LSE refuses cancellation of book launch defending ‘misunderstood' Hamas
The London School of Economics (LSE) claimed it was defending 'free speech' by refusing to cancel the launch of Understanding Hamas and Why That Matters on Monday afternoon.
It comes after the Israeli ambassador to the UK called for the event to be cancelled amid concerns it could 'provide a platform for Hamas propaganda'.
Tzipi Hotovely wrote to Prof Larry Kramer, the vice-chancellor of LSE, asking him to cancel the launch.
In her letter, Ms Hotovely wrote: 'I am deeply concerned that the event is providing a platform for Hamas propaganda – a terror organisation proscribed under United Kingdom law. I worry that by promoting such a book, which sympathises with and justifies the survival and existence of Hamas, will only serve to grow support for a brutal terror organisation among your students and beyond.'
She added: 'The university should not be endorsing this event, let alone organising it through its Middle East Centre.
'Nor should the university allow this event to go ahead on its premises. Therefore, I encourage you to cancel the event.'
The university's Middle East Centre, which is hosting the event on March 10, said the book explores Hamas's 'shift from social and religious activism to national political engagement'.
It added that it 'aims to deepen understanding of a movement that is a key player in the current crisis'.
The event will feature a talk by the book's author and academics researching the Middle East.
An LSE spokesman said: 'Free speech and freedom of expression underpins everything we do at LSE. Students, staff and visitors are strongly encouraged to discuss and debate the most pressing issues around the world.'
They added: 'We host an enormous number of events each year, covering a wide range of viewpoints and positions.
'We have clear policies in place to ensure the facilitation of debates in these events and enable all members of our community to refute ideas lawfully and to protect individual's rights to freedom of expression within the law.
'This is formalised in our code of practice on free speech and in our ethics code.'
Stop the Hate, a Jewish-led direct action group, has asked supporters to write letters to the university to persuade them to cancel the event. It is also planning a protest on Monday at LSE's Middle East Centre.
A spokesman for the Israeli embassy in London said: 'Particularly amid the backdrop of rising levels of anti-Semitism in the UK, including on British university campuses, the platforming of an event that is sympathetic to a proscribed terrorist organisation is especially worrying.
'Universities have a duty to protect their students from hate speech and incitement to violence, and that includes their Jewish students, too. The event should be cancelled. It should never have been allowed in the first place.'
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International Criminal Court refers Hungary to its oversight body for failing to arrest Netanyahu
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Dictators win as Trump cuts aid to human rights groups in Cuba, Venezuela
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Starvation as a Weapon: Chris Hedges on Gaza
More than 1,000 Palestinians seeking food have been killed by Israeli forces in just the last few months, according to the United Nations. Israel's blockade on aid, ongoing bombardment, and the dismantling of independent relief efforts have pushed Gaza to the brink of mass famine. At least 600,000 people are suffering from severe malnutrition, and aid groups warn of a manufactured humanitarian catastrophe. 'It's not about the distribution of food, it's not about humanitarian aid. It's about creating — luring Palestinians who are desperate into the south, putting them into a closed military zone,' says Chris Hedges, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and former Middle East bureau chief for the New York Times. This week on The Intercept Briefing, host Jordan Uhl speaks with Hedges about how we got here and what's at stake. Hedges spent seven years covering the conflict between Israel and the Palestine, much of that time in Gaza. He's the author of 14 books, the most recent being 'The Greatest Evil Is War' and 'A Genocide Foretold.' Listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. TRANSCRIPT Jordan Uhl: Welcome to The Intercept Briefing, I'm Jordan Uhl. More than 1,000 Palestinians seeking food have been killed by Israeli forces in just the last few months, according to the U.N. CBS: And as Israel's military operations ramp up, hunger is at an all time high. WTHR: At least 10 people have died from starvation in the Gaza Strip in the last 24 hours. Al Jazeera: This is what death by forced starvation looks like. JU: Famine has persisted throughout the war. But in March, the crisis deepened as Israel imposed a blockade to aid, broke its ceasefire with Hamas, and resumed airstrikes on Gaza. By May, a newly formed U.S. contractor, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, had taken over most aid distribution after Israel effectively banned independent and established relief groups, including the U.N. agency for Palestine Refugees, UNRWA. Gaza's 400 aid sites were reduced to just four. Recent Intercept reporting from inside Gaza observed 'a famine that is manufactured and an aid distribution system seemingly designed to cause more suffering and death.' António Guterres: We need look no further than the horror show in Gaza. With a level of death and destruction without parallel in recent times. JU: UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres speaking at the Security Council. AG: Malnourishment is soaring, starvation is knocking on every door, and now we are seeing the last gasp of a humanitarian system built on humanitarian principles. Sky News: [Gunfire] This is what the head of the U.N. is talking about. [Gunfire] The abject chaos and danger Gazans face trying to get food. JU: In one of the strongest rebukes of Israel's actions to date, more than 100 aid and human rights groups issued a joint statement calling on world governments to intervene. DN!: The NGOs, including Amnesty, Oxfam, Doctors Without Borders warned, 'Illnesses like acute watery diarrhea are spreading. Markets are empty. Waste is piling up. Adults are collapsing on the streets from hunger and dehydration.' unquote JU: Gaza is on the brink of mass famine. At least 600,000 people are suffering from severe malnutrition, according to staff at Al-Aqsa Hospital in central Gaza. This is not a tragedy of circumstance. It's a deliberate campaign of mass starvation, enforced through Israel's unrelenting bombing and continuous blockade on the flow of aid into Gaza, which is prohibited under international law. The death toll in Gaza has reached nearly 60,000, officially, but experts and relief workers on the ground expect the actual number of casualties to be significantly higher. To be clear: This is a genocide. And Israel's campaign of ethnic cleansing wages on, as lawmakers voted overwhelmingly in the Knesset on Wednesday on a non-binding resolution demanding annexation of the West Bank. To understand how we got here and what this moment most demands, we turn to someone who has spent years reporting on the conflicts: Chris Hedges, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and former Middle East bureau chief for the New York Times. He spent seven years covering the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, much of that time in Gaza. The author of 14 books, his most recent are 'The Greatest Evil Is War' and 'A Genocide Foretold.' He has taught at Columbia, NYU, Princeton, and the University of Toronto. Welcome to The Intercept Briefing, Chris. Chris Hedges: Thanks, Jordan. JU: We're speaking on Tuesday, July 22nd. I'm eager to talk about this book, I finished it recently. But I also want to just first say thank you. You are somebody who has had an outsized influence on my understanding and views on foreign policy. And I heard you speak at my undergraduate alma mater in Youngstown, Ohio, in the early 2010s, and you were talking about the death of a liberal class and what you said there stuck with me to this day. And I remember looking around the room and seeing other people being encouraged and stimulated by what you were saying. And I've always seen you as somebody who has been able to speak truth to power and distill societal and complex problems in a way that we can all comprehend. And just wanted to say thank you. I'm really excited about this. CH: Well thanks, that day Staughton Lynd came to that event with his wife Alice. He's a great hero of mine. JU: Yes, Staughton Lynd. He's the labor attorney who fought to stop steel-mill closures in Youngstown, Ohio, and ultimately the community's post-industrial decline. CH: I remember that event because I speak at places like Skidmore where the children of the one percent are forced to go. They actually have to carry slips that you sign, and most of them probably spent the whole talk on their phones. But that wasn't true at Youngstown because I remember they were seated down the aisles because the student body was older, their parents had been laid off. They had felt the effects of de-industrialization in Youngstown, where the closure of the steel mills, and of course they had the capacity because of that experience, to ask the kinds of questions the children of the privileged don't have to ask or don't want to ask. So I remember that event very well. JU: Let's get into this book. I wanna start though with your 2002 book, 'War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning.' In it, you talk about the use of myth to justify or perpetuate war. In one context, you talk about the creation myth of Israel and how Israelis are unwilling to question what they're conditioned to believe about the state of Israel. Then you also write about the myth of war and how through the filter of the press, the reality of war is misconstrued or even hidden. People are propagandized into believing the official narrative. In this case, in Gaza right now, it is a war for Israel's survival. It is one of self-defense and solely against Hamas. How else do you see the role of myth in Israel's genocide in Gaza? CH: Well every country, including our own, has a foundational myth, which is a narrative to essentially hold up national virtue, national courage. And we do it to this day. We've never really examined the two foundational institutions that created the United States, slavery and genocide against the Native Americans. Israel is the same. It has its own creation myth that somehow the Palestinians — who, let's be clear, had lived in historic Palestine for centuries — did not have an identity as a people, that the land was largely uninhabited. I mean, these were just completely false narratives still propagated by Zionists. And then the myth of war, which you mentioned, is another myth. And that is the myth of glory and honor, and courage and bravery and all the things that after about 30 seconds of combat you will realize are ridiculous. And it's very hard to fight that. But you know, speaking about myself, I spent 20 years overseas covering various conflicts, but also veterans who come back and attempt to be honest. You see it with groups like Veterans for Peace or Iraq Veterans Against the War. These people through overcoming a great deal of trauma and essentially being cast aside by the society and certainly their own comrades within the military have attempted to speak truth. But that truth is essentially deluged with the propaganda peddled by the news media, the entertainment industry, politicians. The tawdry reality of violence, the sickening reality of violence, the savagery of it, the indiscriminate killing that is emblematic with all kinds of industrial weapons is sanitized and rewritten and it's extremely hard to counter that myth. Just as it is extremely hard to counter the national creation myth, and we're watching the Trump administration roll back those efforts. So whether that's through teaching about slavery in school, they of course wanna restore the names of Confederate generals to US Army bases. The attack on DEI that perpetuates white supremacy and patriarchy is one that is challenged, I mean throughout our history, is challenged with great expense. And you see that in Israel, with these very courageous figures like Gideon Levy who writes for Haaretz and Amira Haas. You had the genocide scholar, Omer Bartov, who was a veteran from the 1973 war — he was a unit commander, he teaches at Brown — coming out and calling what's happening in Gaza genocide, I would argue it's a little late, but at least he's doing it. The great Israeli historian Ilan Pappé or Avi Shlaim. And these people have become pariahs in their own country because what they're attempting to do is puncture that myth. And people cling to that myth, because at its core it's really about self adulation. JU: I'm curious if you could elaborate on that. What makes this so enticing to people? Why is this type of myth-making so effective? In your books, you've talked about war specifically and the myth of war as an elixir. And you also point out how it's a deep level of introspection for anybody really to question their national myth because it's not just what you've learned, it's also how you identify and how you see yourself. So what makes it so complicated to challenge it and why is this messaging so effective? CH: Because to look honestly at who we are, where we come from, and what we've done is an existential crisis and it's extremely disconcerting and uncomfortable — as it should be. And so people prefer to have their egos and their national pride and their sense of self worth massaged and catered to even if that comes through lies. And that's why it creates both a societal and a personal crisis because one has to reckon with the darkness that is endemic within white supremacy and patriarchy and empire. And to confront that darkness is painful. It's hard. And so most people will not only flee from that confrontation, but gravitate towards figures, let's say like Trump, who essentially perpetuate or trumpet that myth because it's about feeling good about ourselves. I mean, James Baldwin writes about this quite eloquently, and he talks about the confusion of ignorance with innocence. That somehow Americans are innocent. Well, they're innocent in their own eyes because they're willfully ignorant. They willfully blind themselves to who they are, what they've done. Whether it's in Vietnam or Iraq or Afghanistan or Gaza, where this genocide would not be perpetuated but for the stockpiles of munitions that are sent to Israel. Israel blew through its stockpiles many months ago. I think up to 80 percent of all munitions that Israel uses come from the United States. And it's just easier not to look. It's the old story about the good German, the people who claim that they didn't know there were concentration camps and they didn't know that their Jewish neighbors were being disappeared and shoved into crematoriums. But that's true in every conflict I covered, including in Bosnia. The Serbs in Belgrade really did not want to know and did not know the genocidal campaigns that the Bosnian Serbs were carrying out in Bosnia against the Muslims. JU: Now this new book, 'A Genocide Foretold' is heavy. It's a depressing read, and at times it made me question humanity. How could so many people stand idly by? But in your conversations, your encounters and your experiences with Palestinians and Gaza, you found glimmers of hope. You witnessed real courage and an unwillingness to accept a terminal fate. Could you talk about some of the people you talked to for this book and maybe something one of them said or did that you still think about? CH: Yeah. I opened the book in Ramallah. I was visiting my friend Atef Abu Saif, the great Palestinian novelist. He's from Gaza. He and his teenage son were in Gaza on October 7. They were stuck in Gaza for 80 days. He wrote a memoir a kind of diary of that experience called 'Don't Look Left,' which I highly recommend. I think that this is true in all [war] — war brings out both the best and the worst in people. I mean, let's look at the gangs that steal food and sell it on the black market. If you wanted to leave Gaza — no one can leave Gaza now, by the way. But before you had to pay Hala, the Egyptian organization, $5,000 in U.S. cash per head to get out. So you have families who don't have many resources scrambling, contacting relatives and friends abroad to try and raise those funds to escape the hell that Gaza is. So you have those predators that arise in every war. I remember during the war in Bosnia, one of the most lucrative ways to earn money was — both on the Serb side and on the Bosnian side — when Serb soldiers would be killed, you would have a gang or a mafia that would hold the body and then the Serb Mafia would do the same with Muslim bodies. And at night, for huge sums of money, those bodies would be sold to their families across the river. So that's always true in war. It brings out these predators who see the vulnerability of others [as] a way for personal enrichment and empowerment. But war also brings out, among those who have a conscience and empathy, tremendous acts of self-sacrifice and courage. And when you confront the radical evil that is war, that self-sacrifice, that courage, that empathy can get you killed. It's subversive. And so you see these figures of the doctors and medical staff in Gaza, hundreds who've been killed. I think the number is 400 [medical staff], over 200 journalists have been murdered. And let's be clear — I just came back from Egypt where I've been interviewing Palestinians — these are targeted killings. They're not random killings. For instance, they usually will kill the doctors as they're either going to their shift at the hospital or returning. And they'll bring in a quadruped, one of these drones, and you'll have a multi-story apartment building and the apartment building of that doctor or that journalist often is just attacked and blown up. So it's clearly targeted or they're targeted as they're moving either to and from their work. For instance, I was in Qatar. I've been to Qatar twice to do broadcasting for Al Jazeera Arabic and Al Jazeera English. And when you go into the foyer, it's quite chilling, that just including of course Shireen Abu Akleh who was murdered in the West Bank by an Israeli sniper. Just the number of photographs of the dead. And these people are not naive. They know what it means to be a doctor in Gaza. They know what it means to be a journalist in Gaza. And yet they do it anyway. So that's classic in terms of my experience in war. And on the one hand, of course, it shows the worst aspects of humanity — what human beings are, the atrocities human beings are capable of committing. But then it shows these remarkable figures, who at the risk of their own lives and many of them don't survive, stand up to do what's right. And let's be clear, they're not usually intellectuals, usually. The intellectual class collapses pretty quickly. Intellectualism is morally neutral and many times the intellectuals are the worst. And I think we see that here. I don't know of any head of any Holocaust studies department, there may be one, but I haven't seen one who's denounced the genocide. You have a handful of genocide scholars like Omer Bartov, for instance, who have. And I would suspect just about every university in this country has, if not a department, certainly a Holocaust studies program — they've said nothing. And that's to ignore the fundamental lesson of the Holocaust, which is that when you have the capacity to stop genocide and you do not, you're culpable. And we're all culpable for what's happening now in Gaza. [Break] JU: I want to pivot to Israel's pattern of lying, stalling, investigating, and then later, but only sometimes, quietly admitting wrongdoing. You write about the attempts to obfuscate the al-Ahli hospital explosion where a blast took the lives of a few hundred people. And that exact number varies from both al-Shifa Hospital and the Gaza Health Ministry, but it injured over 300 more people. Could you remind listeners of that tragedy, the spin in the aftermath, and how the response by Israel and its allies is part of a larger, deliberate effort to blur reality? CH: Well, you know, I spent seven years covering this conflict, and a lot of that time in Gaza, I lived in Gaza at a place called the Marna House, which of course doesn't exist anymore. And this is a pattern. So when Israel carries out an atrocity — when I was there they were bombing refugee camps, and they claim that these were, in their words, surgical strikes against a bomb making factory. Well, in fact, when you got to the dense overcrowded alleys, they were just rows of bodies, including children. Whole blocks had been destroyed. But Israel dominates the news cycle by perpetuating their version of events, which is almost uniformly untrue. The Israeli government lies like it breathes. For instance, with the assassination of Shireen Abu Akleh, they claim that Hamas militants shot her. It turned out that there was footage and B'Tselem, this great Israeli human rights organization, they proved this to be false. But by the time the information comes out and weeks later, as is the pattern, Israel will concede that yes, maybe she was killed accidentally by — but it doesn't matter, the story is moved on. So in the case that you mentioned they claim that these were errant rockets. Actually, the New York Times noticed that the timestamp on the video that Israel released didn't correspond to, in any way, to when the explosions took place. So we knew it was false, but that's classic. Israel is very media savvy. When I covered Gaza for instance — and this didn't happen in any other conflict I covered — I would be interviewing eyewitnesses and victims, and then the Jerusalem Bureau would just be inserting almost every other paragraph statements from the IDF, from the Israeli Defense Forces, countering what these victims and eyewitnesses said. What it does is essentially neutralize the story and by the end of it, you can believe whatever you want to believe. But that's been exposed. There's only so many lies Israel can tell — that hospitals are command and control centers for Hamas, human shields. The irony is that Israel is the one that uses human shields on a regular basis and because Hamas, the resistance fighters, will booby trap buildings. They will take Palestinian prisoners, put them in Israeli army uniforms, not give them a weapon, and sometimes with their hands tied or their handcuffed, and then force them into tunnels or buildings that are potentially booby trapped ahead of Israeli troops. That's extremely common. But I sense that I —I think with almost two years of this live streamed genocide, I don't sense that Israel's capacity to fool the public is as deft or as effective as it was when a lot of people weren't paying close attention. For instance, a few years ago, there was this horrible scene at Netzarim where a father was sheltering his young son. The young son is killed. It's just the video footage — I can hardly look at the footage anymore from Gaza, it's just I've lost colleagues and friends. Actually, the — it's not so many, I mean, some of them we know have died, but it's more that we hear from them sporadically, and then we just stop hearing from them completely. And I assume they're buried under the rubble. The numbers of dead are far, far, far above the 50-some-thousand, what is it, 56,000 official death count. I would not be surprised if it's 100, 200,000. Atif's, my friend's sister-in-law or family were all killed. Most of them were niece survived, but lost both her legs and an arm. But they're not counted in the records because the numbers of death or the official statistics on death are accumulated either in morgues or in hospitals, which are no longer functioning. That is the way Israel operates. Here they imposed a blockade on food and humanitarian aid on March 2nd, increasing not only widespread malnutrition, but cases of starvation. Then they have destroyed UNRWA, the UN agency that once had 400 distribution points for food. And turned it over to this probably Mossad-created, but certainly Israeli-backed, Gaza Humanitarian Foundation which only opens aid distribution points for an hour, and nobody argues they have anywhere near enough aid to feed a desperate population. But they've set these up in southern Gaza as kind of traps or bait to lure Palestinians in. And then when people can't get food and there's rioting and people will crawl, push their way into these centers desperate to get a food package. Most people are carrying knives either to protect themselves or to steal food packages from others. And then Israeli troops and US mercenaries hired by this agency have killed over 700 Palestinians and wounded thousands. But of course, it's not about the distribution of food, it's not about humanitarian aid. It's about creating — luring Palestinians who are desperate into the south, putting them into a closed military zone. They're talking about 600,000 to begin with, which is just a gigantic concentration camp. And that is the next step, of course, is expulsion. Israel is in conversation with countries like Somalia, Somaliland, Sudan, and they don't really care where they go. I would not put it beyond Israel to breach the fence. There's a nine mile border between Egypt and Gaza. Parts of that border are literally just a fence. To breach the fence, despite Egyptian objections and pushing Palestinians out. But that's the next step. It is the complete ethnic cleansing, the complete depopulation of Gaza. And that's why if you look closely at footage, you'll see, especially in the north, these heavy bulldozers and excavators that are ripping down buildings that are in rubble. They're clearing it to essentially expand greater Israel, just as they have expanded greater Israel into Lebanon and into Damascus. JU: You also tackle one of the more challenging and nuanced aspects of this conflict, armed struggle and resistance. In 'War As A Force,' you talk about how you're not a pacifist. You write 'There are times when the force wielded by one immoral faction must be countered by a faction that while never moral is perhaps less immoral. We, in the industrialized world, bear responsibility for the world's genocides because we had the power to intervene and did not.' I raise this because I'm curious how you see this ending. If there's a pathway to avoid the total erasure and destruction of Gaza and driving out the Palestinians who remain there. Is there a diplomatic solution or is armed resistance or military intervention the only hope they have left? CH: No, I mean, Hamas has been pretty decimated. And let's be clear, the Palestinians under international law have a right to use armed force to resist what's happening to them. The only solution would be for the United States to suspend or cut all military aid to Israel or a coercive measure taken on the part of countries to create a no-fly zone over Gaza and use naval vessels to break the Israeli blockade to deliver humanitarian aid. I don't see any of that happening. Short of either of those two things happening, Israel will probably succeed and its demented vision of depopulating Gaza, driving people off land that they have lived in for centuries. And of course, they're turning with increasing ferocity on the West Bank. If they get away with Gaza, and I think they will, they'll try the same thing in the West Bank. So, as was true in the war in Bosnia, it was clear to — though I was in, based in Sarajevo during the war — it was clear that only a NATO bombing— So we were completely surrounded. Sarajevo was completely surrounded by Serb heavy artillery. They dug in tanks and these 90 millimeter tank rounds were just used as artillery shells. They were firing Katyusha rockets. Those are bursts of rockets that can take — I've seen it — take down a four story building in a matter of seconds killing everyone inside, usually. The only way it would stop would be to launch airstrikes. And of course, the Bosnian government didn't have any heavy weapons, much less air power. And when that was done, the Serbs were broken. And I supported that action and I support coercive measures to halt the genocide in Gaza. That's what the United States and NATO allies did in northern Iraq. And I was there when Saddam Hussein carried out a campaign of ethnic cleansing of the Kurds, and they were dying in the mountain passes. Well, they forced the Iraqis to withdraw below the 38th parallel of Iraq and created a no-fly zone. That's exactly what should be done in Gaza. That's the only way to halt it. JU: For years, you've talked about and written about how war is a stimulant, and it's used to divert people's attention away from societal collapse. What does that collapse look like now? How has the Trump administration's actions impacted your analysis of American decline? CH: Trump is, you know, he's the symptom. He is not the disease. American decline has been long in the making, decades long in the making. Our democratic institutions were eroded and corrupted, and neither of the political parties really function as real political parties. Even the Democratic voters didn't have a say in Kamala Harris's nomination. Ran this vapid issueless, celebrity driven campaign. Which of course failed spectacularly. You know, a figure like Trump arises out of this morass, out of this social decay. It's what I saw in Yugoslavia. So the war in Yugoslavia was not caused by ancient ethnic hatreds. It was caused by the economic collapse of Yugoslavia and also hyperinflation. And it vomited up these Trump-like figures, Radovan Karadžić and Slobodan Milošević and Franjo Tuđman. And these demagogues pedal a hyper-masculinity. They're cultish figures. They pedal magical thinking. They prey on the despair and desperation of a population that feels completely betrayed. As the working class in the United States has been betrayed in particular by the Democratic Party. Since Bill Clinton gave us NAFTA in 1994, we've had 30 million mass layoffs. And this has just destroyed— My mother's family all comes from Maine. The mills are all closed. I am intimately familiar with the psychological, economic, and physical toll that this has taken. And of course, in desperation, they have turned to a figure like Trump. I think Trump would have been destroyed by a figure, a candidate like Bernie Sanders who talked the language of the New Deal. I think that's why you're seeing so much support in the mayoral race in New York for Zohran Mamdani. But the Democrats, they betrayed their own base. And what Trump is doing, it's kind of the rule of idiots of late empire. He is accelerating the implosion of empire, the destruction of empire through willfully ignorant and self-serving and counterproductive measures. I'm no fan of the Voice of America. USAID, I watched it work. It was clearly used to manipulate governments. That's why Morales threw them out of Bolivia because if there's a government they don't like, they're running all these quote unquote democracy initiatives, which are really just funding and organizing the opposition. They use aid as a weapon. For instance, in Port-au-Prince, the Haitian government wanted a new airport. USAID was willing to give them money, but they said you always have to oppose Cuba's entry into the organization of American states. I mean, so there's always kind of this quid pro quo, but Trump doesn't even understand how the empire works. And that's characteristic of late empire. He's surrounded himself with sycophants and grifters and con-artists and imbeciles and buffoons. These people are however dangerous, but they don't have a clue as to what they're doing. They have the capacity to destroy, they're destroying the Department of Education, for instance, or the EPA, but they don't have the capacity to build anything. And so if you look at late empire— I studied classics. For instance, if you look at the end of the Athenian Empire or you look at the end of the Roman Empire, you had a very similar phenomenon where those people who manage the empire at the end accelerate the collapse. And that's precisely what Trump is doing. JU: We're also starting to see more elected officials, including a handful on the right, criticize the billions in foreign military aid we send to perpetuate and prolong wars and argue we have more pressing domestic needs that affect people's material conditions. Now, what do you make of this slowly but seemingly growing group of members of Congress? Is there a noticeable shift and what do you think the way forward is? CH: Well, they're responding to a widespread feeling among the population that while they're suffering and while they're distress is not being addressed, we're sending billions of dollars to Israel and Ukraine. But the only way to halt this is to severely cut back the one trillion dollars roughly we give to the Pentagon every year. And they're not going to do that because the military is a state within a state. It can't be defied in the same way that the CIA can't be defied. And that's why the socialist Karl Liebknecht on the eve of World War I called the German military, the enemy from within. And even Bernie Sanders, if you watch, was loathed to take on the military industrial complex. That was a battle he didn't wanna fight. They're not even audited, I don't think the pentagon's been audited for a decade. So you have half of all discretionary spending being poured down a rat hole. These debacles in the Middle East — Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya. Syria, Gaza — Ukraine, and it of course drives up the debt, which is dangerous. But it also diverts money or there is no money for the most basic social services, whether that's Meals on Wheels or anything else. So that is — Arnold Toynbee, the historian cites an out of control military, an unregulated, uncontrolled military machine as being the common characteristic of the decline of all empires. And I think that is precisely where we are. So yes, you're right. People will raise these issues, but unless they're willing to confront the war industry, and unless they're willing to seriously curtail the money that — we spend more money on the war industry than, I think it's the next eight countries combined, including like Russia and China and everywhere else. So that's how empires die. And I don't see many politicians willing to take on that battle because that would implode their political career. JU: I wanna thank you so much for joining me. 'A Genocide Foretold' is available wherever you get your books now. Do you have anything else you'd like to add and where can people find more of your work? I know I follow you on substack, I've been a day one subscriber. CH: Yeah, So that has everything. And the only thing I would add is just my deep admiration for the students at these universities who've stood up. They're the nation's conscience. For these groups, like Students for Justice in Palestine, Jewish Voices for Peace, I have unbounded admiration for them. As I do for these very lonely figures like Francesca Albanese, the U.N. repertoire. These are real heroes and when the history of this genocide is written, it will condemn most of us, but it won't condemn them. It's because of their work that people like myself who are outspoken about the genocide are able to continue. JU: Chris, thank you so much for joining us. CH: Thanks, Jordan. JU: That does it for this episode of The Intercept Briefing. We want to hear from you. Share your story with us at 530-POD-CAST. That's 530-763-2278. You can also email us at podcasts@ This episode was produced by Laura Flynn. Sumi Aggarwal is our executive producer. Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief. Chelsey B. Coombs is our social and video producer. Fei Liu is our product and design manager. Nara Shin is our copy editor. Will Stanton mixed our show. Legal review by David Bralow. And transcript by Anya Mehta. Slip Stream provided our theme music. You can support our work at Your donation, no matter the amount, makes a real difference. If you haven't already, please subscribe to The Intercept Briefing wherever you listen to podcasts. And tell all of your friends about us, better yet, leave us a rating or a review to help other listeners find us. Until next time, I'm Jordan Uhl. Thanks for listening.
