Pod Save the World - Israel Begins Rafah Offensive (feat. Ali Velshi)

Episode Date: May 8, 2024

Ben and guest host Ali Velshi discuss the latest developments on ceasefire negotiations between Israel and Hamas, the beginning of a military offensive in Rafah, the shutdown of Al Jazeera in Israel, and plans to ban TikTok in the United States. They also discuss Chinese President Xi Jinping’s first visit to Europe in 5 years, Putin’s inauguration and an alleged assignation plot against President Zelensky, and Canadian police bringing charges in the assassination of a Sikh separatist on their soil. Then, Ben speaks with Ali about his new book, “Small Acts of Courage: A Legacy of Endurance and the Fight for Democracy”, and interviews Slovenian activist Nika Kovač about the “My Voice, My Choice” campaign to fight for abortion rights in Europe.

Welcome back to POTSave the World. I'm Ben Rhodes and Tommy is out today. So we have a very special guest host, a great friend of mine, an incredible journalist. Ali Valshi is here with us. Allie, welcome to Potsay of the World. Thank you. This is super exciting for me to be on with you. Thank you. Well, it's funny because I go on your show sometimes and you ask me questions and now we get to kind of turn the tables around a little bit. I love it. As you, I'm sure know, Ali's an MSNBC anchor of Valshi. He is also the author of a new book, Small Acts of Courage, A Legacy of Endurance in the Fight for Democracy, which is an extraordinary book about an extraordinary family story that we'll get to. But I just want to congratulate you on writing. This is not your kind of typical cable host memoir. This is like a really compelling story. And I knew a little bit about your family background.

I'll get into it later. but congratulations. You must feel good about finishing that. I am very, very excited. And you know, books are like renovations, right? Like, on one hand, I'm excited that today's the book launch, but I'm also excited that means there's no more book stuff to do. And when I've forgotten how much went into that, I, that'll be when I start to consider another book. I admire just, you know, put out books on a regular basis. I'm not one of them. Well, this is a good one. Everybody should pick it up. But today, first, we're going to talk about the latest news at Gaza, including the kind of back and forth on. a potential ceasefire and hostage deal, the potential Rafa invasion, which could be happening, at least in some kind of motion as we speak. The U.S. response to those things, including President Biden making some comments today, as well as the recent decision by Israel to shut down Al Jazeera, which is one of Ali's former employers. Then we'll get into the latest out of Russia, Ukraine, including President Putin's inauguration, a potential assassination plot.

was foiled against President Zelensky. Xi Jinping is in Europe. And the story of been falling out of Canada, Canada pressing charges for the killing of a six separatist on its soil, they say, by Indian intelligence. So a lot to get into. And then after we'll talk about Ali's book. And then I'm going to be joined by Nika Kovac,

who is a good friend of mine, a Slovenian activist, leading the fight to codify a woman's right to abortion in Europe. So a lot to look forward to. But, Ali, let's dig into the latest out of God. Yeah. So a lot is developing the last 24 to 48 hours. It's Tuesday morning here in L.A. The latest information that we have is that there is clearly some type of Israeli military

operation underway in Rafa, although the IDF at this moment is still calling it a more minor and targeted incursion, but we see air strikes. We see even tank movements into Rafa. We've seen, obviously, Hamas rocket fire at the Khrim Shalom crossing, one of the aid crossings that also killed four Israeli soldiers a number of days ago. We've seen these Israeli military send out evacuation orders to about 100,000 civilians in Rafa, as they've done before some of their other ground operations. So there's a lot in motion, and we're going to get to Rafa and how consequential that would be. But first, I want to get into this back and forth about a ceasefire.

So on Monday, after days in which both Israel and the United States were kind of pinning the blame for lack of a ceasefire deal on Hamas, Hamas announced through their telegram channels that they had agreed to a ceasefire deal that they had discussed with Egypt and Qatar after a weekend of reports in which it was reported that those talks had failed. Now, Israel pretty immediately said

it had not agreed to the terms that Hamas agreed to. Ali, you reported this via X, which I still call Twitter. What you reported is that Hamas, accepted a three-phase deal. One, Israeli hostage for 33 Palestinian prisoners based on seniority of those detained in Israeli prisons, stopping military operations permanently, not using the word ceasefire, but rather a permanent halt to Israeli military operations in Gaza. And then each phase of this deal encompasses the return of Israeli hostages, starting with the elderly, then women, sick,

and people, and then finally soldiers. As I hear this, essentially, the differences are you have, you know, somewhere about 33 hostages, Israeli hostages, would be out in this first phase. The real differences seem to be about the duration of this ceasefire. Is it a temporary pause for 40 days or is it something more lasting and maybe some haggling about the sequencing of hostage releases versus Palestinian prisoner releases? But, Ali, what do you make of the current state of play on your reporting and your analysis? Well, it was some, it was some Interesting stagecraft. Hamas agreeing to a proposal that wasn't exactly the proposal that they were given, but it's not, it wasn't completely invented out of thin air. They were in discussions with the, with the Qatari's and with the Egyptians about this deal. And I think you're right that around the edge, it seems like there's a lot of detail in it. In fact, much more than I posted on social media. These kinds of things don't lend themselves to social media because there's so much detail. There's a lot of detail. in it. So it strikes me that this was sort of a hammered out general understanding of how the

process could go, but there are both semantic and real impediments here. The semantic impediments are about an end to the war, cessation of hostilities versus pauses. There doesn't seem to be a world in which Netanyahu and his hard right allies in the government want any system that doesn't allow them to, in their opinion, finish the war, which involves getting rid entirely of Hamas. That's a philosophical question that the United States and Israel have been at odds with since day one. And that is because Hamas comes from a philosophy that has existed for a long time, largely born in the 1930s. It's the same philosophy that gave birth to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt that is alive and well, even though illegal in Egypt. So the U.S. has said,

from the beginning, your goal is wrong, but it now seems that if Israel continues to stipulate the wrong goal, it means no deal will really be acceptable. Israel, Netanyahu in particular, is understanding that a deal that results in the release of the hostages probably puts him out of a job or largely puts him in a situation where there'll be an election at some point and his raison d'être is not going to be as strong to be there. I think Hamas leadership also gets that. There may always be something that feels like Hamas, and that is Hamas ideology, but ultimately, Israel knows how to take people out, and it's got a history of assassination. And if these guys make some kind of deal and go somewhere else, go live in Lebanon or Qatar or Switzerland or wherever

they go live, Israel will probably take them out as well over time. So I think everybody's realizing that the end game means the players don't get to continue. The sad part is that the Israeli hostages and their families remain. And we don't know how many are a lot. and Palestinians are being told to get into yet smaller areas than they're already in to protect from this attack in Rafa. I mean, it's ridiculous. It was already one of the most densely populated places in the world. Now they got everybody that they could into Rafa. Now they're squeezing them into little places in Rafa.

And they're using the attack on Rafa, which started, as you said, it's not really an attack, but the pressure on Rafa to put pressure on Hamas to say, accept the deal we actually gave you. So I think everybody's working over time in this moment. The Americans are trying to tell Hamas, you're not going to get a lot of offers like this. And they're insisting to Israel, including by holding back on a shipment of weaponry last week, which is something we haven't seen before, to say we're serious about this. So I'm hoping, I'm hoping at any point someone interrupt some discussion somewhere that I'm having in the next day or two and says there is something that looks like a deal. But hopeful and optimistic are two different things. Yeah, I tend to completely agree with that analysis. I mean, you have a situation which, if there is a kind of long-term ceasefire, it's hard to see how there's not an election in Israel that leads to Netanyahu Zuster. If there is a rough operation, you know, there's going to be immense humanitarian suffering, which will get to in a second, but also some of those Hamas leaders will likely be killed. But Hamas itself won't be destroyed. And so we're at this kind of grim, milestone where all you can hope for is that some kind of deal can at least allow for hostage releases and then the alleviation of some of the suffering in Gaza from the delivery of aid. But I think people need to kind of get their minds around what may be about to happen in Rafa. So the Israeli War Cabinet has voted already unanimously to support this offensive.

What you have is a situation where there's, you know, anywhere from 1.3 to even 1.5 million people sheltering in Rafa, I think, you know, over 600,000 of whom are. children, which really speaks to the immensity of the humanitarian catastrophe that we could be facing. Israel's begun to kind of increase the pace of airstrikes. We've got these reports of tanks rolling in. But also the Rafa crossing is where aid has generally gotten in. And so we're going to play a couple of clips here about people who've been involved in the

humanitarian response to give a sense of the situation on the ground from Yanti Saripto, who's the CEO of Save the Children, we've heard from on this podcast, and Jonathan Fowler, who's a spokesman for UNRWA based in East Jerusalem. So we'll go to those clips now, Ali, and then we'll get your response to it. The latest escalation in Gaza is making the most difficult humanitarian situation even worse. And I didn't think I was going to say that again and again and again over these last six months. For weeks, we've been warning that there is no feasible evacuation plan for the 1.5 million people who had,

fled to Rafa from all over Gaza. For Save the Children, a very compromise humanitarian assistance operation has been made even harder still. The Rafa Crossing and Keremshalom are closed as of Sunday. That means no new fuel, no new clean water, no food is making its way into the Gaza Strip. What that does to children, to the food security situation, to looming famine, and to hospitals, if they have no fuel to run their incubators, I don't need to spell out for you. The issue with Raffer, of course, is that it's the only way that we've been able to get fuel into the Gaza Strip.

Now, this is hugely problematic because fuel is essential for the trucks that move aid around the Gaza Strip. It's also essential for the pumping stations that keep the water clean and drinkable, the pumping stations that get the sewage out. public sanitation, all these kind of operations fall apart in the absence of fuel. Now, as of yesterday, we only had one day fuel left, so we're in the situation where it's highly likely. There's a huge risk, in fact, that operations will simply grind to a halt tomorrow absent any kind of fuel.

We simply don't have the reserves that are necessary. So there you have it. It's both the consequence for the people in Rafa, who are, potentially caught in the middle of this operation, many of whom have already been displaced once, twice, or three times, but also the lack of the capacity to get aid back in and famine-like conditions. Ali, you know, we keep warning about the dire circumstances in Gaza, but you've covered this part of the world. What do you think we could be looking at in terms of the situation on the ground in Gaza if this goes forward? And we'll get into the U.S. response in a second, but just

how do we think about the scale of this? I'll give you a personal example of the scale. I was in Gaza in 2019. I met a young woman who ran a company in which they design little solar chargers, but they have different wattages, depending on what it is you're charging, because Gaza has never had good power, right? They don't have normal electricity transmission. They have an electrical plant that is driven by diesel fuel.

The diesel fuel comes in by truck, but it used to come in by pipe from Israel. So Gaza, the best of times, did not have power for many, many hours a day. And people try and, if you get up too late, you can't have a shower, you can't use your computer, you can't use your Wi-Fi. So they have this business in which they sold solar charges. If she were in America, Ben, you and I've actually talked to her about her, but I don't know if you knew the story. She's the kind of person who in New York, people would be introducing her, she'd be getting financing,

she'd have a startup, she'd doing TED talks, all that kind of stuff. She'd be famous. She'd be rich. Her house is gone. Her family's living in Brooklyn. And last week, they had a dinner in which people could buy tickets at a GoFundMe to help her family survive. These were prosperous people who would have been the kind of people who could have taken part in a functional government, who could have been a leader. I mean, she's the kind of person who could have been the minister of energy or, you know, some senior.

And there's nothing left. There's no house. There's no business. There's no families all out of Gaza. So there's the brain drain, but there's this idea that not only are people squeezed into 50,000 people to a square mile in Rafa, which is much greater than the concentration in Gaza in general, but they are squeezed in there without sanitation, getting disease, without medical care, without heat, and without adequate calories. Right? This is just, it's multiplying. It's not just what it is.

And this is the problem with tragedies that get this bad, like Darfur and like Yemen. At some point, you lose measure of it because I eat 2,000 calories a day. There are reports that people there are getting somewhere under 500 calories a day. And so we are killing a population. So for all of the really legitimate discussions that we are having here and that we're having about college campuses and that we're having about the American role in this, we have to remember that this isn't a man-made situation that we've got here that, aside from being bad, because lots of people are going to die, just think about the solution to this problem over the long term, what we are doing

to hurt the idea that there will be people who will ultimately have to come together to make peace so that there can be peace between Israel and Palestine. We're not moving closer to that in the things that we've seen in the last few weeks. Yeah, no, I remember you telling me about her when actually you were out here, I was in studio with you. And it speaks to kind of that promise that has just been suffocated among Palestinians, both by Hamas and by Israel in Gaza. Now, you know, if you mentioned that there's this kind of exponential escalation in the humanitarian challenge in Gaza.

We've talked before on this podcast about both the fact that this is the most rapid kind of man-made famine we've seen in recent human history, to population going from not having any famine-like conditions a few months ago to being in the precipice of a major famine today. And also the reality that that is in violation of international law. Essentially, there's an obligation, even if you're fighting a war, to facilitate the flow of humanitarian aid in. Now, that's one of the reasons why the U.S. has been so opposed to a military operation in Rafa. And so I want to get to this question of what does the U.S. do? Because, I mean, anybody who listens to me has known that, you know, I've been concerned for months about why is the U.S. continuing to provide offensive military assistance to the Israeli government?

government, our willingness to continue to veto resolutions. I think all of us have thought that this Rafa operation is going to present, though, some kind of decision point for the Biden administration. You mentioned there's already been a hold on some offensive weapons, including 2,000 pound bombs. Biden spoke with Netanyahu as recently as Monday, reportedly urged him against attacking Rafa. At the same time, Biden spoke today on Holocaust Remembrance Day, a very strong message against the rise of anti-Semitism, which is absolutely necessary in this country, also spoke about the situation in Hamas. I want to play that clip and then ask you about the challenges for the U.S. going forward, Ali. So we'll play the clip of Biden today. People are already forgetting.

They're already forgetting that Hamas unleashed this terror. There was Hamas that brutalized Israelis. It was Hamas who took and continues the whole hot. passages. I have not forgotten, nor have you, and we will not forget. Now, look, that's all absolutely true. But incomplete. But exactly. Because what I was going to get to is it kind of, it's also the message in Netanyahu would want to hear from the U.S. president on the day that their tanks rolling into Rafa, right? That to me is, you know, the unavoidable reality here. And the challenge is, like Biden is trying to have it both ways. He's trying to kind of deliver this message that expresses his kind of full solidarity with Israel, full solidarity with kind of their piece of this

narrative about what happened on October 7th. And yet the substance of what's happening on the ground in Gaza is exactly what Biden has said he didn't want to happen, which is the ceasefire talks seem to be unraveling. Hopefully that's not the case. Hopefully by the time this podcast air is something, well, a rabbit will have been pulled out of a hat. But I would like nothing more. than for this to be outdated because that actually happened. That would be great. But the question I have for you know, how do, at what point does, can Biden's been trying to straddle this line of rhetorical criticism of Netanyahu, but not really having real consequences and essentially still taking these really perspective on what's happening in Gaza. How does Rafa change that, Alley?

We're not, we're not talking about the book just yet, but chapter four by book, which is not about this. the chapter title is a splinter up your ass. And that's what happens when you straddle the fence for too long. In the end, you don't come up with a solution. You think you're, you're balancing yourself, but you're not. And that's the problem here. Because Biden feels a need to say those words. And they are important. And people should Muslims, Jews, Christians, everybody should be fighting anti-Semitism. The people who are anti-Semites are not the friends of the rest of us anyway, first of all. They're the same people who shoot up mosques and synagogues. The battle against growing anti-Semitism should be something in which we are all joined.

There have been a lot of people who've gone and muddled this situation, though, can combine things, combine criticism of the state of Israel with anti-Semitism, which is an incorrect thing to do. And to suggest that this thing, whatever we're in, started on October 7th, is just to be contextually absent. That's the problem. The problem is, yeah, Hamas did a horrible, horrible thing on October 7th. And we need to figure out what justice looks like for Hamas and the perpetrators who committed

those acts. But nothing started on October 7th. I mean, we've been talking about this on my little show for two years about the very specific things that are going on in Israel that are damaging to the Israeli government and damaging to the long-term likelihood of there being peace between these two states. Joe Biden, I don't know what he's trying to do. I understood in the first couple days, and you and I talked in the first couple days after October 8th when I was in Israel.

I understood what he was trying to do. He was trying to put a hand on Israel's shoulder and say, we'll stand with you. We've gone through things like this in the past, and we've made some bad judgments as a result of having gone through things like this in the past. So take some of our guidance on this and don't do that. Not only was Netanyahu not prepared to take that advice, but it is not in Netanyahu's interest to take that advice. Because what Biden was saying is that America got itself into some wars, and a lot of people died and spent a lot of money. and then we handed over Afghanistan back to the Taliban. And had we known that, would we have thought about this differently in the front end, possibly?

But that's not Netanyahu's political goals are entirely different than America's goals were after 9-11. And that's part of the problem. The Netanyahu was in a very long battle for his own political survival. And now this is it. He is staring down the barrel of his own political survival. So his impetus to make a deal, it's great when Hamas says things that are not in line with what they need. When Hamas says we're agreeing to a deal that was not the one you actually put together, that plays right into Netanyahu's hands. Because everything that Hamas doesn't do to get a deal

makes Netanyahu say there's not going to be a deal. He preempts the deals. Hamas preempts the deals. Everybody's playing into everybody's hands right now. And I do believe actually that Blinken and Austin and Biden are trying, trying to get this thing back on, trying to get a deal, not only because the world needs it, because there need to be, those hostages need to be freed. and people need to stop dying. But Joe Biden's got a political problem if he doesn't solve this fairly soon and then starts telling people that I've got them on the road to a two-state solution or at least some kind of sustainable peace in the area.

So it's a messy situation. Yeah. And, you know, I've really tried to hear different perspectives on this conflict. You know, even in recent days and weeks, Alley, like you, I've had a lot of people reach out to me and say, you know, you've been really, you know, you seem focused on Netanyahu. who you've been going hard on the Israeli government. And I understand the perspective. You know, people say you have to look at it from the perspective of the Israeli people

and how they're feeling post-October 7th. I understand all of that as best I can. You know, the vulnerability people feel, certainly the vulnerability that people feel in this country around rising anti-Semitism. I also just, I can't ignore what I see with my eyes, which is a government that at every turn, whether it's Netanyahu or the kind of even further right settler factions that are represented in the finance ministry and the national security ministry, at every turn, they have taken the more extreme course of action, you know, whether it was cutting off food and fuel and water into Gaza,

whether it's been just continuing to carry out these military operations over the objections of the United States, their leading ally that is providing so much military assistance. You know, you can't say that you would like this government to be something that it's not. Right. You know, I feel like a lot of Americans who are sympathetic Israel are looking at this and kind of keep hoping that more recognizable Israeli government kind of somehow emerges when in fact, yes. In part because it's Nanyahu's political survival that is at stake in the continuation of the war,

and in part because there are some very extremist factions in this government that want to push the envelope as far as they can in terms of destruction. in Gaza and potential displacement of Palestinians, that's what we're seeing. If I see something different, that would be great. But we're not seeing that yet. Now, one other example of this recently was the shutting down of Al Jazeera. So this past Sunday, the Israeli government shut down Al Jazeera's operations in Israel, raided their office in Jerusalem, seizing some equipment. Netanyahu is called Al Jazeera a, quote, mouthpiece for Hamas, accused of anti-Israel bias for years. And this was made possible. This wasn't just something Netanyahu did, though. There was a law passed by the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, which gave Netanyahu the authority to order the temporary closure of foreign networks. Now, I'm not asking everybody to be, you know, Al-Jazeera fans here. But the reality is there's not a lot of reporting. Nobody's allowed into Gaza to begin with. So the only reporting we get is from Palestinians on the ground, kind of via social media. Israeli media, which is very good. But on this one, you know, I think.

think has not been as willing to kind of bring some of the imagery from Gaza into Israeli homes, never mind around the world. Al, you worked for Al Jazeera. Like, what was your reaction to seeing that take place? And how would you, as someone who's kind of looked at this from the outside and also once been inside Al Jazeera, how should people think about the consequence of doing this? So there are a number of things here that are complicated. One is the one that you identified, and that is foreign media cannot get access to Gaza. Foreign media is never. When I went in in 2019 and other times that my colleagues have gone in, you can't go in without the permission of the Israeli government, the cooperation of the Israeli government. Now, they know what I'm going to report,

they know how I report, but they have to grant you permission to go in. Now, I was able to go in prior to the war without an Israeli government escort, but now foreign governments who go into Gaza, foreign journalists go into Gaza, go in under the auspices of the IDF. They are basically embedded with the IDF, and their product has to be reviewed by the Israeli sensors before they go out. So that's just an important piece of information people should know. Foreign journalists cannot generate content in Gaza that can be shown without the interference of the Israeli government, number one. Number two, some of the best reporting, meaning the most veteran reporters, the finest equipment,

the most skilled camera operators, the people who can go into the most dangerous situations, are in the news organizations that exist inside of Gaza, staffed by Palestinians, the most robust of which is Al Jazeera. So whether you like Al Jazeera or what you think it stands for, and there is a good debate to be had about that. Al Jazeera is owned by the government of Qatar. Qatar is not a democracy.

Most Arab non-democracies don't like Al Jazeera, but the people do. if you remember when the when the blockade happened on Qatar the number one demand by Saudi Arabia was the dismantling there were 13 demands and number one was the dismantling of Al Jazeera because they don't want this kind of stuff they don't want the two things that journalism does journalism bears witness for people who cannot be present to see what's going on and then takes the bearing of that witness and holds power to account again whatever one's political views of Al Jazeera are they do that and they do it to the extent that they have is Israelis on TV a lot, Israeli officials on TV a lot. In fact, Al Jazeera has been useful to the Israeli government for a long time because they put their officials on there and they feel that's their way of getting the message, not just to Al Jazeera's English-speaking audience, but Al-Jazeera's Arabic speaking audience. And Al-Jazeera has never refused to do that. So they have engaged in good faith as a journalistic organization in Israel, in the occupied territories, and in Gaza. But more

importantly than what Al-Zezira has done is that Israel likes to continue to remind us that it is a democracy, even though many people in Israel do not enjoy democratic rights, but that they value freedom of the judiciary, which many people have gone out to fight in the last year and a half, and freedom of the press. And that ended this weekend. Al-Zerra shuddering means that Israel is no longer committed to that basic principle. You know, I'll tell you a story, Alia. I've never told this one before, but I was, during the Tahrir Square protest in Egypt in 2011, I remember we'd be in these meetings in the situation room and our, let's just say, our officials kept talking about the fact that the Egyptian government was confident that these protests would go away, you know.

And meanwhile, I was, had Al Jazeera on my office, which had, you know, scenes from the protest. And I kept saying, hey, if we relied on, you know, I'm watching television guys. I'm sure you're talking to officials. I'm sure you have many ways of getting information, but the television screens I'm looking at show people that are not going home, you know? And Al Jazeera was useful in just broadcasting what was happening, right? I told this story on a panel a few years later,

and there was a former, very senior Israeli intelligence official. And afterwards he came up to me and he said, you know, you fell for a Qatari Muslim Brotherhood information operation if you were getting your information from Al Jazeera. And I said him, I was like, it was it was footage of people in a square. It wasn't an information operation, you know? And so sometimes, sure, I get it.

You don't like the agenda of the Qatar government. You don't like, but like it's just, it is what it is, you know. They're there and they're reporting the news. That's the part that we have to remember. There are things about Al Jazeera. I didn't enjoy as an employee, but we had a good arrangement. Don't phone me and I won't phone you.

I work for corporate media. I don't endorse. No, but nor does anybody ask me to endorse the policies of all of my bosses. But we do have to understand that media has a role. And when you start banning media as a whole, for things that are a bit not clear as it is in Israel, it's a bad road to go down. So one last thing before we move on to other topics, I want to play one clip two, which is related to this, which was Mitt Romney and Tony Blinken talking about TikTok the other day. We'll play that clip. The way this has played on on social media has dominated the narrative.

And you have a social media ecosystem environment in which context, history, facts get lost, and the emotion, the impact of images dominates. And we can't discount that. I think it also has a very, very, very challenging effect on the narrative. Yeah, a small parenthetical point, which is some wonder why there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down potentially TikTok or other entities of that nature. If you look at the postings on TikTok and the number of mentions of Palestinians relative to other social media sites, it's overwhelmingly so among TikTok broadcasts.

So, you know, kind of saying the quiet part out loud there a little bit of the reality. Romney basically saying that they ban TikTok because there's too much profile seating content. What is your, what's your response to just the way in which TikTok is now, I mean, there's other concerns, obviously, about Chinese government ownership, but, but what's your reaction to that? Yeah. Where I agree with Mitt Romney writ large, and he's a guy I've always wanted to agree with more. So I try and find things. And now I think, you know, he just put. his dog on the top of the roof. He didn't actually see the dog. Where I agree with him is in general, social media has caused us to speak and think quickly, right? It's caused us to have a reaction that's very fast and change your icons into something. And I would love if everybody had some ability to put on social media, the idea that, wow, this thing has happened in the Middle East. I don't really understand it well enough. So I'm going to take some time out to learn about it. So please don't ask me to profess anything until I learn and offer me information.

if you can help. TikTok has an algorithm that makes it more effective than Instagram and Facebook and X. So I get that if you're concerned about the way in which stories get warped, then TikTok is a greater concern. But that concern has to be addressed by our greater sophistication in figuring out how we small our regulate social media. Because to the extent that a democracy and we are struggling in America depends on an informed electorate, social media, in my opinion, recently has not been helping to inform that electorate. But when he went down that road of its pro-Palestinian or whatever the case is and emotions get in the way of whatever, emotions have always gotten in the way of sober thinking. That is the way of the world. I'm not sure we should discount the idea that because there are a lot

of people on social media who are expressing solidarity with or concern for the Palestinians, that either something's wrong with the algorithm or something's wrong with the people or something's wrong with the way it goes. Yes, there are issues with social media. Yes, some of them are exacerbated by TikTok. And no, it's very much like college campuses. At some point, maybe they're actually protesting for something. Maybe you need to stop discounting the fact that the system's all broken. Maybe listen to what it is the folks on TikTok are actually saying. Yeah, that's very well said. And frankly, you know, the concern about TikTok would be more credible if there was a complimentary effort to try to regulate the way in which American social media platforms

have broken people's brains around the world. It's not not dangerous. It's a real thing. But you can't make it dangerous just for the reasons you want it to be dangerous, right? It's like the AI conversation. You're really going to like some AI when it solves that cancer that you haven't been able to solve for a long time, but you're not going to like it when it takes your job. So we have to have a more holistic view of how we look at technology in,

particular, but social media specifically. That was a weak argument. That was week T. All right now, shifting gears here. Right now, Chinese president, Xi Jinping, is making his first visit to Europe in five years. So since before COVID, this is a big deal. And he's going to an interesting collection of countries, France, Hungary, and Serbia. I think we can say, you know, Hungary, obviously, Orban has been much more willing to look towards China and Russia. than the United States. Serbia, a huge trading partner for China. Also, it's a 25th anniversary of NATO bombing the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. So Xi Jinping making a point there, I think probably about China's suspicions about NATO. But most interesting to me is France, because it's not

surprising why she would go to Hungary and Serbia. What's interesting about this is that at the same time that you've had Europe kind of wrestling with how much to go along with America's China policy and you've had China wanting, I think, you know, peel off the Europeans from the United States. Emmanuel Macron has become more outspoken and gave a big interview in the economists this week about the need for Europe to kind of chart its own course on military spending, on Russia, on technology. Allie, you used to, you're as smart as anyone I know. Everybody knows you for covering American politics now and the issues we've been talking about, but you were really good on global economy, on markets. And obviously, this is a huge issue. This question of,

of how does the France or how does the Europe engage China? What do you think Xi Jinping is trying to accomplish? What do you think Emmanuel Macron is trying to accomplish? And what should be the view from the United States as we watch this kind of mutual charm offensive between Xi and Macron? Well, of the old guard of OECD slash NATO leaders, Macron is that guy now. right? I mean, Justin Trudeau still exists, but fundamentally, most of those leaders are gone. And so there are meaningful discussions going on in Europe right now, particularly out of fear of Donald Trump winning the election again and a further weakening of NATO and what happens to Ukraine if Donald Trump comes into office. So I think there's a real sense amongst the Europeans about what are our ways forward economically and militarily, what is. NATO look like, what do our alliances need to look like? And she ends up looking in the world like

somebody who is not, he's, you know, he's always been able to distinguish himself from Kim Jong-un. You know, she is a thoughtful man who's sort of planned out his future. And he's been able to distinguish himself from Vladimir Putin. He's not going to be reckless. So there were a lot of people who thought in the early days of the Ukraine war that perhaps she will take that opportunity to go into Taiwan. And I think he's looked at the world and he said, whatever your view of Joe Biden and how he's handled many things are, he got the world aligned against Russia. China can't afford that. The world can't afford it and China can't afford it, right? The world can afford to be at war with Russia. Russia doesn't sell us much that we need

and we don't, you know, that trade relationship is not all that important other than oil. That's not the case with China. So she has to have a very sophisticated view. And if the, if the Europeans are being forced to think about peeling away from the United States because they might get forced to by a second Trump administration, it sort of behooves him to be in France and it behooves France to talk to him. I kind of get it. It's the, I don't know what the world order is going to look like if Donald Trump becomes the next president of the United States. So I need to start shoring up my, you know, my other options. And I think that's what that is. That's an other option conversation about trade, about energy and about military stuff. If you don't have the

United States by your side all the time. If you cannot trust that they will stand by your side and your Europe, you need options. Kind of weird in 2024 that China might be that option, but it's popped its head up a lot in the last 15 years, right? When Greece had its debt problems, China was there in a second. China shows up very fast when someone is having doubts about what their economic future is going to look like. And they will alleviate it by building you ports and doing all sorts of things. So China is super sophisticated, and I think that is one of those things that we've got to understand. We like to see the world as black and white. You can't with China. China is both ally and adversary at the same time. Yeah, I think that's well said. And we should note,

Hungary and Serbia also part of the Belt Road initiative, the Chinese led initiative. I'm sure one of the things that Macron is going to be talking about is Ukraine and trying, you know, probably futile to get China to reduce its support for Russia. As we're talking today, there's a number of developments which I think kind of speak to Russian confidence in the war in Ukraine. So Putin is being inaugurated for his fifth term as president in a shocking election result that he won that election. In his speech, which comes shortly before Victory Day in Russia, the commemoration of the victory in World War II. He once again talked about Western aggression and attempts to contain Russia. And again, as I said in a couple days, he'll be marking the Soviet Union's victory of a Nazi Germany.

as a part of this whole pageantry. The Washington Post recently had a good report about a month-long exhibit that is taking place in Moscow displaying military equipment that they've captured from the West in the war in Ukraine. So a bit of a sign of some, you know, maybe premature triumphalism. And there's also been reports in the last day or so about a potential assassination plot where two colonels in the Ukrainian military were arrested for their last. alleged evolvement in a plot to assassinate President Zelensky of Ukraine, the New York Times report on this, which included trying to recruit people close to his security detail so they could kidnap and eventually kill Zelensky. So we have to obviously pull the threat on these allegations.

To me, the kind of common threat of all this, Allie, is that, you know, here's Putin feels that he's in pretty good position, right? He's kind of on the offensive in Ukraine. He's displaying war trophies. you know, maybe he's trying fanciful plots to, to once again to captive the Ukrainian government. You know, you've reported on the ground in Ukraine very powerfully. So you've watched this work closely. You've seen the momentum ebb and flow. I mean, part of me kind of thinks maybe the Russians are now the Ukrainians were low overconfident a year ago. Maybe it's the Russians today. What's your kind of sense of the mood music you're seeing out of Moscow? Well, let's put a few more data points on that. Last year was a really bad year for Vladimir

Putin. Right? It was a really bad year. The progosian stuff, the, you know, the facts on the ground in Ukraine is while we describe it as being a relative stalemate on land, it's not on water. The, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, Russians don't control that. And they still don't have air superiority over, over Ukraine, which is kind of amazing. Now, the Ukrainians still don't have, they're not flying the planes that, they've been promised. They're not up in the air. But I remember when the first hypersonic missiles went into Ukraine, and we weren't sure that our Patriot missiles could intercept them. And they could with remarkable accuracy. Now, they've got a lot of tricks. They can send lots and lots of drones

to confuse the missiles. You end up spending millions of dollars to intercept a $20,000 or $40,000 drone. So, you know, Russia's not done. And Russia's got Iran behind it helping it out. And it's not clear where China is on this way. You know, if China decides to really put its, its thumb on the scale in favor of Russia in that war, things can change. That said, they're also trying to recruit women into the military, not because they feel that they want a more equitable military. It's because they're running out of people. So I don't know, I don't, I think Putin does this. He's able to, he knows what works and what doesn't work. So what doesn't work is a nuclear saber rattling. Even the nuclear people don't care anymore. They say that he's just talking about nonsense. He

He does need to shore up things at home. He won this election. Navalny is dead. Vladimir Karamurza is in jail. Just won a Pulitzer Prize two days ago for some of his writing. He needs to shore things up at home. And I think we've heard from Zelensky that people are getting tired in Ukraine. This is hard.

It's hard to fight this war. We hear about the things we hear about. What you don't hear about is that civilians continue to die. People are maimed. People have lost body parts. they think toward a future that involves Ukraine in NATO, but it's moving very slowly. And all Vladimir Putin has to do is wait until Donald Trump gets elected if he thinks Donald Trump's going to get elected. Because the pressure on him dies.

There will not be. It's not just NATO. It's a 15-nation consortium that is working to defend Ukraine. Donald Trump's not going to be interested in that. Lloyd Austin, who's been holding that together, there won't be a Lloyd Austin. So I think at the moment, Vladimir Putin's trying to look really strong. He's trying to keep spirits up in his country. And he's trying to keep this war going at the lowest possible level for the next several months to see how things work out with Donald Trump.

Because if Donald Trump does win, you could see the end of that war and not in a good way. Yeah. Well, time is kind of not working for anybody at this point. But Putin probably feels like he's got at least some chips on our election. Well, one more thing before we get to your book. book, another assassination of sorts and another story of autocracy of sorts. We've followed this on the podcast, but Canadian police have now arrested three suspects who believe to have ties to the Indian government's efforts to murder, successful efforts, to murder six separatist leader,

Hardeeb Singh, Nijjar last June in Vancouver. India has accused Nizjar of terrorism, but denied involvement in his death. So this is kind of moving through the legal process. You know, And we will get this kind of transitions in a way into your book, Alley. You know, you have a history, obviously, in your family back into India, into Gujarat, actually, the state where Modi comes from. What's it like to watch this? You know, you grew up in Canada. You have Indian heritage, so you kind of encompass both identities. Yeah, it's a very strange.

This is a very story. Yeah. So what's it like just for you to watch this as a Canadian and an Indian in some respects? The main takeaway here is that Canada has decided to stand up to Modi, and Modi is not liking that at all. And there's a massive Indian diaspora in Canada, which my family is a part, of which the Sikh population, by the way, were one of the earliest. Most Indians came to Canada the way my family did. You went somewhere from India to Africa or the West Indies, and then you moved your way up into Canada. The Sikhs came as part of the group that included the Chinese and the Japanese to build the railways.

on the Western United States and Western Canada. So they've been here earlier and longer to the point that if you go to British Columbia, which is where the majority of the population, or at least their population centers are, you'll see six in not just in service jobs, but in government, as premiers, as senior government ministers and things like that. And one of the things I write about in my book is when you're Indian diaspora, once you're out there, some of the fights that go on at home don't seem as clear, because you're kind of brown people in this larger white people mass.

but there have been tensions between some groups of Sikhs who are still seeking independence and separate land in India and the Indian government. That is not reflective of the majority of Hindus and Sikhs, but you've got an Indian government that is becoming more ultra-nationalist Hindu to the exclusion of both Sikhs and Muslims. And you've got this intrigue that, by the way, is also going on in the United States. And there is, as you know, we have great difficulty in particular. Modi is one of those guys we have very great difficulty with. There are things we should be telling him about democracy, about Russia, about things that he should be doing. And we know, we hold state dinners for him in the United States. So that's the contrast you're seeing that we are still holding the equivalent of state dinners for Narendra Modi.

And Canada has decided that they are going to charge people and make this seem like it was a crime that it was fostered by the government of India. So all sorts of problems all over the place. This is a major, major diplomatic issue. Some in Canada say that Trudeau should not have stepped into this. But there are pressures to say justice is justice and we're not letting other people come onto our land and undertake assassination. So I don't know how this one's going to unfold, but it's a tricky one. Yeah. Well, I applaud Trudeau for just playing it straight.

You know, sometimes the facts are facts and you've got to let them speak for themselves. That's how he's thinking. Now, look, let's get into your book here directly. So it's an incredible story. The book is your family's journey from India to South Africa during apartheid, up to Kenya, then to Canada, and then finally, your journey to America. So it's really this kind of century-long journey that shaped your personal and professional identity. And I actually love, you know, it brings in all these different elements of history, right? it brings in the, you know, Gandhi's time in South Africa.

It brings in, you know, EDI means evacuation of, expulsion of South Asians from Uganda, you know, Kenya, the diversification of Canada. We'll get to a few of these things. I want to start with Gandhi. Gandhi's time in South Africa is so interesting and often little understood, and it interacted with your family. And I just wanted to ask you to tell the story about Gandhi literally

carrying your young grandfather on his shoulders and the impact that Gandhi had on not just your grandfather, but your whole kind of family ethos and mentality. So my great-grandfather and Gandhi were both Gujaratis, but they didn't know each other in South Africa. But because they were Gujaratis and Gandhi was a lawyer, my great-grandfather was a small businessman, they both needed a bookkeeper. And they shared a Gujarati bookkeeper who then introduced them and they became friends. Gandhi He lived in Johannesburg. My great-grandfather lived in Pretoria. And in Gandhi's agitation of the government, he had to have frequent meetings with government

officials. So he would come to Pretoria to stay with my great-grandfather who had a what was called a dray. It was a horse-drawn cart, not the kind for fancy driving around, but for moving goods. But he would give Gandhi the use of this dray to go to his government meetings. Anyway, my great-grandfather wasn't particularly political. Like many Indian business people in the diaspora, their view was, let's not get involved in politics and rock the boat. We're doing okay here, sending some money home. Let's leave it at that.

Gandhi wanted everybody involved in the struggle. And so he says to my great-grandfather one day, may I take your son, who was seven years old at the time, to my school. And school, by the way, I say very loosely, it's an usher. It was a commune. And the point was he wanted to toughen people up, generally speaking Indians. He wanted them toughened up for the ability to fight apartheid and face the consequences of fighting apartheid, which typically meant going to jail. So my great-grandfather looks at Gandhi and figures out he's got a way out of this. He says, we are Muslims. You're a Hindu. How can I send my son at his formative years to go to live with you and learn your ways? And he said, I will learn your religion to teach it to him. So he did. So my grandfather

at the age of seven became Gandhi's youngest student on this ashram where they had two blankets. You slept on one because it was hard floors. And you had one on top of you, no hot water, no meat. you grew everything that you ate. And the point was to be hardened so that you would become, you could break law, break apartite laws and go to jail. Because if you grow up with that kind of a Spartan existence, jail doesn't trouble you. And that's how, but they would, they couldn't take public transit. They had to walk everywhere.

And my grandfather, being the youngest, would sometimes get tired on these 20 mile walks. So Gandhi would put him on his shoulders and, uh, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, you know, that, you know, that last three years, Gandhi left South Africa, interestingly enough, thinking he had failed. And my grandfather took the lessons that he learned and made it part of the family ethos as the family businesses prospered over the years. And they sort of funneled money from the businesses and did things within the business that allowed them to fight apartheid in their small ways. Because nobody was trying to overthrow the whole government. They were all,

even Gandhi was trying to get like Martin Luther King, trying to get particular laws overthrown and particular things done. But that has in few. my family's view, not just of social justice and of liberty and equality, but also a pluralism, right? My grandfather was taught his own religion by a Hindu who had studied Jewish scriptures and Christian scriptures and Hindu scriptures and Muslim scriptures. So we grew up in this world that said those are not differences that are important to us. Those are just elements of pluralism that make us more interesting to one and up. Yeah. Well, and then you talk about, you know, being in Canada growing up. And it sounds like, you know, this very diverse pluralistic environment in your household,

too, you know, taking in refugees. And I mean, how did you, you're obviously in a minority population, in some respects, in a diaspora population in a place like Toronto. And at the same time, it feels like there was a really concerted effort to kind of infuse your household with a sense of both an obligation and commitment to pluralism. And then ultimately, then that evolves into a commitment to public service. But just how did those early years shape you? I mean, what was it like to revisit that in your writing? And what did it imprint on you?

Well, it was real. It's not one of those things. You know, when you write a book about your own history, your family's history, you color some things in a little bit, right? To make them stand out. But that part didn't need coloring in. That was clear to me as a kid. It was clear to me we were a little different from the sort of,

the waspy neighbors that we had who were all fantastic, just weren't like us. They went to different places and did different things. But it was clear that my family was different otherwise. And the difference was driven by the fact that my father, my mother, and my sister were all born in places in which they could not participate in politics by virtue of the color of their skin. They could not vote. Yeah. And so they were so determined to A, not only get involved in politics, so they show up in Canada and they attend meetings of all three major political parties to try and figure out what they're comfortable. They didn't go in on the, on the basis of ideology. They wanted to go and say, what does this feel like? How do they, how do they, what do they think of us? How does this,

how might we participate? But mostly my parents never wanted to live in a world again where people are separated or judged by the color of their skin or their, their, their, their ethnicity or their race. They wanted to mix. They wanted our house to be a place where everybody met with everybody. It's in the smallest scale. I mean, we were, we were low-income immigrants. It was, it was, like we were having diplomatic parties. But it's as if we were. We had all sorts coming through the house. And finally, 10 years into this adventure in Canada,

and my dad says he wants to run for office. Yeah, I was going to ask you. I mean, what's that like to have your dad run for office? I was sitting on the floor. I remember the living room, probably, you know, a small room. And I was sitting on the floor. And he told everybody this.

And they were all good people. I mean, he gathered the sort of smartest people he knew. And they said, you're never going to win. You can't win. He said, well, we won't know, will we? until we try. He said, we don't, we know we don't win, but we don't try. So how would we know that we can't win if we did try? And he wanted to. And his whole point was that back home, they would have jailed me for this. You can't, this would have been a subversive meeting.

Somebody in that room would have been a snitch. And they, the special branch of the police would be on top of you and you'd be arrested for being a communist sympathizer. That's how it worked in South Africa. In Canada, he's saying, why don't we try it and see if it works? So I'm 11 years old. I'm game, right? I'm fantastic. You're like, this is cool. Let's do it. Yeah. people. This is great. We get all the way to the end of the election. It's, it's an election night. My dad wants to change. He's been in the same sort of outfit all day. He wants to change of the suit for election night. So I zip home with him and we get in the car. It's 8 o'clock.

Polls close. And we weren't really worried about that because how can the, you know, how the results are going to be known at 8 o'clock. But it's 8 o'clock. We're about 10 minutes from the campaign office. Turn on the radio. It says, polls are closed. Too early to tell what the results are except in this one constituency that my dad ran in. They were able to declare at 30 seconds after the hour. Incumbent had been elected. My father was defeated because it was that obvious. I didn't know anything about polling and advanced polling and exit polling. I didn't know anything about this stuff. So I with shock, I look at my dad. I said, I can't believe we lost. He said, of course we lost. I said, why do we do this if we're going to lose? He said, we did it because we could.

Because tomorrow life goes on. Nobody gets arrested. I put my ideology out there for people to vote for. they voted for the other guy, it's all good. Walks into the campaign office, everybody claps for him. I'm thinking, what are you people clapping about? We lost. Goes in the back, calls his opponent. The concession speech, concession phone call takes about a minute. And that's the end of it.

Yeah. And that's the end of it. And the funny part is that my father ran again and won, and that's not the interesting part of the story. The interesting part is I learn more about how he, about politics from how he lost. Yeah. That how he won. Well, and this journey kind of continues, right?

So we've, you know, from India to South Africa, then up to Kenya, to Canada, into politics. And then, you know, your journey, you know, towards the end of the book, you talk about your journey to kind of becoming American, which traces this kind of crazy period of history that I've been in public life, right? You drive your motorcycle in Manhattan shortly after 9-11. And you've kind of lived this two decades becoming a journalist, too, you know, famously reporting on the George Floyd protest. and getting shot in leg with a rubber bullet. I mean, how did you, and reflecting on this in the book, how did you digest the highs and lows of your journey to Americanness during this very crazy period in history?

Well, it corresponds to me realizing that I grew up with a certain privilege my family didn't have. Right. They had a drive in them that was about the fact that something was in equal. They were born into inequality. I wasn't really. I was born into post-independence Kenya, which in theory was a free society, a free democracy, a new democracy. And then I grew up in Canada, which is a free democracy and vibrant democracy.

And until George Floyd, I didn't realize the degree to which our citizenship comes with a series of obligations, not just rights. The reason I wasn't interested in taking on American citizenship is because I didn't need any more rights. right i've got canadian citizenship i've got all these passports what more do i possibly need out of this thing it's not about what you need it's about what it is you do to make this thing feel like a more fair society my father got involved in politics as did my mother after that and my sister all of them got involved in in electoral politics because they felt that they owed an obligation to the place that finally gave them a home in which they were welcomed and now i'm realizing that we all

have to do that we don't all have to run for office uh far from it But if we can look at the society and say some things are unequal, like for instance, today, reproductive rights are unequal in America. I'm not enjoying my full democracy if everybody else around me is not. And I go back to South Africa. And I think to myself, for the 5% of people who voted in South Africa all throughout apartheid, they had a wonderful democracy. Democracy worked for them. They got to pick their prime minister every 40 years. It was fantastic. But we can't look at it that way. We've got to look at it and say, until it's all fair, it's not fair. And that was what woke me up.

That covering George Floyd and many other things since then have woken me up to the idea that I can't just pretend to be a journalist in a completely fixed and fair democracy. I have to remember that there is work to be done. And maybe there will always be work to be done, Ben. This may not be a problem. It may just be the nature of the beast that there's always work to be done to keep bad impulses at bay. We see it in Hungary. We see it in Turkey. We see it in India.

We see it in Russia. There are bad impulses that have to be kept at bay. and it's our job as citizens to do that. Well, I want to ask you one last thing. You know, at the end of this book, you describe going to Tolstoy Farm, this place in South Africa that is so central to your family's history with Gandhi. And not just going there, but kind of retracing the footsteps that Gandhi used to take. The question I wanted to ask you about this is, you know, you're in the churn, right?

I mean, I pop up on your shows now and then, and you're not just hosting Valshi. You're kind of, you're omnipresent. You're popping up on MSNBC and other countries. You're in the middle of politics. You're in the middle of all these world events. And I'm just curious, both the experience of writing a book, as you said, can be laborious. I'm on my third now. But I was curious, what was it like to just take a pause and take that trip to South Africa

and retrace those footsteps and kind of stand in this place, you know, so far away from Washington, D.C. or all these other places. What was that like for you to kind of step out of your life and step back into your family's history that way? It was amazing to me. Not only because if you, and maybe we'll go one day, you can stand where my grandfather stood on that farm and you can see Johannesburg and you can see nothing in between. In other words, it's what he would have seen. There is stuff in between. It's just the way the land curves. You see none of the development. So you almost are looking at what my grandfather may have seen a hundred years ago. The difference is what you see in Johannesburg now are buildings, but what he saw would have been in smokestacks.

He would have seen the idea that there was a city there. So it was amazing to actually look back because I was trying to say, what did my young grandfather think about the world? He was separated from his family. What was he learning? Was he thinking he was going to change the world? And that's sort of my point that you never know you're going to change the world. Something I write about in the book is when my grandfather died at the age of 58, he thought he had failed too, right? He thought it was over. He thought it hadn't worked. He didn't know his children. would get to Canada. Didn't know his son would get elected to office.

He didn't know his daughter-in-law would be a candidate for office. He didn't know his granddaughter would be a multi-endorsed candidate for office. I mean, my sister didn't win her election, but certainly should have. She didn't know I'd be, he didn't know I'd be me. So the point is these small acts of courage, these things you do, they don't have to bear fruit for you immediately. They don't have to, you don't have to sit in the shade of the tree that you planted. Someone will.

And that's largely what that message meant to me. As I retraced his steps, I realized that Gandhi and my grandfather and others had worked so hard to change a world that they never saw change the way they wanted it to. And yet the world did change. And so today I think about the same thing. I think it looks hard out there. It looks daunting. But this world too can change. It can change in the right way.

And it can change because of little things you do that you don't even realize the impact of. Well, look, I really want to thank you, Ali Valshii, for joining us today. You know, I'm just going to take the moment to say, you know, I interact with a lot of people in media and politics. There's very, very few people, very short list who have the combination of intelligence, integrity, and kind of a values compass that infuses everything you do, frankly, from like a segment on TV to this book you wrote. I really encourage people to pick it up. small acts of courage. I think you've got a taste of both the incredible stories and the powerful message in it. So thanks so much for joining us today and we look forward to, you know, being interviewed by you. I'm sure you and I will have opportunity very soon to talk again.

I'm always deeply appreciative of your willingness to do that and to get into tough conversations because that's the only way we're getting through this. Absolutely. Well, the last time actually I remember I was on after Natali Bennett, we've made for an interesting one two punch. Well, look, best of luck with the book lunch, and I'll talk to you soon. Thanks, Fred. Okay, so obviously for the last several years, women's reproductive rights have been under attack here in the United States. It will be a huge issue in this election in the United States. But it's not just an issue here. It's also an issue around the world, including in Europe. And I'm really, really happy to welcome to Ponce

the World, my friend Nika Kovac, who is a Slovenian activist and director of the Research Institute of March about her campaign to protect abortion access across Europe. So Nika, thanks so much for joining us from Slovenia. Yeah, hey. So you are one of the leaders of a campaign called My Voice, My Choice. And so let's just start by asking you, what is the campaign about? What are you trying to accomplish in the upcoming European parliamentary elections in June? Yeah, so basically the state of abortion in Europe is also urgent.

In Poland, women still die in hospitals. In Malta, if you do an abortion, you go for three years to prison. In Austria, abortion is part of panel code, so doctors need to learn it on papayas. And 20 million women doesn't have the access to abortion. And in one moment, we started to think when we saw what happened with you guys in US that we need to protect abortion on European level. And because politicians and bureaucrats don't do this, we decided to take things in our own hands. So we proposed an European citizen initiative, which is basically establishing a mechanism,

which is allowing women to go to countries where abortion is legal and do it there on the costs of European Union. We need to collect one million signatures. We are doing it for 10 days. We have 140,000 of them. It's the fastest growing initiative. And our plan is to do this till European elections. And you've, I mean, we saw some success in France, right, in codifying abortion rights. I mean, what would success look like for your campaign, you know, getting those million signatures and what kind of momentum you're trying to generate?

Yeah. So basically, like, the first moment is, yes, to collect the signatures. we keep saying that in every European country, the support for abortion is more than 60%. And the second fact, which is connected with our campaign, is that we are also inviting people to go and to vote on European elections. Because about our initiative, the next European Parliament will be deciding, and there is a huge threat of far right.

And we are saying to the people, like, these elections are also about reproductive rights. So please vote for the candidates who are supporting our initiative and success for us would be double. So firstly, to collect the signatures and secondly, to elect politicians who will actually support the initiative and who will allow that Europe changes their approach to the abortion. And so in the U.S., obviously, this is a very partisan issue. we see the rise of a number of far-right parties across Europe. As you're heading into the European parliamentary elections, I think there's been some concerns that the far-right might make gains. How political is the issue of abortion in Europe?

Do you see these far-right parties as threatening reproductive health? Is this a voting issue for the far-right as well as people on the progressive side of politics? There is a huge support to abortion in the European. society. So often far-right parties actually lie that they are supporting abortion or they're quiet till they come into the power. We all know Georgia Meloni and what she is doing now. Like last week she decided that she will basically allow anti-abortion activists to enter the clinics where abortions are happening. In Italy, 63% of doctors already is not performing abortions. Now it will be even worse. So basically the far right is attacking the bodies of women. Basically, the far right

is using abortion as their momentum, but not out loud. And what we want to do with this campaign is to show that this is a political issue and basically to show that people don't want to vote for that kind of shit that is happening now in Italy or in Poland or in Malta. And we hope that we will achieve this. But what we are seeing is like by the amount of volunteers, people who are joining the campaign, that this is basically a common value in the Europe, that protecting abortion rights is something that we stand for it, and that people will be voting against politicians who are attacking this. And do you think, is this in the U.S., I think, you know, the abortion issue, unfortunately,

because of what happened with the overturning of Roe v. Wade, you saw more and more women and young people voting and mobilizing around this issue. it seemed like in Poland, for instance, women were pretty important to the election victory, surprising electoral victory of the opposition there. Do you feel like this is an issue that might help swing elections more broadly in Europe if people feel like their rights are on the ballot in the way that we've seen here in the U.S.? Yes, like abortion was the main topic before Polish elections. Polish women strike with Houter, two groups who were fighting.

fighting for abortion and who are fighting to change the authoritarian government in Poland. And one of the first promises of the newly elected politicians was to legalize abortion. These things still didn't happen. People are furious. They are still waiting that someone will die in Polish hospitals. So they are saying, like, now we need to take again things into our own hands, force the politicians in national parliaments to change things, but also on the European level. And for example, France, which is a totally different story, they just put abortion in the constitution.

Again, the feeling between the people is the same. Like, we did it. Like, it's something that we are super proud on it. But now let's force Europe to do the same. And people also understand that their responsibility is also to watch out who we will elect. And if I joke a little bit, like, we don't want to become U.S. in Europe in a sense of, like, what happens to you and how you lost your rights. Well, that's, you know, I mean, you don't want to become us, trust me,

if it involves Donald Trump or overturning rights. All right, I got to ask you a couple more things. You, you know, I've known you for a few years now. What people don't know is you're also like basically like the, in addition to being an extraordinary person, critical to some of the recent successes in Slovenia. My question for you is, what can the world learn from Slovenia when it comes to democracy?

democracy. Yes, Slovenia is a 2 million country. We have two famous people in Slovenia. One is Melania Trump and the other is Luca Donchich from basketball. But I hope that people would know our country by defeating the authoritarian leader that we had, Janice, Yanzaa. Civil society led the fight. We went on the street and we did referendums with a really positive content.

We said we don't want to be angry. We want to show people what is the vision for tomorrow. And we did like bracelets, friendship bracelets before Taylor Swift. We were having concerts, we were having a lot of fun, but also being really clear about what is like our political demand, which is like social state, free school system, free health system, and also like politicians who are not attacking you. We managed to change the government. right now I have a feeling that we are in this period of like transition where you can still

see authoritarian being super alive in the institutions but a center being closed in a sense of like not having like its own agenda and knowing that they need to be here for the people and that I always say that Slovenia taught me that people are not stupid that they will vote for the leaders who will actually deliver who will actually do stuff and I hope that Slovenian governments is becoming aware of this because elections are in two years, and those guys keep coming back. So I don't want to fight again in two years. Yeah. Well, as people can see, you brought a lot of joy and enthusiasm and energy to these campaigns.

You and I were both in Stockholm for a conference. What I remember about that among the incredibly important conference you're at is idle time to kill. and I went to some museum with like pretty austere art from the Viking days. You went to the ABA Museum. Would you recommend that? I felt like I missed out. Yeah, Ava Museum is great. You can dance and sing there.

And like one thing which I keep saying, like to all the people around me is that like the fight that we are leading is like a terrible fight. I think that we lose all the time. We do stupid mistakes. We try with campaigns that don't come together. We have the super hard election year in front of us where I think we can mostly lose. But like one thing that we have is to dance and fight and have fun. So I hope that like fight for democracy become more fun so that more people will join us,

not like gigs like we are. Yeah. Well, how can people join? So like to end this last question is like if people want to get involved, if they want to sign on to your campaign, what's the best way for them to do that? Yeah, so we're really desperate and we want every single person who is listening to join us and help us. We have an Instagram page, which is my voice, my choice, web page. We need volunteers, but also if people just share the link to sign, the initiative would be great.

And to remind your friends to vote on European elections against far right, against the fascist symbols in European Union is something that it's a good beginning. Okay, so everybody should check out my voice, my choice on Instagram, on social media. We have a bunch of listeners in Europe. You should sign up, support in every weekend. Nika, we wish Slovenia the best of luck with Luca Dantzic is starting his series tonight. I know we've got a Eurovision competition tonight. It says a lot, a lot going on for Slovenia right now. And we really thank you for your work and for joining us here.

Yeah, thank you, Ben, for having me. Okay, so you already know the stakes of the 2024 114. if you're listening to this podcast. But if you want to help, but don't know where to start, Vote Save America has you covered. In 2020, Vote Save America mobilized over 300,000 people to take action, and this year with the stakes still so high, they're going big again.

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