Glenn Greenwald
Politics • Culture • Writing
Sahra Wagenknecht on the Failing War in Ukraine, the State of German Politics, and Her New Political Party
Video Transcript
April 19, 2024
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NOTE: Exceptionally, this English-language transcript of the interview with Sahra Wagenknecht, originally conducted in German, was released without a paywall for all to enjoy. Locals subscribers have access to a transcript of every System Update episode.


Interview: Sahra Wagenknecht

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G. GREENWALD: Okay. Sahra, Guten Tag. It's very good to see you again. Thank you for giving us some time.

 

SAHRA WAGENKNECHT: A pleasure. I'm also really looking forward to the interview.

 

G. GREENWALD: Let's start with the war in Ukraine. We spoke to you a little bit more than a year ago about your opposition to Germany's involvement in the war. How—14 months later—do you now see this war between Russia and Ukraine? 

 

SAHRA WAGENKNECHT: Yes, it is horrible. This war is ongoing. Clearly, we can see that everything we've been told—including in Germany—such as, we have to supply the tanks, we have to supply the weapons and that would lead to a solution but none of this has worked. And Germany has become more and more of a war party. There are now politicians in Germany who are calling for the war to be taken into Russia with Taurus missiles. That is a very dangerous development. And it has demonstrated in all honesty that anyone who wants to end this war will have to negotiate and finally make a serious offer for negotiations. And I am very pleased that the Pope is also calling for this, that many countries in the South are calling for this, and that we in Germany will continue to call for this. But the German government has so far entirely opposed this.

 

G. GREENWALD: So, independent of moral arguments or geostrategic arguments, it has become clear to everyone that Ukraine cannot possibly win this war, especially as victory was defined by NATO as Russians expelled from all Ukrainian territory, including Crimea. The Ukrainians have no artillery, and no people left to send to the front line. The only movements in the front line have been in Russia's favor. Has support in Germany for funding and arming the war in Ukraine changed at all over the last year?

 

SAHRA WAGENKNECHT: There is a considerable proportion of the population who see things differently and are also fed up with being told that Ukraine could win this war because they can see that they are unable to do so. But there is a very, very strong media debate in Germany that amounts to the narrative that if we don't stop Putin now, he will invade Poland or Lithuania or the Baltic states. In other words, they are now trying to sway people, who have also come to the realisation that arms deliveries have not led to a turnaround in the war, convinced by creating a new narrative. The new narrative is that we have to do everything we can to stop Putin because if there were to be another compromise now, he would invade other countries. And unfortunately, there are a lot of people in West Germany, and less so in East Germany, who believe that. So you can't say that the mood has now completely changed. 

 

G. GREENWALD: If you look at the history of the 20th century, the one lesson it shows is that very bad things happen when Germany and Russia are antagonistic, or see each other as enemies or involved in wars. And yet we've had the German Chancellor many times give pro-war speeches, saying that Germany must ensure Russia's defeat. What dangers does that create? And what do you think should be the relationship between Germany and Russia? 

 

SAHRA WAGENKNECHT: Yes, relations are very bad. I can imagine that old traumas have been awakened in many people in Russia when they hear that German politicians want to supply weapons to attack Russia. Now, for example, it became public in Russia that there was a discussion among German officers about the delivery of Taurus missiles, where there was a debate about whether it would be possible to deliver them and disguise the fact that they came from Germany. And the Taurus missiles are so dangerous because Ukraine could use them to attack Moscow. They could destroy ministries and the Kremlin in Moscow. They could attack military bases, even nuclear bases in Russia. And when German officers discuss the possibility of delivering such missiles and how it might be possible to conceal the fact that they came from Germany, I can imagine that this will of course reawaken old fears in Russia and that a great deal of historical experience, especially among older people, may bring this back to the surface. The relationship between Germany and Russia is at a low point and that is very regrettable. And it is also incredibly foolish of the Germans because we are harming ourselves above all. Our economy is in crisis because we can't import cheap energy. No gas, no Russian oil. The German economy is now shrinking for the second time this year, probably. We have high inflation, people have lost purchasing power and they are afraid of their industrial jobs. So above all, it is a policy that is damaging the German economy and the people in Germany. 

 

G. GREENWALD: So, at the beginning of the war, in 2022, there was a delusion in the U.S. and in Europe that maybe Ukraine could really win. But I think now almost nobody believes that Ukraine can expel Russia from Ukrainian territory. So what do you think are the real motives in Germany and Europe for why they want to continue this war indefinitely? 

 

SAHRA WAGENKNECHT: Yes, of course, it's a permanent gateway. The war is also very, very expensive for Russia. This means that the economic sanctions will of course remain in place as long as this war continues. You also don't want to admit that you haven't achieved your goals. The German Foreign Minister stepped up at the beginning of the war and said, "We want to ruin Russia", and Russia has not been ruined. On the contrary, Russia now has a close alliance with China and is really very well-paced in the BRICS. Yes, the alliance is getting bigger, but you don't want to admit that, you don't want to acknowledge that either. And I think the German media is much more one-dimensional here. I have the feeling, I also read some of the American press, that there is a more open discussion there about the question of how we can perhaps end this war, how we can get out of it. Meanwhile, for example, the parliamentary group leader of the governing party SPD (Social Democrats) in the Bundestag addressed the issue here, saying that perhaps we need to discuss putting a halt to the war. He was attacked terribly for that. So to address a self-evident fact that we need to end this war means—if you are a member of the SPD in Germany and you recognize that—you will be beaten up for it. The Pope said in an interview that Ukraine needs to consider how negotiations can take place out of self-interest, which was also criticized in the German press. It was said that the Pope was calling on Ukraine to surrender, which he never did. Unfortunately, we also lack diversity and positions in the media here to promote negotiations and to advocate an end to the war, which tends to be pushed very, very much into a corner; these are the people who are allied with Putin, who is running Putin propaganda. And that, of course, has a certain impact on how many people here in the country view the war.

 

G. GREENWALD: It's exactly the same in the United States, everything you just described. Since we last spoke, one of the major developments is that you left the longtime party to which you belong, Die Linke, or the left, to form a new party called Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance for Reason and Justice. Some polls now show your new party polling as high as 20%. One of the things that is most obvious is that the word Linke, left, is not in your party's name, your new party's name. Why is that? And what motivated you to leave the party that you were a member of for so long? 

 

SAHRA WAGENKNECHT: Yes, the Left has unfortunately alienated a large part of its voters. It has mainly focused on these so-called modern, progressive issues, which are mainly within academic milieus, in well-off, privileged milieus, and anti-racism, but also more out of symbolic politics, such as trans debates. But the truly fundamental social problems, wages, pensions, and social fears about the future, have been increasingly lost sight of. And that's why the Left has become very, very weak. Many former voters of the Left have moved to the right and are now voting for the AfD [Alternative für Deutschland]. It's a right-wing party in Germany and at some point, I simply said to myself along with others that we no longer want to watch how the left of the party spectrum is basically just going downhill and the right is benefiting, but rather we want a new force to emerge in Germany that embodies social justice and reason, but also peace policy. Die Linke is increasingly taking very, very unclear positions on the issue of peace policy, for example. A year ago we had a big peace rally with over 50,000 people. The left distanced itself and did not support it. And there are now clear voices on the left that are campaigning for arms deliveries to Ukraine. And that has also contributed to the Left losing voters. And this is where the BSW  [Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht] is now a clear voice for peace, and negotiations, but also for social justice. 

 

G. GREENWALD: So this formula that you're embracing, this new kind of politics, let's say, defending traditional left-wing economic policies to help the working class, but at the same time avoiding or rejecting these very elite left-wing dogmas on culture war issues, seems like that's becoming increasingly visible in other countries in northern Europe as well. Do you see the success of that kind of combination of politics, defending the working class, focusing on their economics, but avoiding these more elite culture war questions as being a framework for success in other left-wing parties in other countries in Northern Europe?

 

SAHRA WAGENKNECHT: Well, we can't complain about the response and the support we have. It's been very, very strong. We only founded the party in January and we're currently at over 5%, in Germany, in some eastern German states we're in double figures. That really is something that is quite unusual when a party is so new. And that's why I can tell that there really was a big gap in the political system that we are now filling. And I am firmly convinced that we can also change politics in Germany as a result. The stronger we become – we hope to achieve a good result in the European elections – the more we can influence German politics. So if we campaign as a voice for peace, then this will also put pressure on the German government. Or, if we make it an issue that wages have been falling in Germany for three years. That is something that has never happened before in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany. It's actually a scandal that people have been losing income for three years and are completely resisting it. And at the same time, we also recognize that people have a longing for stability, and security, that you can't ignore that. In Germany, we live with very high levels of migration. This is something that the Left has always denied. In my opinion, we consider this to be an important issue because it takes place primarily in poor neighborhoods and not in rich ones. So this is already a policy, a policy offer, it also has a logic to it and it's very well received by people. 

 

G. GREENWALD: In the United States, there was a long-time opposition to mass emigration that came mostly from the left, from labor unions, who argued that the people who suffer from mass migration tend to be the poorest, and the working class people whose jobs are taken, whose wages are declined. One of the first, and I guess, most important events that began to drive a wedge between you and your party was your opposition to the policy of Angela Merkel to accept a million refugees from Syria. What do you see as the conflict between immigration, on the one hand, and the interest of the German poor and the working class on the other? 

 

 

SAHRA WAGENKNECHT: Yes, there is a conflict. My own father is from Iran. I understand that people are looking for a better life and that's why they move to wealthy countries. And I also think that we should talk about why people are fleeing their homeland. Many of those who come to Germany are from countries where wars have taken place and these wars have often been waged by the West, or in part, as in Syria, the West has armed certain groups there and supported this civil war because it wanted a regime change. So there are causes of displacement and migration. But you don't eliminate the causes by saying we're going to open the borders and invite everyone in. You need to achieve changes in the home countries. But here in Germany, it is also the case that housing shortages have of course worsened in the poorer residential areas. There is a lack of daycare places, the schools are swamped, there are many districts where first grade is starting and 80% of the children can't speak a word of German. Integration doesn't work either when the numbers are so high. And that's why the less privileged in Germany are very strongly opposed to such high levels of migration. Incidentally, people who have a migration background themselves even express their desire that this uncontrolled migration be stopped. And that's why this is an important issue for us because it strengthens the Right. High levels of migration, as it is happening now, naturally favor low wages and high rents, overburden the infrastructure and ultimately strengthen the Right. 

 

G. GREENWALD: One of the best-known parties in Germany that claims to be on the left is the Green Party, and it has become successful. It now has, among other people, Annalena Baerbock as its foreign minister. And I recall when the Greens were running, they ran on a platform of what they called a feminist foreign policy. This idea that if you have women in positions of power in foreign policy, it would make war less likely. And yet you have Baerbock and the Greens, along with the president of the EU, who are among the most aggressive supporters of Germany's involvement in the war in Ukraine, Israel's war in Gaza, support for NATO generally. Why did that happen? And how do you understand what role the Green Party plays in Germany?

 

SAHRA WAGENKNECHT: Yes, the Greens really are a remarkable phenomenon. The party emerged from the peace movement. So alongside the question of environmental policy, peace policy was a very, very big issue for the first generation of the Greens. Petra Kelly was a great pacifist. She co-founded the Greens. Today, the Greens really are the biggest warmongers. They are the most fanatical about supplying weapons. In some cases, they are people who previously refused to do military service themselves, but who now know all the different types of tanks that are produced in Germany and are pushing aggressively for them to be supplied to Ukraine. Why is that? Well, the Greens are very, very strongly oriented towards the U.S., also on other issues. I can't say for sure why that is, but it is noteworthy. In many respects, the Greens are really the mouthpiece of U.S. politics and represent what is currently being discussed or expected in U.S. politics, and they have completely changed. It certainly also has something to do with this approach of a strong moralization of politics—i.e. you don't do politics to do something good but to be part of the good side. This approach results supposedly to “We are the good guys, the good West is fighting against Putin and the Russian dictatorship”. After all, this too resonates very, very strongly with the Greens as a narrative. In other words, we need to fight for human rights and democracy. It's all a lie. But that's just the Green tone. And in the party, there are now hardly any obvious functionaries who contradict it in any way. There are some in the SPD, but among the Greens, there really is a massive drumbeat for war and also an arrogance towards other countries, which they lecture on how they should be governed, including China, for example. But now the Greens are really the absolute worst when it comes to war policy. 

 

G. GREENWALD: So Ukraine is one war that Germany is providing arms to, but there's another war where Germany is also doing that. That is the war by Israel in Gaza. There's currently a case in the International Court of Justice brought by Nicaragua against Germany, accusing Germany of aiding genocide by providing the arms and bombs to Israel that they use against Palestinian civilians. What is your view of what the German policy toward Israel and its war in Gaza should be? 

 

SAHRA WAGENKNECHT: Yes, I think it's really horrible what we've been seeing in the Gaza Strip for months now. These are war crimes. It's a terrible war against the civilian population, against women, against children. And of course, Germany, or even every German, is special—and they naturally have a different relationship or responsibility towards Israel because of German history, because of the Holocaust. We have always said, and I support this, that we understand or share Israel's right to defend itself against these attacks by Hamas, but what is happening over there has nothing to do with self-defense; it is a major war crime. And that is why we, the BSW, have now submitted a motion in the Bundestag to impose an immediate arms embargo on Israel, i.e. to stop supplying weapons, because Nicaragua is right. Therefore, all countries that supply weapons are partly responsible for this terrible killing in the Gaza Strip. That is why I think it would be deeply appropriate and urgently necessary for us to take a different path here, to stop supplying arms immediately and to condemn this action. Condemn the fact that this is a campaign of revenge and not self-defense. In my opinion, we need to make that very clear. And Netanyahu has now even announced that he may launch a ground offensive on Rafah. And that would take death and horror to a whole new level. So here, I think there is no reason to say that we as Germans should stand on the side of the Israeli government. On the contrary, the Israeli government is basically pursuing a course here that could actually cause the entire Middle East to enter a major war. When I look at the development of relations with Iran, the attack on the Iranian consulate, there is also a possible threat of military escalation. And we absolutely must not allow that to happen, we cannot support it, we need to clearly condemn it and distance ourselves from it, and above all, we need to stop providing weapons. 

 

G. GREENWALD: I think everybody understands the very unique German duty and obligation after the Holocaust and World War II. But I think there are two ways of looking at what Germany's obligation is. One is to say our obligation is just to support Israel in everything that it does, no matter what that is. The other is to say we should oppose genocide and violence against civilians in every instance where it occurs. How does Germany understand the difference between those two options? 

 

SAHRA WAGENKNECHT: In the meantime, the German media, including the German government, has been mildly critical. It's no longer the case that they support everything the Israeli government does. But there is still far too little criticism. I also believe that we have a responsibility to defend Israel's right to exist, but the kind of warfare we are now seeing does not increase security for people in Israel or for Jews worldwide; on the contrary, it endangers it. It is an extremely right-wing Israeli government, whose defense minister even announced at the beginning that they wanted to wage a war against civilians. He spoke of human animals when he spoke of Palestinians. And that wording is fascistoid and we simply need to speak out and recognize that this is not something we can support and that we have no responsibility whatsoever arising from our history in sharing or engaging in such actions and such contempt for humanity, on the contrary, we must condemn such very clearly. 

 

G. GREENWALD: I know that Germany has a much different approach to free speech than the United States has, especially when it comes to expressions of anti-Semitism, for reasons that I think everybody can understand. At the same time, there have been a lot of reports about attempts to punish and repress defenders of the Palestinian cause or critics of Israel, even sometimes when the critics of Israel are Jewish, we see actions by the German government against them. How serious of a problem is this, and do you think it is something to worry about this attack on free speech in the name of defending Israel? 

 

SAHRA WAGENKNECHT: So we don't really have an open debate in Germany, we have a clear narrowing of the spectrum of opinion on many issues, including this one. So anyone who formulates harsh criticism here is met with the sledgehammer of anti-Semitism. For example, my co-chairwoman of the BSW was recently on a television program, a talk show, and she was accused of the BSW  being an anti-Semitic party. In other words, we are a party of anti-Semites because we criticize Israel and because we condemn the actions of the Israeli government. This shows that a truly absurd debate is taking place here. We will continue to point out that there is a big difference between anti-Semitism and a completely justified and absolutely necessary criticism of a far-right Israeli government that is committing the worst war crimes in the Gaza Strip. 

 

G. GREENWALD: The last time you and I talked, you made it very clear that you were very opposed to the far-right German party, AfD. And we talked about the differences between yourself and that party because there had been reports that some people on the right are supportive of you and now your new party. And I understand that. But there are also reports, especially in the wake of this explicit racist discussion, that this party may need to be outlawed or prohibited from the ballot. What are your thoughts on how the AfD should be treated legally? 

 

SAHRA WAGENKNECHT: I am strongly against banning the AfD. In my opinion, the whole debate about it is completely misguided. Ultimately, this will help the AfD. We need to deal with its policies and positions. For example, they have European candidates who clearly have a nationalistic worldview. They define being German by blood. That's racism, it's very bad. But you can challenge this in terms of content or you can address the AfD's economic positions. It has a radical position about the market, wants to dismantle the welfare state, and opposes higher minimum wages. Or, for example, it is not a peace party. When it comes to Ukraine, the AfD has positions that are actually similar to ours in that they also advocate a negotiated peace but, regarding the issue of the Gaza conflict, for example, they are a radical supporter of the Israeli government. That has something to do with the fact that they are very strongly anti-Islamic and not ultimately that they are a force for peace. However, you need to challenge them in terms of content and not with blanket bans and blanket exclusion. The main reason they are now gaining so much popularity is because of how poorly Germany is being governed—because the coalition government is so unjust, so haphazard, so incompetent, the economic situation is very bad and people are afraid. That's why the AfD has doubled in the polls in these two years. But that's not because people are right-wing. And if you want to win back these voters, you need to deal with the AfD objectively. 

 

G. GREENWALD: Well, I find your political project not just very interesting, but very relevant to other countries in the West, including the U.S. And it's always a pleasure to speak to you, and I really appreciated your time today.

 

SAHRA WAGENKNECHT: You're very welcome, thank you very much. And yes, perhaps until next time. 

 

G. GREENWALD: Guten Tag. Tschüss.

 

SAHRA WAGENKNECHT: Okay. Tschüss. 


And that concludes our show tonight.

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Our guest is the independent journalist Ryan Grim, the founder of DropSite News and a co-host of Breaking Points, about a new investigative article he published with Murtaza Hussain about who exactly guides Bari Weiss's media outlet, The Free Press, which seems to be now set to be at the center of one of America's oldest, most prestigious, and most influential news outlets. 

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A lot of different measures have been undertaken over the past 18 months – really a lot longer than that, but they've intensified over the last, say, 20 months since October 7 – as not just Americans, but the world, increasingly watched some of the most horrifying images we've ever seen live-streamed to us on a daily basis, sometimes on an hourly basis, of children getting blown up, of entire families being extinguished and being wiped out of essentially all of Gaza and civilian life there being destroyed systematically while Israeli officials openly admit that their goal is to do exactly that, to cleanse Gaza of the people who live there, to either force them to leave, kill them, or concentrate them in tiny little camps, what has also long been known as concentration camps. 

The evidence of this has become so compelling that many Western politicians who have never been willing to utter a word of criticism about Israel are now feeling required to stand up on a soapbox and speak of Israel in terms as critical and condemning as I'm sure they never imagined they would. The same is true for many media outlets and for organizations. Just in the last week alone, both France and then today, the U.K., sort of recognized the Palestinian state, something they had always refused to do, except in connection with an agreement of which Israel was a part. 

Even Donald Trump came out within the last three days and, in direct defiance of Benjamin Netanyahu's proclamation that there's no starvation policy that Israel has imposed on Gaza and, according to Netanyahu, no starvation at all. Donald Trump said there's absolutely starvation in Gaza. You see it in the children; you see it in people. These are things that you cannot fake. 

The public opinion in the United States has rapidly spiraled out of control against Israel as the world turns against that country, and particularly what it's doing in Gaza. Huge amounts of sympathy for that country emerged in the wake of October 7. Almost every country expressed support for it and was on its side, but what they have done, using October 7 as a pretext, to achieve what were in reality long-term goals of many people inside the Israeli government, similar to how many American neocons used the 9/11 attacks to achieve all kinds of pre-existing goals, 9/11 and 9/11 became the pretext for it, including the invasion of Iraq, but a whole variety of other measures as well.

 Large numbers of people have turned against Israel in the United States, which funds the Israeli military, which funds Israeli wars, which gives $4 billion to that country automatically every year under a 10-year deal signed by President Obama on the way out, much of which is required to be used to buy weapons from American arms dealers – it's basically a gift certificate offered by the American people to Israel to go on a shopping spree in the military industrial complex. But not all of it is required for that. And then every time Israel has a new war or wants to go fight somebody else, the United States not only transfers billions more to them. 

Under the Biden administration, the U.S. government transferred, in addition to that $4 billion a year, another $17 billion to pay for what Israel has been doing in Gaza, the West Bank, Syria and Lebanon. But the U.S. also spends massive amounts of money just deploying our military assets to protect Israel, to fight with Israel, to intercept missiles that are shot at Israel by countries that they're bombing. Therefore, a lot of people who did not grow up based on indoctrination about their obligation to subsidize the Israeli state; people who, after the Iraq war and the 2008 financial crisis, the disruptions of COVID and the lives that accompanied each of those, began losing trust and faith in American institutions but also began losing their own economic security. 

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Israel-Made Famine Crisis Finally Recognized
System Update #493

The following is an abridged transcript from System Update’s most recent episode. You can watch the full episode on Rumble or listen to it in podcast form on Apple, Spotify, or any other major podcast provider.  

System Update is an independent show free to all viewers and listeners, but that wouldn’t be possible without our loyal supporters. To keep the show free for everyone, please consider joining our Locals, where we host our members-only aftershow, publish exclusive articles, release these transcripts, and so much more!

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Tonight, we will cover the rapidly growing body of indisputable evidence that mass famine, mass starvation, is sweeping through Gaza in a way we haven't really quite seen in many decades, given how deliberate and planned it is by the Israeli government. 

By evidence I don't just mean the testimony of people in Gaza, or Gaza journalist or World Health organizations, but many Western physicians who are in Gaza, who are coming back from Gaza and reporting on the horrors that they're seeing, as well as official statements from Israeli government officials about exactly what they are carrying out, and what their intentions are with regard to the blockade that they continue to impose to prevent food from getting to Gaza. 

We're seeing babies, young kids and even now adults starving to death, again, as the result of a deliberate starvation policy that, again, is part of a war that the United States is paying for, that the United States under two successive presidents has been arming and continues to support diplomatically. 

One of the ways that you know that the horrors are immense is that many Western politicians, even Western governments, are now, suddenly, after 18 to 20 months of steadfastly supporting everything Israel is doing, starting to try to distance themselves with all sorts of statements and expressions of concern and even occasionally trying to pretend that they're doing something concrete. They know that what is taking place in Gaza is of historic proportions in terms of atrocity and war crimes and they do not want that associated with them, they don't want that on their conscience or especially on their legacy and so they're attempting to pretend all along is that this were something that they had opposed from the very first moment the Israeli destruction of Gaza began.

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Ever since the start of the destruction of Gaza by the Israeli government following the October 7 attack, there have been all kinds of concerns that one of the things the Israeli government would do is impose mass starvation and famine on the population of 2.2 million people of Gaza. At least that was the population when all this began; half of that population, 1.1 million, are children, under the age of 18. 

This has been something we've seen evidence of, and in part, people were concerned about it because the Israeli government immediately announced that that was their intention. We've now gotten to the point after a full-scale Israeli blockade – and by blockade, I don't mean that Israel is failing to feed the people of Gaza, I mean that the people, groups and organizations that are trying to bring food into Gaza are physically impeded from doing so by the IDF as a result of official Israeli policy. 

There was a complete and full blockade for three months; at the same time, they imposed policies such as destroying any fields or plants where food could grow. They are now killing or at least arresting anybody who tries to just go a little bit out – remember, Gaza has a beach and a sea – to try to fish for food. That is also prohibited. It clearly is a policy designed to starve the population to death, which is why even Israeli experts in genocide who long resisted applying the word genocide to what Israel is doing in Gaza have now relented and said it's the only word that applies. 

The number of groups, governments and people who previously supported what Israel was doing or at least refused to acknowledge the full extent of the atrocities, have now, in their view, no choice but to do so. The evidence is starting to become so overwhelming that only the hardcore Israel loyalists are left to try to deny it or blame somebody else for it.

 ABC News today brings this headline: “More than 100 aid groups warn of 'mass starvation' in Gaza amid Israel's war with Hamas. Their statement warned of "record rates of acute malnutrition." They are the World Health Organization and groups from all over the planet that have immense credibility in having worked with conflicts many times before. 

A leading Israeli newspaper, the daily Haaretz, which has been more critical of the Netanyahu government than most, but which at the same time was supportive for months of what Israel was doing in Gaza following October 7,  had its lead editorial yesterday under this headline: “Israel Is Starving Gaza.” The language they used was so clear, straightforward and direct that it's unimaginable to think of any large corporate Western media outlet saying anything similar.

Last Monday, we interviewed a leading scholar of famine, who has studied famines around the world for his entire life and not only did he describe how what's taking place in Gaza is unprecedented, at least since World War II, because of how minutely planned it is and because they're unlike famine, say, in Ethiopia, or Sudan or Yemen. There are all sorts of organizations with immense expertise and resources that are just a couple of miles away from where children are starving to death, have huge amounts of food and other aids that they want to bring to the people of Gaza and yet are blocked from doing so by the IDF. 

Although I suppose it's encouraging, or at least better than the alternative, that even Western governments and the longstanding Israel supporters who are American politicians are now issuing statements about how disturbed they are by the mass famine in Gaza, how Israel needs to immediately cease this inhumane activity, none of this is surprising. None of it is new. Israel made very clear from the very beginning what exactly their intentions were, and people just decided that they were too scared to stand up and object at the time. 

Oftentimes, you hear that it's only far-right extremist ministers in Netanyahu's government who say things like this, like Ben Gvir, Smotrich, or people like that. In reality, the Israeli defense minister was one of the moderate people comparatively at the start of the war, to the point where Netanyahu ended up ousting him and he was the one who ordered a "complete siege" on the Gaza Strip, saying Israeli authorities would cut electricity and block the entry of food, water and electricity. 

In April of this year, just three months ago, another Israeli minister, Smotrich, said at a conference:

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 Proudly boasting of the actions that the Israeli military, the Israeli government intended to take and then took. In his words, to ensure that not even a grain a wheat entered, a place where 2.2 million people, or 2 million people, or 1.9 million people are clinging to survival in between dodging shelling from tanks and bombs and having everything from schools and U.N. refugees and refugees in even their own tents being blown up. From CNN, in May:

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Just as a reminder, it was in February, after Trump was inaugurated, that Israel explicitly announced to the world that it was blockading all food from entering Gaza. They didn't hide it. It wasn't in dispute. It wasn't in doubt. It was an official Israeli policy to starve the entire population, which is collective punishment as a way of forcing Hamas to negotiate or to surrender. This is exactly sort of the thing that, after World War II, we decided would be intolerable, that people who did it would be guilty of war crimes and treated as such, the way that the Nazis who did things similarly, like starve entire cities, starve entire ghettos of Jews, were treated as war criminals and held responsible and actually executed. 

So, none of this is new for all the people who are now just seeing the babies who are emaciated in skin and bones and dying of malnutrition and increasingly older children and adults as well, to suddenly come out and say, “Oh my God, I can't believe this. What have we been supporting? This has to stop.” 

This is all months in the making, and, as hunger experts and famine groups will tell you, once it gets to this stage, where people are actually dying now of famine in large numbers, it becomes irreversible. Irreversible physically because even if you get the food in, their bodies aren't equipped to process it. They need much more extensive medical care than that. Of course, in children, it impedes brain growth for life and physical vitality for life, to say nothing of the mass death from starvation, which we're now starting to see. 

That's why all these attempts to distance themselves that we're seeing from Western governments and Western politicians are utterly nauseating. They're the ones who enabled it, they're the ones who have been paying for it, they're the ones who have been arming it, they're the ones who've been cheering for it, despite Israeli vows to starve to death the people of Gaza. 

We've been hearing for a year and a half about stories of doctors in Gaza having to perform major surgeries, amputations on children, without so much as any painkillers, let alone anesthesia. Horror stories of the worst kind imaginable. But what we're now seeing is a body of evidence so conclusive and so indisputable from so many different sources that it has essentially become impossible for denialists of these atrocities to maintain their denialism any longer. 

Here is Nick Maynard. He's a British physician who was on the mainstream program “Good Morning Britain,” just like “Good Morning America” in the United States. And he got back from Gaza. He's a surgeon. And here's what he described in his own words. 

Video. Nick Maynard, “Good Morning Britain.” July 25, 2025.

He just gets done saying exactly what he's been seeing that every day, for fun almost, IDF soldiers pick which part of the body they're going to snipe young children, teenagers, young teenagers with, oh, today their heads, tomorrow their chests. How about their kneecaps? How about their testicles? And they come in in clutches with all the same injury. We've been hearing stories of IDF soldiers purposely targeting young boys who come in with bullets in their brains. We've been hearing about this for quite a long time now. He's in Gaza. He saw exactly what he's describing. 

Here he is again, talking about something in one way, not quite as brutal, but in another way, almost more horrific in terms of the intentionality that it shows in terms of what the Israeli government and the IDF are actually up to in terms of their objectives in Gaza. 

Video. NICK MAYNARD, GOOD MORNING BRITAIN. July 25, 2025.

If you are deliberately preventing the entrance in Gaza of baby formula, knowing that there is severe malnutrition among the women giving birth to these babies and not when Hamas operatives are trying to bring them in, but from Western doctors who work with organizations known around the world for treating people with injuries in war zones, if that isn't evidence of genocidal intent, someone needs to tell me what is. 

Here's Senator Amy Klobuchar, Democrat from Minnesota, with a very steadfast pro-Israel record in the Senate for the entire time she's been there. Yesterday, she decided to stand up on the Senate floor to talk about how deeply worried and concerned and upset she is by the stories about nutrition coming out of Gaza and the role that the Israelis are playing in blockading food to starve the people in Gaza to death. She's so moved by it. She had to stand up and make her voice heard. Here's what she said. 

Video. AMY KLOBUCHAR, C-SPAN. July 24, 2025.

I've heard enough of that performance. Very well delivered. The voice cracking was a nice touch. But as you'll see, as you will notice, there's no advocacy of any concrete call. You would think this is just some country doing this, that the United States has nothing to do with. 

The United States pays for the Israeli military. It pays for their wars. It pays for the munitions they use to carry all of this out and has for decades. Amy Klobuchar is a steadfast supporter of that, as are pretty much all of her colleagues in the Senate from both parties. 

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Here is a photograph of 14 senators, seven from the Republican Party and seven from the Democratic Party, the perfect balance to illustrate how bipartisan the reverence and support for Israel is in Washington. There you see Amy Klobuchar. She's right here smiling. And here's Benjamin Netanyahu. Here's Chuck Schumer, here's Ted Cruz, here's Adam Schiff. Just all the kinds of people we're constantly told can never get along with anything. There they all are gathered. You see Netanyahu sort of posing there in front of everybody as some kind of warrior strut. 

Benjamin Netanyahu is an indicted war criminal required to be arrested by any signatory to the International Criminal Court, just like Vladimir Putin is. Just the week before, the IDF soldiers and settlers in the West Bank murdered yet another American citizen, this one 20 years old, who was born in the United States, lived in the U.S., and was visiting relatives in the West Bank. And not only did settlers at the back of the IDF storm their house and beat him to death, but they also then blocked ambulances from getting to the scene to pick him up and bring him to get medical care, and the American citizen died, killed by Israelis. None of these people had anything to say about this, because their loyalty is more to Israel than to even their own fellow citizens.

 So, it's nice that Amy Klobuchar wants to engage in public displays of emotion about how deeply moved she is, except she was just standing right next to the leader of the government responsible. Again, this is not anything new. He is indicted exactly for these kinds of crimes, for deliberate starvation, among many other things. 

I should also point out that Amy Klobuchar's statement about the hostages is preposterous. The Netanyahu government has said many times, very explicitly, that even if Hamas turned over every hostage today, they've said this for months, that they would not stop their war. Their war aim is not to get the hostage back. That's the pretext. Even the hostages' own families know that and have said that, which is why they have deprioritized getting the hostages back because that's not their role. Their goal is to expel all Arabs and Palestinians from all of Gaza, as another minister in the Israeli government said yesterday, and make sure that all of Gaza is exclusively Jewish. They want to cleanse all of Gaza of every Arab and Muslim who lives there, every Palestinian, including Christian Palestinians and Palestinian Catholics, and make it part of the Israeli state where only Israeli Jews are permitted to live. That's the goal of the war. It doesn't have anything to do with the hostages. That's a pretext. 

There's an Israeli scholar who is one of the leading scholars on Holocaust studies and the study of genocide, named Omer Bartov and he served in the IDF. He's an Israeli and he now teaches at Brown University, where he teaches Holocaust studies and the study of Genocide. And for quite a long time, until very recently, he rejected the idea that the word genocide applies to what Israel is doing in Gaza. Even when other human rights groups and other experts in genocide were saying, “The word absolutely applies,” he was insisting it did not. He then wrote an op-ed in The New York Times last week where he said, “I'm an expert in genocide. I know it when I see it,” and laid out a very long case with documentation and evidence. Again, this is an Israeli citizen who fought in the IDF, who dedicated his life to Holocaust studies as a steadfast supporter of Israel, writing in The New York Times op-ed, “I long resisted the conclusion, but there's no other word that can be used to describe what Israel is doing in Gaza besides genocide.” He laid out a long case using his historical understanding, his scholarly analysis of what genocide means and how it's been applied in the past and why it applies today. He then went on Piers Morgan and elaborated on his view and here's part of what he said. 

Video. Omer Bartov, Piers Morgan Uncensored. July 24, 2025.

And that's been true for a very long time. The war aim of this war has always been to destroy civilian life in all of Gaza, whether by killing the people there or making life so impossible that it forces them to try to find some way out. That's the goal. It has nothing to do with the hostages or dismantling Hamas or anything else. It's to steal the land that the fanatics in the Israeli government believe God promised to them, without regard to what the rest of the world believes or thinks about international borders or anything else. And they don't regard the people in Gaza as human. That's the reality. Israel, as a country, obviously has lots of exceptions, but the prevailing ethos in Israel is that these are not human beings. These are less than human beings, which is why there's very little opposition – some have grown, but it’s still an absolute minority in Israel who are objecting to any of this. 

In response to this Israeli scholar of the Holocaust and genocide, not just pronouncing that what Israel is doing is a genocide, but laying out a very extensive case, for whatever reason, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who, you might recall, is the Secretary of Health and Human Services, not the Secretary of State, compelled to go onto Twitter and to say this in response to somebody who denied this claim:

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So, have Robert F. Kennedy Jr. – who is not Jewish, of course, he's part of a Catholic family – accusing Israeli Jews of spreading blood libel against Jews, because they invoke their field of expertise and the decades long study that they've done of genocide to describe what Israel is doing in Gaza as the manifestation of genocidal intent, is a blood libel against Jews.  

Blood libel is now a term that has the same effective definition operationally as antisemitism, which just means criticizing Israel. I have, though, been really amazed. I've noticed this for quite some time now, the way in which non-Jewish supporters of Israel – you can call them Christian Zionists, or Zionists in general – I don't think RFK Jr.'s reverence for Israel comes from any kind of evangelical Christianity, just think it comes from political expediency. 

He was on my show once, talking about it, where he gave this big, long speech about how we have to immediately stop financing the war in Ukraine because we can't afford it any longer. All of that, all of which was true. All of which I agreed with. And then I asked him, Does that same thing apply to Israel? And he immediately rejected it, started saying how Israel is a crucial ally, blah, blah, although, at the end, he did say, you know what, maybe you're right, maybe it is time to stop funding Israel and let them stand on their own two feet. But then the Democrats decided to attack RFK Jr. as antisemitic, and he ran into the arms of the most extremist Israel supporters like Rabbi Shmuley. Ever since, he has been as extreme a supporter of Israel as it gets to the point that he now accuses Israeli professors of Holocaust studies of spreading blood libels against Jews. 

One of the most repugnant things I've seen is this new attempt, this new PR attempt, to shift from, “Oh, no, there's no problem in Gaza with food. There's no famine in Gaza. They have plenty of food.” And then for a while, it became, to the extent people don't have food, “It's Hamas's fault, they're stealing the food.” And then the question is, where are they getting it from to steal it? No food can be allowed in. They destroyed the ability to grow food and crops. They shoot and kill, or at best arrest, people who try to fish off the coast. So, that denialism didn't work any longer, and now the shift in rhetoric has become, “Oh, it's the U.N.'s fault. There's all this aid sitting there that they refuse to distribute.” 

The last time the U.N. tried to take food into Gaza, when they finally got the authorization of the Israeli military to allow trucks to come in, was July 20, which is four days ago. And what happened was, even though they had the authorization of the IDF to come, as soon as they entered with trucks of food, desperate Gaza civilians whose families are dying of hunger, ran over to the trucks. And when they did, the Israeli military, the IDF, started gunning them down, started massacring them. And obviously, when you're shooting that many bullets at people by U.N. trucks, you are also endangering the lives of the drivers of those trucks and the aid workers who are on those trucks. 

Cindy McCain, who tries to be very, very diplomatic, because that's her job, when talking about the role Israel is playing, she's the head of the World Food Program, but it's also her job to get food to the people of Gaza. And she comes from a family that is as pro-Israel as it gets. Her husband was John McCain. Even more fanatically pro-Israel is her daughter, Megan McCain, who accuses everybody of antisemitism daily, basically, if you don't support everything Israel is doing, that's the family she comes from. That's the political tradition out of which she emerged. And so, she's often very careful and cautious in her words. And she wants to be able to get food to the people of Gaza as well. That's her job. And yet, for Cindy McCain, this was quite an extreme language. She went on CNN the following day to describe the massacre aimed at the people getting the food from the U.N., and also the U.N. aid workers themselves, imposed by the Israeli government. 

Here's what she said. 

Video. CINDY MCCAIN, CNN. July 21, 2025.

The last time the U.N. tried to deliver aid and food into Gaza, they were massacred by the Israeli military and now, the IDF and the Gaza Health Foundation, guided by scumbags who used to work for the Obama administration, who are paid to advise them on PR strategies, have told them to stop denying that there's hunger and famine in Gaza, and instead blame the U.N., a group that has been desperately trying to get food to the people of Gaza for more than a year. 

The Prime Minister of Australia came out yesterday with a statement, very melodramatic, about how upset he is and how disturbed he is; 29 countries issued a letter that we read to you late last week. This is all just symbolic. This is a way of, as that book cover says, pretending that they were against this all along. 

Only the West and particularly the United States has the power to stop the Israelis from what they're doing and instead, the American government, like they did in the Biden administration, now under the Trump administration, is doing the opposite, expressing more and more support for what Israel is doing. 

We're just witnessing in real time the kind of war crimes and atrocities that 20, 50, 100 years from now, people are going to be reading their history books, looking back and wondering how this could possibly have happened. And we're seeing it unfold, right in front of our faces, and we all do bear a significant amount of responsibility for it. 

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