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Death of the Holocaust Industry - Read by Eunice Wong 15:22

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This article is read by Eunice Wong , a Juilliard-trained actor, featured on Audible's list of Best Women Narrators . Her work is on the annual Best Audiobooks lists of the New York Times, Audible, AudioFile, & Library Journal. www.eunicewong.actor Text originally published September 10, 2025. The Chris Hedges Report is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Full Text: Nearly all Holocaust scholars, who see in any criticism of Israel a betrayal of the Holocaust, have refused to condemn the genocide in Gaza. Not one of the institutions dedicated to researching and commemorating the Holocaust have drawn the obvious historical parallels or decried the mass slaughter of Palestinians. Holocaust scholars, with a handful of exceptions , have exposed their true purpose, which is not to examine the dark side of human nature, the frightening propensity we all have to commit evil, but to sanctify Jews as eternal victims and absolve the ethnonationalist state of Israel of the crimes of settler colonialism , apartheid and genocide . The hijacking of the Holocaust, the failure to defend Palestinian victims because they are Palestinian, has imploded the moral authority of Holocaust studies and Holocaust memorials. They have been exposed as vehicles not to prevent genocide but to perpetrate it, not to explore the past, but manipulate the present. Any tepid recognition that the Holocaust may not be the exclusive property of Israel and its Zionist supporters is swiftly shut down. The Holocaust Museum LA deleted an Instagram post that read: “NEVER AGAIN” CAN’T ONLY MEAN NEVER AGAIN FOR JEWS” after a backlash . In the hands of Zionists, “never again” means precisely that, never again only for Jews . Aimé Césaire, in “ Discourse on Colonialism ,” writes that Hitler seemed exceptionally cruel only because he presided over “the humiliation of the white man,” applying to Europe the “colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India and the nègres d’Afrique.” It was this distortion of the Holocaust as unique that troubled Primo Levi, who was imprisoned in Auschwitz from 1944 to 1945 and wrote “ Survival in Auschwitz .” He was a fierce critic of the apartheid state of Israel and its treatment of the Palestinians. He saw the Shoah as “an inexhaustible source of evil” that “is perpetuated as hatred in the survivors, and springs up in a thousand ways, against the very will of all, as a thirst for revenge, as moral breakdown, as negation, as weariness, as resignation.” He deplored “Manichaeanism,” those who “shun nuance and complexity” and who “reduce the river of human events to conflicts, and conflicts to duals, us and them.” He warned that the “network of human relationships inside the concentration camps was not simple: It could not be reduced to two blocs, victims and persecutors.” The enemy, he knew, “was outside but also inside.” Levi writes about Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski , a Jewish collaborator who ruled the Lodz ghetto. Rumkowski, known as “King Chaim,” turned the ghetto into a slave labor camp which enriched the Nazis and himself. He deported opponents to death camps. He raped and molested girls and women. He demanded unquestioned obedience and embodied the evil of his oppressors. For Levi, he was an example of what many of us, under similar circumstances, are capable of becoming. “We are all mirrored in Rumkowski, his ambiguity is ours, it is our second nature, we hybrids molded from clay and spirit,” Levi wrote in “ The Drowned and the Saved . ” “[H]is fever is ours, the fever of our Western civilization that ‘descends into hell with trumpets and drums,’ and its miserable adornments are the distorting image of our symbols of social prestige.” “Like Rumkowski, we too are so dazzled by power and prestige as to forget our essential fragility,” Levi adds. “[W]illingly or not, we come to terms with power, forgetting that we are all in the ghetto, that the ghetto is walled in, that outside the ghetto reign the lords of death and that close by the train is waiting.” These bitter lessons of the Holocaust, which warn that the line between the victim and victimizer is razor thin, that we can all become willing executioners, that there is nothing intrinsically moral about being Jewish or a survivor of the Holocaust, are what Zionists seek to deny. Levi, for this reason, was persona non grata in Israel. Holocaust studies, which exploded in the 1970s and were epitomized by the deification of the Holocaust survivor and fervent Zionist Elie Wiesel — literary critic Alfred Kazin called him a “Jesus of the Holocaust” — have now surrendered any claim to championing universal truths. These Holocaust scholars use a benchmark evil, as Norman Finkelstein points out, “not as a moral compass but rather as an ideological club.” The mantra “Do not compare,” Finkelstein writes, “is the mantra of moral blackmailers.” Zionists find in the Holocaust and the Jewish state a sense of purpose and meaning, as well as a cloying moral superiority. After the 1967 war , when Israel seized Gaza and the West Bank, Israel, as Nathan Glazer approvingly observed , became “the religion of the American Jews.” Holocaust studies are based on the fallacy that unique suffering confers unique entitlement. This was always the purpose of what Finkelstein calls “ The Holocaust Industry .” “Jewish suffering is depicted as ineffable, uncommunicable, and yet always to be proclaimed,” writes the European historian Charles Maier in “ The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identity .” “It is intensely private, not to be diluted, but simultaneously public so that gentile society will confirm the crimes. A very peculiar suffering must be enshrined in public sites: Holocaust museums, memory gardens, deportation sites, dedicated not as Jewish but civic memorials. But what is the role of a museum in a country, such as the United States, far from the site of the Holocaust? … Under what circumstances can a private sorrow serve simultaneously as public grief? And if genocide is certified as a public sorrow, then must we not accept the credentials of other particular sorrows too? Do Armenians and Cambodians also have a right to publicly funded holocaust museums? And do we need memorials to Seventh Day Adventists and homosexuals for their persecution at the hands of the Third Reich?” Any crime Israel carries out in the name of its survival — its “right to exist” — is justified in the name of this uniqueness. There are no limits. The world is black and white, a never-ending battle against Nazism, which is protean depending on who Israel targets. To challenge this bloodlust is to be an anti-Semite facilitating another genocide of Jews. This simplistic formula not only serves the interests of Israel, but also the interests of colonial powers that carried out their own genocides, ones they seek to obscure. What was the annihilation of Native Americans by European settlers, the Armenians by Turks, the Indians in the Bengal famine by the British or the Soviet-orchestrated famine in the Ukraine? What was the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Is Manifest Destiny any different from the Nazis’ embrace of the concept of Lebensraum ? These too were holocausts, fueled by the same dehumanization and bloodlusts. The sacralization of the Nazi Holocaust offers a bizarre quid pro quo. Arming and funding the state of Israel, preventing U.N. resolutions and sanctions from being adopted to condemn its crimes, and demonizing Palestinians and their supporters, is proof of atonement and support for Jews. Israel, in return, absolves the West of its indifference to the plight of Jews during the Holocaust, and Germany for perpetrating it. Germany uses this unholy alliance to separate Nazism from the rest of German history, including the genocide German colonists carried out against the Nama and Herero in German South-West Africa, now Namibia. “[S]uch magic,” Israeli historian and genocide scholar Raz Segal writes , “legitimizes racism against Palestinians at the very moment that Israel perpetrates genocide against them. The idea of Holocaust uniqueness thus reproduces rather than challenges the exclusionary nationalism and settler colonialism that led to the Holocaust.” Segal, the director of the program in Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Stockton University in New Jersey, wrote an article on Gaza on Oct. 13, 2023 — six days after the incursion by Hamas and other Palestinian fighters into Israel — titled: “A Textbook Case of Genocide.” This denunciation from an Israeli Holocaust scholar, whose family members perished in the Holocaust, was a very lonely stance. Segal saw in the Israeli government’s immediate demand that Palestinians evacuate the north of Gaza, and the blood-curdling demonization of the Palestinians by Israeli officials — the defense minister said Israel was “fighting human animals” — the stench of genocide. “The whole idea about prevention and ‘never again’ is that — as we teach our students — there are red flags that once we notice them, we're supposed to work in order to stop the process that could escalate to genocide,” Segal said when I interviewed him, “even if it's not genocidal yet.” You can watch my interview with Segal here . “Holocaust studies as a field might be dead, which is not necessarily a bad thing,” he continued. “If indeed Holocaust studies is intertwined from the beginning with the ideology of global Holocaust memory, maybe it's good that we won't have Holocaust studies anymore. And maybe it will open the door for even more interesting and important research on the Holocaust as history, as real history.” Segal paid for his courage and his honesty. The offer to lead the University of Minnesota’s Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies — which has issued no condemnation of the genocide — was revoked . Nearly two years into the genocide, the International Association of Genocide Scholars finally issued a statement saying that Israel’s conduct meets the legal definition set out in the U.N. Convention on Genocide. But the vast majority of Holocaust scholars remain mute, endlessly condemning the atrocities committed by Hamas while ignoring those committed by Israel. They were mute when South Africa argued before the International Court of Justice that Israel was committing genocide. They were mute when Amnesty International published a report in December 2024 accusing Israel of genocide. “How many Palestinian students apply to graduate programmes in Holocaust and Genocide Studies around the world? Usually none. How many Palestinian scholars identify themselves as scholars in this field? They, too, can be counted on one hand,” Segal writes in a co-authored article in the Journal of Genocide Research. Genocide is coded in the DNA of Western imperialism. Palestine has made this clear. The genocide is the next stage in what the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai calls “a vast worldwide Malthusian correction” that is “geared to preparing the world for the winners of globalization, minus the inconvenient noise of its losers.” The funding and arming of Israel by the United States and European nations as it carries out genocide has imploded the post-World War II international legal order. It no longer has credibility. The West cannot lecture anyone now about democracy, human rights or the supposed virtues of Western civilization. “At the same time that Gaza induces vertigo, a feeling of chaos and emptiness, it becomes for countless powerless people the essential condition of political and ethical consciousness in the twenty-first century — just as the First World War was for a generation in the West,” Pankaj Mishra writes in “ The World After Gaza .” The ability to peddle the fiction that the Nazi Holocaust is unique, or that Jews are uniquely entitled, has ended. The genocide presages a new world order, one where Europe and the United States, along with their proxy Israel, are pariahs. Gaza has illuminated a dark truth — barbarism and Western civilization are inseparable. Photos Israeli Soldier Apprehending Civilian Palestinians and Israelis clash on the streets of Hebron on the day of the signing of an accord granting the city self-rule. One of the oldest cities in the world and a center of Islam, Hebron has been a frequent source of controversy in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. (Photo by Peter Turnley/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images) Portrait Of Primo Levi By Larry Rivers NEW YORK - FEBRUARY 10: Portrait of Primo Levi by Larry Rivers on February 10, 1988 in New York, New York. (Photo by Santi Visalli/Getty Images) Primo Levi Italian writer Primo Levi, circa 1980. (Photo by Marcello Mencarini/Getty Images) Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, head of the Council of Elders meets with German officials on a street of the ghetto. Ghetto Lodz, Litzmannstadt, Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, head of the Council of Elders meets with German officials on a street of the ghetto, Poland 1940, World War II. (Photo by: Dukas/Universal Images Group via Getty Images) Elie Wiesel 1986: A portrait of Romanian-born author and concentration camp survivor Elie Wiesel sitting at a desk in front of bookshelves, leaning his head on one hand. (Photo by Nancy R. Schiff/Hulton Archive/Getty Images) US academic Norman Finkelstein arrested in protest against Israeli assaults on Gaza NEW YORK, UNITED STATES - JULY 29: Police officers intervene protesters during a rally against the Israeli strikes on Gaza strip, organized by Jewish and a prominent pro-Palestinian activist Norman Finkelstein, in New York outside the UN office, on July 29, 2014. (Photo by Lewaa Khalek/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images) Nathan Glazer Head-shot portrait of American sociologist Nathan Glazer, seated in a library, wearing a dark suit, with a pencil poking out of his jacket packet, wearing thick, dark glasses, with a serious facial expression, 1969. (Photo by JHU Sheridan Libraries/Gado/Getty Images). South Africa's genocide case against Israel begins at International Court of Justice THE HAGUE, NETHERLANDS - JANUARY 11: Public hearings in South Africa's genocide case against Israel began on Thursday at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague, Netherlands on January 11, 2024. (Photo by Dursun Aydemir/Anadolu via Getty Imag Arjun Appadurai https://trafo.hypotheses.org/3951/030_0180 Israeli forces increase measures near the Gaza border ISRAEL - OCTOBER 12: Israeli tanks move near Gaza border as Israeli army deploys military vehicles around the Gaza Strip, Israel on October 12, 2023. (Photo by Mostafa Alkharouf/Anadolu via Getty Images) This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chrishedges.substack.com/subscribe…

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The Martyrdom of Charlie Kirk - Read by Eunice Wong 9:58

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This article is read by Eunice Wong , a Juilliard-trained actor, featured on Audible's list of Best Women Narrators . Her work is on the annual Best Audiobooks lists of the New York Times, Audible, AudioFile, & Library Journal. www.eunicewong.actor Text originally published September 11, 2025. The Chris Hedges Report is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Full Text: The assassination of Charlie Kirk presages a new, deadly stage in the disintegration of a fractious and highly polarized United States. While toxic rhetoric and threats are lobbed across cultural divides like hand grenades, sometimes spilling over into actual violence — including the murder of Minnesota House of Representatives Speaker Emerita Melissa Hortman and her husband and the two assassination attempts against Donald Trump — Kirk’s killing is a harbinger of full-scale social disintegration. His murder has given the movement he represented — grounded in Christian nationalism — a martyr . Martyrs are the lifeblood of violent movements. Any flinching over the use of violence, any talk of compassion or understanding, any effort to mediate or discuss, is a betrayal of the martyr and the cause the martyr died defending. Martyrs sacralize violence. They are used to turn the moral order upside down. Depravity becomes morality. Atrocities become heroism. Crime becomes justice. Hate becomes virtue. Greed and nepotism become civic virtues. Murder becomes good. War is the final aesthetic. This is what is coming. “We have to have steely resolve,” said conservative political strategist Steve Bannon on his show “War Room,” adding, “Charlie Kirk is a casualty of war. We are at war in this country. We are.” “If they won’t leave us in peace, then our choice is to fight or die,” wrote Elon Musk on X. “The entire Right has to band together. Enough of this in-fighting b******t. We are up against demonic forces from the pit of Hell,” wrote commentator and author Matt Walsh on X. “Put the personal squabbles aside. Now’s not the time. This is existential. A fight for our own existence and the existence of our country.” Republican Congressman Clay Higgins wrote that he will use, "Congressional authority and every influence with big tech platforms to mandate immediate ban for life of every post or commenter that belittled the assassination of Charlie Kirk..." He further states "I’m also going after their business licenses and permitting, their businesses will be blacklisted aggressively, they should be kicked from every school, and their drivers licenses should be revoked. I’m basically going to cancel with extreme prejudice these evil, sick animals who celebrated Charlie Kirk’s assassination." Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale capitalized on Kirk’s death to advocate for a takedown of the “red-green alliance” of “Communists and Islamists” who he claims have united to destroy Western civilization. He proposes an app where citizens can upload pictures of crime and homelessness in exchange for “property-tax rebates.” Far-right comedian Sam Hyde, who has nearly half a million followers on X, wrote in response to Trump’s announcement of Kirk's death that it is, "Time to do your f*****g job and seize power… if you want to be more than a footnote in the ‘American Collapse’ section of future history books, it's now or never.” In his tweet, he tags members of the administration and private military contractors. Conservative actor James Woods warned , “Dear leftists: we can have a conversation or a civil war. One more shot from your side and you will not get this choice again.” His tweet was reposted by almost 20,000 people, received 4.9 million views and over 96,000 likes. These are a sample of the slew of vitriolic sentiments shared and cheered on by tens of millions of Americans. The dispossession of the working class, 30 million who have been laid off because of deindustrialization, has engendered rage, despair, dislocation, alienation and fostered magical thinking. It has fed conspiracy theories, a lust for vengeance and a celebration of violence as a purgative for social and cultural decay. Christian fascists — like Kirk and Trump — have astutely preyed on this despair. They stoked the embers. Kirk’s killing will set it alight. Dissidents, artists, gays, intellectuals, the poor, the vulnerable, people of color, those who are undocumented or who do not mindlessly repeat the cant of a perverted Christian nationalism, will be condemned as human contaminants to be excised from the body politic. They will become, as in all diseased societies, sacrificial victims in the vain attempt to achieve moral renewal and recapture a lost glory and prosperity. The cannibalization of society, a futile attempt to recreate a mythical America, will accelerate the disintegration. The intoxication of violence — many of those reacting to Kirk’s killing seemed giddy about a looming bloodbath — will feed on itself like a firestorm. The martyr is vital to the crusade, in this case ridding America of those Trump calls the “radical left.” Martyrs are memorialized in ceremonies and acts of remembrance to remind followers of the righteousness of the cause and the perfidy of those who are blamed for the martyr’s death. This is what Trump did when he called Kirk “a martyr for truth and freedom” in a video message on September 10 , awarded Kirk the Presidential Medal of Freedom and ordered flags to be flown at half-staff until Sunday. It is why Kirk's casket will be flown back to Phoenix, Arizona on Air Force Two. Kirk was a poster child for our emergent Christian Fascism . He peddled the Great Replacement Theory, which claims liberals or “globalists” allow immigrants of color into the country in order to replace whites, distorting immigration trends into conspiracy. He was Islamophobic, tweeting “Islam is the sword the left is using to slit the throat of America,” and that it is “not compatible with western civilization.” When children’s YouTuber Ms. Rachel said “Jesus says to love God and to love your neighbor as yourself,” Kirk retorted that “Satan has quoted scripture plenty” and added “by the way Ms. Rachel, you might wanna crack open that Bible of yours, in a lesser referenced part of the same part of scripture is in Leviticus 18, is that thou shall Lay with another man and be stoned to death.” He demanded we roll back the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and disparaged civil rights leaders such as Martin Luther King. He was demeaning towards Black people, “If I’m dealing with somebody in customer service who’s a moronic Black woman...is she there because of affirmative action?” He said “prowling Blacks” are targeting white people “for fun.” He blamed Black Lives Matter for “destroying the fabric of our society." Kirk insisted the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. He founded Professor Watchlist and School Board Watchlist to purge professors and teachers with what he called “radical leftist” agendas. He advocated televised public executions which he insisted should be mandatory viewing for children. The idea that he championed free speech and liberty is absurd. He was an enemy of both. Kirk, who was a cheerleader for the cult of Trump, embodied the hypermasculinity that is at the core of fascist movements. This was perhaps his primary attraction to youth, especially white men. He claimed there is “a war on men,” fetishized guns and sold Trump to his followers as a man’s man. “There’s a lot you can call Donald Trump,” he wrote . “No one has ever called him feminine. Trump is a giant middle finger to all the screeching hall monitors that attacked young men for just existing. He’s a giant F YOU to the feminist establishment that was never challenged before he came down the golden escalator. Most of the media missed this. Young men did not.” History has shown what comes next. It won’t be pleasant. Kirk, elevated to martyrdom, gives those seeking to extinguish our democracy the license to kill, just as Kirk was killed. It lifts what few constraints still exist to protect us from state abuse and vigilante violence. Kirk’s name and visage will be employed to accelerate the road to tyranny, which is as he would have wanted it. The Chris Hedges Report is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Thanks for reading The Chris Hedges Report! This post is public so feel free to share it. Photos TOPSHOT-SAFRICA-US-HOMOCIDE-MEDIA-POLITICS-CRIME TOPSHOT - A general view of a wreath laid by mourners outside the US Embassy in Pretoria on September 11, 2025 following the fatal shooting of US youth activist and influencer Charlie Kirk while speaking during an event at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah, United States. US youth activist and influencer Charlie Kirk, a major ally of President Donald Trump, was shot on September 10, 2025 at a US university. (Photo by Phill Magakoe / AFP) (Photo by PHILL MAGAKOE/AFP via Getty Images) Conservatives Gather For Annual CPAC Conference In Washington DC OXON HILL, MARYLAND - FEBRUARY 20: Steve Bannon, media personality and political strategist, speaks during the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) at the Gaylord National Resort Hotel And Convention Center on February 20, 2025 in Oxon Hill, Maryland. (Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images) TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013 - Day 3 NEW YORK, NY - MAY 01: Joe Lonsdale of Formation 8 speaks onstage with Alexia Tsotsis at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013 at The Manhattan Center on May 1, 2013 in New York City. (Photo by Brian Ach/Getty Images for TechCrunch) FILES-US-POLITICS-SHOOTING-KIRK US right-wing activist Charlie Kirk (R) speaks on stage with President Donald Trump at America Fest 2024 in Phoenix, Arizona, on December 22, 2024. Right-wing youth activist and influencer Charlie Kirk, a major ally of President Donald Trump, was shot dead on September 10, 2025 in a murder that sparked fears of more political violence in an increasingly febrile United States. Trump confirmed on social media that Kirk, 31, had died from his injuries. (Photo by JOSH EDELSON / AFP) (Photo by JOSH EDELSON/AFP via Getty Images) US-POLITICS-HOMICIDE-MASS-MEDIA-CRIME A photo of youth activist and influencer Charlie Kirk is seen at his makeshift memorial at Orem City Center Park in Orem, Utah, a day after he was shot during a public event at Utah Valley University on September 11, 2025. (Photo by Melissa MAJCHRZAK / AFP) (Photo by MELISSA MAJCHRZAK/AFP via Getty Images) VP Vance Transports Charlie Kirk's Body Back To Phoenix Via Air Force Two PHOENIX, ARIZONA - SEPTEMBER 11: The casket containing the body of Charlie Kirk is removed from Air Force Two at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport on September 11, 2025 in Phoenix, Arizona. Kirk, the CEO and co-founder of Turning Point USA, was shot and killed on Wednesday in Utah. (Photo by Eric Thayer/Getty Images) Room To Grow's 25th Anniversary Gala - Arrivals Aron Accurso and Ms. Rachel a.k.a. Rachel Griffin-Accurso at Room To Grow's 25th Anniversary Gala held at the Ziegfeld Ballroom on October 25, 2023 in New York City. (Photo by John Nacion/Variety via Getty Images) Politicon 2018 - Day 1 LOS ANGELES, CA - OCTOBER 20: Charlie Kirk speaks onstage during Politicon 2018 at Los Angeles Convention Center on October 20, 2018 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Phillip Faraone/Getty Images for Politicon) US-POLITICS US conservative political activist and YouTuber, Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, speaks at University of Nevada in Reno during his "You're Being Brainwashed" tour, October 8, 2024. (Photo by Andri Tambunan / AFP) (Photo by ANDRI TAMBUNAN/AFP via Getty Images) This is a public episode. 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Abolishing the First Amendment - Read by Eunice Wong 12:11

منذ 6 weeks12:11

12:11

This article is read by Eunice Wong , a Juilliard-trained actor, featured on Audible's list of Best Women Narrators . Her work is on the annual Best Audiobooks lists of the New York Times, Audible, AudioFile, & Library Journal. www.eunicewong.actor Text originally published July 28, 2025. The Chris Hedges Report is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Full Text: I testified at the New Jersey state capital in Trenton last week against Bill A3558 , which would adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, which conflates anti-Zionism with antisemitism. “This is a dangerous assault on free speech by seeking to criminalize legitimate criticism of Israeli policies,” I said. “The Trump administration’s campaign to ostensibly root out antisemitism on college campuses is clearly a trope to shut down free speech and deport non-citizens, even if they are here legally. This bill falsely conflates ethnicity with a political state. And let’s be clear, the brunt of repression on college campuses is directed against students and faculty who oppose the genocide in Gaza, 3,000 of whom were arrested and hundreds of whom were censored, suspended or expelled. Many of these students are Jewish. What about their rights? What about their constitutional protections?” “I have had numerous relationships with Israeli journalists and political leaders,” I went on. “I knew, for example, former Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin who negotiated the Oslo peace agreement. Rabin was assassinated in 1995 by an Israeli ultranationalist who opposed the peace accord. Rabin stated bluntly on numerous occasions that the occupation was harmful to Israel. Israeli colleagues frequently criticize Israeli policies in the Israeli press in language that would be defined as antisemitic by this bill.” “For example,” I continued, “the Israeli journalist Gideon Levy, who served in the Israeli army and writes for the newspaper Haaretz, has called for sanctions to be imposed on Israel to stop the slaughter in Gaza, saying ‘Do to Israel what you did to South Africa.’” “Omer Bartov, who served as an Israeli company commander in the 1973 war, is Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University,” I said. “He stated in an article on July 15 in The New York Times that his ‘inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people.’” “These kinds of statements, and many more I can quote from Israeli colleagues and friends, would see them under this bill criminalized as antisemites,” I added. Committee chairman Robert Karabinchak , a Democrat, muted my microphone, banged his hammer for me to stop and allowed gaggles of Zionists, who openly harassed and insulted Muslims in the room, to jeer and shout me down. There I was arguing that this bill would curtail my free speech, at the same time I was being denied free speech. You can see my full testimony here . This cognitive dissonance defines the United States and Israel. The committee chairman also muted Raz Segal , the Israeli historian and genocide scholar and, in an especially callous move, chastised Mehdi Rabee, whose 14-year-old brother Amer was killed by Israeli soldiers in April 2025. “My 14-year-old brother who was from Saddlebrook, New Jersey, was murdered by the IDF,” Mehdi, his voice shaking with emotion, told the committee. “All he was doing was picking olives from an olive tree with his friends, which we have been doing as Palestinians for thousands of years. My brother, whom I will never see again, my brother who my parents will never watch graduate from high school or college. Assemblywoman Swain, my father and the Palestinian-American Community Center tried reaching out to you over and over. And all that we were met with was nothing but silence. Given your silence, you should not have the right to even consider voting for this bill until you meet with my family, who are under your district.” “I am going to ask you to stick to the bill,” Karabinchak interrupted. “This bill puts at risk my First Amendment right to criticize Israel for what they have done to my brother,” he went on. “I have a right to call Israel whatever I want to call it. When their policies mirror that of the Nazis, I have a right to call it as it is. I call on you to vote no in remembrance of my brother.” You can see Mehdi’s statement here . Karabinchak, angered that supporters gave Rabee a standing ovation, reduced all testimonies critical of the bill from three minutes to one minute. “Time is down to one minute,” he told the crowd of about 400 in the committee and four overflow rooms. “I’m going to ask everybody now to speak, who wants to speak, is going to say ‘I oppose the bill’ or ‘I support the bill.’” He paused. “Let’s have some more claps,” he said, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “Let’s be happy now, right? I didn’t throw you out like I said I was going to. So now you just stifled the other people who have a right to speak. That’s what you just did! Understand what you did! Okay? One minute. One minute. That’s it. And I’m not going to be nice and say let’s rap it up. I’m going to shut the mic off. ” Our sin was that we dared to mention the unmentionable – the genocide in Gaza. The Zionists in the room were verbally and physically abusive to the Muslims who had come to oppose the bill. One Zionist repeatedly shoved himself into the bodies of those outside the state capital holding a rally against the bill. You can see his harassment here . Amy Gallatin , who is on the commission of the West Orange Human Relations Commission, “established by municipal ordinance in 1992 in order to create and foster values of diversity, equity and inclusion among groups in the community,” pulled up pictures on her iPad in one of the overflow rooms and said to those seated around her “Look, it’s Mohammed!” You can see her Islamophobic hate speech here . When Rabbi Yitzchok Deutsch made an emotional plea to save the people of Gaza Lisa Swain of District 38 and Assemblyman Avi Schnall of District 30, both Democrats, snickered and laughed as he spoke. You can see their reactions to Rabbi Deutsch here . Zionists, who painted lurid pictures of Jews living under harassment and in fear for their lives, and of Nazism supposedly running amok on the streets of New Jersey, were not muted, although their statements were hyperbolic to the extreme and often a product of over-active imaginations. They openly salivated at the adoption of the bill, which they said would give law enforcement the tools to criminalize those who engage in hate speech, which, if you read the “contemporary examples of antisemitism,” that accompany the IHRA, include speech that criticizes Israeli policies. The IHRA has been adopted by 35 states, the District of Columbia and universities such as Harvard and Columbia . “The IHRA working definition of antisemitism includes protected criticism of Israel and its policies,” writes the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). “For example, the definition declares that ‘denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor,’ ‘drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis,’ and ‘applying double standards by requiring of [Israel] a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation’ are all examples of antisemitism.” “If the Department of Education were to adopt this definition, and investigate universities for Title VI complaints based on it, college and university administrators would likely silence a range of protected speech including criticism of the Israeli government’s treatment of Palestinians, analogies likening Israeli policies to those of Nazi Germany, or sharing differing beliefs about the right to a Jewish state,” the ACLU continues. “People may disagree about whether such speech is antisemitic, but that debate is irrelevant to the First Amendment, which prohibits the government from censoring or penalizing core political speech.” U.S. attorney Kenneth S. Stern — a self-professed Zionist and the lead drafter of what became the IHRA definition of antisemitism — laments that the IHRA has been “grossly abused” to “restrict academic freedom and punish political speech,” including “pro-Palestinian speech.” The five committee members, who had clearly made up their minds before they entered the packed hearing room, unanimously passed the measure, which will go to the floor of the State Assembly for a vote. They will, like all politicians who bow before the dictates of the Israel lobby , no doubt, be compensated for their perfidy. America, like Israel, exists in a parallel reality. It denies the stark and incontrovertible reality of the live-streamed genocide. It slanders anyone, including Israeli holocaust scholars such as Professor Segal, as antisemites. I know, sadly, where this goes. I witnessed it in the many dictatorships I covered as a foreign correspondent for two decades in Latin America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. Those of us who fight for an open society are silenced, attacked as traitors and criminals. We are blacklisted, censored and at times, locked up. If we can escape in time, we are forced into exile. As we are silenced, the sycophants, grifters, Christian fascists, billionaires, Zionists and thugs, elevated to the highest positions in the federal government by the Trump White House, are rewarded with absolute power, luxury and debauchery. Our corporate-indentured ruling class has no genuine political ideology. Political parties are a farce, a species of entertainment to beguile the population in our pretend democracy. Liberalism, and the values it claims to represent, is a spent and bankrupt force. The burlesque in the committee room in Trenton was another depressing reminder that there is little now that will halt our path towards an authoritarian state, not the press , not the universities , not the courts , which cannot enforce the few rulings made by courageous judges, not the political class , including the Democratic Party , and not the electoral process. We must resist, if only to assert our integrity and dignity, if only to stand in solidarity with the oppressed, if only to slow the consolidation of tyranny, if only to revel in the small pyrrhic victories that resistance alone makes possible. But we should not be fooled. Thanks for reading The Chris Hedges Report! This post is public so feel free to share it. The Chris Hedges Report is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. 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The Gaza Riviera - Read by Eunice Wong 12:50

منذ 7 weeks12:50

12:50

This article is read by Eunice Wong , a Juilliard-trained actor, featured on Audible's list of Best Women Narrators . Her work is on the annual Best Audiobooks lists of the New York Times, Audible, AudioFile, & Library Journal. www.eunicewong.actor Text originally published July 26, 2025. The Chris Hedges Report is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Full Text: Israelis do not see the images of skeletal corpses of Palestinian children who they have starved to death as a curse. They do not see the slain families they gun down at food hubs — designed not to deliver aid but lure starving Palestinians into a massive concentration camp in the south of Gaza in preparation for deportation — as a war crime. Israelis do not look at the savage bombing and shelling that kill or wound dozens of Palestinian civilians, where an average of 28 children die daily , as anything extraordinary. They do not see the wasteland of Gaza, pulverized by bombs and methodically being torn down by bulldozers and excavators, leaving virtually the entire population of Gaza homeless, as barbaric. They do not see the destruction of water purification plants, decimation of hospitals and clinics, where doctors and medical staff are often unable to work because they are weak from malnutrition , as savage. They do not blink at the assassinations of doctors as well as journalists , 232 of whom have been murdered for trying to document the horror. Israelis have blinded themselves morally and intellectually. They view the genocide through the lens of a bankrupt media and political class that tells them only what they want to hear and shows them only what they want to see. They are intoxicated by the power of their industrial weapons and license to kill with impunity. They are drunk on self-adulation and the fantasy that they are the vanguard of civilization. They believe that the extermination of a people, including children, condemned as human contaminants, makes the world, especially their world, a happier and safer place. They are the heirs of Pol Pot , the killers that carried out the genocides in East Timor , Rwanda and Bosnia and, yes, the Nazis. Israel, like all genocidal states — no population since World War II has been dispossessed and starved with such speed and ruthlessness – has a final solution that would have earned the stamp of approval from Adolf Eichmann . Starvation was always the plan, the preordained final chapter of the genocide. Israel methodically set out from the beginning of the genocide to destroy sources of food, bombing bakeries and blocking food shipments into Gaza, something it has accelerated since March, when it severed nearly all food supplies. It targeted the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) — on which most Palestinians depended on for food — for destruction, accusing its employees, without providing evidence, of being involved in the attacks of Oct. 7. This accusation was used to give funders such as the United States, which provided $422 million to the agency in 2023, the excuse to halt financial support. Israel then banned UNRWA. Over 1,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli soldiers and U.S. mercenaries in the chaotic scramble to get one of the few food packages distributed during the brief blocks of time, usually an hour, at the four aid sites set up by the Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation , according to the U.N. Human Rights Office. Once Gaza was turned into a moonscape after 21 months of saturation bombing, once Palestinians were forced to live in tents, under crude tarps or in the open air, once clean water, food and medical aid became nearly impossible to find, once civil society was obliterated, Israel began its grim campaign to starve the Palestinians out of Gaza. One in three people in Gaza are going multiple days without eating, according to the U.N. Starvation is not a pretty sight. I covered the famine in Sudan in 1988 that took an estimated 250,000 lives. There are streaks in my lungs — scars from standing amid hundreds of Sudanese who were dying of tuberculosis. I was strong and healthy and fought off the contagion. They were weak and emaciated and did not. I watched hundreds of skeletal figures, ghosts of human beings, trudge at a glacial pace across the barren Sudanese landscape. Hyenas, accustomed to eating human flesh, routinely picked off small children. I stood over clusters of bleached human bones on the outskirts of villages where dozens of people, too weak to walk, had laid down in a group and never got up. Many were the remains of entire families. The starved lack enough calories to sustain themselves. They eat anything to survive — animal feed, grass, leaves, insects, rodents, even dirt. They suffer from constant diarrhea. They have trouble breathing because of respiratory infections. They rip up tiny bits of food, often spoiled, and ration it in a vain attempt to hold off the gnawing hunger pains. Starvation reduces the iron needed to produce hemoglobin, a protein in red blood cells that carries oxygen from the lungs to the body, and myoglobin, a protein that provides oxygen to muscles, coupled with a lack of vitamin B1, which affects heart and brain function . Anemia sets in . The body, in essence, feeds on itself. Tissue and muscle waste away. It is impossible to regulate body temperature. Kidneys shut down. Immune systems crash. Vital organs atrophy. Blood circulation slows. The volume of blood decreases. Infectious diseases such as typhoid, tuberculosis and cholera become an epidemic, killing people by the thousands. It is impossible to concentrate. Emaciated victims succumb to mental and emotional withdrawal and apathy. They do not want to be touched or moved. The heart muscle is weakened. Victims, even at rest, are in a state of virtual heart failure. Wounds do not heal. Vision is impaired with cataracts, even among the young. Finally, wracked by convulsions and hallucinations, the heart stops. This process can last up to 40 days for an adult. Children, the elderly and the sick expire at faster rates.This is the future Israel has preordained for the two million people in Gaza. But it is not the future Israelis see. They see paradise. They see an ethno-nationalist Jewish state where Palestinians, whose land they stole and occupied and whose people they have subjugated and forced into an apartheid existence, do not exist. They see cafes and hotels rising up where thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of bodies lie buried under the rubble. They see tourists frolicking on the Gaza beachfront, a vision enhanced by an Artificial Intelligence-generated video uploaded to social media by Israeli Minister of Innovation, Science and Technology, Gila Gamliel. It is what a Gaza devoid of Palestinians would look like, echoing the absurdist AI video posted by Donald Trump. In the new video, carefree Israelis eat at seaside restaurants. Anchored in the sparkling Mediterranean are luxury yachts. Gleaming hotels and office high rises, including a Trump Tower, dot the beachfront. Attractive residential neighborhoods stand where now there are broken, jagged mounds of concrete. The video shows Benjamin Netanyahu and his wife, Sara, as well as Trump and Melania, strolling along the seaside. Gamliel, like other Israeli leaders and Trump, cynically uses the term “voluntary emigration” to describe the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. This omits the stark choice Israel actually offers the Palestinians — leave or die . Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has called for a “security annexation” of the northern Gaza Strip and vowed that Gaza will become an “inseparable part of the State of Israel.” He made the remarks at a Knesset conference called “The Gaza Riviera — from vision to reality,” which presented proposals for the building of Jewish colonies in Gaza. Smotrich said Israel would “relocate Gazans to other countries,” and that Trump endorsed the plan. Israeli Minister of Heritage Amichai Eliyahu, who once proposed dropping a nuclear bomb on Gaza, declared that “All Gaza will be Jewish.” The Israeli government “is racing ahead for Gaza to be wiped out,” Eliyahu said. He described Palestinians as Nazis. “Thank God, we are wiping out this evil. We are pushing this population that has been educated on ‘ Mein Kampf .’” Genocidal killers embrace fantasies of eradicating a native population and expanding their ethnonationalist state. The Nazis carried out their genocidal assault, which included mass starvation, on Slavs, Eastern European Jews and other indigenous people, dismissed as Untermenschen , or subhumans. Colonists were then to be shipped to Central and Eastern Europe to Germanize the occupied territory. These killers do not reckon with the darkness they unleash. The upscale beachfront properties dreamt of by Israel will never appear, just as the modern, exclusively Serb capital, with its golden domed cathedral, imposing presidency building, 15-story clock tower, state-of-the-art medical center and national theater with a 72-foot revolving stage was never built on the ruins of Bosnia. Rather, there will be ugly apartment blocks, populated by the usual miscreants, proto-fascists, racists and mediocrities who live in the Jewish colonies in the West Bank. These ultranationalists , who have formed rogue militias to seize Palestinian land and joined the Israeli army in murdering over 1,000 Palestinians in the West Bank since Oct. 7, will define Israel. They are the Israeli version of the 3-million-strong Pancasila Youth — Indonesia’s equivalent of the Brown Shirts or the Hitler Youth — that in 1965 helped carry out the genocidal mayhem that left half a million to one million dead. These rogue militias, equipped with automatic weapons provided by the Israeli government, lynched Saifullah Musallet, a 20-year-old Palestinian-American, who was attempting to protect his family’s land two weeks ago. He is the fifth U.S. citizen killed in the West Bank since Oct. 7. Once these Israeli goons and thugs are done with the Palestinians, they will turn on each other. The genocide in Gaza signals the abolition, for Israelis as well as Palestinians, of the rule of law. It marks the obliteration of even the pretense of an ethical code. Israelis are the barbarians they condemn. If there is any warped justice in this genocide it is that Israelis, once they finish with the Palestinians, will be forced to live together in moral squalor. Thanks for reading The Chris Hedges Report! This post is public so feel free to share it. Photos Chris Hedges Chris Hedges, a former Pulitzer Prize winning foreign correspondent for the New York Times and best selling author of 'Empire of Illusion', stands next to a window for a portrait, Princeton, NJ, November 2010. Hedges is also the author of 'Death of the Liberal Class' and is a columnist for Truthdig. (Photo by Oliver Morris/Getty Images) TOPSHOT-PALESTINIAN-ISRAEL-CONFLICT-GAZA-AID TOPSHOT - Palestinians gather at an aid distribution point set up by the privately-run Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), near the Nuseirat refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip on June 25, 2025. (Photo by Eyad BABA / AFP) (Photo by EYAD BABA/AFP via Getty Images) Right Wing Supporters Take Part In March Towards Gaza SOUTHERN ISRAEL, ISRAEL - JULY 30: An explosion is seen in the northern Gaza Strip as right-wing activists observe from a vantage point during a rally calling to resettle the Northern Gaza Strip on July 30, 2025 in Southern Israel, Israel. Reports in the Israeli press suggest that President Netanyahu has promised far-right politicians in the coalition government that Israel will begin to resettle North Gaza in the near future. (Photo by Amir Levy/Getty Images) Israeli army withdraws from Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza GAZA CITY, GAZA - APRIL 1: A woman mourns as the Palestinians gather around the burned and destroyed Al-Shifa Hospital after the Israeli attacks as Israeli forces withdrew from Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City, Gaza on April 1, 2024. (Photo by Dawoud Abo Alkas/Anadolu via Getty Images) TOPSHOT-ISRAEL-PALESTINIAN-GAZA-CONFLICT TOPSHOT - Israeli soldiers prepare tanks at an Israeli army deployment area near the Israel-Gaza Strip border for a potential ground operation in the Palestinian coastal enclave on November 20, 2012. AFP PHOTO / JACK GUEZ (Photo by JACK GUEZ / AFP) (Photo by JACK GUEZ/AFP via Getty Images) IDF Soldiers Remain On The Gaza Border After Ceasefire ISRAEL/GAZA, ISRAEL - NOVEMBER 22: Israeli soldiers laugh and dance to music provided by visiting Hassidic Jews who visited to show their support to soldiers at the border with the Gaza Strip on November 22, 2012 close to the northern Gaza Strip border with Israel. (Photo by Christopher Furlong/Getty Images) An undated photo of genocidal leader Pol Pot (L) w ANLONG VENG, CAMBODIA: An undated photo of genocidal leader Pol Pot (L) with former Khmer Rouge foreign minister Ieng Sary (C) recovered from the guerilla's former stronghold of Anlong Veng by Agence France-Presse reporter Reach Sambath on March 28 1998. The picture was believed to be taken in China in the late 1970's, according to Pich Chheang, former Khmer Rouge ambassador to China. Man on the right is unidentified. AFP PHOTO (Photo credit should read AFP via Getty Images) Prime Talking 5th November 1975: Foreign Minister Ernesto Melo Antunes with his Indonesian counterpart Adam Malik outside the Portuguese Embassy in Rome, discussing the civil war on the Portuguese island of Timor. (Photo by Keystone/Getty Images) Hitler And Goebbels Being Saluted (Original Caption) 10/31/1933.Berlin, Germany- Chancellor Adolf Hitler & Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels (left) receiving the cheers and Nazi salutes of their followers in the Berlin sports Palast where they opened the campaign of Hitler's government to get the support of the citzens for their program for the nation.The ballots for this election do not contain names of candidates for this or that office. Food distributed to Palestinians struggling with hunger in Gaza GAZA CITY, GAZA - AUGUST 01: Palestinians, including children gather with cooking pots to receive hot meals distributed by a charitable organization in the Al-Ansar area of western Gaza City on August 1, 2025. The food distribution comes amid severe hunger and humanitarian crisis caused by ongoing Israeli attacks. (Photo by Abdalhkem Abu Riash/Anadolu via Getty Images) Ethiopian Refugees An Ethiopian woman from Eritrea and her starving children sit in a hospital tent located in a refugee camp in eastern Sudan. (Photo by Peter Turnley/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images) SUDAN-FAMINE An elderly woman and some children shown in a file photo dated 03 November 1988 waiting by an empty bowl in Juba, southern Sudan, four days after their last meal. The international medical charity Medecins sans Frontieres (MSF-Doctors without Borders) warned 08 June of famine in southern Sudan's Bahr el-Ghazal state and called for urgent measures to avert disaster. (Photo by ALEXANDER JOE / AFP FILES / AFP) (Photo by ALEXANDER JOE/AFP FILES/AFP via Getty Images) ISRAEL-IRAN-POLITICS Iranian crown prince Reza Pahlavi (L), whose father was the shah overthrown in the 1979 Islamic revolution, alongside Israel's Intelligence Minister Gila Gamliel visit the Sorek Desalination Plant, south of Tel Aviv, on April 19, 2023. (Photo by JACK GUEZ / AFP) (Photo by JACK GUEZ/AFP via Getty Images) TOPSHOT-ISRAEL-ARGENTINA-POLITICS-DIPLOMACY-PARLIAMENT TOPSHOT - Israel's (L to R) Foreign Minister Gideon Saar and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich attend the address of Argentina's President to a session of the Israeli parliament (Knesset) at its headquarters in Jerusalem on June 11, 2025. (Photo by Menahem KAHANA / AFP) (Photo by MENAHEM KAHANA/AFP via Getty Images) Amichai Eliyahu https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Amichai_Eliyahu.jpg Israeli settlers march to Gaza border, demand resettlement ISRAEL - JULY 30: Jewish settlers and far-right activists march from Sderot toward the northern border of Gaza, calling for the re-establishment of settlements in the territory, on July 30, 2025, in Israel. Chanting slogans such as "We are returning to Gaza," the demonstrators carried Israeli flags throughout the march. (Photo by Mostafa Alkharouf/Anadolu via Getty Images) Sumpah Pemuda https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HUT_Sumpah_Pemuda_.jpg This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chrishedges.substack.com/subscribe…

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The Persecution of Francesca Albanese - Read by Eunice Wong 6:38

منذ 8 weeks6:38

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This article is read by Eunice Wong , a Juilliard-trained actor, featured on Audible's list of Best Women Narrators . Her work is on the annual Best Audiobooks lists of the New York Times, Audible, AudioFile, & Library Journal. www.eunicewong.actor Text originally published July 9, 2025. The Chris Hedges Report is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Full Text: When the history of the genocide in Gaza is written, one of the most courageous and outspoken champions for justice and the adherence to international law will be Francesca Albanese, the United Nations Special Rapporteur, who today the Trump administration is sanctioning. Her office is tasked with monitoring and reporting on human rights violations that Israel commits against Palestinians. Albanese, who regularly receives death threats and endures well-orchestrated smear campaigns directed by Israel and its allies, valiantly seeks to hold those who support and sustain the genocide accountable. She lambasts what she calls “the moral and political corruption of the world” that allows the genocide to continue. Her office has issued detailed reports documenting war crimes in Gaza and the West Bank, one of which, called “ Genocide as colonial erasure ,” I have reprinted as an appendix in my latest book, “ A Genocide Foretold .” She has informed private organizations that they are “criminally liable” for assisting Israel in carrying out the genocide in Gaza. She announced that if true, as has been reported, that the former British prime minister David Cameron threatened to defund and withdraw from the International Criminal Court (ICC) after it issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant, which Cameron and the other former British prime minister Rishi Sunak could be charged with a criminal offense for, under the Rome Statute. The Rome Statute criminalizes those who seek to prevent war crimes from being prosecuted. She has called on top European Union (EU) officials to face charges of complicity of war crimes over their support for the genocide, saying that their actions cannot be met with impunity. She was a champion of the Madleen flotilla that sought to break the blockade of Gaza and deliver humanitarian aid, writing that the boat which was intercepted by Israel, was carrying not only supplies, but a message of humanity. You can see the interview I did with Albanese here . Her latest report lists 48 corporations and institutions, including Palantir Technologies Inc., Lockheed Martin, Alphabet Inc. (Google), Amazon, International Business Machine Corporation (IBM), Caterpillar Inc., Microsoft Corporation and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), along with banks and financial firms such as BlackRock, insurers, real estate firms and charities, which in violation of international law, are making billions from the occupation and the genocide of Palestinians. You can read my article on Albanese’s most recent report here . Secretary of State Marco Rubio condemned her support for the ICC, four of whose judges have been sanctioned by the U.S. for issuing arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant last year. He criticized Albanese for her efforts to prosecute American or Israeli nationals who sustain the genocide, saying she is unfit for service as a special rapporteur. Rubio also accused Albanese of having "spewed unabashed antisemitism, expressed support for terrorism, and open contempt for the United States, Israel, and the West." The sanctions will most likely prevent Albanese from travelling to the U.S. and will freeze any assets she may have in the country. The attack against Albanese presages a world without rules, one where rogue states, such as the U.S. and Israel, are permitted to carry out war crimes and genocide without any accountability or restraint. It exposes the subterfuges we use to fool ourselves and attempt to fool others. It reveals our hypocrisy, cruelty and racism. No one, from now on, will take seriously our stated commitments to democracy, freedom of expression, the rule of law or human rights. And who can blame them? We speak exclusively in the language of force, the language of brutes, the language of mass slaughter, the language of genocide. “The acts of killing, the mass killing, the infliction of psychological and physical torture, the devastation, the creation of conditions of life that would not allow the people in Gaza to live, from the destruction of hospitals, the mass forced displacement and the mass homelessness, while people were being bombed daily, and the starvation — how can we read these acts in isolation?” Albanese asked in an interview I did with her when we discussed her report, “Genocide as colonial erasure.” The militarized drones, helicopter gunships, walls and barriers, checkpoints, coils of concertina wire, watchtowers, detention centers, deportations, brutality and torture, denial of entry visas, apartheide existence that comes with being undocumented, loss of individual rights and electronic surveillance, are as familiar to desperate migrants along the Mexican border, or attempting to enter Europe, as they are to Palestinians. This is what awaits those who Frantz Fanon calls “the wretched of the earth.” Those that defend the oppressed, such as Albanese, will be treated like the oppressed. Thanks for reading The Chris Hedges Report! This post is public so feel free to share it. Photos Chris Hedges Chris Hedges, a former Pulitzer Prize winning foreign correspondent for the New York Times and best selling author of 'Empire of Illusion', stands next to a window for a portrait, Princeton, NJ, November 2010. Hedges is also the author of 'Death of the Liberal Class' and is a columnist for Truthdig. (Photo by Oliver Morris/Getty Images) NATO Foreign Ministers Meeting April 2024 BRUSSELS, BELGIUM - APRIL 03: Britain's Foreign Secretary David Cameron speaks to the press after his arrival at NATO headquarters on the first day of the NATO Foreign Ministers' meeting on April 03, 2024 in Brussels, Belgium. The meeting of foreign ministers from NATO countries coincided with the 75th anniversary of the alliance's founding. (Photo by Omar Havana/Getty Images) The State Visit Of The President Of The Republic Of Korea - Day 1 LONDON, ENGLAND - NOVEMBER 21: Britain's Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, right, and David Cameron, the Foreign Secretary, left, walk across Horse Guards parade for the Ceremonial Welcome by King Charles and Queen Camilla for the President of Korea Yoon Suk Yeol and First Lady, Kim Keon Hee, on November 21, 2023 in London, England. The President of Korea Yoon Suk Yeol is on a four-day State visit to Britain. (Photo by Frank Augstein - WPA Pool/Getty Images) 'Freedom Flotilla' And Greta Thunberg Prepare To Depart Italy For Gaza CATANIA, ITALY - JUNE 01: The bow of the Madleen ship, featuring an illustration inspired by the Palestinian flag, ready to set off from the port of San Giovanni Li Cuti on June 01, 2025 in Catania, Italy. (Photo by Fabrizio Villa/Getty Images) 'Freedom Flotilla' And Greta Thunberg Prepare To Depart Italy For Gaza CATANIA, ITALY - JUNE 01: Greta Thunberg with part of the crew of the ship Madleen, shortly before departure for Gaza, during the press conference in San Giovanni Li Cuti on June 01, 2025 in Catania, Italy. (Photo by Fabrizio Villa/Getty Images) Senators Meet For Their Policy Luncheons On Capitol Hill WASHINGTON, DC - MAY 10: Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) leaves the Senate Chamber following a vote at the U.S. Capitol on May 10, 2023 in Washington, DC. Republican and Democratic Congressional leaders met with President Joe Biden at the White House yesterday to continue to negotiate how to raise the debt limit. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images) TOPSHOT-US-ISRAEL-POLITICS-DIPLOMACY-TRUMP-NETANYAHU TOPSHOT - US President Donald Trump shakes hands with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during a meeting in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC, on April 7, 2025. (Photo by SAUL LOEB / AFP) (Photo by SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images) PALESTINIAN-ISRAEL-CONFLICT-FOOD Palestinians shove to receive a hot meal at a charity kitchen in the Mawasi area of Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip on July 22, 2025. The head of Gaza's largest hospital said 21 children have died due to malnutrition and starvation in the Palestinian territory in the past three days, amid a devastating assault by Israeli forces. (Photo by AFP) (Photo by -/AFP via Getty Images) TOPSHOT-PALESTINIAN-ISRAEL-US-BARRIER-TRUMP TOPSHOT - A man walks past graffiti depicting US President Donald Trump on the controversial Israeli separation barrier in the West Bank town of Bethlehem on August 4, 2017. (Photo by Musa AL SHAER / AFP) (Photo by MUSA AL SHAER/AFP via Getty Images) Emergency Ministerial Conference on Global Leaders Convene in Bogota BOGOTA, COLOMBIA - JULY 15: Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur on the Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanes attends the Emergency Ministerial Conference on Palestine at the San Carlos Palace in Bogota, Colombia, on July 15, 2025. (Photo by Juancho Torres/Anadolu via Getty Images) This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chrishedges.substack.com/subscribe…

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Trump, Epstein and the Deep State - Read by Eunice Wong 14:57

منذ 8 weeks14:57

14:57

This article is read by Eunice Wong , a Juilliard-trained actor, featured on Audible's list of Best Women Narrators . Her work is on the annual Best Audiobooks lists of the New York Times, Audible, AudioFile, & Library Journal. www.eunicewong.actor Text originally published July 12, 2025 . The Chris Hedges Report is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Full Text: The refusal by the Trump administration to release the files and videos amassed during investigations into the activities of the pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, should put to rest the absurd idea, embraced by Trump supporters and gullible liberals, that Trump will dismantle the Deep State. Trump is part of , and has long been part of, the repugnant cabal of politicians – Democrat and Republican – billionaires and celebrities who look at us, and often underage girls and boys, as commodities to exploit for profit or pleasure. The list of those who were in Epstein’s orbit is a who’s who of the rich and famous. They include not only Trump , but Bill Clinton , who allegedly took a trip to Thailand with Epstein, Prince Andrew , Bill Gates , hedge fund billionaire Glenn Dubin , former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson , former Secretary of the Treasury and former president of Harvard University Larry Summers , cognitive psychologist and author Stephen Pinker , Alan Dershowitz , billionaire and Victoria’s Secret CEO Leslie Wexner , the former Barclays banker Jes Staley , former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak , the magician David Copperfield , actor Kevin Spacey , former CIA director Bill Burns , real estate mogul Mort Zuckerman , former Maine senator George Mitchell and disgraced Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein , who reveled in Epstein’s perpetual Bacchanalia . They also include law firms and high-priced attorneys, federal and state prosecutors, private investigators, personal assistants, publicists, servants and drivers. They include the numerous procurers and pimps, including Epstein’s girlfriend and daughter of Robert Maxwell , Ghislaine Maxwell. They include the media and politicians who ruthlessly discredited and silenced the victims, and strong armed anyone, including a handful of intrepid reporters, seeking to expose Epstein’s crimes and circle of accomplices. There is a lot that remains hidden. But there are some things we know. Epstein installed hidden cameras in his opulent residences and on his private Caribbean island, Little St. James, to capture his high-powered friends engaging in sexual romps and abuse of teenage and underage girls and boys. The recordings were blackmail gold. Were they part of an intelligence operation on behalf of the Israeli Mossad ? Or were they used to ensure that Epstein had a steady source of investors who funneled him millions of dollars to avoid being outed? Or were they used for both? He shuttled underage girls between New York and Palm Beach on his private jet the Lolita Express , which was allegedly outfitted with a bed for group sex. His coterie of famous friends, including Clinton and Trump , are recorded as traveling on the jet numerous times on released flight logs, although many other flight logs have disappeared. Epstein’s videos are in the vaults of the FBI, along with detailed evidence that would rip back the veil on the sexual proclivities and callousness of the powerful. I doubt there is a client list, as Attorney General Pam Bondi claims. There is also no single Epstein file. The investigative material amassed on Epstein fills many, many boxes, which would bury Bondi’s desk and probably, if collected in one room, dominate most of the space in her office. Did Epstein commit suicide, as the official autopsy report claims, by hanging himself in his jail cell on August 10, 2019 at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York City? Or was he murdered? Since the cameras recording activity in his cell the night were not functional, we do not know. Michael Baden, a forensic pathologist hired by Epstein's brother, who served as the chief medical examiner for New York City and who was present at the autopsy, said he believes Epstein's autopsy suggests homicide . The Epstein case is important because it implodes the fiction of deep divisions between Democrats, who had no more interest in releasing the Epstein files than Trump, and the Republicans. They belong to the same club. It exposes how the courts and law enforcement agencies collude to shield powerful figures who engage in crimes. It lays bare the depravity of our exhibitionist ruling class, accountable to no one, free to violate, plunder, loot and prey on the weak and the vulnerable. It is the tawdry record of our oligarchic masters, those who lack the capacity for shame or guilt, whether dressed up as Donald Trump or Joe Biden. This class of ruling parasites was parodied in the first-century satirical novel “ Satyricon ” by Gaius Petronius Arbiter , written during the reigns of Caligula, Claudius, and Nero. As in Satyricon, Epstein’s circle was dominated by pseudointellectuals, pretentious buffoons, grifters, con artists, petty criminals, the insatiable rich and the sexually depraved. Epstein and his inner circle routinely engaged in sexual perversions of Petronian proportions, as The Miami Herald investigative reporter Julie Brown, whose dogged reporting was largely responsible for reopening the federal investigation in Epstein and Maxwell, documents in her book “ Perversion of Justice: The Jeffrey Epstein Story .” As Brown writes, in 2016 an anonymous woman, using the pseudonym “Kate Johnson,” filed a civil complaint in a federal court in California alleging she was raped by Trump and Epstein when she was thirteen, over a four-month period, from June to September 1994. “I loudly pleaded with Trump to stop,” she said in the lawsuit about being raped. “Trump responded to my pleas by violently striking me in the face with his open hand and screaming that he could do whatever he wanted.” Brown continues: Johnson said that Epstein invited her to a series of ‘underage sex parties’ at his New York mansion where she met Trump. Enticed by promises of money and modeling opportunities, Johnson said she was forced to have sex with Trump several times, including once with another girl, twelve years old, whom she labeled ‘Marie Doe.’ Trump demanded oral sex, the lawsuit said, and afterward he “pushed both minors away while angrily berating them for the ‘poor’ quality of the sexual performance,” according to the lawsuit, filed April 26 in U.S. District Court in Central California. Afterward, when Epstein learned that Trump had taken Johnson’s virginity, Epstein allegedly ‘attempted to strike her about the head with his closed fists,’ angry he had not been the one to take her virginity. Johnson claimed that both men threatened to harm her, and her family if she ever revealed what had happened. The lawsuit states that Trump did not take part in Epstein’s orgies but liked to watch, often while the thirteen-year-old “Kate Johnson” gave him a hand job. It appears Trump was able to quash the lawsuit by buying her silence. She has since disappeared. In 2008, Alex Acosta, who at the time was the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, negotiated a plea deal for Epstein. The deal granted immunity from all federal criminal charges to Epstein, four named co-conspirators and any unnamed “potential co-conspirators.” The agreement shut down the FBI probe into whether there were more victims and other powerful figures who took part in Epstein’s sex crimes. It halted the investigation and sealed the indictment. Trump, in what many consider an act of gratitude, appointed Acosta as Secretary of Labor in his first term. Trump contemplated pardoning Ghislaine Maxwell after she was arrested in July 2020, fearing she would reveal details of his decades-long friendship with Epstein, according to Trump biographer Michael Wolff. In July 2022, Maxwell was sentenced to 20 years in prison. “Jeffrey Epstein’s closest relationship in life was with Donald Trump…these were two guys joined at the hip for a good 15 years. They did everything together,” Wolff told host Joanna Coles on The Daily Beast Podcast. “And this is from sharing, pursuing women, hunting women, sharing at least one girlfriend for at least a year in this kind of rich-guy relationship with each other’s planes, to Epstein advising Trump on how to cheat on his taxes.” The legal anomalies, including the disappearance of massive amounts of evidence incriminating Epstein, saw Epstein avoid federal sex-trafficking charges in 2007, when his attorneys negotiated the secret plea deal with Acosta. He was able to plead guilty to lesser state charges of soliciting a minor for prostitution. The prominent men accused of engaging in Epstein’s carnival of pedophilia, including Epstein’s attorney Dershowitz, viciously threaten anyone who seeks to expose them. Dershowitz, for example, claims that an investigation which he has refused to make public, by the former FBI director Louis Freeh, proves he had never had sex with Epstein’s victim Virginia Giuffre, who was trafficked at 17 to Prince Andrew. Giuffre, one of the few victims to publicly take on her abusers, said she was “passed around like a platter of fruit” among Epstein and Maxwell’s friends, until at the age of 19 when she escaped. She “ committed suicide ” in April 2025. Dershowitz has sent repeated threats to Brown and her editors at The Miami Herald. Brown continues: [Dershowitz] kept referring to information that was contained in sealed documents. He accused the newspaper of not reporting “facts” that he said were in those sealed documents. The truth is, I tried to explain, newspapers just can’t write about things because Alan Dershowitz says they exist. We need to see them. We need to verify them. Then, because I said “show me the material,” he publicly accused me of committing a criminal act by asking him to produce documents that were under court seal. This is the way Dershowitz operates. What disturbs me the most about Dershowitz is the way that the media, with few exceptions, fails to critically challenge him. Journalists fact-checked Donald Trump and others in his administration almost every day, yet, for the most part, the media seems to give Dershowitz a pass on the Epstein story. In 2015, when Giuffre’s allegations first became public, Dershowitz went on every television program imaginable swearing, among other things, that Epstein’s plane logs would exonerate him. “How do you know that?” he was asked. He replied that he was never on Epstein’s plane during the time that Virginia was involved with Epstein. But if the media had checked, they could have learned that he was indeed a passenger on the plane during that time period, according to the logs. Then he testified, in a sworn deposition, that he never went on any plane trips without his wife. But he was listed on those passage manifests as traveling multiple times without his wife. During at least one trip, he was on the plane with a model named Tatiana. Epstein donated money to Harvard and was made a visiting fellow in Harvard’s Department of Psychology, although he had no academic qualifications in the field. He was given a key card and pass code, as well as an office in the building that housed Harvard’s Program for Evolutionary Dynamics. He referred to himself in his press releases as “Science Philanthropist Jeffrey Epstein,” “Education activist Jeffrey Epstein,” “Evolutionary Jeffrey Epstein,” “Science patron Jeffrey Epstein” and “Maverick hedge funder Jeffrey Epstein.” Epstein, replicating the pretensions and vacuity of the characters who were parodied in the “Dinner with Trimalchio” chapter of Satyricon, organized elaborate dinner gatherings for his billionaire friends, including Elon Musk, Salar Kamangar and Jeff Bezos. He dreamed up bizarre schemes of social engineering, including a plan to seed the human species with his own DNA by creating a baby compound at his sprawling ranch in New Mexico. “Epstein was also obsessed with cryonics, the transhumanist philosophy whose followers believe that people can be replicated or brought back to life after they are frozen,” Brown writes. “Epstein apparently told some of the members of his scientific circle that he wanted to inseminate women with his sperm for them to give birth to his babies, and that he wanted his head and his penis frozen .” The Epstein story is a window into the moral bankruptcy, hedonism and greed of the ruling class. This crosses political lines. It is the common denominator between Democratic politicians, such as Bill Clinton, philanthropists, such as Bill Gates, the billionaire class, and Trump. They are one class of predators and grifters. It is not only girls and women they exploit, but all of us. Thanks for reading The Chris Hedges Report! This post is public so feel free to share it. Photos Chris Hedges Chris Hedges, a former Pulitzer Prize winning foreign correspondent for the New York Times and best selling author of 'Empire of Illusion', stands next to a window for a portrait, Princeton, NJ, November 2010. Hedges is also the author of 'Death of the Liberal Class' and is a columnist for Truthdig. (Photo by Oliver Morris/Getty Images) Donald Trump Donald Trump (L), owner of the New Jersey Generals, of the U.S. Football League, said 10/18 his league’s $1.32 billion antitrust suit against the national Football League will crack “one of the great monopolies in the is country.” At right is his attorney Roy Cohn. Robert Maxwell British media proprietor Robert Maxwell (1923 - 1991), UK, 21st November 1973. (Photo by Evening Standard/Hulton Archive/Getty Images) "Chinese Box" Screening Ghislaine Maxwell attends "Chinese Box" Screening at the Paris Theater in New York City on November 22, 1997. (Photo by Ron Galella/Ron Galella Collection via Getty Images) Bob Woolmer Death Investigation Continues KINGSTON, JAMAICA - MARCH 27: A CCTV camera operates in the Pegasus Hotel in Jamaica where Pakistan Coach Bob Woolmer was found dead a week ago, March 27, 2007 in Kingston, Jamaica. A murder investigation is now under way into the death of Bob Woolmer after the post-mortem results proved that Bob Woolmer's death was due to asphyxia as a result of manual strangulation. (Photo by Clive Rose/Getty Images) Messy Retro Desk - stock photo Intentionally aged wide angle photo of a cluttered desk with old monitor. High dynamic range photo. (by DaveLongMedia) Dr. Michael Baden Testifying (Original Caption) WASHINGTON: Dr. Michael Baden, chief medical examiner of New York City, uses drawing during testimony before the House Assassination Committee 9/7 on the shooting of President Kennedy demonstrating the path of the bullet through Kennedy's head. Bust of Claudius (Original Caption) Claudius, Roman Emperor. 41-54 A. D. Bust Of Roman Emperor Nero (Original Caption) Bust of the Roman Emperor Nero (37-68 A.D.). The bust is in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence. Undated. CPJ's 29th Annual International Press Freedom Awards NEW YORK, NEW YORK - NOVEMBER 21: Julie K. Brown speaks onstage at the Committee to Protect Journalists' 29th Annual International Press Freedom Awards on November 21, 2019 in New York City. (Photo by Dia Dipasupil/Getty Images) President Donald Trump Departs White House For Midwest Trip WASHINGTON, DC - JULY 12: Labor Secretary Alex Acosta stands with U.S. President Donald Trump while announcing his resignation to the media at the White House on July 12, 2019 in Washington, DC. Acosta has been under fire for his role in the Jeffrey Epstein plea deal over a decade ago when he was a U.S. Attorney in Florida. (Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images) Author Michael Wolff Discusses His Controversial New Book On Trump Administration PHILADELPHIA, PA - JANUARY 16: Author Michael Wolff discusses his controversial book on the Trump administration titled "Fire and Fury" on January 16, 2018 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Trump's lawyer had previously sent a cease-and-desist letter to the author and publisher of the book claiming that it was defamatory and libelous and should not be published or distributed. (Photo by Jessica Kourkounis/Getty Images) Ghislaine Maxwell Tenerife, Mort du magnat et homme politique britannique Robert Maxwell. Ici, sa fille Ghislaine Maxwell sur le yacht de son père "Le Lady Ghislaine". Elle sera, au début des années 2000, la compagne de l'homme d'affaires Jeffrey Epstein (Photo by Mathieu Polak/Sygma/Sygma via Getty Images) Trump, Knauss, Epstein, & Maxwell At Mar-A-Lago From left, American real estate developer Donald Trump and his girlfriend (and future wife), former model Melania Knauss, financier (and future convicted sex offender) Jeffrey Epstein, and British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell pose together at the Mar-a-Lago club, Palm Beach, Florida, February 12, 2000. (Photo by Davidoff Studios/Getty Images) Senate Impeachment Trial Of President Trump Continues WASHINGTON, DC - JANUARY 29: Attorney Alan Dershowitz, a member of President Donald Trump's legal team, speaks to the press in the Senate Reception Room during the Senate impeachment trial at the U.S. Capitol on January 29, 2020 in Washington, DC. Wednesday begins the question-and-answer phase of the impeachment trial that will last up to 16 hours over the next two days. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images) Donald Trump Holds Campaign Rally At Madison Square Garden In NYC NEW YORK, NEW YORK - OCTOBER 27: Tesla and X CEO Elon Musk raises his hands as he takes the stage during a campaign rally for Republican presidential nominee, former U.S. President Donald Trump, at Madison Square Garden on October 27, 2024 in New York City. (Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images) International Center For Journalists 2012 Awards Dinner WASHINGTON, DC - NOVEMBER 13: Salar Kamangar poses for a photo during the International Center for Journalists 2012 Awards dinner at the Ronald Reagan Building on November 13, 2012 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Kris Connor/Getty Images) British PM Boris Johnson Meets With Amazon Founder Jeff Bezos NEW YORK, NEW YORK - SEPTEMBER 20: Amazon founder Jeff Bezos arrives for his meeting with British Prime Minister Boris Johnson at the UK diplomatic residence on September 20, 2021 in New York City. (Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images) This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chrishedges.substack.com/subscribe…

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War Deja Vu - Read by Eunice Wong 11:46

منذ 12 weeks11:46

11:46

This article is read by Eunice Wong , a Juilliard-trained actor, featured on Audible's list of Best Women Narrators . Her work is on the annual Best Audiobooks lists of the New York Times, Audible, AudioFile, & Library Journal. www.eunicewong.actor Text originally published June 19, 2025 Full text: There are few differences between the lies told to ignite the war with Iraq and the lies told to ignite a war with Iran. The assessments of our intelligence agencies and international bodies are, as they were during the calls to invade Iraq, airily dismissed for hallucinations. All the old tropes have been resurrected to entice us into another military fiasco. A country that poses no threat to us, or to its neighbors, is on the verge of acquiring a Weapon of Mass Destruction (WMD) that imperils our existence. The country and its leaders embody pure evil. Freedom and democracy are at stake. If we do not act now the next smoking gun will be a mushroom cloud. Our military superiority assures victory. We are the saviors of the world. Massive bombing, an updated version of Shock and Awe , will bring peace and harmony. We heard these canards leading up to the 2003 war in Iraq. Twenty-two years later they have been resurrected. Anyone who advocates for negotiations, for diplomacy and peace, is a stooge for terrorists. Did we learn any lessons from the fiascos in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria, not to mention Ukraine? All the ghouls who sold us these past wars on false pretenses, such as conservative talk show host Mark Levin , Max Boot — who writes , “that strategic imperative argues for bombing Fordow,” where Iran’s nuclear enrichment program is buried underground — David Frum , John Bolton , Gen. Jack Keane , Newt Gingrich , Sean Hannity and Thomas Friedman , have returned to saturate the airwaves with breathless fearmongering. Never mind that their grand plan to topple the Taliban in Afghanistan and then invade and replace the regimes in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Libya, Sudan, Somalia — and finally in Iran — blew up in their faces. Never mind that their lust for war left hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions dead and drained trillions from the U.S. Treasury. Never mind the sheer idiocy of their arguments. Their megaphones are secure. They are dutiful shills for the war industry, brain dead neoconservatives and genocidal Zionists, who believe in the magical regeneration of the world through violence, ignoring catastrophe after catastrophe. Forget the intelligence community’s Annual Threat Assessment that “Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme leader Khomeini has not authorized the nuclear weapons program that he suspended in 2003,” something reiterated by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director General Rafael Grossi this week. Forget that Benjamin Netanyahu, for almost three decades, has been breathlessly warning that Iran is on the cusp of producing a nuclear weapon. Forget that the preemptive attack on Iran by Israel is a war crime , not to mention the bombings of a hospital , ambulance and journalists . Forget the hundreds of Iranian civilians Israel has slaughtered in its waves of airstrikes. Forget that Israel launched its attack on Iran as the sixth round of negotiations on nuclear enrichment between the U.S. and Iran were set to take place in Oman. Forget that it is the Israeli prime minister, not the leader of Iran, who is subject to an arrest warrant, accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Forget that Israel, in the midst of carrying out a campaign of genocide against the Palestinians, possesses at least 90 nuclear weapons — built in violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) — and blocks inspections by the IAEA. Forget that Donald Trump ripped up the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) in 2018, an agreement to limit Iran’s nuclear program, which Iran was abiding by. Forget that Washington and London orchestrated the 1953 coup to topple Iran’s democratically elected government, the first in the region, and installed the compliant Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi into power. Forget that the U.S., along with Israel , trained and equipped the SAVAK, the Shah’s savage secret police. Bomb! Bomb! Bomb! Iran’s purported nuclear weapons program is the evidence-free equivalent of Saddam Hussein’s mythical WMDs and alliance with Al-Qaeda . The invasion and occupation of Iraq , which led to the deaths of over 4,000 U.S. soldiers and Marines and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians, resulted in widespread destruction, regional instability and gave birth to a range of fanatical extremist groups, including the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). The assurances — that our invasion would implant democracy in Baghdad, which would emanate outwards across the Middle East, that we would be greeted as liberators and that the oil revenues would pay for the reconstruction — were a fantasy dreamed up by the George W. Bush administration and Washington think tanks. These shills for endless war do not grasp the mechanism or the consequences of war. They are culturally, historically, and linguistically illiterate about the countries they attack. Iraq. Afghanistan. Libya. Syria. Iran. I doubt they can tell the difference. These cheerleaders of war, once they are proven wrong, are adept at issuing mea culpas. They assure us of their good intentions. They did not mean to peddle disinformation. They only wanted to keep the world safe from “evildoers” and protect our national security. No one, even those within the Bush and now Trump administrations, are intentionally dishonest. It is not their fault if they act on flawed intelligence. The problem is one of judgment, not virtue. They are good people. But this, perhaps, is the biggest lie. The intelligence assessments used to justify the war against Iraq were cooked up by a cabal of lunatic neoconservatives and rabid Zionists because they did not like the assessments of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and other intelligence agencies. Now another cabal, dominated by Israel-firsters, is concocting bogus intelligence assessments to justify a war with Iran. These wars are not prosecuted in good faith. They are not based on a careful and rational assessment of verifiable intelligence. They are utopian visions severed from reality where our own intelligence agencies are ignored along with international bodies such as the United Nations, WMD inspectors or the IAEA. The history of modern Iran is the history of a people battling tyrants propped up and funded by Western powers. The brutal crushing of legitimate democratic movements over the decades resulted in the 1979 revolution that brought the Iranian clerics to power. The new Islamic government of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini championed Islam and argued for standing up to “arrogant” world powers and their regional allies, who would oppress others – including Palestinians – to serve their own interests. “The central story of Iran over the last 200 years has been national humiliation at the hands of foreign powers who have subjugated and looted the country,” Stephen Kinzer, the author of “ All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror ,” told me. “For a long time the perpetrators were the British and Russians. Beginning in 1953, the United States began taking over that role. In that year, the American and British secret services overthrew an elected government, wiped away Iranian democracy, and set the country on the path to dictatorship.” “Then, in the 1980s, the U.S. sided with Saddam Hussein in the Iran-Iraq war, providing him with military equipment and intelligence that helped make it possible for his army to kill hundreds of thousands of Iranians,” Kinzer said. “Given this history, the moral credibility of the U.S. to pose as a promoter of democracy in Iran is close to nil.” You can see an interview I did with Kinzer about Iran here . How would we react if Iran orchestrated a coup in the U.S. to replace an elected government with a brutal dictator, who for decades persecuted, assassinated and imprisoned democracy activists? How would we react if Iran armed and funded a neighboring state, as we did during the eight year war with Iraq, to wage war against us? How would we react if Iran shot down one of our passenger jets as did the USS Vincennes (CG49) — caustically nicknamed the “Robocruiser” by the crews of other American vessels — when in July 1988 it fired missiles at a commerical aircraft filled with Iranian civilians, killing all 290 passengers, including 66 children? How would we react if Iranian intelligence services sponsored terrorism within the U.S., as our and Israel’s intelligence services do in Iran ? How would we react if these state-sponsored terrorist attacks included suicide bombings, kidnappings, beheadings, sabotage and “targeted assassinations,” of government officials, scientists and other Iranian leaders? How would we react if, like Israel, a country attacked us based on a hypothesis, an attack that is illegal under the U.N. charter, which forbids preemptive war? The pimps of war who orchestrate these military fiascos have risen once again from the crypt. They migrate like zombies from administration to administration. They are ensconced in think tanks — Project for the New American Century , American Enterprise Institute, Foreign Policy Research Initiative , The Atlantic Council and The Brookings Institution — funded by corporations, the Israel lobby and the war industry. They are puppets jerked up and down by their masters, given megaphones by a bankrupt media, urging us forward from one quagmire to the next. The old faces and the old lies are back, exhorting us into another nightmare. The Chris Hedges Report is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Thanks for reading The Chris Hedges Report! This post is public so feel free to share it. Photos TOPSHOT-UN-SECURITY COUNCIL-POWELL VIAL 2 TOPSHOT - US Secretary of State Colin Powell holds up a vial that he said was the size that could be used to hold anthrax as he addresses the United Nations Security Council 5 February, 2003 at the UN in New York. (Photo by Timothy A. CLARY / AFP) (Photo by TIMOTHY A. CLARY/AFP via Getty Images) Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei TEHRAN, IRAN - MAY 10: (----EDITORIAL USE ONLY MANDATORY CREDIT - 'IRANIAN LEADER PRESS OFFICE / HANDOUT' - NO MARKETING NO ADVERTISING CAMPAIGNS - DISTRIBUTED AS A SERVICE TO CLIENTS----) Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamanei attends an event in Tehran, Iran on May 10, 2025. (Photo by IRANIAN LEADER PRESS OFFICE/Anadolu via Getty Images) Baghdad Under Siege BAGHDAD, IRAQ - MARCH 21: (USA and Canada SALES ONLY) Fires rage on the west bank of the Tigris river on March 21, 2003 in Baghdad, Iraq as hostilities between U.S. led Coalition forces and the Iraqi Regime continue. (Photo by Mirrorpix/Getty Images) GETTY IMAGES HAS EXCLUSIVE RIGHTS TO THIS IMAGE IN NORTH AMERICA Radio Hall Of Fame 2018 Induction Ceremony NEW YORK, NY - NOVEMBER 15: Inductee Mark Levin speaks on stage during Radio Hall Of Fame 2018 Induction Ceremony at Guastavino's on November 15, 2018 in New York City. (Photo by Michael Kovac/Getty Images for Radio Hall of Fame ) Max Boot at the 2024 Library of Congress National Book Festival on August 24, 2024 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Max_Boot_at_the_2024_Library_of_Congress_National_Book_Festival_on_August_24,_2024_(cropped).jpg Politicon 2017 - Day 1 David Frum speaks during Politicon at the Pasadena Convention Center in Pasadena, California on July 29, 2017. Politicon is a bipartisan convention that mixes politics, comedy and entertainment. (Photo by: Ronen Tivony) (Photo by Ronen Tivony/NurPhoto via Getty Images) John Bolton Joins NCRI-US Conference Examining Iran's Nuclear Agenda WASHINGTON, DC - AUGUST 17: Former National Security Adviser John Bolton speaks at a panel hosted by the National Council of Resistance of Iran – U.S. Representative Office (NCRI-US) at the Willard InterContinental Hotel on August 17, 2022 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images) House Homeland Security and Foreign Affairs Committee Hearing on Terrorism UNITED STATES - NOVEMBER 18 - Ret. Gen. Jack Keane, Chairman of the Board of the Institute for the Study of War, listens during a House Homeland Security and Foreign Affairs Committee joint hearing on "on examining the rise of radicalism, growing terrorist sanctuaries, and the threat to the U.S. homeland," on Capitol Hill, in Washington, Wednesday, November 18, 2015. (Photo By Al Drago/CQ Roll Call) Newt Gingrich Speaking to Press House Speaker Newt Gingrich speaks to the press about term limits at the U.S. Capitol. (Photo by © Wally McNamee/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images) Gov. Ron DeSantis Visits "Hannity" NEW YORK, NEW YORK - SEPTEMBER 13: Sean Hannity host a live taping of Hannity at Fox News Channel Studios on September 13, 2023 in New York City. (Photo by Steven Ferdman/Getty Images) "Women In The World: Stories And Solutions" Summit - Day 2 NEW YORK - MARCH 13: Thomas L. Friedman attends day 2 of the "Women In The World: Stories and Solutions" Summit at Hudson Theatre on March 13, 2010 in New York City. (Photo by Marc Bryan-Brown/WireImage) Intelligence Chiefs Testify To House Select Committee On Intelligence WASHINGTON, DC - MARCH 26: Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard testifies during an annual worldwide threats assessment hearing at the Longworth House Office Building on March 26, 2025 in Washington, DC. The hearing held by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence addressed top aides inadvertently including Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief for The Atlantic magazine, on a high level Trump administration Signal group chat discussing plans to bomb Houthi targets in Yemen. (Photo by Kayla Bartkowski/Getty Images) International Atomic Energy Agency Holds Annual Board Meeting VIENNA, AUSTRIA - SEPTEMBER 11: Rafael Grossi, Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency, arrives for a meeting of the Board of Governors at IAEA headquarters on September 11, 2023 in Vienna, Austria. (Photo by Thomas Kronsteiner/Getty Images) Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (Front) WASHINGTON, DC - JULY 10: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (Front) addresses the joint session of US Congress as the Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich (R) and US Vice President Al Gore (L) listen 10 July at the Capitol in Washington DC. Netanyahu called on Europe and Asia to join efforts to isolate Iran and Iraq and prevent them from developing nuclear capabilities that he warned would bring catastrophe. AFP Photo Travis HEYING A (Photo credit should read Travis HEYING/AFP via Getty Images) Israel Holds Successful Test Of Arrow Anti-Missile Missile ISRAEL - DECEMBER 2: In this photo released by Israel Aircraft Industries, an Arrow II anti-missile missile is successfully launched December 2, 2005 from an unnamed military base in central Israel. (Photo by IAI via Getty Images) TOPSHOT-IRAQ-UNREST TOPSHOT - Military helicopters fly over the Green Zone area in Baghdad following a loud explosion early on October 18, 2010. Violence in Iraq has plunged dramatically since its peak in 2006-2007 but casualties from insurgent and military action still remain part of daily life. AFP PHOTO / SABAH ARAR (Photo by SABAH ARAR / AFP) (Photo by SABAH ARAR/AFP via Getty Images) Islamic State/Iraq/Syria: A masked Islamic State soldier poses holding the ISIL banner somewhere in the deserts of Iraq or Syria. ISIL publicity image, 2015 Islamic State/Iraq/Syria: A masked Islamic State soldier poses holding the ISIL banner somewhere in the deserts of Iraq or Syria. ISIL publicity image, 2015. (Photo by: Pictures from History/Universal Images Group via Getty Images) Rumsfeld, Libby And Cheney WASHINGTON, UNITED STATES - SEPTEMBER 5:Vice President Dick Cheney (left) with Chief of Staff to the Vice President, Scooter Libby (centre), and Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, outside the Pentagon briefing room September 5, 2002 in Washington, DC. (Photo by David Hume Kennerly/Getty Images) Tehran March Demonstrators guided by clergymen in Tehran, during the Iranian Revolution, 19th January 1979. As many as 17 million people up and down the country marched peacefully to demand the removal of the Shah and the return of Ayatollah Khomeini. (Photo by Kaveh Kazemi/Getty Images) IRAN-POLITICS-REVOLUTION-ANNIVERSARY This handout picture provided by the office of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei shows him praying inside the tomb of the late Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in Tehran on January 30, 2025, ahead of the 46th anniversary of the 1979 Islamic Revolution. (Photo by KHAMENEI.IR / AFP via Getty Images) Exiled Shah Reads Telegram (Original Caption) 8/22/1953-Rome, Italy- Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi is flanked by reporters, as he reads a telegram urging him to return to Tehran. After five days in exile in Rome, the ruler of Iran was notified that Mossadegh's coup was thwarted and that it was safe to return. IRAN-COUP D'ETAT-MONARCHISTES Des manifestants monarchistes qui viennent d'incendier un journal gouvernemental, défilent sur l'Avenue Chah Abbas en plein centre de Téhéran le 26 août 1953. Le Shah d'Iran est rentré d'Italie le 22 août, où il était en exil, après la réussite du coup d'Etat pour restaurer la monarchie. (Photo by - / INTERCONTINENTALE / AFP) (Photo by -/INTERCONTINENTALE/AFP via Getty Images) Saddam Hussein with Soldiers in North Iraq Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein visits soldiers in northern Iraq. (Photo by Jacques Pavlovsky/Sygma via Getty Images) USS Vincennes https://www.history.navy.mil/about-us/leadership/director/directors-corner/h-grams/h-gram-020/h-020-1-uss-vincennes-tragedy--.html This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chrishedges.substack.com/subscribe…

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War With Iran - Read by Eunice Wong 3:15

منذ 13 weeks3:15

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This article is read by Eunice Wong , a Juilliard-trained actor, featured on Audible's list of Best Women Narrators . Her work is on the annual Best Audiobooks lists of the New York Times, Audible, AudioFile, & Library Journal. www.eunicewong.actor Text originally published May 26, 2025 Full text: War opens a Pandora’s box of evils that once unleashed are beyond anyone’s control. The warmongers who ordered the strikes by U.S. bombers on Iranian nuclear sites have no more of a plan for what comes next in Iran than they had in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya or Syria. European allies, whom Israel and Trump have alienated with these air assaults, are in no mood to cooperate with Washington. The Pentagon, even if it wanted to, does not have the hundreds of thousands of troops it would need to attack and occupy Iran -- the only way Iran might be subdued. And the idea that the marginal and discredited Iranian resistance group Mujahedeen-e-Khalq (MEK), which fought alongside Saddam Hussein in the war against Iran and is viewed by most Iranians as composed of traitors, is a viable counter force to the Iranian government is ludicrous. In all these equations the 90 million people in Iran are ignored just as the people of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria were ignored. They will not welcome the United States and certainly not Israel as liberators. They may hate the regime, but they will resist. They don’t want to be dominated by foreign powers. A war with Iran will be interpreted throughout the region as a war against Shiism. Soon there will be retaliation. Lots of it. It will come at first with desultory missile strikes and then attacks carried out by elusive enemies on ships, military bases and installations. Steadily it will grow in volume and lethality. The death toll, including among the some 40,000 soldiers and Marines stationed in the Middle East, will mount. Ships, including aircraft carriers, will be targeted. We will, as we did in Iraq and Afghanistan, begin to lash out with a blind fury, fueling the conflagration we began. Those who lured us into this war know little about the instrument of war and even less about the cultures or peoples they seek to dominate. Blinded by hubris, believing their own hallucinations, they have learned none of the lessons of the last two decades of warfare in the Middle East. A war with Iran will be a self-defeating and costly quagmire, one more nail in the rotting edifice of the empire. The Chris Hedges Report is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Thanks for reading The Chris Hedges Report! This post is public so feel free to share it. Photos IRAN-US-ISRAEL-CONFLICT A banner bearing a painting that represents various categories of the Iranian society is deployed against the facade of a building in Tehran, with a message that reads in Farsi: " we are all soldiers of Iran", on June 22, 2025. (Photo by AFP) (Photo by -/AFP via Getty Images) Chris Hedges Chris Hedges, a former Pulitzer Prize winning foreign correspondent for the New York Times and best selling author of 'Empire of Illusion', stands next to a window for a portrait, Princeton, NJ, November 2010. Hedges is also the author of 'Death of the Liberal Class' and is a columnist for Truthdig. (Photo by Oliver Morris/Getty Images) President Trump Addresses Nation After US Bombs Iranian Nuclear Sites WASHINGTON, DC - JUNE 21: U.S. President Donald Trump delivers an address to the nation from the White House on June 21, 2025 in Washington, D.C. President Trump addressed the three Iranian nuclear facilities that were struck by the U.S. military early Sunday. (Photo by Carlos Barria - Pool/Getty Images) The Iran–Iraq War Mojahedin women during the Iran–Iraq War. The People's Mojahedin of Iran (aka Mojahedin-e-Khalq (MEK)) is an Iranian leftist revolutionary organization that participated in the 1979 Revolution that overthrew the Pahlavi Shah. (Photo by José Nicolas/Corbis via Getty Images) Remaining US Troops In Iraq Patrol Restive Babil Province ISKANDARIYA, IRAQ - JULY 18: Military vehicles that have been cleaned and repaired are lined-up for return to the U.S. from Iraq at U.S. military base Kalsu on July 18, 2011 in Iskandariya, Babil Province Iraq. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images) (FILE) The Third Anniversary Of The Fall Of Baghdad BAGHDAD, IRAQ - APRIL 9: (FILE PHOTO) U.S marines and Iraqis are seen on April 9, 2003 as the statue of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein is toppled at al-Fardous square in Baghdad, Iraq. (Photo by Wathiq Khuzaie /Getty Images) This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chrishedges.substack.com/subscribe…

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Rule of Idiots - Read by Eunice Wong 12:58

منذ 13 weeks12:58

12:58

This article is read by Eunice Wong , a Juilliard-trained actor, featured on Audible's list of Best Women Narrators . Her work is on the annual Best Audiobooks lists of the New York Times, Audible, AudioFile, & Library Journal. www.eunicewong.actor Text originally published May 26, 2025 Full text: The last days of dying empires are dominated by idiots. The Roman, Mayan, French, Habsburg, Ottoman, Romanoff, Iranian and Soviet dynasties crumbled under the stupidity of their decadent rulers who absented themselves from reality, plundered their nations and retreated into echo chambers where fact and fiction were indistinguishable. Donald Trump, and the sycophantic buffoons in his administration, are updated versions of the reigns of the Roman emperor Nero , who allocated vast state expenditures to attain magical powers; the Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huang, who funded repeated expeditions to a mythical island of immortals to bring back a potion that would give him eternal life; and a feckless Tsarist court that sat around reading tarot cards and attending séances as Russia was decimated by a war that consumed over two million lives and revolution brewed in the streets. In “ Hitler and the Germans ,” the political philosopher Eric Voegelin dismisses the idea that Hitler — gifted in oratory and political opportunism, but poorly educated and vulgar — mesmerized and seduced the German people. The Germans, he writes, supported Hitler and the “grotesque, marginal figures,” surrounding him because he embodied the pathologies of a diseased society, one beset by economic collapse and hopelessness. Voegelin defines stupidity as a “loss of reality.” The loss of reality means a “stupid” person cannot “rightly orient his action in the world, in which he lives.” The demagogue, who is always an idiote , is not a freak or social mutation. The demagogue expresses the society’s zeitgeist, its collective departure from a rational world of verifiable fact. These idiots, who promise to recapture lost glory and power, do not create. They only destroy. They accelerate the collapse. Limited in intellectual ability, lacking any moral compass, grossly incompetent and filled with rage at established elites who they see as having slighted and rejected them, they remake the world into a playground for grifters, con artists and megalomaniacs. They make war on universities, banish scientific research, peddle quack theories about vaccines as a pretext to expand mass surveillance and data sharing , strip legal residents of their rights and empower armies of goons, which is what the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has become, to spread fear and ensure passivity. Reality, whether the climate crisis or the immiseration of the working class, does not impinge on their fantasies. The worse it gets, the more idiotic they become. Hannah Arendt blames a society that willingly embraces radical evil on this collective “thoughtlessness.” Desperate to escape from the stagnation, where they and their children are trapped, hopeless and in despair, a betrayed population is conditioned to exploit everyone around them in a desperate scramble to advance. People are objects to be used, mirroring the cruelty inflicted by the ruling class. A society convulsed by disorder and chaos, as Voegelin points out, celebrates the morally degenerate, those who are cunning, manipulative, deceitful and violent. In an open, democratic society, these attributes are despised and criminalized. Those who exhibit them are condemned as stupid; “a man [or woman] who behaves in this way,” Voegelin notes, “will be socially boycotted.” But the social, cultural and moral norms in a diseased society are inverted. The attributes that sustain an open society — a concern for the common good, honesty, trust and self-sacrifice — are ridiculed. They are detrimental to existence in a diseased society. When a society, as Plato notes, abandons the common good, it always unleashes amoral lusts — violence, greed and sexual exploitation — and fosters magical thinking, the focus of my book “ Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle .” The only thing these dying regimes do well is spectacle. These bread and circus acts — like Trump’s $40 million Army parade to be held on his birthday on June 14 — keep a distressed population entertained. The Disneyfication of America, the land of eternally happy thoughts and positive attitudes, the land where everything is possible, is peddled to mask the cruelty of economic stagnation and social inequality. The population is conditioned by mass culture, dominated by sexual commodification, banal and mindless entertainment and graphic depictions of violence, to blame itself for failure. Søren Kierkegaard in “The Present Age” warns that the modern state seeks to eradicate conscience and shape and manipulate individuals into a pliable and indoctrinated “public.” This public is not real. It is, as Kierkegaard writes, a “monstrous abstraction, an all-embracing something which is nothing, a mirage.” In short, we became part of a herd, “unreal individuals who never are and never can be united in an actual situation or organization — and yet are held together as a whole.” Those who question the public, those who denounce the corruption of the ruling class, are dismissed as dreamers, freaks or traitors. But only they, according to the Greek definition of the polis , can be considered citizens. Thomas Paine writes that a despotic government is a fungus that grows out of a corrupt civil society. This is what happened to past societies. It is what happened to us. It is tempting to personalize the decay, as if ridding ourselves of Trump will return us to sanity and sobriety. But the rot and corruption has ruined all of our democratic institutions, which function in form, not in content. The consent of the governed is a cruel joke. Congress is a club on the take from billionaires and corporations. The courts are appendages of corporations and the rich. The press is an echo chamber of the elites, some of whom do not like Trump, but none of whom advocate the social and political reforms that could save us from despotism. It is about how we dress up despotism, not despotism itself. The historian Ramsay MacMullen, in “Corruption and the Decline of Rome,” writes that what destroyed the Roman Empire was “the diverting of governmental force, its misdirection.” Power became about enriching private interests. This misdirection renders government powerless, at least as an institution that can address the needs and protect the rights of the citizenry. Our government, in this sense, is powerless. It is a tool of corporations, banks, the war industry and oligarchs. It cannibalizes itself to funnel wealth upwards. “[T]he decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness,” Edward Gibbon writes. “Prosperity ripened the principle of decay; the cause of the destruction multiplied with the extent of conquest; and, as soon as time or accident had removed the artificial supports, the stupendous fabric yielded to the pressure of its own weight. The story of the ruin is simple and obvious: and instead of inquiring why the Roman Empire was destroyed we should rather be surprised that it had subsisted for so long.” The Roman emperor Commodus, like Trump, was entranced with his own vanity . He commissioned statues of himself as Hercules and had little interest in governance. He fancied himself a star of the arena, staging gladiatorial contests where he was crowned the victor and killing lions with a bow and arrow. The empire — he renamed Rome the Colonia Commodiana (Colony of Commodus) — was a vehicle to satiate his bottomless narcissism and lust for wealth. He sold public offices the way Trump sells pardons and favors to those who invest in his cryptocurrencies or donate to his inauguration committee or presidential library. Finally, the emperor’s advisors arranged to have him strangled to death in his bath by a professional wrestler after he announced that he would assume the consulship dressed as a gladiator. But his assassination did nothing to halt the decline. Commodus was replaced by the reformer Pertinax who was assassinated three months later. The Praetorian Guards auctioned off the office of emperor. The next emperor, Didius Julianus, lasted 66 days. There would be five emperors in A.D. 193, the year after the assassination of Commodus. Like the late Roman Empire, our republic is dead. Our constitutional rights — due process, habeas corpus, privacy, freedom from exploitation, fair elections and dissent — have been taken from us by judicial and legislative fiat. These rights exist only in name. The vast disconnect between the purported values of our faux democracy and reality means our political discourse, the words we use to describe ourselves and our political system, are absurd. Walter Benjamin wrote in 1940 amid the rise of European fascism and looming world war: A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. Our decay, our illiteracy and collective retreat from reality, was long in the making. The steady erosion of our rights, especially our rights as voters, the transformation of the organs of state into tools of exploitation, the immiseration of the working poor and middle class, the lies that saturate our airwaves, the degrading of public education, the endless and futile wars, the staggering public debt, the collapse of our physical infrastructure, mirror the last days of all empires. Trump the pyromaniac entertains us as we go down. The Chris Hedges Report is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Thanks for reading The Chris Hedges Report! This post is public so feel free to share it. Photos Chris Hedges Chris Hedges, a former Pulitzer Prize winning foreign correspondent for the New York Times and best selling author of 'Empire of Illusion', stands next to a window for a portrait, Princeton, NJ, November 2010. (Photo by Oliver Morris/Getty Images) Joined By Elon Musk, Trump Holds First Cabinet Meeting Of His Second Term WASHINGTON, DC - FEBRUARY 26: U.S. President Donald Trump delivers remarks during a Cabinet meeting at the White House on February 26, 2025 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images) Saluting New Dictator A jubilant crowd salutes Nazi Leader Adolf Hitler outside the Reich Chancellery, Berlin, after a plebiscite, which gave Hitler absolute power as German Fuhrer, 19th August 1934 (Photo by FPG/Hulton Archive/Getty Images) TOPSHOT-US-POLITICS-COMPUTERS-CLIMATE-ENERGY-CRYPTOCURRENCY TOPSHOT - US President Donald Trump (2R), flanked by US Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick (L), US Secretary of Treasury Scott Bessent (2L) and White House AI and Crypto Czar David Sacks (R), attends a the White House Crypto Summit in Washington, DC, March 7, 2025. (Photo by Jim WATSON / AFP) / ALTERNATE CROP (Photo by JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images) National Guard Continues Border Security In Texas EAGLE PASS, TEXAS - FEBRUARY 4: U.S. Border Patrol agents guard migrants that crossed into Shelby Park as they wait to be picked up for processing on February 4, 2024 in Eagle Pass, Texas. (Photo by Michael Gonzalez/Getty Images) Portrait Of Hannah Arendt Portrait of German-born American political theorist and author Hannah Arendt (1906 - 1975), 1949. (Photo by Fred Stein Archive/Archive Photos/Getty Images) TOPSHOT-US-POLITICS-CPAC TOPSHOT - Elon Musk (L) holds a chainsaw alongside Argentine President Javier Milei during the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) at the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center at National Harbor in Oxon Hill, Maryland, on February 20, 2025. The chainsaw was a present to Elon Musk from Argentina's President Javier Milei. (Photo by SAUL LOEB / AFP) (Photo by SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images) Washington DC Celebrates Army's 250th Anniversary With Parade And Festivities WASHINGTON, DC - JUNE 14: U.S. President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump stand together at the end of the U.S Army parade on June 14, 2025 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images) Magic Returns to Disneyland Park as Theme Parks Plan to Reopen April 30 ANAHEIM, CA - AUGUST 27: Mickey Mouse poses in front of Sleeping Beauty Castle at Disneyland Park on August 27, 2019 in Anaheim, California. Disneyland plans to reopen on April 30, 2021. (Photo Joshua Sudock/Walt Disney World Resorts via Getty Images) New American Citizens Pledging Allegiance Almost ten thousand new citizens, predominantly Hispanic, pledge allegiance to the United States of America during a naturalization ceremony at Miami's Orange Bowl Stadium. Thomas Paine circa 1770: The English-born American revolutionary philosopher Thomas Paine, (1737 - 1809), who wrote and published 'The Rights of Man', (1791 - 1792), in England. In it he expressed his support for the French Revolution and called for the overthrow of the British monarchy. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images) President Of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky Addresses Congress WASHINGTON, DC - DECEMBER 21: President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky receives an American flag from U.S. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Vice President Kamala Harris as he addresses a joint meeting of Congress in the House Chamber of the U.S. Capitol on December 21, 2022 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images) The Rachel Maddow Show - Season 2019 THE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW -- Pictured: (l-r) Rachel Maddow, Secretary Hillary Clinton -- Interview with Secretary Hillary Clinton in Studio 3A, 30 Rockefeller Plaza on Wednesday May 1, 2019 -- (Photo by: Mackenzie Calle/MSNBC/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images) NYCC Protest Against Trump's Recent Financial Executive Order at NY, USA NYCC is protesting due to the recent comments from Donald Trump on rolling back Dodd-Frank and his recent Finanical Executive Order written by former Goldman employee Gary Cohn at Liberty St near Federal Reserve Bank of New York, NY, USA, 7 february 2017. (Photo by Anik Rahman/NurPhoto via Getty Images) Portrait of Edward Gibbon Edward Gibbon (1737-1794), British historian. His best known work is The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. The Roman Emperor Commodus Fires an Arrow to Subdue a Leopard Engraving by Giovanni Stradano The Roman Emperor Commodus Fires an Arrow to Subdue a Leopard Engraving by Giovanni Stradano (Photo by © Historical Picture Archive/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images) Portrait and scene of assassination. Commodus (161-192 AD). Roman emperor (177-192 AD). Nerva-Antonine Dynasty. Commodus had a passion for gladiatorial combat. Laetus formed a conspiracy with Eclectus and Marcia. The gladiator Narcissus strangling him in his bath. Portrait. Watercolour painting by Francisco Fonollosa, Spanish illustrator (late 20th century). (Photo by: Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images) WALTER BENJAMIN (1892-1940). German philosopher and writer. (Eingeschränkte Rechte für bestimmte redaktionelle Kunden in Deutschland. Limited rights for specific editorial clients in Germany.) WALTER BENJAMIN (1892-1940). German philosopher and writer. (Photo by ullstein bild/ullstein bild via Getty Images) Bill Tompkins The Celebrity Aprentice Donald Trump Archive NEW YORK, NY - May 10 MANDATORY CREDIT Bill Tompkins/Getty Images Joan Rivers, Donald Trump and melissa Rivers pose during the Season Finale of the Celebrity Apprentice on May 10, 2009 in New York City. (Photo by Bill Tompkins/Getty Images) This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chrishedges.substack.com/subscribe…

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The Last Days of Gaza - Read by Eunice Wong 11:16

منذ 14 weeks11:16

11:16

This article is read by Eunice Wong , a Juilliard-trained actor, featured on Audible's list of Best Women Narrators . Her work is on the annual Best Audiobooks lists of the New York Times, Audible, AudioFile, & Library Journal. www.eunicewong.actor Text originally published May 26, 2025 Full text: This is the end. The final blood-soaked chapter of the genocide . It will be over soon. Weeks. At most. Two million people are camped out amongst the rubble or in the open air. Dozens are killed and wounded daily from Israeli shells, missiles, drones, bombs and bullets. They lack clean water, medicine and food. They have reached a point of collapse. Sick . Injured . Terrified . Humiliated . Abandoned . Destitute . Starving . Hopeless . In the last pages of this horror story, Israel is sadistically baiting starving Palestinians with promises of food, luring them to the narrow and congested nine-mile ribbon of land that borders Egypt. Israel and its cynically named Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), allegedly funded by Israel’s Ministry of Defense and the Mossad, is weaponizing starvation. It is enticing Palestinians to southern Gaza the way the Nazis enticed starving Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto to board trains to the death camps. The goal is not to feed the Palestinians. No one seriously argues there is enough food or aid hubs. The goal is to cram Palestinians into heavily guarded compounds and deport them. What comes next? I long ago stopped trying to predict the future. Fate has a way of surprising us. But there will be a final humanitarian explosion in Gaza’s human slaughterhouse. We see it with the surging crowds of Palestinians fighting to get a food parcel, which has resulted in Israeli and U.S. private contractors shooting dead at least 130 and wounding over seven hundred others in the first eight days of aid distribution. We see it with Benjamin Netanyahu’s arming ISIS-linked gangs in Gaza that loot food supplies. Israel, which has eliminated hundreds of employees with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), doctors, journalists, civil servants and police in targeted assassinations, has orchestrated the implosion of civil society. I suspect Israel will facilitate a breach in the fence along the Egyptian border. Desperate Palestinians will stampede into the Egyptian Sinai. Maybe it will end some other way. But it will end soon. There is not much more Palestinians can take. We — full participants in this genocide — will have achieved our demented goal of emptying Gaza and expanding Greater Israel. We will bring down the curtain on the live-streamed genocide. We will have mocked the ubiquitous university programs of Holocaust studies, designed, it turns out, not to equip us to end genocides, but deify Israel as an eternal victim licensed to carry out mass slaughter. The mantra of never again is a joke. The understanding that when we have the capacity to halt genocide and we do not, we are culpable, does not apply to us. Genocide is public policy. Endorsed and sustained by our two ruling parties. There is nothing left to say. Maybe that is the point. To render us speechless. Who does not feel paralyzed? And maybe, that too, is the point. To paralyze us. Who is not traumatized? And maybe that too was planned. Nothing we do, it seems, can halt the killing. We feel defenseless. We feel helpless. Genocide as spectacle. I have stopped looking at the images. The rows of little shrouded bodies. The decapitated men and women. Families burned alive in their tents. The children who have lost limbs or are paralyzed. The chalky death masks of those pulled from under the rubble. The wails of grief. The emaciated faces. I can’t. This genocide will haunt us. It will echo down history with the force of a tsunami. It will divide us forever. There is no going back. And how will we remember? By not remembering. Once it is over, all those who supported it, all those who ignored it, all those who did nothing, will rewrite history, including their personal history. It was hard to find anyone who admitted to being a Nazi in post-war Germany, or a member of the Klu Klux Klan once segregation in the southern United States ended. A nation of innocents. Victims even. It will be the same. We like to think we would have saved Anne Frank. The truth is different. The truth is, crippled by fear, nearly all of us will only save ourselves, even at the expense of others. But that is a truth that is hard to face. That is the real lesson of the Holocaust. Better it be erased. In his book “ One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This ,” Omar El Akkad writes: Should a drone vaporize some nameless soul on the other side of the planet, who among us wants to make a fuss? What if it turns out they were a terrorist? What if the default accusation proves true, and we by implication be labeled terrorist sympathizers, ostracized, yelled at? It is generally the case that people are most zealously motivated by the worst plausible thing that could happen to them. For some, the worst plausible thing might be the ending of their bloodline in a missile strike. Their entire lives turned to rubble and all of it preemptively justified in the name of fighting terrorists who are terrorists by default on account of having been killed. For others, the worst plausible thing is being yelled at. You can see my interview with El Akkad here . You cannot decimate a people, carry out saturation bombing over 20 months to obliterate their homes, villages and cities, massacre tens of thousands of innocent people, set up a siege to ensure mass starvation, drive them from land where they have lived for centuries and not expect blowback. The genocide will end. The response to the reign of state terror will begin. If you think it won’t you know nothing about human nature or history. The killing of two Israeli diplomats in Washington and the attack against supporters of Israel at a protest in Boulder, Colorado, are only the start. Chaim Engel , who took part in the uprising at the Nazis’ Sobibor death camp in Poland, described how, armed with a knife, he attacked a guard in the camp. “It’s not a decision,” Engel explained years later. “You just react, instinctively you react to that, and I figured, ‘Let us to do, and go and do it.’ And I went. I went with the man in the office and we killed this German. With every jab, I said, ‘That is for my father, for my mother, for all these people, all the Jews you killed.’” Does anyone expect Palestinians to act differently? How are they to react when Europe and the United States, who hold themselves up as the vanguards of civilization, backed a genocide that butchered their parents, their children, their communities, occupied their land and blasted their cities and homes into rubble? How can they not hate those who did this to them? What message has this genocide imparted not only to Palestinians, but to all in the Global South? It is unequivocal. You do not matter. Humanitarian law does not apply to you. We do not care about your suffering, the murder of your children. You are vermin. You are worthless. You deserve to be killed, starved and dispossessed. You should be erased from the face of the earth. “To preserve the values of the civilized world, it is necessary to set fire to a library,” El Akkad writes: To blow up a mosque. To incinerate olive trees. To dress up in the lingerie of women who fled and then take pictures. To level universities. To loot jewelry, art, food. Banks. To arrest children for picking vegetables. To shoot children for throwing stones. To parade the captured in their underwear. To break a man’s teeth and shove a toilet brush in his mouth. To let combat dogs loose on a man with Down syndrome and then leave him to die. Otherwise, the uncivilized world might win. There are people I have known for years who I will never speak to again. They know what is happening. Who does not know? They will not risk alienating their colleagues, being smeared as an antisemite, jeopardizing their status, being reprimanded or losing their jobs. They do not risk death, the way Palestinians do. They risk tarnishing the pathetic monuments of status and wealth they spent their lives constructing. Idols. They bow down before these idols. They worship these idols. They are enslaved by them. At the feet of these idols lie tens of thousands of murdered Palestinians. The Chris Hedges Report is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Thanks for reading The Chris Hedges Report! This post is public so feel free to share it. Photos TOPSHOT-PALESTINIAN-ISRAEL-CONFLICT TOPSHOT - A man walks past shelter tents erected near collapsed buildings in the Bureij camp for Palestinian refugees in the central Gaza Strip on October 1, 2024 amid the ongoing war in the Palestinian territory between Israel and Hamas. (Photo by Eyad BABA / AFP) (Photo by EYAD BABA/AFP via Getty Images) PALESTINIAN-ISRAEL-CONFLICT Sewage water from collapsed underground pipes covers an area by destroyed buildings in Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip on July 8, 2024 amid the ongoing conflict in the Palestinian territory between Israel and Hamas. (Photo by Bashar TALEB / AFP) (Photo by BASHAR TALEB/AFP via Getty Images) Jewish Ghetto Streetcar (Original Caption) The Star of David attached to the top of this street car indicates it is in use for residents of Warsaw's ghetto, wherein live Jews from every Nazi occupied country of Europe. The German caption for this picture states that the car travels back and forth early and late. PALESTINIAN-ISRAEL-CONFLICT Displaced Palestinians gather to collect portions of cooked food at a charity distribution point in Jabalia in the northern Gaza Strip on May 19, 2025. (Photo by Bashar TALEB / AFP) (Photo by BASHAR TALEB/AFP via Getty Images) TOPSHOT-PALESTINIAN-ISRAEL-CONFLICT-DISPLACED TOPSHOT - Displaced Gazans cross the Netzarim corridor from the southern Gaza Strip into Gaza City on January 27, 2025. (Photo by Omar AL-QATTAA / AFP) (Photo by OMAR AL-QATTAA/AFP via Getty Images) TOPSHOT-US-POLITICS-TRUMP-BIDEN TOPSHOT - US President Joe Biden shakes hands with US President-elect Donald Trump during a meeting in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC, on November 13, 2024. (Photo by SAUL LOEB / AFP) (Photo by SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images) TOPSHOT-PALESTINIAN-ISRAEL-CONFLICT TOPSHOT - A fireball erupts from an Israeli airstrike in Gaza City on October 9, 2023. (Photo by MAHMUD HAMS / AFP) (Photo by MAHMUD HAMS/AFP via Getty Images) The new Anne Frank exhibit will open 1 The new Anne Frank exhibit will open 11 June 2003 by US First Lady Laura Bush at The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. (Photo credit should read TIM SLOAN/AFP via Getty Images) Nazi Sympathisers Salute Nazi Sympathisers taking the salute during a meeting, New York City, New York, United States, 8th April 1934. (Photo by UPI/Bettmann Archive/Getty Images) TOPSHOT-US-ISRAEL-DIPLOMACY TOPSHOT - US President Donald Trump greets Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as he arrives for meeting on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, DC, January 27, 2020. (Photo by SAUL LOEB / AFP) (Photo by SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images) Primary voting in New Hampshire. MANCHESTER, NH - FEBRUARY 9: Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, surrounded by family and friends, shouts as he celebrates his victory at a New Hampshire primary campaign watch party at the Executive Court Banquet Facility in Manchester, NH on Tuesday Feb. 09, 2016. (Photo by Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images) President Biden Departs The White House For Maryland WASHINGTON, DC - NOVEMBER 07: U.S. President Joe Biden gives a thumbs up as he shouts to the press while walking to Marine One on the South Lawn of the White House on November 7, 2022 in Washington, DC. The President and first lady are traveling to Bowie, MD where they will be participating in a rally for Democratic gubernatorial nominee Wes Moore before the midterm elections tomorrow. (Photo by Samuel Corum/Getty Images) This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chrishedges.substack.com/subscribe…

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American Concentration Camps - Read by Eunice Wong 12:36

منذ 14 weeks12:36

12:36

This article is read by Eunice Wong , a Juilliard-trained actor, featured on Audible's list of Best Women Narrators . Her work is on the annual Best Audiobooks lists of the New York Times, Audible, AudioFile, & Library Journal. www.eunicewong.actor Text originally published May 26, 2025 Full text: Our offshore concentration camps, for now, are in El Salvador and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. But don’t expect them to remain there. Once they are normalized, not only for U.S.-deported immigrants and residents , but U.S. citizens , they will migrate to the homeland. It is a very short leap from our prisons, already rife with abuse and mistreatment , to concentration camps , where those held are cut off from the outside world — “disappeared” — denied legal representation and crammed into fetid, overcrowded cells. Prisoners in the camps in El Salvador are forced to sleep on the floor or in solitary confinement in the dark. Many suffer from tuberculosis, fungal infections, scabies, severe malnutrition and chronic digestive illnesses. The inmates, including over 3,000 children, are fed rancid food. They endure beatings. They are tortured , including by water-boarding or being forced naked into barrels of ice-cold water, according to Human Rights Watch. In 2023, the State Department described imprisonment as “life-threatening,” and that was before the Salvadoran government declared a “state of exception” in March 2022. The situation has been greatly “exacerbated,” the State Department notes, by the “addition of 72,000 detainees under the state of exception.” Some 375 people have died in the camps since the state of exception was established , part of El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s “war on gangs,” according to the local human rights group Socorro Jurídico Humanitario. These camps — the “Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo” (Center for Terrorism Confinement) known as CECOT, to which U.S. deportees are being sent, holds some 40,000 people — are the model, the harbinger of what awaits us. Metal worker and union member Kilmar Ábrego García, who was abducted in front of his five-year-old son on March 12, 2025, was accused of being a gang member and sent to El Salvador. The Supreme Court agreed with District Judge Paula Xinis who found that García’s deportation was an “illegal act.” Trump officials blamed their deportation of García on an “administrative error.” Xinis ordered the Trump administration to “facilitate” his return. But that does not mean he is coming back. “I hope you’re not suggesting that I smuggle a terrorist into the United States,” Bukele told the press at a White House meeting with Trump. “How can I smuggle — how can I return him to the United States? Like, I smuggle him into the United States? Well, of course I’m not going to do it…the question is preposterous.” This is the future. Once a segment of the population is demonized — including U.S. citizens Trump labels “homegrown criminals” — once they are stripped of their humanity, once they embody evil and are seen as an existential threat, the end result is that these human “contaminants” are removed from society. Guilt or innocence, at least under the law, is irrelevant. Citizenship offers no protection. “The first essential step on the road to total domination is to kill the juridical person in man,” writes Hannah Arendt in “ The Origins of Totalitarianism .” “This was done, on the one hand, by putting certain categories of people outside the protection of the law and forcing at the same time, through the instrument of denationalization, the nontotalitarian world into recognition of lawlessness; it was done, on the other, by placing the concentration camp outside the normal penal system, and by selecting inmates outside the normal judicial procedure in which a definite crime entails a predictable penalty.” Those who build concentration camps build societies of fear. They issue relentless warnings of mortal danger, whether from immigrants, Muslims, traitors, criminals or terrorists. Fear spreads slowly, like a sulfurous gas, until it infects all social interactions and induces paralysis. It takes time. In the first years of the Third Reich, the Nazis operated ten camps with about 10,000 inmates. But once they managed to crush all competing centers of power — labor unions, political parties, an independent press, universities and the Catholic and Protestant churches — the concentration camp system exploded. By 1939, when World War II broke out, the Nazis were running over 100 concentration camps with some one million inmates. Death camps followed. Those that create these camps give them wide publicity. They are designed to intimidate. Their brutality is their selling point. Dachau, the first Nazi concentration camp, was not, as Richard Evans writes in “ The Coming of The Third Reich ” “an improvised solution to an unexpected problem of overcrowding in the goals, but a long-planned measure that the Nazis had envisioned virtually from the very beginning. It was widely publicized and reported in the local, regional and national press, and served as a stark warning to anyone contemplating offering resistance to the Nazi regime.” Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, wearing plainclothes and circling neighborhoods in unmarked cars, kidnap legal residents such as Mahmoud Khalil. These abductions replicate those I witnessed on streets of Santiago, Chile under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, or in San Salvador, El Salvador’s capital, during the military dictatorship. ICE is swiftly evolving into our homegrown version of the Gestapo or The People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD). It oversees 200 detention facilities. It is a formidable domestic surveillance agency that has amassed data on most Americans, according to a report compiled by The Center of Privacy & Technology at Georgetown. “By reaching into the digital records of state and local governments and buying databases with billions of data points from private companies, ICE has created a surveillance infrastructure that enables it to pull detailed dossiers on nearly anyone, seemingly at any time,” the report reads. “In its efforts to arrest and deport, ICE has — without any judicial, legislative or public oversight — reached into datasets containing personal information about the vast majority of people living in the U.S., whose records can end up in the hands of immigration enforcement simply because they apply for driver’s licenses; drive on the roads; or sign up with their local utilities to get access to heat, water and electricity.” Those abducted, including the Turkish national and PhD student at Tufts University, Rümeysa Öztürk, are accused of amorphous behaviour such as “engaging in activities in support of Hamas.” But this is a subterfuge, accusations no more real than the invented crimes under Stalinism where people were accused of belonging to the old order — Kulaks or members of the petit bourgeoisie — or were convicted for plotting to overthrow the regime as Trotskyites, Titoites, agents of capitalism or saboteurs, known as “wreckers.” Once a category of people is targeted, the crimes they are charged with, if they are charged at all, are almost always fabrications. Concentration camp inmates are severed from the outside world. They are disappeared. Erased. They are treated as if they never existed. Nearly all efforts to obtain information about them are met with silence. Even their death, should they die in custody, becomes anonymous, as if they were never born. Those who run concentration camps, as Hannah Arendt writes, are people without the curiosity or the mental capacity to form opinions. They don’t, she notes, “even know any more what it means to be convinced.” They simply obey, conditioned to act as “perverted animals.” They are intoxicated by the God-like power they have to turn human beings into quivering flocks of sheep. The goal of any concentration camp system is to destroy all individual traits, to mold people into fearful, docile, obedient masses. The first camps are training grounds for prison guards and ICE agents. They master the brutal techniques designed to infantilize inmates, an infantilization that soon warps the wider society. The 250 purported Venezuelan gang members shipped to El Salvador in defiance of a federal court were denied due process. They were summarily herded onto planes, which ignored the judge’s order to turn back, and once they arrived, were stripped, beaten and had their heads shaved. Shaved heads are a feature of all concentration camps. The excuse is lice. But of course it is about depersonalization and why they are in uniforms and identified by numbers. The autocrat openly revels in the cruelty. “I look forward to watching the sick terrorist thugs get 20 year jail sentences for what they are doing to Elon Musk and Tesla,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “Perhaps they could serve them in the prisons of El Salvador, which have become so recently famous for such lovely conditions!” Those that build concentration camps are proud of them. They show them off to the press, or at least the sycophants posing as the press. Secretary for Homeland Security Kristi Noem, who posted a video of herself visiting the El Salvadoran prison, used the shirtless and head shaved inmates as a stage prop for her threats against immigrants. If fascism does one thing well, it is spectacle. First they come for the immigrants . Then they come for the activists on foreign student visas on college campuses. Then they come for green card holders. Next are the U.S. citizens who fight Israeli genocide or the creeping fascism. Then they come for you. Not because you broke the law. But because the monstrous machine of terror needs a constant supply of victims to sustain itself. Totalitarian regimes survive by eternally battling mortal, existential threats. Once one threat is eradicated, they invent another. They mock the rule of law. Judges, until they are purged, may decry this lawlessness, but they have no mechanism to enforce their rulings. The Department of Justice, turned over to the Trump sycophant Pam Bondi, is, as in all autocracies, designed to block enforcement, not facilitate it. There are no legal impediments left to protect us. We know where this is going. We have seen it before. And it is not good. The Chris Hedges Report is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Thanks for reading The Chris Hedges Report! This post is public so feel free to share it. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chrishedges.substack.com/subscribe…

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Trump’s Useful Idiots - Read by Eunice Wong 16:34

منذ 15 weeks16:34

16:34

This article is read by Eunice Wong , a Juilliard-trained actor, featured on Audible's list of Best Women Narrators . Her work is on the annual Best Audiobooks lists of the New York Times, Audible, AudioFile, & Library Journal. www.eunicewong.actor Text originally published May 26, 2025 Full text: The media, universities, the Democratic Party and liberals, by embracing the fiction of “rampant antisemitism,” laid the groundwork for their own demise. Columbia and Princeton, where I have taught, and Harvard, which I attended, are not incubators of hatred towards Jews. The New York Times, where I worked for fifteen years and which Trump calls “an enemy of the people,” is slavishly subservient to the Zionist narrative. What these institutions have in common is not antisemitism, but liberalism. And liberalism, with its creed of pluralism and inclusiveness, is slated by our authoritarian regime for obliteration. The conflation of outrage over the genocide with antisemitism is a sleazy tactic to silence protest and placate Zionist donors, the billionaire class and advertisers. These liberal institutions, weaponizing antisemitism, aggressively silenced and expelled critics, banned student groups such as Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine, allowed police to make hundreds of arrests of peaceful protests on campuses, purged professors and groveled before Congress. Use the words ‘ apartheid ’ and ‘ genocide ’ and you are fired or excoriated . Zionist Jews, in this fictional narrative, are the oppressed. Jews who protest the genocide are slandered as Hamas stooges and punished. Good Jews. Bad Jews. One group deserves protection. The other deserves to be thrown to the wolves. This odious bifurcation exposes the charade. In April 2024, Columbia University President Minouche Shafik, along with two board members and a law professor, testified before the House of Representative education committee. They accepted the premise that antisemitism was a significant problem at Columbia and other higher education institutions. When Co-Chair of the Board of Trustees of Columbia University David Greenwald and others told the committee that they believed “from the river to the sea” and “long live the intifada” were antisemitic statements, Shafik agreed. She threw students and faculty under the bus, including long-time professor Joseph Massad. The day after the hearings, Shafik suspended all the students at the Columbia protests and called in the New York City Police Department (NYPD), who arrested at least 108 students. “I have determined that the encampment and related disruptions pose a clear and present danger to the substantial functioning of the University,” Shafik wrote in her letter to the police. NYPD Chief John Chell, however, told the press, “the students that were arrested were peaceful, offered no resistance whatsoever, and were saying what they wanted to say in a peaceful manner.” “What disciplinary action has been taken against that professor?” Representative Elise Stefanik asked in the hearing about Columbia law Professor Katherine Franke. Shafik volunteered that Franke, whose position at the law school where she had taught for 25 years was terminated, and other professors, were being investigated. In an apparent reference to visiting Columbia Professor Mohamed Abdou, she claimed he was “terminated” and promised he “will never teach at Columbia again.” Professor Abdou is suing Columbia for defamation, discrimination, harassment and financial and professional loss. The Center for Constitutional Rights wrote of the betrayal of Franke: In an egregious attack on both academic freedom and Palestinian rights advocacy, Columbia University has entered into an “agreement” with Katherine Franke to leave her teaching position after an esteemed 25-year career. The move — “a termination dressed up in more palatable terms,” according to Franke’s statement — stems from her advocacy for students who speak out in support of Palestinian rights. Her ostensible offense was a comment expressing concern about Columbia’s failure to address harassment of Palestinians and their allies by Israeli students who come to campus straight from military service — after Israeli students sprayed Palestinian rights protestors with a toxic chemical. For this, she was investigated for harassment and found to be in violation of Columbia’s policies. The actual cause of her forced departure is the crackdown on dissent at Columbia resulting from historic protests opposing Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. Franke’s fate was sealed when former Columbia president Minouche Shafik threw her under the bus during her cowardly appearance before Congress. You can see my interview with Franke here . Despite her capitulation to the Zionist lobby, Shafik resigned a little more than a year after assuming her position as head of the university. The crackdown at Columbia continues, with an estimated 80 people arrested and over 65 students suspended following a protest in the library in the first week of May. Former television journalist and Columbia’s acting president Claire Shipman condemned the protest, stating,“Disruptions to our academic activities will not be tolerated and are violations of our rules and policies…Columbia strongly condemns violence on our campus, antisemitism and all forms of hate and discrimination, some of which we witnessed today.” Of course, appeasement does not work. This witch hunt, whether under the Biden or Trump administration, was never grounded in good faith. It was about decapitating Israel’s critics and marginalizing the liberal class and the left. It is sustained by lies and slander, which these institutions continue to embrace. Watching these liberal institutions, who are hostile to the left, be smeared by Trump for harboring “Marxist lunatics,” “radical leftists,” and “communists,” exposes another failing of the liberal class. It was the left that could have saved these institutions or at least given them the fortitude, not to mention analysis, to take a principled stand. The left at least calls apartheid apartheid and genocide genocide . Media outlets regularly publish articles and OpEds uncritically accepting claims made by Zionist students and faculty. They fail to clarify the distinction between being Jewish and being Zionist. They demonize student protesters. They never bothered reporting with any depth or honesty from the student encampments where Jews, Muslims and Christians made common cause. They routinely mischaracterize anti-Zionist, anti-genocide and pro-Palestinian liberation slogans and policy demands as hate speech, antisemitic, or contributing to Jewish students feeling unsafe. Examples include, The New York Times: “ Why the Campus Protests Are So Troubling ,” “ I’m a Columbia Professor. The Protests on My Campus Are Not Justice,” and “ Universities Face an Urgent Question: What Makes a Protest Antisemitic? ”; The Washington Post: “ Call the campus protests what they are ” “ At Columbia, excuse the students, but not the faculty ”; The Atlantic: “ Campus Protest Encampments Are Unethical ” and “ Columbia University’s anti-Semitism Problem ”; Slate: “ When Pro-Palestine Protests Cross Into Antisemitism ”; Vox: The Rising Tide of Antisemitism on College Campuses Amid Gaza Protests ”; Mother Jones: “ How Pro-Palestine Protests Spark Antisemitism on Campus ”; The Cut (New York Magazine): “ The Problem With Pro-Palestine Protests on Campus ”; and The Daily Beast: “ Antisemitism Surges Amid Pro-Palestine Protests at U.S. Universities .” The New York Times, in a decision worthy of George Orwell, instructed its reporters to eschew words such as “refugee camps,” “occupied territory,” “slaughter,” “massacre,” “carnage,” “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing,” when writing about Palestine, according to an internal memo obtained by The Intercept. It discourages the very use of the word “Palestine” in routine text and headlines. In December 2023, Democratic Governor of New York Kathy Hochul sent a letter to university and college presidents who failed to condemn and address “antisemitism,” and calls for the “genocide of any group.” She warned that they would be subjected to “aggressive enforcement action” by New York State. The following year, in late August, Hochul repeated these warnings during a virtual meeting with 200 university and college leaders. Hochul made clear in October 2024 that she considered pro-Palestine slogans to be explicit calls for genocide of Jews. “There are laws on the books – human rights laws, state and federal laws – that I will enforce if you allow for the discrimination of our students on campus, even calling for the genocide of the Jewish people which is what is meant by ‘From the river to the sea,’ by the way,” she said at a memorial event at the Temple Israel Center in White Plains. “Those are not innocent sounding words. They're filled with hate.” The Governor successfully pressured City University of New York (CUNY) to remove a job posting for a Palestinian studies professorship at Hunter College which referenced “settler colonialism,” “genocide” and “apartheid.” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer in his new book “ Antisemitism in America: A Warning ,” leads efforts by the Democratic Party — which has a dismal 27 percent approval rating in a recent NBC News poll — to denounce those protesting the genocide as carrying out a “blood libel” against Jews. “Whatever one’s view of how the war in Gaza was conducted, it is not and has never been the policy of the Israeli government to exterminate the Palestinian people,” he writes , ignoring hundreds of calls by Israeli officials to wipe Palestinians from the face of the earth during 19 months of saturation bombing and enforced starvation. The grisly truth, openly acknowledged by Israeli officials, is far different. “We are disassembling Gaza, and leaving it as piles of rubble, with total destruction [which has] no precedent globally. And the world isn’t stopping us,” gloats Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich. “Last night, almost 100 Gazans were killed…it doesn’t interest anyone. Everyone has gotten used to [the fact] that [we can] kill 100 Gazans in one night during a war and nobody cares in the world,” Israeli Knesset member Zvi Sukkot , told Israel’s Channel 12 on May 16. The perpetuation of the fiction of widespread antisemitism, which of course exists but which is not fostered or condoned by these institutions, coupled with the refusal to say out loud what is being live streamed to the world, has shattered what little moral authority these institutions and liberals had left. It gives credibility to Trump’s effort to cripple and destroy all institutions that sustain a liberal democracy. Trump surrounds himself with neo-Nazi sympathizers such as Elon Musk, and Christian fascists who condemn Jews for crucifying Christ. But antisemitism by the right gets a free pass since these “good” antisemites cheer on Israel’s settler colonial project of extermination, one these neo-Nazis and Christian fascists would like to replicate on Brown and Black people in the name of the great replacement theory. Trump trumpets the fiction of “white genocide” in South Africa. He signed an executive order in February that fast-tracked immigration to the U.S. for Afrikaners — white South Africans. Harvard, which is attempting to save itself from the wrecking ball of the Trump administration, was as complicit in this witch hunt as everyone else, flagellating itself for not being more repressive towards campus critics of the genocide. The university’s former president Claudine Gay condemned the pro-Palestine slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” which demands the right of an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel, as bearing “specific historical meanings that to a great many people imply the eradication of Jews from Israel.” Harvard substantially tightened its regulations regarding student protests, in January 2024, and increased the police presence on its campus. It barred 13 students from graduating, citing alleged policy violations linked to their participation in a protest encampment, despite an earlier agreement to avoid punitive measures. It placed more than 20 students on “involuntary leave” and in some cases evicted students from their housing. Such policies were replicated across the country. The capitulations and crackdowns on pro-Palestine activism, academic freedom, freedom of speech, suspensions, expulsions and firings, since Oct. 7, 2023, have not spared U.S. colleges and universities from further attacks. Since Trump took office, at least $11 billion in federal research grants and contracts have been cut or frozen nationwide according to NPR. This includes Harvard ($3 billion), Columbia ($400 million), University of Pennsylvania ($175 million) and Brandeis ($6-7.5 million annually). On May 22, the Trump administration intensified its attacks on Harvard by terminating its ability to enroll international students that make up around 27 percent of the student body. “This administration is holding Harvard accountable for fostering violence, antisemitism, and coordinating with the Chinese Communist Party on its campus,” Kristi Noem, DHS Secretary wrote on X, when posting screenshots of the letter she sent to Harvard revoking foreign student enrollment. “Let this serve as a warning to all universities and academic institutions across the country.” Harvard, like Columbia, the media, the Democratic Party and the liberal class, misread power. By refusing to acknowledge or name the genocide in Gaza, and persecuting those who do, they provided the bullets to their executioners. They are paying the price for their stupidity and cowardice. The Chris Hedges Report is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Photos Chris Hedges Chris Hedges, a former Pulitzer Prize winning foreign correspondent for the New York Times and best selling author of 'Empire of Illusion', stands next to a window for a portrait, Princeton, NJ, November 2010. Hedges is also the author of 'Death of the Liberal Class' and is a columnist for Truthdig. (Photo by Oliver Morris/Getty Images) Protestors Rally In Support Of Gaza In New York City NEW YORK, NEW YORK - OCTOBER 5: Pro-Palestinian protesters rally in support of Gaza and Lebanon in Times Square on October 5, 2024 in New York City. Protesters are ramping up their demonstrations in anticipation of the October 7th one year anniversary of the attack on Israel by Hamas. (Photo by Stephanie Keith/Getty Images) Protesters Hold A Rally Outside The U.S. Capitol Building Calling For A Ceasefire In Mideast War WASHINGTON, DC - OCTOBER 18: Protesters hold a demonstration in support of a cease fire in Gaza in the Cannon House Office Building on October 18, 2023 in Washington, DC. Members of the Jewish Voice for Peace and the IfNotNow movement staged a rally to call for a cease fire in the Israel–Hamas war. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images) Protesters Hold A Rally Outside The U.S. Capitol Building Calling For A Ceasefire In Mideast War WASHINGTON, DC - OCTOBER 18: Demonstrators are detained by U.S. Capitol Police after they staged a sit-in inside the Cannon House Office Building to demand a cease-fire against Palestinians in Gaza on Independence Avenue near the U.S. Capitol October 18, 2023 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images) Columbia in Crisis: Columbia University's Response to Antisemitism UNITED STATES - APRIL 17: Minouche Shafik, president of Columbia University, testifies during the House Education and the Workforce Committee hearing titled "Columbia in Crisis: Columbia University's Response to Antisemitism," in Rayburn building on Wednesday, April 17, 2024. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images) Dueling Rallies Held At George Washington University As Campus Protests Continue Nationwide WASHINGTON, DC - MAY 2: A woman wears a hat that reads "Curb Your Antisemitism" during a rally against campus antisemitism at George Washington University on May 2, 2024 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images) Columbia in Crisis: Columbia University's Response to Antisemitism UNITED STATES - APRIL 17: David Greenwald, Board of Trustees Co-Chair, Columbia University, testifies during the House Education and the Workforce Committee hearing titled "Columbia in Crisis: Columbia University's Response to Antisemitism," in Rayburn building on Wednesday, April 17, 2024. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images) NYPD officers arrest pro-Palestinian protests began at Columbia University spread to other schools in New York NEW YORK, US - APRIL 22: Police intervene and arrest more than 100 students at New York University (NYU) who continue their demonstration on campus in solidarity with the students at Columbia University and to oppose Israel's attacks on Gaza, in New York, United States on April 22, 2024. (Photo by Fatih Aktas/Anadolu via Getty Images) Columbia University President Minouche Shafik Visits Campus After Protest Encampment Cleared NEW YORK, NEW YORK - MAY 1: Columbia University President Minouche Shafik visits Hamilton Hall on the campus of Columbia University on May 1, 2024 in New York City. (Photo by Indy Scholtens/Getty Images) NYPD Chief of Patrol John Chell speaks during Mayor Eric... NEW YORK, UNITED STATES - 2024/10/26: NYPD Chief of Patrol John Chell speaks during Mayor Eric Adams and NYPD (New York City Police Department) executives hold briefing on security preparations in advance of Former President Trump's rally at 1 Police Plaza. (Photo by Lev Radin/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images) Rally In Support Of Israel Held In Times Square NEW YORK, NY - MAY 20: Pro Palestinian protesters face off with a group of Israel supporters and police in a violent clash in Times Square on May 20, 2021 in New York City. Despite an announcement of a cease fire between Israel and Gaza militants, dozens of supporters of both sides of the conflict fought in the streets of Times Square. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images) USA-PALESTINE-COLUMBIA-GRADUATION-PROTEST-NYC New York, United States 2025-05-21 NYPD officers push through demonstrators wearing keffiyehs during a pro-Palestinian protest on Columbia University s campus. (Photo by Madison Swart / Hans Lucas / Hans Lucas via AFP) (Photo by MADISON SWART/Hans Lucas/AFP via Getty Images) US-EDUCATION-POLITICS-COMMENCEMENT Columbia University Acting President Claire Shipman speaks during the Commencement Ceremony at Columbia University in New York on May 21, 2025, (Photo by Seth Wenig / POOL / AFP) (Photo by SETH WENIG/POOL/AFP via Getty Images) New York Governor Kathy Hochul Announces Large Scale Increase In Law Enforcement Within Subway System NEW YORK, NEW YORK - MARCH 6: New York Governor Kathy Hochul speaks during a press conference to announce new subway safety measures at NYCTA Rail Control Center on March 6, 2024 in New York City. Hochul announced that 1,000 New York State Police, MTAPD and the New York National Guard will be used to support the NYPD in conducting bag checks. (Photo by Adam Gray/Getty Images) New York State Governor Kathy Hochul... Melville, N.Y.: New York State Governor Kathy Hochul visits Newsday headquarters on Jan. 22, 2024 in Melville, New York. (Photo by Howard Schnapp/Newsday RM via Getty Images) ISRAEL-POLITICS-RELIGION-JUDAISM-ORTHODOX-FUNERAL The leader of Israel's Religious Zionist Party Bezalel Smotrich (C) attends the funeral of Israeli Orthodox Jewish rabbi Haim Drukman, a spiritual leader of the nationalist Religious Orthodox Jewish movement, at Merkaz Shapira near Kiryat Malachi on December 26, 2022. (Photo by Gil COHEN-MAGEN / AFP) (Photo by GIL COHEN-MAGEN/AFP via Getty Images) Israeli extreme right member of Knesset, Zvi Sukkot holds an... JERUSALEM, ISRAEL - 2024/06/05: Israeli extreme right member of Knesset, Zvi Sukkot holds an Israeli flag outside Damascus gate in Jerusalem. Tens of thousands of young religious Ultra nationalists Zionist men and women have paraded through Muslim parts of the Old City of Jerusalem in the annual Jerusalem Day Flag march, an event that threatens to trigger further violence in the Israel-Hamas war.(Photo by Eyal Warshavsky/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images) A protester holds a placard comparing Elon Musk to Hitler... LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM - 2025/03/29: A protester holds a placard comparing Elon Musk to Hitler doing the Nazi salute during the demonstration. Protesters gathered outside the Tesla Centre in Park Royal as part of the Tesla Takedown Global Day of Action against Tesla and Elon Musk. (Photo by Vuk Valcic/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images) SAFRICA-US-POLITICS-DEMO A man wears a Make Afrikaners Great Again (MAGA) cap in reference to the American MAGA as white South Africans supporting US President Donald Trump and South African and US tech billionaire Elon Musk gather in front of the US Embassy in Pretoria, on February 15, 2025 for a demonstration. (Photo by Marco Longari / AFP) (Photo by MARCO LONGARI/AFP via Getty Images) University Presidents Testify In House Hearing On Campus Antisemitism WASHINGTON, DC - DECEMBER 05: Dr. Claudine Gay, President of Harvard University, testifies before the House Education and Workforce Committee at the Rayburn House Office Building on December 05, 2023 in Washington, DC. The Committee held a hearing to investigate antisemitism on college campuses. (Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images) This is a public episode. 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The Chris Hedges Report Podcast

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Palestine Post: A Genocide Foretold w/ Chris Hedges – Spring Fund Drive Special 59:59

منذ 17 weeks59:59

59:59

The interview starts at 9 minutes into the recording. Text below is from KPFA, linked here , where this podcast was originally posted. You can participate in the fund drive special here . FUND DRIVE SPECIAL – Pledge $120 and receive Chris Hedges new book, A Genocide Foretold: Reporting on Survival and Resistance in Occupied Palestine. In it, the Pulitzer Prize–winning former Middle East Bureau Chief for The New York Times, explores zionist settler colonialism in Gaza with a powerful emotional depth. A Genocide Foretold confronts the stark realities of life under siege in Gaza and the heroic effort ordinary Palestinians are waging to resist and survive. Weaving together personal stories, historical context, and unflinching journalism, Chris Hedges provides an intimate portrait of systemic oppression, occupation, and violence. The Chris Hedges Report is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Thanks for reading The Chris Hedges Report! This post is public so feel free to share it. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chrishedges.substack.com/subscribe…

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Trump's War on Education - Read by Eunice Wong 13:02

منذ 25 weeks13:02

13:02

This article is read by Eunice Wong , a Juilliard-trained actor, featured on Audible's list of Best Women Narrators . Her work is on the annual Best Audiobooks lists of the New York Times, Audible, AudioFile, & Library Journal. www.eunicewong.actor Text originally published March 11, 2025 I Stink Therefore I Am - by Mr. Fish The attacks on colleges and universities — Donald Trump’s administration has warned some 60 colleges that they could lose federal money if they fail to make campuses safe for Jewish students and is already pulling $400 million from Columbia University — has nothing to do with fighting antisemitism. Antisemitism is a smoke screen, a cover for a much broader and more insidious agenda. The goal, which includes plans to abolish the Department of Education and terminate all programs of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), is to turn the educational system, from kindergarten to graduate school, into an indoctrination machine. Totalitarian regimes seek absolute control over the institutions that reproduce ideas, especially the media and education. Narratives that challenge the myths used to legitimize absolute power — in our case historical facts that blemish the sanctity of white male supremacy, capitalism and Christian fundamentalism — are erased. There is to be no shared reality. There are to be no other legitimate perspectives. History is to be static. It is not to be open to reinterpretation or investigation. It is to be calcified into myth to buttress a ruling ideology and the reigning political and social hierarchy. Any other paradigm of power and social interaction is tantamount to treason. “One of the most significant threats that a class hierarchy can face is a universally accessible and excellent public school system,” writes Jason Stanley in “ Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future :” The political philosophy that feels this threat most acutely — and that unites hostility toward public education with support for class hierarchy — is a certain form of rightwing libertarianism, an ideology that sees free markets as the wellspring of human freedom. These kinds of libertarians oppose government regulation and virtually all forms of public goods, including public education. The political goal of this version of libertarian ideology is to dismantle public goods. The dismantling of public education is backed by oligarchs and business elites alike, who see in democracy a threat to their power, and in the taxes required for public goods a threat to their wealth. Public schools are the foundational democratic public good. It is therefore perfectly logical that those who are opposed to democracy, including fascist and fascist-leaning movements, would join forces with right-wing libertarians in undermining the institution of public education. I taught Howard Zinn’s “ A People’s History of the United States ” in a New Jersey prison classroom. Zinn’s book is one of the primary targets of the far-right. Trump denounced Zinn in 2020 at the White House Conference on American History, saying , “Our children are instructed from propaganda tracts, like those of Howard Zinn, that try to make students ashamed of their own history.” Zinn implodes the lies used to glorify the conquest of the Americas. He allows readers to see the United States through the eyes of Native Americans, immigrants, the enslaved, women, union leaders, persecuted socialists, anarchists and communists, abolitionists, anti-war activists, civil rights leaders and the poor. He holds up the testimonies of Sojourner Truth , Chief Joseph , Henry David Thoreau , Frederick Douglass , W.E.B. Du Bois , Randolph Bourne , Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr . As I gave my lectures I would hear students mutter “Damn” or “We been lied to.” Zinn makes clear that organized militant forces opened up democratic space in American society. None of these democratic rights — the abolition of slavery, the right to strike, equality for women, Social Security, the eight-hour work day, civil rights — were given to us by a benevolent ruling class. It involved struggle and self-sacrifice. Zinn, in short, explains how democracy works. Zinn’s book was revered in my cramped prison classroom. It was revered because my students intimately understood how white privilege, racism, capitalism, poverty, police, the courts, and lies peddled by the powerful, deformed their communities and their lives. Zinn allowed them to hear, for the first time, the voices of their ancestors. He wrote history, not myth. He not only educated my students, but empowered them. I had always admired Zinn. After that class I too revered him. Zinn, when he was teaching at Spelman College, a historically Black women’s college in Atlanta, became involved in the civil rights movement. He served on the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. He marched with his students demanding civil rights. Spelman’s president was not amused. “I was fired for insubordination,” Zinn recalled . “Which happened to be true.” Education is meant to be subversive. It gives students the ability and the language to ask questions about reigning assumptions and ideas. It questions dogma and ideology. It can, as Zinn writes, “counteract the deception that makes the government’s force legitimate.” It lifts up the voices of the marginalized and oppressed to honor a plurality of perspectives and experiences. This leads, when education works, to empathy and understanding, a desire to right historical wrongs, to make society better. It fosters the common good. Education is not only about knowledge, it is about inspiration. It is about passion. It is about the belief that what we do in life matters. It is about, as James Baldwin writes in his essay “The Creative Process,” the ability to drive “to the heart of every answer and expose the question the answer hides.” The rightwing attacks on programs such as critical race theory or DEI , as Stanley points out in his book, “intentionally distort these programs to create the impression that those whose perspectives are finally included — like Black Americans, for instance — are receiving some sort of illicit benefit or unfair advantage. And so they target Black Americans who have risen to positions of power and influence and seek to delegitimize them as undeserving. The ultimate goal is to justify a takeover of the institutions, transforming them into weapons in the war against the very idea of multi-racial democracy.” The integrity and quality of public higher education in America has been under assault for decades, as Ellen Schrecker documents in her book “ The Lost Promise: American Universities in the 1960s .” The protests on college campuses in the 1960s, Schrecker points out, saw “the enemies of the liberal academy” attack its “ideological and financial underpinnings.” Tuitions, once low, if not free, have soared , and with them tremendous student debt. State legislators and the federal government have slashed funding to public universities, forcing them to seek support from corporations and reduce most faculty to the status of poorly paid adjuncts, often lacking benefits, as well as job security. Nearly 75 percent of the instruction at colleges and universities is in the hands of adjuncts, part-time lecturers, and non-tenure-track full-time faculty, who have no hope of being granted tenure, according to the American Federation of Teachers. Public institutions, which serve 80 percent of the nation’s students, are chronically short of funding and basic resources. Higher education has evolved, even at major research universities, into vocational training, no longer a vehicle for learning but economic mobility. The assault sees elite schools, where tuition can run over $80,000 a year, cater to the wealthy and the privileged, locking out the poor and the working class. “The current academy functions primarily to replicate an increasingly inequitable status quo, it is hard to imagine how it could be restructured to serve a more democratic purpose without external pressure for something like universal free higher education,” Schrecker writes. Totalitarian societies do not teach students how to think but what to think. They churn out students who are historically and politically illiterate, blinded by an enforced historical amnesia. They seek to produce servants and apologists who conform, not critics and rebels. Liberal arts colleges, for this reason, do not exist in totalitarian states. PEN America has documented nearly 16,000 book bans in public schools nationwide since 2021, a number, PEN writes, “not seen since the Red Scare McCarthy era of the 1950s.” These books include titles such as “The Bluest Eye” by Toni Morrison, “The Color Purple” by Alice Walker and “Maus,” the graphic novel on the Holocaust by Art Spiegelman. The most important human activity, as Socrates and Plato remind us, is not action, but contemplation, echoing the wisdom enshrined in eastern philosophy. We cannot change the world if we cannot understand it. By digesting and critiquing the philosophers and realities of the past, we become independent thinkers in the present. We are able to articulate our own values and beliefs, often in opposition to what these ancient philosophers advocated. A capacity to think, to ask the right questions, however is a threat to totalitarian regimes seeking to inculcate a blind obedience to authority. Unconscious civilizations are totalitarian wastelands. They replicate and embrace dead ideas, captured in José Clemente Orozco’s mural “ The Epic of American Civilization ” where skeletons in academic robes bring forth baby skeletons. “Before they seize power and establish a world according to their doctrines, totalitarian movements conjure up a lying world of consistency which is more adequate to the needs of the human mind than reality itself; in which, through sheer imagination, uprooted masses can feel at home and are spared the never-ending shocks which real life and real experiences deal to human beings and their expectations,” Hannah Arendt writes in “ The Origins of Totalitarianism .” “The force possessed by totalitarian propaganda — before the movements have the power to drop iron curtains to prevent anyone’s disturbing, by the slightest reality, the gruesome quiet of an entirely imaginary world — lies in the ability to shut the masses off from the real world.” As bad as things are, they are about to get much worse. The nation’s educational system is being dragged into the slaughterhouse, where it will be dismembered and privatized. The corporations profiting from the charter schools system and online colleges — whose primary concern is certainly not with education — replace real teachers with non-unionized, poorly trained instructors. Students, rather than being educated, will be taught by rote and fed the familiar tropes of authoritarian playbooks — paeans to white supremacy, national purity, patriarchy and the nation’s duty to impose its “virtues” on others by force. This mass indoctrination will not only ensure ignorance, but obedience. And that is the point. The Chris Hedges Report is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Photos Chris Hedges Chris Hedges, a former Pulitzer Prize winning foreign correspondent for the New York Times and best selling author of 'Empire of Illusion', stands next to a window for a portrait, Princeton, NJ, November 2010. Hedges is also the author of 'Death of the Liberal Class' and is a columnist for Truthdig. (Photo by Oliver Morris/Getty Images) 'The Pequot War' A colorized engraving shows a militia raised in Connecticut Colony as they attack and ultimately set fire to an encampment of Pequot indians in what became Mystic, Connecticut, 1637. (Photo by Stock Montage/Getty Images) TOPSHOT-US-POLITICS-CPAC TOPSHOT - Billionaire Elon Musk, the head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), holds a chainsaw reading "Long live freedom, damn it" as he shakes hands with Argentinian President Javier Milei at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) at the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center at National Harbor in Oxon Hill, Maryland, on February 20, 2025. The chainsaw was a present to Elon Musk from Argentina's President Javier Milei. (Photo by SAUL LOEB / AFP) (Photo by SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images) US-POLITICS-TRUMP-HISTORY US President Donald Trump speaks during the White House Conference on American History at the National Archives in Washington, DC, September 17, 2020. (Photo by SAUL LOEB / AFP) (Photo by SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images) Protesters Being Hosed by Fireman (Original Caption) Firemen bear in on a group of African Americans who sought shelter in a doorway as hoses and dogs were used in routing anti-segregation demonstrators in Birmingham, Alabama, 3rd May 1963. Celebrity Reading Of "Voices Of A People's History Of The United States" LOS ANGELES, CA - OCTOBER 05: Author Howard Zinn, reads on stage at the Celebrity Reading Of "Voices Of A People's History Of The United States" held at the Japan America Theatre, on October,2005 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Frazer Harrison/Getty Images) James Baldwin American novelist and activist James Baldwin (1924 – 1987), USA, October 1963. (Photo by Mario Jorrin/Pix/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images) Police Point Revolver at Student Demonstrators SAN FRANCISCO -- DECEMBER: Policeman with a drawn gun holds back anti-war demonstrators who attacked the Administration Building at San Francisco State College. They were also protesting the selection of S.I. Hayakawa as president of the school, December, 1968. (Photo by David Hume Kennerly/Bettmann/Corbis via Getty Images) The Epic of American Civilization Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Orozco_-_Dartmouth_c.JPG This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chrishedges.substack.com/subscribe…

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The Last Chapter of the Genocide - Read by Eunice Wong 10:09

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This article is read by Eunice Wong , a Juilliard-trained actor, featured on Audible's list of Best Women Narrators . Her work is on the annual Best Audiobooks lists of the New York Times, Audible, AudioFile, & Library Journal. www.eunicewong.actor Text Originally posted Mar. 22, 2025 This is the last chapter of the genocide. It is the final, blood-soaked push to drive the Palestinians from Gaza. No food. No medicine. No shelter. No clean water. No electricity. Israel is swiftly turning Gaza into a Dantesque cauldron of human misery where Palestinians are being killed in their hundreds and soon, again, in their thousands and tens of thousands, or they will be forced out never to return. The final chapter marks the end of Israeli lies. The lie of the two-state solution. The lie that Israel respects the laws of war that protect civilians. The lie that Israel bombs hospitals and schools only because they are used as staging areas by Hamas. The lie that Hamas uses civilians as human shields, while Israel routinely forces captive Palestinians to enter potentially booby-trapped tunnels and buildings ahead of Israeli troops. The lie that Hamas or Palestine Islamic Jihad (PIJ) are responsible — the charge often being errant Palestinian rockets — for the destruction of hospitals , United Nations’ buildings or mass Palestinian casualties . The lie that humanitarian aid to Gaza is blocked because Hamas is hijacking the trucks or smuggling in weapons and war material. The lie that Israeli babies are beheaded or Palestinians carried out mass rape of Israeli women. The lie that 75 percent of the tens of thousands killed in Gaza were Hamas “terrorists.” The lie that Hamas, because it was allegedly rearming and recruiting new fighters, is responsible for the breakdown of the ceasefire agreement. Israel’s naked genocidal visage is exposed. It has ordered the evacuation of northern Gaza where desperate Palestinians are camped out amid the rubble of their homes. What comes now is mass starvation — the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) said on March 21 it has six days of flour supplies left — deaths from diseases caused by contaminated water and food, scores of killed and wounded each day under the relentless assault of bombs, missiles, shells and bullets. Nothing will function, bakeries, water treatment and sewage plants, hospitals — Israel blew up the damaged Turkish-Palestinian hospital on March 21 — schools, aid distribution centers or clinics. Less than half of the 53 emergency vehicles operated by the Palestine Red Crescent Society are functional due to fuel shortages. Soon there will be none. Israel’s message is unequivocal: Gaza will be uninhabitable. Leave or die . Since Tuesday, when Israel broke the ceasefire with heavy bombing, over 700 Palestinians have been killed , including 200 children. In one 24 hour period 400 Palestinians were killed . This is only the start. No Western power, including the United States, which provides the weapons for the genocide, intends to stop it. The images from Gaza during the nearly sixteen months of incessant attacks were awful. But what is coming now will be worse. It will rival the most atrocious war crimes of the twentieth century, including the mass starvation, wholesale slaughter and leveling of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943 by the Nazis. Oct. 7 marked the dividing line between an Israeli policy that advocated the brutalization and subjugation of the Palestinians and a policy that calls for their extermination and removal from historic Palestine. What we are witnessing is the historical equivalent of the moment triggered by the annihilation of some 200 soldiers led by George Armstrong Custer in June 1876 at the Battle of the Little Bighorn . After that humiliating defeat, Native Americans were slated to be killed with the remnants forced into prisoner of war camps, later named reservations, where thousands died of disease, lived under the merciless gaze of their armed occupiers and fell into a life of immiseration and despair. Expect the same for the Palestinians in Gaza, dumped, I suspect, in one of the world’s hellholes and forgotten. “Gaza residents, this is your final warning,” Israeli Minister of Defense Israel Katz threatened : The first Sinwar destroyed Gaza and the second Sinwar will completely destroy it. The Air Force strikes against Hamas terrorists were just the first step. It will become much more difficult and you will pay the full price. The evacuation of the population from the combat zones will soon begin again…Return the hostages and remove Hamas and other options will open for you, including leaving for other places in the world for those who want to. The alternative is absolute destruction. The ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas was designed to be implemented in three phases . The first phase, lasting 42 days, would see an end to hostilities. Hamas would release 33 Israeli hostages who were captured on Oct. 7, 2023 — including women, those aged above 50, and those with illnesses — in exchange for upwards of 2,000 Palestinian men, women and children imprisoned by Israel (around 1,900 Palestinian captives have been released by Israel as of March 18). Hamas has released a total of 147 hostages, of whom eight were dead. Israel says there are 59 Israelis still being held by Hamas, 35 of whom Israel believes are deceased. The Israeli army would pull back from populated areas of Gaza on the first day of the ceasefire. On the seventh day, displaced Palestinians would be permitted to return to northern Gaza. Israel would allow 600 aid trucks with food and medical supplies to enter Gaza daily. The second phase, which was expected to be negotiated on the sixteenth day of the ceasefire, would see the release of the remaining Israeli hostages. Israel would complete its withdrawal from Gaza maintaining a presence in some parts of the Philadelphi corridor, which stretches along the eight-mile border between Gaza and Egypt. It would surrender its control of the Rafah border crossing into Egypt. The third phase would see negotiations for a permanent end of the war and the reconstruction of Gaza. Israel habitually signs agreements, including the Camp David Accords and the Oslo Peace Agreement, with timetables and phases. It gets what it wants — in this case the release of the hostages — in the first phase and then violates subsequent phases. This pattern has never been broken. Israel refused to honor the second phase of the deal. It blocked humanitarian aid into Gaza two weeks ago, violating the agreement. It also killed at least 137 Palestinians during the first phase of the ceasefire, including nine people, — three of them journalists — when Israeli drones attacked a relief team on March 15 in Beit Lahiya in northern Gaza. Israel’s heavy bombing and shelling of Gaza resumed March 18 while most Palestinians were asleep or preparing their suhoor, the meal eaten before dawn during the holy month of Ramadan. Israel will not stop its attacks now, even if the remaining hostages are freed — Israel’s supposed reason for the resumption of the bombing and siege of Gaza. The Trump White House is cheering on the slaughter. They attack critics of the genocide as “antisemites” who should be silenced, criminalized or deported while funneling billions of dollars in weapons to Israel. Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza is the inevitable denouement of its settler colonial project and apartheid state. The seizure of all of historic Palestine — with the West Bank soon, I expect, to be annexed by Israel — and displacement of all Palestinians has always been the Zionist goal . Israel’s worst excesses occurred during the wars of 1948 and 1967 when huge parts of historic Palestine were seized, thousands of Palestinians killed and hundreds of thousands were ethnically cleansed. Between these wars, the slow-motion theft of land, murderous assaults and steady ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, continued. That calibrated dance is over. This is the end. What we are witnessing dwarfs all the historical assaults on Palestinians. Israel’s demented genocidal dream — a Palestinian nightmare — is about to be achieved. It will forever shatter the myth that we, or any Western nation, respect the rule of law or are the protectors of human rights, democracy and the so-called “virtues” of Western civilization. Israel’s barbarity is our own. We may not understand this, but the rest of the globe does. Thanks for reading The Chris Hedges Report! This post is public so feel free to share it. The Chris Hedges Report is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Photos Chris Hedges Chris Hedges, a former Pulitzer Prize winning foreign correspondent for the New York Times and best selling author of 'Empire of Illusion', stands next to a window for a portrait, Princeton, NJ, November 2010. Hedges is also the author of 'Death of the Liberal Class' and is a columnist for Truthdig. (Photo by Oliver Morris/Getty Images) Food distribution in Gaza amid Israeli blockade JABALIA, GAZA - MARCH 27: Crowd of starving Palestinians, including children, wait to receive food distributed by charity organizations amid Israel's blockade as the situation dramatically deteriorates in Jabalia refugee camp, Gaza on March 27, 2024. (Photo by Mahmoud Issa/Anadolu via Getty Images) Aftermath of Israeli army's withdrawal from Al-Shifa Hospital and its surroundings GAZA CITY, GAZA - APRIL 1: An aerial view of damaged area around the Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, Gaza on April 01, 2024. The Israeli army said Monday that it wrapped up its military operation at the Al-Shifa Hospital complex in Gaza City, following a 14-day siege and incursion that resulted in scores of casualties and hundreds of arrests. (Photo by Omar El Qattaa/Anadolu via Getty Images) TOPSHOT-PALESTINIAN-ISRAEL-CONFLICT TOPSHOT - Members of a Palestinian family rush out of a bombed house during Israeli airstrikes on Gaza City on October 9, 2023. (Photo by Eyad AL-BABA / AFP) (Photo by EYAD AL-BABA/AFP via Getty Images) The destruction in Turkish-Palestinian Friendship Hospital in Gaza GAZA CITY, GAZA - JANUARY 28: A view of the destruction at Turkish-Palestinian Friendship Hospital, built by Turkish Cooperation and Coordination Agency (TKA) between the years 2011-2017 in Gaza City, Gaza on January 28, 2025. (Photo by Hamza Z. H. Qraiqea/Anadolu via Getty Images) Israeli airstrikes continue on the 17th day in Gaza GAZA CITY, GAZA - OCTOBER 23: A woman holding a girl reacts after Israeli airstrikes hit Ridwan neighborhood of Gaza City, Gaza on October 23, 2023. (Photo by Ali Jadallah/Anadolu via Getty Images) TOPSHOT-ISRAEL-PALESTINIAN-CONFLICT TOPSHOT - Journalists take cover behind cars as Israeli soldiers take position during clashes with Palestinian fighters near the Gevim Kibbutz, close to the border with Gaza on October 7, 2023. (Photo by Oren ZIV / AFP) (Photo by OREN ZIV/AFP via Getty Images) TOPSHOT-PALESTINIAN-ISRAEL-CONFLICT TOPSHOT - Displaced Palestinian children walk on a hill facing their makeshift camp in Rafah, on the southern Gaza Strip on the border with Egypt on January 19, 2024, amid continuing battles between Israel and the militant group Hamas. (Photo by AFP) (Photo by -/AFP via Getty Images) Custer Attacks Black Kettle's Camp Engraving depicts the 7th U.S. Cavalry, under the command of General George Arnstrong Custer, as it attacks a camp of Cheyenne Native Americans under Chief Black Kettle along the Washita River, near what is now Cheyenne, Oklahoma, November 27, 1868. (Photo by Kean Collection/Getty Images) TOPSHOT-PALESTINIAN-ISRAEL-CONFLICT TOPSHOT - Palestinian families fleeing Gaza City and other parts of northern Gaza towards the southern areas, walk along a road on November 10, 2023 amid ongoing battles between Israel and the Palestinian Hamas movement. (Photo by MAHMUD HAMS / AFP) (Photo by MAHMUD HAMS/AFP via Getty Images) ISRAEL-FRANCE-PALESTINIAN-POLITICS-DIPLOMACY-CONFLICT Israel's Foreign Minister Israel Katz waits to receive France's Minister for Europe and Foreign Affairs in Jerusalem on October 7, 2024. (Photo by Ahmed GHARABLI / AFP) (Photo by AHMED GHARABLI/AFP via Getty Images) Israeli snipers seen taking positions on the rooftop during... WEST BANK, KAFR QADDUM, QALQILYA, PALESTINE - 2019/04/19: Israeli snipers seen taking positions on the rooftop during the clashes. Palestinians clashed with Israeli army during demonstration in the village of Kafr Qaddum. (Photo by Bruno Thevenin/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images) IDF Takes Delivery Of Long-Range Drone PALMACHIM, ISRAEL - MARCH 7: In this photo provided by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), the IDF's first long-range drone, named the Heron, comes in for landing March 7, 2007 at Palmachim air base in central Israel. (Photo by IDF via Getty Images) Sahur meal of Ramadan in a shelter on Gaza as Israeli attacks continue GAZA - MARCH 12: A Palestinian family, who left their homes due to the Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip, has sahur (pre-dawn) meal with za'atar, pepper sauce, a few pieces of bread and tea during the holy month of Ramadan at Salah al-Din shelter center in Gaza on March 12, 2024. (Photo by Dawoud Abo Alkas/Anadolu via Getty Images) President Trump Meets With Visiting Israeli PM Netanyahu At The White House WASHINGTON, DC - FEBRUARY 04: U.S. President Donald Trump, accompanied by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (L), speaks during a meeting in the Oval Office of the White House on February 04, 2025 in Washington, DC. Netanyahu is the first foreign leader to visit Trump since he returned to the White House last month. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images) Egyptian Prisoners in the Six-Day War A truck full of captured Egyptian soldiers meets a convoy of Israeli troops near El Arish, Egypt. The Israelis had taken El Arish and are heading toward the Sinai Desert. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chrishedges.substack.com/subscribe…

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