NERMEEN SHAIKH: The death toll in Gaza has topped 31,300. At least five people were killed on Wednesday when Israel bombed an UNRWA aid distribution center in Rafah — one of the U.N. agency’s last remaining aid sites in Gaza. The head of UNRWA called the attack a, quote, “blatant disregard to international humanitarian law.”
This comes as much of Gaza is on the brink of famine as Israel
continues to limit the amount of aid allowed into the besieged
territory. At least 27 Palestinians have died of starvation, including
23 children.
Meanwhile, Al Jazeera is reporting six Palestinians were killed in
Gaza City when Israeli forces opened fire again on crowds waiting for
food aid. Over 80 people were injured.
In other news from Gaza, Politico reports
the Biden administration has privately told Israel that the U.S. would
support Israel attacking Rafah as long as it did not carry out a
large-scale invasion.
AMY GOODMAN:
Well, we begin today’s show looking at how the U.S. media is covering
Israel’s assault on Gaza with the acclaimed TV broadcaster Mehdi Hasan.
In January, he announced he was leaving MSNBC
after his shows were canceled. Mehdi was one of the most prominent
Muslim voices on American television. In October, the news outlet Semafor reported MSNBC
had reduced the roles of Hasan and two other Muslim broadcasters on the
network, Ayman Mohyeldin and Ali Velshi, following the October 7th
Hamas attack on Israel. Then, in November, MSNBC
announced it was canceling Hasan’s show shortly after he conducted this
interview with Mark Regev, an adviser to Israeli Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu. This is an excerpt.
MEHDI HASAN:
You say Hamas’s numbers — I should point out, just pull up on the
screen, in the last two major Gaza conflicts, 2009 and 2014, the Israeli
military’s death tolls matched Hamas’s Health Ministry death tolls, so
— and the U.N., human rights groups all agree that those numbers are
credible. But look, your wider point is true.
MARK REGEV: Can I challenge that?
MEHDI HASAN: We shouldn’t —
MARK REGEV: Will you allow me —
MEHDI HASAN: We shouldn’t —
MARK REGEV: — to challenge that, please? Can I just challenge that?
MEHDI HASAN: Briefly, if you can.
MARK REGEV: I’d like to challenge that.
MEHDI HASAN: Briefly.
MARK REGEV:
I’ll try to be as brief as you are, sir. Those numbers are provided by
Hamas. There’s no independent verification. And secondly, more
importantly, you have no idea how many of them are Hamas terrorists,
combatants, and how many are civilians. Hamas would have you believe
that they’re all civilians, that they’re all children.
And here we have to say something that isn’t said enough. Hamas,
until now, we’re destroying their military machine, and with that, we’re
eroding their control. But up until now, they’ve been in control of the
Gaza Strip. And as a result, they control all the images coming out of
Gaza. Have you seen one picture of a single dead Hamas terrorist in the
fighting in Gaza? Not one.
MEHDI HASAN: Yeah, but I have —
MARK REGEV: Is that by accident, or is that —
MEHDI HASAN: But I have, Mark —
MARK REGEV: — because Hamas can control — Hamas can control the information coming out of Gaza?
MEHDI HASAN:
Mark, but you asked me a question, and you said you would be brief. I
haven’t. You’re right. But I have seen lots of children with my own
lying eyes being pulled from the rubble. So —
MARK REGEV: Now, because they’re the pictures Hamas wants you to see. Exactly my point, Mehdi.
MEHDI HASAN: And also because they’re dead, Mark. Also —
MARK REGEV: They’re the pictures Hamas wants — no.
MEHDI HASAN: But they’re also people your government has killed. You accept that, right? You’ve killed children? Or do you deny that?
MARK REGEV: No, I do not. I do not. I do not. First of all, you don’t know how those people died, those children.
MEHDI HASAN: Oh wow.
AMY GOODMAN: “Oh wow,” Mehdi Hasan responded, interviewing Netanyahu adviser Mark Regev on MSNBC. Soon after, MSNBC
announced that he was losing his shows. Since leaving the network,
Mehdi Hasan has launched a new digital media company named Zeteo.
Mehdi, welcome back to Democracy Now! It’s great to have you
with us. I want to start with that interview you did with Regev. After,
you lost your two shows, soon after. Do you think that’s the reason
those shows were canceled? Interviews like that?
MEHDI HASAN: You would have to ask MSNBC,
Amy. And, Amy and Nermeen, thank you for having me on. It’s great to be
back here after a few years away. Look, the advantage of not being at MSNBC anymore is I get to come on shows like this and talk to you all. You should get someone from MSNBC on and ask them why they canceled the shows, because I can’t answer that question. I wish I knew. But there we go.
The shows were canceled at the end of November. I quit at the
beginning of January, because I wanted to have a platform of my own. I
couldn’t really spend 2024, one of the most important news years of our
lives — genocide in Gaza, fascism at the door here in America with
elections — couldn’t really spend that being a guest anchor and a
political analyst, which is what I was offered at MSNBC
while I was staying there. I wanted to leave. I wanted to get my voice
back. And that’s why I launched my own media company, as you mentioned,
called Zeteo, which we’ve done a soft launch on and we’re going to
launch properly next month. But I’m excited about all the opportunities
ahead, the opportunity to do more interviews like the one I did with
Mark Regev.
NERMEEN SHAIKH:
So, Mehdi, could you explain Zeteo? First of all, what does it mean?
And what is the gap in the U.S. media landscape that you hope to fill?
You’ve been extremely critical of the U.S. media’s coverage of Gaza,
saying, quite correctly, that the coverage has not been as consistent or
clear as the last time we saw an invasion of this kind, though far less
brutal, which was the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
MEHDI HASAN:
Yeah, it’s a great question. So, on Zeteo, it’s an ancient Greek word,
going back to Socrates and Plato, which means to seek out, to search, to
inquire for the truth. And at a time when we live in a, some would say,
post-truth society — or people on the right are attempting to turn it
into a post-truth society — I thought that was an important endeavor to
embark upon as a journalist, to go back to our roots.
In terms of why I launch it and the media space, look, there is a gap
in the market, first of all, on the left for a company like this one.
Not many progressives have pulled off a for-profit, subscription-based
business, media business. We’ve seen it on the right, Nermeen, with, you
know, Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire and Bari Weiss’s The Free
Press, and even Tucker Carlson has launched his own subscription-based
platform since leaving Fox. And on the progressive space, we haven’t
really done it. Now, of course, there are wonderful shows like Democracy Now!
which are doing important, invaluable journalism on subjects like Gaza,
on subjects like the climate. But across the media industry as a whole,
sadly, in the U.S., the massive gap is there are not enough — I don’t
know how to put it — bluntly, truth tellers, people who are willing to
say — and when I say “truth tellers,” I don’t just mean, you know, truth
in a conventional sense of saying what is true and what is false; I’m
saying the language in which we talk about what is happening in the
world today.
Too many of my colleagues in the media, unfortunately, hide behind
lazy euphemisms, a both-sides journalism, the idea that you can’t say
Donald Trump is racist because you don’t know what’s in his heart; you
can’t say the Republican Party is going full fascist, even as they
proclaim that they don’t believe in democracy as we conventionally
understand it; we can’t say there’s a genocide in Gaza, even though the
International Court of Justice says such a thing is plausible. You know,
we run away from very blunt terms which help us understand world. And I
want to treat American consumers of news, global consumers of news
— it’s a global news organization which I’m founding — with some
respect. Stop patronizing them. Tell them what is happening in the
world, in a blunt way.
NERMEEN SHAIKH:
So, Mehdi, talk about this. I mean, in your criticism of the U.S.
media’s coverage, in particular, of Israel’s assault on Gaza — I mean,
of course, you have condemned what happened, the Hamas attack in Israel
on October 7th. You’ve also situated the attack in a broader historical
frame, and you’ve received criticism for doing that. And in response,
you’ve said, “Context is not causation,” and “Context is not
justification.” So, could you explain why you think context, history, is
so important, and the way in which this question is kind of elided in
U.S. media coverage, not just of the Gaza crisis, but especially so now?
MEHDI HASAN:
So, I did an interview with Piers Morgan this week. And if you watch
Piers Morgan’s shows, he always asks his pro-Palestinian guests or
anyone criticizing Israel, you know, “Condemn what happened on October
7th.” It’s all about October the 7th. And what happened on October 7th
was barbarism. It was a tragedy. It was a terror attack. Civilians were
killed. War crimes were carried out. Hostages were taken. And we should
condemn it. Of course we should, as human beings, if nothing else.
But the world did not begin on October the 7th. The idea that the
entire Middle East conflict, Israel-Palestine, the occupation,
apartheid, can be reduced to October 7th is madness. And it’s not just
me saying that. You talk to, you know, leading Israeli peace
campaigners, even some leading Israeli generals, people like Shlomo
Brom, who talk about having to understand the root causes of a people
under occupation fighting for freedom. And it’s absurd to me that in our
media industry people should try and run away from context. My former
colleagues Ali Velshi and Ayman Mohyeldin, who Amy mentioned in the
introduction, they were on air on October the 7th as news was coming in
of the attacks, and they provided context, because they’re two anchors
who really understand that part of the world. Ayman Mohyeldin is perhaps
the only U.S. anchor who’s ever lived in Gaza. And they came under
attack online from certain pro-Israel people for providing context. This
idea that we should be embarrassed or ashamed or apologetic as
journalists for providing context on one of the biggest stories in the
world is madness. You cannot understand what is happening in the world
unless we, unless you and I, unless journalists, broadcasters, are
explaining to our viewers and our listeners and our readers why things
are happening, where forces are coming from, why people are behaving the
way they do. And I know America is a country of amnesiacs, but we
cannot keep acting as if the world just began yesterday.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to ask you about a piece in The Intercept — you also used to report for The Intercept — the headline, “In Internal Meeting, Christiane Amanpour Confronts CNN
Brass About 'Double Standards' on Israel Coverage.” It’s a really
interesting piece. They were confronting the executives, and “One issue
that came up,” says The Intercept, “repeatedly is CNN’s
longtime process for routing almost all coverage relating to Israel and
Palestine through the network’s Jerusalem bureau. As The Intercept reported
in January, the protocol — which has existed for years but was expanded
and rebranded as SecondEyes last summer — slows down reporting on Gaza
and filters news about the war through journalists in Jerusalem who
operate under the shadow of Israel’s military censor.” And then it
quotes Christiane Amanpour, identified in a recording of that meeting.
She said, “You’ve heard from me, you’ve heard my, you know, real
distress with SecondEyes — changing copy, double standards, and all the
rest,” Amanpour said. The significance of this and what we see, Mehdi?
You know, I’m not talking Fox right now. On MSNBC —
MEHDI HASAN: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: — and on CNN, you rarely see Palestinians interviewed in extended discussions.
MEHDI HASAN:
So, I think there’s a few issues there, Amy. Number one, first of all,
we should recognize that Christiane Amanpour has done some very
excellent coverage of Gaza for CNN in this
conflict. She’s had some very powerful interviews and very important
guests on. So, credit to Christiane during this conflict. Number two —
AMY GOODMAN: International —
MEHDI HASAN: — I think U.S. media organizations —
AMY GOODMAN: — I just wanted to say, particularly on CNN International, which is often not seen —
MEHDI HASAN: Very good point.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: — on CNN domestic.
MEHDI HASAN: Very good — very good point, Amy. Touché.
The second point, I would say, is U.S. media organizations, as a
whole, are engaging in journalistic malpractice by not informing
viewers, listeners, readers that a lot of their coverage out of Israel
and the Occupied Territories is coming under the shadow of an Israeli
military censor. How many Americans understand or even know about the
Israeli military censor, about how much information is controlled? We
barely understand that Western journalists are kept out of Gaza, or if
when they go in, they’re embedded with Israeli military forces and
limited to what they can say and do. So I think we should talk about
that in a country which kind of prides itself on the First Amendment and
free speech and a free press. We should understand the way in which
information comes out of the Occupied Territories, in particular from
Gaza.
And the third point, I would say, is, yeah, Palestinian voices not
being on American television or in American print is one of the biggest
problems when it comes to our coverage of this conflict. When we talk
about why the media is structurally biased towards one party in this
conflict, the more powerful party, the occupier, we have to remember
that this is one of the reasons. Why are Palestinians dehumanized in our
media? This is one of the reasons. We don’t let people speak. That’s
what leads to dehumanization. That’s what leads to bias.
We understand it at home when it comes to, for example, Black voices.
In recent years, media organizations have tried to take steps to
improve diversity on air, when it comes to on-air talent, when it comes
to on-air guests, when it comes to balancing panels. We get that we need
underrepresented communities to be able to speak. But when it comes to
foreign conflicts, we still don’t seem to have made that calculation.
There was a study done a few years ago of op-eds in The New York Times and The Washington Post on the subject of Israel-Palestine from 1970 to, I think it was, 2000-and-something, and it was like 2% of all op-eds in the Times and 1% in the Post
were written by Palestinians, which is a shocking statistic. We deny
these people a voice, and then we wonder why people don’t sympathize
with their plight or don’t — aren’t, you know, marching in the street
— well, they are marching in the streets — but in bigger numbers. Why
America is OK and kind of, you know, blind to the fact that we are
complicit in a genocide of these people? Because we don’t hear from
these people.
NERMEEN SHAIKH:
Well, Mehdi, I mean, explain why that’s especially relevant in this
instance, because journalists have not been permitted access to Gaza, so
there is no reporting going on on the ground that’s being shown here. I
mean, dozens and dozens of journalists have signed a letter asking
Israel and Egypt to allow journalists access into Gaza. So, if you could
talk about that, why it’s especially important to hear from Palestinian
voices here?
MEHDI HASAN:
Well, for a start, Nermeen, much of the imagery we see on our screens
here or in our newspapers are sanitized images. We don’t see the full
level of the destruction. And when we try and understand, well, why are
young people — why is there such a generational gap when it comes to the
polling on Gaza, on ceasefire, why are young people so much more
antiwar than their elder peers, part of the reason is that young people
are on TikTok or Instagram and seeing a much less sanitized version of
this war, of Israel’s bombardment. They are seeing babies being pulled
from the rubble, limbs missing. They are seeing hospitals being — you
know, hospitals carrying out procedures without anesthetic. They are
seeing just absolute brutality, the kind of stuff that U.N. humanitarian
chiefs are saying we haven’t seen in this world for 50 years.
And that’s the problem, right? If we’re sanitizing the coverage,
Americans aren’t being told, really, aren’t being informed, are, again,
missing context on what is happening on the ground. And, of course,
Israel, by keeping Western journalists out, makes it even easier for
those images to be blocked, and therefore you have Palestinian — brave
Palestinian journalists on the ground trying to film, trying to document
their own genocide, streaming it to our phones. And we’ve seen over a
hundred of them killed over the last five months. That is not an
accident. That is not a coincidence. Israel wants to stamp out
independent voices, stamp out any kind of coverage of its own genocidal
behavior.
And therefore, again, you’re able to have a debate in this country
where the political debate is completely disconnected to the public
debate, and the public debate is completely misinformed. I’m amazed,
Nermeen, when you look at the polling, that there’s a majority in favor
of a ceasefire, that half of all Democrats say this is a genocide.
Americans are saying that to pollsters despite not even getting the full
picture. Can you imagine what those numbers would look like if they
actually saw what was happening on the ground?
NERMEEN SHAIKH:
Well, I want to go to what is unfolding right now in Gaza. You said in a
recent interview that in the past Israel was, quote, “mowing the lawn,”
but now the Netanyahu government’s intention is to erase the population
of Gaza. So let’s go to what Prime Minister Netanyahu said about the
invasion of Rafah, saying it would go ahead and would last weeks, not
months. He was speaking to Politico on Sunday.
PRIME MINISTER BENJAMIN NETANYAHU:
We’re not going to leave them. You know, I have a red line. You know
what the red line is? That October 7th doesn’t happen again, never
happens again. And to do that, we have to complete the destruction of
the Hamas terrorist army. … We’re very close to victory. It’s close at
hand. We’ve destroyed three-quarters of Hamas fighting terrorist
battalions, and we’re close to finishing the last part in Rafah, and
we’re not going to give it up. … Once we begin the intense action of
eradicating the Hamas terrorist battalions in Rafah, it’s a matter of
weeks and not months.
NERMEEN SHAIKH:
So, Mehdi, your response to what Netanyahu said and what the Israelis
have proposed as a safe place for Gazans to go — namely, humanitarian
islands?
MEHDI HASAN:
So, number one, when you hear Netanyahu speak, Nermeen, doesn’t it
remind you of George Bush in kind of 2002, 2003? It’s very — you know,
invoking 9/11 to justify every atrocity, claiming that you’re trying to
protect the country, when you, yourself, your idiocy and your
incompetency, is what led to the attacks. You know, George Bush was
unable to prevent 9/11, and then used 9/11 to justify every atrocity,
even though his incompetence helped allow 9/11 to happen. And I feel the
same way: Netanyahu allowed the worst terror attack, the worst massacre
in Israel to happen on his watch. Many of his own, you know, generals,
many of his own people blame him for this. And so, it’s rich to hear him
saying, “My aim is to stop this from happening again.” Well, you
couldn’t stop it from happening the first time, and now you’re killing
innocent Palestinians under the pretense that this is national security.
Number two, again George Bush-like, claiming that the war is nearly
done, mission is nearly accomplished, that’s nonsense. No serious
observer believes that Hamas is finished or that Israel has won some
total victory. A member of Netanyahu’s own war cabinet said recently,
“Anyone who says you can absolutely defeat Hamas is telling tall tales,
is lying.” That was a colleague of Netanyahu’s, in government, who said
that.
And number three, the red line on Rafah that Biden suppposedly set
down and that Netanyahu is now mocking, saying, “My own red line is to
do the opposite,” what on Earth is Joe Biden doing in allowing Benjamin
Netanyahu to humiliate him in this way with this invasion of Rafah, even
after he said he opposes it? I mean, it’s one thing to leak stuff —
AMY GOODMAN: Mehdi —
MEHDI HASAN: — over a few months —
AMY GOODMAN: — let’s go to Biden speaking on MSNBC.
He’s being interviewed by your former colleague Jonathan Capehart, as
he was being questioned about Benjamin Netanyahu and saying he’s hurting
Israel more than helping Israel.
PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN:
He has a right to defend Israel, a right to continue to pursue Hamas.
But he must, he must, he must pay more attention to the innocent lives
being lost as a consequence of the actions taken. He’s hurting — in my
view, he’s hurting Israel more than helping Israel by making the rest of
the world — it’s contrary to what Israel stands for. And I think it’s a
big mistake. So I want to see a ceasefire.
AMY GOODMAN:
And he talked about a, well, kind of a red line. If you can address
what Biden is saying and what he proposed in the State of the Union,
this pier, to get more aid in, and also the dropping — the airdropping
of food, which recently killed five Palestinians because it crushed them
to death, and the humanitarian groups, United Nations saying these
airdrops, the pier come nowhere near being able to provide the aid
that’s needed, at the same time, and the reason they’re doing all of
this, is because Israel is using U.S. bombs and artillery to attack the
Palestinians and these aid trucks?
MEHDI HASAN:
Yeah, it’s just so bizarre, the idea that you could drop bombs, on the
one hand, and then drop aid, on the other, and you’re paying for both,
and then your aid ends up killing people, too. It’s like some kind of
dark Onion headline. It’s just beyond parody. It’s beyond belief.
And as for the pier, as you say, it does not come anywhere near to
adequately addressing the needs of the Palestinian people, in terms of
the sheer scale of the suffering, half a million people on the brink of
famine, over a million people displaced. Four out of five of the
hungriest people in the world, according to the World Food Programme,
are in Gaza right now. The idea that this pier would, A, address the
scale of the suffering, and, B, in time — I mean, it’s going to take
time to do this. What happens to the Palestinians who literally starve
to death, including children, while this pier is being built? Finally, I
would say, there’s reporting in the Israeli press, Amy, that I’ve seen
that suggests that the pier idea comes from Netanyahu, that the Israeli
government are totally fine with this pier, because it allows them still
to control land and air access into Gaza, which is what they’ve always
controlled and which in this war they’ve monopolized.
The idea that the United States of America, the world’s only
superpower, cannot tell its ally, “You know what? We’re going to put aid
into Gaza because we want to, and you’re not going to stop us,
especially since we’re the ones arming you,” is bizarre. It’s something I
think Biden will never be able to get past or live down. It’s a stain
on his record, on America’s conscience. The idea that we’re arming a
country that’s engaged in a “plausible genocide,” to quote the ICJ,
is bad enough. That we can’t even get our own aid in, while they’re
bombing with our bombs, is just madness. And by the way, it’s also
illegal. Under U.S. law, you cannot provide weaponry to a country which
is blocking U.S. aid. And by the way, it’s not me saying they’re
blocking U.S. aid. U.S. government officials have said, “Yes, the
Israeli government blocked us from sending flour in,” for example.
NERMEEN SHAIKH:
So, Mehdi, let’s go to the regional response to this assault on Gaza
that’s been unfolding with the kind of violence and tens of thousands of
deaths of Palestinians, as we’ve reported. Now, what has — how has the
Arab and Muslim world responded to what’s going on? Egypt, of course,
has repeatedly said that it does not want displaced Palestinians
crossing its border. The most powerful Muslim countries, Saudi Arabia,
Qatar and the Emirates, if you can talk about how they’ve responded? And
then the Axis — the so-called Axis of Resistance — Houthis, Hezbollah,
etc. — how they have been trying to disrupt this war, or at least make
the backers of Israel pay a price for it?
MEHDI HASAN:
So, I hear people saying, “Oh, we’re disappointed in the response from
the Arab countries.” The problem with the word “disappointment” is it
implies you had any expectations to begin with. I certainly didn’t. Arab
countries have never had the Palestinians’ backs. The Arab —
quote-unquote, “Arab street” has always been very pro-Palestinian. But
the autocratic, the despotic, the dictatorial rulers of much of the Arab
world have never really had the interests of the Palestinian people at
their heart, going back right to 1948, when, you know, Arab countries
attacked Israel to push it into the sea, but, actually, as we know from
historians like Avi Shlaim, were not doing that at all, and that some of
them, like Jordan, had done deals with Israel behind the scenes. So,
look, Arab countries have never really prioritized the Palestinian
people or their needs or their freedom. And so, when you see some of
these statements that come out of the Arab world at times like this, you
know, you have to take them with a shovel of salt, not just a grain.
Also, I would point out the hypocrisy here on all sides in the region. You have countries like Saudi Arabia and the UAE,
which were involved in a brutal assault on Yemen for many years,
carried out very similar acts to Israel in Gaza in terms of blockades,
starvation, malnourishment of the Yemeni children, in terms of bombing
of refugee camps and hospitals and kids and school buses. That all
happened in Yemen. Arab countries did that, let’s just be clear about
that, things that they criticize Israel for doing now. And, of course,
Iran, which sets itself up as a champion of the Palestinan people, when
Bashar al-Assad was killing many of his own people, including
Palestinian refugees, in places like the al-Yarmouk refugee camp, Iran
and Russia, by the way, were both perfectly happy to help arm and
support Assad as he did that. So, you know, spare me some of the
grandiose statements from Middle East countries, from Arab nations to
Iran, on all of it. There’s a lot of hypocrisy to go around.
Very few countries in the world, especially in that region, actually
have Palestinian interests at heart. If they did, we would have a very
different geopolitical scene. There is reporting, Nermeen, that a lot of
these governments, like Saudi Arabia, privately are telling Israel,
“Finish the job. Get rid of them. We don’t like Hamas, either. Get rid
of them,” and that Saudis actually want to do a deal with Israel once
this war is over, just as they were on course to do, apparently,
according to the Biden administration. We know that other Arab countries
already signed the, quote-unquote, “Abraham Accords” with Israel on
Trump’s watch.
AMY GOODMAN:
I wanted to ask you about the number of dead Palestinian journalists
and also the new U.N. investigation that just accused Israel of breaking
international law over the killing of the Reuters video journalist
Issam Abdallah in southern Lebanon. On October 13th, an Israeli tank
opened fire on him and a group of other journalists. He had just set up a
live stream on the border in southern Lebanon, so that all his
colleagues at Reuters and others saw him blown up. The report stating,
quote, “The firing at civilians, in this instance clearly identifiable
journalists, constitutes a violation of … international law.” And it’s
not just Issam in southern Lebanon. Well over a hundred Palestinian
journalists in Gaza have died. We’ve never seen anything like the
concentration of numbers of journalists killed in any other conflict or
conflicts combined recently. Can you talk about the lack of outrage of
other major news organizations and what Israel is doing here? Do you
think they’re being directly targeted, one after another, wearing those
well-known “press” flak jackets? It looks like we just lost audio to
Mehdi Hasan.
MEHDI HASAN: Amy, I can — I can hear you, Amy, very faintly.
AMY GOODMAN: Oh, OK. So —
MEHDI HASAN: I’m going to answer your question, if you can still hear me.
AMY GOODMAN: Great. We can hear you perfectly.
MEHDI HASAN:
So, you’re very faint to me. So, while I speak, if someone want to fix
the volume in my ear. Let me answer your question about journalists.
It is an absolute tragedy and a scandal, what has happened to
journalists in Gaza, that we have seen so many deaths in Gaza. And the
real scandal, Amy, is that Western media, a lot of my colleagues here in
the U.S. media, have not sounded the alarm, have not called out Israel
for what it’s done. It’s outrageous that so many of our fellow
colleagues can be killed in Gaza while reporting, while at home, losing
family members, and yet there’s not a huge global outcry. When Wael
al-Dahdouh, who we just saw on the screen, from Al Jazeera, loses his
immediate family members and carries on reporting for Al Jazeera Arabic,
why is he not on every front page in the world? Why is he not a hero?
Why is he not sitting down with Oprah Winfrey? I feel like, you know,
when Evan Gershkovich from The Wall Street Journal is wrongly
imprisoned in Russia, we all campaign for Evan to be released. When
Ukrainian journalists are killed, we all speak out and are angry about
it. But when Palestinian journalists are killed on a level we’ve never
seen before, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, where is
the outcry here in the West over the killing of them? We claim to care
about a free press. We claim to oppose countries that crack down on a
free press, on journalism. We say journalism is not a crime. But then I
don’t hear the outrage from my colleagues here at this barbarism in
Gaza, where journalists are being killed in record numbers.
