Speaker 1: Al Zone Media. Hey everybody, Robert Evans here and I
Speaker 1: wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode.
Speaker 1: So every episode of the week that just happened is
Speaker 1: here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package
Speaker 1: for you to listen to in a long stretch if
Speaker 1: you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every
Speaker 1: day this week, there's going to be nothing new here
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Speaker 2: It's riot time when it could happen here, this is
Speaker 2: this is the podcast that you're listening to. It's about
Speaker 2: this is this one's kind of about bad things. This
Speaker 2: is this is about a bunch of riots in the past.
Speaker 2: I'm your host to be along with Vus James and Garrison.
Speaker 3: Hello Harmony.
Speaker 2: So one of the kind of I don't know, the
Speaker 2: trends of twenty twenty four is everyone looking at this
Speaker 2: year and going this is nineteen sixty eight. Again. There's
Speaker 2: campus occupations that are anti war protests. There is a
Speaker 2: Democratic National Convention that is expected to be extremely hot,
Speaker 2: and so so one of one of the things that
Speaker 2: we are doing in the run up to the Democratic
Speaker 2: Convention is we are going to go do some episodes
Speaker 2: about nineteen sixty eight, and we are eventually going to
Speaker 2: do episodes about like the Columbia campus occupations and about
Speaker 2: the DNC. But unfortunately, in order to do that, we
Speaker 2: have to why I say, unfortunately, this is actually not unfortunately,
Speaker 2: this this mostly rules. I don't know, some of it's bad.
Speaker 2: But in order to talk about this, and this is
Speaker 2: this is the part of this whole thing that has
Speaker 2: been completely forgotten, right, you know, there's there's become this
Speaker 2: kind of like I don't know, state cult isn't quite
Speaker 2: the right word, but there's become this sort of like
Speaker 2: professional institutional history of nineteen sixty eight, where like all
Speaker 2: of these universities like proudly have banners from like nineteen
Speaker 2: sixty eight protests. Everyone has been like, you know, incredibly
Speaker 2: willing to embrace the legacy of the anti war movements
Speaker 2: and the campus occupations, and you know, like insofar as
Speaker 2: they tell people not to embrace things, it's this stuff
Speaker 2: about like you know, you hear this concert screaming about
Speaker 2: don't repeat the sixty eight convention. But there's one part
Speaker 2: of this story that has is just gone, has been
Speaker 2: excised from the historical record. It is extremely clear that
Speaker 2: no one wants you to remember it whatsoever. And that
Speaker 2: is the Holy Week Uprising? Do you two know? Have
Speaker 2: you heard of the Holy Week Uprising?
Speaker 4: Not before you started talking about it in our work meetings.
Speaker 5: I'm familiar with it. I've covered in US history ghosts before,
Speaker 5: not as that name. I think people might be more
Speaker 5: familiar with it. Have you described the events?
Speaker 2: Yeah? So the other name for is the MLK riots,
Speaker 2: which is a week I mean, okay, so it's okay, yeah, yeah, okay, yeah,
Speaker 2: so okay, so and I should be clear about this. Okay,
Speaker 2: So there are there are really two things going on here.
Speaker 2: There is one the actually it's usually thought of it
Speaker 2: was about a week, but it's it's actually longer than that.
Speaker 2: There's like a couple of months of rioting in various
Speaker 2: places over the oascination of MLK. The other thing that's
Speaker 2: going on here is a wave of urban rebellion. And
Speaker 2: when I say urban here, I'm not just talking about
Speaker 2: you know, like Watts or Detroit or Chicago, like these
Speaker 2: like giant urban cities, which is which is how you know,
Speaker 2: insofar as anyone ever talks about rioting in this period,
Speaker 2: is about these large urban centers. No, they are rioting
Speaker 2: in Milwaukee. The most intense fighting that we're going to
Speaker 2: talk about in this episode happens in York, Pennsylvania. In
Speaker 2: this period for about is about nineteen sixty three to
Speaker 2: roughly by by nineteen seventy one seventy two, it's kind
Speaker 2: of over. There are a staggering number of urban uprisings.
Speaker 2: I'm gonna I'm gonna read a quote from a book
Speaker 2: called The Great Uprising, which is about this sort of period.
Speaker 2: Between nineteen sixty three and nineteen seventy two, America experienced
Speaker 2: over seven hundred and fifty urban revolts. Upwards of five
Speaker 2: hundred and twenty five cities were affected, including nearly every
Speaker 2: one with a black population over fifty thousand. The two
Speaker 2: largest wave of uprisings came during the summer of nineteen
Speaker 2: sixty seven Entry and Holy Week in nineteen sixty eight,
Speaker 2: following the assassination of Martin Luther King Junior. In these
Speaker 2: two years alone, one hundred and twenty five people were killed,
Speaker 2: nearly seven thousand were injured, approximately forty five thousand arrests
Speaker 2: were made, and property damaged topped one hundred and twenty
Speaker 2: seven million dollars or approximately nine hundred million and twenty
Speaker 2: seventeen dollars.
Speaker 5: If you can even stretch this out to, like can
Speaker 5: I just give you the spam and I put on
Speaker 5: this in my history class and then and then we
Speaker 5: can we continue? Yeah, okay, So the way I perceive
Speaker 5: this is the process of decolonization begins like in the colonies,
Speaker 5: and it comes back to the metropol right, and we
Speaker 5: see like this physical declonization in places like Algeria, right,
Speaker 5: and then the impact of witnessing that returns to the
Speaker 5: metropol along with the theories that like if you want to
Speaker 5: say they decononize the mind, I think that that's an
Speaker 5: acceptable way. And like this sort of struggle and even
Speaker 5: the esthetic, right, like the esthetic of the Battle of
Speaker 5: Algias is present in some of these uprisings, like and
Speaker 5: you can stretch it out to like, you know, I
Speaker 5: like to talk about wynded Ny, but a second occupation
Speaker 5: of Wyndedney in nineteen seventy three. I think you could
Speaker 5: also see that as part of this decolonization struggle. At
Speaker 5: least that's my uh, yeah, that's my angle on it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And I think there's definitely a lot of like,
Speaker 2: I don't know, there's a lot of inspiration taken there.
Speaker 2: I think the way it's usually seen in the US
Speaker 2: is as this is the sort of I don't know,
Speaker 2: it's kind of as it's seen. This is kind of
Speaker 2: this is where everything went off the rails after the
Speaker 2: Civil Rights movement, which isn't what happens. Yeah, And the
Speaker 2: other way I think this is seen and this is
Speaker 2: I don't know, a lens that is kind of useful
Speaker 2: to talk about this, but kind of isn't is about
Speaker 2: the sort of quote unquote long nineteen sixty eight. So
Speaker 2: you know, we're gonna be covering a lot of nineteen
Speaker 2: sixty eight stuff on this show, you know, So like
Speaker 2: there's obviously this nineteen sixty eight in France. I think
Speaker 2: I think if you want to look at the origin
Speaker 2: point of the sort of like wave uprisings that are
Speaker 2: specifically nineteen sixty eight and that aren't sort of like
Speaker 2: the decolonization arc, I think it probably starts in China
Speaker 2: with the January storm in nineteen sixty seven. But on
Speaker 2: the other hand, sort of and then this is you know,
Speaker 2: one of the things about this period is everything is
Speaker 2: happening so much at the same time, right, Like we
Speaker 2: have a lot of experience about this, but like you know,
Speaker 2: as the January Storm, the January Storm is this part
Speaker 2: of the culture revolution where Mao kind of loses control
Speaker 2: and Mao kind of incites a bunch of these like
Speaker 2: a bunch of workers in Shanghai to like take the city.
Speaker 2: But then they actually take the city, and they run
Speaker 2: the Party out, they run the PLA out, and for
Speaker 2: a brief period of time, Shanghai like has just been
Speaker 2: taken by its working class and is not being run
Speaker 2: by the Party. And there's this whole like you know,
Speaker 2: massive series of struggles, it kind of struggles. But the
Speaker 2: the thing the think about the sort of the way
Speaker 2: sixty is understood is, you know, even some people even
Speaker 2: include that, but these riots, specifically the Holy Week riots
Speaker 2: are almost never talked about as as part of this process,
Speaker 2: which I think they obviously are, and I think you know,
Speaker 2: part of the reason we're talking about them now is
Speaker 2: that you can't understand the Columbia campus occupations. You can't
Speaker 2: understand the kind of politics that's going to come after that.
Speaker 2: You can't understand the and see you can't understand like
Speaker 2: the rise of Black radicalism. Like, none of this is
Speaker 2: comprehensible at all unless you understand these riots, because this
Speaker 2: was the uprising that sort of kicked everything off. It's
Speaker 2: also this is a very hard thing to write about
Speaker 2: because like this, I've had the time of my life
Speaker 2: trying to put this together because this thing should be
Speaker 2: like thirty five hours, and I don't have thirty five hours.
Speaker 2: I have thirty minutes. So that being said, let's get
Speaker 2: into why these are happening. So obviously, there is the
Speaker 2: civil rights movement happening. You know, nineteen sixty five, you
Speaker 2: get get the Voting Rights Act. We've had some civil
Speaker 2: rights Act. But comma, if you are like you are
Speaker 2: a part of the black working class in nineteen cities
Speaker 2: of America, a society is still unbelievably racist. Like they're like,
Speaker 2: you know, on a very basic level, there's a bunch
Speaker 2: of people walking around calling you the N words. You
Speaker 2: are restricted to the shittiest jobs available, assuming you can
Speaker 2: find work at all. One of the biggest ones. And
Speaker 2: this is something that this is something that was a
Speaker 2: very big focus of the kind of later civil rights
Speaker 2: ument that kind of has been a race for historical memory.
Speaker 2: Was the struggle over housing. I'm going to read another
Speaker 2: thing from the Great Uprising. SNCC field worker John Beptize,
Speaker 2: who took over for Robinson and Hanson, described many of
Speaker 2: the homes in the second ward. This is in Cambridge,
Speaker 2: which is one of the places where those really intense rioting.
Speaker 2: Both we'll talk about this in a little bit, but
Speaker 2: both in sixty three and in sixty seven describe many
Speaker 2: of the homes in the second ward as nothing more
Speaker 2: than converted horse barns, corn cribs, and company shacks which
Speaker 2: lacked hot running water, flush toilets, and electricity. Separate and
Speaker 2: independent investigations by federal officials confirmed at USA's claims. We
Speaker 2: were shown block after block of tottering, single family frame structures,
Speaker 2: often lined along dirt roads and generally with little or
Speaker 2: no setback, which is like they're like directly on the
Speaker 2: street right like you open your door and you're on
Speaker 2: the street, crowded almost against each other, and on small lots,
Speaker 2: sometimes of no more than fifty or sixty foot depth,
Speaker 2: reported one US Department of Housing a urban development official.
Speaker 2: These dwellings were obviously obsolete and in disrepair, with tumbling
Speaker 2: porches and steps. Many were without inside toilets, and in
Speaker 2: several instances, the outside privy served more than one family.
Speaker 2: Hot Water is rarely available, and several are without inside water.
Speaker 2: Overcrowding is a common pattern. So you know, this is
Speaker 2: the kind of like, this is one of the centers
Speaker 2: of these struggles. So these people are living in like
Speaker 2: nineteen thirties bar and this, you know, there is there
Speaker 2: is a sort of staggering amount of anger about this.
Speaker 2: And the other the other aspect of this is that
Speaker 2: you know, okay, so these people are living in like
Speaker 2: places that are not fit human habitation. Also, they're on
Speaker 2: average fifty six percent more of their income goes to
Speaker 2: rent than white people than then white people paid a rent,
Speaker 2: which means that you know, and and this this is
Speaker 2: also one of the things that's happening in this period
Speaker 2: is that there's a bunch of money for like white
Speaker 2: people that the government is giving them, are giving people
Speaker 2: sort of loans and subsidies and tax credits to go
Speaker 2: buy houses. None of this is happening for black people.
Speaker 2: So what you have is a situation where like, if
Speaker 2: you are black, basically all of your money is being
Speaker 2: absorbed into rents. There is no possibility of you like
Speaker 2: saving or you know, like saving to buy a house,
Speaker 2: like other than the sort of like ramshackle shit that
Speaker 2: you're in, like the conventional civil rights movement, right, you're
Speaker 2: sort of like non violent marches. This hasn't done shit
Speaker 2: to deal with any of these problems. You're also dealing
Speaker 2: with really really intense labor discrimination, you know, and I
Speaker 2: mean these are things like like there's this kind of
Speaker 2: like example in Baltimore where you know, you'll you'll you'll
Speaker 2: have union locals that are literally all white locals, right,
Speaker 2: and they will they will cut these deals with management
Speaker 2: where they'll be like, well, management will hands like hiring
Speaker 2: and firing power over to the unions, and the unions go,
Speaker 2: oh great, okay, and this this is a negotiated thing
Speaker 2: between the two. The unions are like, okay, only unions
Speaker 2: can work at only union members can work at the shop,
Speaker 2: which in theory is good, but in practice what this
Speaker 2: means is because these are all white unions, right, they've
Speaker 2: they've now created a system by which you can, by
Speaker 2: which you can just not hire black people. Ever.
Speaker 5: Yeah, the the Brianna wu method. God, yeah, you know
Speaker 5: it's a reference to a terrible tweet I hopefy people
Speaker 5: haven't seen.
Speaker 2: Oh god, yeah. And you know the the other things
Speaker 2: that are sort of happening here, right, is so in
Speaker 2: theory desegregation is supposed to be happening. In practice, that
Speaker 2: shit is not happening. People are making people are doing
Speaker 2: these like you know, like white progressors are giving these
Speaker 2: speeches about how like a segregation is like ending where
Speaker 2: we're like integrating quickly, and it's not happening, and all
Speaker 2: of this kind of you know, all of this sort
Speaker 2: of fuel and also and obviously the sort of immediate
Speaker 2: spark of a lot of a lot of these uprisings,
Speaker 2: So particularly in sixty seven, is that as as happens today,
Speaker 2: you know, you all statistically have lived I don't know
Speaker 2: why I was saysistically, all of you have lived through this.
Speaker 2: All of you probably have been to at least one
Speaker 2: protest that is this is that the coptious murder people.
Speaker 2: And all of this sets off a set of kindling
Speaker 2: and is going to lead to a simply staggering wave
Speaker 2: of uprisings. But first, do you know what, I won't
Speaker 2: lead to a simply staggering set of uprisings if you
Speaker 2: buy them.
Speaker 5: It's the production and consumption of created needs as described
Speaker 5: by her.
Speaker 4: But Mark Husa, that's right, James, yes, or more on that.
Speaker 4: Here's these ads.
Speaker 2: So we are back, all right, So let let's start
Speaker 2: actually talking about some of these riots. Okay, So I've
Speaker 2: mentioned before that these riots are happening in a lot
Speaker 2: of places that are not like that are not typically considering.
Speaker 2: We're actually not gonna talk sort of stunningly for thinking
Speaker 2: about this. We're not going to talk about the wats riots,
Speaker 2: which are probably the biggest and most famous of the
Speaker 2: riots in this period. We're not going to talk about
Speaker 2: Detroit either, even though that was another really big one,
Speaker 2: because you know, you you can go out and you
Speaker 2: can find a bunch of people kind of talking about these.
Speaker 2: We are going to start in Omaha, where begin Yeah,
Speaker 2: but again this is this is something that's very important,
Speaker 2: is that this is not just a sort of uprising
Speaker 2: of the urban ghettos, which is which is how it's
Speaker 2: like very explicit. This is literally the language that is
Speaker 2: used at this time to describe what's happening here. But like, no,
Speaker 2: this is happening in a bund like again Cincinnati. Omaha
Speaker 2: is interesting because it has one of the a very
Speaker 2: very common. One of the other big sort of rallying
Speaker 2: points in this era is price gouging. So you know,
Speaker 2: if you're if you're in one of these like ninety
Speaker 2: nine percent black communities, like the one like the one
Speaker 2: white person who is there is the shop owner. And
Speaker 2: the thing the shop owner is doing is the shop
Speaker 2: owner is gouging you for food because you don't you know,
Speaker 2: you don't have any other options to buy for you from,
Speaker 2: so they're going to gouge you and they're going to
Speaker 2: give you like the worst products you can ever you've
Speaker 2: ever seen in your life. And so by May sixty six,
Speaker 2: people are just fed up with this. There start there
Speaker 2: start to be sort of protests, like specifically at these
Speaker 2: white stores. Uh there's a bunch of people, you know,
Speaker 2: throwing rocks at the cops. Yeah, and so you know, so,
Speaker 2: I mean, okay. The other thing that's very important to
Speaker 2: understand about these places is that these riots don't just
Speaker 2: start out of nowhere, right. These are mostly places where
Speaker 2: there have been existing civil rights movements and they kind
Speaker 2: of just ran into a stone wall.
Speaker 5: You know.
Speaker 2: One of the big things in this period too, and
Speaker 2: this is something that like like you know, this is
Speaker 2: what MLKA and the Poor People's Campaign was sort of
Speaker 2: working on at the same time, was you know, these
Speaker 2: these these demands for job programs, and so people are
Speaker 2: you know, marching around they doing like pickets Omaha, like
Speaker 2: has has a Malcolm X come speak at one point
Speaker 2: and he's talking about like, you know, like the youth
Speaker 2: these protests and people like marching outside of Safeway saying
Speaker 2: like we want jobs, and these protests start getting attacked
Speaker 2: by the police and this is something that you know,
Speaker 2: this is something that that has been happening to these
Speaker 2: nonviolent sit ins. I'm going to read a passage from
Speaker 2: the book. Then the burnings began from there. Omaha police
Speaker 2: Wallace is quote unquote goon squad and spectators began to
Speaker 2: beat the protesters out of the auditorium using batons and
Speaker 2: metal folding chairs. Reeling from the attacks, African American youth
Speaker 2: retaliated in the streets. So like like they'll be in
Speaker 2: meetings with community with like like the mayor or whatever,
Speaker 2: and these fucking mobs will start just beating people with chairs.
Speaker 4: The goons squad.
Speaker 5: You say, yeah, God reminds me of the within running
Speaker 5: ads to free down at Peltier a week. But the
Speaker 5: guardians of the Agglala Nation, but like they literally call
Speaker 5: themselves the goons. I'm guessing they'll people, not the people
Speaker 5: participating in this particular beating. Non many such cases in
Speaker 5: this area.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and this gets to another aspect of these of
Speaker 2: these riots is that a lot of them aren't started
Speaker 2: by rioters. They're started by a bunch of like a
Speaker 2: white mob showing up and attacking people. And so you
Speaker 2: know in Omaha, and this is something that we're going
Speaker 2: to see a lot. Uh that is something that kind
Speaker 2: of doesn't happen as much now, is like they just
Speaker 2: the cops just fucking kill people the streets from protests
Speaker 2: are happening in Omaha. They like they just they murder
Speaker 2: a kid with a riot gun. And this, you know,
Speaker 2: this sets off like as sort of you know the
Speaker 2: patterns that work shore visa seeing of like these sort
Speaker 2: of escalating riots. And this is a very kind of
Speaker 2: familiar riot, right, Like I think we've all we've all
Speaker 2: had the like, Okay, so the police attacked a bunch
Speaker 2: of people, so it caused a riot kind of thing.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so now a riot starts y.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And this is this is a relatively non violent riot,
Speaker 2: which is to say that people are mostly throwing stones
Speaker 2: and molotovs. That is absolutely not true of a huge
Speaker 2: amount of the rest of these riots, and particularly as
Speaker 2: we sort of get closer to Holy Week. Something something
Speaker 2: that is very important about the sixty eight riots that
Speaker 2: is not true about any riots that we've ever lived
Speaker 2: through is that not only are people extremely well armed,
Speaker 2: they are the state's monopoly on violence in nineteen sixty
Speaker 2: eight is nowhere near as powerful as it is now.
Speaker 2: People will just fucking shoot. And one of the constant
Speaker 2: things you read about when when you're reading about these
Speaker 2: riots is that is you know, every police account has
Speaker 2: police like like screaming about and like I didn't believe this,
Speaker 2: right because I was reading this, I was like, okay,
Speaker 2: whatever other police, Right, they talk about snippers all the time.
Speaker 2: You see this in radical accounts too, where people will
Speaker 2: talk about like, well, yeah, like the the National Guard
Speaker 2: and Watts will be talking about how they're taking sniper
Speaker 2: fires so they'll start shooting machine guns and like the
Speaker 2: rus of build at buildings, right, But no, like this
Speaker 2: was real. People actually were like doing this, and you
Speaker 2: know I was I was really sort of like like
Speaker 2: on the on the fence about this, like this was
Speaker 2: this actually happening? And then the next thing I read
Speaker 2: was an interview with a guy who'd been a black
Speaker 2: nationalist and starts talking about how they they they were
Speaker 2: using all of their dynamite stores and how they didn't
Speaker 2: have fuses for the dynamite so they had to like
Speaker 2: they had to plant the dynamite and then retreat across
Speaker 2: the sheet to shoot at the dynamite so the dynamite
Speaker 2: would go off.
Speaker 5: It sounds like a fun exercise.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it was. It was nuts. It was like the
Speaker 2: kinds of stuff these people were doing is sort of
Speaker 2: just really it's it's really staggering.
Speaker 5: This, Like you say, the state just didn't have that
Speaker 5: same monopoly on on violence like that there was. It
Speaker 5: didn't have the overwhelmed cops, didn't have like the overwhelming
Speaker 5: force that they do now, that they didn't possess tanks,
Speaker 5: and like it was a lot harder to trace gun
Speaker 5: purchases in nineteen sixties because not everyone used credit cards,
Speaker 5: so it made it a whole lot easier for folks
Speaker 5: to have and keep guns.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, the other thing is, like, you know, this
Speaker 2: is something that that in some of the This is
Speaker 2: something that played into some of the NAACP, like chapters
Speaker 2: in the South that were the sort of like black
Speaker 2: working class chapters. Is that, like so if you were
Speaker 2: if you were an NRA chapter, you could just buy
Speaker 2: at a really cheap bulk rate like surplus M one
Speaker 2: gearns from the US Army and AMMO, and they would
Speaker 2: just sell it to you.
Speaker 5: Yeah, you can still buy them at a pretty cheap
Speaker 5: rate to the CMP.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, but you could buy like like really large
Speaker 2: quantities of them as long as you were sort of
Speaker 2: like you know, there was this kind of like popular
Speaker 2: like popular like gun marksmen culture that we don't like
Speaker 2: we have and in like our gun culture is kind
Speaker 2: of insane, and this was like a very different thing
Speaker 2: from there.
Speaker 5: Yeah, definitely. And you had like Rob Williams was the
Speaker 5: the are you failing with Rob Williams? Yeah, yeah, he
Speaker 5: wrote a book called Negroes with Guns. He was the
Speaker 5: he was the leader of the NRA chapter right in Monroe.
Speaker 5: But then yeah, also a member of the NAACP, which,
Speaker 5: like the NRA has has has pivoted a long way
Speaker 5: from what it was.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Well, and part of what's happening here is people
Speaker 2: are just kind of like picking up whatever institution they
Speaker 2: have and using it to like build a movement a tool.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So all right, we're gonna we're gonna move on
Speaker 2: from Omaha and Cincinnati, like you know, so we're we're
Speaker 2: gonnatart talking about some of the I guess you'd call
Speaker 2: like the uprising proper. So I guess before we fully
Speaker 2: head into this, it should be noted that there's it's generally,
Speaker 2: you know, I talked about this before. There's generally the
Speaker 2: way these riots are understood is as a thing that
Speaker 2: is discontinuous from the civil rights movement, and that's just
Speaker 2: not true. A lot of the civil rights movement, like
Speaker 2: things that people now think of like non violent campaigns,
Speaker 2: weren't like a lot of the stuff in Oh My
Speaker 2: fucking like a lot a lot of the fights in Louisiana,
Speaker 2: like are just straight up riots. Yeah. And one of
Speaker 2: the important sort of bridge figures here is Gloria Richardson,
Speaker 2: who's I wish we could do like an entire episode
Speaker 2: about her right now, but that'll have to wait till later.
Speaker 2: She's a civil rights activist in Cambridge and her movements,
Speaker 2: like you know, like she is in a lot of
Speaker 2: ways that like kind of dedicated non violence, but she's
Speaker 2: very explicit that we're going to do armed self defense,
Speaker 2: and a lot of the stuff that she leaves. I mean,
Speaker 2: this is you know, getting back to like nineteen sixty three.
Speaker 2: Like the civil rights stuff that she's doing is extremely effective,
Speaker 2: and a lot of it is just straight up riots,
Speaker 2: to the point where like there's a very famous thing
Speaker 2: for the civil rights there are called the Treaty of Cambridge,
Speaker 2: where like she and her people agreed to like stop
Speaker 2: rioting and the city agreed to completely integrate. But by
Speaker 2: the time he gets to nineteen sixty seven, they haven't
Speaker 2: done it, and so the riots started off in Cambridge again,
Speaker 2: and you have this incredibly sort of like summer over
Speaker 2: the course of ninety sixty seven is there's there's this
Speaker 2: like enormous wave of riots and you know a Cambridge
Speaker 2: a famous one, but like Detroit's another big one. And this,
Speaker 2: I don't know, this should have given people warning that
Speaker 2: there there would be you know, giant uprisings if anyone
Speaker 2: did anything to MLK, but apparently it didn't. And I
Speaker 2: you know, I you know what else I won't I
Speaker 2: don't know, set off I've already used the you know
Speaker 2: what else won't set off massive waves of uprisings pivot.
Speaker 2: I really didn't prepare good enough pivots for this.
Speaker 5: What weren't assassinated civil rights leader.
Speaker 2: We can't promise that. We really cannot promise them.
Speaker 4: No, companies would never do anything like that that talking
Speaker 4: about dames.
Speaker 5: Certainly not the mail kit delivery. Save is that we
Speaker 5: got mentioned by name.
Speaker 2: All right, we are back, so all right, it is
Speaker 2: now officially timed for Holy Week. So on April fourth,
Speaker 2: nineteen sixty eight, MLK is giving is you know, like
Speaker 2: he is preparing to support a bunch of striking sanitation
Speaker 2: workers and they fucking kill him. Who the they is
Speaker 2: is kind of unclear. Mlk's family later sued the US
Speaker 2: government to make the government prove that they didn't have
Speaker 2: they weren't involved in the assassination. The government paid them
Speaker 2: one dollar instead, So you know, make of that what
Speaker 2: you will. But what did happen is that, you know,
Speaker 2: he was killed by white people. And this this detonates
Speaker 2: a fucking nuclear weapon in the US. You know, reading
Speaker 2: accounts to me, it reminds me of the first week
Speaker 2: of the George Floyd up risings in twenty twenty. I
Speaker 2: want people remember this. There's this picture of this guy
Speaker 2: in Philly with an Elmo like wearing like an Elmo
Speaker 2: like head, and he has his fist rays and he's
Speaker 2: standing in front of a bunch of things of fire
Speaker 2: like this. This is what this is what that looks like.
Speaker 2: I'm going to read a quote from one of the
Speaker 2: people who was people who was there. I mean I
Speaker 2: was sad when I first heard the dues of King's death,
Speaker 2: but not but not like the world around me. The
Speaker 2: city was burning and I'm walking through the city and
Speaker 2: the city is burning, and that's what we wanted. This
Speaker 2: was our time. I mean fire all around my house.
Speaker 2: I mean my house almost got caught on fire when
Speaker 2: I was living because Seventh Street, the whole block was burning.
Speaker 2: And it was just we thought we were in a
Speaker 2: war again. Simple. Simple. One of the interesting parts about
Speaker 2: this is at a lot of civil rights leaders, and
Speaker 2: this is not just true of like obviously the moderate
Speaker 2: civil rights leaders are trying to tell people not to riot,
Speaker 2: but even like Stokesly Carmichael like comes out to the
Speaker 2: crowd and tries to go like please don't like, don't
Speaker 2: ryot don't do this, and the crowd basically tells him
Speaker 2: to fuck off and does it anyways, And the fact
Speaker 2: that they killed MLK, who was you know, m Oka
Speaker 2: was I mean, like even at that time, like the
Speaker 2: sort of living human symbol of nonviolence, right, but he
Speaker 2: was also the symbol of sort of cooperation, of of
Speaker 2: of this belief that you know, you could you could
Speaker 2: do sort of peaceful that you do people, peaceful integration.
Speaker 2: This is something that MLK is kind of like even
Speaker 2: he's kind of getting cynical about by by sixty eight.
Speaker 2: But the fact that they killed him, it, it is,
Speaker 2: it is a kind of psychological blow that I don't
Speaker 2: think we've ever experienced. Like maybe maybe if if you
Speaker 2: took like if you took like Trump's election like on
Speaker 2: at the same time as a twenty twenty uprising, that
Speaker 2: like maybe maybe kind of captures what people are feeling
Speaker 2: in this moment. And I want to read another account.
Speaker 2: I want to read an account that's it's it's it's
Speaker 2: it's sort of secondhand account by this priest. It's like
Speaker 2: a Catholic priest in a largely black area. This this
Speaker 2: is from the Great Uprising, Yet other observers saw the
Speaker 2: uprising as a clear protest against the persistence of racial inequality.
Speaker 2: Father Richard Lawrence, an activist priest whose Catholic parish served
Speaker 2: many blacks, recalled encountering one of his parishioners on the
Speaker 2: street after the revolt had begun. Father, you don't understand.
Speaker 2: I know you've been with the demonstrations and all that
Speaker 2: sort of thing, the parishioner explained to Lawrence, But you
Speaker 2: were born white and you can't really totally understand. I mean,
Speaker 2: I've done the civil rights thing too, you know it.
Speaker 2: I've been there. I've been to the marches, I've been
Speaker 2: to the rallies, you name it. Nobody's listening, His parishioner continued, murdering,
Speaker 2: doctor King was just the last straw that nobody's listening.
Speaker 2: We can go on demonstrating as long as we want.
Speaker 2: No one will listen. I don't know what to try next,
Speaker 2: but maybe blood flowing in the streets is what it takes.
Speaker 2: Maybe some of his blood with some of my blood
Speaker 2: flows in the streets, then maybe the man will listen.
Speaker 2: Maybe not, but I've got nothing left to try. I
Speaker 2: don't care if I got killed. I've got two kids
Speaker 2: and I'm not going to have them come up in
Speaker 2: the world I came up up in. I'm just not
Speaker 2: going to have it. And this is this is I
Speaker 2: think a really important part of these riots is that
Speaker 2: these are people who had fought, who had fought for
Speaker 2: a decade over it. I mean, it's this place about
Speaker 2: a decade and a half of struggle. They've done everything.
Speaker 2: They've done strikes, they've done boycotts, they've done sit ins,
Speaker 2: they've voted, they got the right to vote, right, they marched,
Speaker 2: they did civil disobedience, and you know the product of
Speaker 2: this is that they're living in a dilapidated house with
Speaker 2: a shitty job, and then they fucking killed MLK and
Speaker 2: the country burns. The National Guard straight up is there
Speaker 2: there are there are like there are just straight up
Speaker 2: military occupations in an enormous number of cities. DC is
Speaker 2: occupied by like the five hundred and third Military Police Battalion,
Speaker 2: National Guard and famously the eighty second Airborne. So like
Speaker 2: the regular US Army is being sent into to like
Speaker 2: to like is being sent into these cities. The level
Speaker 2: of sort of burning here too. And this is the
Speaker 2: thing that's I think kind of the most famous part
Speaker 2: of these riots. Is they burn staggering parts of cities.
Speaker 2: There are I mean, just like unbelievable numbers of buildings
Speaker 2: are burned, and people people sort of people, people go
Speaker 2: out to fight people are people are shooting at the police,
Speaker 2: the police are shooting back at them. I mean, there's
Speaker 2: I wasn't able to find the footage. One of my
Speaker 2: friends was telling me about, Like there's there's footage from
Speaker 2: from news people in New York of like a guy
Speaker 2: shooting outside of a window, and they have footage of
Speaker 2: like a police like swat team. Basically I think it's
Speaker 2: like still pre swap, like a police like team coming
Speaker 2: in just killing him. And you know, I mean Richard M.
Speaker 2: Daley famously has has a here's the mayor of Chicago
Speaker 2: has a shoot to kill order. You know, his his
Speaker 2: words are, quote shoot to kill any arsonists or anyone
Speaker 2: with a Molotov cocktail, and quote shoot to cripple or
Speaker 2: mame anyone looting any stores in our city. Jesus. It's
Speaker 2: really fucking bad. And you know, this is something that's
Speaker 2: that's about about these these riots, right Like, Okay, if
Speaker 2: if you look at even the watch riot, or if
Speaker 2: you look at twenty twenty. If you look at like
Speaker 2: twenty fourteen, like the Baltimore Uprising in twenty fifteen, there
Speaker 2: are like people having a good time. Like this is
Speaker 2: always the thing in riots. There's always like someone who's
Speaker 2: like having a great time. Fucking no one. I read
Speaker 2: like dozens and dozens and dozens of interviews of people
Speaker 2: from people from the Holy Week up Prising. Every single
Speaker 2: person involved in this is having the absolute worst time
Speaker 2: of their lives. That's like on every single side, right
Speaker 2: that everyone is fucking miserable. And you know, but part
Speaker 2: part of what's happening here too is these are these
Speaker 2: these uprisings are also about Vietnam, because you know, a
Speaker 2: lot of these people either have been sent to Vietnam
Speaker 2: or like their families have been sent to Vietnam. Black
Speaker 2: people are dying at an unbelievable rate in Vietnam, and
Speaker 2: these people come back and they're like, well, we're gonna
Speaker 2: fucking die anyway, So I'd rather die. I'd rather go
Speaker 2: out fighting the cops than, you know, than than dying
Speaker 2: in Vietnam. And also, you know what I've been talking
Speaker 2: a lot about kind of like the stipers in the windows,
Speaker 2: but one of the most common ways people get killed. Well, okay,
Speaker 2: probably the most common ways they get trapped into a
Speaker 2: burning building, which is terrible. But one of the other
Speaker 2: really common ways is that these are these are gun fights.
Speaker 2: You know, we kind of saw this in twenty twenty.
Speaker 2: There's a bunch there are like white store owners are
Speaker 2: like popping out of their businesses to take pot shots
Speaker 2: at a protesters, and like they're they're you know, one
Speaker 2: of the people that they interviewed was a guy who
Speaker 2: had been like walking past a store and the guy
Speaker 2: had pulled out a gun and shot him, and he
Speaker 2: had he had managed shop, but the guy next to
Speaker 2: him got shoped, so if he took out a molotov
Speaker 2: and like burned the store down. And this is a
Speaker 2: lot of the kind of dynamics of this, right are
Speaker 2: like it's not just that people are furious. It's not
Speaker 2: just the people sort of you know, like people want
Speaker 2: this world to burn. It's that like they are very
Speaker 2: directly responding to the fact that the like white people
Speaker 2: also fucking lose their minds when this starts happening, and
Speaker 2: you you get this degree of sort of urban conflict
Speaker 2: that kind of you know, we don't really have this
Speaker 2: now no here. Yeah, like like eve, even our riots
Speaker 2: are like largely nonviolent, like people don't shoot it out
Speaker 2: with the cops or each other in the same way
Speaker 2: that like, you know, like like it happens sometimes like
Speaker 2: this is happening fucking all over the country. Like this
Speaker 2: is happening in like like like you know, like like
Speaker 2: fucking small ass cities in the Midwest, there are people
Speaker 2: getting in gunfights, right, you know, and so eventually, Okay,
Speaker 2: So the other very important thing about this that is
Speaker 2: that's really interesting and not marked upon very much is that. Okay,
Speaker 2: So like obviously the police in Chicago go fucking feral, right,
Speaker 2: The National Guard commanders come in and like the general
Speaker 2: of the National Guard goes, okay, you motherfuckers, you're gonna
Speaker 2: kill someone. None of you are allowed to have loaded weapons.
Speaker 2: You're allowed to have loaded weapons. And I mean these guys,
Speaker 2: I'll say, like they have bayonets on their rifles. This
Speaker 2: used to be a thing, like they used bayonets as
Speaker 2: a form of like like a less special weapon. They
Speaker 2: just fucking stab you with a bee and you know,
Speaker 2: they their bayatra order to be covered. And because of this,
Speaker 2: the Guard doesn't actually kill anyonean this dream the sixty
Speaker 2: eight riots, unlike the Sicky seven riots where they fucking
Speaker 2: murdered a bunch of people. And this was a really
Speaker 2: smart decision by the National Guard people because if they
Speaker 2: had started actually shooting into these crowds like this wouldn't
Speaker 2: have been one week of really intense rioting that ends
Speaker 2: with the Civil Rights Sack, which we'll talk about, Well,
Speaker 2: it doesn't end with the Civil Right Sack, but like,
Speaker 2: you know, it could have sort of gets that this
Speaker 2: would have been like apocalyptic on a scale that I
Speaker 2: don't think anyone kind of like has the capacity to imagine.
Speaker 2: But instead they kind of, you know, there's really intense riots,
Speaker 2: they kind of they kind of wind down over the
Speaker 2: course of a couple of months, and like they kind
Speaker 2: of they wind down faster in a lot of ways
Speaker 2: than twenty twenty did. But on the other hand, that
Speaker 2: is not the end of these riots. And the thing
Speaker 2: I want to close this episode on while we're going
Speaker 2: to talk about I feel, okay, le let's talk about
Speaker 2: Civil Rights Act first, because it is a very very
Speaker 2: weird piece of legislation. So like five days in now seven,
Speaker 2: a weekend to the riots, Congress passes the Civil Rights
Speaker 2: Act of nineteen sixty eight. And this is a very,
Speaker 2: very weird piece of legislation. I mean, it's obviously this
Speaker 2: is something that's been like frantically like scrambled out because
Speaker 2: like this, you know, the like there are just straight
Speaker 2: up armed uprisings in a huge portion of the United States,
Speaker 2: and Congress's responses, so they passed the Fair Housing Act.
Speaker 2: That's like, that's probably the most famous part of this bill.
Speaker 2: It is very I mean it it has done. It's
Speaker 2: not like a perfect piece of legislation, but it has
Speaker 2: done a staggering amount of good, right and it is
Speaker 2: in some sense a direct answer to the protesters demands, right,
Speaker 2: like it does improve discrimination of sort of housing. But
Speaker 2: it's also okay, there's a bunch of stuff about the
Speaker 2: Bill of Rights applying to indigenous people that is good,
Speaker 2: but we'll cover that. I don't know, maybe if we
Speaker 2: do an aim occupation episode, we'll talk about that more later.
Speaker 2: That's kind of outside the scope of this one. But
Speaker 2: the other part of it is this absolutely dranged like
Speaker 2: conspiracy thing about like because like so the line you know,
Speaker 2: the line here as it wasn't twenty twenty, So this
Speaker 2: is all being caused by outside agitators. So part of
Speaker 2: this thing is what's known as the Riot Act, which
Speaker 2: is it bans like quote travel and interstate commerce with
Speaker 2: the intent to incite, promote, engage to participate in or
Speaker 2: carry out a riot. It's not used very much, but
Speaker 2: this is like straight up a conspiracy theory. So it's
Speaker 2: a conspiracy theory about what happened in the nineteen sixty
Speaker 2: seven uprising in Cambridge. So like that that uprising, like
Speaker 2: that's the thing that produced Spireau Agnew, who was like
Speaker 2: Nixon's deranged VP, who Nixon picked to be so deranged
Speaker 2: that no one wouldssassinate him because asassinating him would put
Speaker 2: spuiau Agnu in charge. Like Agnew had been like a liberal,
Speaker 2: like he'd been a liberal Republican. But then there were
Speaker 2: these riots in Cambridge sixty eight in sixty seven, and
Speaker 2: the narrative that comes out of it is what happened
Speaker 2: was a Black power leader named H. H. Rat Brown
Speaker 2: came in and gave a speech and then there was
Speaker 2: like riots, right, and this is this is the standard
Speaker 2: line for like seventy years. What actually happened was that
Speaker 2: he gave you know, rap gives Rep. Brown age. Rep.
Speaker 2: Brown gives a very militant speech, right, Like he does
Speaker 2: give a speech telling people to burn a school down,
Speaker 2: like he's saying, you need to like five people. But
Speaker 2: then everyone just goes home, as h Rap Brown is is,
Speaker 2: you know, they're like dispersing this young woman asked to
Speaker 2: be escort at home just and get beat up by
Speaker 2: the police, and so h Rap Brown and thirty people
Speaker 2: like okay, and so they try to go home and
Speaker 2: the police walk up to them and start shooting them
Speaker 2: with shotguns. Ahrap Brown gets hit by a fucking chockgun
Speaker 2: blast and that that is the book. It was after
Speaker 2: that that the rioting started, right, So, yeah, so that's
Speaker 2: what actually happened, But but the memory of it is
Speaker 2: that it was like, oh, like these these like these
Speaker 2: black nationalists came in and they started this riot, and
Speaker 2: like this literally is now law in the US, and
Speaker 2: this is this is very famously. At the end of
Speaker 2: this episode, we're going to talk about who this was
Speaker 2: used against. But before wanting to do that, I need
Speaker 2: to make it clear these riots don't end in sixty eight, right,
Speaker 2: And in fact, I think the one that is the
Speaker 2: most intensive these is York in York, Pennsylvania, which I
Speaker 2: promise you the beginning of this episode we were going
Speaker 2: to do, and that is in nineteen sixty nine. Because again,
Speaker 2: like the conditions that cause these erb and uprisings like
Speaker 2: haven't changed. So you know, like the the immediate flames
Speaker 2: of sort of like of the Holy Week uprising, like
Speaker 2: of this rebellion by MLK sort of you know, eventually
Speaker 2: trickle out, but there's just more of them. So this
Speaker 2: is another one one of the things you come across
Speaker 2: when you research this is that like every single the
Speaker 2: conventional like accepted public narrative, but why these started, They're
Speaker 2: all wrong this one. So it's generally attributed to this
Speaker 2: black kid lying but being set on fire and like
Speaker 2: that did happen, but this kid's like fourteen, right, But
Speaker 2: what actually happened was that there were two black guys
Speaker 2: talking to a black police officer and two members of
Speaker 2: this like white power white supremacist street gang like walked
Speaker 2: up and shot them both. And this kicks off a
Speaker 2: series of shootings, brickings, and fistfights between black and white
Speaker 2: people like all over the city. And this is a
Speaker 2: kind of this is also the other kind of right
Speaker 2: in this period like we don't really have this anymore
Speaker 2: like there, but you know there are places where just
Speaker 2: effectively straight up race wars start. Well, you know, one
Speaker 2: of the things happens here. This happens in a lot
Speaker 2: of cities. They'll just be like a bunch of white
Speaker 2: people in a van driving around shooting at people out
Speaker 2: their windows and we sort you know the like this
Speaker 2: happened in Portland, right, but it was like they were
Speaker 2: shooting paintballs. These guys are just shooting actual guns, like
Speaker 2: out their windows any black people they see on the street. Right,
Speaker 2: there's there's a crowd of like eventually like protest start
Speaker 2: like this, this crowd of like pretty well armed black
Speaker 2: people and this uh and and and like a line
Speaker 2: of cops are facing each other, and you know this
Speaker 2: is one of these There's two sides to the story.
Speaker 2: The cops claim that the crowd just started shooting at them,
Speaker 2: Like everyone in the crowd claims that the cops shot
Speaker 2: at them first, and they started shooting back, And so
Speaker 2: there's just this fucking shootout between the cops and this
Speaker 2: this giant crowd. There are like there are reports of
Speaker 2: cops like just set up on the rooftop of a factory,
Speaker 2: just shooting everyone they can find, like white gangs or
Speaker 2: firebombing black houses. One of the I don't like it.
Speaker 2: It's said that like should be infamous, but like I've
Speaker 2: never fucking seen talked about anywhere is uh a fucking
Speaker 2: police armored truck. There's a bunch of people who have
Speaker 2: come out to their lawn to figure out what the
Speaker 2: fuck is going on, and the police are truck rolls
Speaker 2: up and just starts shooting them, and so, you know,
Speaker 2: people and people start shooting back, and there's a bunch
Speaker 2: of like like people. People eventually get sort of tried
Speaker 2: for this. And one of the you know, one of
Speaker 2: the things people talk about it is like, yeah, there's
Speaker 2: like twenty guys in their houses like having a shootout
Speaker 2: with this armored car because the armored car is just
Speaker 2: fucking starting murdering everyone. And you know, the sort of
Speaker 2: remarkable thing about this, I mean, one of the markable
Speaker 2: things about this is that literally the day before this happens,
Speaker 2: all of these cops had been at a police training
Speaker 2: seminar about the best way to respond to civil unrest. Amazing,
Speaker 2: and the police seminar and they're like, correctly, because this
Speaker 2: is actually, if you are the police, the best way
Speaker 2: to handle one of these sort of uprisings, you know,
Speaker 2: they're told, they're told, and no one certain terms. The
Speaker 2: best way to do this is do not confront the crowd.
Speaker 2: Do not shoot at the crowd like you know, okay,
Speaker 2: like do like containment, but don't go don't like walk
Speaker 2: up and fight them, because that will make people fight
Speaker 2: them back. And then literally the next day they are
Speaker 2: having running shootouts with like the entire black population of
Speaker 2: this town. And you know, like York is a place
Speaker 2: that has had civil rights stupment stuff before this, it's
Speaker 2: also has you know again like it has just literal
Speaker 2: white power, like street gangs who the police are in.
Speaker 2: I mean the police literally just call them the boys
Speaker 2: like that. That's how, that's how, that's how tight these
Speaker 2: people are.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: But and this is the thing, you know, one of
Speaker 2: the notes I want to close on is that like
Speaker 2: a lot of the focus and I get why people focus,
Speaker 2: there's a lot of the focus from sort of radical
Speaker 2: accounts of this period is about you know, because these riots,
Speaker 2: these uprisings like these are this is the crucible in
Speaker 2: which sort of black power is forged in and so
Speaker 2: There's a lot of attention paid to sort of like
Speaker 2: black power, like people who are going to become Black
Speaker 2: power leaders and people influenced by these movements like doing
Speaker 2: arm self defense, and that is true and that is important,
Speaker 2: but also just regular ass people are also doing this, right,
Speaker 2: Like the guys, the twenty guys who are having a
Speaker 2: shootout with a police armored vehicle, they are just like
Speaker 2: some of them are Vietnam vets, but like they're just
Speaker 2: they're they're just regular people who saw the police fucking
Speaker 2: roll up like into like roll up on a fucking
Speaker 2: house and start shooting people. There is a sense in
Speaker 2: you know, in this period that the thing that guns
Speaker 2: are for are to protect you from the government, right,
Speaker 2: and people actually believe this, like JFK. You know, one
Speaker 2: there's a really good article in Strange Matters called the
Speaker 2: Double Kind of Resergency that's about this, that talks about
Speaker 2: how JFK literally gives a speech where he talks about
Speaker 2: like again, who is a liberal gives a speech about
Speaker 2: how like, yeah, we need guns to defend it yourself
Speaker 2: against the tyurity of the government, and yeah, like if
Speaker 2: you are a black person in York in nineteen sixty
Speaker 2: nine and you are watching the police from an armored
Speaker 2: vehicle shooting people on their front lawn. The response people
Speaker 2: had was, Okay, we're gonna die here or we're gonna
Speaker 2: die in Vietnam, and so I'm gonna I'm I am
Speaker 2: choosing to die here fighting the cops. And that's I
Speaker 2: think that's important. I think because a lot of you know,
Speaker 2: a lot of what we're going to talk about next. Right,
Speaker 2: are these student radicals. And everyone now looks at these
Speaker 2: student radicals and goes, these people were insane. These people
Speaker 2: were stupid. These people didn't understand what was happening. There
Speaker 2: was no way a revolution was ever going to happen.
Speaker 2: And they're wrong. Those people are fucking wrong. What these
Speaker 2: people were watching, right, They were watching this. They were
Speaker 2: watching hundreds of cities going into open revolt. They were
Speaker 2: watching people having shootouts with the cops. They were watching
Speaker 2: and people people tended not to shoot the national Guard
Speaker 2: because people had enough military experience to realize that if
Speaker 2: you try to shoot the national Guard, you're not gonna
Speaker 2: win because they have machine guns and stuff. But people
Speaker 2: did it still right there, there are still numbers of
Speaker 2: this that they are watching. They're watching armed up risings
Speaker 2: in basically every every major in mind not even major,
Speaker 2: every like minor American city has one of these. And
Speaker 2: these people assume that this is the revolution and that
Speaker 2: you know, like that this is this is the opening
Speaker 2: stage of the revolution, that it's coming, and they weren't
Speaker 2: they weren't wrong to think that, like it didn't happen.
Speaker 2: But it's not that these people, like, you know, it's
Speaker 2: not that these people were sort of nive or foolish.
Speaker 2: It was they they had the same rational reaction to
Speaker 2: what they were seeing that the f behind the Nixton
Speaker 2: administration did. And I think that's the place I'm going
Speaker 2: to close. So I think the next one of these
Speaker 2: episodes is going to be about the Columbia student occupations.
Speaker 2: But the one after that, well, I m might be
Speaker 2: basically staying there, but we are eventually going to get
Speaker 2: to the DNC all part. And I promised you the
Speaker 2: a thing about the people who were charged under the
Speaker 2: Riot Act. Yeah, so the people who are going to
Speaker 2: the most videos, people who are going to be charged
Speaker 2: with this like interstate riot shit or the Chicago seven
Speaker 2: seven people arrested at the Democratic National Convention. So, uh,
Speaker 2: when we come back in however long it takes to
Speaker 2: do the rest of the ninety six yea, so for
Speaker 2: you do. Before we get to that, we will come
Speaker 2: back to this Civil Rights Act fucking over a bunch
Speaker 2: of people's lives.
Speaker 5: I'm going to look forward to that. Hi everyone, and
Speaker 5: welcome to the podcast. It could happen here. It's a
Speaker 5: podcast about the world falling apart and people putting it
Speaker 5: back together. Today we've got a little bit of both.
Speaker 5: I'm joined again by Mick and Rose. This time we'll
Speaker 5: be discussing the treatment of migrants inside the European Union,
Speaker 5: and specifically the treatment of migrants by the government of
Speaker 5: the Netherlands in a place called ter Apple. Welcome to
Speaker 5: the show, guys. Thanks thanks for joining us.
Speaker 3: Thanks good to be back, Thanks for having us.
Speaker 5: Yeah, thank you. It's good to have you. I wonder
Speaker 5: if you could beg game. We were talking about this
Speaker 5: before you record it, and I think it's very obviously
Speaker 5: the migration laws in Europe are very different, but so
Speaker 5: the situations with regard to shelter and just like facilities,
Speaker 5: with the US being so big, we have them dotted
Speaker 5: all over the place. So you were just explaining that
Speaker 5: this is a place where anyone who wants to register
Speaker 5: for asylum in the Netherlands has to go.
Speaker 3: Is that right? Yeah, so that's almost entirely right. So
Speaker 3: everyone who arrives in the nets and wants to ask
Speaker 3: for asylum has to go to this village all the
Speaker 3: way on the northeastern border with Germany, and that's where
Speaker 3: the only registration center is for most asylum seekers. I
Speaker 3: believe only people who do family reunification can go somewhere else.
Speaker 3: But yeah, we have like one registration center for the
Speaker 3: entire country. And yeah, yeah, I mean we have a
Speaker 3: tiny country, but it still became a huge bubblewreck because
Speaker 3: it was the only one.
Speaker 5: So it didn't work out that well apparently, and that's
Speaker 5: why we're talking about it, right, So just so people
Speaker 5: understand where these people are in their asylum journey, Like
Speaker 5: they've entered the EU, right, and then they've traveled to
Speaker 5: the Netlands, which is a country where they want to
Speaker 5: claim asylum.
Speaker 3: Is that right? Yeah, exactly, So basically they arrived at
Speaker 3: their final destination. So most people that I met inter
Speaker 3: Apple had already been traveling for weeks, months, sometimes years,
Speaker 3: depending on how much money and luck they had. Usually
Speaker 3: so Yeah, they would have either crossed the Mediterranean Sea
Speaker 3: or gotten into Europe through Turkey or Belarus, and then
Speaker 3: they would have crossed many many borders and many many
Speaker 3: border guards and fences yep. And they would have gotten
Speaker 3: stuck in places for weeks or months before they could
Speaker 3: move on again. Yeah. And people who would actually go
Speaker 3: to the registration center in the Netherlands, that means they
Speaker 3: wanted to ask for asylum there and probably stay there.
Speaker 5: Right, that would be their country of residents going forward.
Speaker 5: So can you explain I mean, I'm looking at pictures
Speaker 5: of it right now. It's not hard if you if
Speaker 5: you want to look at pictures, you can spell it
Speaker 5: t er A p e L. But can you explain
Speaker 5: the condition said, because looking at it, it's atrocious, like
Speaker 5: from the pictures I can see.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean I saw many pictures before I went
Speaker 3: there myself. It's basically just a tenth camp, So I
Speaker 3: mean it's a it's a shelter, right, So it's like
Speaker 3: it used to be an army base. It can hold
Speaker 3: two thousand people. It has loads of like small housing
Speaker 3: units where people live. It has like a lot of
Speaker 3: offices for all the registration steps, and like the yeah,
Speaker 3: the immigration service, the police, the shelter organization like blah blah, blah,
Speaker 3: bah blah. But so like one and a half year ago,
Speaker 3: there was a lack of shelter in the whole country,
Speaker 3: but specifically also went there Apple and yeah, somehow the
Speaker 3: authorities decided that the solution would be to just leave
Speaker 3: people on the field that was inside of the registration
Speaker 3: in front of the registration center, and so there was
Speaker 3: just an informal camp, like people were sleeping outside for
Speaker 3: weeks or months, not even intense, but they would have
Speaker 3: like huge kind of banners or tarps that would kind
Speaker 3: of provide some shade. So it was like midsummer. It
Speaker 3: was a very dry summer, which for us was crazy lucky.
Speaker 3: The climate activists were not happy, but we were happy. Yeah.
Speaker 3: So yeah, people were just like laying on the ground
Speaker 3: and that was Yeah, there were some that water that
Speaker 3: were like dixies for toilets that were obviously gross, and
Speaker 3: so yeah, what you would see if you google it,
Speaker 3: you just see people lying on the field and just
Speaker 3: being there for extended periods of time. But when I
Speaker 3: personally went there the first time, it was kind of
Speaker 3: worse than what I expected. It to be because I
Speaker 3: think the level of neglect was not visible on photo
Speaker 3: or on video. So people would come to us and
Speaker 3: tell us that they had show us really big wounds
Speaker 3: that were infected, or people would come and tell us like, hey,
Speaker 3: I had a heart attack a few weeks ago, I
Speaker 3: need this medication, or I have diabetes or whatever. So
Speaker 3: there was just this dystopian situation of this enormous facility
Speaker 3: that can hold thousands of people and then a big
Speaker 3: fence around it, and then people with clearly like very
Speaker 3: serious medical conditions just standing in front of the gate
Speaker 3: and the security guards just being like now maybe like
Speaker 3: a staff member will show up today, maybe not, but
Speaker 3: like we don't care how dangerous situation is or something. Yeah,
Speaker 3: just the fact that there was like no proper place
Speaker 3: to wash, there were no toilets. The food was like, yeah,
Speaker 3: I worked in camps across the borders, across European borders,
Speaker 3: and I've seen a lot of like horrible food. But
Speaker 3: like in their Apple, they just decided to rent a Yeah,
Speaker 3: like if you have like a party or something, you
Speaker 3: would just rent this place that will just sell fries.
Speaker 3: So they were just giving fries to people like every
Speaker 3: single day Jesus. Yeah, just I mean just just pre
Speaker 3: packed food from the supermarket would be more healthy than
Speaker 3: just fries every day for a month, right, Yeah, So
Speaker 3: just a level of like, yeah, neglect, lack of care.
Speaker 3: It was just even even more than what you can
Speaker 3: see on the pictures.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and like a complete like lack of like failure
Speaker 5: of the government to address their basic rights and needs.
Speaker 5: And how long can people expect to spend in that situation? Then,
Speaker 5: like they have to they have to go there, right,
Speaker 5: like if they want the asylum, they have to go there.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so like the the irony wasn't the only way
Speaker 3: to get shelter was to be there and then be
Speaker 3: without shelter or you wouldn't know how long like right, Yeah,
Speaker 3: I mean sometimes it was hours, especially for their women
Speaker 3: and children. It was usually they would usually be let
Speaker 3: in in the evening, but yeah, men definitely days sometimes
Speaker 3: if they were not lucky, weeks, And it was just
Speaker 3: also so like unclear, so people would just not get
Speaker 3: any information. They would be there and then all of
Speaker 3: a sudden hear someone shout and all start running towards
Speaker 3: where the shout came from because maybe they would be
Speaker 3: let in or yeah, I don't know, like guards would
Speaker 3: just shout at them in Dutch and then be like
Speaker 3: why don't you understand me? Or like it was all
Speaker 3: just like consciously like it's so unnecessarily chaotic and therefore
Speaker 3: also like people pushing around police getting like intimidating and
Speaker 3: violent and yeah, just this very chaotic and disrespectful approach
Speaker 3: to people.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's worryingly similar to what we see in open
Speaker 5: aired tension sites here, Like they'll do it. People are
Speaker 5: outside there too, they have an exce no shelter there too.
Speaker 5: We volunteers make the food, so it's better than that. Yeah,
Speaker 5: they'll turn up in a bus, like I've seen them
Speaker 5: turn up in a bus and just shout run and
Speaker 5: like if you understand English, you run. If you don't
Speaker 5: stand English, you see everyone else running, so you run.
Speaker 5: And then they can only take thirty people, and you've
Speaker 5: now had more than one hundred people come stampeding across,
Speaker 5: like just if you've got to grab their bags and everything,
Speaker 5: and it's yeah, completely unnecessarily chaotic and cruel. And then
Speaker 5: once they let in, what can they expect from that?
Speaker 5: They're saying it like a barracks or something. While there
Speaker 5: while they're processed.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so it was very very chaotic. I think it
Speaker 3: took them like almost a year to actually process everyone,
Speaker 3: because they would just if a municipality would say like, oh,
Speaker 3: I have space for a hundred people, they would just
Speaker 3: randomly put one hundred people in the bus and drop
Speaker 3: them there, and then a year later it would run
Speaker 3: that they were never properly registered or something. But yeah,
Speaker 3: I think like there was a night shelter not so
Speaker 3: far away from their apple, so that was always like
Speaker 3: late in the evening, there would still be a few
Speaker 3: buses going to that night shelter. That was just a
Speaker 3: big sports hall I think, full of beds, bunk beds
Speaker 3: or yeah, like stretchers, and yeah, no privacy, just like
Speaker 3: hundreds of people in one room. The lights would stay
Speaker 3: on all night for safety reasons. But of course that's
Speaker 3: also very cruel too.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and then if people would get registered, they would
Speaker 3: be usually sent to like a temporary emergency shelter because
Speaker 3: there was such a huge shortage of regular shelters. So
Speaker 3: some people were living in sports halls without much privacy
Speaker 3: for like half year or a year or some people
Speaker 3: are still there, to be honest.
Speaker 5: Wow, Yeah, that's crazy. It's atrocious, talking of atrocious. Unfortunately,
Speaker 5: we have to break the ad.
Speaker 3: We'll do that.
Speaker 5: Okay, we're back. Hope you do this out of it,
Speaker 5: and we're talking about ter Apple, this, I guess migrant
Speaker 5: reception registration center in the Netherlands. One thing I saw
Speaker 5: when I was sort of doing some reading about this
Speaker 5: recently was that babies born TOEP mothers or people in
Speaker 5: the te Apple asylum center are seven times more likely
Speaker 5: to die in or around perfect That is shocking. Yeah,
Speaker 5: so is there just no access to medical care of
Speaker 5: people like delivering babies in this asylum center.
Speaker 3: Well, I think the excuse of the government is that
Speaker 3: they didn't have proper care during the pregnancy because they
Speaker 3: were still traveling. Of course that is often the case,
Speaker 3: Like yeah, yeah, but still it's insanely high. Seven times
Speaker 3: more people dying, and especially when this super chaotic situation occurred, Like, yeah,
Speaker 3: we would have people in the field that we were
Speaker 3: suspecting they were getting like hypothermia or you know, some
Speaker 3: sort of yeah, strong physical reaction to the tough conditions
Speaker 3: they were facing. But they could be dropped in the
Speaker 3: night shelter, picked out again in the morning, being back
Speaker 3: on the field, staying on the field for a few nights,
Speaker 3: again going for one night to a night shelter, being
Speaker 3: transferred to an emergency camp for two days, being transferred
Speaker 3: to another emergency camp for three days. And during this
Speaker 3: time there is no coherence medical care, right, And of
Speaker 3: course it would usually be a little bit better for
Speaker 3: women and especially pregnant women, so they would try to
Speaker 3: put them in a more stable place and like not
Speaker 3: move them around that much, but trying is yeah, they
Speaker 3: would not always actually manage to do that, So they've
Speaker 3: definitely also been comple planes of yeah, of people and
Speaker 3: especially like pregnant pregnant women still being forced to move
Speaker 3: to a different camp, like really close to the data
Speaker 3: the baby was expected to come, and yeah, that definitely
Speaker 3: doesn't help. So, I mean, the care on the field
Speaker 3: was absolutely horrendous. I think women were usually not exposed
Speaker 3: to it that much because we do. Yeah, there's also
Speaker 3: this weird sexism in migration that men can always suffer more,
Speaker 3: which is not always true, especially if you're not filtering
Speaker 3: out the really thick men either, because I was definitely
Speaker 3: a lot more healthy than a lot of the men
Speaker 3: walking around there. But yeah, at least in the case
Speaker 3: of like pregnant women, I think they would be moved
Speaker 3: out pretty quickly. But yeah, it was chaotic. And then
Speaker 3: also you have like, of course you have a lot
Speaker 3: of people who speak Arabic or Farsi or digit Yeah,
Speaker 3: but you also have people who speak on a link
Speaker 3: language that is only spoken in a province of a country.
Speaker 3: You know, Like it's very hard to get proper trends
Speaker 3: for like all the possible languages of people that apply
Speaker 3: for asylum. Yeah, but yeah, I mean I definitely think
Speaker 3: the conditions, especially when when there were so many people
Speaker 3: living in really bad emergency shelters or even on the streets,
Speaker 3: did not help babies at all.
Speaker 5: Yeah, oh, anyone, I guess no. Can you explained then,
Speaker 5: like this situation arose about a year ago, I think, right,
Speaker 5: so you are part of a group of people that
Speaker 5: were able to respond to help, like at least, I
Speaker 5: guess make it a little bit less terrible. Can you
Speaker 5: explain a little bit about the group, about what you're
Speaker 5: able to do.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so, I mean we just so, I was already
Speaker 3: a part of my grades, which is an organization that
Speaker 3: like I personally worked on the borders, like providing food
Speaker 3: and clothes and stuff like that to people on the move,
Speaker 3: and Migrades is more like also more an activist organizations
Speaker 3: or organizing protest or campaigns and stuff like that. So
Speaker 3: we just like went to see what was going on,
Speaker 3: and then we very quickly, yeah, realized that it was
Speaker 3: worse than it looked, but also that there were so
Speaker 3: many basic things that were not being done by the
Speaker 3: government that we were actually able to do. So yeah,
Speaker 3: we just asked around a lot for hours and hours,
Speaker 3: like what do you need, what's going on? What is missing?
Speaker 3: Like what is your primary issue at this moment, And
Speaker 3: one of the main things people were saying was like
Speaker 3: the food is fucking driving them and saying like yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: just the lack of flavor, but also just the lack
Speaker 3: of health and yeah, people would just get like diarrhea
Speaker 3: and stuff. And then it turned out, of course that
Speaker 3: there were already some people around that wanted to do stuff,
Speaker 3: so we just had a big call and then it
Speaker 3: turned out that there was like this squads where they
Speaker 3: had a big kitchen and they were like, yeah, of
Speaker 3: course you can cook here. And then there was another
Speaker 3: like former squads where they also had a big soup kitchen.
Speaker 3: And then I was like, okay, this is like it
Speaker 3: was a big like media store was a big thing
Speaker 3: for the Netherlands, that this was happening because we have
Speaker 3: this like, yeah, idea that we are perfectly organized and
Speaker 3: blah blah blah, and that like all the bad things
Speaker 3: happen on the border is still like at the like
Speaker 3: with a very clear role of our politicians, but like somehow, yeah,
Speaker 3: there's not much talk about that. So it was it
Speaker 3: was like on the front page every single day for weeks.
Speaker 3: So I thought, yeah, like because the people that were
Speaker 3: already trying to do something, they were like how can
Speaker 3: we get enough money for the groceries and how can
Speaker 3: we get volunteers? And then yeah, I was like we'll manage.
Speaker 3: If there's one thing I learned from the border, it's
Speaker 3: like if you start doing something, people will will come
Speaker 3: and join. Yeah, and we first said like, okay, let's
Speaker 3: just cook two times a week, you know, one time
Speaker 3: in the squad and another time in the other squad,
Speaker 3: and then it's like super doable, blah blah blah. And
Speaker 3: then basically we started and it's yeah, there was just
Speaker 3: no way back. So yeah, we said like Okay, let's
Speaker 3: hand out food twice, and then yeah, I just went
Speaker 3: like day and nights being on the field, and quite
Speaker 3: quickly we moved to food distribution every day because there
Speaker 3: were so many people in the area that wanted to cook.
Speaker 3: There was like an Islamic group that were churches that
Speaker 3: were like, yeah, from all over the country. People were
Speaker 3: coming into action, and yeah, so first we did food
Speaker 3: kind of because people really wanted it, but also kind
Speaker 3: of because we just knew how to do it because
Speaker 3: we had some people who had a big kitchen and
Speaker 3: some experience cooking in large quantities. And then quickly it
Speaker 3: became like colder and rainy as well, so we started
Speaker 3: to move towards leaving bags and ponchos and just yeah,
Speaker 3: big distributions. And then we also started to hand out tents,
Speaker 3: and then we got into a whole fight with the
Speaker 3: municipality and the police because they were constantly like confiscating
Speaker 3: the tents. Yeah, but yeah, we just started with what
Speaker 3: we thought would be feasible to do, I guess, and
Speaker 3: then it kind of escalated really quickly to yeah, us
Speaker 3: being kind of responsible for a lot of basic needs
Speaker 3: of everyone on the field, and also us monitoring, like
Speaker 3: informing journalists because like the government would be like, oh, no,
Speaker 3: there's nobody there on the field right now, and then
Speaker 3: we would.
Speaker 4: Just like.
Speaker 3: Five minutes, I'd be like no one. Yeah. So we
Speaker 3: also quite quickly like became a big part of the
Speaker 3: whole political debate where like the government was saying one
Speaker 3: thing and we were saying another, and like they were
Speaker 3: all all the time trying to pretend that nothing was
Speaker 3: wrong and everything was fine, and yeah.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I think it's it's such a common it's sadly
Speaker 5: a common experience, right, It's being like a the government
Speaker 5: is lying to you, Like you can see this with
Speaker 5: your eyes that you're being lied to, and be like
Speaker 5: they're just going to leave these people if we don't
Speaker 5: do certain thing, no one will. Something that we've had here,
Speaker 5: we see it, to say, every border in Europe more
Speaker 5: or less, right, Like it's just a consequence of the
Speaker 5: way that like neoliberal capitalism has decided to deal with migration,
Speaker 5: which is to make to be as cruel as possible
Speaker 5: and to make it as hard as possible for people.
Speaker 5: I wonder, like you've been organizing there, at least in
Speaker 5: this place for like a year. I think I want
Speaker 5: this to be instructive for people, because, like, we've been
Speaker 5: organizing here too, and we've learned a lot. Are there
Speaker 5: things that you've learned that you think other people could
Speaker 5: take from the organizing or or like and make you
Speaker 5: you're also a part of organizing in your area. If
Speaker 5: either of you have things that you've learned about specifically
Speaker 5: organizing to help migrants, I'd love to hear them.
Speaker 3: Oh, so many things. I'm probably gonna forget some of
Speaker 3: the things I've learned. Well. I think one thing that
Speaker 3: I've learned and that I've learned over and over and
Speaker 3: over again, is that if you start doing something, you
Speaker 3: will find people who will join. And I think that's
Speaker 3: one of the scary things when you see a gigantic
Speaker 3: problem and even if you know a concrete thing that
Speaker 3: you can do about it, it's still Yeah, there is
Speaker 3: a lot of things that you cannot do as a
Speaker 3: single human being. But I found this true in many
Speaker 3: countries across the world, that if you just start and
Speaker 3: you say that you're doing it, people will actually join.
Speaker 3: And I found that especially like Painful in their Apple
Speaker 3: that we were on this field and there had been
Speaker 3: so much media attention and there was nobody there, Like
Speaker 3: everyone was speaking about it and no one was doing anything,
Speaker 3: and it was kind of depressing to witness that and
Speaker 3: to feel that nobody it felt like nobody cared. Right,
Speaker 3: But as soon as we just started with this small
Speaker 3: thing like Okay, you can donate to groceries, you can
Speaker 3: come help cook, you can come help do the dishes,
Speaker 3: like concrete things that you can do, yeah, we were
Speaker 3: like I think we got like a thousand people who
Speaker 3: wanted to volunteer with us, which was like way too much.
Speaker 3: We never got back to all of them because it
Speaker 3: was just insane. We did not need thousand people to
Speaker 3: cook food for two hundred people, so like, yeah, but
Speaker 3: we just started, and I think, yeah, I think that
Speaker 3: was really helpful, or I think that can be very
Speaker 3: helpful if you're thinking about doing something like start small,
Speaker 3: but don't be afraid that it will not kind of
Speaker 3: grow because people will join and people will make it
Speaker 3: into something bigger. Also a great lesson that I learned, Well,
Speaker 3: it's very basic and understandable actually, but like try to
Speaker 3: make Yeah, my experience is usually with like a mass distribution,
Speaker 3: so you have hundreds of people, you have food or
Speaker 3: blankets or whatever something that people really need. And it's
Speaker 3: like so important to really plan the distribution well and
Speaker 3: to really inform and discuss with people, because that's one
Speaker 3: thing that also happened in their Apple that at some
Speaker 3: point people were just dumping shit on the field. They
Speaker 3: were actually causing fights and causing tensions between people because
Speaker 3: you cannot you kind of show but five sleeping bags
Speaker 3: when hundreds of people are in desperate need of a
Speaker 3: sleeping back. You know, like that's kind of inhumane. And
Speaker 3: I get that people have good intentions, and I get
Speaker 3: that it could potentially mean that five people are less cold,
Speaker 3: but like, yeah, some sort of shelter is a basic necessity,
Speaker 3: so you cannot give that to a few and not
Speaker 3: to others. So yeah, I think like, like the first
Speaker 3: time we did the distribution into Apple, I was kind
Speaker 3: of scared because people were spreading, like there was a
Speaker 3: lot of rumor about like, oh, it's so violent and
Speaker 3: these people are like blah blah blah, and and of
Speaker 3: course I kind of didn't believe it because I worked
Speaker 3: with migrants for a long time and I know that
Speaker 3: they're human being, you know, and they're not so like
Speaker 3: shockingly different than but I've also learned that you need
Speaker 3: to be They did not learn at all to trust
Speaker 3: anyone there because like people were lying to them. People
Speaker 3: were telling them they would get shelter in the night,
Speaker 3: but they would not. People would say that they would
Speaker 3: see a doctor, and they would not get to see
Speaker 3: a doctor. So like the I think it's really important
Speaker 3: if you want to tell people that you take them
Speaker 3: seriously and that you build up some trust. So for example,
Speaker 3: we we went the first time, we cooked so much food.
Speaker 3: We were like, it's we cannot make it run out,
Speaker 3: you know, like we want everyone to get as much
Speaker 3: as they want and more. Yea, even if we have
Speaker 3: to trash, because like these people for once have to
Speaker 3: get the feeling that it's like that we're there for everyone.
Speaker 3: So like if you make if you do a mass distribution,
Speaker 3: you usually make light lines and people have to like
Speaker 3: wait for their turn. But we spent hours just telling
Speaker 3: people like, hey, we're going to give out food. There's
Speaker 3: so much food, you know, don't worry like it's to
Speaker 3: and then also actually live up to that of course,
Speaker 3: make sure that there is enough food. Yeah, and like
Speaker 3: try to make it like fun. And this is like
Speaker 3: it's kind of awkward because you like, I kind of
Speaker 3: feel awkward of putting people in a line and telling
Speaker 3: them to wait, and you know, like that because you're
Speaker 3: kind of being bossing them around. But yeah, if it
Speaker 3: goes well once and everyone just feels like, hey, here
Speaker 3: I don't have to fight to get to the front,
Speaker 3: and here I can just chill out and we can
Speaker 3: make a chat with each other and we can just
Speaker 3: you know, smile and like wish each other a good day,
Speaker 3: then Yeah, I think it's also really important to try
Speaker 3: to make distributions kind of fun or at least as
Speaker 3: chill as possible, and to like try to not make
Speaker 3: it another survival of the fittest moment, because that is
Speaker 3: exactly what the state is pushing people into, and that
Speaker 3: is what I don't want people to get into.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I think that's very true. Like we've definitely learned
Speaker 5: a lot of those similar things. I can't like put
Speaker 5: enough emphasis on planning before you just show up and
Speaker 5: do a distribution, like we had so many fucking chaotic
Speaker 5: it's not on. Yeah, people are fighting hungry and they've
Speaker 5: had to fight to get fed for the duration of
Speaker 5: the journey, be the days, months, of years and like
Speaker 5: it's no, they're doing what like they understand to be
Speaker 5: the necessary thing.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and there's it's absolutely not like humane to just
Speaker 3: recreate that that mode, you know, like it's amazing to
Speaker 3: be able to create a nice atmosphere where people can
Speaker 3: relax and feel safe and feel finally treated like equally
Speaker 3: and somehow like fairly again, even if it's just for
Speaker 3: a very simple meal. But it's yeah, I mean you
Speaker 3: can already get moody if someone jumps in front of
Speaker 3: you at the supermarket, you know, like I can get
Speaker 3: moody with that. But it's like that, but then like
Speaker 3: way more extreme and for actual, yeah, things that you
Speaker 3: need to survive all the time, Like it's it's yeah,
Speaker 3: it's hard to imagine, I guess if you've never really
Speaker 3: been in a survival situation. But yeah, it can be
Speaker 3: so much fun. Also, maybe that's another good one, because
Speaker 3: I remember people were feeling sorry for me when I
Speaker 3: was working there, like, oh my god, this must be
Speaker 3: so hard, and I mean it was fucking hard sometimes,
Speaker 3: like I have literally been standing there like pushing away
Speaker 3: tears and being like no, I'm fine, but I'm not
Speaker 3: fine at all. But also it's fun, like you're just
Speaker 3: joking around and you're making each other happy, and you
Speaker 3: feel like you're part of something bigger and you feel
Speaker 3: I think it's very empowering to be like the state
Speaker 3: is fucking it up and we can actually do it better.
Speaker 5: Yeah, very much. So, Like I think it's very like affirming, right,
Speaker 5: like to be like we don't need like anyone telling
Speaker 5: us what to do, We don't need anyone trying to
Speaker 5: control us, like we can we can take care of
Speaker 5: these people ourselves without creating mechanisms of control. And like
Speaker 5: I think for me, that was like one of the
Speaker 5: reasons I really enjoy doing it is that that like
Speaker 5: me and my friends can care for these people. And
Speaker 5: it's like I don't know from my perspective, like I've
Speaker 5: had conversations with hundreds of people from all around the world.
Speaker 5: Like we would do things like play music while people
Speaker 5: waited for food. If we had a friend who was
Speaker 5: able to play music, you know, we had enough enough people.
Speaker 5: We'd always recruit people from among the migrants to help
Speaker 5: us with food distribution, which turned out to be great
Speaker 5: because like they taught us different words in different languages
Speaker 5: and like, you know, I can say hot source in
Speaker 5: like twenty five languages now and like it was important
Speaker 5: parts yeah yeah right there real to death. But yeah,
Speaker 5: it was very and then like I remember one night
Speaker 5: it was like in Septemme it was so cold, one
Speaker 5: of the cold nights. It was in September and it
Speaker 5: was just about freezing, and like there were very few
Speaker 5: of us back then, and we my friend had some
Speaker 5: guitars and like drums and we like parked the band
Speaker 5: to block the wind and everyone sat around and played
Speaker 5: the guitar and they played their different songs and like
Speaker 5: we had all these really happy moments. Yeah it's not
Speaker 5: like we said around growing all the time, like it said.
Speaker 3: No, not at all, very empowering, I think, No, I
Speaker 3: think it's important what you just said that. Also, a
Speaker 3: lot of work can be done by people themselves. So
Speaker 3: I remember a volunteer being like I want to give
Speaker 3: out the food, whereas these guys were giving out the
Speaker 3: food every day and they had this whole routine and
Speaker 3: they were much faster, and you know, like and also
Speaker 3: it's not about you feeling good about.
Speaker 5: You know, like yeah, yeah, not that to help you.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, like listen to people like really spend
Speaker 3: a lot of time understanding what people need and what
Speaker 3: they want and because it's really often not what you expect,
Speaker 3: and yeah, make sure that people can also do stuff themselves.
Speaker 3: And also like, for example, if we would have tents
Speaker 3: but not for everyone, or blankets but not for everyone,
Speaker 3: instead of making like a very rigid decision of like
Speaker 3: you get it and you don't, it's so useful to
Speaker 3: just talk to people and to just be like, hey, sorry,
Speaker 3: this is a situation or yeah. Like there were a
Speaker 3: lot of fights because families were always allowed to go first,
Speaker 3: but it was not really clearly communicated by the government's
Speaker 3: like can facility and stuff. But when we were just
Speaker 3: discussing with them, like hey, how can we make the
Speaker 3: distribution more chill, they were like, well, can women and
Speaker 3: children and elderly people just go first? And I was
Speaker 3: like yeah, or you know, I mean, it's not really
Speaker 3: any of my business, like yeah, And then if everyone
Speaker 3: just understands it and it's kind of clear and understandable
Speaker 3: and explained, it's like so much more chill. Whereas if
Speaker 3: you're just shouting at people and assuming that they will
Speaker 3: not understand or assume that they will be selfish, you
Speaker 3: are also forcing people into that role. Yes, and I
Speaker 3: think it's really beautiful if you can snap out of that,
Speaker 3: and you could, yeah, you can just be somewhat equal,
Speaker 3: even though like legally or in a completely different situations.
Speaker 5: Yeah, totally.
Speaker 6: So what you're telling me is that if you talk
Speaker 6: to people and treat them as human beings, that has
Speaker 6: positive results for bad situations.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 6: This is a hot take, a very hot take.
Speaker 3: Yeah, breaking news.
Speaker 6: I don't have nearly the amount of field experience that
Speaker 6: Rose has. So but another thing that I think is
Speaker 6: really important to highlight is that it's not just it's
Speaker 6: not just the necessities I was part of. I did
Speaker 6: first date at the No Border camp near to the
Speaker 6: Apple last summer, and some of the activists there that
Speaker 6: a really admirable job day. I think they did not
Speaker 6: go to their apple because it was too politically hot
Speaker 6: at the time, so they went to different centers where
Speaker 6: migrants were living, and they handed out toys and they
Speaker 6: hired a bouncy.
Speaker 2: Castle for the kids to play.
Speaker 6: It was really it was really basic in the sense
Speaker 6: that it didn't need like massive fund massive funds or
Speaker 6: incredible abouance of organization that you need bureaucracies to handle.
Speaker 6: It was just people thinking of ways, like hey, how
Speaker 6: can we make these people happier or more comfortable or
Speaker 6: at least forget for like a few hours about like
Speaker 6: this situation therein because our media likes to, you know,
Speaker 6: dive onto every time there's a fight in a migrant center, right,
Speaker 6: but it's rarely discussed that if you put a lot
Speaker 6: of people in a stressful situation on top of each other,
Speaker 6: people will there will be tensions and there will be fights.
Speaker 5: Which is I think we don't cover that enough, right, No, And.
Speaker 3: Also nobody really cares because I think it's it's one
Speaker 3: of the most beautiful things for me as well. I said,
Speaker 3: the solidarity that people show each other, and like, yeah,
Speaker 3: you don't even see it half the time, but people
Speaker 3: give each other like their waterproof jackets or I remember
Speaker 3: one night it was a horrible night in Fair Apple
Speaker 3: and we didn't expect people to be there, and all
Speaker 3: of a sudden there were hundreds of people and they
Speaker 3: hadn't had food since the morning. And then people in
Speaker 3: the camp they all get microwave meals and they kind
Speaker 3: of hate them, but like they all had kind of
Speaker 3: a stash, so they all like started to eat up
Speaker 3: microwave meals and bring them outside, and they were actually
Speaker 3: way more able to provide food on such a short
Speaker 3: notice than we were. And it was not the best food,
Speaker 3: but like everyone had food and they were even sharing
Speaker 3: it with us, and we were all just like so
Speaker 3: glad to be eating after ten hours in the rain
Speaker 3: and in the cold. And yeah, people, Yeah, I don't know,
Speaker 3: carrying luggage for someone who has Like it's all the
Speaker 3: time you see people standing up for each other, and
Speaker 3: I think that is honestly an amazing thing, and maybe
Speaker 3: more tough situations bring that out somehow more as well,
Speaker 3: Like it's easy for most people in western societies to
Speaker 3: be very individualists and live very isolated and yeah, non
Speaker 3: fulfilling lives, but then if you are in this kind
Speaker 3: of situation, in some ways, it can also bring out
Speaker 3: the best in people.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I think so, Like we were just talking about
Speaker 5: before we started, how like yesterday I was out helping
Speaker 5: down by the border and around the two Mauritanian guys
Speaker 5: who had carried a Chinese man with a leg injury
Speaker 5: for two days and they couldn't even share the same language,
Speaker 5: and like that walk is now that hike is no joke,
Speaker 5: Like I do that with a big backpack full of water.
Speaker 5: That's hard, and I do a lot of hiking, but
Speaker 5: I wasn't carrying another human. You know, it can actually
Speaker 5: really bring out some incredible acts of kindness. And I wondered, guys,
Speaker 5: we're running close to the end of a signed time.
Speaker 5: If people want to help, either they say they're in
Speaker 5: the Netherlands and they want to come and help, or
Speaker 5: if they want to help in a financial way, or
Speaker 5: maybe they can do some remote so help. Maybe they
Speaker 5: can respond to the thousand volunteers for email for you, Yeah,
Speaker 5: how can they do that?
Speaker 3: Yeah, donations are always welcome. We're currently not working in
Speaker 3: their apple, but it doesn't look good. So usually the
Speaker 3: influx is highest in summer and early autumn. And we
Speaker 3: have like a far right majority in parliament since a
Speaker 3: few months, so we're wouldn't be surprised if we have
Speaker 3: people out on the streets again. Also, I think there's
Speaker 3: a very big chance that the shelters for undocumented people
Speaker 3: might close, so we would have a lot of people
Speaker 3: on the streets then, So we need a lot of
Speaker 3: solidarity and a lot of things, like a lot Yeah,
Speaker 3: so like, yeah, financial support is always welcome, but I
Speaker 3: think it's also really important that people think about what
Speaker 3: they can do in their lives and that it is
Speaker 3: also something that they can manage inside of their lives.
Speaker 3: So like not everyone can drop everything and yeah, move
Speaker 3: to the other side of the country or whatever, but
Speaker 3: if you can host one person, or if you can
Speaker 3: support someone else who's hosting, like there are ways. I
Speaker 3: think migrats it does not have like all the options
Speaker 3: to volunteer, but like we really hope that there will
Speaker 3: be a lot of networks of solidarity that yeah, we
Speaker 3: just need them across the country, I think, and I
Speaker 3: do think there's like a serious risk of like more
Speaker 3: criminalization of aid workers. We were also criminalized for handing
Speaker 3: out tents. I got a letter that said that I
Speaker 3: risk like three months of imprisonment for handing out tents.
Speaker 3: Oh wow, Yeah, but that's democracy.
Speaker 5: Yeah, we need that European social democracy model that everyone's
Speaker 5: talking about.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we are just doing great. Yeah yeah, And so,
Speaker 3: like tents were constantly confiscated and stuff, and it was
Speaker 3: intense there because people had to be there to get sheltered,
Speaker 3: which they legally were entitled to. But it is a
Speaker 3: bigger trend, so regular homeless people will also see their
Speaker 3: tents confiscated or smashed without them getting an offer to
Speaker 3: get into a shelter. Right. So, I think the criminalization
Speaker 3: in our case was a bit extreme because most of
Speaker 3: the criminalization had to do with at least a very
Speaker 3: vague relationship with like smuggling or people crossing borders, whereas
Speaker 3: like handing out senses like the most humanitarian, basic thing
Speaker 3: that you can possibly do, and somehow they still thought
Speaker 3: it was a good idea to criminalize that. Yeah, I
Speaker 3: think we need to like prepare for the fact that
Speaker 3: our borders and our migration policies are going to get
Speaker 3: more cruel and that the only thing that we can
Speaker 3: do to help is like really strong works of solidarity
Speaker 3: and resistance, and that we might sometimes risk prison time,
Speaker 3: but that we still probably need to do it because
Speaker 3: the alternative is that we're just letting people be destroyed
Speaker 3: in the system.
Speaker 5: I think that's very very good, Mike, Do you have
Speaker 5: anything adworking people for you find more ways to support,
Speaker 5: ways to show solidarity.
Speaker 6: I think what I plugged last time, like that Polish
Speaker 6: Front text campaign, find your local activist group.
Speaker 3: Or started because we exactly exactly. Even if you're just
Speaker 3: one person, that's like.
Speaker 6: Yeah, like through social media, you can find a lot
Speaker 6: of people. Find your local squad, they will be they
Speaker 6: will want to help.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Oh and maybe what you just said, like there's every
Speaker 3: year no border camp somewhere in another one, so that's
Speaker 3: also a good place to start.
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah, yes, you can find them on Instagram. I
Speaker 6: think I'm not on Instagram. I don't know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's there.
Speaker 6: That's that. That's definitely an option. Atmosphere is great. There,
Speaker 6: I don't I'm not on the socials, so you can't
Speaker 6: find me if you want to. I'm sorry. And well
Speaker 6: I'm also like Rosa you said, I do some stuff
Speaker 6: with like a first aid collective. So if you guys
Speaker 6: are if you are doing something and you you're like, hey,
Speaker 6: we could use some people with some degree of medical training,
Speaker 6: reach out to me. You have my contacts, because that
Speaker 6: is the kind of thing I will most definitely get
Speaker 6: well excited is the wrong words.
Speaker 3: If she hits evanitser Apple, we could really use some
Speaker 3: first aid as well, then yeah.
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah, reach out. I will I will gladly come
Speaker 6: over there and with all the medical supplies that are
Speaker 6: scuttered around my room.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that's I think that's a good illustration though, right
Speaker 5: to finish up, Like, everybody has a skill that we
Speaker 5: can use, Like you might not think you do, but
Speaker 5: you probably do. Like someone knitted hats for us, you know,
Speaker 5: if you're a person who likes to knit. And we
Speaker 5: had people who didn't think they had much to offer
Speaker 5: and then came and just made sandwiches. And they created
Speaker 5: a method for making sandwiches in bulk that like allowed
Speaker 5: us to make more sandwiches more quickly. Everybody has even
Speaker 5: if you want to be the person who washes the blankets,
Speaker 5: and that's a massive task. It means somebody's warm at night.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's an insane test. And also like maybe the
Speaker 3: the more intimidating fast, Like I think it could be
Speaker 3: intimidating to be like, oh, we're going to I don't know,
Speaker 3: hundreds of men and everyone says they're scary, but indeed
Speaker 3: there's also so much things happening in the background, like
Speaker 3: collecting blankets, getting clothes, getting groceries, Like there's so so
Speaker 3: many layers to it. And it can also be that
Speaker 3: you collect end blankets, but like hundreds of people collect
Speaker 3: end blankets, right. So it's also you're always part of
Speaker 3: something bigger and there's always a there's always I think
Speaker 3: that it's always very good to think that, Like, if
Speaker 3: you're faced with a big problem, it's very hard to
Speaker 3: get to the solution of it, but at the same time,
Speaker 3: it's very easy to do a tiny thing about it.
Speaker 3: And I think it's much more useful to do that
Speaker 3: tiny thing than to be like, oh, I can never
Speaker 3: get to the real solution of this problem, And in
Speaker 3: the end you will kind of get to it by
Speaker 3: doing that with more and more people and actually building
Speaker 3: up collective power and resistance.
Speaker 6: Yeah, about the collecting thing, like, yeah, for example, I
Speaker 6: know my parents still have like old toys from when
Speaker 6: we and my brother were younger. If you're in an
Speaker 6: area with a refugee center, you could always just give
Speaker 6: those toys to the people there. If you have old
Speaker 6: old children's books or something, people can use that to
Speaker 6: get a grasp on the Gibberish that is the Dutch language.
Speaker 6: These little things also matter a lot, and it's something
Speaker 6: very impactful that you can do that doesn't take much
Speaker 6: of your own effort.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's very low threshold, right, and it makes a
Speaker 5: huge difference. It makes someone feel cared for and welcome.
Speaker 5: That can make all the difference in the world. And
Speaker 5: what is Can you just spell out the migreat website
Speaker 5: for us?
Speaker 3: Uh huh m I G R E A T dot.
Speaker 2: Org dot org.
Speaker 3: Perfect, It's like, migration is great, migrat migreat.
Speaker 5: Yeah, all right, thank you so much, both of you.
Speaker 3: Thanks, thank you for having us.
Speaker 4: Welcome to what could happen here? The show about things
Speaker 4: falling apart, and often what's falling apart is kind of
Speaker 4: our general agreed upon sense of what reality is, and
Speaker 4: that's kind of what we're talking about here.
Speaker 2: Today.
Speaker 4: We're going to talk about the latest batch of new
Speaker 4: transgender conspiracy theories. And to join me in this exciting
Speaker 4: journey is Mia Wong.
Speaker 2: Hello, Miya. You know, why is it that whatever we're
Speaker 2: covering transgender conspiracy, it's not like conspiracies that trans people
Speaker 2: made up. It's always conspiracies about trans people. It's like, like,
Speaker 2: can we never get one that like.
Speaker 4: Often I can't remember the last time I had like
Speaker 4: a positive Pride Month episode, which I feel kind of
Speaker 4: bad about, but I don't know. It's still an interesting
Speaker 4: topic and I've not seen this discussed as much as
Speaker 4: that should be. And you know, last week, I really
Speaker 4: thought I was going to have, you know, a difficult
Speaker 4: work week researching Trump pornography. I thought that'd be, like,
Speaker 4: you know, the low part of my month. But it
Speaker 4: turns out spending three days to sifting through mass Shooter
Speaker 4: is actually much worse, much worse than looking through Trump board.
Speaker 2: So Jarisy, can I can?
Speaker 3: I can? I can?
Speaker 2: I recommend that you two spend your time listening to
Speaker 2: a bunch of rioters talking about the absolute worst time
Speaker 2: of their life. Much better, all right, So let's get
Speaker 2: into it. We're gonna talk first about video games. I'm
Speaker 2: gonna quote a tweet from a kind of failure of
Speaker 2: a far right influencer, which is exciting because they're mostly
Speaker 2: gonna be talking about successful ones. But is this guy
Speaker 2: named ben ko uk flag in bio, so opinion immediately discarded.
Speaker 2: But he has said a few days ago quote Activision's
Speaker 2: Call of Duty has added transgender bullets to the game
Speaker 2: in honor of Pride Month, so you can literally play
Speaker 2: as a transgender mass shooter unquote. This tweet was almost
Speaker 2: ripped word for word by Ian Miles Chung basically said
Speaker 2: the exact same thing, except you said role play, not play.
Speaker 2: Extremely funny and I did not realize the bullets themselves
Speaker 2: identified as trans. But good for she her they them,
Speaker 2: I guess. So we started to see this claim repeated
Speaker 2: through the anti trans far right grifter media space right.
Speaker 2: Limbs of TikTok said that quote call of Duty is
Speaker 2: now enabling kids to rule play being a literal trans terrorist.
Speaker 2: And for some reason, whenever Limbs of TikTok writes terrorists,
Speaker 2: she asterix out the o's.
Speaker 4: I don't know why, but this this started to pick
Speaker 4: up steam. There was an article in Glenn Beck's The
Speaker 4: Blaze quote call of Duty Pride Bundle let's players simulate
Speaker 4: murder using trans flag adorned guns and bullets.
Speaker 2: I'm so excited for these people to fi to find
Speaker 2: out about counter strike. There are gonna be literally so many,
Speaker 2: so many articles. They just have the video clip of
Speaker 2: the thing in places at the n words says terrorists win.
Speaker 4: The Quartering wrote, call of Duty is so trans Pride
Speaker 4: bullets whatevery mass shooter wants. So what's going on here?
Speaker 4: Cause this, you know, if you're not as online as
Speaker 4: some of us, some other people are you know, this
Speaker 4: is maybe confusing. Why are they saying that trans people
Speaker 4: are all mass shooters?
Speaker 2: Now?
Speaker 4: What's going on?
Speaker 5: And you know?
Speaker 4: And also if you're thinking it's kind of odd that
Speaker 4: there would be a Call of Duty update where you
Speaker 4: can literally play as a transgender mass shooter and shoot
Speaker 4: transgender bullets, you would be right because that never happened.
Speaker 4: It's false, no way, not this time.
Speaker 2: We created it.
Speaker 4: Not this time. No, not this time. So let's get
Speaker 4: into what's really going on with this Call of Duty
Speaker 4: Pride update, and then we'll discuss why so many of
Speaker 4: these far right influences are pushing this kind of trans
Speaker 4: terrorist story. So on June first, Activision did release an
Speaker 4: update for the terrible new Call of Duty Modern Warfare three.
Speaker 4: It contained anime mecha skins and seven free weapon skins
Speaker 4: themed after various Pride flegs. Now, some would argue that
Speaker 4: the mechasuits are essentially also Pride themed, but I digress.
Speaker 4: For this Pride Weapon Camo pack, it will color your
Speaker 4: gun with the flag of your choosing. One of the
Speaker 4: said flags is the blue, pink and white trans flag. Yet,
Speaker 4: if you apply the trans skin to any of the
Speaker 4: regular guns in the game, the bullets will not be trans'd.
Speaker 4: So what gives without the transgender bullets? How is anyone
Speaker 4: supposed to literally role play a mass shooter like libs
Speaker 4: of tech Talk and Ian Miles Chung say we can.
Speaker 4: So it turns out these quote unquote transgender bullets were
Speaker 4: in fact not intentionally added to the game in honor
Speaker 4: of Pride Month, and are most likely a bug that
Speaker 4: affects one single gun when one exclusive attachment is equipped.
Speaker 4: I'm going to quote from Kotaku quote Modern Warfare three's
Speaker 4: M four came with a special Soul Harvester weapon blueprint
Speaker 4: which includes a skin and a specific attachment for the
Speaker 4: M four and quote unquote trace a rounds, which are
Speaker 4: colorful AMMO options that also leave traces of different visual
Speaker 4: effects like paint splatters or rose petals.
Speaker 2: This is special.
Speaker 4: The blueprint was for people who spend one hundred dollars
Speaker 4: to purchase the Vault edition of the game. Based on
Speaker 4: Kataku's testing, it appears the quote unquote trans bullets only
Speaker 4: appear when applying the transgender flag Camo skin on this
Speaker 4: specific weapon blueprint. It's unclear this is a bug. At
Speaker 4: one point during testing, the bullets in the cartridge were
Speaker 4: only the pink colors in the flag or is just
Speaker 4: an extremely indiosyncratic reflection of how Call of Duty's complex
Speaker 4: shader system interacts across thousands of items and cosmetics. During testing,
Speaker 4: any other Camo skin applied to the M four Soul
Speaker 4: Harvester blueprint resulted in bullets in the cartridge changing the
Speaker 4: color to match that skin.
Speaker 2: Unquote.
Speaker 4: Now, I do think it's a little bit silly that
Speaker 4: there's so much uproar about these trans colored bullets, but
Speaker 4: not as much about like just a trans colored gun,
Speaker 4: Like why is the bullet the big thing?
Speaker 2: And we all know that you.
Speaker 4: Can't play as a mass shooter in Call of Duty.
Speaker 4: You play as a war criminal and most transgender war
Speaker 4: criminals are just drone pilots or work for Raytheon. If
Speaker 4: you want to play a mass shooter game, you can
Speaker 4: just play GTA five or hit Man, where you play
Speaker 4: as CIS men.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I.
Speaker 4: Know, but the Russian terrorist airport level don't at me.
Speaker 4: I don't care anyway. There there was a great article
Speaker 4: in former Tucker Carlson Project, The Daily Caller with the
Speaker 4: headline Pride Month finally comes for one of the last
Speaker 4: bastions of manhood and the opening tagline is gamers. They
Speaker 4: targeted gamers.
Speaker 3: Oh no, So.
Speaker 4: Anyway, what's really at play here with this transmash shooter stuff.
Speaker 4: This is just another beat in the rhetorical strategy that
Speaker 4: conservative anti trans influencers have been building over the past
Speaker 4: year and a half, using a mix of cherry picked data,
Speaker 4: bad stats, and often outright lies to convince people that
Speaker 4: there is an increasing epidemic of transgender mass killing attacks
Speaker 4: sweeping the nation. When discussing this, Calling Duty, Pride Pack
Speaker 4: Libs of TikTok said, quote, with the uptick in actual
Speaker 4: trans violence we've been seeing, it's alarming that call of
Speaker 4: duty would introduce this and a Blaze article read quote.
Speaker 4: Critics have suggested activision Blizzard may want to reconsider given
Speaker 4: the recent mass shootings executed by lgbt radicals. There have
Speaker 4: been multiple mass shootings executed, attempted, or at the very
Speaker 4: least planned by transvestites and LGBTQ radicals in recent years.
Speaker 4: So this Blaze article begins by listing four alleged instances
Speaker 4: of these trans mass shooters. Two of these simply never happened,
Speaker 4: as the alleged transgender individuals, a trans guy and a
Speaker 4: fifty six year old organ and nazi were arrested after
Speaker 4: they made concerning posts online. And the other two which
Speaker 4: which did happen. These were shootings, except these were never
Speaker 4: actually done by trans people.
Speaker 3: It's a made up tick. It's a total fabrication. It
Speaker 3: never happened.
Speaker 6: It never happened.
Speaker 2: This one was invented by a writer.
Speaker 4: So although this transgender mass shooter narrative might not be real,
Speaker 4: do you know what is real?
Speaker 2: Mia? Is it capitalism?
Speaker 4: It is, and capitalism is fueled, at least currently by
Speaker 4: the products and sponsors that support this podcast. Okay, we
Speaker 4: are back now. Trying to frame every new mass shooter
Speaker 4: as some like crazed leftist of some variety is an
Speaker 4: old tactic popularized by the likes of Andy Know, Which
Speaker 4: is you know ironic? Considering the fact that political extremist
Speaker 4: related killings for the past ten years are overwhelmingly done
Speaker 4: by individuals tied to right wing extremism, the ADL puts
Speaker 4: it at seventy five percent, whereas leftist extremism, which is
Speaker 4: categorized as including anarchists as well as black nationalist groups,
Speaker 4: are responsible for just four percent. Most of the rest
Speaker 4: they categorize as Islamic violent extremists, including the twenty sixteen
Speaker 4: Pulse nightclub massacre targeted against c people in Orlando, although
Speaker 4: one could argue that that is also right wing extremistum
Speaker 4: like they are also right wiggers like It's like yes,
Speaker 4: it turns out the ADL might have troubling some troubling
Speaker 4: ways of collecting data breaking news anyway, regardless of the
Speaker 4: actual facts. Lying about the political demographic of mass shooters
Speaker 4: is an old tactic employed by far right content creators
Speaker 4: to gain clicks and influence the talking points of more
Speaker 4: popular media figures and politicians, And now the past few
Speaker 4: years we've seen a new iteration of this tactic, where
Speaker 4: in the confusion and chaos of the first few minutes
Speaker 4: and hours after a shooting, anti trans influencers will do
Speaker 4: everything they can to frame an alleged or suspected shooter
Speaker 4: of being transgender, often using out of context social media posts,
Speaker 4: doctored photographs, photos of other people, or just pictures of
Speaker 4: like long or dyed hair to affirm that a MAI
Speaker 4: shooter must actually be transgender now, even if this claim
Speaker 4: is like widely debunked later on, most of the people
Speaker 4: that follow these far right accounts won't be hearing about that,
Speaker 4: So all they need to do is use this brief
Speaker 4: window of chaos to seed the idea into people's minds.
Speaker 4: And if you do this thing frequently enough after each
Speaker 4: new mass shooting, then it's pretty easy to create a
Speaker 4: false perception of this increasing trend. Now, this style of
Speaker 4: propaganda has been largely spearheaded by chia y Trek using
Speaker 4: her libs of TikTok account. Here's another quote from her quote.
Speaker 4: The modern LGBTQ plus movement is radicalizing young activists into
Speaker 4: becoming violent terrorist extremists. The uptick in trans violence is
Speaker 4: going to get worse unquote. But this sort of rhetoric
Speaker 4: has been spread by many other online figures in this orbit,
Speaker 4: like disgraced buzzfeedwriter Benny Johnson and chronic poster ian Miles Chunk.
Speaker 4: Their rhetoric has been spread by sitting politicians Donald Trump
Speaker 4: Junior and Elon Musk. Now, to clarify, people have been
Speaker 4: lying about the gender identity of mass shooters for like
Speaker 4: a long time. It's one of the oldest jokes on
Speaker 4: four Chan. But what's been going on the past two
Speaker 4: years is something different, and it requires a little bit
Speaker 4: more in depth examination of this propaganda trend. Now to
Speaker 4: get into more specific examples here, I like to break
Speaker 4: down a common meme format used to spread this type
Speaker 4: of false propaganda. It's usually about five pictures of mass
Speaker 4: shooters with text next to each picture that reads something
Speaker 4: like the Nashville shooter identified as trans, the X shooter
Speaker 4: identified as trans. So it will just list all of
Speaker 4: these people that allegedly are mass shooters and allegedly identified
Speaker 4: as trans. Now, police didn't identify the Nashville Covenant School
Speaker 4: shooter as a trans man, that we have to take
Speaker 4: their word for it. They've released no other info on that. Typically,
Speaker 4: this is seen as like the first legitimate mass shooting
Speaker 4: done by a transgender individual, and the past year we've
Speaker 4: been waiting for more and more context to come out
Speaker 4: about this mass shooting and it's possible motivations. So I'm
Speaker 4: not even going to really discuss this one right now.
Speaker 4: Well just to say, sure, this is a trans person
Speaker 4: who happened to do a mass shooting and leave it
Speaker 4: at that, even though it's you know, not totally clear.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, I do. I want to add one
Speaker 2: thing briefly, which is that like trying to find out
Speaker 2: information from the police about a mass shooting is such
Speaker 2: a crapshoot, Like they just you know, they'll they'll be
Speaker 2: like an initial flurry of press releases or whatever, and
Speaker 2: then they just will never talk about it again until
Speaker 2: maybe the trial. And sometimes you get some from that well.
Speaker 4: And in often cases for mass shooters who often die,
Speaker 4: there is.
Speaker 2: No true never get yeah yeah if they're dead.
Speaker 4: Like but even keeping this Nashville incident as a legitimate
Speaker 4: mass shooting done by a person who happens to be
Speaker 4: trans when talking about this meme, the thing is is
Speaker 4: that with these five pictures that are on this meme.
Speaker 2: Most typically three out.
Speaker 4: Of the five people that have their pictures here aren't
Speaker 4: even treads.
Speaker 3: Not this time.
Speaker 2: It never happened.
Speaker 3: It is false. It never happened. It's a fake.
Speaker 2: It's fiction.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 4: Most famously, we have the Colorado Springs shooter Anderson Lee Aldrich,
Speaker 4: who killed five people and injured twenty five others at
Speaker 4: a queer club in twenty twenty two. Later on, his
Speaker 4: lawyer claimed that the shooter was non binary, which I
Speaker 4: believe is a disgusting and disingenuous attempt to get out
Speaker 4: of the more than now fifty hate crime charges that
Speaker 4: the shooter is facing. And this opinion is shared not
Speaker 4: only by the DA but also all other legitimate extremists
Speaker 4: and researchers. Prior to these claims in court, there was
Speaker 4: no indication whatsoever that the shooter was non binary or
Speaker 4: used they then pronouns. However, they did own rainbow flag.
Speaker 4: Shooting Targets ran a neo Nazi website that posted gun
Speaker 4: training videos and was known by online acquaintances to frequently
Speaker 4: post racist and homophobic content. Now I should clarify when
Speaker 4: I say shooting targets, I don't mean that it's pride
Speaker 4: theme shooting targets. It's that the people that you are
Speaker 4: shooting are painted like they are gay. So there you
Speaker 4: go now. Pictured next in the meme is someone with
Speaker 4: purple colored hair, labeled as the Denver shooter. This person
Speaker 4: is not trans, has never claimed to be trans. He
Speaker 4: just has dyed hair. He killed one person in a
Speaker 4: school shooting that he planned with a sixteen year old
Speaker 4: trans guy.
Speaker 2: In mass shooting? Correct? Correct?
Speaker 4: Will we will get in We will get into this
Speaker 4: later because the definition of mass shooting is getting stretched
Speaker 4: liberally here now. The third person pictured who is in
Speaker 4: trans changes more frequently in different versions of the meme
Speaker 4: that you can find online. One version includes someone referenced
Speaker 4: as the Philadelphia shooter. This is referencing a shooting spree
Speaker 4: that resulted in five people being killed. This shooter had
Speaker 4: previously posted photos of himself cross dressing in women's clothes,
Speaker 4: and this was used by figures like Marjorie Taylor Green
Speaker 4: to claim that the cis Mail shooter was actually quote
Speaker 4: another trans shooter. Family of this shooter referred to him
Speaker 4: as a quote unquote biblical extremist, and he often posted
Speaker 4: bizarre Christian spiritual conspiracy theories and was an outspoken fan
Speaker 4: of Tucker Carlson. In another version of the meme posted
Speaker 4: by Chaia Reichik, she identifies the Uvalde school shooter as
Speaker 4: transo and includes a picture of a transwoman holding the
Speaker 4: trans Pride flag. This was posted in January of this year.
Speaker 4: Elon Musk replied to the tweet with two exclamation points.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 4: In the hours after the Euvaldi School shooting, pictures of
Speaker 4: two or three different transwomen were used to falsely label
Speaker 4: the shooter as trans, with at least one of these transwomen,
Speaker 4: being from New York, the other from Georgia. Both these
Speaker 4: women received a great deal of harassment after the shooting,
Speaker 4: Arizona Congressman Paul Gozar tweeted that the shooter was quote
Speaker 4: a transsexual, leftist illegal alien unquote, which is frankly amazing
Speaker 4: because every word in that sentence is wrong.
Speaker 3: We made this one up.
Speaker 1: It's a made up tap, it's a total fabrication.
Speaker 6: It never happened.
Speaker 3: It never happened.
Speaker 4: Now, the other person in this meme that is typically
Speaker 4: accepted to be trans is the Aberdeen shooter. Now, I'm
Speaker 4: going to just quote from the Washington Post here.
Speaker 2: Quote.
Speaker 4: In twenty eighteen, in Aberdeen, Maryland, a twenty six year
Speaker 4: old shot and killed three people at a pharmaceuticals distribution
Speaker 4: center before turning the weapon on themselves. The sheriff said
Speaker 4: the shooter had been diagnosed as mentally ill. In twenty sixteen,
Speaker 4: a close friend reported the shooter quote suffered from bipolar
Speaker 4: disorder and struggled since early in high school with severe depression,
Speaker 4: partly connected to their feelings of not being accepted when
Speaker 4: they first came out as a gay teenage girl and
Speaker 4: later as transgender unquote by most accounts this is the
Speaker 4: transgender guy who began transitioning shortly before the shooting. Pronouns
Speaker 4: and stuff are unclear. They also worked at this distribution
Speaker 4: center a few weeks prior to them doing the shooting.
Speaker 4: This incident's typically not categorized as a mass shooting because
Speaker 4: only three people were killed, excluding the shooter.
Speaker 6: Now.
Speaker 4: One of the more recent attempts at this transgender terrorist
Speaker 4: syop was in the aftermath of the shooting at Joel
Speaker 4: Ostein's megachurch in Houston earlier this February. The shooter was
Speaker 4: a thirty six year old woman carrying her seven year
Speaker 4: old son, sadly, both of whom died along with one
Speaker 4: other person just hours after the shooting. Of far right
Speaker 4: accounts like lips of TikTok and end Wokeness claimed that
Speaker 4: she was transgender, pointing to documents where she used the
Speaker 4: name Jeffrey Now. Chaia Reichek called the shooting quote another
Speaker 4: act of trans terrorism. We need to have a national
Speaker 4: conversation about the LGBTQ movement turning youth into violent extremists.
Speaker 2: Unquote. Didn't she literally say that exact thing with the
Speaker 2: last one? Yeah, they don't even cope with new tweets.
Speaker 4: Like they really just have the same five tweets in rotation.
Speaker 4: Marjorie Taylor Green called her quote a trans from El
Speaker 4: Salvador unquote. Missouri Representative Josh Holly, Marco Rubio, and Elon
Speaker 4: musk All post about this quote unquote epidemic of trans violence.
Speaker 4: These claims were boosted by Donald Trump Junior and Ted Cruz.
Speaker 4: Fox News ran a whole story with a headline about
Speaker 4: the shooter being transgender and guess what, She's not trans.
Speaker 4: She is a cis woman who gave birth to a
Speaker 4: child and has always identified as a woman. It just
Speaker 4: appears that she was given a masculine name at birth
Speaker 4: and later changed it to a more feminine name. The
Speaker 4: far right content sphere created so much uproar that the
Speaker 4: police had to do a whole press conference about how
Speaker 4: the shooter was not trans, and after the Peace lawyers
Speaker 4: clarified she was not trans, Fox News changed their claim,
Speaker 4: now saying on air that the shooter quote identified as
Speaker 4: both genders and was quote a biological woman who sometimes
Speaker 4: identified as a man named Jeffrey unquote, which just isn't true.
Speaker 2: Jesus Christ.
Speaker 4: But the thing about this one is that it wasn't
Speaker 4: just far right influencers in Fox News who ran with
Speaker 4: this transgender narrative. MSNBC jumped on very early to say
Speaker 4: that the shooter was quote a Hispanic transgender woman who
Speaker 4: quote unquote identified as a woman unquote.
Speaker 3: Is totally made up, pure fiction. It's fiction. It's fiction.
Speaker 3: We made it up.
Speaker 2: MSNBC war like MSNB.
Speaker 5: Shit, great great with me, great, great, doing great this morning.
Speaker 4: Do you know what's also doing great?
Speaker 2: Mia? Is it the products and services support this podcast.
Speaker 4: They're pretty consistent. Yeah, they are still around and here
Speaker 4: you can listen to their important messages.
Speaker 2: All right, we are so back.
Speaker 4: So there's so many more cases like the ones that
Speaker 4: I've talked about. Right. The reason I started working on
Speaker 4: this episode in the first place was due to far
Speaker 4: right accounts claiming that a man named Jared Rivierez, who
Speaker 4: killed his seventy year old roommate and went on a
Speaker 4: massive stabbing spree last month outside of an AMC theater
Speaker 4: and a McDonald's Massachusetts, was claimed to be a quote
Speaker 4: mentally ill trans terrorist by limbs.
Speaker 1: Of TikTok and.
Speaker 4: A transactivist quote unquote who's a man who thinks he's
Speaker 4: a woman, which is a line libs of TikTok loves
Speaker 4: using Now. Jared claimed to be an artist in a
Speaker 4: model but was actually like this really weird like grifter entrepreneur.
Speaker 4: He kind of reminds me of that weird Canadian cat
Speaker 4: killer Luke Megnan YadA, who like created a whole bunch
Speaker 4: of fake posts to like pretend to be famous and
Speaker 4: like created like fake fans. It's very similar to this case.
Speaker 4: And later this guy Luke in Canada also killed a
Speaker 4: gay man. Very similar cases. Honestly, Jared here again, he's
Speaker 4: like pretending to be like an international entrepreneur. He looks
Speaker 4: like this weird like hippie surfer dude with long bleached hair.
Speaker 4: Jared's father is a wealthy Christian therapist who looks very
Speaker 4: similar and anti trans influencers have pointed to the word
Speaker 4: she on Jared's Instagram file, but Jared's actual gender identity
Speaker 4: is really unclear. He's never pictured wearing women's clothing. He
Speaker 4: would frequently post shirtless buff selfies. Jared has never claimed
Speaker 4: to be trans or a woman, and has never used
Speaker 4: transgender language or iconography. Jared did file a name change
Speaker 4: request last April, but it was to change his last name.
Speaker 4: He goes by Jared. That same month, April, So two
Speaker 4: months ago, Jared sexually harassed a model at a Beverly
Speaker 4: Hills hotel, saying that he wanted to have kids with
Speaker 4: her and proposed to her, saying, I'm going to be
Speaker 4: a good husband. You're gonna be my wife. Unquote. This
Speaker 4: person simply, we have no no reason to think they're trans.
Speaker 4: They do this, They do like weird like art stuff,
Speaker 4: and I don't know. They're like California, Beverly Hills, poison brained,
Speaker 4: and it seems to they seem to have gone through
Speaker 4: some kind of mental health breakdown which resulted in them
Speaker 4: killing their roommate, two dogs, and stabbing like six or
Speaker 4: seven people in Massachusetts. But another trans terrorist? Sure?
Speaker 5: Why not?
Speaker 4: In January of this year, in Iowa, teenager open fire
Speaker 4: at a school, killing one person and then himself again.
Speaker 4: The usual suspects were super quick to label him as
Speaker 4: another trans terrorist, Elon Musk saying, this is happening a lot.
Speaker 4: Something is deeply wrong. This kid largely seemed like a
Speaker 4: regular gen Z liberal. He listed his pronouns as he they.
Speaker 4: He posted things like nominally in support of trans people.
Speaker 4: He used the hashtag gender fluid a single time in
Speaker 4: a TikTok video filmed with what appears to be a
Speaker 4: trans friend of his. He also posted on Reddit two
Speaker 4: years ago that he didn't want to transition because he
Speaker 4: didn't quote wants to look ugly. He never specifically identified
Speaker 4: as trans. This is just kind of a tragic case.
Speaker 4: I don't know what the deal with this kid was.
Speaker 4: They seemed deeply confused and upset and killed someone and
Speaker 4: then killed themselves. It sucks, but it's not a mass shooting,
Speaker 4: and it doesn't it doesn't link to anything being a
Speaker 4: pattern of transgender terrorism. That does not stop someone like
Speaker 4: Donald Trump Junior is saying, quote, the modern LGBTQ plus
Speaker 4: movement is radicalizing our youth into becoming violent extremists per capita.
Speaker 4: Is there a more violent group of people anywhere in
Speaker 4: the world than radicalized transactivists Given the tiny fraction of
Speaker 4: the population they make up, it doesn't seem like anyone
Speaker 4: else comes even close. We have a lot of claims
Speaker 4: like this, which is why I need to start talking
Speaker 4: about statistics my least favorite thing, because this sort of
Speaker 4: messaging is repeated a lot. We have this post from
Speaker 4: I think Benny Johnson or Donald Trump Junior. I can't
Speaker 4: twelve which one because unfortunately it got deleted before I
Speaker 4: was able to log who did it, so apologies for that.
Speaker 4: But it's a very similar sort of thing, saying there's
Speaker 4: been at least five massive tacks by transgender people since
Speaker 4: twenty eighteen. Considering the group makes up less than point
Speaker 4: five percent of the population, that's a massive overrepresentation. We'll
Speaker 4: get into that in a sec. So boy often when
Speaker 4: these people are talking about this trend of trans mass shooters,
Speaker 4: they're focusing specifically on the period of time between twenty
Speaker 4: eighteen and twenty twenty four because largely a lot of
Speaker 4: conservatives think that trans people were kind of like invented
Speaker 4: around twenty eighteen. That's when they first started to kind
Speaker 4: of like notice that people were trans, which is something
Speaker 4: we've talked about before in terms of like the arc
Speaker 4: of homophobia and transphobia in relation to like gay marriage
Speaker 4: and like a few other things. This is something we've
Speaker 4: reported about consistently on the show. So they're very often
Speaker 4: only looking at data from select years, and as we've
Speaker 4: discussed here, they largely inflate the number of quote unquote
Speaker 4: mass shooters, as well as the number of mass shooters
Speaker 4: who they call transgender. They will often, you know, very
Speaker 4: loosely define what a mass shooting is when it suits them,
Speaker 4: and then very strictly define it when it doesn't. In
Speaker 4: the Blaze article about that Call of Duty pride pack,
Speaker 4: they say quote uote trans identifying suspects. A share of
Speaker 4: public mass shootings nationwide over the twenty eighteen or twenty
Speaker 4: twenty three period is reportedly well over seven times their
Speaker 4: share of the population, which links to a very sketchy
Speaker 4: right wing crime stats website that doesn't publish any of
Speaker 4: their data. So sure, so, there is a few different
Speaker 4: ways to categorize what a mass shooting is. There's no
Speaker 4: universal definition for what makes a mass shooting versus a
Speaker 4: mass killing, so different groups categorize things kind of differently.
Speaker 4: The Mass Killing Database is a partnership between the ap
Speaker 4: USA Today and Northwestern University, and it defines mass killings
Speaker 4: quote as the intentional killing of four or more victims,
Speaker 4: excluding the deaths of unborn children and the offenders by
Speaker 4: any means, within a twenty four hour period. Their database
Speaker 4: currently lists five hundred and ninety such killings since two
Speaker 4: thousand and six. James Allen Fox, professor of criminology and
Speaker 4: law at Northwestern University who manages the database, has said, quote,
Speaker 4: you can count the number of transgender and non binary
Speaker 4: shooters on one hand, they're actually underrepresented unquote, And again
Speaker 4: it's possible that because of how successful the right has
Speaker 4: been at this syop. When you're counting these number of
Speaker 4: transgender non binary shooters on one hand, that's also super
Speaker 4: overrepresented because they're most likely containing like the Colorado spring
Speaker 4: shooter and a lot of these other people. Now, trans
Speaker 4: people on average are reported to make up about one
Speaker 4: percent of the US population, but that number is steadily growing.
Speaker 4: We got to pump those numbers up. Those are rookie
Speaker 4: numbers now. It's also just kind of unclear what that
Speaker 4: number actually is. That's the current one from the US
Speaker 4: Census Bureau, and kind of an average, doubt because a
Speaker 4: lot of stats of like people older than twenty five
Speaker 4: say the numbers at like round zero point five point
Speaker 4: six percent versus people under twenty five reportedly it's like
Speaker 4: one point five percent. So you know, I'm just going
Speaker 4: to say around one percent now under most criterias for
Speaker 4: mass killings. Only one incident, the one in Nashville, qualifies
Speaker 4: for inclusion. Another data source called The Violence Project has
Speaker 4: recorded data on mass shootings in the US since nineteen
Speaker 4: sixty six. They more narrowly define a mass killing as
Speaker 4: four more people killed in a public unconnected to other
Speaker 4: criminal activity. Their current database has one hundred and ninety
Speaker 4: three entries. A spokesperson for their organization told Reuters that
Speaker 4: the twenty twenty three Nashville shooting quote is the first
Speaker 4: case of a trans perpetrator in their database, per their methodology.
Speaker 4: Another more broad data collection project is called the Gun
Speaker 4: Violence Archive. I'm just going to quote from Reuter's heer quote.
Speaker 4: The Gun Violence Archive, which began collecting data on gun
Speaker 4: violence in the US in twenty thirteen, recorded more than
Speaker 4: four thousand and four hundred mass shootings in the last decade.
Speaker 4: Its definition of a mass shooting is four or more
Speaker 4: people shot resulting in injury or death, excluding the perpetrator
Speaker 4: of those quote. The number of known suspects in a
Speaker 4: mass shooting which are trans is under ten for the
Speaker 4: last decade, which translated to zero point one one percent
Speaker 4: of the four four hundred shootings unquote, which is about
Speaker 4: nine times lower than SIS people per capita if we
Speaker 4: use the one percent trans population stat and even using
Speaker 4: the more conservative mass killing data set, the rate of
Speaker 4: this sort of violence by trans people is far lower
Speaker 4: than what would match our population margin. I'm going to
Speaker 4: add in a short quote from the Washington Post to
Speaker 4: kind of add in some context here quote. The gun
Speaker 4: violence Archive methodology would allow for inclusion of the Aberdeen
Speaker 4: and Denver cases, with zero point six percent of the population,
Speaker 4: one would expect at least sixteen mass shootings to be
Speaker 4: conducted by people identifying as trans in the past five years. Instead,
Speaker 4: there are just three possible cases cited by most conservatives unquote.
Speaker 4: So after looking over all of this data, it would
Speaker 4: actually appear that transgender people are less likely to commit
Speaker 4: a mass shooting than CIS people, even by some of
Speaker 4: the more conservative estimates. The other side of this is
Speaker 4: that not only are trans people less likely to you know,
Speaker 4: do this sort of violence, they are way more likely
Speaker 4: to be on the receiving end than sispeople. For the
Speaker 4: National Archive of Criminal Justice data, LGBTQ plus people are
Speaker 4: more than twice as likely to be a victim of
Speaker 4: gun violence than their cisgender and straight peers. According to
Speaker 4: the Human Rights Campaign, twenty nine percent of transgender youth
Speaker 4: have been threatened or injured with a weapon on school property,
Speaker 4: compared to seven percent of cisgender youth. So even for
Speaker 4: school shootings, you are so much, so much more likely
Speaker 4: to face gun violence at school if you are trans, transgender,
Speaker 4: non binary, gender question people have reportedly higher rates of
Speaker 4: being impacted or knowing someone who's been impacted by a
Speaker 4: mass shooting compared to their cisgender queer peers. This is,
Speaker 4: you know, a data average, but it's usually around twenty
Speaker 4: two percent to nineteen percent. And this whole topic gets
Speaker 4: so much more like dark and grounded when you know
Speaker 4: that three hundred and twenty trans people were killed last
Speaker 4: year according to data from the annual Trans Murder Monitoring Report,
Speaker 4: which is like, it's so dark that we even have
Speaker 4: something called the Trans Murder Monitoring Report.
Speaker 2: Also, we need to mention this because I don't think
Speaker 2: people this is really badly understood people who aren't trans.
Speaker 2: But those numbers are always significant undercounts, because yes, those
Speaker 2: projects are people scraping. Basically, news reports are trying to
Speaker 2: find like the families of victims, and there are a
Speaker 2: lot of people who get killed who the only people
Speaker 2: who know are their friends. And those people fucking either
Speaker 2: aren't talking to the press or the precious never like
Speaker 2: covers it, or you know, the police give their dead
Speaker 2: name and never talk about it, so they just are
Speaker 2: dead and everyone thinks they're sis.
Speaker 3: Yep.
Speaker 4: And just in the United States last year, thirty three
Speaker 4: trans people were murdered, and again this is a vast undercount.
Speaker 4: Like Mia said, meanwhile, you have all these people on
Speaker 4: the right who will talk about all of these, all
Speaker 4: these alleged mass shootings by alleged trans people, And one
Speaker 4: of their favorite lines when they try to like affirm
Speaker 4: that a shooter is actually trans is quote watch how
Speaker 4: quickly the story will now disappear unquote, which is just
Speaker 4: ironic for a few reasons. One, because that's how news works,
Speaker 4: is that we move on to a new thing. But
Speaker 4: also it'll probably disappear as well well because they're not
Speaker 4: actually trans, you know, when you're in the case of
Speaker 4: the Uvaldi shooter, in the case of the megachurch shooter
Speaker 4: from last year. Yeah, people move on. But also they're
Speaker 4: not going to keep harping on your weird conspiracy theory
Speaker 4: because it's a weird conspiracy theory. It's not true even
Speaker 4: if this is, even if they were right, which they
Speaker 4: are not. It also is just like imagine in like
Speaker 4: nineteen twenty or like, we have a problematic rise in
Speaker 4: left handed mass shooters. So we're like, well, yeah, because
Speaker 4: there's more left handed people, there's going to be at
Speaker 4: least some level of correlation statistically. Again, these people act
Speaker 4: like trans people were only invented in twenty eighteen and
Speaker 4: are just like slowly like recruiting in numbers, which, hey,
Speaker 4: you know, at least we are kind of slowly recruiting,
Speaker 4: And like the actual goal of this rhetoric, beyond just
Speaker 4: you know, altering the fabric of reality, is to just
Speaker 4: encourage violence against trans people. That is what they're doing.
Speaker 4: It's to see trans people as a threat that you
Speaker 4: feel justified in doing violence against them. Just a few
Speaker 4: weeks ago, a very popular gun YouTuber made this joke
Speaker 4: where they were talking about, you know, getting ready to
Speaker 4: shoot a tea word and they stopped and they were like, oh, sorry,
Speaker 4: I mean a school shooter. Wink wink. So like they're
Speaker 4: trying to use school shooter to be a dog whistle
Speaker 4: for trans people This is all just to justify violence.
Speaker 4: That's all this is doing, and to some degree it's working.
Speaker 4: Just last week, a trans kid was assaulted in the
Speaker 4: men's bathroom at school and reportedly one of their teeth exploded.
Speaker 4: This was a trans girl who was using the men's
Speaker 4: bathroom like all of these freaks want them to, and
Speaker 4: she still got assaulted. I think it's super important when
Speaker 4: talking about this sort of unreality propaganda is that like
Speaker 4: these people like Limbs of TikTok and Miles Schong, they're
Speaker 4: not just like falling further into a delusional conspiracy theory.
Speaker 4: Same thing with Elon Musk, Right, it's easy. I think
Speaker 4: it's easy to be like, oh, they just actually like
Speaker 4: legitimately are like falling into this like conspiratorial delusion.
Speaker 2: And it's not that.
Speaker 4: What it is is they are actually intentionally crafting reality.
Speaker 4: It's not them like falling victim to this like unfortunate delusion.
Speaker 4: They are choosing which a version of reality to believe
Speaker 4: in because it's the one that they want, and that's
Speaker 4: what they're doing, and they want it to be a
Speaker 4: reality where more people feel comfortable assaulting and killing trans people.
Speaker 4: That's that's the actual goal of its propaganda.
Speaker 2: We need to be very clear about this, about what's
Speaker 2: sort of happening here, which is one of the fastest
Speaker 2: ways to get a group of people to commit a
Speaker 2: genocide is by convincing them that they are all about
Speaker 2: to be killed.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 2: This is one of the things behind this or behind
Speaker 2: the Bosnian genocide, This is one of the things behind Rwanda.
Speaker 5: Is if you can.
Speaker 2: Convince a lot of people that their neighbors are about
Speaker 2: to fucking kill them, that's how you get them to
Speaker 2: do the genocide. Because the thing that they believe is
Speaker 2: that like, oh, this is self defense, Like these people
Speaker 2: are about to kill us, and that is the kind
Speaker 2: of reality tunnel being mobilized here is a is it
Speaker 2: called genocide? And the other side of this that I
Speaker 2: think is so grim is that there used to be
Speaker 2: a time as a society where you know, we attempted
Speaker 2: to explain why there are mass shootings.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: This is something that I remember living through. Like if
Speaker 2: you go back to like twenty sixteen, two thousand, seventeen,
Speaker 2: twenty fifteen, like we used to there used to be
Speaker 2: people other than these just like genocidal fascists attempting to
Speaker 2: explain why why these shootings were happening. The actual data
Speaker 2: on transmass shooters and how few of them there are
Speaker 2: is quietly devastating to a lot of the theories that
Speaker 2: used to be sort of bandied about, right, the theories
Speaker 2: that this was about sort of objection, the theory that
Speaker 2: this was about this, you know, like sort of de
Speaker 2: industrialization and like the consequences that this has had on
Speaker 2: people that there were you know, it was this sort
Speaker 2: of like downward social mobility that was causing this violence. Right,
Speaker 2: If any of that were true, there would be a
Speaker 2: fucking million mass shooters, because again, the transpoverty rate is
Speaker 2: like it's it's it's a rits around thirty percent, right,
Speaker 2: for the rest of the country it is like a
Speaker 2: quarter as well, it's that quarter. It's like a third
Speaker 2: of that much, which right, there should be if it
Speaker 2: was just purely a product of like material conditions, there
Speaker 2: would be a lot more transmitted shooters. But there aren't
Speaker 2: because again, you know, the actual theory that fits this
Speaker 2: data and fits also the behavior of all of these people,
Speaker 2: like all of these sort of fascists trying to explain
Speaker 2: mass shootings as being about trans people. The thing that
Speaker 2: it fits is this is the theory that this is
Speaker 2: basically the replacement of clan rallies. Right, we don't have
Speaker 2: we don't have collective lynchings anymore. We have individual ones.
Speaker 2: And all of these fucking people are trying to make
Speaker 2: sure that there's just more lynchings and that these lynchings
Speaker 2: are you know, is like it's there their sort of
Speaker 2: like armed follower fanatics go and shoot a bunch more
Speaker 2: trans people in a nclub, and then you know, once
Speaker 2: that happens, they will disavow it by saying, oh, hey,
Speaker 2: this this this nightclub shooting was this is actually done
Speaker 2: by a fucking transperson. They'll keep doing this until they
Speaker 2: have enough political power to openly come out and claim
Speaker 2: that all of these people were their fucking revolutionary heroes
Speaker 2: in their nude fucking pantheon of the fascist state.
Speaker 4: And there was that trans boy who was assaulted in
Speaker 4: the bathroom a few months ago and died days later
Speaker 4: in the hospital. There's this this It keeps happening. And
Speaker 4: I didn't want this to be like a depressing episode.
Speaker 4: I wanted this to break down a conspiracy theory I've
Speaker 4: been seeing more frequently talk about you know what's fueling
Speaker 4: it actually go over the instances that are included in
Speaker 4: it to kind of you know, debunk for lack of
Speaker 4: a better term, uh, this sort of rhetoric, and just
Speaker 4: so you can be more aware of it when you
Speaker 4: see it, because often you'll see this this you know,
Speaker 4: this meme with five five pictures, you'll see a copy
Speaker 4: pasta version of it. So just just being aware of
Speaker 4: what this is, what the what this rhetoric is trying
Speaker 4: to do, and the you know, unfortunate fact that trans
Speaker 4: people are form are far far more likely to be
Speaker 4: a victim of gun violence and mash and mass shootings
Speaker 4: than they ever then then say people and are actually
Speaker 4: less likely to participate in such violence statistically speaking. So yeah,
Speaker 4: that is the episode today. Not meant to be depressing,
Speaker 4: just meant to be informative. But you know, when it
Speaker 4: comes to me, those things often overlap.
Speaker 2: Any such cases.
Speaker 4: I hope you have, I hope you have a good
Speaker 4: Pride month, Stay safe and stay dangerous.
Speaker 7: Hello and welcome to it could happen here. This is
Speaker 7: Sharene and today we are going to be talking about
Speaker 7: the current quote unquote peace plan that was presented by
Speaker 7: the US and what they say is their attempt to
Speaker 7: end the genocide in Lesse. They call it a war,
Speaker 7: and I call it what it is, which is a genocide.
Speaker 7: Earlier this month, Joe Biden announced what he claimed was
Speaker 7: an Israeli peace plan to bring about an eventual ceasefire
Speaker 7: in Jse. But according to journalists and anyone with eyes,
Speaker 7: the new plan is almost indistinguishable from previous plans proposed
Speaker 7: by Hamas. We're going to get into the details of
Speaker 7: the US plan in a little bit, but first I
Speaker 7: want to address the immense loss of Palestinian life that
Speaker 7: has led up to this plan, because if the plan
Speaker 7: is successful, it would usher in a ceasefire to a
Speaker 7: genocide that has killed more than thirty seven thousand Palestinians,
Speaker 7: which is a very low estimate, and the majority of
Speaker 7: these deaths are women and children. Not only have Palestinian
Speaker 7: children been brutally slaughtered for months, but Razza now has
Speaker 7: the largest population of child amputees in the world. In November,
Speaker 7: children in Razza hosted a press conference in English to
Speaker 7: beg the world for life. It's June now, and all
Speaker 7: we've seen since then is massacre after massacre. And while
Speaker 7: I think drawing attention to the children and the women
Speaker 7: who have been slaughtered is immensely necessary and important. I
Speaker 7: also want to emphasize that Palestinian men are not expendable,
Speaker 7: and not mentioning the immense loss that we have suffered
Speaker 7: across the board with men included, implies to the world
Speaker 7: that Arab men are not worth mourning, not worth saving
Speaker 7: nor protecting, that they are all terrorists or terrorists to
Speaker 7: be who are simply killed as casualties in the quote
Speaker 7: fog of war. I also think that the mention of
Speaker 7: children is specifically used as a way to at least
Speaker 7: try to make the world empathize and fucking feel something
Speaker 7: about the lives that have been stolen. Parents literally hold
Speaker 7: up the limp and decapitated bodies of their babies in
Speaker 7: its broadcasts worldwide, and yet the dehumanization of Arabs runs
Speaker 7: so deep that such graphic displays of horror and death
Speaker 7: are considered normal. No one bats an eye. It is
Speaker 7: insane that two hundred and seventy four Palestinians were slaughtered
Speaker 7: for four prisoners of war who could have been released
Speaker 7: in a prisoner exchange exchanges and deals that Israel has
Speaker 7: repeatedly red. We will get into this more in this episode,
Speaker 7: and people are celebrating this shameful military operation which US
Speaker 7: troops were a part of, and ignoring the Palestinians that
Speaker 7: were killed and murdered in the process, further emphasizing that
Speaker 7: Palestinian life is not as important as Israeli life by
Speaker 7: a huge margin. In in case you didn't hear the
Speaker 7: details about this operation that I'm talking about, US and
Speaker 7: Israeli troops infiltrated a refugee camp in trucks disguised as
Speaker 7: humanitarian aid to trojan horse their way into further massacrering
Speaker 7: and maiming people who were already being forcibly starved. Are
Speaker 7: you hearing this one more time? They infiltrated a refugee
Speaker 7: camp and trucks disguised as humanitarian aid. Israeli special forces
Speaker 7: were also disguised as Palestinian refugees looking for a place
Speaker 7: to live when they entered the buildings where they thought
Speaker 7: the hostages were being held. Remember in January, and there
Speaker 7: was also video evidence of the IOF pretending to be
Speaker 7: medical staff in a hospital and then shooting and killing
Speaker 7: unarmed doctors, nurses, and patients. Oh, and then there was
Speaker 7: the discovery of at least three mass graves at Elsheffa hospital,
Speaker 7: where bodies, including many wearing scrubs, were found zip tied
Speaker 7: and buried in piles. Israel has been doing this for
Speaker 7: months and years and decades, and they've been getting away
Speaker 7: with it for months and years and decades. No one
Speaker 7: is hiding how they feel anymore. They are out here
Speaker 7: showing us with their actions. It's not ambiguous, it is
Speaker 7: not confusing. They are making it very simple. They are
Speaker 7: making it crystal clear. Palestinians do not matter, and Israel's
Speaker 7: intention is to continue their ethnic cleansing of Palestine. What's
Speaker 7: happening in Gliza is not about the hostages, and it
Speaker 7: has never been about the hostages. If that isn't clear
Speaker 7: to you by now, you have not been paying attention
Speaker 7: a few things about the hostages. Hamas has repeatedly offered
Speaker 7: since last year to release all hostages in exchange for
Speaker 7: Israel releasing all Palestinian prisoners. As of November first, according
Speaker 7: to Human Rights Watch, Israel held nearly seven thousand Palestinians
Speaker 7: in its prisons, and many of those held captive by
Speaker 7: Israel are not convicted of any crime. At least three
Speaker 7: thousand and six hundred and sixty Palestinians being held in
Speaker 7: Israel are under what is called administrative detention. An administrative
Speaker 7: detainee is someone held in prison without charge nor trial,
Speaker 7: without charge, no crime committed. I want to take a
Speaker 7: moment to bring up a report that came out recently
Speaker 7: that's not getting nearly enough attention. It's truly horrific, and
Speaker 7: I don't know how people are just glossing over it.
Speaker 7: But New York Times recently reported that Palestinians are being
Speaker 7: tortured and abused in Israeli prisons. Two journalists from the
Speaker 7: New York Times spent three months interviewing Israeli soldiers as
Speaker 7: well as Palestinians were detained at one particular prison. I'm
Speaker 7: not going to pretend I know how to pronounce it.
Speaker 7: It's spelled sde space Tei m An said Teman. I'm
Speaker 7: just going to go with that. But essentially, Israel is
Speaker 7: carrying out a policy of systematic torture in this army base,
Speaker 7: and this army base has been used as a detention
Speaker 7: camp for Palestinians from the Gaza Strip. This was all
Speaker 7: confirmed by a New York Times investigation. Reports of abuse
Speaker 7: at this site had already emerged in both Israeli and
Speaker 7: Arab media, and this was followed by outcries from local
Speaker 7: and international rights groups about the horrific conditions there. Apparently,
Speaker 7: it was mainly used as a quote makeshift interrogation center,
Speaker 7: but now it has become a major focus for the
Speaker 7: accusations that the Israeli military has mistreated its detainees, including
Speaker 7: people who were later determined to have no ties to
Speaker 7: Hamas or any other armed groups. The investigation revealed that
Speaker 7: at least twelve hundred Palestinian civilians were detained at this
Speaker 7: site in quote demeaning condition, without the ability to plead
Speaker 7: their cases to adjudge for up to seventy five days,
Speaker 7: and additionally denied access to lawyers for up to ninety days.
Speaker 7: Eight former detainees, all of whom the military confirmed were
Speaker 7: held at the site and spoke on the record, said
Speaker 7: they had been punched, kicked, and beaten with batons, rifle butts,
Speaker 7: and a handheld metal detector while they were in custody.
Speaker 7: Others said that they had been forced to wear a
Speaker 7: diaper while being interrogated, and that they had received electric
Speaker 7: shocks during their interrogation. According to the new York Times.
Speaker 7: Most of these testimonies were corroborated by interviews conducted by
Speaker 7: officials from the unr WA, the UN Agency for Palistine Refugees.
Speaker 7: The agency interviewed hundreds of returning detainees who reported widespread
Speaker 7: abuse at this site, as well as other Israeli detention facilities,
Speaker 7: including the beatings and the use of an electric probe.
Speaker 7: An Israeli soldier who served at this site also disclosed
Speaker 7: to The New York Times that his fellow soldiers often
Speaker 7: bragged about beating detainees, and he observed many instances of
Speaker 7: such treatment. He was speaking on condition of anonymity to
Speaker 7: avoid prosecution, but he said a detainee had been taking
Speaker 7: for treatment at the site's makeshift field hospital with a
Speaker 7: bone that had been broken during his detention, while another
Speaker 7: person was briefly taken out of sight and then returned
Speaker 7: with bleeding around his rib cage. I strongly urge you
Speaker 7: to read the New York Times piece in full. It
Speaker 7: details the most horrific things I've read in recent memory.
Speaker 5: I would be.
Speaker 7: Remiss to not mention at least a few of them,
Speaker 7: just to understand the severity. But this report essentially proves
Speaker 7: that Palestinians are experiencing sexual violence and have experienced sexual
Speaker 7: violence in Israeli prisons. This is one example. Mister el Hamloui,
Speaker 7: a senior nurse, said a female officer had ordered two
Speaker 7: soldiers to lift him up and press his rectum against
Speaker 7: a metal stick that was fixed to the ground. He
Speaker 7: said the stick penetrated his rectum for roughly five seconds,
Speaker 7: causing it to bleed and leaving him in unbearable pain.
Speaker 7: A leaked draft of the UNRWA report detailed at interview
Speaker 7: that gave a similar account. It cited a forty one
Speaker 7: year old detainee who said that interrogators made him sit
Speaker 7: on something like a hot metal stick that felt like fire,
Speaker 7: and he said that another detainee died after they put
Speaker 7: the electric stick up his anus. Doctor Elhemlaui also recalled
Speaker 7: being forced to sit in a chair wired with electricity.
Speaker 7: He said he was shocked so often that after initially
Speaker 7: urinating uncontrollably, he then stopped urnating for several days. He
Speaker 7: said that he too had been forced to wear nothing
Speaker 7: but a diaper to stop him from soiling the floor.
Speaker 7: Ibrahim Shaheen, thirty eight, a truck driver, He said he
Speaker 7: was shocked roughly half a dozen times while sitting in
Speaker 7: a chair. Officers had accused him of concealing information about
Speaker 7: the location of dead hostage, which ended up having no
Speaker 7: connection to him at all. Another man, mister Beckett, said
Speaker 7: that he was also forced to sit in a chair
Speaker 7: wired with electricity, sending a current pulsing through his body
Speaker 7: that made him pass out. Mister Beckett also said, along
Speaker 7: with other detainees that corroborated this, he only received roughly
Speaker 7: three meager snacks on most days, mostly bred with small
Speaker 7: quantities of cheese or jam or tuna. The military said
Speaker 7: the food provisions had been approved by an authorized nutritionist
Speaker 7: in order to maintain their health, but according to several
Speaker 7: of these detainees, that's not nearly enough, and they lost
Speaker 7: more than forty pounds during their detention. Again, I urge
Speaker 7: you to read the report in full. It needs more
Speaker 7: attention than is getting. But it is horrific and this
Speaker 7: is proof of the vile mistreatment of Palestinians. And it's
Speaker 7: from the New York Times. If you need a source
Speaker 7: that you quote unquote trust more than an El Jazeera
Speaker 7: or something which makes most But for those who do
Speaker 7: there it is Now, let's go back to the topic
Speaker 7: at hand. We were talking about the hostages and how
Speaker 7: Hamas had offered many times in the past to release
Speaker 7: all the hostages in exchange for releasing Palestinian prisoners, and
Speaker 7: despite Hamasa's offers, Israel has never agreed to any deal
Speaker 7: which involves the release of all Israeli hostages. On October ninth,
Speaker 7: two days after October seventh, Hamas offered to release all
Speaker 7: the civilian hostages in exchange for the io F not
Speaker 7: entering the Gaza Strip, but Israel rejected that offer, and
Speaker 7: many hostages have died since then, which could have been
Speaker 7: avoided if Israel cared. A few stats, one hundred and
Speaker 7: five Israeli hostages were freed via a temporary ceasefire, and
Speaker 7: no November of last year, four other hostages were released
Speaker 7: by Hamas. Three hostages were killed by IOF quote friendly
Speaker 7: fire because the IOF considered them a threat as they
Speaker 7: were waving white flags. During four Israeli quote rescue missions,
Speaker 7: one hostage was killed one soldier was saved in what
Speaker 7: Israel called Operation Golden Hand. On February twelfth of this year,
Speaker 7: two hostages were saved and at least ninety four Palestinians
Speaker 7: were killed, and then on June eighth, what is now
Speaker 7: being called Operation Are None, four Israeli hostages were rescued
Speaker 7: and at least two hundred and seventy four Palestinians were killed.
Speaker 7: In a statement released after the attack, Hamas said, in
Speaker 7: exchange for them the four Israeli hostages, your own army
Speaker 7: killed three of your own captives in the same attack,
Speaker 7: one of them holding a US citizenship. And it must
Speaker 7: be mentioned that the Israeli attacks on Leisa have also
Speaker 7: killed an unknown number of hostages and have mass captivity,
Speaker 7: as well as the at least thirty seven thousand Palestinians
Speaker 7: killed since October seventh. Relentlessly bombing a tiny strip of
Speaker 7: land or Israel knows its hostages are located, doesn't really
Speaker 7: indicate that Israel gives a shit about the lives of
Speaker 7: the hostages. The hostages are pawns being used in a
Speaker 7: disgusting political game. And I have seen several unhinged and
Speaker 7: deranged comments about this latest operation, which again killed two
Speaker 7: hundred seventy four Palestinians, including children, in the process of
Speaker 7: saving four hostages. The comments range and severity and psychopathy
Speaker 7: but a lot of them are basically saying how else
Speaker 7: were they supposed to get the hostages back? And Israel
Speaker 7: must rescue its people by any means necessary, and that
Speaker 7: this is what you get when you mess with Israel.
Speaker 7: But after reading the previous numbers, it is an absolute
Speaker 7: fact that the only mass release of hostages has come
Speaker 7: through ceasefire and prisoner exchanges. More hostages have been killed
Speaker 7: by the Israeli army then rescued by them. A ceasefire
Speaker 7: deal means freed hostages without mass death. And so if
Speaker 7: Israel really cared about the lives of these hostages, why
Speaker 7: on earth wouldn't they agree to a deal that can
Speaker 7: guarantee their safety. I want to take a quick tangent
Speaker 7: only to mention that the number of Palestinians killed in
Speaker 7: Raze is most likely far, far greater than the reported
Speaker 7: number because the infrastructure that was used to document the
Speaker 7: death toll has been decimated, along with nearly everything else
Speaker 7: in Lessee. The number thirty seven thousand also does not
Speaker 7: include the thousands and thousands of Palestinians buried underneath rubble
Speaker 7: who are unable to be found nor retrieved. The Health
Speaker 7: Ministry's director of International Cooperation in the West Bank. Doctor
Speaker 7: Yassir Bozzia says he works closely with Ministry colleagues in Raze.
Speaker 7: When he spoke with NPR in late January from his
Speaker 7: office in Ramalala, he said and estimated ten thousand people
Speaker 7: were missing and presumed dead under the rubble in Rasee,
Speaker 7: but even that number was low. It's like a snowball,
Speaker 7: he said. It's only an estimation. The actual number is
Speaker 7: much much higher. Bozia and doctors Andrezze say the death
Speaker 7: count published by the Health Ministry also largely excludes people
Speaker 7: who have died from a lack of adequate treatment, disease,
Speaker 7: and other impacts from the war, like hunger. The death
Speaker 7: toll only includes people killed by the occupation bombardment, he said.
Speaker 7: The Health Ministry describes its casualty figures as those resulting
Speaker 7: from Israeli aggression. Bozzias is a colleague in Raze, told
Speaker 7: him that the only way to really know how many
Speaker 7: people have died is to count the number of people
Speaker 7: still alive compared with the population of Raze before October seventh.
Speaker 7: He said that because of the continued brutal genocide going
Speaker 7: on in Rasee, it is impossible to have the real number.
Speaker 7: It will only be revealed after the violence has stopped.
Speaker 7: The death toll also does not make clear how many
Speaker 7: militants are among the dead. Israel says its forces have
Speaker 7: killed more than ten thousand fighters in Razze, but Israel
Speaker 7: has also not provided any sort of evidence or detailed
Speaker 7: information to back up its estimate. In every interview, every
Speaker 7: Israeli correspondent or spokesperson has given they always given number
Speaker 7: for the estimated fighters or terrorists killed in Razze, but
Speaker 7: they're very unsure about how many civilians have been killed.
Speaker 7: And now to go back to the US peace plan
Speaker 7: that is basically identical to previous peace plans proposed by
Speaker 7: and agree to buy Hamas. What does this US plan propose?
Speaker 7: This plan has three stages. The first stage proposes to
Speaker 7: involve a six week ceasefire, during which the Israeli army
Speaker 7: will withdraw from the populated areas of Razze. Hostages, including
Speaker 7: the elderly and women, would be exchanged for hundreds of
Speaker 7: Palestinian prisoners. Civilians would also return to all of Braze
Speaker 7: with six hundred trucks carrying humanitarian aid flooding the enclaved
Speaker 7: daily Biden said. The second phase would see Hamas and
Speaker 7: Israel negotiate terms for a permanent end to hostilities. Biden
Speaker 7: said the cease fire will still continue as long as
Speaker 7: negotiations continue. In the third phase, a permanent ceasefire would follow,
Speaker 7: facilitating the reconstruction of the Resids Strip, including sixty percent
Speaker 7: of clinics, schools, universities, and religious buildings damaged or destroyed
Speaker 7: by Israeli forces. This plan is nearly identical to a
Speaker 7: previous plan that Hamas had already agreed to on May sixth,
Speaker 7: a deal which Israel ended up rejecting. We will talk
Speaker 7: more about that deal later on, but for now, let's
Speaker 7: focus on the US's pleasiarized version of this plan and
Speaker 7: who supports it. But first let's take an ad break
Speaker 7: and we'll be read back, Okay, And we are back.
Speaker 7: So soon after the announcement of the US deal, Hamas
Speaker 7: said that it views the proposals in this deal positively.
Speaker 7: This week, US Secretary of State Anthony Blincoln o'tool arrived
Speaker 7: in the Middle East on his latest trip to the region,
Speaker 7: which he said will focus on Washington's Gaza truce proposal
Speaker 7: and the future of the Palestinian territory. B Lincoln met
Speaker 7: Egyptian President Elssi and Cairo on Monday, repeating US calls
Speaker 7: for Hamas to accept the true deal. Speaking to reporters
Speaker 7: before leaving Egypt, b Lincoln squarely blamed Hamas for prolonging
Speaker 7: the quote unquote war, saying that Hamas is an outlier
Speaker 7: in the region for not agreeing to the US deal.
Speaker 7: He told reporters my message to governments throughout the region,
Speaker 7: to people throughout the region, if you want to cease fire,
Speaker 7: press Hamas to say yes. Blincoln arrived in Israel later
Speaker 7: on that same day and met with Nan Yahoo. He
Speaker 7: will further hold talks and thought in Jordan this week.
Speaker 7: The State Department said. Blinkn reaffirmed the quote ironclad US
Speaker 7: commitment to Israel's security during his meeting with Nanyahu. A
Speaker 7: curious note is that while Blinkn portrayed the truce plan
Speaker 7: as Biden's proposal, when Biden made the deal public initially,
Speaker 7: he said it was an Israeli plan. This could be
Speaker 7: just a little slip because Biden is very old, or
Speaker 7: it could be a slip that just confirms what we've
Speaker 7: all known to be the case all along, that the
Speaker 7: US and Israel are one and the same, especially when
Speaker 7: it comes to their political interests in military power, and
Speaker 7: while US officials have insisted that Israel agreed to this proposal,
Speaker 7: various Israeli officials, including the n YAHOO, have vowed to
Speaker 7: continue fighting until the elimination of Hamas. Just days before
Speaker 7: Biden announced his initiative, a top Israeli officials said the
Speaker 7: military would fight in Jez until at least the end
Speaker 7: of the year. On the other hand, Hamas has said
Speaker 7: that it will only agree to a deal that would
Speaker 7: lead to a lasting end to the war and the
Speaker 7: full withdrawal of Israeli troops from Raze. Hamas reiterated its
Speaker 7: position on Monday after its political chief Ismael Haniyeh, met
Speaker 7: with officials from the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a smaller armed
Speaker 7: group in Duha. Hamas said in a statement the two
Speaker 7: delegations discussed the indirect negotiations and efforts to end the war,
Speaker 7: stressing that any agreement must include a permanent ceasefire, complete
Speaker 7: withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, reconstruction, ending the siege, and
Speaker 7: a serious prisoner's exchange. Hamas previously called for a explicit
Speaker 7: commitment from Israel to a lasting ceasefire, and despite the
Speaker 7: lack of clarity in the Israeli position, Biden administration officials
Speaker 7: have repeatedly said that Hamas is the only hurdle to
Speaker 7: ending the war in Gaza. The US blaming Hamas for
Speaker 7: prolonging what it calls a quote unquote war again not
Speaker 7: a war a genocide is ridiculous. Hamas has accepted previous
Speaker 7: peace deals. It has offered previous peace deals. Israel has
Speaker 7: been the one to reject them, and then the US
Speaker 7: comes along and just repackages one of these previously agreed
Speaker 7: on deals that Hamas had endorsed, and has the audacity
Speaker 7: to then blame Hamas for obstructing peace. Give me a break. Additionally,
Speaker 7: the US truce plan does not outline plans for the
Speaker 7: future of Gaza after the war, but the US government
Speaker 7: has said that it would not accept Hamas rule in
Speaker 7: the territory. The Biden administration says it wants a quote
Speaker 7: reformed Palestinian Authority aka the PA to eventually govern Gaza,
Speaker 7: but the Israeli government has ruled out allowing the occupied
Speaker 7: West Bank based PA to govern Huzzi with Nan Yahoo
Speaker 7: like in k Fata, the dominant faction in the PA
Speaker 7: to Hamas. Other support for the plan has come from
Speaker 7: some Israeli politicians, as well as the families of the
Speaker 7: hostages and the international community. Benny Gantz, a centrist member
Speaker 7: of Israel's three man war Cabinet and Prime Minister Benjamin
Speaker 7: Yahu's principal rival, spoke positively of the proposal and asked
Speaker 7: his two colleagues in the war cabinet, Nan Yahoo and
Speaker 7: Defense Minister Yoev Galant, to convene to discuss the quote
Speaker 7: next steps. Gance had previously threatened to leave the cabinet
Speaker 7: by June eighth if no plan for Gaza beyond the
Speaker 7: war had been agreed on, and on Sunday, June ninth,
Speaker 7: he officially announced his resignation. Gans's resignation does not immediately
Speaker 7: pose a threat to Natanyahu, who still controls a majority
Speaker 7: coalition in Parliament, but it does mean that the Israeli
Speaker 7: leader becomes more heavily reliant on his far right allies.
Speaker 7: Gantz said that the Enyahu was making quote total victory
Speaker 7: impossible and that the government needs to put a return
Speaker 7: of the hostages seized on October seventh by Hamas above
Speaker 7: political survival. Gans is a popular former military chief, and
Speaker 7: he joined the n Yahoo's government shortly after the Hamas
Speaker 7: attack in a show of unity. His presence also boosted
Speaker 7: Israel's credibility with its international partners. Gance has good working
Speaker 7: relations with US officials. Ganz canceled a planned news conference
Speaker 7: the night of June eighth after the Forestraeli hostages were
Speaker 7: rescued from Gaza earlier in the day, which again was
Speaker 7: Israel's largest operations since October. Another reminder that two hundred
Speaker 7: and seventy four palest Indians, including children, were killed in
Speaker 7: the assault. Another Israeli politician who supported the US peace
Speaker 7: plan was opposition leader Yard Lapid, who also promised to
Speaker 7: support the plan, pledging support of his party yesh Atid,
Speaker 7: which translates from Hebrew to there is a future if
Speaker 7: those from ultranationalists and far right parties withdraw support. United
Speaker 7: Nations Secretary General Antonia Gutierrez also endorsed the plan, as
Speaker 7: have many of Israel's political allies, including the UK and Germany.
Speaker 7: So who doesn't like the plan. Much of the opposition
Speaker 7: to the peace plan has come from within the Israeli cabinet,
Speaker 7: n Enyahu said any initiative that did not include a
Speaker 7: quote elimination of Hamas's capacity to govern and make war
Speaker 7: was a non starter. In his announcement on Friday May
Speaker 7: thirty first, Biden seemed to indicate that he regarded Hamas's
Speaker 7: presence within Gaza to have been so downgraded that a
Speaker 7: repeat of October seventh was impossible. As expected, the ultranationalists
Speaker 7: and extreme right members of the nyahu's right wing coalition,
Speaker 7: which includes it Tamar Bengavie and Bezileel Simotric, threatened to
Speaker 7: withdraw from the government and cause its collapse if the
Speaker 7: proposals were accepted. So as far as Israel's politics are concerned,
Speaker 7: it seems like the outcome may end up depending on
Speaker 7: what El Jazeira describes as quote parliamentary arithmetic. The far
Speaker 7: right in ultranationalist parties hold fourteen seats, while Ganza's block
Speaker 7: only has eight seats. Meeting the far right has far
Speaker 7: more influence on a prime minister who wants to stay
Speaker 7: in power. As for Lapid, his seventeen seats are offered
Speaker 7: as support only in what pertains to the peace proposals.
Speaker 7: This leaves that n YAHOO reliant on the far right block.
Speaker 7: As far as the deal being accepted, that is still
Speaker 7: not clear. Despite what the US says. The families of
Speaker 7: Israeli hostages are putting pressure on the government to accept
Speaker 7: the deal, as are some parts of Israel's political class,
Speaker 7: but pressures to reject the deal are just as strong,
Speaker 7: and it will remain to be seen whether Natanyahu chooses
Speaker 7: his own survival or the return of the hostages. But
Speaker 7: if one thing is clear, it is that Netanyahu does
Speaker 7: not really care about the hostages because the IOF under
Speaker 7: his command, continues to bombard areas where the hostages can
Speaker 7: be held. And may remind you that the IOWEF have
Speaker 7: already killed Israeli hostages that they have mistakenly identified as threats.
Speaker 7: Speaking of threats, I'm kidding. There is no ad break
Speaker 7: and there is no threat. That's the end of part one,
Speaker 7: and if you want to listen to part two, tune
Speaker 7: in tomorrow. Talking about the history of Hamas and how
Speaker 7: we got here. So yeah, see e then three Palestine, Hello,
Speaker 7: and welcome back to it could happen here. This is
Speaker 7: Sharen and today we are continuing our conversation from yesterday
Speaker 7: where we talked about the US proposed peace deal for
Speaker 7: Hamas and Israel that looks suspiciously like a deal Hamas
Speaker 7: had already agreed to just a few weeks before that,
Speaker 7: and Israel did not agree to. We had ended part
Speaker 7: one talking about how the IOF literally killed their own
Speaker 7: hostages when they mistakenly thought they were threats, and I
Speaker 7: ended saying speaking of threats, and I'm going to continue
Speaker 7: because that's what professionals do. So since October seventh, Israel
Speaker 7: has described Hamas as an existential threat, saying that it
Speaker 7: needs to destroy the group and won't stop the violence
Speaker 7: in Gaza until it does so. But I would argue
Speaker 7: that most people who are pro Israel or Western Zionists
Speaker 7: in general don't actually know anything about Hamas other than
Speaker 7: thinking they're this big, bad evil that has to be
Speaker 7: eradicated by the quote only democracy in the Middle East,
Speaker 7: which I hope by this point people realize is a
Speaker 7: sick joke. Hamas is suddenly being talked about on every
Speaker 7: news channel, and anything even remotely pro Palestine is now
Speaker 7: labeled as pro Hamas, when most people in this country,
Speaker 7: I would argue, most likely had never even heard of
Speaker 7: Hamas before October seventh. Labeling something as pro Hamas truly
Speaker 7: just means nothing as far as Israel's concerned, the UN
Speaker 7: is Hamas. In May, Israel's ambassador to the UN, Galad Erdan,
Speaker 7: said in an interview with Israel's Army Radio that the
Speaker 7: UN has quote turned into a collaborator with Hamas, maybe
Speaker 7: even more than that, a terror organization unto itself. Wow,
Speaker 7: Israeli leadership has just continued to one up themselves when
Speaker 7: it comes to saying the most insane fucking shit. And then,
Speaker 7: according to Zionists, the college campus protests that were calling
Speaker 7: for a literal end to genocide are also pro Hamas.
Speaker 7: Earlier this month, a lawsuit was filed in Virginia by
Speaker 7: a US law firm and an Israeli legal group who
Speaker 7: have teamed up to suit two organizations involved in recent
Speaker 7: college campus protests, the American Muslims for Palestine and National
Speaker 7: Students for Justice in Palestine. They accused these groups of
Speaker 7: collaborating with Hamas to serve as their quote propaganda division.
Speaker 7: In the US. Arson of Trowski, the CEO of the
Speaker 7: International Legal Forum, who was working with this US legal
Speaker 7: team of Greenberg Taig and the National Jewish Advocacy Center,
Speaker 7: he called the American Muslims for Palestine and the National
Speaker 7: Students for Justice in Palestine, as well as all the
Speaker 7: protesters supporting Palestine, most of whom are students as quote
Speaker 7: the foot soldiers of Hamas. If I was going to
Speaker 7: go through everything that Israel and Zionists have labeled US
Speaker 7: pro Hamas, this episode would never end. But I hope
Speaker 7: it's clear that this label and accusation isn't based on
Speaker 7: any real sort of evidence or proof, and it is
Speaker 7: only a way to scare people into blindly supporting Israel
Speaker 7: in quote defending itself big quotes there against this growing
Speaker 7: evil spreading across the globe and invading our campuses, when
Speaker 7: in reality, there would be no Hamas without Israel. Although
Speaker 7: Hamas eventually grew into being the most active armed resistance
Speaker 7: group in Gaza, it definitely didn't start that way and
Speaker 7: it wouldn't have even had the power to grow the
Speaker 7: way it did if it weren't for intentional actions by
Speaker 7: Israeli leadership that started decades ago. Before we get into
Speaker 7: a timeline of the Resa Hamas peace deals that have
Speaker 7: led to this very similar deal at the US proposed
Speaker 7: all deals that again Israel has rejected I want to
Speaker 7: make sure we at least have an understanding of what Hamas,
Speaker 7: even is Hamas, which is an Arabic acronym for Islamic
Speaker 7: resistance movement, would not exist today if it wasn't for Israel.
Speaker 7: American and Israeli politicians are always saying the same thing,
Speaker 7: how dangerous and evil Hamas is, without mentioning how Israel
Speaker 7: itself helped create Hamas. The TLDR of it all is
Speaker 7: that Israeli's helped turn a bunch of fringe Palestinian Islamists
Speaker 7: in the late nineteen seventies into one of the world's
Speaker 7: most notorious militant groups. Is in a conspiracy theory, It's
Speaker 7: a confirmed fact. Former Israeli officials, such as Brigadier General A.
Speaker 7: Sak Sagev, who was the Israeli military governor in Gaza
Speaker 7: in the early nineteen eighties, have openly spoken about this.
Speaker 7: After his tenure, Segev told a New York Times reporter
Speaker 7: that he had helped finance the Palestinian Islamist movement as
Speaker 7: a quote counterweight to secularists and leftists of the Palestine
Speaker 7: Liberation Organization aka the PLO, as well as the fut Party,
Speaker 7: which was led by Yaser Arafat. Arafat too referred to
Speaker 7: Hamas as quote a creature of Israel. Hamas was officially
Speaker 7: founded in nineteen eighty seven, at the start of the
Speaker 7: First Palestinian Intefada, or uprising against the Israeli occupation, but
Speaker 7: its beginnings actually started much earlier. Hama's founder, Sheikh ahmadia Sin,
Speaker 7: was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. The Brotherhood had
Speaker 7: been repressed by Egyptians in Gaza prior to nineteen sixty seven,
Speaker 7: but once the Israelis invaded and occupied the Gaza Strip,
Speaker 7: they chose to encourage this group of extremist Islamists. The
Speaker 7: dominant Palestinian political force in Palestine at the time was
Speaker 7: the PLO, and it was deemed a threat to Israel,
Speaker 7: and so Israel sought to undermine its power. The PLO
Speaker 7: is a nationalist coalition which was centered around the secular
Speaker 7: FATA party led by Yasser Arafat. By empowering a scene
Speaker 7: in the Muslim Brotherhood, Israel thought they could divide the
Speaker 7: occupied Palestinian people and eventually rule over them by playing
Speaker 7: them against each other secular nationalists versus religious Islamists. In
Speaker 7: nineteen seventy eight, Yasine wanted to officially register his Islamic Association,
Speaker 7: which was basically the precursor to present day Hamas. The
Speaker 7: Israelis jumped on the opportunity to help make this happen.
Speaker 7: Yasine built and grew a network of Islamists social institutions
Speaker 7: across Gaza, funded largely by Israel. Avnar Cohen is a
Speaker 7: former Israeli religious affairs official who worked in Gaza for
Speaker 7: more than two decades. In two thousand and nine, he
Speaker 7: told the Wall Street Journal Hamas to my great regret,
Speaker 7: is Israel's creation. Back in the mid nineteen eighties, Cohen
Speaker 7: even wrote an official report to his superiors warning them
Speaker 7: not to play divide and rule in the occupied territories
Speaker 7: by backing Palestinian Islamists against the Palestinian Secularists. He wrote
Speaker 7: in his report, I suggest focusing our efforts on finding
Speaker 7: to break up this monster before reality jumps in our face. Clearly,
Speaker 7: his superiors did not listen to him, and Hamas was
Speaker 7: the result. To be clear, Israelis had helped build up
Speaker 7: a militant strain of extremist political Islam in the form
Speaker 7: of Hamas and its Muslim Brotherhood precursors and allowed it
Speaker 7: free reign in order to quiet any chance of progress
Speaker 7: in Palestine, and then when it became convenient for their
Speaker 7: desionist narrative, the Israelis tried to bomb, besiege and blockade
Speaker 7: it out of existence. David Hashem, a former Arabs affairs
Speaker 7: expert in the Israeli military who was based in President
Speaker 7: in the nineteen eighties, said the original sin was Israel's
Speaker 7: support of Ya Seine in the nineteen seventies. He said,
Speaker 7: when I look back at the chain of events, I
Speaker 7: think we made a mistake. But at the time, nobody
Speaker 7: thought about the possible results. Yeah, no shit. The only
Speaker 7: American politician that I know of who has ever referenced
Speaker 7: how Israel is responsible for Hamas's creation is Ron Paul.
Speaker 7: In two thousand and one on the floor of the House,
Speaker 7: Ron Paul said Hamas was encouraged and really started by
Speaker 7: Israel because they wanted Hamas to counteract Yasser Arafat. Speaking
Speaker 7: of Arafat, not only did he himself tell an Italian
Speaker 7: newspaper that Hamas is a creature of Israel, he also
Speaker 7: said that the former Israeli Prime Minister Yasakrabien admitted this
Speaker 7: to him, calling it a quote fatal error. Yasine was
Speaker 7: eventually assassinated by an Israeli air strike in Gaza on
Speaker 7: March twenty second, two thousand and four. Sylvan Shalom, former
Speaker 7: Israeli Vice Prime minister, said after Yasine's death that quote
Speaker 7: sche Yassin and his organization Hamas are responsible for the
Speaker 7: killings of more than four hundred Israelis, when actually no
Speaker 7: Israel is clearly largely responsible. David Long, a former Middle
Speaker 7: East expert in the US State Department under Ronald Reagan,
Speaker 7: told journalist Robert dry I thought the Israelis were playing
Speaker 7: with fire. This, of course, is not a unique development,
Speaker 7: as there have been dozens of instances of unneeded and
Speaker 7: malignant US intervention in other countries for its own gain,
Speaker 7: and since then Hamas has killed far more Israelis than
Speaker 7: any secular Palestinian militant group. Israel built up ye Scene
Speaker 7: and Hamas as a rival to Arafat's Fatah, then they
Speaker 7: killed Yasne, and then they doubled down in making Hamas
Speaker 7: Israel's worst enemy, an enemy it would use to justify
Speaker 7: to the entire world that it was not only okay,
Speaker 7: but necessary to control and massacre millions of Palestinians. In
Speaker 7: the process of destroying this threat, Israel spent more than
Speaker 7: twenty years helping build up Hamas and then spent another
Speaker 7: twenty years trying to destroy it. All of this is
Speaker 7: to say that, aside from the purposeful assistance from Israel
Speaker 7: and creating Hamas, that Hamas wouldn't even exist if it
Speaker 7: was for the Israeli occupation. There would be no resistance
Speaker 7: because without the ethnic cleansing and forced violent occupation, there
Speaker 7: would be nothing to resist. In the process of bolstering
Speaker 7: this militant group, Hamas also became the main armed force
Speaker 7: behind the Palestinian resistance, and many view Hamas as the
Speaker 7: only group even attempting to defend Palestinians in the face
Speaker 7: of Israeli occupation. And the organization itself has changed over
Speaker 7: the years, especially in the last decade, it seems like
Speaker 7: Hamas was and is increasingly trying to establish a more
Speaker 7: favorable status quo for the Palestinian people. Hamas's leaders were
Speaker 7: shaped by the hard realities of a brutal occupation, which
Speaker 7: was marked by mass arrests of Palestinians. The expropriation of
Speaker 7: Palestinian lands and control of their resources. More than half
Speaker 7: a million Palestinians were arrested and tried in Israel's military
Speaker 7: run courts between nineteen sixty seven and nineteen eighty seven,
Speaker 7: and over fifteen hundred Palestinian homes were demolished and thousands
Speaker 7: of Palestinians were forcibly deported aka ethnically cleansed. After HAMAS
Speaker 7: won the two thousand and six elections in Gaza, its
Speaker 7: leader Hanija said the group accepted a state on the
Speaker 7: nineteen sixty seven borders, as well as all the decisions
Speaker 7: taken by the PA and the PLO, but there were
Speaker 7: no takers. HAMAS leaders also backed the two thousand and
Speaker 7: two era Peace Initiative that called for the following the
Speaker 7: withdrawal of Israeli forces from territories occupied in nineteen sixty seven,
Speaker 7: the right of Palestinian refugees to return to the homes
Speaker 7: they had been forcibly displaced from since nineteen forty eight,
Speaker 7: and the formation of a sovereign, independent Palestinian state in
Speaker 7: return for air recognition of Israel. But Hamasa's offers heatedly
Speaker 7: dismissed by Israel and ignored by Israel's Western allies, including
Speaker 7: the US, despite Washington's claims of playing the role of
Speaker 7: a quote honest broker in the conflict. Tarek Baconi, author
Speaker 7: of Hamas contained the Rise and Pacification of Palestinian resistance,
Speaker 7: told Al Jazeera Hamas has always said that they are
Speaker 7: ready to offer a truce and to stop targeting civilians
Speaker 7: if the Israeli occupation removes its settlers. At least seven
Speaker 7: hundred and fifty thousand Israelis live in hundreds of fortified
Speaker 7: illegal settlements and outposts across the occupied Palestinian territories of
Speaker 7: the West Bank and East Jerusalem, the vast majority of
Speaker 7: which are again built illegally, either entirely or partially on
Speaker 7: private Palestinian land, and thus they violate international law. One
Speaker 7: of the more infuriating and frankly incredibly stupid talking points
Speaker 7: that Zionists have when it comes to talking about Hamas
Speaker 7: is the two thousand and six election where Palestinians ala
Speaker 7: elected Hamas as they're appointed leadership. I want to remind
Speaker 7: every one of a few things. The Gaza strip has
Speaker 7: a very young population. Most of the inhabitants in Gaza
Speaker 7: are under fifteen years old. The largest population group in
Speaker 7: Gaza are children between the ages of five and nine
Speaker 7: years old. This population wasn't even born yet, let alone
Speaker 7: old enough to vote in two thousand and six. And Furthermore,
Speaker 7: leadership does not indicate your right to live a life,
Speaker 7: your right to not be killed. If you're in America
Speaker 7: and Trump is your elected president and you hate Trump
Speaker 7: and maybe other foreign entities hate Trump, do you deserve
Speaker 7: to die?
Speaker 2: No, you don't.
Speaker 7: The resistance fighters in Hamas are not the ones who
Speaker 7: wrote the original charter. They're not the ones who establish
Speaker 7: Hamas in the first place. They're young people that are
Speaker 7: joining the most active armed resistance to defend Palestine. It's
Speaker 7: their only option, and Palestinians have tried other non violent
Speaker 7: forms of resistance against this occupation. In twenty eighteen to
Speaker 7: twenty nineteen, there was something called the Great March of Return.
Speaker 7: It started on March thirtieth, twenty eighteen, and ended December
Speaker 7: twenty seventh of twenty nineteen. Every Friday for those years,
Speaker 7: Palestinians in Gaza demonstrated and protested along the border fence
Speaker 7: between Israel and Gaza for a right to return to
Speaker 7: their homes. And to demand an end to the Israeli
Speaker 7: blockade in Gaza. During this time, the Israeli army killed
Speaker 7: a total of two hundred and twenty three people. Over
Speaker 7: thirty six hundred and one thousand people, including nearly eight
Speaker 7: thousand and eight hundred children, were injured. This is after
Speaker 7: a peaceful attempt at demonstrating, after a peaceful attempt at
Speaker 7: trying to resist occupation, their still shot and killed. They're
Speaker 7: shot with the intention to kill. Expecting Palestinians to be
Speaker 7: pacifists when it comes to resisting a brutal, violent occupation
Speaker 7: that has been now almost a century long is very
Speaker 7: small minded and entitled and frankly wrong. Palestinians have their
Speaker 7: right to resist. Armed resistance is legal under international law.
Speaker 7: When it comes to resisting and occupying power. What does
Speaker 7: this mean? Maybe you've heard that train of thought before.
Speaker 7: Let me explain it to you. Let's go back in
Speaker 7: time a little bit. The General Assembly of the United
Speaker 7: Nations the UNGA, which was once described as the collective
Speaker 7: conscious of the world, noted the right of peoples to
Speaker 7: self determination, independent and human rights as early as nineteen
Speaker 7: seventy four Resolution three three one four of the UNNGA
Speaker 7: prohibited states from any military occupation, however temporary hum curious
Speaker 7: Israel has been doing that for now. In the relevant
Speaker 7: part of the resolution, the resolution not only went on
Speaker 7: to affirm the right to self determination, freedom, and and
Speaker 7: dependence of peoples forcibly deprived of that right, and particularly
Speaker 7: peoples under colonial and racist regimes or other forms of
Speaker 7: alien domination, but it also noted the right of the
Speaker 7: occupied to quote struggle and to seek and receive support
Speaker 7: in that effort. The term armed struggle was implied without
Speaker 7: precise definition in that resolution and many early other ones
Speaker 7: that upheld the right of indigenous peoples to evict an
Speaker 7: occupier again the right of an indigenous people to evict
Speaker 7: their occupier, but the imprecise language was changed on December third,
Speaker 7: nineteen eighty two. At that time, the WNNGA Resolution three
Speaker 7: seven Slash four to three removed any doubt or debate
Speaker 7: over the lawful entitlement of occupied people to resist occupying
Speaker 7: forces by na any and all lawful means. The resolution
Speaker 7: reaffirmed quote the legitimacy of the struggle of peoples for independence,
Speaker 7: territorial integrity, national unity, and liberation from colonial and foreign
Speaker 7: domination and foreign occupation by all available means, including armed struggle.
Speaker 7: And although Israel has tried time and time again to
Speaker 7: recast this ambiguous intent of this precise resolution, trying to
Speaker 7: place its now nearly century long, violent, brutal occupation in
Speaker 7: the West Bank and Gaza beyond this resolution's application, the
Speaker 7: declaration itself proceeds to be very explicit in its language
Speaker 7: when it comes to Palestine. Section twenty one of the
Speaker 7: resolution strongly condemned quote the expansionist activities of Israel in
Speaker 7: the Middle East and the continual bombing of Palestinian civilians,
Speaker 7: which constitute a serious obstacle to the realization of self
Speaker 7: determination and independence of the Palestinian people. That's what I mean,
Speaker 7: and that's what many people mean when they say that
Speaker 7: Palestinians have the right to resist and armed resistance is
Speaker 7: illegal under international law. I want to bring that up
Speaker 7: because even if Hamas does not reflect the viewpoint of
Speaker 7: some Palestinians, HAMAS is also the main armed resistance group
Speaker 7: that has been fighting against the IOF in defending Palestine,
Speaker 7: Gaza in particular against Israel, and they have a right
Speaker 7: to do that clearly, as international law states. Regardless let's
Speaker 7: go back to talk about the history of Hamas and
Speaker 7: how they amended their charter.
Speaker 2: In twenty seventeen.
Speaker 7: In twenty seventeen, Hamas formerly amended its original nineteen eighty
Speaker 7: eight charter. The new charter holds that armed resistance against
Speaker 7: an occupying power is justified under international law. And while
Speaker 7: the nineteen eighty eight Hamas Charter has been widely criticized
Speaker 7: for us anti semitism, each two thousand and seven document
Speaker 7: states that Hamas's fight is not with the Jewish people,
Speaker 7: but with the Zionist project, and as you should realize
Speaker 7: by now, anti Zionism is not anti Semitism. The new
Speaker 7: charter also announced once again that it would accept a
Speaker 7: Palestinian state on the nineteen sixty seven borders. This would recognize,
Speaker 7: in effect, a two state solution and therefore the existence
Speaker 7: of Israel as a legitimate entity. This was proposed even
Speaker 7: as Israel continued to insist that it can no longer
Speaker 7: allow Hamas to exist, and as Israeli politicians, led by Netanyahu,
Speaker 7: repeatedly ruled out a two state solution. Hama's political leader
Speaker 7: Haled Michal said at the time the Hamas, thinking from
Speaker 7: the very start was clear we are not facing a
Speaker 7: religious war. Hamas ever since its inception, realizes the nature
Speaker 7: of the struggle against the Israeli occupier, that it is
Speaker 7: not a struggle because they are Jews, but because they
Speaker 7: are occupiers. Israeli officials dismissed the new policy paper as
Speaker 7: lies in a video Ntenya, who symbolically and dramatically threw
Speaker 7: the document into a trash ban, saying it was an
Speaker 7: attempt to deceive the world. Through its actions which span
Speaker 7: across decades, Israel has not shown any interest in a
Speaker 7: political agreement, whether with Hamas or other Palestinian political parties
Speaker 7: like FATA, which governs the occupied West Bank. Sary Arabi,
Speaker 7: a Ramala based political analyst, told El Dazeira, the issue
Speaker 7: is not about Gaza. It's also not about whether Israel
Speaker 7: or Hamas started the war. There are daily killings and
Speaker 7: assaults in the occupied West Bank. There are attacks on
Speaker 7: the Uxa Mosque, there are prisoners and checkpoints. The people
Speaker 7: in Gaza are refugees. They were isolated and separated from
Speaker 7: the rest of the Palestinian people, and the vast majority
Speaker 7: of Gaza's population are refugees who were forcibly expelled from
Speaker 7: their homes and villages in the nineteen forty eight Nekba
Speaker 7: by Zionist militias. Many political analysts also blame Israel for
Speaker 7: the failure of the OSCO Accords, signed in nineteen ninety
Speaker 7: three and nineteen ninety five between Israel and the PLO,
Speaker 7: which was representative of the Palestinian people at the time.
Speaker 7: The agreements led to the formation of the PA, an
Speaker 7: interim five year governing body meant to lead to an
Speaker 7: independent Palestinian state comprising of the occupied territory of East
Speaker 7: Jerusalem and the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. However,
Speaker 7: thirty years into its existence, the PA has failed to
Speaker 7: create a state in the face of Israeli occupation, legal
Speaker 7: land grabs and settlements, and then Hamas took control of
Speaker 7: Gaza from the PA in two thousand and seven. While
Speaker 7: there was initial support for the OSCO Accords among Palestinians,
Speaker 7: the failure to reach a final peace agreement by nineteen
Speaker 7: ninety nine and the growing settlement projects, particularly under nan Yahoo,
Speaker 7: left many disappointed. In a leaked video in twenty ten, Nanyah,
Speaker 7: who boasted about how he made sure the OSCO Accords
Speaker 7: did not succeed. The hopes of the OSCO Accords turned
Speaker 7: into despair as Israeli policies under successive governments continued to
Speaker 7: undermine the PA and its aspirations. Today, the PA has
Speaker 7: limited administrative rule over pockets of the occupied West Bank,
Speaker 7: while Israeli settlements, which are again considered illegal under international law,
Speaker 7: have grown rapidly. The settler population in the occupied West
Speaker 7: Bank and East Jerusalem has grown from two hundred and
Speaker 7: fifty thousand Israelis in nineteen ninety three to more than
Speaker 7: seven hundred thousand this year. In his talk with El Jazeera,
Speaker 7: author Tarik Barconi said the Israelis wanted OSLO because that's
Speaker 7: how they maintained their colonization. By maintaining the facade of
Speaker 7: a peace process. Hamas was showing a mirror to the
Speaker 7: Israelis to say, if you're actually talking about the possibility
Speaker 7: of ending the occupation, then end it. That was their offer,
Speaker 7: instead of the nineteen ninety three awesome agreements that they
Speaker 7: would stop armed resistance if Israel let Palestinians be in
Speaker 7: the eastern side of Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza.
Speaker 7: When we look into the history of Hamas, we see
Speaker 7: that its political leadership has over the years proposed numerous
Speaker 7: long term truces or cease fires to Israel in exchange
Speaker 7: for the realization of a sovereign, independent Palestinian state, but
Speaker 7: Israel has rejected those offers, arguing that Hamas could not
Speaker 7: be trusted to adhere to any long term ceasefire and
Speaker 7: insisting that any proposal for a short term pause and
Speaker 7: fighting were insincere and strategically aimed only at helping the
Speaker 7: armed movement regroup from losses. I've said this before, but
Speaker 7: it bears repeating. Every Zionist accusation is a confession. The
Speaker 7: reality is that Israel is the one who cannot be
Speaker 7: trusted to adhere to any long term ceasefire, as we
Speaker 7: have seen time and time again. Here is a summarized
Speaker 7: timeline of the most recent peace deal attempts that have
Speaker 7: been proposed since October seventh, since the genocide in Gaza started.
Speaker 7: In January twenty twenty four, the n YAHOO rejected a
Speaker 7: Hamas proposal to end the war and release more than
Speaker 7: one hundred captives held by the group in exchange for
Speaker 7: a withdrawal of Israeli forces, the release of Palestinian prisoners
Speaker 7: in Israeli jails and recognition of Hamas governance over Gaza.
Speaker 7: And then on May sixth, Hamas said it accepted a
Speaker 7: Gaza ceasefire proposal which was put forward by Egypt and Kuttar.
Speaker 7: This deal would come in three stages that would see
Speaker 7: an initial halt in the fighting, leading to lasting calm
Speaker 7: and the withdrawal of Israeli troops from the Palaesainian territory.
Speaker 7: It would also ensure the release of Israeli captives in Gaza,
Speaker 7: as well as an unspecified number of Palestinians held in
Speaker 7: Israeli jails. The framework of the agreement in brief is
Speaker 7: the release of all Israeli captives in the Gaza Strip,
Speaker 7: civilians or military, alive or otherwise from all periods, in
Speaker 7: exchange for a number of Palestinian prisoners held by Israel
Speaker 7: as agreed upon, and a return to a sustainable calm
Speaker 7: that leads to a permanent ceasefire and the withdrawal of
Speaker 7: Israeli forces from the Gaza Strip, as well as its
Speaker 7: reconstruction in the lifting of the siege hm That seems
Speaker 7: little familiar, doesn't it, But Israel unsurprisingly did not agree
Speaker 7: to this proposal. Instead, it bombed Rupha, which made the
Speaker 7: Israeli government's message clear there will be no permanent ceasefire.
Speaker 7: Israel's bombing of Raupphah was justified by Israel as a
Speaker 7: way to disband Hamspitalians and seize control of the Gaza
Speaker 7: Egyptian cross which Israel accuses Hamas of using to smuggle
Speaker 7: weapons into Gaza. But humanitarian groups were quick to point
Speaker 7: out that a closure of such a crossing would only
Speaker 7: lead to further disastrous consequences for the more than one
Speaker 7: million Palestinians living in Dapah, the majority of them displaced
Speaker 7: from other areas of Gaza who fled to Daphah after
Speaker 7: being told by Israel that it was a quote unquote
Speaker 7: safe zone. Israel said at the time that the terms
Speaker 7: of the May Hamasisepire deal differed from previous proposals it
Speaker 7: had seen, but analysts believe that the wider issue is
Speaker 7: that Israel is not willing to agree to a permanency
Speaker 7: spire even after Hamas releases all Israeli captives. Omar Dehman,
Speaker 7: an expert on Israel Palestine with the Middle East Council
Speaker 7: for Global Affairs, spoke about this in May saying the
Speaker 7: last couple of days have proved that Israel was not
Speaker 7: really negotiating in good faith. The moment that Hamas agreed
Speaker 7: to a deal, Israel was willing to low that up
Speaker 7: by commencing their assault on Rafah. The goal is to
Speaker 7: destroy Gaza in its totality. And then, on May thirty first,
Speaker 7: the US announced its own ceasefire proposal that Biden said
Speaker 7: would lead to a quote lasting ceasefire in the Gaza strip.
Speaker 7: He said the proposal involves three phases, the first of
Speaker 7: which would last six weeks and would include a full
Speaker 7: and complete ceasefire as well as the withdrawal of Israeli
Speaker 7: forces from all populated areas of Gaza. Again, this peace
Speaker 7: plan is almost indistinguishable from the one that Hamas agreed
Speaker 7: to on May sixth. A quick reminder that only twenty
Speaker 7: five days before this announcement, on May sixth, Hamas had
Speaker 7: agreed to a cease fire proposal by Egypt and Katad
Speaker 7: that is almost identical to the one Biden announced on
Speaker 7: May thirty first, and Israeli leaders rejected that initiative. On
Speaker 7: June seventh, Israel rejected the UN's resolution of its own
Speaker 7: hostage deal. Offer, which was a permanent seat ease fire
Speaker 7: in exchange for release of all hostages. A reminder that
Speaker 7: the only mass release of hostages has come through ceasefire exchanges,
Speaker 7: and that a ceasefire deal means freed hostages without mass death.
Speaker 7: It boggles my mind that there are still people defending
Speaker 7: Israel and saying all this Palestinian death is for the hostages,
Speaker 7: because again, if Israel cared about their lives at all,
Speaker 7: they would agree to a deal because that deal can
Speaker 7: guarantee the safety of the hostages. But they do not
Speaker 7: care about the hostages. Every time Israel rejects a deal,
Speaker 7: they are telling you that, and yet their supporters are
Speaker 7: too entrenched in the lies and propaganda of Zionism to
Speaker 7: ever see clearly. So, just to summarize, the US proposed
Speaker 7: a ceasefire deal which was almost indistinguishable from previous plans,
Speaker 7: agreed to buy Hamas, and then, while seemingly waiting for
Speaker 7: Israel to accept the deal, the US launched a military
Speaker 7: operation and committed more war crimes to murder hundreds of Palestinians.
Speaker 7: And they did this by hiding in humanitarian aid trucks
Speaker 7: while deceiving the world and the Palestinians into thinking that
Speaker 7: they were trying to formulate a ceasefire agreement. The US
Speaker 7: helped Israel plan and carry out its massacres. This is
Speaker 7: what peacemaking looks like to the United States. A ceasefire
Speaker 7: deal is the absolute bare minimum, and it is nowhere
Speaker 7: near enough. The removal of Nan Yahoo is nowhere near enough.
Speaker 7: He's being set up as the fall guy and scapegoat
Speaker 7: for Israel, skirting the responsibility of what the Israeli state
Speaker 7: has done to Palestinian people since nineteen forty eight. The
Speaker 7: Fight for Palestine is a liberation movement which demands nothing
Speaker 7: less than the full dignity, freedom, and security of all
Speaker 7: all who live under this violent military occupation. It's a
Speaker 7: demand to end Israeli apartheid, and until that happens, Israel
Speaker 7: will continue to get away with the nekapa that started
Speaker 7: in nineteen forty eight and continues today. The Nekapa never ended.
Speaker 7: Israel will continue to get away with the genocide and
Speaker 7: ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people until Israel and it's
Speaker 7: apartheid is dismantled. A ceasefire is the absolute bare minimum
Speaker 7: to achieving that, and that my friends is our episode
Speaker 7: for today. Please keep sharing and learning about what is
Speaker 7: happening in Palestine and got stop talking about it. Free Palestine.
Speaker 1: Hey, We'll be back Monday with more episodes every week
Speaker 1: from now until the heat death of the Universe.
Speaker 7: It Could Happen Here as a production of cool Zone Media.
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Speaker 7: You can find sources for It Could Happen Here, updated
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