Our call this week will be at our new regular time: Friday at 11 AM Eastern.
Our guest will be Laila Al-Arian, an investigative journalist and executive producer of Fault Lines, an Emmy and Peabody award-winning show on Al Jazeera English. She’s also the executive producer of “The Night Won’t End,” an extraordinarily powerful documentary about three families in Gaza during this war. We’re going to talk about how the documentary was made, what it reveals about how Israeli is waging this war, and about how the media is covering it.
Paid subscribers will get the link this Tuesday and the video the following week. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Rashid Khalidi, Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Omar Barghouti, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.
Sources Cited in this Video
Joe Biden and Barack Obama’s response to the attempted assassination of Donald Trump versus Trump’s response to the attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband.
J.D. Vance and House Majority Leader Steve Scalise claim that Democrats are inciting violence by calling Trump a threat to democracy.
Czeslaw Milosz’s The Captive Mind.
Things to Read
(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)
In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Maya Rosen reports on the rise of October 7 tourism.
Although overshadowed by the horror in Gaza, many Palestinians in the West Bank have grown desperate economically as Israel has further restricted their right to travel and work since October 7. Please consider supporting this crowdfunding campaign for two West Bank families in dire need.
Muhammad Al-Zaqzouq on burning books for fuel in Gaza.
For the Foundation for Middle Peace, I talked to Professor Rashid Khalidi about the threat to his family’s library in Jerusalem.
A new podcast about Palestinian citizens of Israel.
In the Jewish News of Northern California, Ben Linder writes about the bulldozing of the West Bank village of Umm al-Khair.
Professor Alon Confino died last month. I got to know him when I began writing about the Nakba and how it is—or isn’t—remembered by Israeli Jews. I was struck not only by the depth of his knowledge but by the quality of his spirit. Here is a memory of him by a colleague. And here is a lecture he gave about antisemitism and Zionism in Italy, the country of his grandparents’ birth. May his memory be a blessing.
See you on Friday at 11 AM,
Peter
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
Hi. So, every time it seems like things can’t get worse in American politics and American society, they do. And now we have the attack, the assassination attempt, on Donald Trump, which is just a catastrophe for a variety of reasons.
First of all, it’s a catastrophe because political violence is simply wrong. Period. It doesn’t matter who it’s against. It’s very, very dangerous for this to be kind of re-injected into American politics. So, that’s the most important thing. No matter how one feels about Donald Trump, it’s just appalling that someone tried to murder him. Secondly, it’s a disaster because this will help Trump, I think, who was already clearly ahead, maybe even heading towards a landslide victory, and now defeating him will be that much harder. And thirdly, because I think everything we know about Donald Trump, and the entire Republican party at this point, suggests that they will use this as an excuse for further authoritarian crackdowns on their enemies.
And so, it’s really I think important to kind of be clear about the political environment in which this actually took place, right? That this is not a political environment in which the two parties have equal relationships to the question of violence and the question of conspiracy theories, right? So, Joe Biden, you know, responded to this as any decent politician would. He said, ‘there’s no place in America for this kind of violence. Everybody must condemn it.’ He took down his television ads. Barack Obama said, ‘there’s absolutely no place for political violence in our democracy,’ right?
It is worth contrasting that with Donald Trump’s reaction when a man attacked Nancy Pelosi’s husband with a hammer in his home. And Trump said, ‘it’s weird things going on in that household. The glass it seems broken from the inside to the out. So, it wasn’t a break in. It was a break out,’ playing into various conspiracy theories that were floating around in the Republican party at that time, right? So, it’s just important to remember that there is a difference between the way the leaders of the two political parties respond to acts of violence.
And it’s also extremely important that people reject this line, which is now coming out from Republicans, which is to say that because Democrats were saying they were worried about Trump as a threat to democracy, that that emboldened or is responsible for this shooter right? So, you had J. D. Vance—I mean, gosh, J. D. Vance. I mean, there’s so many people who one can look at—I don’t know if anyone is familiar with this book, Czesław Miłosz’s book, The Captive Mind, which is an extraordinary book about basically how people’s characters are transformed, or things inside their characters are brought out, as a society is overtaken by totalitarianism. But I think, you know, you could do a study, a chapter in a book like that, on Lindsey Graham, on Marco Rubio, on all of them, but especially on J. D. Vance. I mean what a horrifying person he’s turned out to be.
So, J. D. Vance says, ‘today is not just some isolated incident. The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.’ I mean, that’s just a complete bald-faced lie. It is true that the central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Trump is an authoritarian fascist who should be stopped, but not at all costs. They want to stop him by defeating him in the election, and they also believe that he should be subject to the rule of law when he commits crimes. There’s nothing that President Biden has said, or come close to suggesting, that he wants to stop by trump at all costs, meaning by shooting him or having people shoot him. It’s just it’s an utter lie!
And yet, you see, the Republicans repeating this. This is their line, right. House majority leader Steve Scalise: ‘for weeks, Democrat leaders have been fueling ludicrous hysteria that Donald Trump winning reelection would be the end of democracy in America. Clearly, we’ve seen far left lunatics act on violent rhetoric in the past. This incendiary rhetoric must stop.’ Sorry, it is not incendiary rhetoric to say that Donald Trump represents a threat to democracy when he tried to overturn the last election and has said he won’t respect the result of this election unless he wins, right. And to suggest that by saying that somebody is a threat to democracy is an incitement to violence is so perverse because the whole reason that you need to protect liberal democracy is that liberal democracy puts constraints on the violence that the state can enact. States are violent entities. But liberal democracy checks and balances some popular will. Those things can be some restraint on the violence of the state. And when you eliminate those, or strip those away as Donald Trump tried to do and clearly will try to do again, you are actually creating environment of much greater state violence.
So, it’s just Orwellian to say that you’re emboldening violence by trying to stop someone from overthrowing liberal democracy and turn the country into an authoritarian state. And yet that is what the Republicans are saying in this terrible, terrible frightening moment. I don’t know that I can remember another moment in my adult life where I felt things were this bleak. But here we are.
