Glenn Greenwald
Politics • Culture • Writing
THE WEEKLY UPDATE: JUNE 3-7
Weekly Newsletter
June 10, 2024
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We are pleased to summarize the key stories we covered last week on SYSTEM UPDATE. 

—Glenn Greenwald

MONDAY, JUNE 3 - SYSTEM UPDATE 276

Dr. Fauci Coddled by Democrats During COVID Testimony While He’s Grilled by GOP 

PLUS: Interview with Russia/Ukraine Expert Prof. Ivan Katchanovski on Ukraine’s Growing Problems

Dems praised Dr. Fauci during his Congressional COVID hearing while GOP members pressed him on lab-leak theory cover-up efforts. Russia/Ukraine expert Prof. Ivan Katchanovski warns about Ukraine’s growing draft resistance and the realities of the war ignored by Western media. 

The COVID pandemic was unquestionably one of the most significant events of our lifetime. Entire populations, countries, and communities were shut down for almost two years. Children were forcibly masked, vaccinated with an experimental medication, and prevented from attending schools for months at a time. People were trained to acquiesce to a level of control previously unthinkable: from being arrested for certain kinds of political protests, to standing six feet apart from one another in public, to obeying curfews and lockdowns. Questioning many of the pronouncements and policy decisions of health care and other political officials were banned through online censorship.

Yet, for a variety of reasons, there has been no accountability for these acts and very little transparency about the government’s decision-making. In part, that is because COVID turned into a partisan culture war issue in which the defense of Dr. Anthony Fauci and the WHO became a virtually religious duty. Any criticisms or even questioning of his decisions and judgments were off-limits and deemed as right-wing attacks on science. Thus, liberal elites and most Democratic Party members and followers insist that Dr. Fauci is a hero and that any inquiry should begin and end there. They insist that all those other questions, debates, and controversies should be left alone and unresolved.

We should be thankful that some members of Congress and some members of the media — mostly the independent media — refused to allow such a momentous moment in history to go unexamined. Over the last year, there has finally been some reporting that makes undeniably clear that many of the statements made by health policy elites were highly dubious, if not outright deliberately false. But establishment sectors have implicitly decided that there is no benefit in re-examining any of what happened during that period — almost all of which they vigorously endorsed. I have many criticisms of the House Republicans — particularly with respect to their support for the Biden administration's foreign policy in Ukraine, Israel, and most other places — but they have done a commendable job in taking their oversight responsibilities concerning the Executive Branch. 

Monday, the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic — something I can guarantee would not exist if the Democrats were in control of the House — held a hearing at which Dr. Fauci testified. One Democrat after the next expressed outrage that Dr. Fauci was even being questioned at all and instead used their time to heap unfettered and obsequious praise on him, much like they do when officials from the U.S. Security State appear before Congress. Fauci was grilled by GOP members on a wide range of issues, including his statements and decisions regarding the origins of COVID-19, mask mandates, vaccine efficacy and harm, and far more. Many of these exchanges were quite revealing — of Fauci's borderline-pathological willingness to lie and about the substantive issues themselves — and we will report on the key highlights.

Then: Disturbing scenes of Ukrainian men violently resisting efforts to force them to the front lines in the war against Russia — men refusing to serve as cannon fodder for this futile NATO war against Russia — have become increasingly common. In general, they know what everyone not named Zelenskyy or Lindsey Graham has long ago recognized: there is no way NATO can achieve its definition of "victory."

Prof. Katchanovski has been one of the most reliable sources of news and analysis since the start of this war. A scholar in Russian studies and that region, Professor Katchanovski now teaches at the School of Political Studies & Conflict Studies and Human Rights Program at the University of Ottawa and has been a Visiting Scholar at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University. We are thrilled to welcome him to discuss the latest defeats and problems for Ukraine and the West, the serious and growing challenges of Ukrainian recruitment, and the causes that led to this conflict in the first place.

READ THE FULL STORY

READ THE FULL INTERVIEW

WATCH THE EPISODE


WEDNESDAY, JUNE 5 - SYSTEM UPDATE 277

INTERVIEW: Sen. Rand Paul on COVID Cover-Ups, Ukraine, and More

PLUS: Israel's Disinformation Campaign in the U.S. Revealed and Hunter Biden Laptop Story Vindicated

Senator Rand Paul returns to talk about COVID-19 cover-ups, U.S.-backed wars, and Trump’s conviction. Israeli influence campaign in the U.S. revealed, just as Hunter Biden’s laptop — once deemed “Russian disinformation” — authenticated by an FBI agent. 

We speak to Sen. Rand Paul, the thrice-elected Senator from the state of Kentucky, about a wide range of issues. Among them are the key revelations from Dr. Fauci’s testimony at a House hearing on COVID, efforts to censor dissidents and people like Sen. Paul from questioning Dr. Fauci’s claims, and remaining questions about COVID. Plus, we speak to him about the ongoing futile and failing war in Ukraine and why the U.S. Government continues to fund it. 

But before we get to our interview with Senator Paul, both the Israeli newspaper Haaretz and the New York Times reported Wednesday, based on the research and journalism of the journalism watchdog site entitled "Fake Reporting," that Israel has launched a large-scale disinformation campaign aimed at Americans — mostly black Americans and progressives — designed to manipulate them into having more positive views of Israel and its war in Gaza. Many of the tactics used involved fake accounts, inorganic messages, and attempts to deceive people about the identity of those making various claims.

For the same reasons I long scoffed about the grave attack on American democracy caused by Russian and Chinese messaging campaigns aimed at Americans, I am not going to claim I regard this as some massive threat to our liberty. But it does raise the question of why these revelations are treated so differently from similar campaigns involving other nations. For years, we have heard from the top levels of our government that few things threaten American democracy more than influence campaigns from Russia and China. That rationale was even the basis for the banning or forced sale of TikTok recently and the basis of four years of Russiagate hysteria.

If those foreign influence campaigns are such an affront to our sovereignty and such a grave threat to our democracy, why aren't the ones that Israel has clandestinely launched against our citizenry considered to be similarly menacing? Why do all of the claimed beliefs and values of so many people instantly dissipate when it comes to this one foreign country? We will have the details on this Israeli influence campaign and remind you of what U.S. officials previously said about such projects when coming from other foreign nations.

Then: We will briefly report on an infuriating but unsurprising development in the prosecution of the President's son, Hunter Biden. In order to prosecute Hunter Biden, the FBI and DOJ need to rely on documents taken from his laptop. And to use such documents, the FBI has to testify that they concluded that the laptop and the documents found on it were both authentic and unaltered, and that is exactly what the FBI just testified to under oath.

That claim, while provably true, is the exact opposite of the claim that was continuously circulated by a union of the CIA, the corporate media, and the Democratic Party: namely, that no reporting based on documents taken from the laptop could be trusted because the laptop was not authentic but rather "Russian disinformation." This claim was long disproven — including by the very media outlets that first spread the original lie. To see an admission this ironclad from the FBI — made under oath during Hunter Biden’s prosecution — is yet another reminder of the severity of the media/intelligence community fraud before the 2020 election.

READ THE FULL STORY

WATCH THE EPISODE


THURSDAY, JUNE 6 - SYSTEM UPDATE 278

Steve Bannon's Contempt Charges Reveal Historic Double Standard

Interview with RFK Jr.'s Running Mate Nicole Shanahan on the 2024 Election and More

A historical weaponization of the legal system by the Biden DOJ as Steve Bannon is sent to jail. Nicole Shanahan, RFK Jr.’s running mate, speaks on running as an Independent, money in politics, foreign affairs, and more. 

Steve Bannon — one of President Trump's top White House advisers in the first part of his presidency, and currently one of his closest allies — was ordered to surrender to a federal prison on July 1, three weeks from now. Bannon had been out on bail pending appeal of his 2022 conviction on charges of disobeying a Congressional subpoena to testify about the events of January 6. Bannon was sentenced to four months in prison.

In addition to President Trump — who was just convicted of 34 felonies on obviously dubious and, no pun intended, trumped-up charges — Bannon is not the first top Trump aide to be jailed for an alleged violation of a Congressional subpoena. In March of this year, Peter Navarro, President Trump's trade advisor, reported to a federal prison to serve a four-month sentence on similar charges. A large group of key Trump officials and allies — including Gen. Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort, and Roger Stone — also faced unprecedented prosecutions in American history.

Indeed, Congress often issues subpoenas to Washington officials that are ignored or violated in one way or the other. Rarely, does that result in anything like what has been done to Navarro and now Bannon. We'll go through the relevant history to illustrate how, yet again, the Biden DOJ and Democratic prosecutors are so transparently weaponizing the legal and judicial system against their political enemies for partisan ends.

In general, as I learned firsthand when I started writing about politics in the second term of the Bush administration and then into the Obama administration, the consensus in Washington politics and media has long been that only banana republic countries prosecute their political enemies and the prior administration. I never agreed with that consensus — I wrote countless articles and even a 2011 book arguing against it — but these prosecutions do not represent an abandonment of that Washington rule. Like so many other things, it represents merely a temporary suspension for one Washington official: Donald Trump.

Then: We will speak to Nicole Shanahan, now officially the Vice Presidential running mate of RFK, Jr. If polls hold up at all, that ticket will be one of the most successful third-party candidacies in decades.

Bobby Kennedy's choice baffled a lot of people. While Shanahan is reasonably well-known in Silicon Valley — in part for accumulating a net worth estimated at $1 billion as a result of her marriage to one of the world's richest billionaires, Google cofounder Sergey Brin, and in part for her accomplishments and initiatives — many American citizens had never heard of Shanahan since she never held elected office of any kind.

That does not mean that she has been uninterested in politics. She has donated a reasonably large amount of money to Democratic Party candidates, including Hillary Clinton, Pete Buttigieg, the 2020 campaign of Joe Biden, as well as more left-wing candidates and causes. This raises a lot of questions about her current political views, her past political trajectory, and the role of big money in our politics. We'll talk to her about that, as well as her views on current U.S.-financed wars, the issue of online censorship, whistleblowers, and more.

READ THE FULL STORY

WATCH THE EPISODE


FRIDAY, JUNE 7 - SYSTEM UPDATE 279

Briahna Joy Gray on her Firing from The Hill and Free Speech Double Standards

Leighton Woodhouse on his Reporting About Dr. Fauci’s Dog Experiments

Briahna Joy Gray talks about her firing from The Hill, her viral “eye roll” moment, and corporate media’s history of censoring Israel’s critics. Leighton Woodhouse reveals the truth about Dr. Fauci’s dog experiment cover-up and The Washington Post’s role in spinning facts into "conspiracies."

There's no doubt that certain forms of right-wing speech have been targeted with censorship over the last decade: in academia, in media, and online. But it is equally true that in the United States, Israel's critics have been frequent targets of viewpoint-based firings, censorship, and other forms of sanctions. One could spend all night documenting how many people have been fired or censored for criticizing this one foreign country and still not be close to comprehensively documenting all of them.

Since Oct. 7, this always-potent censorship framework has exploded. There are at least dozens of cases of media figures, political officials, and academics who have been fired for saying the wrong thing about Israel. As we have repeatedly reported: laws have been enacted to expand the legal definition of "antisemitism" to include a wide range of commonly expressed oppositions to Israel; fanatically pro-Israel governors have issued Executive Orders purporting to ban antisemitism – though no other form of bigotry – in their states; and there have been countless attempts to punish students who express opposition to Israel.

The long list of Americans being fired for expressing views about Israel deemed over the line or even bigoted now has a new member: she is Briahna Joy Gray, my former colleague at The Intercept, the Press Secretary of the 2020 Bernie Sanders campaign, and, until yesterday, the very popular host of The Hill’s news show called "Rising." After Briahna became a major target of indignation by pro-Israel activists over the last several weeks, The Hill sent her an email firing her yesterday. 

Then: when Anthony Fauci appeared before Congress last week, Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene asked him about gruesome and morally repugnant experiments that had been conducted on dogs – specifically beagles, who were chosen because of their particularly trusting and human-loving nature. Democratic partisans and others in the media immediately mocked her for spreading a deranged conspiracy theory, in part because news outlets – particularly the Washington Post – had gone to great lengths to depict this connection as a right-wing lie.

But it is far from a lie. 

Earlier today, the independent journalist Leighton Woodhouse – with whom I have done extensive reporting over the years on the cause of mistreatment of animals – published a detailed and amply documented report on our Locals site that laid out all the facts that Fauci and the NIH have tried to conceal. Those facts make clear the connection between the U.S. Government and these dog experiments. 

Roughly at the same time that we published Leighton's article, the Washington Post fact-checker, notorious for being extremely partisan in favor of Democrats, published his own analysis of Congresswoman's Greene accusations and Fauci's denial. The Post's fact-checker, Glenn Kessler, began with a confession: "When we first saw Greene hold up the photo, we figured this would be easy to debunk — another in a string of misleading attacks against Fauci, who became the public face of the government’s response to the pandemic."

But he ultimately concluded that the facts cast grave doubt on the denials of both Fauci and the NIH. We will speak to Leighton Woodhouse about what he discovered and reported. 

READ THE FULL STORY MONDAY

WATCH THE EPISODE

READ LEIGHTON WOODHOUSE’S ORIGINAL REPORTING

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Stephen Miller's False Denials About Trump's Campus "Hate Speech" Codes; Sohrab Ahmari on the MAGA Splits Over Antitrust, Foreign Wars, and More
System Update #495

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 as a podcast on Apple, Spotify, or any other major podcast platform.  

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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One of President Trump's most powerful advisers, Stephen Miller, last night claimed that I had posted what he called "patently false" statements about the Trump administration’s policy. Specifically, earlier in the day, I had pointed out – and documented, as I've done many times – that the Trump administration has implemented a radically expanded "hate speech" code that outlawed a wide range of opinions about Israel and Jewish individuals and, even worse, that they have been pressuring American universities to adopt this expanded "hate speech" code on campuses to restrict the free speech rights, not of foreign students, but of American professors, American administrators and American students. It's a direct attack on the free speech rights of Americans on college campuses. 

I also pointed out – as I have covered here many times – that the Trump administration has also adopted a policy of deporting law-abiding citizens, not for criticizing the United States, but for criticizing Israel. All of my claims here are demonstrably and indisputably true. Yet after I pointed them out yesterday, and various MAGA influencers began responding to them and promoting them, White House officials began contacting them to convince them that my claims weren't true. When that didn't work because I was able to provide the evidence, the White House late last night dispatched one of its most popular officials – Stephen Miller – to label my claims “patently false." 

The policies in question, adopted by the Trump administration, especially these attacks on free speech on American college campuses through hate speech codes, are of great importance, precisely, since they do attack the free speech rights of Americans at our universities, and the actual truth of what the Trump administration should be demonstrated. So that's exactly what we're going to do tonight. 

Then: The emergence of Donald Trump and his MAGA ideology in the Republican Party led to the opening of all sorts of new ideas and policies previously anathema in that party. All of that, in turn, led to vibrant debates and competing views within the Trump coalition, as well as to all new voices and perspectives. One of the most interesting thinkers to emerge from that clash is our guest tonight: he's Sohrab Ahmari, one of the founders of Compact Magazine and now the U.S. editor for the online journal UnHerd. We’ll talk about all of that, as well as other MAGA divisions becoming increasingly more visible on economic populism generally, war and foreign policy, and much more. 

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Sometimes, government policy is carried out with very flamboyant and melodramatic announcements that everyone can listen to and understand, but more often it's carried out through a series of documents, very lengthy documents, sometimes legal documents, that have a great deal of complexity to them. 

Oftentimes, when that happens, the government, if it has a policy or is pursuing things that are unpopular, especially among its own voters, can just try to confuse things by claiming that people's descriptions of what they're doing are untrue and false and trying to just confuse people with a bunch of irrelevances or false claims. A lot of people don't know what to make of it. They just throw up their hands because most people don't have the time to sort through all that. Especially if you're a supporter of a political movement and you hear that they're pursuing a policy that you just think is so anathema to their ideology that you don't want to believe that they're doing, you're happy to hear from the government when they say, “Oh, that's a lie. Don't listen to the persons or the people saying that. That's not actually what we're doing.”

Yet when that happens, I think it's very incumbent upon everybody who wants to know what their government is doing to actually understand the truth. And that is what happened last night. 

I've been reporting for several months now on the Trump administration's systematic efforts to force American universities to adopt expanded hate speech codes. Remember, for so long, conservatives hated hate speech codes on college campuses. They condemned it as censorship. They said it's designed to suppress ideas. 

Oftentimes, those hate speech codes were justified on the grounds that it's necessary to protect minority groups or that those ideas are hateful and incite violence. And all of this, we were told by most conservatives that I know, I think, in probably a consensus close to unanimity, we were told that this is just repressive behavior, that faculty and students on campus should have the freedom to express whatever views they want. If they're controversial, if they are offensive, if they are just disliked by others, the solution is not to ban those ideas or punish those people, but to allow open debate to flourish and people to hear those ideas. 

That is a critique I vehemently agree with. And I've long sided with conservatives on this censorship debate as it has formed over the last, say, six, seven, eight years when it comes to online discourse, when it comes to campus discourse, free speech is something that is not just a constitutional guarantee and according to the Declaration of Independence, a right guaranteed by God, but it is also central to the American ethos of how we think debate should unfold. We don't trust the central authority to dictate what ideas are prohibited and which ones aren't. Instead, we believe in the free flow of ideas and the ability of adults to listen and make up their own minds. 

That's the opposite of what the Trump administration has now been doing. What they said they believed in, Donald Trump, in his inauguration and other times, was that he wanted to restore free speech. Early on in the administration, JD Vance went to Europe and chided them for having long lists of prohibited ideas for which their citizens are punished if they express those views. And the reality is that's exactly what the Trump administration has been doing. 

I want to make clear I'm not talking here about the controversies over deporting foreign students for criticizing Israel. That's a separate issue, which is part of this discussion, but that's totally ancillary and secondary. I've covered that many times. That is not what I'm discussing. 

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What are CBS News' Billionaire Heirs Doing with Bari Weiss? With Ryan Grim on the Funding Behind It: Europe Capitulates to Trump Again
System Update #494

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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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