you were saying about, you know, if all the working classes was members of the state. Reminds me of a video I was watching last night, actually, from this YouTuber, Anak, Daniel Barion, and he was talking about, I believe, how the state is necessarily exclusive.

If everybody holds power, then the state necessarily must be wiped out, must be wiped away. If not, it's going to try to reclaim its monopoly on power, its monopoly on violence. It cannot exist without people under it, you know. And so, as you know, we are engaging in this as we are, you know, organizing strikes, creating networks of activists, creating assemblies, creating, you know, self-managed schools and social centers and cooperatives and all these different forms of infrastructure that can weather and exist under capitalism, but serve as prefigurations of our potential beyond capitalism. And so, I guess to pivot back to the topic I was speaking of in the beginning, with regard to infrastructure, you know, all of history books and stuff, general history books tend to speak of the government, centralized government states and stuff arising out of the need to build and maintain like these big infrastructure projects. They tend to use the example of irrigation. It's taken for granted, you know, taken as a given, that bureaucracies and such were necessary for organizing these large populations. And that while, you know, egalitarian principles may thrive on a small scale, they just cannot scale up when populations get any bigger than like a small band of people.

But what we do know is that complex rural irrigation systems and egalitarian urban decision-making systems have occurred in, you know, human history that our ancestors were able to organize those institutions without a state, without a centralized body with a cohesive, you know, authority. There's also like this implicit assumption, you know, when people make these decisions, that societies must necessarily grow and endlessly grow, and that we cannot choose to limit our scale in any way to avoid centralization, to enhance egalitarianism. You know, we can't scale ourselves down to more manageable levels, a.k.a. degrowth. And as you've seen, that's just not true. You know, we are capable of making those shifts, you know, large scale projects like irrigation or, you know, supply lines and stuff, they do require coordination. But coordination is not synonymous with the state. Coordination is not synonymous with hierarchy. Yeah, and that's something that's interesting to me the way people, like, how badly people think about that because, like, even in terms of sort of like mercantilist trade, right, like, that kind of like long-range coordination, long-range like moving goods across the world has, like, it's mostly not been states doing that? Like, it's, you know, and you can talk about like, okay, whatever, it's like, it's, however you sort of want to think about the market mechanisms here, but like, yeah, like, people have been, people have been moving stuff from one side of the world to the other, like, essentially without the state having anything to do with it for, like, as long as there have been people? Exactly. I think that's one of the things that frustrates me most about the discourse about, like, any kind of post-capitalism is this purposefully, I think in a lot of cases, like, malignantly inaccurate attitude that, like, the idea of people, like, exchanging goods and services is fundamentally capitalist,

that the idea of people, like, organizing that the, that, like, a factory, right, is something that has to be, has to be either organized under capitalist models or under state socialist models. Angles. Angles. Angles. Yeah, exactly. As if people haven't done it in other ways, right? This is not theoretical. We're not, like, trying to posit, like, well, maybe it could work this way.

It's like, no, motherfuckers have done this. Yeah, we have practical examples. There's examples. Even under capitalism. Yeah, yeah, stuff like the Mondragon Corporation and whatnot. Like, it's not, like, it's, this is not, like, theoretical stuff that we're talking about. I was thinking more along the lines of what happened in Argentina. Yeah, yeah.

You don't have to say as you go. Or if it's something going a bit further back as, you know, like, the CNT, which I'll get into in a little bit. Yeah, like, that's something, well, I mean, I think part of what's happening there is it's like, yeah, like, people have run factories in other ways, in other ways, and every single time they try to do it, every other political faction on earth sets out, sets aside all their political differences and goes and tries to kill them. And it's like, hmm, this is not great. Yeah, that's true. That's true.

I'm also reminded of the fact that, you know, part of what happened and part of the issue that, you know, occurred in Argentina and as it could elsewhere is this concept that I think Michael Albert talks about a lot. This idea of the coordinator class and the issues that arise out of that sort of coordinator class. And so I think part of that sort of organization is going to involve confronting that, you know, we tend to think of it in terms of, you know, the capitalist ownership and getting rid of the capitalist, but there's, you know, a lot more play than just the capitalist hell of the firm is the firm. I think there's also like this sort of assumption that people aren't capable of like taking any kind of, you know, I think there's this kind of weird assumption that people aren't capable of taking initiative, that people aren't capable of, you know, seeing the needs around them and organizing to fulfill them. So when people end up, you know, trying to do these gotchas and stuff like this, like, oh, well, how are you going to deal with garbage?

It's like, people don't like garbage around them, you know, which is why we have a sanitation system, which is why we have garbage disposal systems in place. But, you know, under this system, because everything is all the costs of, you know, our consumption and stuff are externalized and hidden, people don't have to think about the ways that, you know, our actions are affecting our local, you know, ecosystem. You know, we see that we pay other countries to, or at least one, I can't say a week, the U.S. The U.S. pays other countries. I mean, we have a problem in trying that as well, where all of our waste just gets dumped like right next to our mangrove. And there's a community right opposite the highway where the dump is located. And, you know, they burn garbage there.

And it's like, they burned garbage, just like a constant smell of burned garbage around that community. And it's, of course, the most impoverished community in the country. And it's the whole thing. But I digress, you know, when we aren't able to just, you know, externalize the costs of, you know, how we live, communities are able to, you know, notice how to, you know, notice the problem and figure out ways to handle it. You know, whether it be small rewards, people who volunteer to, you know, deal with trash or, you know, just, there's people who enjoy doing that as well, you know. And the same goes for other undesirable jobs.

Or, you know, people decide to go on like a rotating basis. And the reality is, you know, we don't have to like define our lives around a career. So, you know, a person doesn't have to be entirely like a garbage collector. And on top of that, you know, as we scale down the amount of garbage we produce, that task will become, you know, less and less necessary. Yeah, so, you know, with waste infrastructure, people are able to take care of that. You know, we can't externalize those sorts of issues. You know, with food infrastructure, you know, we're able to, like for example, in the Titer Hills region of what is now Kenya, you know, people were able to create these complex irrigation systems that, you know, lasted hundreds of years.

Before, you know, colonial states moved in and ended these agricultural practices. You know, back then, you know, the households would share the day-to-day maintenance of that irrigation infrastructure. You know, everyone would take care of the parts of the infrastructure that was closest to where they lived. And, you know, as it was common, people enjoyed it in common, people maintained it in common, people benefited in common. People would also come together periodically for, like, major repairs. And it was a form of collective, socially motivated work that we see in many other, you know, decentralized societies. You know, I often hear conversations, or rather, I often read about, you know, these different societies. And even under capitalism, you have communities that, you know, when someone needs somewhere to live,

the whole community gets together and helps them build their house. And when someone else needs somewhere to live, you know, everyone gets together and builds their house and so on and so forth. You know, people are already doing this in parts of the world. These systems are already in place in parts of the world. These sort of reciprocal networks of support. And I mean, whether you're talking transportation or power or communications or housing or food or healthcare, there's a precedent set, you know. These precedents may have certain flaws, but we could study them, we could learn from them and we could establish something better. You know, for example, like, as we mentioned earlier, in Anarchist Spain, right, during the Spanish Civil War,

Barcelona's medical syndicate, which was organized largely by anarchists, managed 18 hospitals, six of which they had created, 17 sanatoriums, 22 clinics, six psychiatric establishments, three nurseries, and one maternity hospital. Whenever they had a request, the syndicate would send doctors to places in need. Because medicine was considered to be in service of the community, not the other way around. You know, funds for these clinics would come from the contributions of, like, local municipalities. And this syndicate had a health workers union that included 8,000 health workers. The union operated 36 health centers and distributed through Catalonia and provided health care to everyone in the region.

And these syndicates would send delegates, you know, to Barcelona and they would be able to deal with common problems and implement common plans. But every department was both autonomous, but also not isolated. So they supported one another where needs be. Under the CNT, you know, we also see, like, lands being taken by peasant syndicates who would organize properties and allow the whole community to take care of, you know, their land and their animals and, you know, their crops as needs be. Yeah, there was something, I've been, the more I've read about it, the more impressed I've been with the way that... I guess you would call it, like, the anarchists in Spain, like, basically did a universal health care program in one year in the middle of a civil war. And, like, you know, I think the other thing about it that was important is that, like, they were able to... They had this whole program that was about, like, sending doctors into the countryside to get into communities that had never actually had regular access to medical care before.

And they were able to do this extremely quickly and had a system the benefits of which are, like, enormously better than, like, basic... Like, you can go find, I'm forgetting the exact example, like, you can go find, like, their policy for, like, how much time off you can get for, like, an injury and stuff. And it's like, yeah, you can take, you can take, like, six months, eight months off at, like, full pay, like, people, like, your family will be provided for. Like, they had all of this just, like, incredible, like, health care infrastructure they were able to set up really, really fast. Yeah, yeah. Because they also had, you know, these regional federations of different collectives, and they were able to basically, you know, distribute surplus goods and distribute, as you said, health care. And, you know, basically pool the infrastructure so that everybody would rather pool the resources so that everybody was able to benefit. You know, they often pooled resources for things where, you know, areas were unevenly developed, you know, so that, you know, more developed regions were able to help other regions improve their infrastructure, you know, build roads and canals and hospitals. As this, when I read about, you know, what happened in Catalonia, I'm not saying they were perfect, they definitely had a lot of issues.

When I read what happened there, you know, in the midst of a civil war, the possibilities that were present and what could have potentially happened further along, you know, it's very inspiring. Yeah, and I think it goes back to the sort of the point we've been talking about, which is that, like, the capacity to provide care for people and the capacity to do stuff like this exists in our society, right? It's not something that has to be just sort of just, like, completely manufactured from the ground up, it's just that the capacity is not being used to actually, like, give people what they need. It's like, well, okay, it's not, it's less like a process of just completely reconstructing the society and more a process of, like, hey, why don't we use the resources we already have to do the things that are, like, actually useful? And people for some reason think that, like, stops being true if you don't have a state and it's like, no. Like, the state, the state disappearing does not mean that every single doctor suddenly vanishes from the face of the earth. Yeah, it doesn't mean every single sanitation worker suddenly disappears, every single construction worker suddenly disappears, every single, you know, teacher suddenly disappears. Yeah, like I said, we're not starting from, like, a new Minecraft world, you know, you don't have to go and kill the end the dragon and all that.

But I mean, I guess that's a good place to wrap up, basically. We have these possibilities, we always have. And in a lot of ways, the state and, you know, capitalism and all these other manifestations of hierarchy are holding us back. They're preventing us from reaching our full creative, the full unleashing of our creative potential as people. Yeah, we should do that instead of this. Yeah, we should do this instead of that, you know. Rather, we should do that instead of this. Yeah.

Well, Andrew, thank you so much. Where can people follow you? I believe you just put out a new video this week, if I'm remembering correctly. Yes. I don't know if they will hear this episode before my next video is out. But you all can find me on YouTube.com slash Android zone. And you can find me on Twitter at underscore St. Drew. Awesome. All right. Well, go start a hospital. Look, let's do it. Hi, everybody. Wow, you served Jesus, Shireen.

Oh, I thought that's what Sophie said I should do. I know you did the right thing. I'm the one being an asshole here. Okay, well, this is Shireen. This is also it can happen here. It's a podcast that happens every day that I am now on. What is it about again? It's about everything happening here. Yes, it's about everything happening here. And this week's episode is about my neighbor, Dave, who appears to be gardening. No, that's not what the show is about. I'm sorry.

It's about how society is crumbling and how maybe we could put it back together. There it is. That's what, yeah, that's what it is about. And Shireen Lanianus is going to take lead today, but we also have Christopher Wong, Robert Evans, and it is me, Sophie. Yes, that's good. See, this is what I'm going to keep in mind next time if I ever have to do this again, like what introing this show means. I mean, it is a daily show. I have a lot of opportunities to get this right.

Yeah, I wanted to do something a little different today, so hopefully the listeners are okay with it. Be easy on me. Well, and if they're not, we will simply club them into submission. Yeah, well, I appreciate that. I live for violence. That is why we've spent half of our year's podcasting budget on chaleles. But I wanted to take a couple episodes to talk about something very important that I don't think it's enough news coverage, and I want to talk about Palestine.

And this first episode, I wanted to focus on how bias news coverage is as far as depicting what's happening in Palestine and Israel. So that's what we're going to talk about today. So are you ready? Are you all strapped in? I'm going to start talking at you guys for a long time. Hell yeah, motherfucker. Okay, at the height of the 2014 war between the Israeli military and Palestinian factions in the Gaza Strip, New York Times ran an article headlined Israel says that Hamas uses children's shields, reviving debate.

It was a reference to the hundreds of Palestinian civilians who had been killed in the Israeli attacks by that point in the war. And there was no question about who had killed them, yet the language shifted the subject to a debate about who was really responsible. A few weeks earlier, after an Israeli airstrike had killed several Palestinian soccer fans, The Times ran another absurd title titled, Missile at Beachside Gaza Cafe Finds Patrons Poise for the World Cup. And they later- Just found them, huh? Wow. Yep, they found them poise just sitting there. It's amazing. People talk about the exonerative case in like journalism and it appears to apply to the Israeli military and American cops. Yes, exactly. And they did later amend this title because they had like a widespread like backlash and disgust that was expressed on social media.

It only changed after that. But the whole point is that headlines matter and it's the first and sometimes only exposure the general public has to world events. And especially like now, I believe that in our current time, the words at the top of that page or like sometimes the only words that show up in a hyperlink are more important than the articles themselves because sometimes it's all people see before they keep on scrolling. And in the case of Israel and Palestine, inappropriate misleading and biased headlines like those that appeared in the New York Times that I just mentioned have been all too common accepted and treated as accurate reporting and quote unquote journalism. In 2019, there was a study titled 50 years of occupation that was published by 416 labs, which is a research and data analytics firm based in Canada. This firm analyzed nearly 100,000 news headlines about the conflict and the American press over the past five decades and found that the Israeli point of view surprise surprise was featured much more prominently than the Palestinian one. And that references to Palestinians experiences of being refugees or living under occupation, that word, especially that has steadily declined over time. So one of the studies authors, Awaya Sahir, he told the intercept that the findings demonstrate a persistent bias in coverage of the Israeli Palestinian issue. One where Israeli narratives are privileged and where despite the continued entrenchment of the occupation, the very topics germane to the Palestinians day to day reality have disappeared.

It calls to attention the need to more critically evaluate the scope of coverage of the Israeli occupation and recognize that readers are getting at best a heavily filtered rendering of the issue. So this study analyzed 50 years of news headlines on the Israeli Palestine conflict. I put that in quotes, I feel like conflict is suggest an equal also like under stating it. Yes, exactly. Come on. It's very, it's under stating what's actually happening. And it just depicts a somehow neutral playing field, but it's not for sure. But the study analyzed 50 years of headlines from five major American publications, the Chicago Tribune, the LA Times, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal.

It employed this thing called natural language processing or NLP. And these techniques are used to analyze massive databases of headlines published over this period. NLP is a big data analysis approach used to identify statistical trends and patterns and large caches of text. In this case, researchers analyzed nearly 100,000 headlines and identified dozens of frequently recurring terms and word sequences and stories about the Israel and Palestine. While studies of media coverage on Israel and Palestine have been conducted before, this one by the 416 labs analysis is the largest and most comprehensive look at headline coverage since the occupation began in 1948. And their findings show a clear slant towards the Israeli perspective. Headlines like the one that I mentioned earlier from New York Times about civilian deaths in Gaza that use the term Israel says were two and a half times more likely to appear than headlines citing Palestinian equivalents. Headlines centering Israel were published four times more than those centering Palestinians and words connoting violence such as terror appeared three times more than the word occupation. And since 1967, that's the year that the Israeli military took control of the West Bank. There has been an 85% overall decrease in the mention of the term occupation and headlines about Israel, despite the fact that the Israeli military's occupation of the Palestine territory has in fact intensified over this time.

And the mention of the term Palestinian refugees meanwhile has declined a massive 93%. And while this is maybe subtle from the outside, it's just a consistent disproportion of article headlines, which by default gives a greater airtime to one side and avoids certain key issues and this obviously can impact public perception. Yeah, I mean, it's very noticeable once you realize what the bias is looking especially on like social media and stuff when you see just just the headline of an article. It's obvious. Yeah, it's just, I don't know, like what you have is a conflict where one side is treated like a military force and the other side is treated like almost like weather. Like that's that's almost how they write about when the Israeli military does something. It's like like a like a thunderstorm came in right like it's nobody's fault. This is just what happened, you know, like the Palestine, you know, the Hamas or whatever, that's like a military force. And so we talk about them the way that we talk about, you know, a military force carrying out a strike or something.

But but the Israeli military is like, it's like with a weather, right? There's nothing to be there's no blame to go around. It just rained, you know, yeah. And also like legitimizes Israel like delegitimizes any kind of force that Palestine exerts because it's like shown in this like, yeah, like a militant terrorist lens. When it's just acting in self defense. It's interesting because the US media actually does a better job of discussing the US military as if it actually can be like guilty of crimes. Like the New York Times in particular has done some like not that there's not still problems with it. But they like there's there's something unique about the way they write about Israel that I guess not quite unique because they do often write about police in a similar way.

But it's very peculiar that it's like, I don't know. Yeah, there's definitely a lot of crossover with US police and Israel in more ways than one. Oh, yes. They trained them, first of all, but also just like the way and I'll talk more about this later. But the fact that there are so many videos like blatantly showing like brutal acts against like humanity or like just brutalism in general and like they still get away with it just shows that they know there's no punishment. They know that there's a certain amount of immunity because they have big brother America to always fucking get their back. But despite this ongoing American involvement, the total volume of US media coverage about the conflict has been an overall decline since the 1993 Oslo peace accords. This was a negotiated agreement between the then Palestine leader Yasser Arafat and then Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

And it was intended to establish conditions for peace in the region. The decline in news coverage says little about the conditions on the ground, because they didn't get better. But the hopes that were briefly raised by this Oslo peace accord effectively died in 1995. After an Israeli extremist assassinated Rabin and a new hard line Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu, he took power in 1996. And since then, the Israeli military, their occupation of the West Bank has only expanded with new settlements eating away at the remaining areas of Palestinian control, even while global media attention has declined. And it's not just American media that shows a clear bias that favors Israel. British media coverage on the violence in Palestine is also very biased against Palestinians, which in turn skews public perception internationally. In 2021, the Muslim Council of Britain's Center for Media Marketing, the CFMM, published a 44 page report that was titled Media Reporting on Palestine 2021.

And this report came after two weeks of violence in which Israeli police cracked down on protests against the imminent evictions of Palestinians in the occupied East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah. And this subsequently attacked Palestinian worshipers at the Al-Aqsa Mosque and that wounded hundreds. I don't know if you guys remember, but in 2021, last year, there was a lot of violence occurring in Palestine. There is more coverage than usual, especially covering Sheikh Jarrah. And obviously, news headlines didn't always come at it in an even-handed way. But the brutal escalation of violence that followed as rockets were fired from Gaza and Israeli airstrikes on the besieged enclave that killed at least 248 Palestinians, including 66 children. In the occupied West Bank in East Jerusalem, 29 Palestinians were killed and the rockets fired from Gaza killed 12 people in Israel. The CFMM stated that between May 7th and May 20th of 2021, that's May 20th is when a ceasefire was announced, there were 62,400 online print articles and nearly 8,000 television broadcasts reporting on the events.

And this report found that the narrative was extremely unbalanced due to, quote, skewed language, misleading headlines, and problematic framing. Rizwanah Hamid, the director of CFMM and the co-author of this report, told the Middle East Eye that the overwhelming amount of complaints that was received by the monitoring organization about the biased media coverage in Britain covering the events in Palestine, it aligned with the analysis and evidence that this is all skewed and it makes sense to get defensive when being rightfully called out. Just to kind of talk a little bit about Sheikh Jarrah and al-Aqsa really quick, this report cited several examples of media referring to the situation in Sheikh Jarrah, which the situation was Palestinians being forcibly removed from their homes. They called this an eviction or a real estate dispute, which implies a legal basis for these forced displacements when in reality it was a violation of international law. So that's minimizing it to an extreme. It also found that 50% of broadcast media clips between May 7th and May 10th refer to quote unquote evictions or similar terms to describe illegal settlement plans in Sheikh Jarrah. And that also kind of just conflates that there's nothing you can do.

This is like a legal dispute, not your problem. Let the mess be over there and we're just sitting here all pretty in America. Yeah, they make it seem like it's like, oh, this is like a landlord thing. Yeah, there's also this way in which the actual thing that is happening is a bunch of people are showing up with guns and stealing people's houses. And this is getting treated as like, oh, this is like, this is, you know, this is some kind of sort of like. It's like a rental dispute. Yeah, it turns into this like completely bloodless legal thing. And then, you know, you look at what's actually happening and it's like, yeah, they're stealing people's houses at gunpoint.

They are like blowing up children with high explosives. It's just like, yeah, it's definitely not presented in an accurate way. And especially if you don't know what's actually happening like you do and you just see these like random headlines and whatever, you don't think it's anything but what it is, what they're telling you. Like, why would you deep dive any further if you're not affected by it, you know? And one of the things I noticed like when I was reading some of the coverage of this is like, the reporters would like go try to find some kind of legal basis for this and they'd start like, these like five paragraph long things about like weird legal stuff from like 1953.

This has nothing to do with what's happening. You've taken the, yeah, yeah, it's like they've taken the exonerative case from the title and then gone and just done exonerative journalism. Yeah, I do have to say that is, we keep using the term exonerative case. Somebody came up with that and I keep forgetting who it was, but it's one of the better developments in discussing the way the media talks about Palestine. Yeah, no, for sure. Yeah, it's, yeah, I just hate the word, I hate that even the word journalism has like a, it's not, I don't even like calling this journalism, you know what I mean? I don't like that the New York Times doesn't use anything, but it is what it is.

That's what we got. Well, and it's, you know, as is always the frustration with the New York Times, they have also done some really good journalism on fucked up shit done by, like on the, I think it was the New York Times who did one of the articles on Shireen's murder, but no, that was CNN, I think, this time. CNN did a really good article. Yeah, CNN did a really good. And it's like all of these, like these problems are systemic, all of these news agencies have people who do care and who have like been over there and know how fucked up things are. So it's not like there aren't people within the system trying to wrench it.

It's just like a sign of kind of how powerful the fucking, how much inertia there is built up in Israel's favor here, I guess. But maybe that's, maybe that's too exonerative for what's actually happening. I think it's also like, I'll get into this a little bit later, but New York Times, for example, it like, there are some writers that are clearly, they clearly have a bias in favor of Israel, whether it's like they've described themselves as being like right wing or whatever. Obviously, yes. So it's like, it's, there's no, there's not even an option for balanced journalism if you're giving someone that kind of voice. And they're, I mean, even if you are, if you have an opinion, you would think as a journalist, you would understand what journalism means when it comes to like reporting accurate and fair information. But I think bias always wins.

Yeah. Well, because not like if you're, even if you're like, because I think honestly, if you know what's going on there, if you've actually spent time in the area and not just like hung out with the Israeli military, the honest take is a tremendous amount of sympathy for the Palestinian cause and Palestinian people. But even so, if you're an honest journalist, you're going to try to be carefully like you do have to report on stuff like, you know, missile strikes and whatnot, but because you've got that side and then you've got the people who are overwhelmingly in Israel's corner and refused to report on the other side of things, the coverage de facto is always going to tilt towards Israel because the side that would be kind of reflexively and purely on kind of the Palestinian side just has no visibility here, you know. I don't know like what you do with that because this is again a broader, as with all these things, is your broader problems in media. But yeah.

You know what else is a broader problem in media? It is the fact, it is the fact that news and journalism is heavily advertising supported, which leads to deep amounts of bias in journalism and also problematic traffic seeking behaviors and a wide variety of things that are careening us all towards an unsurvivable outcome. And we're back. Hopefully that was and if not, well, it is what you get. But I want to bring up something about, so go ahead. No, I just was apologizing for calling the audience motherfuckers. Never apologize for that.

Never apologize for that. Yeah. Go to hell you sons of bitches. Thank you for listening. Yeah. Thank you so much. Also be nice to me. But I want to bring up something that I hear all the time as far as like people that have been to Israel on birthright.

I want to say that birthright does not count unless you have like critical thinking and you understand how biased that trip even is. And the fact that like, you don't even have to be from that land to go back there. Meanwhile, Palestinians are not allowed to even step foot in that land. So that's another episode entirely. I won't get into it, but it does really make me mad. And I'll stop there before I rage talk any further. But let's go back to Israeli violence and police. So with regards to the violence at the al-Aqsa mosque, it resulted in hundreds of Palestinians being wounded.

And the report, the British report that we're talking about documented widespread instances of media outlets using terms like clashes, conflict, scuffles and skirmishes. Which kind of implies equal blame, which is obviously not true because one side is armed in swat gear. And it also cited several news reports speaking of an intifada, which it said played into fear-mongering and framing Palestinians as violent aggressors. I want to point out that the word intifada is just an Arabic word that means rebellion or uprising or a resistance movement. This is a key concept in contemporary Arabic usage. It refers to illegitimate uprising against oppression. And I feel like, like so many Arabic words, it's been skewed into something to fear. Like even the words alahu akbar, which literally just means like thank you God or like dear God.

You know what I mean? Like I think the fact that those words are invoking fear, like it's really breaks my heart to hear like my native language being used to incite fear. Trust me, I've been on airports with my parents where we've gotten really strange looks just for speaking in Arabic. So again, another episode, I keep getting distracted. There are so many things that make me mad. But I just wanted to bring up that if you're afraid of the word intifada, don't be because that's also public media skewing your brain. Don't believe it. And Hamid, the director of this organization and the co-author of this report, she said that as far as language is concerned, terms like evictions, they mask the illegal force removals and expulsion of Palestinians from their homes.

References to conflict and clashes, they try to equalize what is in effect a battle between David and Goliath. And it also, as I said earlier, masking, ethnic cleansing as rental disagreements is absurd, but it also like implies that there's like a legal basis for everything. But it's not surprising at this point. Like I feel like clashes also isn't it's just any time you see a writer using the word clashes, it like clashes is just like is it's just the coward tense. Clashes is what you say when you are incredibly desperate not to at any point talk about who started the violence is happening and why. Because clashes let you just write it off. There's two people fighting each other. A clash is fine.

Like if you're just if you're discussing like Ukrainian and Russian troops like fighting in a village, like, yeah, you can call that a clash. Both sides showed up with tanks and weaponry to like fight a war. And if you're talking about the band, the clash, you can talk about the clash, but otherwise maybe don't use the term clash. Yeah. Unless you're talking about someone who's not dressed well or who's dressed really well. One of the two I forget. No, but you're right. I think especially for talking about literal an army coming to an unarmed family's home and kicking them out.

That's not a fucking clash. Yeah. That is. Yeah. Or it's like you're teargassing someone in a mosque and it's like this is not a clash. No. This is a chemical weapons attack. Like what?

Yeah, it's a chemical weapons attack on a house of worship, which is what we in the biz call not cool. What's really ironic too is that that mosque and that region, like that point in particular is sacred to Muslims, Jewish people and Christians alike. So the fact that they're desecrating it at all in any way is really ironic to me because it's they don't care about anything. But another area of concern surrounding this reporting on Jerusalem was an overemphasis on religion. That's a good segue. Look at that. An accidental segue. I'll take it.

It's pronounced. Okay. I found that nearly two thirds of 90, nearly two thirds of 90 clips in this timeframe referred to Palestinians religion. In some cases explicitly just saying that they're Muslim. One ITV report from May 10th reference sirens, which prompted quote, Jewish worshipers at the Western Wall to flee and run for cover. And Palestinians using the quote, third holiest site in Islam as a base to throw stones at Israeli police. While religious significance may be important to know at times. Journalists I believe should avoid implying this religious motivation, unless it's necessary, because it portrays the history of Israel versus Palestine as anything other than settler colonialism.

If it's a religious dispute, then it's just like a far away decades, centuries long fight that there's nothing we can do about it. Our hands are in the air. But really it's really simple, it's just settler colonialism and skewing as anything kind, any kind of religious conflict is very purposeful to get people not to care and get people not to think that there's a solution. And, as I said, not only does this false religious narrative it ignores the existence of persecution also of Palestinian Christians because not all Palestinians are Muslim there are Palestinian Christians and Palestinian Jews. But it ignores their existence and their persecution by Israel and it furthers the narrative that there is a centuries long religious war that is too complex. That word is always used in this conflict. Conflict again, I hate that word, but it's always used to describe what's happening is too complex to talk about or understand when instead it's opposite. It's the opposite.

It's simple. It's an oppressor and there's an oppressed. Israel is an apartheid state that has been ethnic cleansing Palestinians and stealing their land ever since it was established. And I'd even say that war and conflict. It's not a fair fight. It's not an even word. And we've been witnessing a genocide that has been occurring in Israel since it was established and it's like there's a clear oppressor and a clear oppressed. Any kind of wording that implies otherwise is a lie.

Let's go on to Gaza for a moment and the headlines that describe what's happening in Gaza. There are multiple examples of problematic language and framing regarding violence in Gaza. An article in The Sun on May 12th of 2021 was titled 15 kids massacred in Israel Hamas conflict as Netanyahu warns we will inflict blows you couldn't dream of. This headline failed to mention the 14 of the 15 children that were killed were Palestinian because reading it and implies that those children are all Israeli and Palestinians are monsters. That's not the case. And then on the 17th of May of 2021, I news reported that 42 Palestinians died over the weekend. They died over the weekend. That's sad.

I'm like heart failure. Like fuck you. It failed to mention that all of those deaths were Palestinians in Gaza that were killed because died does not give the same impression as murder. If you swap out the truthful word at any of these headlines, it makes a huge difference for people that only see these headlines like 42 Palestinians died is not the same as 42 Palestinians were murdered. There's a huge into like connotation difference for the people that just read something and move on. And popular headlines tell us time and time again just like this that Palestinians have died while stating that Israelis on the other hand were killed. Israelis don't die. They're always killed.

Palestinians, they always died though, they're never killed. There's a huge misproportion of those two words being used for those sides. Christopher brought up earlier about like passive voice and journalism and saying Palestinians died is another example of that and bias media outlets use this passive voice and they avoid specifying in its headlines who was killed and who was responsible. Israel portrays Israel as the aggressor, the use of passive voice that de emphasizes or hides those perpetrating such negative action on Palestinians. And this has the rhetorical effect of minimizing the responsibility of Israeli aggressors and call and causing Palestinian suffering. A lot of headlines also refer to the Israeli military, while referring to Palestinian groups as militants or Islamists, which implies differences and legitimacy, like we mentioned earlier. There are also headlines describing Israeli airstrikes of having come quote after Hamas rocket attacks, but this ignores that the violence from Israeli settlers and police in Jerusalem preceded those rocket attacks. It's like starting in the middle of a fight where you punch in self defense and that's where the article starts like you punch someone, not the person that punched you first.

Maybe that's a bad example, but it's just thinking of it that way you're starting in the middle of a timeline versus the beginning. And Hamid told the Middle East eye that the media narrative erases history, context and legitimacy of the Palestinian cause by presenting Palestinians as the aggressors and Israel as acting in self defense when it is quite the opposite. And I can't talk about Palestine or Israel without mentioning the anti semitism claims that a lot of people bring up every time you mention Palestine. Other instances of skewed media coverage, they included articles that conflated pro-Palestinian activism with anti semitism. There was an article in the Telegraph that said that demonstrators in London that were in support of Hamas were therefore anti semitic because the group was committed to the elimination of Jews, which is not correct. I don't agree, obviously, with everything that Hamas does, but you have to keep in mind that no one else is fighting for Palestinians and desperate times, desperate measures. And there's no, there is never a reason to excuse any kind of murder of anyone that's unarmed or innocent. But again, David and Goliath, what choice does Palestine have if no one in the international community is coming to the rescue?

Anyone who supports any military action anywhere supports the kind of collateral damage that Hamas does. They just support it under different circumstances and with different weapons systems. Doesn't make it okay to fire rockets blindly into a city, but the United States Air Force fires way more rockets just as blindly into way more cities. It's like, yeah, war is horrible. It's fucked up and bad. It doesn't say anything about the broader cause. Like, sure, certainly you can have, you know, whatever the moral, there's moral condemnation to be had for military leaders with Hamas as there is for the military leaders with any militant force and for, you know, some of the soldiers doing some of those things. But at the end of the day, it says nothing about the overall righteousness of the cause because there's not a discrepancy in the willingness to accept civilian casualties between Hamas and Israel. They're both very willing to accept civilian casualties in pursuit of their goals. So you have to set that aside when you're trying to determine what is happening here and where is righteousness.

And I think righteousness overall lies on the side being ethnically cleansed. Yeah, very well said. I think it's a good place to take an ad break. You know who also condones heavy civilian casualties in pursuit of their goals? The good people. I was just saying, but that works too. That does also work. Honestly, has gotten a lot more people killed than Hamas, right? I can't. To be fair, they may have gotten more people killed than the Israeli military has cost a lot of bloodshed over the years.

Yikes. Anyway, here's our sponsors. Okay, we're back. Before the break, we were talking about pro-Palestinian activism being conflated with anti-Semitism. And I want to bring up this quote from a Daily Mail column. Commentator Richard Little-John stated that anti-Semitism, like COVID, comes in waves. This is the Palestinian variant. Excuse me.

Wow. Sometimes I just have to read that and really just remember what planet I'm on. But this research also mentions examples of insufficient challenge to views in broadcast interviews. This included a Sky News interview with Tzatzibi Hotolevi, the Israeli ambassador to the UK, failing to sufficiently answer or be challenged on questions about ethnic cleansing in Sheikhterah. She has previously described herself as a religious right winger and has referred to the 1948 displacement of 750,000 Palestinians as a quote... Displacement. No, listen, she describes it as a quote, strong and popular Arab lie.

This is the Israeli ambassador to the UK. And it's like, there's a lot that's frustrating here. One is that you do have to take some care, particularly when you talk about the media complicity in pushing the Israeli narrative and all of the different things like APAC that fund US politicians and whatnot. Because you do have to be careful to not veer into conspiracy territory and you have to be careful with the sources that you pick. Because since a lot of mainstream news doesn't cover it, you find some of this written about by people who are definitely not the folks you want to have on your side. But that doesn't make talking about this anti-Semitic. It just means that the entire discourse is poisoned because of the way the internet functions.

Yeah, and yeah, no. Good point. I'm not going to expand because I will restate it in a worse way. But that quote just really baffles my mind, especially because this person has a lot of power as an ambassador. But she's also been accused of holding racist and Islamophobic views and has expressed support for the annexation of the entire illegally occupied West Bank. Yeah, really great stuff there. It seems like nobody's calling that racist though. No, exactly. You think about the reaction to like, hey, yeah, we want to literally take over all of this land.

We compare that to the reaction to like someone saying from the river to the sea, which like everyone immediately loses their minds. Oh yeah, this is the ambassador saying this stuff and nothing happens. Yeah, it's really unsettling. And having someone like that in power, as I'll mention later within Yahoo, someone that is so right-wing or like extremist, it just like encourages people like that in the population. It encourages that kind of leases them to like expand just like Donald Trump did, just like Donald Trump did with his fan base or fan base, his base. D-trizzle as we call it around here. Yeah. The British report that I'm mentioning are also reported that Palestinians were regularly asked to answer for the actions of Hamas and recommended that Spokespeople for the group should instead be given a platform to respond to allegations.

Meanwhile, you don't see like random Israelis being asked to answer for murders committed by the IDF. It's always very one-sided. In 2021, there was also another study that was conducted by MIT titled The New York Times distorts the Palestinian struggle. It was written by Holly M. Jackson, and it was tracking changes in news coverage bias, showing how anti-Palestinian bias has persisted in the times coverage by analyzing its articles during the first and second Palestinian intifadas, both periods in which Israeli violence far exceeded that committed by Palestinians. Following machine learning methods to analyze over 33,000 articles, Jackson focused on bias in the language of the times reporting through two linguistic features. First was to identify whether actions by Israeli and Palestinian groups were being described in the active and passive voice, and the second was to classify the objectivity and tone of the language used. In this content analysis conducted across 16,000 articles during the first intifada, which was from 1987 to September 1993, it revealed some revealing results. Nearly 93% of these articles reference Israelis, while only 40% reference Palestinians, and about 12% of all references to Palestinians used violent language, as opposed to only 5.9% for Israelis. Palestinians, meanwhile, were referred to in the passive voice nearly 16% of the time, while the passive voice was used only about 6% of the time to describe Israelis. And I know this is just all numbers and percentages, because we obviously know how biased it is, but I think it's helpful to scientifically, mathematically see that this is actually accurate, and there's not just us talking about it, this is actually true.

So I do believe these studies are really important in showing people that might be, I don't know, skeptical that this is actually the reality. And then Jackson also highlighted that during this period, the times stable of reporters were filled with those with known prejudices like Thomas L. Friedman and Joe Friedman, who framed their articles by elevating Israeli perspectives alongside blatant anti-Palestinian sentiment. So like we said, they're giving platforms to people with really clear biases. Oh, also, Thomas Friedman famously super fucking bullish on the Iraq war, and also very famously said when he was trying to rally support for the Iraq war, that the Iraq war was about telling Muslims to, quote, suck on this. Good guy, Tom Friedman, real cool dude, unbiased. They gave this man a Pulitzer. I think they gave him multiple of them. They would give him a Pulitzer very quickly and thrown overhand.

Yeah. That makes me sick. Thank you for sharing that. I'm glad I know that now. It's cool shit. He doesn't talk about that anymore. He keeps going, damn, that's shit, doesn't he? Shut the absolute fuck up. I mean, realizing that was the Iraq war and now he's still obviously given a platform to talk about Palestine. There's no repercussion or even like red flags about this kind of language because it's accepted and it's very really normalized. It sucks. Yes. The headlines surveyed for bias dredged up editorials like, quote, Israel and Arab neighbors must bend a little, no more Palestine, and quote, and Israel has controlled little of Palestine.

So they're really clearly trying to frame this in incorrect way. As if Israel's Arab neighbors haven't basically just abandoned Palestine by this point. Even the fucking idiot tankies talk about how Assad supports them, but he put them into fucking camps. He's like arrested and tortured and killed Palestinian activists. Like, you know, the thing none of these people ever want you to do is Google what Hafez al-Assad was fucking doing and why he didn't bring in the air force at a certain very critical moment that Hafez al-Assad famed buddy of Henry K. My friend. Everyone's friends. Everybody's friends. That's what makes politics fun. Yeah. Additionally, there was a systematic attempt to highlight petty disputes between Palestinian groups or contradictions and their leader strategy to frame Palestinians as irrational or disorganized.

And I will say that there has been significant changes in US media coverage of the conflict, especially in the last couple of years, and this is driven in part by popular pressure coming from social media. There are also signs that Israel is becoming a partisan issue that divides liberals and conservatives in the US with polls showing that growing numbers of Americans would like their government to take a more even-handed stance on the conflict. However, hardline supporters of the Israeli government have seemingly shifted their approach from winning, quote, hearts and minds to punishing opponents. They've published blacklists of Palestinian activists, they've censored public figures that are vocal about the conflict, they've speared them as anti-Semitics, and they've advocated for laws to restrict boycotts of Israeli goods. I want to just take a really quick sidebar to mention that boycotting works. I'll do another episode probably one day about the BDS movement, but BDS stands for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions, and it works to end international support for Israel's oppression of Palestinians and pressure Israel to comply with international law just by boycotting products and companies that are either based in Israel or have products from Israel, and it works because Israel doesn't like it, and I think that's telling enough that if Israel has a problem with boycotting shit, you should keep doing it. And it's now a vibrant global movement.

It's made up of unions, academic associations, churches and grassroots movements across the world. BDS launched in 2005 and it has a major impact in effectively challenging international support for Israeli apartheid and settler colonialism. That's my sidebar about BDS. But nonetheless, people that have followed the US debate on the quote unquote conflict for decades say that there are serious tectonic changes occurring at the level of the American public, both in media and in popular sentiment. Phyllis Benes, the director of the new internationalism project at the Institute for Policy Studies, a DC based progressive think tank said although news coverage is not even handed and is still generally skewed toward the Israeli perspective, there has been a massive shift over the past five years and how this issue is both reported and discussed in the United States. We are seeing a shift in the types of stories that are being covered by major outlets, as well as the stances that public figures are willing to take. There are still huge problems, but things are changing. The discourse on Israel Palestine is nothing like it was in decades past, which is very true.

And for me personally seeing the public discourse change firsthand has been like very surreal and amazing, but really surreal because I think a lot of Palestinians and Palestinian supporters never thought it would happen. Seeing public figures talk so actively about being pro Palestine. And even though this occupation this problem seems insurmountable outing these quote unquote journalists and news outlets is extremely important because of public opinion and pressure is strong enough, things have to change. And the proof of this seen the headline that I mentioned at the very top, where the times change their headline because of widespread discussed express on social media. And speaking up and sharing the truth on social media is extremely important, especially if you aren't Palestinian and especially if you live somewhere that is skewing all these news headlines against Palestinians there's nothing else but your voice left. And Palestinian voices have been and are continuing to be silenced and this is not simply a Palestinian issue. It's a human issue that calls for humans to stand up when they are witnessing extreme injustice take place and boycotting works or else Israel wouldn't be so afraid of it. Choosing to remain silent is choosing the side of the oppressor you've heard it before. It's true.

And I am hopeful with the chains that we've seen the last few years with public figures using their platforms to speak out and defend Palestine. I think it's honestly the best use of their platform and I respect them for that. And I know that like the concept of celebrity is ridiculous and stupid, but I think if you have the platform, and you have millions of people watching you using your voice in a way to support people that are in danger and like stand up for the oppressed is one of the only things you should do. And people that I respect this includes Bella Hadid Susan Sarandit Natalie Portman Selena Gomez Dua Lipa the weekend just to name a few. These people are huge names they have millions of people watching them and they're not afraid to speak up, especially Bella Hadid recently like every other story she posts on Instagram is about these really occupation, which I really respect. I really respect that she has taken such a clear stance and use like utilizing their platform it does make a difference of public perception, because fans that follow her might not follow news or anything else. It's there's just a lot of crossover that I think is really valuable. And ultimately I think using your voice is the only right thing to do.

And any alternative or silence is simply cowardice. And that's my time. That's what I got today. All right. Well, thank you, Shirin. This was pretty bleak but important and I tried to uplift at the very end. All of you go, go. Oh, yeah. Don't ever do that again.

Nope. It could be. How are we opening? We are. We already opened. It's your show. We're going the distance, Shirin. Going the distance. Hello. We're going for speed.

Hello, this is Shirin and I'm talking to you from It Can Happen Here. Oh, It Could Happen Here? Yeah. Isn't that a podcast? Yeah, Robert, you're correct. Wow. Do you want to tell everybody what that is? No.

The story to be today is Robert Evans, Sophie and Chris and Garrison. I'm going to be running the show today for those of you that didn't like yesterday. Too bad. Yeah, motherfuckers. Die and go to hell. That was a little much. No death threats. It was more of a promise.

Okay. I do want to take over today. I wanted to focus an episode on Shirin Abu-Aulah, who is a Palestinian American journalist who worked as a reporter for Elders Era for 25 years. She was one of the most prominent names across the Middle East for her decades of reporting on the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories. And she was killed last month. And you might have heard of it.

You might have not. But her death deserves some more attention, and I also think it reflects a bigger issue. Let's just jump right in. She was killed by Israeli soldiers on May 11th. And although Israel commits these kinds of vile crimes against humanity and against Palestinians virtually every day, including but not limited to murder, torture, imprisonment, harassment, displacement, aka ethnic cleansing, Israel gets away with its crimes every time. And last episode we talked about how the media enforces a blameless view of Israel and how

that's an element to all the passes it receives. And even though I'm going to focus mostly on one woman's death in this episode, like I said, she represents something so much more. And while I wish I can give every victim of Israel an entire episode, that would take a million episodes. So here we are. Syrians live in a constant state of trauma, and there is no time to grieve their dead. And even when they do grieve, it becomes a target for the IDF, which I'll get into later.

But I want to tell you for now how Shireen was killed. And for a while there was only one video, which should be more than enough, but I digress. There was only one video in the beginning that seemed to prove that Shireen was targeted and assassinated despite wearing a press vest. She had been standing with a group of journalists near the entrance of the Jenin refugee camp where the journalists were there to cover an Israeli raid. While the footage does not show Abu Akhla being killed, eyewitnesses told CNN that they believe Israeli forces on the same street deliberately fired on the reporters in a targeted attack.

All of the journalists were wearing protective blue vests, and they identified themselves as a member of the news media to the Israelis that were across the street. So this video, this first video, was filmed by El Jazeera cameraman Mahjib Anura, and it shows that around 6.30 a.m. on May 11th in Jenin, multiple shots are fired. The cameraman filming the scene scrambles backwards to take cover behind a low concrete wall. The man cries out in Arabic, Shireen injured, Shireen ambulance. When the camera finally pans around the corner, you see Shireen lying motionless on the ground, face down. And another Palestinian reporter, Shaita Hanesha, she crouches down beside her

and uses a tree-chunk for cover. She reaches out and tries to get her colleague, the gunshots continue, and there's no response. Both women are wearing helmets and blue protective vests mark press. And in the moments that follow, there's a man in a white shirt that makes several attempts to move Abu Akhla's body. And he's forced to repeatedly back away by gunfire. And after a few very long minutes, he manages to drag her body from the street. One of the reporters, Hanesha, she told CNN that we stood in front of the Israeli military vehicles for about 5 to 10 minutes before we made moves to ensure that they saw us.

This is a habit of ours as journalists. We move as a group and we stand in front of them so they know we are journalists. And then we start moving. So they do this cautious approach every time toward when they're in the midst of the Israeli military so they can be safe. And she says that I didn't think they were trying to kill us. On the day of the shooting, Israeli military spokesperson Ran Kachav told Army Radio that Abu Akhla had been filming and working for a media outlet amidst armed Palestinians.

He said, they're armed with cameras if you'll permit me to say so, according to the Times of Israel. The Israeli military says it is not clear who fired the fatal shot. And in a preliminary inquiry, the Army said that there was a possibility that she was either hit by indiscriminate Palestinian gunfire or by an Israeli sniper positioned about 200 meters away that was in an exchange with a Palestinian gunman. So no blame to the Israelis at all. The IDF said that on May 19th, it had not yet decided whether to pursue a criminal investigation into her death. On May 23rd, the Israeli military's top lawyer, Major General Yathat Tomeir, you're a shalmi, I'm sorry,

I'm 100% saying that wrong. But he said in a speech that under the military's policy, a criminal investigation is not automatically launched if a person is killed in quote, the midst of an active combat zone, unless there is credible and immediate suspicion of a criminal offense. A lot of US lawmakers and the UN and the international community have called for an independent probe, which hasn't really meant anything because it's not happening. An investigation by CNN, it offers a lot of new evidence and it's an investigation that I really respect. The article is really well done.

It'll be in the sources whenever that comes out, whatever. But this report, this investigation included two videos of the scene of the shooting. There was no active combat nor any Palestinian militants near Abu Bakr the moments that led up to her death. And the videos are corroborated by testimony from AI witnesses, an audio forensic analyst, and an explosive weapons expert that suggests that she was shot dead in a targeted attack by Israeli forces. A lot of the footage shows a calm scene before the reporters came under fire in the outskirts of the Jenin refugee camp. The other journalists and three local residents said that it had been a normal morning in Jenin. It's home to about 345,000 people, 11,400 of whom live in the refugee camp.

Many this morning were on their way to work or school and the street was relatively quiet. Shari'in Abu Akhle was a veteran journalist. She's a household name across the Arab world for her coverage of Israel and Palestine and Israel's occupation of the Palestinian territories. She arrived in Jenin to report on the raid. She was an icon. She was really loved and admired by the entire Arab world. It's weird to use past tense. It's really sad for me. But when she arrived there, about a dozen or so men, some dressed in sweats or flip flops, they had gathered to watch Abu Akhle and her colleagues at work.

They were milling around, chatting, some smoking cigarettes, and others were filming the scene on their phones. In one 16-minute cell phone video, the man filming walks toward the spot where journalists had gathered, zooming in on the Israeli armored vehicles that were parked in the distance that they could see. And he says, look at the snipers. This is before anything had happened. And a teenager in this video, he peers tentatively over the street and he shouts, don't kid around, you think it's a joke, we don't want to die, we want to live. The person that recorded the 16-minute video, Saleem Awad, he's a 27-year-old Jenin camp refugee resident who filmed the video and told CNN that there were no armed Palestinians or any clashes of any kind in the area

and he hadn't expected there to be gunfire at all, even the presence of journalists nearby. He said that there was no conflict or confrontations at all. We were about 10 guys, give or take, walking around, laughing and joking with journalists. We were not afraid of anything. We didn't expect anything would happen because when we saw journalists around, we thought it would be a safe area. Obviously, the situation changed rapidly and he said that the shooting broke out about seven minutes after he arrived at the scene and his video captures this and he also captures the moments that the shots were fired at the four journalists

and the four journalists, by the way, Abu Akhle, Haidasha that I mentioned earlier, another Palestinian journalist, Mujahid al-Sadi, and the Al Jazeera producer Ali al-Samaudi who was injured in the gunfire. But these four journalists, they walked toward the Israeli vehicles, they showed them that they're pressed in the footage. As the gunfire starts, Abu Akhle can be seen turning away from the barrage and then the footage shows a direct line of sight towards the Israeli convoy. He said, we saw around four or five military vehicles on that street

with rifles sticking out of them and one of them shot Shireen. Standing right there, we saw it. When we tried to approach her, they shot at us. I tried to cross the street to help, but I couldn't. He added that he saw a bullet strike Abu Akhle in the gap between her helmet and her protective vest right by her ear. Another 16-year-old, he was among the group of men and boys on the street, told CNN that there were no shots fired, no stone throwing, nothing, when she was shot and he said that journalists had told them to not follow them

because they walked towards the Israeli forces to identify themselves, so he stayed back. And then when gunfire broke out, he ducked behind a car in the road and he watched the moment that Shireen was killed. And he shared his video with CNN that was filmed at 6.36 a.m. just after the journalist left the scene for the hospital and it showed the five Israeli army vehicles driving slowly past the spot where Shireen was killed before leaving the camp.

CNN reviewed a total of 11 videos showing the scene and the Israeli military convoy from different angles before, during, and after Abu Akhle was killed. Eyewitnesses who were filming when the journalist was shot were also in the line of fire and they pulled back when the gunfire started so it doesn't capture the exact moment that she was hit with the bullet, which I think is the little amount of sliver of a space that Israel needs to be like, it wasn't us, but obviously it was our multiple witnesses there, multiple videos that show it.

But regardless, there wasn't a clash, there wasn't any Palestinian gunfire, the IDF were shooting directly at the journalists and they assassinated Shireen Abu Akhle. A senior Israeli security official flatly denied to CNN on May 18th that Israeli troops killed her intentionally. The official spoke under the condition of anonymity to discuss details about an investigation that remains formally open. The official said in no way would the IDF ever target a civilian, especially a member of the press.

An IDF soldier would never fire an M16 on automatic. They shoot bullet by bullet. This is in contrast with Israel's assertion that Palestinian militants were firing recklessly and indiscriminately while its soldiers conducted the raid in Jenin. There is a security consultant and British Army veteran, Cobb Smith. He told CNN that he believed Abu Akhle was killed in discrete shots, not by a burst of automatic gunfire. And to reach that conclusion, he looked at imagery obtained by CNN

that showed markings that the bullets left behind on the tree where she had fallen and her other colleague was taken cover. He told CNN that the number of strike marks on the tree where Shireen was standing proves this wasn't a random shot she was targeted. At 200 meters, he said that there was no chance that the random firing would result in the three or four shots hitting such a light or such a tight configuration. From the strike marks on the tree, it appears that the shots, one of which hit Shireen, came from down the street from the direction of the IDF troops.

The relatively tight grouping of the rounds indicate Shireen was intentionally targeted with aimed shots and not the victim of a random or stray fire. This tree is now referred to in Jenin as the journalist tree and has become a makeshift shrine to Abu Akhle with photographs of the beloved reporter taped to the trunk in Palestinian Hafea scarves, the checkered, not checkered, but like the black and white scarves that you probably see Palestinian protests draped on the branches. She was lugged by very many and the entirety of Palestine

and everyone who supports its liberation have been grieving for this like insurmountable loss. And to loop this discussion back into yesterday's extreme media bias episode where the media favors Israel, here are a few headlines that describe her murder. The New York Times said, Shireen Abu Akhle, trailblazing Palestinian journalist, dies at 51. She dies at 51. From what? Heart failure? Disease? She died of death.

And I will bet you, and this is not to let the New York Times off the hook, but I will bet you the fact that the title even acknowledged her death that much was the result of a tremendous battle behind the scenes. Oh, for sure. Yeah, which they wouldn't do for anybody else, right? Like they would fucking immediately call out like the Russian military or even the US military if it had killed an American journalist, which I'm not saying, I don't think it should.

No, I'm going to bring that up right now. No, I'm going to bring that up right now. Brent Renaud, he's an American journalist that was killed in Ukraine. There were two headlines that were for articles. His headline read, an American journalist killed in Ukraine. Hers said, a Palestinian journalist dies at 51. Keep in mind, Shareed is a Palestinian American. Not that it fucking matters, but these are both American journalists

and they were killed while working on their assignment. It matters to highlight the hypocrisy, not because one nationality of journalist is less worthy of being killed than another. I mean, it's even frustrating that their value of life is even greater because they're a quote unquote journalist. Yes, there's a lot that's frustrating about it. They can kill dozens of like Palestinian people and it doesn't matter, but one quote unquote American journalist dies

and now it's a big story, which is like, it's horrible. I mean, they've not downplaying how bad it is, but I am really uncomfortable with how much emphasis we put on like Americans and then of course just like someone being a journalist as opposed to just like killing people who are like worshiping or killing people in the street, right? Who are just regular Palestinians. And that's a whole other aspect.

In a war zone, like ethically, really the only division should be between soldiers, people underarms and civilians who are not, right? And it should always be seen as like a tragedy and a mistake worthy of like some sort of restitution or vengeance when civilians are killed by soldiers in a war zone. Like that would be ideal, but also, you know, the world is what it is. The world, but no, I second everything you guys said

and I'm looking at a tweet from Aiman Muhleddin. He's an Egyptian born journalist that's based in New York and he works for NBC and MSNBC, but he tweeted this contrast. He's headlines of Brett Renaud, an American journalist killed in Ukraine, and Sharina Buakla, a Palestinian journalist dying at 51. Like first of all, everything you guys,

it's repetitive at this point to keep talking about it, they've stripped her of her American identity, her Palestinian identity erases the importance that her death has for some reason, because she's not seen it as an American journalist, even though she is. And again, the concept of that being important is ludicrous to begin with, but that's the world.

It's still a way to do, it's still in their minds, it's still a way to dehumanize them, which is like gross on a whole other level, but it's, yeah, there's so many ways that it's horrible that it's hard to evenly comprehend. Yeah, totally. I agree, and now it's time for a break, and I don't have a great segue, like...

This is a hard one to segue. You know who will... execute... This is break, this is the break. Adbreak happening. We're back. I want to talk about her funeral now, Shareen's funeral.

Just to bring up one last headline, I'll get into what happened at the funeral, but the BBC News said that Shareen Abu-Aqli, violence at El Jazeera reporters, funeral in Jerusalem. Side note, even saying that she's an El Jazeera reporter versus just like an American journalist

is another way to dehumanize her, because El Jazeera is seen as like this scary Arabic organization. It's like, oh, they're brown people, is what they're trying to say. Exactly. And the real headline that should have been shared is that Israeli forces were attacking

and beating Palestinian mortars at her funeral. Let's talk about that. The Friday following her death, May 13th, a funeral procession was held for Shareen in Jerusalem, but her funeral was marred by another burst of violence early that afternoon as thousands of people

massed East Jerusalem in the largest Palestinian funerals in recent memory. A mob of Israeli riot police assaulted a group of mourners that were carrying the casket containing her body, and they almost dropped the casket because of the attack. There are videos of this,

and it was streamed live at one point, and it shows IDF soldiers clearly attacking people holding up a coffin, a coffin holding the body of someone Palestine loved, and they're just attempting to mourn, and even this is deemed punishable by Israel. I want to bring up that it was

live and all these videos are shown because there's just so many videos of a blatant blame, like blatant attacks by Israelis and the Israeli military, and that's not enough to condemn anything.

And there were no weapons, there was no provoking of any kind on the side of the Palestinians, and again, we have thousands of videos like this of the IDF clearly beating and at times killing Palestinians and nothing happens.

It's like similar to me of videos of police brutality in the U.S. They both keep doing it because they know they won't be punished. And if this is what they do on camera, you can only imagine what they do off camera when it's not being captured. In a separate episode, I'm sure

I can bring up the crossover of Israel and U.S. police because Israel trains U.S. police and so there's a lot of connection there, but I digress. It's just really horrifying. If they know that this is all being captured,

it doesn't stop them, it doesn't matter. And this assault occurred outside a hospital in East Jerusalem where her body had been kept since another memorial happened the day before on Thursday where hundreds had gathered to witness the start of her funeral courtage. Tensions arose

between Palestinians and the Israeli police officers after Palestinians began waving Palestinian flags. Things escalated after the police refused to allow mourners to take the coffin on their shoulders to the church and then they began beating anyone in sight. The Israeli police later said

that they had intervened because the mourners who wanted to carry the coffin by foot to the funeral had refused to put it in a hearse, which was an arrangement the police said had previously been agreed upon by her family. This obviously is a just cause for starting

to beat people, which is absurd. It's so absurd because it's just a traditional mourning. They're carrying this loved one on their backs and the fact that she was almost dropped is horrifying to me.

But regardless there was this standoff between mourners and the police who refused to let them leave with the coffin from the hospital or in the direction from the hospital to the church and keep in mind again this is the standoff is really

unbalanced. One side of it is heavily armed and wearing helmets and swat gear and the other side is holding a fucking coffin in mourning. Officers swung their batons and they kicked and beat the men carrying the coffin, forcing them backward. They knocked over one man who had backed into the group

that was carrying the coffin and then they proceeded to kick him as he was lying on the ground. This is caught on video and I don't understand how anyone could possibly defend or gloss over why this happened. As they were being hit the coffin carrier briefly lost control as I said of one end

of the coffin which sagged suddenly to the ground and mourners threw projectiles in response included what appeared to be a stick. Officers threw what appeared to be a stun and smoke grenades in response so super

warranted on their side. But this occasion that was intended to be a moment of catharsis had instead descended into chaos and it just compounds the indignity and the pain that to many Palestinians Abu Akhla's death had embodied.

And let's quickly fast forward to Sunday May 29th where about 70,000 Israelis marched through the old city occupied East Jerusalem waving Israeli flags emphasizing that they in their eyes were the true rulers of Jerusalem. They were celebrating Jerusalem Day

which is an Israeli holiday that marks the capture of the old city in 1967. 1967 also marks the occupation and the subsequent annexation of East Jerusalem and Palestinians see this event which passes through the heart of the Muslim center as a provocation.

Last year the parade helped trigger an 11 day war with Gaza militants. This doesn't stop the parade from happening again and this year it attracted one of the largest crowds on record. Palestinians old and young were attacked while Israeli forces watched on.

Some marchers sprayed pepper spray at Palestinians and journalists and one video shared on social media a young Jewish man kicked and sprayed an older Palestinian woman in the face sending her crumbling to the ground police fired rubber bullets and used clubs and pepper spray

to disperse Palestinian protesters from the area. In all this time Palestinians were forced to listen to the ultra nationalist Jews chanted anti-Palestinian Islamophobic chants such as Death to Arabs and Muhammad is dead. Groups of Orthodox Jewish

youths gathered outside Damascus Gate waiting flags singing religious and nationalistic songs. The crowds who were overwhelmingly young Orthodox Jewish men were shouting the Jewish nation lives before entering the Muslim quarter. One large group

attended Death to Arabs and Mayor Village Byrd which is a reference of the ethnic cleansing and the start of the occupation that occurred in 1948 and it's one of their very common chants a lot of Zionists that parade through these are the two most

popular chants if you want to call them that and other chants accompanied by boisterous dancing and the sound of drums included a Jew is a soul an Arab poor and Shufayat is on fire and

this is a disgusting chant I mean they're all disgusting but this one Shufayat is on fire it celebrates the murder of 15 year old Palestinian teenager Muhammad Abu Khadir by Israeli settlers in Jerusalem in 2015 this child was kidnapped by Israeli

settlers tortured forced to drink gasoline and burned alive so that's what they're celebrating when they're saying Shufayat is on fire and this tragedy is the focus of a miniseries that HBO did in 2019 which is pretty good and I recommend watching it it's called Our Boys

and it was created by collaboration of both Israeli filmmakers and Palestinian filmmakers so I respected their approach to this and I highly recommend watching it if you have a stomach for it I cried a lot but it's really good regardless settlers were also chanting Shireen is a whore and Shireen is dead

so not only was her funeral this huge like this huge portrayal of disrespect and inhumanity but this is the sentiment of these internationalist Jewish protestors they are happy

she's dead that's why she was targeted by the IDF probably they recognized her as a threat and this icon on the eyes of the Palestinians Prime Minister Naftali Bennett issued a statement instructing police to show quote no tolerance toward the racist groups he described them as a minority

that came to set the area on fire and vowed to prosecute violent extremists which never happens and hasn't happened an article in the Israeli daily Jerusalem Post that interviewed some of the Israelis participating in the march reflected a fervent nationalist mentality

that interchanged the words Arabs and terrorists without a second thought according to this article most of the marchers are quote not driven by hate for Palestinians but rather a love for Israel and the constant fear that it might not exist forever it would suck to feel like your home is not going to be around forever

yeah exactly that would be really scary yes the irony is definitely lost on them it's definitely lost on them but the director of the Palestinian forum

for Israeli studies she said that the political views of Israelis who attended the march are absolutely not a fringe element of Israeli society she says themographically speaking they are from the religious settler class they transform from being a marginal group

to an essential part within Israeli society and the Jewish body as a whole and I mentioned this briefly I don't know if it was this episode or the one before but former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's 12 year rule bolstered the presence of this class into the mainstream this very right wing

mentality where their figureheads held top positions in state institutions and in various governments regardless the current Prime Minister Naftali Bennett he used to be the minister of the settlement council and that should speak volumes about the change

in the heart of Israeli society this mentality is really encouraged and Khanim went on to say the Israeli government is getting more religious and giving more powers to the ultra-orthodox factions and to the ultra-religious and ultra-nationalists

the extreme settlers it is a continuous shift for the whole society to be on the right of the political spectrum the fanatical religious and the settler right and before I continue any further let's take our second break because I can rage for a long time

I don't have a segue again Robert it's not f***ing this is the break I know but Sophie still has to believe it because she said it so my goal has been well done Shireen we did it together we did it okay we're back

wow wasn't that a fun ad okay let's go back to we were talking about right extremism being like bolstered in Israeli society Ulri Noy is an Israeli political activist and journalist and they agreed and described this annual event as a

congratulatory mainstream Israeli event and she said the marchers are not the minority not in numbers not in ideology and not in their political status so regardless of what the prime minister says it's not a fringe element at all she goes on to say that maybe many Israelis

do not like to see photos of an old Palestinian woman being beaten up by a kid but the march itself is a huge Israeli celebration it's not something on the political periphery anymore I also want to quickly mention that as I was writing this another Palestinian journalist was killed by the IDF

last week 31-year-old LeFran Hamid Warasna was shot in the chest at the Arab refugee camp in the occupied West Bank Israel said that she tried to attack a soldier with a knife

in a statement the Israeli army said an assailant armed with a knife advanced toward an IDF soldier who was conducting routine security activity however witnesses told El Jazeera that in their view she posed little threat to the soldiers she had just started a new job at a radio station

three days prior to being killed she was leaving her home on the way to work according to eyewitnesses and doctors at the hospital said the bullet she was shot with pierced her heart and local and international rights groups have condemned what they call Israel's excessive use

of force and their shoot to kill policy against Palestinians including suspected assailants and the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip senior Israeli politicians including Prime Minister Bennett have encouraged the use of legal force and given orders to shoot Palestinians who did not

post an eminent threat these are their orders to shoot Palestinians even if they don't pose an eminent threat the United Nations office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights noted that in the reports Israeli forces quote often use firearms against Palestinians on mere suspicion or as

a precautionary measure in violation of international standards and yeah surprise surprise her funeral was also attacked by these Israeli occupation just like Shireen's was they beat the mourners and nothing

nothing changed in the the several days that followed that funeral it happened again because they knew they could happen again there was no punishment for the first round and that's all I got for today

I do I mean there's so much more to talk about but it just it'll take a lifetime and maybe I'll chip out of it away over time I do want to plug a film that I really love called Gods of Christ for Freedom it's a 2019

documentary it's on YouTube for free and it's by Abby Martin and it's filmed by cameraman on the ground in Gaza and it really shows the imbalance that takes place especially in that region I know we didn't cover Gaza that much in this episode

but just like Shireen's death it reflects the larger issue and the just blatant genocide and ethnic cleansing that's happening so I would really recommend that if you want to learn more again just like our boys the miniseries it's really hard to watch

at least for me and another I mean the reason I mentioned I want to describe the video Shireen's death earlier is because I haven't seen it and I don't want to see it like I it really triggers me when I see like a photo of

I mean anybody like I don't want to sensationalize their death but I do want you guys to know about it and to understand that it's important that's my share yeah I mean I have seen it and just

as a general rule someone has worked in those conditions she's very obviously not in a situation in which it makes sense that she would have gotten on a crossfire between a gunfight like obviously this has been documented but it was pretty obvious from the beginning that this was not like two sides shooting

at each other and someone getting caught up in the middle yeah yeah it's depressing I guess I didn't end this one with any kind of uplifting anything but I encourage everyone who's interested

or who doesn't know and who wants to know more to just get your information from Palestinians spread awareness of social media because Palestinian voices are usually silenced and it really makes a difference

when people speak up because that's the only way things change it's the only way articles change their headlines or anything even pivots in the right direction but is this the end should I say goodbye now goodbye now

goodbye now thank you but no I appreciate the listeners of today and yesterday's episodes it means a lot to me and I'll see ya when I see ya bye bye bye now

hey we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe it could happen here is a production of CoolZone Media for more podcasts from CoolZone Media visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeart Radio App Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts

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