The Majority Report with Sam Seder - Best Of 2025 Dispatch From Gazas Nasser Hospital W Dr Tarek Loubani

Episode Date: January 11, 2026

It's another Best of 2025 episode. On today's program: 8/11/25 - It's Monday! Sam and Emma are joined by Palestinian-Canadian emergency room physician, Dr. Tarek Loubani who is currently volunteering at Nasser hospital in Gaza. It's a harrowing interview but we must bear witness to the terror our tax dollars are funding. Watch/Listen to The Majority Report live Monday–Friday at 12pm EST on YouTube OR via daily podcast at http://www.Majority.fm All that and more. The Congress switchboard number is [phone]. You can use this number to connect with either the U.S. Senate or the House of Representatives. Check out IceRRT.com to find an ICE rapid response team nearest to you. Follow us on TikTok here: https://www.tiktok.com/@majorityreportfm Check us out on Twitch here: https://www.twitch.tv/themajorityreport Find our Rumble stream here: https://rumble.com/user/majorityreport Check out our alt YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/majorityreportlive Gift a Majority Report subscription here: https://fans.fm/majority/gift Subscribe to the AMQuickie newsletter here: https://am-quickie.ghost.io/ Join the Majority Report Discord! https://majoritydiscord.com/ Get all your MR merch at our store: https://shop.majorityreportradio.com/ Get the free Majority Report App!: https://majority.fm/app Go to https://JustCoffee.coop and use coupon code majority to get 10% off your purchase Check out today's sponsors: ZOCDOC: Go to Zocdoc.com/MAJORITY and download the Zocdoc app to sign-up for FREE and book a top-rated doctor SUNSET LAKE: Use coupon code "Left Is Best" (all one word) for 20% on their full lineup of CBD products to support your New Year wellness goals and Dry January aspirations at SunsetLakeCBD.com  Follow the Majority Report crew on Twitter: @SamSeder @EmmaVigeland @MattLech On Instagram: @MrBryanVokey Check out Matt's show, Left Reckoning, on YouTube, and subscribe on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/leftreckoning Check out Matt Binder's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/mattbinder Subscribe to Brandon's show The Discourse on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/ExpandTheDiscourse Check out Ava Raiza's music here! https://avaraiza.bandcamp.com

The destiny of America is always safer in the hands of the people than in the conference rooms of any elite. Sam Cedar. They are unanimous in their hate for me, and I welcome their hatred. We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The majority report with Sam Cedar. Ah, ha, ha. And I get the feeling you've been cheated. It is Tuesday, December 30th, 2025.

My name is Sam Cedar. This is the five-time award-winning majority report. We are broadcasting live to tape steps from the industrially ravaged Gowanus Canal in the heartland of America, downtown Brooklyn, USA. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, it is our famous series of best of shows. all this week, maybe not Friday, we're not sure yet. But all this week, the best of's 2025. And here is Emma Vigley from the Majority Report. Hello.

To tell you what we're listening to today. You will be listening to Dr. Tariq Lubani. Palestinian, your level of enthusiasm is not. I'm trying to look like it was frozen, so they look like there's a reason why I'm throwing it to you. Yes. I'm not actually here, like we did this separately. Okay, you might be overthinking it. Dr. Terak Lubani, a Palestinian-Canadian emergency room physician and of the Glea Project.

So it's a harrowing interview, but we were able to speak to him from within Gaza, where he had been volunteering. And I'd interviewed him in 2024, which was also an incredible interview if people want to go watch that. But getting an update from him from within. in Gaza from just a few months ago. It's a difficult listen, but an essential interview. Yeah, it's a tough interview to listen to. And it is marked, you know, we've had two and a half years of three years now.

A little over two years of genocide. And the deprivation, emiseration continues in Gaza. Israelis continue to refuse to allow the amount of aid that is needed to enter in there. They continue to occupy a large swaths of Gaza. They continue to concentrate the Palestinians in Gaza as a prelude to attempting to drive them out of their homes. They've destroyed 90% of the homes. in Gaza, they've destroyed schools, they have destroyed mosques and churches and hospitals. And there's, you know, at the time being, there's no, there seems to be no accountability

other than, I think, people around the world, including Americans, and particularly young Americans, realizing that we should not be, at the very least, supporting this government or society and that there needs to be justice for Palestinians. Absolutely. And health care workers like Dr. Lubani, I mean, he could be in Canada. When I spoke to him, the first time he had come back from Gaza and was in Canada. But he goes in and puts his life at risk. risk and the amount of harrowing things that you must see there, it's just unbelievable. So these are

real heroes and he's one of them. And what's the organization that he's? The Glea project. We'll put a link down below for people if they want to support the Glea project, which he's his organization, you can donate there and it helps provide medical care for, it definitely in Gaza might be elsewhere as well, but certainly I think they're focused on Gaza right now. And Matt Leck will put in some of his special Matt picks. Nice. Some in the fun half for folks. And of course, we'll be back tomorrow with another best of.

And we're still debating about whether we'll be live on Friday. Right. It's going to be one of those things where you're going to get to tune in and find out. Exactly right. But don't get too disappointed if we're not alive. We'll definitely be live on January, let's see here, January 5th at Monday. But we may check it out on January 2nd. Also, I have it in my calendar.

Trump is due to get juiced on January 5th. So that's a good to know. It'd be good to know. We might get some good clips from him. Noticing some diminishing returns on this juice. It's true. He usually got three days. Now he's getting about six hours.

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slash majority. All right. We're going to take a quick break. When we come back, we're going to be playing an interview from, when was it? It was August 11th. August 11th in 2025, Dr. Tarek, Lubani, speaking to us from Gaza's Nassar Hospital. Quick break, and then that interview. We are back.

Sam Cedar, Emma Viglin. on the majority report, it is a pleasure to welcome back to the program, Dr. Torek Lombani, Canadian emergency room physician. He runs the Glea project, which seeks to provide medical supplies to provisional locations. It has been stationed in Gaza for at least a year now. I know that you spoke with Emma. You're now in a Nassar hospital near Conunis. Why don't we start with that? What has changed over the past year? Yeah, a lot has changed here over the past year. I've been in Gaza this time for the past two and a half months, so not quite a year.

But even getting in was incredibly challenging because the Israelis, of course, will prevent anybody from entering and have been constantly banning any international medical groups or any medical groups at all from entry. since we spoke, Glea's been banned by the Israelis for reasons unknown, and only through some Herculean diplomatic efforts where we and the six other organizations that were banned with us allowed back in. So what's changed in the past year? All of the Palestinians who I see are more impoverished. There are, of course, many more people killed, and everybody is starving. Over the past year, almost everybody that I've met has been forced out of their homes at least once, some of them two, three, four times. And the amount of food that has been coming in has progressively dwindled to the point

that now when I see patients, almost everybody is starving. Really, truly, every patient who I see, I can clearly make out their spine, I can make out their scapula, their shoulder blades, I can see how much weight they've lost, the skin that's hanging off of them, that shows me what they used to look like before the war. It has been grinding, it has been painful,

and it has been progressive. And of course, as you know, it's all been driven by this depraved, almost maniacal Israeli policy of making sure that Palestinians can't live. When you talk about the starvation, can you explain from your perspective as a physician what starvation does to the human body, especially once you get to a certain point where it's difficult to reverse it, even if, nutrition was going to be provided immediately? Yeah, you know, I've had a good look on starvation for quite a while. I myself have been on several hunger strikes, especially when I had been previously jailed. I've followed people on hunger strikes. I've seen people in famines.

And this true, and of course in Palestine, Palestine has been the subject of restriction of food for many years. Dove Weisglaas, and I think it was 2007, was an advisor to then Prime Minister Ehud Olmer and started what he called the Gaza diet, which was a caloric restriction program that made sure that Palestinians didn't have enough literal calories. They literally counted how many calories were allowed into Gaza

and made sure that there weren't enough for every Palestinian. But all of these programs, they, they allowed still for the fact that Palestinians could do their own thing. And so actually one of the biggest reasons why there's a famine right now isn't the cutting off of aid, but rather the complete raising of almost all agricultural lands. Something to the effect of 98% of all agricultural lands have either been heavily damaged or completely raised. So when Palestinians were able to obtain a measure of self-sustainability, that's, self-sustainability was taken when their lands were literally bulldozed, and when anybody

who went to try to replant the land was killed and shot, as though they were some kind of, you know, freedom fighter. Like they were just trying to raise, you know, some animals, some simple animals, or to plant some simple crops. Even now, in the midst of the starvation, almost the only food that is here is food that has been grown by Palestinians for everybody. In terms of what it does to the body, I mean, I can describe to you some of the scenes. I went, myself, I'm not a pediatrician, but because I'm not a pediatrician, because this is not the thing that I see the most, I decided to go to one of the malnutrition wards. And of course, the malnutrition award is based in the pediatric hospital because the people who are the most impacted by malnutrition are the kids.

Malnutrition and these famines, they impact the weakest people in society. And so when I first got to Gaza two and a half months ago, what I was seeing were the old people, were the people who had preexisting medical problems, the young kids, they were the ones who were dying of malnutrition and who looked like they were clearly suffering. And they looked just like you imagine out of the textbooks, Emma. Like they really did look like skin and bones, barely surviving. And I remember the first little girl who I saw less than a year old, I believe she was about eight months old, and her father had brought her in because he thought that we could do something to help her. And she was dead.

He put her on the table in front of us, and I looked at her and realized like, oh, my God, this little girl has died because they couldn't feed her. and I asked him some questions, half because it was my job medically, half just out of curiosity about how exactly this happened. And of course, for her, since the beginning of the war, she had had very little access. There was no formula available. The formula that was available was incredibly expensive and so out of reach for the family. And when they came to the hospital, the little formula that they were given as part of the hospital treatment was simply not enough. they took lentils, which at the time was the only thing available, was some lentils, and they mixed it with water and tried to give that to her as a kind of formula.

That doesn't work. It didn't work. She died. And I realized looking at her, she was eight months old. She looked like she was three or four months old, and she had a weight that was about as much as what a little newborn baby would have. In that specific case, before we could even say too much to the, family, a mass casualty started, and they were off to the morgue, you know, while we dealt with all these other Palestinians. But every single Palestinian who I see at this point, their body looks emaciated. Like I described to you, you can see clearly the bones going through the skin.

You can see clearly the impacts. At this point, the people who are severely malnourished, they will die. They will all die. That is thousands, if not tens of thousands. of people. And that's not because it's impossible to fix their problem. That's because Israel will not allow us the materials and the supplies that we need to fix their problem. And so even when Israel did start allowing supplies them like they have over the past week, for example, yesterday I ate a little piece of meat for the first time in three months, a little piece of meat. You know, now that those supplies have started coming in, they're still not enough. It's still too little. We are receiving bicoloric count 60% of the population's needs. And so even though we're now eating, we're eating most of us one meal a day. And the people who are starving, they need massive numbers of calories, but not only that, they need nutritious calories. I can't just give them rice, which is what's available. I can't just give them lentils, which is what's available. Or yesterday what arrived some kidney beans. I need to give them highly.

nutritious foods that include vegetables, that include greens, that include vitamins, you know, things like that. And that's why the people who are so deeply malnourished are going to die. And my understanding is it's sort of just the severity is creeping up the sort of the spectrum or across the spectrum of healthy people, right? I mean, like almost any other dynamic, I would imagine, the more vulnerable you are health-wise in the best of times, the more susceptible you are to succumbing to this. What, do you have any sense that there, I mean, the Israelis are claiming that food supplies are being intercepted. Do you have any sense of that? Is there any talk of food supplies being intercepted? or rather just simply, it's just not coming?

I think it's very clear. Firstly, we have to start anytime we say about anything about an Israeli statement that has to be prefaced with, the Israelis are war criminals and serial liars. They lie basically about everything, including yesterday their pronouncements about these journalists who were killed. The Israelis are war criminals and liars. In this specific case, let's expand upon how,

they're lying. They're lying in two ways. The first way is that there isn't enough food coming in. The whole premise of food being looted and diverted is the fact that there simply isn't enough food for people. And so it creates a dynamic where people can sometimes compete for the food. If there was an orderly way in which food could be given to people, then that simply wouldn't exist. So yes, there is some food being looted. But the primary reason for that is because the food is not sufficient. However, here's another question. Where is the food being looted? Where are these things happening? They're almost universally happening in what are called red zones, areas that the Israelis themselves protect and enforce. And the people who are

doing the looting are people who are Israeli sponsored. They are gangs like the gang of Abu Shab. They are groups of people who are literally under the protection of the Israelis. And anytime Palestinians, whether it be Palestinian families, Palestinian police, which do exist, or the Palestinian citizenry, any time that they fight these gangs, what they find, and I've literally seen this when one of these gangs attacked the hospital about a month and a half ago, is that the Israelis quadcopters show up, the Israelis drones show up, and start fighting in terms of protecting their goons and killing anybody who's trying to bring order back to the situation. So you've seen that.

I mean, you've experienced being under attack at Nasser Hospital and Israeli military support, basically these drones coming in and fighting alongside one of these gangs. And just I don't know that people have a full awareness of Hamas exists in the context of of Gaza, but there are competing gangs that, particularly now, and we see this whenever you destroy the infrastructure of a country, competing gangs start to rise, and some are being supported actively by Israel as a way ostensibly of, I guess, fighting against Hamas, but also as surrogates for Israeli forces. Yeah, let me paint you picture.

of the attack on Nasr that happened in June. So the first thing to say is that that attack, the last attack, the one that I'm going to describe, was the sixth attack on Nasir that primarily were Israeli-led. These ones included Palestinian gangs, but they were primarily Israeli led within a three-month family. We're not talking about something that rarely happens. The Israelis attack Nasda and other hospitals regularly. Yesterday, they destroyed a good portion of the emergency department while they were assassinating journalists.

So the Israelis attack Palestinian hospitals regularly. The way in which this happened was that we are in these accommodations for international doctors and health care workers that are relatively high up in the hospital. And all of a sudden, it was like all how broke loose shooting everywhere by all manner of heavy weaponry and light weaponry. And so, of course, we all bunkered down, went to the ground, and being an emergency doctor, and this having been the third attack on the hospital, I knew that I needed to get to the emergency. So I ran down to the emergency department where these gangs were trying to break into the hospital, shooting at anybody who they could. They killed, I think, four or five people in the hospital within the two days before. That was a third attack in three days.

and we, of course, took our patients to the ground. And I remember this one little girl who was there with a chest tube and her family around her because there had been a bombing, she caught some shrapnel, some obviously Israeli bombing shrapnel that had gone into her chest. So we put a chest tube to drain some of the blood that had accumulated around her lung. And so we put her to the ground. She was six or seven, of course, terrified. And her family around her were terrified.

And we just sat there while these gangs sort of attacked. And one of the things that was unique and different was that we heard the quadcopters that were protecting them and pinging off anybody who was around, who was firing back, who was trying to protect the hospital. And then finally there was a drone strike just before the Palestinian police were able to repel the gang. of course, the responsibility was taken by Yasser Abu Shabab in a Facebook post. Like, we're not speculating about who did this. And Yasser Abu Shab said, yes, we were supported by the Israelis because we are doing the right thing. You know, that's what he said in his Facebook post. He took down the Facebook posts, I think, when his handlers realized how damning that post was.

But they took full responsibility for it. This kind, I want to just sort of pull back to what this is from. The Israelis are interested in deep chaos in Palestine. Palestine is not a chaotic society. Palestine is a very highly ordered society, and people know how to self-organize. I was amazed the first time that I went to one of these refugee camps with tents. The tents were almost like put by a laser line. They were all lined up.

There were no tents at a line. there were little streets, people were organizing the tents, providing supplies, making sure that the very little that was available was available to everyone. There is no disorder by nature in Palestinians or Palestinian society, or I would argue, among anybody anywhere. In disasters, we usually see people self-organized and are very good to each other. So Israel keeps trying to stoke these flames of civil unrest among the Palestinians and the different friends. factions. What entities end up protecting the hospital from these assaults at this point? It's the Palestinian police. So the Palestinian police still exist. They have to basically be relatively undercover, but they're around. And obviously, like any other police, some of them have

light weapons like guns or some light assault rifles. And they are the ones who everybody, regardless of faction is hoping are going to be able to protect us when these guys show up. When the gang showed up that first day, the first of the three days, and started killing people, executing people in the emergency, all of us, regardless of faction, regardless of creed or belief, we're all hoping that the police would be there to protect us, that the security of the hospital would be there to protect us. So, yeah, it's the Palestinian police.

There are also, there's also one other main faction that your audience might have heard of, which is called the Arrow Unit. The Arrow Unit is a kind of internal protection unit that tries to put down these types of disorders that has targeted Abu Shabab that has killed members of Abu Shab. Yesterday, for example, by Nasser Hospital, some members of the Arrow Unit had brought a stolen truck that was loaded with flour that had been stolen by one of the gang. and just left it at the gates of the hospital so that people could take anything that they wanted of the flower. And, you know, nobody sees them. I don't know what they look like. Nobody knows what they look like. They show up, they disappear. And when people ask, you know, how did this truck get here? It was obvious that it was the arrow unit. But other than the arrow unit, which is, you know, technically a subdivision of the resistance, the Palestinian resistance, which at this point is a combined operation between all of the armed factions,

it's just the simple Palestinian police, a civilian force that is answerable to whatever democratic forces still exist within the society. What do you know about how many hospitals are actually functioning at this point through the strip? Yeah, we have to take a very, very liberal view of what the word functioning means. So imagine, you know, what it looks like to have a hospital that works. You know, you've probably been to hospital. point for yourself or for a loved one. And there are certain expectations. Like, for example,

you expect that your doctor is being paid. Well, salaries are very rare here, very difficult to come by. You expect that your doctor probably was able to sleep the night. Well, most, almost all, if not all of the medical stuff that I worked with yesterday, I worked in a shift yesterday that was 24 hours, almost all of them are sleeping in tents, if not all of them. you expect that they're fed. Well, doctors are literally passing out on the floor sometimes because they're so underfed. We're eating what the population is eating.

And so for literally, over a month, the most that I used to get was a handful, a literal handful of rice or of lentils. And I want to know, I am an international. I literally have access to the most of everything. And still, that's the food that we were receiving. We were receiving the same food as everybody else, which was provided out of whatever aid. So when we say that the hospital is functioning, we're talking about an absolutely Sisyphian effort

that Palestinians put in, in which they show up despite losing their family members, despite themselves sometimes being wounded, despite not having anything or definitely not enough to eat, and despite none of us having equipment to eat. And I have so many stories of times that I saw patients and wished that there was something that I could do for them, that there was something more that could happen for them. You know, patients who were so eminently treatable and I couldn't treat them because of a lack of supplies. Every day, it's like a surprise what exactly we're going to be lacking on that particular day. Yesterday was glove day. There were just no gloves.

And so that meant that, again, I would wear one glove. You know, obviously they sometimes come in packs of two when they're not in boxes. And so I'd wear one glove, try to deal with the patient as much as I could. That was the glove that I dealt with the patient with as much as possible. And then just wash the other one when it got full of blood. Another day, it was Gau's Day. Simply no Gau's. medications are almost 80% at severe shortage and 50% stockout, zero supply.

Do you, have you ever had a pain medication? Because in Gaza, you can't. You know, have you ever needed some kind of intravenous antibiotic? Because almost all of them are out in Gaza. It is, yes, they are functioning, but they're functioning despite these severe locks. And really by the most liberal definition. There's Nassar, the hospital I'm at. It is the best functioning.

And then the other main hospital is Derr al-Belah, Al-Aqsa hospital, and then the last one is Shifa Hospital. That's it. There's these smaller, you know, just indignities that I also think don't get spoken about fully. Like there was a piece, I'm forgetting which paper it was in, but about there's no menstrual products for women and girls. and people who are pregnant are also incredibly vulnerable. Can you speak a little bit about pregnancies

and what life is like for the creation of life in the Gaza Strip amongst these horrific conditions? There is quite literally nothing more hopeful to me than to see a little baby in these environments. And any baby who is born is born despite this tremendous hardship that happens. Of course, there's no contraceptive products here. So it's not like really there are many options. And like you said, there's no menstrual products.

We brought Glea just about a month ago, brought in a bunch of reusable menstrual products. And that's the best that we can do. But most women who I see when they're on their period, when I see them in the hospital, have usually torn up t-shirts that they're using as makeshift menstrual products. So there is a severe shortage of basically anything like that. And speaking of people who need things, of course, there's a trans population in Gaza who are on all kinds of hormonal products that are also not available. So the shortages are severe and are drastic.

When a baby is born, the first thing that we try to do, is to feed the mother as much as possible. Families, you see entire extended families, pouring their resources and sacrificing their food for the mother so that the mother can produce breast milk. If the mother doesn't produce breast milk, there is a good chance that child is going to die because Israel does not allow baby formula into Gaza.

And as I say the words out loud, I mean, it really hits me hard because we're talking about baby formula. You know, we as an organization brought in some baby formula in one of the bags and were able to get it in. And when we presented it to the Ministry of Health, it was like Christmas for them because there just isn't enough. There was another doctor who tried to enter a couple of weeks ago, about four or five weeks ago, and all of his baby formula was identified and taken. They saw it on the x-ray, and so they took it. And I won't discuss how we got our formula in, but suffice it to say, you know, we learned some of the lessons from how they identified his formula and made some adjustments.

So just think about this for a second. We're smuggling in baby formula like it's cocaine. That's crazy. It's absolutely crazy. And so if a child has to be on baby formula, they will be malnouraged because mothers have to water down the baby formula. lot. They have to not give enough. They're trying their best to keep these children alive until either they can start taking in any kind of solid nutrition or until the situation changes. Now, in terms of what it looks like, in terms of dealing with babies, we see pregnant women who

are the victims of bombings all the time. And I remember this one woman where she'd come in, the woman was dead, very, very dead. And the first thing we do when we see a woman that late term as we asked, when did she die? They said, well, it's only been about five minutes. So we put the ultrasound and saw this baby scrambling in there, but with a good heart rate, and it was obvious that this baby was going to die unless we did something. And so then the question began, you know, do we have a little ventilator for the baby? And we didn't. Do we have the equipment to take this baby out? It's called the perimortem's caesarean section. And we didn't.

And so me, the other doctors, senior doctor at the moment, and the junior doctors, we stood around this woman and I had this knife in my hand. I was ready to go on this cut. And all we could really think is to what? I think if we were even in a Gaza of six months ago, six months ago, that baby would have been treatable. But on this particular day, we knew that if we tried to cut this baby out, we had no medicine to give it, no nutrition to give it, no, you know, there's a special medication for the lungs that helps them operate in those first days when they're not yet ready to be born. We had none of that to give it. We had nothing.

We had nothing. And so we watched with our ultrasound on this dead mother's belly. You know, as that child's heart wound its way down, and its fight gave way to just death. And you had said how much has changed? We were speaking briefly before since, you know, we last spoke, because in many ways, of course, the genocide is ongoing. But I even see it, Dr. Lubani and you, that it's, you've lost some weight, right? I mean, it's different than when we last spoke. The level of suffering over the past year, if you could just put that into context,

because you also previously had been doing work in the Gaza Strip, and before the active genocide began, you were shot in the peaceful Great March of Return in 2018. So you have a good sense of how the suffering has escalated, just a big picture view from your perspective. I think probably the best way to describe the big picture is my trips to the morgue. We end up with so many bodies in the resuscitation part of the emergency department that often I can't do medicine. I have to turn into somebody who literally carries bodies

because some of these people, their entire family is that there's nobody to take them. usually the people who take people to the morgue are their families. And sometimes the entire family is executed in one of these assassination operations or in one of these tent massacres. And so I start taking people over. And occasionally, as I'm taking people over, somebody will look over at the body, ask me about it, or, you know, say something. And a year ago, when somebody died, there was this, there's always a deep mourning,

Palestinian society is a society of life that also sort of venerates both its living and its death. And people would have this sadness that somebody had died. Now when somebody dies, you see that there's a kind of relief that most people say, God has now shown this person mercy. God has given them mercy to take them out of this fresh hell. And that's truly how it is. You know, you noted that I've lost weight. yeah, I've lost weight.

Yeah, I haven't felt what it's like to have a full tummy in three months. It's a personally devastating experience, but it's a reflection of the fact that for four months, five months now, nothing has come into Gaza. You know, when Gaza was cut off just as Ramadan began, which is a special kind of torture. That's a time of real celebration for Palestinians and for Muslims. And so they have suffered so tremendously over the past year that for all of us, when somebody dies, of course, there is a morning.

But then there is also like that little bit of God has now ended this person's suffering once and for all. You know, now may they see paradise. You know, I was never really a deeply religious person, but I can't but wish and hope for a paradise. because the hell in which these people live before they show up to me in my emergency department, it's unbearable. It's unbearable. I see them, you know, especially the kids. The little kids are, of course, the hardest thing for all of us. As you mentioned, I've seen a lot of wars. And I see a lot of men, a lot of women who have been shot, who have been bombed, who have been killed. But, and I've seen a lot of children, too. But it's never felt like the war was against children.

and almost as though everybody else who gets killed is on the side, you know, collateral damage, as though the whole thing is for kids. For example, today, seven children were killed in Gaza in what it really has to have been described as a targeting of just this house of kids. Schools have been targeted, shelters have been targeted. So the biggest change that I've seen in the past year is that people, in despite staying strong are in a spiritual sense

being broken piece by peace by the hunger, by the depravity and by the feeling that you know I can't help but share that nobody out there cares enough to stop this Dr. Lubani is there any obviously

political pressure on the government our government that's support this beyond that in terms of aid. Are there vehicles that you would recommend if folks want to try and help? Are there, or is it a day-by-day thing in terms of where to help? Obviously, none of this is even remotely close to sufficient. And we need to, we need Israel to allow for more aid to come in but from your perspective, is there anything that we can do? Or is it just simply people should share these stories? Sam, you know, one of the statements that you said, I kind of want to pick on for a moment.

He said we need Israel to allow the aid to come in. Israel is a depraved criminal society running a war crime writ large, mass large, and a genocide. They will not allow aid to come in. come in, they will be forced to allow aid in. That, I think, can happen. And so we must force Israel to stand aside while aid goes in. We must force Israel to stand aside while Palestinians rebuild their agriculture. And we must force Israel into a ceasefire. Now, in terms of what you and your audience can do, probably by this point, everybody watching this show has been to a protest. We know the protests work. The protests work in a way that's probably

excuse me, the protests work in a way that's probably a little bit different in the sense that that, excuse me, in the sense that we are not strong enough to beat back our governments in a single goal, but the fact that we have been persistent over now two years, just shy of two years, it means that the governments have been forced to listen and forced to take heed and force to change their actions. And so governments have changed the way that they're approaching things. Governments have done things differently. That's because of the persistence of your viewers and people like them who keep protesting. That's political attrition. There's also a kind of economic attrition that at our level has been driven by the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement. And at other levels

have been driven by people like the Yemenis with direct boycotts and direct intercept. of the Israeli economy. And so that economic attrition is also really important. And of course, the last thing to stop this, perhaps the most important, is military attrition. Military attrition is what's happening on the battlefield. It's changing the way in which Israel is running this genocide, and it's stopping them from rolling into Gaza City or into other cities. For example, when they took Rafah, they were able to do it because the resistance wasn't able to stop.

them, but the resistance was able to stop them in Chen Yunus. They surrounded Nasr Hospital over the past two months. All of Nasr has been surrounded and in a red zone, with it being the single exception and it was the resistance that stopped the Israelis from progressing to where they wanted to. So those three political, economic and military attrition are what's going to stop this. And people have to think about how they can plug into one of those three and do the maximum that they can. Are we succeeding? Yeah, to some extent. Do we need to do more? Absolutely. Last question.

And this is probably beyond the scale of something that you can fully speak to, but I would still love to ask you because we get these death toll numbers in the United States that feel like these wild, wild undercounts. And the level of carnage that you're talking about here does not match the numbers that are printed in the Western press. Could you just shed some light on that dynamic? and why there is such a lag and what your assessment is of the true reality based on what you know. I loved your description. The numbers are a wild undercount. That's perfect. I can tell you, for example, about malnutrition. So I work within the Ministry of Health System, right?

We as what are called emergency medical teams international doctors and nurses and allied health professionals, we go in solidarity with medical teams. And so we sort of follow their lead in terms of how they do things. And so when I document what the cause of death is for somebody, everybody receives a piece of paper that says how they died. What our directive is, is that if there's anything other than simple malnutrition that's causing this death, don't write it down as a malnutrition case. You can write it as secondary tertiary, but don't write that this person died for malnutrition.

Similarly, Palestinians do not count the dead unless they have been to a hospital. So, for example, there have been many aid massacres, which, by the way, is another kind of depravity. We haven't even touched upon. And so when the aid massacres have been happening, there are many bodies that people tell me, lots of my patients will tell me there are bodies stranded there that we couldn't get to. We don't count those debt. We don't count them even really as more than missing because we don't know for 100% sure that that person is dead. Look at the lists the Palestinians release. They release only the bodies they

can identify with the ID numbers attached to them. Of course, it's a wild undercount. Think of how many people are under the rubble, how many people are still in red zones, how many people are thrown around laying dead in the sun in various parts, including at GHF sites, this Gaza humanitarian, so-called Gaza humanitarian foundation sites. Of course, it's a wild undercount. Really, credible organizations that have done these counts for other places like Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo estimate the number at this point to be five to six times more easily. That's 300,000 people who are very likely dead. And of course, there's another concept in medicine called excess deaths. So for example, I've seen numerous number of people, for example,

dialysis patients. I saw dialysis patient who we worked on yesterday for a number of hours who ended up dying. In our account, that person died of a kidney-related cause, but obviously that person was malnourished. They couldn't receive dialysis care the way they were supposed to. They were killed by Israel. They were killed by the occupation. But we don't count those as direct conflict-related deaths. Dr. Torek, Lubani, thank you so much for your time today. And thank you for the work you're doing there. don't, obviously, you know, I don't know what to say. It's sort of speechless what people are going through there and what you're having to deal with,

which, so thank you for your time. Really appreciate it. Thank you. And I mean, the last thing to say is Palestinians are staying strong. Your audience should stay strong, and we should just keep working at this still at stop. Thank you. Absolutely.

And the Glea project will put a link. to that down below wherever people are listening to or watching this. Thank you. Thank you. Adam Friedland had Richie Torres on his show. He's just had a bunch of different interviews that seemed to come out of nowhere, including one that was pretty hilarious with Anthony Wiener. Chris Cuomo. Chris Cuomo. But the latest one here is Richie Torres, obviously a member of Congress who has become notorious for taking a lot of A-PAC money and being a vociferous defender of Israel's genocide in Gaza and speaking with a lot of authority about what Jewish people care about and what is

anti-Semitic and what is hateful towards Jews and what is not. Adam Friedland is a Jewish man and here sits across from Richie Torres and like I know that it seems like what Adam was saying when when he posted about this was that he had mixed feelings about this interview because he was very vulnerable, I think it's really awesome that he was and showed, you know, courage to put yourself out there in this way to speak about his experience of being indoctrinated into Zionism and having gone to Israel and what the process was like to extricate himself from that. I always think that's valuable when people talk about it. And what I think the best part of what came out of this interview was was that,

Torres looks like a sociopath, and he looks immensely vapid and callous and corrupt. And for my money, that's a pretty good outcome because that's kind of the reality. So here is an excerpt from that interview talking about Israel. You're being big. That's mean. I'll go back a little bit. That's okay. Maybe like 30 seconds.

This is perfect. The world saw the Holocaust. and they established standards for what a genocide is. It was the same year. And the world said that this shouldn't be a thing that happens. You know? Pause briefly, we don't need to take it off the screen, but he's referring to 1948, basically saying that the standards for what constitutes

a genocide and the same year that the state of Israel was founded, it happened at the same year. Like, like, it doesn't make sense to me. like what like what like I don't know it it doesn't track to me why there's this fixation with kids at a school

that and two examples of people at a restaurant that there was banging two examples I mean there are surveys on it read the EDL surveys on it because it's hard it's hard for me to talk about this in public clearly I mean you're being big that's mean

no no I'm not being am just to clear it's an emotional topic all right I'll show you share with you what happened. I lived there. Sir, I lived there when I was 18, and I grew up as Zionists. And we were told, and our whole community in this country is told,

that we have to defend Israel and love Israel because it will stop at the Holocaust. It will stop another Holocaust for happening. And my parents, my dad was born in 1951. That was six years after these atrocities. His friends' parents, he knew. these people that had been through this hell, these skeletons. And it terrified us.

And the understanding in our communities that we have to defend Israel. But I lived there, and I went to a settlement at the end of my year there. And I looked down the hill at a Palestinian village. And I saw how they lived. And I turned back and I looked at this element and saw how they lived. And people live in a world where there is. and demeaned and dehumanized and surveilled constantly by people in, and this isn't in Gaza, by people in SWAT team outfits with semi-automatic weapons, and that's what the world is seeing.

And you keep telling me that the problem is someone's getting yelled at at a restaurant. I'm sorry. You're complaining two different issues. Please, just, please. Me saying this to you right now will hurt people in my own family, okay? because this is a very important thing to us. And the fact that I still fucking care about being Jewish is embarrassing. I should just be a guy.

But this feels like a stain on our history. And it feels like it's changed what being Jewish is. Because what being Jewish is isn't Israel. Judaism has existed for 4,000 years. This is a country for 75 years. You know, like, it is the oldest. one of the oldest monotheistic religions it's it is

anti-semitism is one of the oldest forms of hatred people in my life are going to be mad at me about this but but I'm saying this because I am Jewish you know and and I don't understand why you would be

look how you defy I I want to have like I'm here to be lectured not shut up that's not nice you can't talk that way why are one One said of Jews, but more poor than others. No one's saying any... What happened?

You went to the beach at Israel? What, you went to a restaurant or something? Yeah. A nice restaurant? Like, listen. All right, all right. Let's pause it now, because this is, that's one excerpt, but... Wow, yeah.

Brian has a theory about this. I don't want to put you on the spot about this, but... There's some back context. When this was Come Town, before it was the Adam Frieden show, Adam always talked about getting sucked off on his trip to Israel. They made fun of him for that all the time, but that's like a move. And I think Richie Torres.

Maybe got laid. Overlooking the Mediterranean and in a condo. Must be beautiful. Later in the interview, he brings up gratuitously Tel Aviv pride out of nowhere, which is just like another way that Westerners get sold on the. idea that like Israel is this a calatarian place because they they have bribe there although you can't legally get married in Israel if you're a gay person let's leave that alone for a second so it was it was informative to see how

Torres bought into that and how it seems like he was on an Israel trip when he was really young richie grew up 24 years old 24 rich you grew up like in a lot of poverty yeah and you go like we get flooded with this amount of money where APAC is like, we will basically secure your place in power or, uh, for X period of time with our unlimited funds. You can get to the dance.

Uh, if you're a guy like Torres who doesn't seem to have a lot of scruples, you sign up. Yeah, who's plucked out of poverty and joined a mafia. Yep. Yeah. I mean, that's,

that's our political system. Yeah. Um, but I mean, I mean, Adam Friedland is a really, actually a pretty earnest guy. I've been a fan of his

for well since the Comtown was using the home improvement theme song as an intro. We had him on the Michael Brooks show six years ago talking about and I believe an I-24 interview and he was similar to this sort of

embarrassed about it. He didn't really want to talk about it and when posting this he said they weren't sure if they're going to release it. The trouble is he was too earnest for what is a complete psychopath. I think that that shows to people. Like, Richie Torres is like, when you say the word buy in, he's bought. Like, he would not be there. We would not know who Richie Torres is unless he was willing to justify everything that Zionists

want justified and nothing that they don't. And to the extent that he will ever break with Israel, he has permission to because it's untenable. Also, I think, you know, you do Richie Torres and people like him too many favors when you even insinuate that they can. care about Jewish people or Jewish people being safe. And that's not what Adam Friedman was doing. And I think that was a very powerful clip because he was obviously very vulnerable. And like, it's important to hear about these experiences and how people, you know, extricate themselves from these sorts of ways of thinking. But Richie Torres, you know, most Zionists, like, their care for Jewish people is more about the care for the power that invoking Jewish people's identity

and like that collective. And, you know, in the case of the Holocaust, that collective tragedy and trauma has allowed them to wield within our political system. And it's not. just the Jewish identity. You see this across the board with the way in which a lot of our political parties engage with identity. It's not about the people. It's about the power that you can garner from co-opting people's story, co-opting people's tragedy. And then, you know, once it's no longer politically useful, they jettison them. Like, I have no doubt that once, you know, being really, really pro-Israel, being really, really, like, evocatively anti-Semitic is no longer valuable to Trump or no longer valuable to the Democrats, you won't hear anything about it. You know, like, and in the

anti-Semitism that has a rose as a result of their actions will be something that they don't take responsibility for, they have no solution for, they'll maybe go on TV and chastise people about it, but there'll be no structural solution or acknowledgement of how we got to this point, or they're rolling against this point. Yeah, and Adam touches on this too, where his assertion is the correct one, which is that the people committing genocide are waving a Jewish star around, and that is contributing a lot more to anti-Semitism than to the people protesting it. This was another part that I found, I sent the codes in our chat. This was another part that I found to be fascinating.

They're going back and forth here speaking about phrases like from the river to the sea and Hamas's intentions with the state of Israel. and you see how Torres uses the Hebron massacre to basically justify the Nakba which he doesn't acknowledge in the clip and Friedman kind of calls him out on it so this was another part that I

thought was good. They didn't have to fucking move because black people could vote and talking about South Africa. Tell your kids to come back because we need them to build our country. I don't know. I think that I don't see what's wrong with people being afforded the right to vote. Do you think that's what a mosque means when it says free Palestine from the river to the sea?

To me, it seems like maybe if there's a recognition that people were cleared off their land in 1948. But there are those who only want a Jewish state and there are those who only want a Palestinian state. Then they could fuck off. and we should be advocating for the coexistence of Jewish state and the Palestinians. Why can you just believe? I continue to believe the two-state solution ultimately is the inevitable path forward. It's stupid. You know, there were a thousand Jews who were murdered before the establishment of Israel,

like half a century before the establishment of Israel. Half is... A thousand Jews. Yeah, they were killing each other. Jews and Palestinians, yeah. A brawn massacre. It doesn't make sense to me. this uh in in 2025 the only point was was there was violence against jews before the establishment

of the state of israel there's violence against palisid i mean sorry can we just say like the the establishment of the state of israel was more than just a brief moment where uh england's like hey here's israel there was a zionist set uh settlement process going on for the decades ahead of it like rachia colides hundreds year war of palestine isn't called the 75 years war on palestine for a fucking reason. Yeah. There's no... Sorry, go ahead.

I can say there are no other examples where, like, America or American politicians would apply this logic into any other group that has had violence committed against them by colonial powers, by even, like, coexisting powers within their own region. They would never accept, like, inter-ethnic group, like, concentration camps and parts of Eastern Europe. I mean, they may be would, depending on who was in charge. But you know what I mean? Like, the argument that they're making for this is entirely predicated at all.

it being in service of the United States war machine. And of course, our NATO allies in Europe. But like it doesn't, it wouldn't apply to Native Americans doing it to white people in America, black people doing it. It's the kind of logic that like you can use to like kind of convince liberals that this fascism has like a, you know, liberal bent to it. But it's it just, it falls apart when you look at any other example of like how we treat minority groups or what we think that they deserve around the world.

Right. And I'm reading here from the Jewish virtual. library talking about the Hebron massacre, and this is their read of it. Hebron had up until this time been outwardly peaceful, though the tensions hid below the surface, the Sephardi Jewish community in Hebron had lived quietly with its Arab neighbors for century. These are Jews, as they reference, who were originally from Spain, North Africa, and Arab countries. How is that possible if Islam is inherently violent?

Right. These Sephardi Jews spoke Arabic and had a cultural connection with the Arabs in Hebron. In the mid-1800s, Ashkenazi, native European Jews, started moving to Hebron. And in 1925, the Slabodka, yeshiva, officially called the yeshiva of Hebron-Knesset, Israel's Slabodka, was open. Yashashivah students live separately. And basically, it becomes a clash between Zionist immigrants, as they write, and their Arab neighbors. They are acknowledging that there were Jews that were living there, the Sephardi Jewish community, that lived peacefully with their Arab neighbors. But once Zionism started, that's when tensions, and that's when violence began to become more frequent, because the settlements were acts of violence, and there were obviously tensions, and there was resistance.

It's the nationalism, stupid. So this is, Torres using that to justify basically the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1948. Go ahead, Brandon. And also he's still justifying it now. And evoking the two-state solution is just a stalling tactic. It's meant to stall because the two-state solution is something that nominally, only one side of this conflict has been working on for the entire time it's been talked about as Palestinians. And it's been disrupted by the U.S. and Israel are, you know, not that those are two different entities, but, you know, the U.S.-Israeli complex has been disrupting that talk because it's not what Israel wants in the region. The settlements are an example of that.

They've been very open about not wanting it because they view a two-state solution as unacceptable and they view the alternative, which is the more likely scenario of what will happen now that they've been doing their genocide, a one-state solution where it's not a Jewish ethno state, the same thing as losing their country. And that is just the white supremacy or analog that they have become in their country. And Gerichich-Cholras understands that stalling is a tactic that they can use to hopefully outlasts genocide. And maybe by the time people realize or start actively, like, agitating in a way that Democrats can't ignore or Republicans can't ignore or, you know, labor can't ignore in the UK or any other of these Western countries that are complicit in this genocide can't ignore, it'll be over. You know, they'll all be in South Sudan or they'll all be dead. And then everyone can then wake up to the genocide for the first time.

All of the people complicit in our media can wake up to it. All of our politicians can wake up to and go like, huh, I can't believe this happened and no one did anything. And maybe we just won't do this again in the future. and that's what they're hoping will happen. I don't think it's possible, but that's like, that shows you the depths of their deprivation here, that they're hoping that they can just keep talking about, you know, unicorns and two-state solutions until every Palestinian is dead or displaced. And then, like, acknowledge that something bad happened.

And just one more point, this is not the only topic they do this about. Climate change is another topic that they do this about. They talk about the ways in which it's complex and how they acknowledge the science. And they're really just stalling with the idea that, like, there'll never be a time where It's too late for there to be a two-state solution or too late to tackle the climate catastrophe that are on the way. But, you know, we're already there for both of those things. And that's just something people have to become aware of, I think, that this is a way for them to get their way without becoming or seeming actively antagonistic to things that we would consider to be liberal, like fighting climate change or not doing a genocide. Or racial integration. Go ahead, Bender.

I was going to say what really struck me when I was watching this along with Adams, you know, a very emotional discussion. And I thought that was great. You know, Ritchie comes off like he's offended as if he has something to be offended for. Like he's not Jewish. He's not even Israeli. He's not Palestinian. He's not being. But he's not. But he's not. But he's not, you. He's sitting, well, you know, Adam's not talking. No, I get it. Yeah. Right. But, but he's sitting there as if he's, like, as if Adam is saying something against him. And they just, it struck me, because it comes a very bizarre and inappropriate, by the way, when you're actually sitting across from someone who is actually Jewish and lived in Israel, who's sharing this feeling with you based on their own personal life experiences for him to come on.

off as if like something was said that deeply affects him when when there's there's nothing there richie torres will life goes on for richie torres no matter what happens in israel and Palestine he has no family there he has no connection there he has no connection he had a great name Tel Aviv bender yeah but yeah other than that he has no connection to the other factors such as uh you know his judaism which he isn't Yet he's sitting there, like, upset that Adam would dare to say these things to him. And I think that really comes across. And it's not just Richie Torres.

There are so many U.S. politicians, not even just politicians, also just evangelical Christians, Christians, period, non-Jews altogether, that for some reason they feel like their position on what's happening. with and in Israel and Palestine has some sort of effect on them when it doesn't at all. I mean, the effect is in their own imaginary land where whatever their religion believes. It does, though, in his career, yes. Because that's why he's so indignant, Binder, and you hit the nail on the head, is it's because the continued conversation around this is a threat to his political future. broader, you know, big ambitions. He was putting his name out there about running for governor potentially, but stood down because Hockel does already have a challenger to her left in Delgado.

And the, but you see the inherent anti-Semitism behind anti-Zionism in the way that he treats Adams' Jewish experience as something that is an inconvenience to him or not, you know, He's totally disrespectful about it because it is a problem for him using Jewish people to justify the blood-soaked money that he takes. I just want to go a little bit more. I was going to say, like, I'm not sure if we're getting to that clip, but I think it's, well, if we already watched that, I can't remember. But there's a point where he says, like, you know, that's just your experience or something to the effect of, like, that's not everyone's experience. Right. It might be in this.

I forget. But I just wanted to point out that they never look at. that they never have that view when someone is sharing the opposite, right? Like, there's never, there's never, they never say to someone who's sharing a pro-Israel feeling that, well, you know, there are people on the other side. No, that only ever happens when someone is criticizing Israel. And then they say, well, that, you know, that's not, that's just your view. It's never the other way around.

But to be honest, that's how we should approach it too, because fuck them. Anybody who supports Israel or thinks that actually Israel's trying to minimize civilian casualties, fuck them. Who gives a fuck? I don't care. I don't care what they think. First of all, they're a small part of the party that he's a member of, like a vanishingly small. But even outside in the real world, like they're fucking wrong. Who gives a shit?

Before the establishment of the state of Israel. There was violence against Palestinians. And there was an ethnic cleansing in 1948. I mean, the Hebron massacre. What? are you talking about right now? You're in the government? I listen, I didn't want to argue. I'm sorry, you're not familiar with the Abram massacre in 1920. Oh, you got him. Well, you're saying that that justifies an entire ethnic cleansing in 1948.

Israel was a, well, this is such a, this is even a good argument. Hold on. Israel, what are you talking? I didn't realize we were debating. I don't want to do it, but you say something like that. The Jewish state was established by international law, right? The UN passed a resolution. It's that recognized the establishment of a Jewish. What else does an international? National law say. Yeah. And there were a number of Arab countries, including Egypt, that declared war in Israel. Yes.

The war of independence. And Israel won the war. The Palestinians didn't declare war with them. There were just people that were living there. And they were kicked off their land. They were either a gun-in-boid or killed. They were ethnically cleansed from the Arab world. Do you know what they were Jews?

You know how many Jews there are in the Arab world? Not by the Palestinians. I'm not talking about the broader Arab world. So why do... Well, that's interesting. Right. That's what I like. The responsibility of the...

Classic. Yeah. Arab world. The conflation of Arab and Palestinian here, too, another racist trope that APEC, you know, tries to trot out there, that there's really no difference. Right. Keep going.

The Algerians kicking the Jews out. You can relentate... Why do the Palestinians bear the responsibility of Egypt invading? Israel's been a state for 77 years. Bro, it's so depressing what you're saying with him. You're proposing to undo an established state? No. I know people that live there.

I have family that lived there. I don't think that they should leave. What are you proposing? I'm proposing a democracy. I'm proposing an extensive demographic study of what was taken and what was lost, extensive reparations for what that was taken, and a truth and reconciliation process. Where we can end this shit. What we're seeing right now is that members of the Israeli government are talking about clearing that shit out.

And Trump, our president, is talking about putting a fucking jet ski museum there. And you're, that's the reality right now. That's the far right. That's a view that I reject. What the far right? Can you pause? This is interesting to me and maybe not to anybody else, but I do like tracking political rhetoric and how they shift in moments where they're feeling some sort of tension or like

it's not justifiable anymore for them to use previous talking points. Even Torres now, first of all, Adam Schiff came out and said, I'm in favor of blocking some arms to Israel. And now you have Richie Torres coming out and throwing Netanyahu under the bus. They're pretending that Netanyahu is the sole problem. We just played in, or yesterday read from an interview where Isaac Chautner of the New Yorker spoke with Jack Liu, Biden's Israeli ambassador, where he accidentally admitted in the middle of the interview that the Netanyahu government was being propped up by Biden because they preferred to work with him over having the government collapse. So Forgive me if I don't believe

this now turn to Netanyahu is the big bad guy But keep going a little bit longer And the generals that are That are in charge of Israel The Bengavirs, the smultruges of the world That's a view that they're the cabinet Yes, and I reject them That's what Hamas is saying they want to do to Israel

What does that mean? I'm sorry I mean Hamas murdered I mean Hamas murdered thousands of people So there's thousands Can we just stop at thousands? What does that mean? That's not true.

Right. The civilians that died, what about 800 if we're assuming all of those were killed by Hamas, which is, you know, something that is worth checking and going back on. IDF members killed on October 7th is not the same thing. Yeah. And thousands. I mean, this is just... Thousands implies multiple thousands, not just 1,200.

Let's say even if you're including the IDF people who, uh, uh, any type of, whether it's Hamas, any, any Palestinian resistance has, for international law, a right to attack because they're occupying. Like, this is just, I mean, and also, go ahead, Brandon. No, no. I was just going to say, I mean, you're absolutely right. But this is just a way we can tell Democrats are disingenuous and they're pushing back against the worst elements of the genocide now, right?

This idea that now that Trump is in charge and he's going to do a lot of the same things that Biden was going to do, but a lot more aggressively, antagonistically, vocally about them. They can pretend that they're against the genocide and against the ethnic cleansing, and then they can, you know, point to, and then they can just like still, you know, legitimize. They can still, like, say thousands of people were, like, killed by Hamas for no reason. And, you know, all of these innocent civilians were killed. And a part of this is just about, not even a part of this, all this is about America and how Americans perceive their place in the world. And without Israel, Democrats would have a lot harder time while getting money from the

military industrial complex, but also advocating for the United States imperial objectives in the Middle East. Because like Israel represents a very convenient way for Democrats to pretend like they are pro-liberal values while still just funneling tons of money to the security state, to the, you know, to the intelligence agencies, to military industrial complex, to the war machine that destabilizes the Middle East and makes, you know, makes Western country a lot more endangered by a result of like the blowback that they will inevitably experience in the form of like retribution from these countries.

and also just in the form of the violence that inevitably springs up in these countries by nature of the fact that they, you know, valorize this kind of violence. They valorize and they legitimize genocide at the geopolitical level, at the international level. At the domestic level, we have an occupational force that's targeted towards brown people in one form or another. And, you know, the violence that we experienced will, you know, just be interpreted as being out of nowhere, which will then just further fuel the war machine. It will further fuel people, you know, believing that there's barbarism over the, you know, there, as opposed to like what is really happening, which is, you know, barbarism is seated in the seat across from Adam Friedland, right? You know, it's stuffed into a suit.

Mentioning Hebrew in the same way Zionists mentioned October 7th, as if, oh, this is the time where history starts. And there was nothing, say, before it, that could have provoked such a thing that happened other than the evil in the hearts of the Arabs, as they call it. Exactly. And, I mean, that, it seems ludicrous, but that is how our entire media, understands this supposed conflict.

I mean, it's even it's even like his line of thinking is even like less complicated than that and that's not even complicated. Like he's saying that Hamas you know so so Adam

brings up how those far right elements are in in Nanyahu's government. And so Richie Torres is able to just bat that down by saying he doesn't support those guys. Yeah. Even though they and their government are responsible for tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of deaths. Oh, it's hundreds of thousands.

We got to use that only going forward. Yep. Right. And but then his response to Adam is, oh, but what about Hamas and the thousands that they killed? As if that's like, like he doesn't even see how that's the equivalent. It's not equivalent, but how that's. the equivalent on each side, I should say. Like, if you're saying, he thinks it's worse.

Right. Right. But if you can just bat away the bad elements of the Israeli government that you view as the only bad elements of the Israeli government and wash your hands of those hundreds of thousands of deaths. But then you're going to turn around and say, oh, but, you know, by speaking out against Israel, I guess you're just aligned with Hamas. And you're responsible for the thousands that they killed. It's just ludicrous line of thinking. Yeah, I mean, but that I think is not just unique to Israel. We have to accept that that is the unique reality of the asymmetrical expectations

that underpin like Western society. And our colonial projects around the world, our imperial projects around the world, it's only violence, it only starts being violence when they hit back. Because we've legitimized the occupation. We've legitimized the necessity of the occupation of certain groups around the world at home and abroad for the social order. And so when they fight back, when they hit back, that's unreasonable. It's immoral.

It's impossible because they're barbarians. But if they do do it, they deserve the worst to happen to them. And when we do that, it's no moral stain on our people, no moral stain even on our country, people who do it except for an incredibly specific circumstances where we feel comfortable exceptionalizing like a Netanyahu, a Ben Gavir, a Donald Trump. And then everyone else remains, like, just confused and morally unstained by it. But America's war machine will continue to produce these results anomalous, anomalously, apparently. So I do think we have to understand that this is not unique to Israel.

This is just the way, like, colonial powers have always expected colonial subjects to behave. And it's the way Americans are going to be expected to behave as, like, resources get scarcer here, as less people have jobs, as more people are displaced by climate catastrophes, as more people are thrown illegally into the concentration camps that are being built around. the country, like fighting back will be the only violence that is acknowledged. And so like as people legitimize the talking points that Richie Torres says, if you can't find yourself caring about the plight of other people just because there are other people who deserve to live, understand that this is the test run for what's going to happen to you, happen to your neighbors, happen to your kids. In fact, it's already happening to them. It's happening to them right now. The war on terror was like everyone should read the Palestine Laboratory by Anthony Lewenstein

and also just look into the tactics they're being used on migrants and how they basically took torture from the Iraq war and expanded upon it to bring it domestically. Same stuff's going to happen in the way that like, you know, fascism or imperialism or whatever turns inward and it becomes fascism and those tactics are used against the population. Absolutely. So that's what we're going to be.

The war on terror. Yep. Yep. The war on crime. The war on drugs. the war on poverty. They've always just been wars on the American people, wars on workers, wars on, you know, the middle class. And they've been being waged unrestricted by like our government. Lockkins step with the oligarchs who, you know, are now like out of the shadows, just like, you know, walking into the White House, big smiles.

I would encourage you to go see the full video. It was about 12 minutes long. It's quite clear that around minute eight, at least Lottkin's staff was going, hey, hey, hey, hey, wait, she's got to go. We drove all the way here, but she's got to leave now. We just remembered she had another appointment. Let's just start with the easy question. If Senator Lisa of Slotkin, if she supports Chuck Schumer in his leadership, and I found this a fun. Support Chuck Schumer's leadership here.

He isn't given an interview in about a month. I didn't know that. I mean, for me, I mean, I've now served in the Senate for six months in the House before that. him, Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries have hard jobs. Like, hurting cats, it's not fun. I've said for a very long time, long before I got into the Senate and long before President Biden dropped out, that we need a new generation of leadership. Leadership, you can feel it in.

And I think at this point, I mean, especially New York, right? You're looking at New York. It's like, I'd rather roll the dice with someone new than have like the warmed over leftovers that I've already known. Ooh. Okay. Is that a key of Jeffries? Is he warmed over leftovers too?

I mean, I like to think both of them are, but let's not forget that Chuck Schumer tapped Slotkin as the, giving the response to Donald Trump's state of the union, saying that she's the future of the party. But it's nice that she calls him warmed over in that respect. Like literally, he's not even like sloppy seconds. He's like just been sitting there under the heat lamp. 7-Eleven wings. Look at me. Yes, I know I'm supposed to be mashed potatoes and it's not supposed to be crusty on the top. But this is what you get.

I've been just sitting here waiting. Well, that was encouraging. And the beauty of that question was, that was, I think, the way that Sager and Crystal. And Crystal really took the lead on this interview made her feel like, oh, they're going to frontload the difficult questions. The rest is going to be a cakewalk. let's just play this moment where she's asked if what's going on in Israel is a genocide. And remember, Slotkin was a former CIA. She served in Iraq.

And she gets caught up here in a couple of ways. I will say that I think relative to most of the members of the Democratic caucus, she didn't buckle in a way that I think a lot of these people would. I would have loved to seen Chuck Schumer have to answer any of these questions, frankly. I don't think, you know, Slotkin did it, you know, particularly well, but I think she did it better than some. But the real value that's coming out of this is that these people live in a bubble. and we know that from like Andrew Cuomo thinking he's going to win in New York by representing Benjamin Netanyahu to the international criminal court.

We know that by Chuck Schumer assuming like, oh, the way that the drum up a democratic support is three months after Trump gets elected, I'll come out with my book on anti-Semitism. I mean, we know this from all of their behavior that they are living in a bubble and refuse to acknowledge where the Democratic Party is in terms of Israel. So this is encouraging. Let's play this starting at 612. Do you accept that? And if you do, I mean, what responsibility does a United States senator have for this is a nation that, you know, we send every year billions of dollars to aid to aid that you have, you know, voted for and supported?

Like, what responsibility does a United States Senator have to prevent genocide and to stop genocide that we see ongoing? We have a responsibility up till today to ensure that food is getting in so that people don't starve. I don't know that I'd use that term. Why? It is using the—it is violating the law of war. Why don't you use the term, though? Because I think, you know, it's, to me, if it is—do I think it's ethnic cleansing, which is what I think of in genocide? I don't know if it meets that definition.

They're announcing it. Yeah, but didn't you say it earlier that it was ethnic cleansing? He said that they wanted to force it. I mean, this is open from the Israeli government. Like, they're saying it. They're ministering national security. They come out and they're like, we need, we don't need shells. We don't need, we need shells, not food.

And we need to encourage migration. I, like they're saying that. You're not going to get me to support what the Israeli government is saying right now. I think the point I was trying to make is it's not just about, like, we have relationships with nations over time, regardless of who they're leaders are. We have really tough moments. We have easier moments. But that doesn't, so I'm not willing to say that, like, I hate everything ever into the future. Even if you accept that they're committing a genocide, you still wouldn't cut off their aid. I think that defensive aid and offensive

aid are different things. And I think at this point, so if they're doing every single day, if Nazi Germany said we want defensive aid, I mean, it's just, you have to see where they're all weapons that are being shipped. The weapons that they're using right now, I mean, to be honest, if you look at what's happening on the ground, the military part of this conflict. All right. And here, you know, we're slocking shifts and sort of like, you know,

slides to sort of some type of distraction. The bottom line is, if you accept that Israel is using food and starvation and deprivation as a weapon of war, which she sounds like she does, right? When she says, like, they're breaking the, the, the, um, and she says in that interview, the occupier has a responsibility to make sure that the people aren't. And so she's citing international law there. And then she also is arguing that like Israel is a longstanding ally.

And there are times when your ally does things you don't like them to do. And there are times that they do things that you do like them to do. And you don't just, you know, say, I hate you because of one tiny thing. like, I don't know, an ethnic cleansing or a genocide. But she's like, I don't know if it's an ethnic cleansing. I mean, it self-evidently is. I mean, they're literally talking about building in the north of Gaza just days ago they were introducing. It's all well reported.

I mean, all of this stuff is out there. But the point is that if your ally is engaged, And that's why Crystal asked the question. Are you still going to give them defensive aid, regardless if you found that they were committing genocide? Like, how much do you as an ally refuse to pressure these countries if they are doing the most heinous of things? the guy there is no

there is no greater like crime than genocide that a country could commit and if you are saying that an ally is allowed to commit genocide insofar as

we would exercise no extraordinary influence on it, i.e. we're cutting off all aid, period. I don't care what you use it for. We're cutting off all aid because you're doing the worst crime that can be done. And like how big of war crimes, like we're on the scale, and she refuses to answer that question. If you conceded that what they're doing is genocide, would you then cut off all aid?

She sort of like dodges around that question. I said, well, I don't know if it's genocide and blah, blah, blah. But the real question from a hypothetical standpoint is, would you do that? And if the answer is yes, but they're not committing genocide, well, where is the threshold that you would then cut off fall aid to stop them from doing what they're doing or threaten it and you have to follow through you follow through what what is the threshold is it ethnic cleansing is it well you're just starving them you're not asking him to leave you have no expectation you're just starving them and how starving like starving to death or just like we're just going to create long-term health

effects on 50% of the population that are children by starving them like what's the threshold until you will say to an ally even if you have this um construct of you know you always support allies thick and thin. What is the threshold where you will say offensive weapons, defensive weapons, whatever it is, any type of aid, economic aid, we're going to stop. We're going to stop. I mean, this is the question that Democratic lawmakers have to start answering because if they get, if they take the House, they may not be able to, stop aid, but they can certainly indicate to

the Israelis that if the Democrats get control of the government, it all may end. So these are questions that Slotkin and her colleagues in the Senate and in the House, they better start figuring out the answers to because the Democratic Party,

the voters, are way ahead of them. That includes AOC. It includes Bernie. The Democratic Party is way ahead of them right now. And it ain't going to change. That's just the political reality. And it's good that, you know, she had a firsthand understanding of where the many are in the Democratic Party. But you also just look at the polling. And yes, this is New York. Two-thirds or more of New York City Democratic primary voters agree with Zoham. I'm Donnie's position on Israel, including arresting Netanyahu. I think there's similar numbers

that what Israel is doing is genocide. Now, you can argue, oh, this is New York. These Jews in New York, they're so liberal. So anti-Semitic. They're so anti-Semitic. Yeah, we're to the Christians in Alabama here about this anti-Semitism. I mean, this is what's, this is the Democratic Party is going if they're not already there. And you can write off the Jews, the biggest Jewish

population in the world after Israel. But I don't know how far you're going to get with that. I'd take all strength that guy to get to where I want but I'm looking at there.

I wasn't looking when I just got between the truth and the letter