It Could Happen Here - Israel Bombing Aid Workers and World Central Kitchen in Gaza

Episode Date: April 16, 2024

James and Shereen are joined by humanitarian advocate Charles McBryde to discuss Israel’s bombing of a World Central Kitchen aid convoy. Mondoweiss article: https://mondoweiss.net/2024/04/i-resigned-from-the-world-central-kitchen-because-it-refused-to-tell-the-truth-about-the-israeli-genocide-in-gaza/?utm_content=buffer27b39&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter&utm_campaign=buffer  Misson Kharkiv missionkharkiv.com  Charles McBryde instagram.com/charlesmcbrydecharlesmcbryde.substack.comcharlesmcbryde.com See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Submit your podcast today at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. CallZone Media. Hi, everyone. It's James. We just wanted to let you know that some new shit has come to light. Call Zone Media a publication that covers Israel and Palestine and the United States role there. And it's, it's given us some more information about what's in the kitchen. We didn't know when we first recorded this. And so we are going to address that at the end. So after the second ad break,

Charles will go, Shireen and I will come back and we're going to address some stuff that we found in that op-ed. We will also link it in the description to this podcast. Yes. It's a really good article. I recommend you guys give it a full read, but yeah, we will be talking all about it in the description to this podcast. Yes, it's a really good article. I recommend you guys give it a full read. But yeah, we will be talking all about it at the end. So please listen

to the whole episode. Hello, everybody. Welcome to It Could Happen Here. Today, I am joined by my illustrious colleague, James. Hi, James. Hi, Shireen. And my now friend, Charles McBride. Hi, Charles. Welcome back to the show. Hi, now friend, Shireen. And my now friend, Charles McBride. Hi, Charles. Welcome back to the show. Hi, now friend, Shireen. It's wonderful to be here. And to know that you're a real person and not a federal psyop. Yeah. Fun fact, I have met Charles in person, but I have not met James in person.

And I think that's pretty funny. That's why I got colleague and Charles got friend. No, it's not. Don't think we're not taking notes over here, Shireen. No, don't read into that. Don't read into that. Okay. What do we have we're talking about world central kitchen and the tragedy that happened last week in which uh seven aid workers

were killed both of these gentlemen have personal experience with the organization so i thought it would be good to talk about but james take it away okay so yeah i think i think we should maybe start off charles you and i have both seen world central kitchen in different places like my longest James, take it away. Okay. So yeah, I think we should maybe start off, Charles, you and I have both seen World Central Kitchen in different places. Like my longest experience with them was starting in 2018 in Tijuana, right? When we were trying to feed people who were part of a caravan of migrants

who had arrived right before the midterms. And what was a relatively normal thing became a really big political sort of football which resulted in the people remember like people being tear gassed in mexico from inside the united states people being held first in a baseball stadium and then in an old strip club which was really gross and there being essentially no NGO presence at first and then mutual aid presence and then the world center kitchen, one of the first people to show up and cook for people.

And like at this point there was a really dire need for food. Like I have this vivid memory of three of my friends and I riding in a bed of a pickup truck into this refugee camp and people just mobbing for food and water. And, and like people were good about like not stamping on children once once we stopped but like i was really worried there was going to be a crash people were very hungry and very thirsty and i had just had massive respect for people showing up and just being like we are people who cook food and what we're here to do is cook food and these people are hungry so we're going to give it to them and so I've I've always been admiring of their work since then and I wonder Charles like what your sort of initial

experience was with them and if you could describe like sort of what sort of work you've seen them doing yeah so first experience that I had with World Central Kitchen was actually hands off. It was when my friends and I, we created this thing four years ago called the Farm Link Project, which is a food rescue organization. It basically finds food that's going to waste on farms and pays the wages of the truckers and the drivers to transport the food to food banks that are overworked. We sort of tagged in with World Central Kitchen in the beginning of COVID and talked with them a little bit, but there was never any official partnership. Some of their comms people gave us advice. Some of their fundraising people gave us advice. First time

I ever saw them in operation was coming into the zhemesh train station week two of the ukraine war and they were the organization feeding all the refugees coming in a bunch of people in world central kitchen and and the thing i noticed was none of them were speaking english they were all speaking polish and ukrainian or russian And I started to realize this is an organization that knows how to mobilize a local population and a local response as a part of the thing. And that's something I really noticed when almost a year later, I flew from Ukraine to Turkey when a 7.5 magnitude earthquake went through southeastern Turkey, Kurdistan. And I flew into Adana and then basically linked up with the world's central kitchen people in the city of Osmaniye. And one of the things I noticed was how quickly they were able to get into Syria when nobody else was getting into Syria.

And the reason is because it's just chefs. It's just using chefs in restaurants in places where they already exist. Every place in the world has chefs and restaurants. And Jose Andres has this amazing quote that I really like. He says, everyone already works for World Central Kitchen, they just don't know it yet. And I saw that in action. I saw all these kitchens transformed into, you know, shelters and food distribution sites. And I got to work alongside their team. So my project, I was trying to fundraise for heaters and blankets to heat the Afad tents in the affected regions in Kurdistan, in the Kurdish villages on the border with Syria, because it was still very cold at that time, and there was not adequate attention paid to that. Obviously, Afad and its cronies is part

of the whole reason that that incident was as bad as it was, but World Central Kitchen stepped up in a big way in turkey and i was really impressed with kind of their outfit we were working out of the same distribution center you know i got to accompany jose andres on a couple of his deliveries and and we went to and walked around and and saw the extent of the devastation and visited all the world central kitchen feeding sites and it was just it was all Turkish people and Gorgias people who were there working for World Central Kitchen. They had been mobilized by this entity.

So there's this decentralized element to World Central Kitchen that I found really impressive. It didn't feel like the top-down bureaucratic thing I kept running into in my humanitarian work with these big NGOs. It was much more grassroots, much more bottom-up. So it gained a lot of respect for me in that sense. Yeah, I think that's a really good point to make that they do have a different model, it allows them to be flexible. It's allowed them to

be places where other people aren't like, I think a lot of people perhaps like are not as familiar with the NGO world as you and I might be like NGOs often present themselves in places where people need help it's like you know they have large office buildings and white land cruises and they have one way of doing things and it's their way and sometimes that doesn't work I can recount countless examples of this right NGOs that exist to do things in a certain way and don't adapt to a local situation or culture. And that's something that World Central Kitchen have done really well, in my experience, all over the world. Yeah, they graft themselves on to a local response. And everywhere that they go,

it takes on a local flavor. And I think that's why this happened, is because they inserted themselves into a highly volatile situation. And because they are so decentralized, and because they are so on the ground, they also expose themselves to the realities of what Palestinians have been facing in Gaza, and lost members of their team, you know, as a result. And I think that is part of that is there's a lot of people who won't even go into Gaza. You know, if they had the opportunity. Like you said, these big NGOs. I think last time I was on the podcast, Shireen, I talked about, you know, seeing these big UN advertisements in the Copenhagen airport saying save Ukrainian children when I first when I was going over there.

And then as soon as I got there, I mean, the minute you go east of Lviv, you're not going to see a UN truck anywhere. And it was that way for nine months. And yeah, it was just a bunch of people with like brand new white Land Cruiser Prados sipping cocktails in Lviv while subcontracting with actual humanitarians working closer to the front line. World Central Kitchen was not that way they were they were all the way out all the way on the east everywhere i went there was world central kitchen cars even deep into donetsk and that was really impressive it just fit it was so it felt antithetical to the whole non-profit industrial complex model that i'd become

familiar with and i was impressed by that yeah so perhaps we should speak about exactly what they were doing in gaza because i think people are perhaps a little confused there's been a lot of like misinformation from from all kinds of angles about what they were doing in gaza so do you have a good handle on that i mean world Central Kitchen positioned itself, they engage in slightly more activist humanitarianism than most organizations, which is why, I mean, Jose Andres went big on Ukraine. He was there, he brought the whole team. I mean, they dedicated so many resources to Ukraine. And for him, it was unequivocal. Ukrainians are the good guys. Russians are the bad guys. We're helping the victims of this conflict. And, you know, we're on the side of the angels in this. And that was the positioning. And I think it was a bit of a wake-up call when after October 7th, he did the same thing in Israel and went and, you know, gave food to the, to the, to the different kibbutzim that were affected by the October 7th attacks. And at first very much positioned himself as like, we're here

to help relieve the affected Israelis. Um, which again, for like polite liberals in the humanitarian world, you know, Israel, Ukraine, both aligned with western interests western values theoretically and um i think and then you know suddenly the war focus goes from what happened to the kibbutzim to what's happening in gaza and so they they went to egypt and they started helping the refugees and they tried to get into gaza then they did get into Gaza and they set up, you know, an effective system of food aid. And I started to notice while that was happening, that the perspectives of a lot of the people that I was working with in the aid community were starting to shift on this whole thing. People who didn't have a political interest in supporting the Palestinians and were just kind of supporting Israel because of the default. When they actually went to Gaza,

they started to really change their tune. And you see this a little bit with Jose Andres as well. Um, I think Jose Andres was, yeah, I mean, this, this, in terms of his personal views on Israel, they seem to have very clearly evolved. You can see very soon after October 7th, he is calling out the Spanish prime minister on calling what's happening in Palestine a genocide. He's saying that Israel has a right to defend itself. Gaza and now he's greeting everyone in Arabic and then this thing happens and he immediately points the finger at Israel he says you guys targeted my team you killed them deliberately and you made sure the job was finished and that is that is just so reproachable and in doing so he became one of the only like really big celebrity voices to make what appeared to be something of a 180 turn on that conflict and pretty much everyone that i've worked with in the humanitarian or journalism space has also done the same thing in regard to gaza i'd say most people thought my

views on this were too extreme after october 7th when i began immediately criticizing israel and now the ones who have actually been there pretty much unequivocally say they're the bad actor in this region. And I think you saw that shift happen in real time with sort of the attitude that World Central Kitchen took to Gaza. All of that stuff is available from public statements. I don't want to share private sentiments that have been shared with me by members of World Central Kitchen staff. Those are their own and they don't represent the organization but i think even just watching the yo-yo of jose andres's perspective on this change has been enlightening yeah and i think like it's easy to be critical of someone for having opinions which

like have not aged well right like and sometimes that's okay sometimes sometimes we need to do that sometimes people say shit which is unforgivable but like uh i think in this instance like we can be critical at a point but i don't think now is the time for that like i i think now is the time for like everyone who wants the starving and killing of innocent people in gaza to stop is on our side right now and we need to welcome that and like there are a lot of people in this country right who we need to do that same 180 and giving examples of people doing that is good like they and there are a lot of people who don't see themselves when they see dead people in gaza and that's a problem, right? And that's some shit that they need to examine. And because there's a lot of bigotry there, but if they see themselves in those aid workers or they see themselves in Jose Andres and look fucking,

when I saw the bodies of those aid workers, right, you have a tall, skinny British guy with, with long hair and a plate carrier with a badge on like that.'s what i look like to 99 of the world and it's hard not to feel like oh shit like that could be me um and and i i have well i feel like i have a lot of empathy for people in gaza i have friends in gaza we we speak to them on the podcast shireen and i spoke to him last week but whatever it takes for those people to change their opinions right now is what we need like and then we can we can dissect the how we got here later but like every minute that this continues more innocent people die and if we can stop this one minute sooner then there's important lives that we can save and i

think it's really important to focus on where we are not like how how we got here right now if that makes sense as far as global conflicts go i believe it's like 224 aid workers have died in gaza which is not a normal number in any kind of war so i that's according to the un yeah a hundred journalists right like every there is one person i can think of who has worked with in gaza who is still alive everyone i know has lost family members uh yeah and that's just my tiny slice you know i'm by no means as affected by this as most people but yeah the three times as many children have died since october in gaza as are normally killed in conflicts in a year worldwide like it's fucking horrific and uh yeah we would do well to like put aside our differences and make it stop i think yeah i agree opposition to genocide and wanting to end

it should be a very big tent and the fact that some people on the internet are trying to make it a smaller one doesn't make a lot of sense to me yeah yeah yeah it promotes infighting which is not helpful right now yeah it is helpful to not call it a war and continue calling it a genocide because that's what it is so yeah just continuing to change all the rhetoric around this genocide i think is important this is also not the first time that israel has directly targeted uh aid workers that are clearly labeled as aid workers. In 2006 in Lebanon, Israel struck a Red Cross ambulance right in the center of the logo, right on top of the truck. There was, or the van was a Red Cross, a clear Red Cross, and it struck right in the center.

I think that image is now going around again. It's from 2006 again. It's not the first time that Israel has directly targeted aid workers. And I think it's really appalling seeing leadership in Israel just kind of apologize half-heartedly being like, this was a mistake. And then they just move on. If this was the red line for people, one, I find that frustrating. But if it's finally the red line for people i one i find that frustrating but if it's finally the red line for people i just hope it continues and people don't let it go there's that story that was absolutely fucking heartbreaking right of that young girl who was trapped in her car and she called the ambulance and the ambulance came and they bombed the ambulance right and

killed her and they killed the ambulance drivers like those two ambulance drivers were palestinian they were working for the palestinian red crescent they deserve every bit as much outrage as the world central kitchen people do and what they did with every bit as admirable um but like if this is what it takes for people to change then like i hope that they will also acknowledge that everything else that happened before was an atrocity too. Talking of like atrocities, we have an advertising break now. That was good, James. Good job.

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And I'm Jimei Jackson-Gadsden. We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline, the early career podcast from LinkedIn News and iHeart Podcasts. One're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline, the early career podcast from LinkedIn News and iHeart Podcasts. One of the most exciting things about having your first real job is that first real paycheck. You're probably thinking, yay, I can finally buy a new phone. But you also have a lot of questions like, how should I be investing this money? I mean, how much do I save? And what about my 401k? Well, we're talking with finance

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and just a reminder of how frustrating it is that this had to be the red line for people there are over 33,000 people in Gaza who have been murdered nearly half of which are children there are probably thousands more who are trapped under the rubble and other thousands that are just unaccounted for because of the bombing of hospitals and the lack of records. So to have the killing of six aid workers be a red line for people, that's what I mean by saying it's frustrating because it is a tragedy. But tragedy has been taking place for the past six months and also the past 76 years. So yes, the video that Charles made got some well-deserved attention. And I'd love for you to talk about it a little bit.

Yeah, so this was like a strange convergence of things for me because I had been keeping up with the WCK team as they went into Gaza. I'd actually even been in conversations with some of them about potentially going there. But I hadn't, I mean, like these were just buddies from a humanitarian trip. I mean, you know, like James probably knows you make friends really fast when you're connected, when you're in these sorts of scenarios. And, you know, I had, I made friendships while i was in turkey that i've i've maintained and but then my my palestinian advocacy was separate you know i'm i'm over here educating and everything and then suddenly there's this convergence of like former you know co-workers on this team dying. And then it being the fault of this regime that I've spent the last six months trying to educate people on why it's bad. And I posted a video which was my tribute to the fallen WCK employees who were very close friends of people that I got really close to on that project.

got really close to on that project and it was a tribute to them and also a way of pointing out how their martyrdom has been has overshadowed the martyrdom of so many palestinians who will never get the kind of press and attention that they did. And I think it achieved that effect. The video went very, very viral. It's exceeded a million views on TikTok. It's at around a quarter of a million on Instagram. And more than that on the accounts that have reposted and shared it, sometimes without the context that I am not a World Central Kitchen employee, nor do I represent the opinions of the organization. And one of the things that I think made that story go viral is that I did shift the attention to, I said, this is a genocide. And I said, as grieved as I am at the loss of these people that I have this connection with, I do want to point out that it is overshadowing the horrendous

loss of life of Palestinians. And I think that resonated with a lot of people. It also resonated with my former, you know, my friends at WCK who reached out to say, we appreciate you using your platform to talk about this, especially considering the fact that WCK employees do not typically, are not really supposed to be making statements online about this. So they have a little more leeway with that concerning the fact that the head of the organization has explicitly now condemned Israel for this strike. But I've had some very interesting conversations with friends of mine that either still work or connected to the organization. And that's a slightly complicated thing because World Central Kitchen subcontracts with so many different people.

So at any given point, there are people who are connected to World Central Kitchen who are not representatives of the organization or technically employees. So, you know, you can't say definitively, this is what the majority of people in WCK feel about Gaza or Israel or anything. You know, different people have different opinions about that whole situation I think we what you tried to do was obviously not to represent them and it would be disingenuous so I don't want to suggest you did but the internet does that I want to talk about one more talking of disingenuous things on the internet I guess there was this thing that went around immediately in the aftermath of the photos coming out of the

different people's corpses that like it seemed to be mostly like tankies or perhaps people who still believe that they can generate revenue from views on twitter saying that like because these people had a security team the security team was somehow spies and this is evidence they were working for israel right like and you can speak to your experience charles like i've worked with security teams and seen people working with security teams all over the fucking world because war is dangerous and you have the thing that everyone needs if you have the misfortune of being a veteran of the global war on terror you have a very few outlets for your skill set one of those is providing security for humanitarian actors and journalists and that is one of the most pro-social applications of your skill set

yeah there are a lot of worse things to do in Ukraine and elsewhere who have decided to turn their sort of military intelligence background experience into, well, okay, I'm good at this. I'm familiar with these types of scenarios. And if there's one thing I'm decent at, it's, well, at least trying to keep people safe and give them intelligence. And that's never a guarantee. But in all the people I've met who actually are legit security consultants or just veterans who have applied their skills towards a pro-social humanitarian purpose, pretty good guys and while i'm sure you know there are some of them who are connected to various you're still connected to sort of the intelligence services of their various countries um i think that's definitely a possibility a lot of them are not they're just veterans who are trying to help and they this is a way that they can make a living while

doing something that has a low moral hazard so i yeah i i dismiss that stuff there's a lot of conspiracies the problem is i mean in the vacuum of the sort of post-manufacturing consent world where none of us trust the western liberal media a lot of people trust stuff that's even dumber including just like takes on the internet that somebody pulled out of their ass and a lot of it is if you if you have set yourself up against everything that comes out of the west then every everything that looks like a fingerprint of an intelligence agency or anything is going to to ring your alarm bells obviously you know james i feel like ukraine is a great example of this. The fact that the United States supports Ukraine means that Ukraine must be the villain

and that the entire thing must be a CIA psyop and there's spies everywhere. And I'm a spy for going to Ukraine and helping grandmothers get their insulin. All of those things have been said about Ukraine, about me, about, you know, that sort of thing. And we know it's not true. It's just that people, I mean, as far as I know, these were guys who were security consultants, very similar to, I work with a lot of British veterans of the global war on terror, basically on various different projects, some of it having to do with PTSD, others having to do with environmental conservation, some of whom have worked in Palestineestine um and been in the west bank and i think brits by and large have a more sane perspective on palestine than than people in the u.s do i've just noticed that there are like fewer ultra zionist brits than americans i think our

politics is less dominated by that perspective there are ultra-zionist british people but yeah it's also just i think a little bit harder to live a life in britain where you don't know if not palestinian people arab people and and muslim people right and that that complete demonization and dehumanization of muslim people that the western media did for 20 years to manifest your consent for war that wasn't about weapons of mass destruction or women in afghanistan it doesn't stick the landing quite so well when like you have friends and you can you can kind of see through the nonsense yeah yeah well also i think the percentage of like evangelical christians was probably much less uh yeah no one's breeding a fucking red cow in england to take it to this third temple

that i know of that was one of the things i was going to point out is i don't think you even have to know like to be a zionist you don't even have to know jewish people in the u.s i was raised an ultra zionist without knowing a single jewish family because i came from an evangelical community in south carolina that was very cro-nationalist, very kind of culturally dispensationalist, even though my family wasn't dispensationalist. It was all about in times you support Israel because that's where, you know, that's where Jesus is going to come back. So, yeah, I remember, I mean, we even had like fake Passover ceremonies in our church. God, this is bringing up some interesting. Yeah. Into the trauma box but truly i mean one of my

one of my early sort of i i would say i was i was completely anti-zionist before i was even a leftist and part of that reason was because i got to know a palestinian friend in washington d DC while sharing a desk with an Israeli conservative and a liberal Zionist. Wow. That is a joke. Like these people walking to a bar. Yeah. Trio of people. So I like, I think I had kind of, I got pilled on Palestine. Part of it was because like I was history major in college. So I learned historiography. I just never applied historiography to the Israel-Palestine conflict. And then having these two voices in my ear while like living and working in DC, I was like, oh, I need to actually look into this. And so, yeah, I mean, I would say even before I was like a leftist, I was down on Israel. I figured they were not the good guys. And then I think the fateful triangle by noam chomsky really

solidified that and uh obviously ilan pape kind of was the nail in the coffin for me so yeah and speaking of like you know what happens in dc and you know americans opinions on the middle east most of them are dog shit opinions because most people do not have some sort of strong point of reference to this zone. But it goes back to what we were saying about how being against genocides should be a very big tent and we should resist efforts to make it smaller. Because I'm reading through the Hundred Years War on Palestine right now, Rashid Khali. right now, Rashid Khali. And one of the things that he said is how the war is fought in the United States in Congress because we hold the keys. So as much as it's as painful as it is to try and change the minds of dumb Americans with no geopolitical understanding, it's absolutely essential to holding Israel to account. It is actually one of the best things that you can do. And when someone who has the international

appeal of Chef Jose Andres points the finger at Israel and said, you killed my employees deliberately and you're starving Gazans, That goes a long way towards shifting the opinions of the people who actually hold the keys to everything Israel does. Yeah, I think that's a very good point. And like, that's what we need to do, right? Stop them getting bombs to kill people, not argue on Twitter or Instagram or what have you. We need to make the make the killing stop i wonder like you spoke at charles about ignoring people i know world central kitchen are no longer working in gaza for the time being from what is that still

correct they they've publicly announced that they're scaling back their efforts yes i i'm not sure if they're going to totally close down their operation i think right now they're probably trying to reconsider their security protocols before making another step yeah i mean i don't really know what as there are things of course but like they did attempt to deconflict i guess and they were using a road which is designated for the use that they were using it for and israel knew where they were like it's they have to report where they are so i mean it would be fucking crazy if israel uh attacked aid workers again right now but also it's israel i mean yeah also they've done crazier things yeah but can we like dwell on that for a second like israel constantly boasts about its isr capabilities

in isr's intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance so like israel is constantly reassuring people that it is doing everything it can to avoid civilian casualties it talks about its chain of command for approval. And in light of that, none of the things that they've said about this make any sense whatsoever. Because if their protocols, because they're either, it's like they can't decide what they're trying to gaslight the world into believing.

Every claim that they're making is muddling what they're trying to get the world to believe about them and it just gives everyone the distinct impression that they're recklessly incompetent lying evil or potentially all three right like even if you look i was because i don't know why this is the thing that i do i was looking at like trying to work out what munition israel had used to, to destroy those vehicles. And Israel has, they have a number of different sort of munitions that they could have used,

but one of the things that they do in the U S does it too, but it's, it's a, it's a bigger thing with Israel is if they have inert or low yield hellfire munitions, so like guided munitions that are fired from a helicopter or a drone, and they use them to do a thing that they call roof knocking right which sounds maybe like you're like knocking on someone's roof what you're doing is sending a missile through somebody's roof and that is the means

by which you alert them to evacuate the building because you're planning a larger strike that in itself yeah we have this great isr capability and what do we what do we do with it we we we launch missiles into the homes of civilians and then hopefully they will run away in fear for their lives so that more of them don't die when we blow up that block 10 minutes later like it's just you know you have to look at what's happening not what's being said i guess but no they're they're absolutely allergic to accountability and i think you can see just how far they've been they're scrambling now because they've been able to get away with so much for so long and their excuses are falling apart because they're alternatively depicting themselves as a

highly disciplined and professional you know army or that they're just making mistakes because it's war and that people should get off their back because no one holds anyone else to the same standard they hold israel so it's like which is it like what are you trying to get the world to believe are you either this like crack disciplined unit with a very sophisticated chain of command and an ai software that you're really proud of for targeting or are you is this the fog of war and you're just making mistakes and everyone makes mistakes and we should get off your back for it because you can't have it both ways yeah yeah the civilian casualties are too high for you to have it both ways so either you are making mistakes and too many people are getting killed and you're violating the laws of rule or you're doing it deliberately which is worse yeah people can make up their own

minds i guess charles thank you so much for joining us today. I really respect all the work you do. And I am grateful that you have shared your voice with our audience once again. Where can people find you on the internet if you want to be found? Thank you, Shereen. Yeah, just you can find me pretty much everywhere except Twitter with Charles McBride. And that's McBride with a Y rather than an I. Charles McBride and that's McBride with a Y rather than an I. It's on Substack, Instagram, TikTok, and my website,

charlesmcbride.com will be live at this point when this episode drops. If you want to support the humanitarian work I've been involved in in Ukraine, you can support Mission Harkiv on Instagram. It's mission.harkiv and their website is missionharkiv.com. And if you're looking for an org that is already working in Gaza to provide life-saving aid in the wake of UNRWA being gone,

World Central Kitchen now pulling out, ANERA pulling out, Global Empowerment Mission is still there and still fulfilling a lot of the same functions that those organizations were doing. Thank you so much, Charles. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search,

better offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field. And I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough, so join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts.

Check out betteroffline.com. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian, Elian. Elian Gonzalez.

Elian, Elian. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home, and he wanted of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. González wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation.

Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Gianna Parente. And I'm Jimei Jackson-Gadsden. We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline, the early career podcast from LinkedIn News and iHeart Podcasts. One of the most exciting things about having your first real job is that first real paycheck. You're probably thinking, yay, I can finally buy a new phone. But you also have a lot of questions like, how should I be investing this money?

I mean, how much do I save? And what about my 401k? Well, we're talking with finance expert Vivian Tu, a.k.a. Your Rich BFF, to break it all down. How should I be investing this money? I mean, how much do I save? And what about my 401k? Well, we're talking with finance expert Vivian Tu, aka Your Rich BFF, to break it all down. I always get roasted on the internet when I say this out loud, but I'm like, every single year, you need to be asking for a raise of somewhere between 10 to 15%.

I'm not saying you're gonna get 15% every single year, but if you ask for 10 to 15 and you end up getting eight, that is actually a true raise. Listen to this week's episode of Let's Talk Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Shereen and James from the future here giving you an update about the article that we mentioned at the top of the episode so the title itself is I resigned from world central kitchen because they refused to tell the truth about the Israeli genocide in Gaza the ex-staffer is Ramzi Talhami the article itself has some really damning information about WCK so we're going to get

into it he He says, for months, World Central Kitchen leadership censored material coming out of its Gaza operation and refused to honor staff concerns about their work there. And even though they're finally taking a stand after its personnel have been murdered, it is much too late. So he resigned in early March of this year. And at the time, he was the only staff member of Palestinian descent at WCK. And there is an amendment there. He says that while WCK hired many Palestinian contractors in Gaza and Egypt, he was the only Palestinian with staff status following the departure of one other longtime employee.

And he resigned in protest of the extensive unexplained censorship regarding Gaza at the organization. They talk about how in December 7th of last year, they sent a letter to WCK's executive team. And that letter called for WCK to join other regionally active NGOs in calling for a ceasefire and condemning Israel's blockade, as well as conforming its language and coverage of Gaza to the standard that was set by the coverage of Ukraine, as well as stopping meal service in Israel. It got 43 signatures and the WCK executive team declined to meet up with the people that signed the letter and they failed to respond to any inquiries. And they also actively still served the meals in Israel while the second day of the ICJ genocide hearing was happening in January.

There's one paragraph that I wanted to highlight as well, just because I think it's very crucial when we're discussing the fact that these people died working for Central Kitchen. And that's this paragraph that I'll just pick up halfway through. In another instance, a video of a WCK kitchen caught in an IDF bombing was put on hold entirely it appears this incident as well as the fact that wck personnel were aboard a un convoy that was bombed have not been mentioned anywhere externally like i think that's a really crucial getting off point you can have shit politics but if you're not saying stuff when your people are getting bombed like until they're getting killed a i don't know what's wrong with you and b if you didn't change

things i don't know then change things right that's not detailed here but like you have to change things if your people are being bombed like if i'm working somewhere where that's a likelihood you know like if if we get bombed once and we're lucky enough to be okay we do not continue doing the same shit and i'm not entirely sure that they did i don't want to for a moment suggest that like this the people who died were in like complicit right that's not what i'm saying it's not what shireen's saying i very much understand the desire to to go to places where dangerous things are happening and help the people who did nothing to deserve this and i think the people who did that deserve

our unending gratitude and respect um i'm not for a minute saying that that's not true i'm saying that this organization needs to really think about how it does shit if it wants to continue operating. And yeah, the blame is on the executives of this organization. The article also talks about how the character of WCK's relief response to Gaza, it was revealed very early on after October 7th, the chief communications officer, Linda Roth, she had put out a statement about the communications team's input, which is apparently breaking precedent. And it was about how Hamas attacked Israel with no mention of the Palestinian lives that were lost. And then three days later,

Jose Andres posted a video to WCK's Instagram where he only makes reference to the October 7th attack with no mention of the climbing Palestinian death toll at the time or the blockades. And then on social media, Charles mentioned this at the episode. On October 16th, he tweeted at the Spanish prime minister to be removed for her protest of the Israeli tactics. And at the same time, WCK continued to work closely with the IDF over the course of the relief response. The initial statement, as well as Andre's video, were decisions that were made by leadership against the concerns of the WCK personnel. There's this paragraph that I want to read just verbatim. Much of the work in a genocide is not pulling the trigger, but instead minimizing and denying that a genocide is going on.

Genocide is a phenomenon of gradual boundary pushing. Each increment must be accepted by the parties with agency for the next to be reached. Under the direction of CEO Aaron Gore, Linda Roth, and quote, chief feeding officer Jose Andres, World Central Kitchen recklessly endangered its personnel, shelflessly exploited the situation for its own benefit, and actively participated in the normalization of an ongoing genocide. I think what I want to say more broadly here, it's my stance, I guess maybe other people share it, maybe they don't. This situation is not going to be solved by NGOs, and it's certainly not going to be solved by NGOs which have this very explicitly neoliberal political agenda, right? Like, at best best they can plug a hole in a leaky

bucket and it's good when they do that, right? If one less person starves, that's good. It doesn't mean they don't have to be perfect to help, but they don't get to be exempted from criticism because they're helping, right? Like world central kitchen didn't want to help us at the border in my friends reached out. They didn't want to do us at the border in cucumber my friends reached out they didn't want to do that yeah i don't think you should expect ngos to share your your radical politics it doesn't mean that they can't do harm reduction and does mean that when they are doing harm reduction they sometimes need your money and in the situations where this is happening you should give it to them if you can't help more directly right um but like you know if we look at their communications we do see them calling

for a ceasefire which is about what you can expect from an NGO you know we'd actually it appears that we see Jose Andres calling for a ceasefire and we see world central kitchen saying Jose Andres called for a ceasefire which I don't quite know why they don't just say we are calling for a ceasefire they didn't sign that document with the other NGOs like that I don't quite know why they don't just say we are calling for a ceasefire. They didn't sign that document with the other NGOs. I don't know if they're trying to play like have it both ways. I don't know. I don't, I'm not privy to those conversations, right?

They didn't sort of wholeheartedly say this is a genocide, but they have to get permission for Israel to do stuff. I mean, now they're saying it, but after the atrocity that happened, the whole world is watching, right? Not that the whole world shouldn't have been watching from the start,

but like i don't think ngos are ever going to be you know as radical as people on the internet want them for they're also they're doing stuff and people on the internet aren't so you know we have to respect that and i don't want any of this to take away from the fact that some people from all over the world right from europe from australia from the united states have died feeding people who need to be fed because like that's the most any of us can give is our lives right and so i don't for a minute want any of this to detract And so I don't for a minute want any of this to detract from the sacrifice they made, nor should their sacrifice be held in any higher regard than the sacrifice made by hundreds, if not thousands, of Palestinian aid workers, people working for the Palestinian Red Crescent, even the Palestinian people working for international NGOs,, the United nations people who have been killed. Right. Um, none of those sacrifices should be ignored or undermined because those people have certainly given a lot more than I have. I don't have any right to, to say that.

I think, yeah, this org, it changes communications, right. I think they've obviously realized that like, there is no nicely, nicely about this, like you have to call a spade a spade when it comes to what's happening in gaza which is a deliberate and targeted attempt to kill civilians thousands and tens of thousands of children even and i think until we move the conversation on to one where that is being called by its name that is to say genocide then i don't think we'll see the reactions that we need and i think they they appear to have reflected on that i wish they'd got there sooner but they're there now and

i'm sorry that it took these people's lives to get there but what i see from them is what i see from other ngos it's not they're not certainly not uniquely bad in fact they're better than very many ngos and they were there when other people weren't and they're delivering food when other people weren't so I don't want I don't want to distract from that but yeah this messaging this internal conduct like there's some of these internal messages they are troubling and like it did again it's just what I expect from any other NGO whereas I've seen these guys do things in many ways that are better than other NGOs but none of that messaging takes away from these people giving their lives. And I don't want to suggest that.

I think the most telling thing is that they're making the biases of the top people that work for this company very evident. In the article, it goes into Linda Roth's background and her pro-Israeli stances in the past and the fact that in all the outwardly facing materials about Gaza, it was very typical. To change the word siege to conflict or to question the blockades. It talks about how the people at the very top, their biases just seeped through and the people that were actually working for the organization were in disagreement with this.

I think the last thing I want to read from this article just really highlights that WCK did not protect the people that worked for them. It says, save the possibility of genuine incompetence, the WCK leadership's decisions were not made to maintain neutrality, did not increase effectiveness, and as April 1st demonstrated, did not protect personnel. The leadership's failure to honestly portray the dire reality in Gaza and lack of an attempt to influence the genocide in Gaza via its status and close ties to the Biden administration means that they bear responsibility for its outcomes. Let no one say they did everything they could. And this is obviously talking about the leadership versus the personnel. And then he goes on to close the article saying that his experience is one experience and when he resigned there was a palpable widespread atmosphere of disappointment

among the staff and employees and he ends with just calling on current and former WCK employees contractors and volunteers to publicly share their stories as well in order to force accountability and change yeah look if you work for Central Kitchen, you can message us. I'm here to hear your stories. But yeah. Yeah. We just wanted to make sure

that this perspective was shared. And again, the article will be in the description, so please give it a good read. But yeah, that is the episode. Thanks for listening. Free Palestine. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media,

visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. or queer sex, cruising, relationships, and culture in the new iHeart podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Sniffy's Cruising Confessions will broaden minds and help you pursue your true goals. You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeartRadio app

or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. Welcome to Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get real and dive straight into todo lo actual y viral. We're talking música, los premios, el chisme, and all things trending in my cultura. I'm bringing you all the latest happening in our entertainment world and some fun and impactful interviews with your favorite Latin artists, comedians, actors, and influencers. Each week, we get deep and raw life stories, combos on the issues that matter to us. And it's all packed with gems, fun, straight up comedia,

and that's a song that only Nuestra Gente can sprinkle. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast. And we're kicking off our second season digging into Tex Elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose.

Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from.