Pod Save the World - White House extremists

Episode Date: June 1, 2018

Tommy talks with journalist Mehdi Hasan about a troubling series of hires on Trump's National Security Council staff of individuals with far-right, paranoid, Islamaphobic views. Then they talk about the situation in Gaza now that the protests have ended and TV cameras have left.

Welcome back to Pots Save the World. This is Tommy Vitor. Thank you guys for listening. My guest today is Medi Hassan. He's a columnist for The Intercept. He's a really smart journalist. And we talked about two big things. One is the fact that Donald Trump and John Bolton keep hiring more and more radical individuals to work on the National Security Council, not just radical in terms of being hawkish or warmongers or what have you, but also people who believe truly fringe paranoid conspiracy theories that are often Islamophobic and are having real impacts on policymaking. The second thing we talk about is this ongoing situation in Gaza. It has fallen from the headlines somewhat, but the problem has not gotten better, and maybe gives us an update on that and some history. Medi is someone who has been critical of Obama, has been critical of Trump. It was a spirited back and forth, and I really appreciated him doing the show.

So here is the interview. Welcome back to Pod Save the World. My guest today is Medi Hassan. He's a columnist for The Intercept, where he hosts the Deconstructed podcast, which is fantastic. The last episode was with Edward Snowden, so congrats on a very big day. get there. A lot better than the one you had two before, which was me, some hack. You were also the host of Al Jazeera English's program Up Front, a contributing editor of the New Statesman, and you've been named one of the 500 most influential Muslims in the world and one of the 100

most influential Britons on Twitter. The Twitter list is dubious to say the least. But thank you so much for doing the show. It's great to talk to you again. Thanks very much, Tommy. Great to be on a great show. So let's start by talking about radical extremism. No, I'm not talking about ISIS. I'm talking about John Bolton and the new National Security Council staff. A quick refresher, folks who have not listened to the show before, might not know that the National Security Council or NSC is the way the president convenes all the relevant people to make foreign policy decisions. You gather the Secretary of State, defense, CIA, et cetera. They come together in the situation room and you hash out issues and try to come to agreement. The National Security

Advisor, John Bolton, the National Security Advisor and the NSC staff, they are incredibly powerful. And that comes from being down the hall from the President of the United States, but also determining what gets discussed by the NSC, what policy papers are in Trump's case. I guess policy listicles get sent up to him for review. And that power could be easily abused, which makes some of the more recent hires. Bolton has made troubling to, say the least. So let's start with the new NSC chief of staff, Fred Flights. I think I'm saying that right. There's a lot to unpack with this guy.

He comes from helping lead a group called the Center for Security Policy. We'll get into them more soon. But they believe all kinds of odious shit, starting with pushing a conspiracy theory that Islamists have infiltrated the U.S. government in a plot to take over the country. So, Medi, given that Donald Trump was recently elected president, how do you think the Islamist takeover plot is going? It's not going so well, is it? I'm not sure how well it ever went in the past. But it is kind of scary for those of us who are Muslims living in the US. I happen to have the misfortune of being a Muslim immigrant living in Donald Trump's America.

And it's worrying when you see the cast of characters that he continues to recruit to his White House, to his NSC, to his State Department, to his CIA, to his Pentagon. And they go through waves, Tommy because Fred Flights and John Bolton and Mike Pompeo are kind of a round two or maybe round three. You remember when he came to office, he had General Mike Fleming. in, who I interviewed a couple of times, who is a kind of personally actually a very nice guy, but is a complete raving anti-Muslim bigot. You know, tweets things like fear of Muslims is rational. And he had people like him. He had Sebastian Gorker.

Have we all forgotten Sebastian Gorker with his dodgy PhD from Hungary and his kind of obsession with Muslims? And now he's got this guy, Fred Flights, Chief of Staff of the National Security Council, Chief of Staff to John Bolton, who is just, I mean, he's a definition of a wingnut, a complete, not just a bigot, Tommy. I mean, bigots are bad enough. A conspiracy theorist. Right.

You know, you know, detached from reality. These are people who make stuff up about what's going on in Europe, what's going on in government, wild conspiracy theories. So to put some more meat on the bones of what they've made up. I mean. Okay. So Fred Flights is a guy who works at CSP. You mentioned the Center for Security Policy where he was senior vice president for policy. The SPLC, the Southern Poverty Law Center, calls the CSP a hate group.

The Anti-Defamation League, the ADL, calls it a conspiracy promoting Islamophobic organization. They promote things like, and Fred has promoted things like, in Europe, there are no go zones, where if you're non-Muslim, you can't go in there. Most of the people in those cities like Paris, London, Birmingham have said, that's complete BS. It's been debunked heavily. The British Prime Minister, Conservative, David Cameron at the time, said, this is nonsense. Idiots believe this only. These are guys who have promoted the idea of a clash of civilisation. He co-authored a report in 2015, Tommy, called a plan for victory over the global jihad movement.

in which he claimed that the majority of Muslims promote or support jihad. A majority of the world's 1.8, 1.9 billion Muslims apparently promote jihad. He says that British Muslims don't integrate. That's why they're all terrorists. He says we should surveil Muslim communities in Michigan and Minnesota because they're responsible for measles outbreaks. Did you hear this one? Because apparently Somali communities don't like vaccines,

and that's causing a measles outbreak in Minnesota, which is ironic because he works for Donald Trump now, who is an anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist. That's right. That's right. The CSP also pushed around a widely debunked survey that suggested a quarter of Muslim support violence against Americans. Trump actually cited that survey during his campaign

when he was arguing for the Muslim ban. So that's the NSC chief of staff. Just quickly on Bolton. I mean, he is a terrible record, too. We don't talk enough about his anti-Muslim record. We talk about him being a war monger, but Bolton's from a very similar kind of anti-Muslim fringe. Yeah, oh, absolutely.

I mean, he was the chairman of the Gatestone Institute, which is an organization that claims Muslims have established micro states governed by Islamic Sharia law through France. That's bullshit. He said Muslim refugees have brought, quote, a rape culture and exotic diseases with them to Germany. He says the UK is on the cusp of becoming an Islamist colony. Yeah, this is the organization that he chairs.

Amazing. So I guess, let me start with a question that maybe is hard to answer. I don't know how to process someone believing or working for an organization that promotes ideas that are that paranoid and that are clearly conspiracy. theories. I mean, is this a mental health issue? Is this calculated dishonesty to push a political agenda? I genuinely don't get it. Like, what do you make of this? I think it's definitely calculated. If you look at the quote-unquote Islamophobia industry and my friend Nathan Lean has written a brilliant book about the Islamophobia industry, there is, you know, clear connecting of the dots.

None of these guys live in isolation. There's a reason why when Trump became president, he brought these people in from the fringes and they all keep hiring each other to go work at the White House and elsewhere, because they have been part of a fringe which includes the Gateson Institute, the Center for Security Policy. Act for America, Tommy, is another huge grassroots group run by a woman called Bridget Gabriel, who says that any practicing Muslim cannot be a loyal citizen of the United States. And now you might think that sounds batshit crazy, but General Flynn sat on her board. Mike Pompeo, the new Secretary of State, accepted an award from her organization. So these guys have gone from the fringes to the mainstream under Trump, and it is very calculated.

It's well funded. It's well organized. And these people are obsessed with the kind of, you know, like the anti-communist industry was in the 70s, 80s, you know, reds under every bed. There are Muslim Brotherhood agents under every bed. You know, when you were in government, they were claiming Obama was a secret Muslim, Huma Aberdeen, Hillary Clinton's aid at the State Department was part of a Muslim Brotherhood plot to take over the US. And that was what Frank Gaffney, who's the head of the Center for Security Policy, was saying at the time. So there is a real issue that these people, have put together these conspiracy theories for naked partisan ideological reasons. A lot of it has to do with the Middle East Tommy. A lot of these groups are supporters of the Liquid Party in Israel. They take a very hardline view on Israel, Palestine, and they've imported a lot of that rhetoric about Muslim terrorists into the US political discourse.

And Obama being president just gave them kind of huge jet fuel, you know, rocket boosters. And Trump becoming president has brought them in from the fringes. Before they were just on the fringes, having conferences summit saying awful things on Fox. now they're making policy in a place you used to work at the National Security Council. Yeah. So I'm going to throw one more name into the mix because I think you mentioned Frank Gaffney. And I really don't think you can understand this sort of fringe conspiracy theory-filled foreign policy world unless you know who Frank Gaffney is.

He's a former Reagan aide. He founded the Center for Security Policy, which we've been talking about. And he's the intellectual father of a lot of these paranoid, nutty, dangerous ideas. And as you said, the Republican establishment sort of viewed him that way until John Bolton helped rehabilitate his reputation. But again, this other poverty law center called him one of America's most notorious Islamophobes. He thinks the Muslim Brotherhood is trying to destroy the U.S. from within. He blamed Saddam Hussein for the Oklahoma City bombing. He's a birther who said that Obama getting elected while being Muslim was, quote, the most consequential bait and switch since Adolf Hitler.

He claimed Obama was a practicing Muslim. He said it many times. And now he tries to run away from that when he's called out on it. Tommy, he's come up with this phrase, which is a really clever, if dangerous phrase, which is civilization jihad, right? So you've heard of jihad, which many Muslims would say doesn't mean holy war,

it means a struggle, but many terrorists have taken it to mean only holy war, only the killing of non-Muslims. He's taken the phrase jihad and he's applied this word civilization jihad. So what he refers to is he says

there's a bunch of Muslims living in America, you know, a lot of them, a majority may be, and they're all sympathizing with the Muslim Brotherhood organization in the Middle East and they're all trying to take over America and impose Islamic law.

And that's what he calls civilization jihad. We're not doing it violently apparently, but we're doing it secretly behind the scenes. He claims that Muslim Brotherhood agents have infiltrated the U.S. government. He claims Obama was a secret Muslim. And, you know, this is a guy so extreme that back in 2011, CPAC, I think, kicked him out. They said you couldn't speak. And that's where we've come to now that full-circled in 2018, a Republican president is relying on his guys for staff members. And in fact, I think he was actually an advisor to or a member

of the Trump transition team. He was. Until his name was spotted and then they quickly kind of, even, he was too extreme even for them. But look, if CPAC turned you away, what does that tell you about how extreme you? Yeah, none of this is funny, but this is so crazy. You can't help laugh. In 2010, CPAC, the sort of crazy right-wing conference that we watch for a few days on TV every year, banned Gaffney from speaking because Frank Gaffney accused Grover Norquist of having ties to the Muslim Brotherhoods. But as you said, with Trump and with Breitbart, they found a home again. And Gaffney spoke at CPAC in 2015 and 16. And so, Here's what's so depressing, Tommy, that, okay, we can laugh at the far right and we can say, look, this is a, this is the far right fringe and, you know, they're absurd. Are they mentally ill? Are they, you know, dishonest ideologues? But what really what upsets me is that Islamophobia and anti-Muslimbigh has become so normalized and mainstreamed in the US that, quote-unquote, the liberal media, I believe, haven't done enough to call these people out. I agree.

Or draw attention to it. You're very admirably, you know, talking about this top of your show at the top of this interview with me. But you look at the New York Times, I think there were one or two articles about Pompeo and Bolton's. ties to Islamophobes right at the beginning and then they've moved on. And when you see the kind of tweets about these people from media organizations, it always says something like the hawkish John Bolton or, you know, even the warmonger John Bolton, you hear for some liberals. Yeah, that is true. But what about the anti-Muslim bigot John Bolton? Right. The anti-Muslim bigot, Mike Pompeii. We'd be saying anti-Semite, if they were saying this stuff about Jewish people and they were nominated, we would be saying the anti-Semitic Bolton is being. But when it comes to anti-Muslim bigotry, they get a kind of a pass. Yeah, and I don't understand why. And honestly, it's worse than that,

because Islamophobia is not new for Donald Trump. I mean, as we said, his political rise. It's integral to his. Yeah, this rumor about Obama being born in Kenya and that he was a secret Muslim. By the way, implicit in that is that if he were Muslim, it would be bad, right? Which is not accurate. Which famously Colin Powell had to shoot down in 2008. Right.

But you look at that, you look at Trump. And not only did he not pay any cost for maligning a religion or smearing a president, he benefited enormously from it. And I worry that that suggests that others will see that as a playbook to, follow. Well, I mean, the tragedy, Tommy, is that even when Trump was doing it, let's be very clear, he was doing it in the most brazen way in 2015, 2016. But other Republicans, quote, unquote, mainstream Republicans were doing it too. I mean, Ted Cruz was talking about surveilling Muslim areas, if you remember. Marco Rubio was talking about shutting down Muslim cafes

that he thought might be extremist hotbeds. Others were doing it in their kind of anti-Syrian refugee pronouncers, which were really dog whistles about Islamophobic, you know, about Muslims in Islam. They were another form of Islam. phobia coded. So it's not as if, you know, Trump, Trump was both a symptom of the Islamophobia and bigotry that existed in the party and a driver of it and it kind of has pushed it into the mainstream. But as I say, it's, it's not just about the far right. It's about what do the rest of us do about it? When are we going to take it much more seriously? And I think, you know, credit to Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton, they did it in their own kind of weird ways. I wasn't a

great fan of the way they handled it. But at least they tried to call out the Islamophobia very late in the day. But, you know, I wish more people on the left, liberals, Democrats, had taken this problem seriously much more earlier when Obama was being smeared and when all these things were being said on Fox News. Maybe we wouldn't be in the situation we are today. I agree. I mean, you mentioned Mike Flynn earlier, Trump's first national security divisor. He believes some pretty out-there, Islamophobic conspiracy theories. And luckily, he flamed out, in H.R. McMaster, Clean House. Yeah, he's like Roseanne in a military uniform. Yeah. But now, as you said, we're back where we started. In fact, it's worse with Bolton.

And is the lesson here that Flynn and Fred Flights and Frank Gaffney are there a better representation of core Republican foreign policy beliefs than the people we assumed were the mainstream like an HR McMaster? That's a really good question. And I think H.R. McMaster, one of the reasons we know he went is because he was one of the few who resisted this obsession with Islam. You remember he tried to get Trump in his address to Congress not to say Islamic terrorism. But Trump ignored him. That was like literally in the first or second week of the job, he got shot down. And the fact that he was. He's gone now. The fact that Mattis is so blatantly sidelined and the fact that these guys, you know, it is a Bolton foreign policy. It is a Pompeo foreign policy is very worrying because it has implications for the domestic scene where Muslim Americans are more afraid than ever before. You know, I go to gatherings of Muslim Americans with a religious gatherings, community gathering. You know, people joke about being intern, being put in camps. And we can laugh about that. But that's pretty depressing situation to being where minority communities having to kind of resort to black humor to get through this situation. And then, of course, course abroad, you know, the more Islamophobic you are, the more likely you're like to go to war in Muslim countries. We know that. Islamophobia has played a crucial role in softening up American public opinion for wars abroad. And that is what Bolton specializes in. How aware do you think the broader Muslim world is about people like Bolton or Gaffney or flights in their roles in these governments? Is that something that is written about in newspapers abroad or things, you know,

certainly not the New York Times, as you mentioned, but people are aware of in other places? I think increasingly so, thanks to social media, and I think amongst the younger people, definitely, amongst younger, maybe more educated folks, definitely. I think obviously there's a separate issue in places like the Arab world where, you know, even without Bolton, there is a sense that the United States government is pretty Islamophobic. I think even when your boss was in charge, they would have had some pretty anti-views about, you know, drone strikes and the rest and support for Israel, which happened on Obama's watch, which would have been seen through the lens at times justifiably, at times unjustifiably as, you know, Islamophobic or crudely. stereotyping a part of the world. I think when it comes to these individuals, what's interesting is definitely in Muslim communities in America, there's a lot of talk about these people,

no doubt about that. Abroad, what's interesting is you have to divide, of course, between governments and peoples, especially in the non-democratic parts of the Muslim world. So it's interesting, don't you think, that Pompeo's been appointed, Bolton's been appointed, not a peep from the Saudis or the Emirati

or even the Turkish government or the Egyptian government. These people have said outrageous things about Islam, Muslims, the Quran, have supported groups who have said outrageous things. And yet Muslim governments, Muslim majority world country governments, have turned a blind eye, which has pissed off a lot of Muslims and reminded them, you know what? And I talked to a lot of Muslim American communities who used to maybe get funding for their mosques or community centres from Saudi Arabia or the UA.

And there's a lot of anger that, you know, we've just been thrown under the bus for the sake of your arms deals, oil deals, Iran obsession, that all these countries are willing to turn a blind eye. I find it ironic that when Trump made his shithole country remark, within 24 hours, I think every country in the continent of Africa or almost every country got together and put out a joint statement saying this is outrageous. And yet, despite him filling his administration with Islamophobes, I don't see the members of the Muslim majority world or the Arab world coming together to condemn Trump for his bigotry or the appointment of bigots. And that's what's so depressing. That was literally my next question. I mean, I sit here and I imagine the phone call to the Saudis or to the UAE or to Pakistan or to any Muslim majority country. We're asking them to do something hard to help the United States with a policy priority.

How is that call received when you know these people are whispering in Trump's ear and making major decisions and pushing things in a bad direction for an entire religion of people? Yeah. And as I say, I think, sadly, anyone who thinks that some of these governments have the interests of the broader Muslim world or the interests of fighting bigotry at the forefront of their minds is misled. They don't care. Right now, most of those Arab governments, Gulf governments, are obsessed with Iran. therefore they will do whatever deal needs to be done, whether it's with Benjamin Netanyahu,

whether it's with John Bolton, they will do whatever deal has to be because their number one threat is Iran. Or they perceive it to be. They don't give a damn about Islamophobia. They don't give a damn about the rise of the far right in Europe or the US. That's not their concern. Why would they give a damn? Obviously, on the ground, people hear and see this stuff, and that has a huge, you know, that has huge ramifications. When Trump is saying Islam hates us, oh yeah, everybody in the Muslim world knows about that.

And there's no coincidence that, you know, even during the election campaign, Tommy, al-Shabaab, the Somali terror group, were putting out recruitment videos using Trump clips. We know that ISIS and other groups have done similar things. When I interviewed General Hayden, the former head of the CIA a few couple years ago during the campaign, he said it clearly. You know, there is no doubt if you're a Muslim terrorist group, you're going to use Donald Trump as a recruiting sergeant. And that's fundamentally, that's what I always say to kind of, you know, people in the political world, just forget the morality of it for a second. I don't expect you to give a damn about, you know, bigotry or Muslim communities or marginalized people.

But even from a national security perspective, this Islam. homophobia is bonkers. Yes, it really is. I mean, that's something that Obama tried to address in his Cairo speech. And that was when, yeah, the Frank Gaffney's of the world started accusing him of apologizing for America or being a secret Muslim. I mean, this has been insidious from the very beginning. To your point about the mainstreaming of these abhorrent views, these organizations, like Frank Gaffney's think tank in, with air quotes, they could, they could not operate without money and donations. And we don't have a full list of them of donors. But in 2014, Salon, dot com got a hold of a list of contributors from 2013. It included the following, 25 grand from

Boeing, 15 grand from General Dynamics, money from Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grunman, Raytheon, GE, then a bunch of fringe foundations. How is it possible that big businesses like those are willing to turn a blind eye to Islamophobia and support someone this disgusting? I think it's probably a mixture of three different things. I think it's number one. A lot of it is ignorance. These guys portray themselves in D.C. on the circuit as kind of security think tanks, security groups. You know how easy it is to get a think tank up in Washington, D.C., and say hawkish things and get money. And obviously, they have the credentials. You know, Gaffney is a nutter. He's a conspiracy theorist, but he's also a former Assistant Secretary of Defense under Ronald Reagan.

And that still goes along the way in this town. You know, Bolton for all his sins before being rehabilitated by Trump was a former senior Bush administration official. So these guys know how to open doors. They have that kind of quote-unquote security credibility, which allows all these companies to be ignorant about some of the more bigoted stuff that they push. I also think, of course, you mentioned a lot of these companies are defense contractors. These guys are all pushing for war. Sorry to sound like a lefty conspiracy theorist myself, but, you know, war is a good for the defense economy. And number three, I would say that, you know, it comes back to what you and I said earlier, which is not many people take Islamophobia seriously. We, you know, Muslims are among the few

groups still left today where it's perfectly acceptable to be bigoted about them in, you know, in general stereotypical terms. I did a documentary in the, in the UK, Tommy, when I was a TV producer back in England. And we went out on the streets in a shopping mall. And we took headlines from the British newspapers about Muslims, like outrageous headlines about Muslims. And we changed the word Muslim to Jew, black and gay. And we showed people this.

We just literally stopped people on the street and said, what do you think about this headline? They were like, ah, that's outrageous. That's horrific. And then we kind of turned the paper over and said, here's the real headline. It's a real headline. It just says Muslim.

And they're like, ah, okay. And there's a sense that, you know, Muslims have become in the West the one group where it's just, okay to make sweeping statements about, to have generalized views about what a threat they pose or how different they are. And you can say things about Muslims in Washington, D.C., in London, in Paris that you could not say about gay communities or Jewish communities or African-American communities unless you're Rosanne. You could not say it. Roseanne got punished for it rightly. Actually, Roseanne, Tommy, just reminded him as I rambled on. Rosanne made a statement about

Valerie Jarrett, which got her fired, right? What did she say? She said that she's the product of a union between Planet of the Apes and the Muslim Brotherhood. And we all rightly got worked up about a black woman being called her ape. But let's be clear, if she hadn't mentioned Planet of the Apes, Tommy, do you think she'd still be in a job if she just said Muslim Brotherhood? I suspect she would be. You're right. You're right. It is glaring and obvious.

And what you did with changing the headline, the words the headline, I'm glad you did that, and that's important. I also just want to remind people that this is sort of a, there's a cultural problem here. And cultural problems can often be the easiest ones to fix. I mean, look how far we've gone on, you know, gay rights or a whole host of, you know, social issues in this country. So it's the kind of thing where if you're listening and you hear someone say this shit, if you say something in response, it actually can make a difference. Definitely. Let's turn to a much less, emotional, less fraught issue, Gaza.

Yeah. So calm. On Deconstructed, you did a great episode recently. I believe you had Rula Gibriel and Linda Sarsour that I listen to and I recommend people listen to. And one of the things I like about talking with you is you're someone who was a fierce critic at times of the Obama administration. And we don't always agree on stuff. But I think it's important for my listeners to hear your perspective and criticism from the left. And I think that's why they should listen to the show.

So back to Gaza, because of all the U.S. embassy opening, the ongoing protests, the world was paying a lot of attention to the plaintiff of the Palestinian people for a small window of time. And now they are not. But that does not mean things are calm or better or okay. militants are launching mortars at Israel. The Israeli defense forces are responding with airstrikes. How worried are you about the status quo in Gaza today and the likelihood that it will get worse? Okay, so before I answer that question,

I'm going to be a party pooper, not party pooper, I'm going to be a pedant. And I'm going to pick on your question when you said militants are firing mortars and the Israelis are responding. For a lot of people who follow the debate over Israel-Palestine, this is a source of great frustration that comes to media coverage of the conflict. I'm sure you've heard this before.

this idea that all of the conflict is always framed as Palestinians attacking Israelis responding. Palestinians launching terrorist attacks, Israelis defending themselves. And A, completely unfair, but also inaccurate in the sense of, for example, this week's exchange of rocket fire and mortar fire actually came after the Israelis killed members of Islamic Jihad and Hamas. And Islamic Jihad and Hamas said, we're going to respond now. There's a reason they hadn't actually launched any rockets or mortars for I think three months, four months of all these protests. And they did it this week because the Israelis killed members of their group. Now, I'm not saying the Israelis shouldn't kill members of their group. I'm not justifying their rocket attacks.

But just the order of events is very important here because it always, in the U.S. media, in the U.S. media, Palestinians always seem to come across like mad, irrational people who just embrace violence at a particular moment for no good reason at all. And I think that's part of the problem in terms of our coverage and understanding what's going on. And you've spoke, I've heard your shows on Gaza. You know very well what's going on in Gaza, the siege in Gaza. The blockade of Gaza. And actually, a lot of what happens, the violence that comes out of Gaza or the West Bank, whether you agree with it, don't agree with it, whether it's terrorism or not terrorism. There is a reason for it.

It's not just kind of because there's a culture of death as some supporters of Israel try and kind of defame the Palestinian people with. That's fair. No. And so let me ask you my second question first, because it's about language. And then we'll go back to the first one. Because I thought you did an interesting explainer video for the Washington Post about two words that you don't. hear much in the U.S. when we talk about the Israeli-Palestin conflict, which are occupation and annexation. Why are those words so important as we talk about the broader language of how

this conflict is discussed? And how do those words tell a bigger story about how we got to today? I'm so glad you asked that question because it is key and there are airbrushed, unfortunately, from the media coverage and therefore you cannot understand what is going on. So, for example, when we see Israelis shooting Palestinians in Gaza and the Israelis say, this is self-defense, every country has a right to defend itself. People who don't have a dog in this conflict who are not pro-Israeli or pro-Palestin, they might hear that and say, yeah, that's a fair point.

Every country has a right to defend it. Of course they do. The problem is, unless you talk about the occupation, unless you contextualize it with the occupation, it doesn't make sense to then criticize Israel. Israel has a right to defend itself inside its own borders, Tommy, just like any other country does. It doesn't have a right to defend itself on someone else's land. An occupier doesn't have the right to defend itself.

And occupied people do under international law. Any occupied people has a right to defend itself, even militarily, even violently. The problem is when the Israelis are shooting Gazans in Gaza from Gaza, that is a problem. That is an occupying force. And therefore, it's not self-defense anymore. Just as in your everyday life, you can defend yourself on your own property from an intruder. You can't go and shoot someone in the middle of the street and say, well, I'm defending my property. And that is the same problem here in Gaza.

Gaza is occupied. I know the Israelis try and tell us it isn't, but the United Nations says it's occupied. common sense tells us it's occupied. Israel controls three of the four borders. It controls territorial waters. It controls the airspace. It controls the population register, entry and exit points. It blockades the strip of land. It is occupied territory, just as the West Bank is occupied territory, just as East Jerusalem is occupied territory. So without understanding occupation, you can't understand why people are so upset, so angry, so frustrated. When the embassies move to Jerusalem and people say, well, what's wrong with Israel having the embassy in their capital? Every other

country gets to have the U.S. embassy in its capital, but every other country's capital doesn't include occupied territory. So unless you have occupation as part of every conversation, you can't understand why Palestinians are so upset, so angry, wanting to resist, and you can't understand why Israel is doing so many awful things. Some people go further and use the word apartheid. Is that a word you use or think is appropriate? Well, it's interesting. So I wrote a piece about this for the intercept last year, because the UN had done a report saying there's apartheid in the occupied territories and they had to withdraw the report from pressure from Israel and the US government and others. Yeah, I would use the word apartheid in the occupied territories in particular, not just

because it's true. And apartheid refers to the segregation of peoples. It refers to different legal systems for different people, which is completely what goes on in the occupied territories when you see settler-only roads, when you see Israeli settlers treated under the civilian justice system inside of Israel, whereas Palestinians are treated by the Israeli military justice system. and there's many pieces of evidence which suggest that it is apartheid in the occupied territories. People like Desmond Tutu,

South African anti-aparadite activists have come and said, this is apartheid. But what's interesting is many leading Israelis have said, this is apartheid. Many leading Israelis have warned that if you carry on down this road. Ehud Olmert said,

if we do not give back the occupied territories, this will be apartheid. Ehud Barak has said, while this continues, it's very hard to get away from the apartheid label. Prominent former Israeli prime ministers have used the A word. And it upsets a lot of people.

people because we all hated apartheid South Africa, but people who have been on the ground in the occupied territories have seen it with their own eyes have no doubt about the fact that this is apartheid. Yeah. So I think that was a very helpful bit of background about how frustrated people who live in Gaza are, how long this has been a problem, how 50 years, Tommy, the longest military occupation in the world. 1967, right? Yeah. So now that both sides are shooting at each other again, which has happened before, but things get calmed down. I mean, how worried are you about this getting worse? Because, you know, there were this a well-planned series of protests that got a lot of attention and awareness, but it's just, it's remarkable how quickly the coverage has seemed to fade.

Yeah, and I am very worried about it because, unfortunately, you just need to look at recent history. There is a, when we say a war in Gaza, again, coming back to language, I feel very uncomfortable. I'm a journalist. I use short hands as well. A war in Gaza, I've used it myself. But, you know, it's not a war in Gaza. When the Israelis, a nuclear-armed power with one of the strongest militaries on earth, pounds, a tiny, densely populated area of land where the people have no real weaponry that equips them to defend themselves against the Israeli Air Force. That's not really a war. That's a kind of one-sided bombardment. And you saw that in the wars that have come along, Tommy. We've seen three wars in Gaza, if you can call them wars, 2009, 2012, 2014, which killed thousands

of Palestinians. And I think the ratio of deaths was something like 100, 200 to 1. When we talk about both sides dying. No, the Palestinians died at a rate of kind of 100, 200 to 1. And thousands have been killed. Many more thousands have been injured. Hundreds of thousands of properties, homes, buildings, demolished, damaged over the years in the Gaza Strip. And, you know, the Israelis have a phrase, Tommy. It's called Mowing the Lawn. Israeli security officials use this phrase. It's a really horrible phrase because basically the Palestinians are like weeds who need to be cut down from time to time. And Israeli security officials use this phrase called, we go into Gaza to mow the lawn, and they do this episodically. And I said three times in the last 10 years. So yeah, a lot of people

have been worried that all of this recent episodes have been all about building up to another war. And many of us who criticize Israel for their provocations would say, look, they're looking for another provocation. They're looking for another casaspellai. Just like George Bush and his neocons looked for a casaspellai in Iraq, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his hawks constantly look for casaspellai in the West Bank in Gaza to justify bombing, pounding, invading. And that's been going on, as I said, for the last decade in Gaza. And, you know, you mentioned your boss and my criticism of him. Yeah. You know, I was a huge fan of Obama when he was running for president. I had great hope with many people. And yet, in his transition, the first Gaza war, 2008, December 2008, January

2009, you know, Obama said nothing. He was thinking he was playing golf in Hawaii. And then by the time of his inauguration, the Israeli conveniently shut it down in time for his inauguration. But that then carried on over the period of his presidency. There were three wars in Gaza. all on Obama's watch, all of which directly or indirectly Obama supported, sadly. Well, so let's talk a little more about your views of Obama's approach to the peace process to Gaza, because are there specific moments or missed opportunities along the way that you think he should have capitalized on or should a bigger emphasis have been put on the situation in Gaza? Obviously, there was a huge effort to bring a whole bunch of leaders together, the Israelis, Palestinians,

the Egyptians, Jordanians, us, and host a summit to try to get to a peace process that ultimately failed and crumbled. But, you know, I think it's a fair criticism to say that Gaza was far from front and center in his conversations about the region. Yeah. And there's been this myth now promulgated by the right that Obama threw Israel under the Basque, that Obama was anti-Israel. And the irony is for those of us on the left who criticized Obama over Israel, we were saying, stopped selling Israel so many weapons. I think Obama signed the biggest military aid package to Israel in the history of the United States. Correct. He also, you know, here's take one example, Tommy. In 2014, in the summer of 2014, the Israelis bombed a UN school. They bombed many schools. They kill 500 kids in that summer of

2014 in Gaza. They bombed a UN school and the White House, your former colleague, Josh Ernest, came out and others came out and actually condemned it. They criticized State Department. Actually came out and really firmly criticized it. It was the closest they came to a firm criticism of Israel. And what was interesting is at the same time as rhetorically denouncing an Israeli attack on a UN school in Gaza, they were resupplying the Israel. Air Force with ammunition, with bombs. And that was a real problem for those of us who were saying to Obama, you know, please, you have leverage.

Don't say you don't have leverage. Just because you and Netanyahu don't get along with each other, just because the Israeli right say awful things about you, sometimes racist things about you, the US still fundamentally acts as the arms supplier number one of Israel, as an aid supplier, number two of Israel, as a protector of Israel at the United Nations. And you'll see, do you remember right at the end of his presidency, you know, they abstained on a UN resolution back in December 2016. And we know now that General Michael Flynn and Jared Kushner were trying to talk to the Israelis

and the Russians behind the scenes to stop that from happening. There's a bit of collusion going on with Israel, not just Russia. But what was interesting is, why didn't he do that earlier? I mean, what is even a vote against it? It was an abstention, but, you know, we'll take it. Why didn't he do that earlier on settlements when settlement growth was going up on his watch? When Joe Biden went to Israel and he was insulted by the Israelis, why didn't the American

government stand up for itself? When John Kerry was being humiliated time and time again trying to get peace and win Nobel Peace Prize, why didn't they stand up for themselves? I don't buy this idea that Obama didn't have leverage because him and Beebe didn't get along. The American government does have leverage over these early government. And sadly, maybe because he wanted to get some kind of peace deal, maybe because he was trying to do an Iran nuclear deal. Maybe the most uncharitable explanation, he simply didn't care about the Palestinians. He didn't use that leverage. I think this is a worthwhile and complicated conversation. I mean, I think that we absolutely

have a ton of leverage. I think a lot of it was carrot versus stick, which is to say, a Obama offered BB unbelievable amounts of incentives in terms of military hardware or other political offers to try to get them to have a freeze settlement construction to allow us to get to a series of peace talks. Netanyahu always dragged his feet. Abbas said stupid shit constantly that made it harder that, you know, it never ultimately worked out. They never even had the talks during the period of these freezes. Whether or not there was a real set of punitive measures on the table that wouldn't be quickly vetoed or overturned by Congress, I don't know. I think that's a-

Congress is a fundamental problem. I don't have never disputed that. But, you know, I just, even rhetorically, Tommy, you know, in 2014, summer of 2014, the Israelis are bombing Gaza. They are killing kids. They're shooting kids on the beach who are playing soccer. They are blowing up apartment buildings. They are, you know, blowing up hospitals, ambulances.

It's all well documented by Amnesty International, by Human Rights Watch, by Israeli human rights groups like Bet Salem. They've well-documented stuff. And yet at the same time, Obama and Hillary Clinton are saying, Israel has a right to defend itself. Again, that same mantra, Israel has a right to defend itself. Yes, but defending yourself doesn't justify or explain killing 500 kids in a single summer. Doesn't justify bombing apartment buildings, residential buildings, hospitals, civilian targets. It just doesn't justify a siege of Gaza, which, you know, at one stage, Tommy, I think John Kerry went to Gaza and he asked,

why are you blocking pasta? People don't realize this. The Israelis block pasta from going into Gaza. What weapon of mass destruction do you build with pasta? They blocked cilantro from going into Gaza. What terrorist attack do you mount with cilantro? This is a kind of cruel, petty, but really inhumane practices that were going on and are still going on in Gaza. And the American government, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, even if you say, okay, Congress would have blocked any kind of punitive aid package or punitive arms package.

even rhetorically, they abandon the Palestinians in Gaza in particular. I agree with you that the list of things that are blocked from entering Gaza feels ludicrous and arbitrary at times. I mean, cilantro, that's an insane example. Salonro sucks, let's be honest, but like that's an insane thing. No, cilantro doesn't suck? You talk about it. You talk to a guy who's Indian. You can't do anything with that cilantro.

But I also think that there's a massive disconnect between the language used by the United States government, from Democrats, Republicans, everyone involved, and then the. literal images you will see on the ground of human suffering. There is never a real accounting or understanding or empathy for the individuals who are being hurt as a result of Hamas and their actions, but also bombs landing from the IDF on innocent kids. You know, and it just, it is... Although hopefully that's changing. I mean, slowly, the Democrats seem to be slowly, very slowly, starting to shift the fringes. You see that recently with the recent guards of violence. A handful of senators, only a handful, came out, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Patrick Lehi, slowly, slowly came out and

said, you know, baby steps, this is disproportionate, this is excessive. I mean, I would, I would like to go much further. But still, it's a start. The base is pushing them in the direction of human rights, in the direction of civil liberties. Because this is, you know, people say to me, oh, one state solution, two state solution, where's the border, Jerusalem? And my point is, you know what, that can all be negotiated. What can't be negotiated on our basic human rights? My case for Palestine is not about whether you support one state or two state or whether you, it's about, These are people who deserve basic human rights. And right now, those human rights are not guaranteed.

It's really that simple. And I think the Democratic base now understands that. You've got a lot of progressives in Congress now coming through who understand that. You know, I've interviewed Pramila Jayapal for this week's show, not on the subject of the Middle East, about immigration, rising star congresswoman, but she's part of this kind of faction of progressives who are bringing a much more interesting view to foreign affairs to global policy that the United States made. I agree with you that I think that Netanyahu might have gotten a huge item on his wish list

by getting the embassy moved. But I do think that announcement, and a lot of the things Trump has said about Israel has politicized support for Israel in a way that was never politicized to that degree before. And I think as you look forward to 2020, they're going to be groups putting pressure on candidates from the left

to take a tougher line on Israel, starting with Bernie Sanders. And I think it was 13 senators who sent that letter you're talking about criticizing their conduct in Gaza. And I think long term, it's going to create a political challenge in the U.S.

for the Israeli government, whether it's Netanyahu or whoever comes after. And Bernie himself shifted on this issue, of course. Back in 2014, when the Gaza was going on, he was getting heckled by people at events for not coming out strongly against the Israeli government. And he's moved over the years after conversations with activists, after finding out more about this stuff, and seeing where the party's moving. And I think that's welcome. And yeah, I think there'll be more and more people.

Not enough. I don't think it's, you know, I'm not deluded. I don't think there's going to be some radical transformation on Israel and the U.S. political scene in the next 24 months. but, you know, slowly but surely, you know, what was it your boss used to say about the arc of history? Long, but bends toward justice. Speaking of bending the wrong direction, and this is my last question for you, but I could argue with you about this stuff forever, because it's fascinating. You wrote a piece recently that said the sum total of Donald Trump's actions in the Middle East from Syria to Iran to Bahrain is essentially given a green light to dictators and torturers and the worst actors throughout the region.

How do you think he's enabled them and how is that manifesting on the ground in ways that people can see or that are harmful to, real people in the region or the United States interest. Yeah, no, it's an important point because a lot of people on the left say, well, all American presidents support dictators, which is indisputably true. Barack Obama had a very good relationship with many Middle East autocrats. You know, he supported, you know, it's not like the Americans didn't support the Mubarak government or the Saudi government. But the difference is Obama, even George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, at least, and you don't

have to agree with me, at least they pretended to care about human rights. They went through the motions of condemning bad things when they happened. They talked about democracy in their speeches. They said, oh, you know, human rights matter. At certain meetings, many State Department officials said, well, we can't give you aid unless you fix some of your human rights decisions. That did happen. The problem with Trump now is it's just kind of all bets are off.

Every dictator can do whatever they want, not just without the opposition of Trump, but with the blessing of Trump. And I think this is a big change. And I think, you know, I say to, you know, friends of mine on the left, this is not continuity politics. What he's doing is actually much worse than any previous U.S. administration has done. And the dictators themselves know it. I mean, I write in this Intercept piece that you mention that if you talk to Bahraini activists,

and I mention a couple in the piece, Trump met with the King of Bahrain, which is a very close U.S. ally, has been since well before Trump, but is in the middle of cracking down on its own Arab Spring uprising, has been doing that for seven years now. And it's gotten worse over the last year, they say, because of Trump. That's what the activists say. And they say that when Trump met the King of Bahrain in Saudi Arabia last year, he said, we're going to have great relations with you. You had a few tensions under my predecessor, but none now is basically what Trump said to the king. Within days, they carried out a massacre of opposition activists who were on a peaceful sit-in. And within days, they were calling in human rights lawyers in Bahrain and torturing them. One of them said that when she was being tortured, the torturer in the secret, the Bahraini secret policeman said, we have a green light from Donald Trump.

Imagine torturers quoting Donald Trump as they carry out torture. People say, oh, you're hysterical about Donald Trump. The left are, you know, exaggerate. This is actually happening in the Middle East right now. Talk to the people on the ground. He is quantitatively and qualitatively worse for human rights in some of these countries than any of his predecessors were. And I include George W. Bush in that list.

Obviously, George W. Bush kill loads of Iraqis. People always say to me, oh, Bush is worse than Trump because he carried out Iraq. Well, give him time. Trump's only been president for, yeah. Wouldn't have kind of, you know. Unfortunately, let's see what happens at Iran, God forbid. But, you know, what he's done over the last 18 months in terms of human, human rights abuses. And he went to Saudi Arabia, don't forget, and gave that speech to all of those

kind of autocracies in dictatorships. Do you know in that speech, Tommy, he did not mention the words democracy or human rights once. Not once. And you can say, well, previous president said it, but didn't mean it. But you know what? When an American president says it, it has some value. Not enough, but it does have an impact on the ground. I agree. We got to win these fucking midterms, man. Something, anything to push back. Anything right now will be a silver lining in this kind of dark perpetual cloud, but right now, you know, maybe Kim Kardashian can lead the resistance against her husband's comp. I don't know. Celebrity politics has taken over everything. Yeah. I sound like an old man. Yeah. What are you going to do? Medi Hassan, everyone

subscribe to the Deconstructed Podcast. It's excellent. Thank you so much for doing the show. Thank you for welcoming me on your show. This has been a lot of fun. It's been great. Thanks so much, I'm glad we're over to do this. Me too. I really appreciate it. Thanks again for listening to Pate the World. Remember to rate and review us in the iTunes store and check out the Deconstruction Podcast for Medi. It's a good show.