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Sorry I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America and by God we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again.
You've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came.
He saw.
He died.
We ain't killing they army.
We killing them.
We be on CNN like say our name, been saying, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
Okay, you guys introducing Ramzi Baroud.
Welcoming back to the show, I should say Ramzi Baroud.
He is the author of the new book, The Last Earth, a Palestinian story and he writes a lot of great articles all over the place, palestinechronicle.com and Ramzi Baroud, I think it's .net, right?
We republish all of it at antiwar.com.
Welcome back to the show, Ramzi.
How are you doing?
I'm doing great.
Thanks for having me, Scott.
Yeah, sure thing.
Very happy to have you here.
Before we get into the news regarding Israel, Palestine and all of that, and your great recent essays, how's the book tour going?
I've been very curious to know how well you're doing with this thing.
It's going wonderful, better than expected, really.
I mean, aside from the book selling very well, the kind of reception that I'm receiving, you know, there is a lot of interest in new ideas about Palestine and I think that the nature of the debate about Palestine is also changing wherever I go.
The kind of restrictions that we've had in the discourse, it is disappearing.
People are thinking past two-state solutions, they are thinking, you know, there is a strong constituency for the boycott movement.
It's something I haven't experienced in the last tour, a few years ago.
That's great.
And you've been traveling all around, too, right?
I have, yeah.
I've been to eight countries so far and I still have a few others to cover, yeah.
Man, that's great.
Well, I'm really glad to hear that it's doing so well.
And I'm sorry, again, that I haven't gotten to it yet.
It's on my pile, but it's an unbelievable pile and I've been doing really bad at it.
You'll get to it, I'm sure, yeah.
But I read every article you write, with no exception, so that's pretty good.
And including this brand new one here, I guess we're running tomorrow, we ran yesterday, I lose track of time, on antiwar.com, beating the U.S. veto, Palestinians need urgent protection from Israel.
And it starts out saying, you know, criticizing basically the framing of the issue by the media and by the government, of course, in calling the situation in Israel-Palestine a conflict and, you know, necessarily then equating the position of the Palestinians and the Israelis.
And of course, usually it's even worse, right?
Usually it's even completely upside down.
What all are the Palestinians willing to do for peace when the burden should be completely on the Israeli colonizers?
But anyway.
That's right.
It's quite easy sometimes to get entangled in terminology that is really of no real relations to the actual situation on the ground.
But it creates this illusion in the minds of readers and listeners and viewers that, you know, that there is a conflict, and if there is a conflict, it means that there is equal responsibility, not just how the conflict started, but equal responsibility of how it should be resolved.
And it's the it is very rare that we use the term conflict with any situation involving a colonial power or a military occupation of one's country or one's nation.
We've hardly ever used it with the case in South Africa or Argentina, rather Algeria or, you know, even Vietnam.
I mean, we use conflicts with North Korea, for example.
But North Korea, as weak as it is, as poor as it is, is still a nation with an army, with a standing army and even nuclear capabilities.
Gazans are not a standing army.
It's a nation that is colonized and, you know, gradually over the course of 70 years.
To term what's happening in Palestine a conflict is completely contrary to reality on the ground.
But again, it creates this misconception about what is actually happening there.
And now, so talk a little bit about what was going on at the United Nations there, because this is where, you know, nitpicking language really counts, of course, is in international law and how it's applied.
And I guess you bring it up only to dismiss the importance of it ultimately, which is fair and understandable.
But tell us about what happened with Nikki Haley there.
Well, Nikki Haley is the worst, man.
I mean, she's been she has really taken bias to a whole new level since the first day she arrived there.
She arrived with vengeance.
The idea was, you know, Obama has done the Palestinians supposedly a favor in December of 2016 when he decided not to veto a resolution that is condemning Israel's constructions of illegal settlements in the West Bank and Jerusalem.
Now, it's good that he did not veto it, but it was a case of too little, too late.
He should have done something at the United Nations in the first year he was there so that he would have several years of defending that position and trying to create the kind of reality that would ultimately resolve the so-called conflict.
But he didn't.
He just waited and waited and waited.
He gave Israel a lot of money.
And he gave Israel, in fact, he helped contributed to the building of the settlements financially.
And he helped contribute to Israel's war efforts against Gaza in 2014.
But a few weeks before he left, he did this, you know, act of not vetoing, which is contrary to American traditions at the UN, not vetoing a resolution that basically says that Israel has no right to construct illegal settlements and condemning the settlements and saying that Israel needs to reverse its occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
And then he left.
There was really no follow-up, because his administration was, you know, closing its shops and moving on.
Nikki Haley comes, and they particularly selected Nikki Haley really just because of Palestine.
Who cares about the U.S. other major conflicts going on around the world?
It's just because of Palestine.
And she made that memorable speech before the Israeli lobby group Apex conference, where she said that there is a new sheriff in town and I would be, you know, clicking my heels wherever Israel is being attacked at the UN, and I will not concede any ground, basically, on Palestine and Israel.
And really she held true to her word.
So she has this, you know, anti-Palestinian attitude that's really unprecedented.
I mean, not even Condoleezza Rice, not even Madeleine Albright, not even John Negroponte.
Nobody even comes close to her.
And not only she, like in the case of the last resolution where Kuwait, the country of Kuwait, said, you know, let's provide some protection for those protesters in Gaza who are being killed and gunned down in their hundreds and thousands.
Let's provide some mechanism for protection.
Okay, fine, let's not send armed observers.
Let's make them unarmed.
In fact, let's not even call it a force.
Let's just change the language in any way that will allow the U.S. to accept that resolution.
Not only did she veto the resolution, she had a counterdraft in which she was actually blaming the Gazans for the disturbances of the borders that led Israel to killing, you know, killing 130 and wounding 13,000.
So not only is it just the American veto is still being used with the same callous nature of the past, but now there are even counter resolutions blaming the unarmed Palestinians for their own death by the Israeli, by the Israeli army.
Yeah.
You know, I saw a quote this morning here.
I'm trying to page down here.
Oh, it's an Israeli journalist.
It's not a actual government official, but from Mondoweiss.net on Twitter, Israel, Israeli journalist Dan Margalit warns of a scenario where Palestinian, quote, terrorists and children and handicapped break through the fence around Gaza and set up an outpost.
And so and so this is why shooting all the ones that they have, maiming and killing all the ones that they've had has saved many Palestinian lives.
Because if you let children and cripples escape from their pen, you'd have to obviously waste them all.
I swear to you, Scott, I've been reporting on this for so many years.
I have never even got close to a situation.
I mean, we are out of words.
What is happening there is so incredible.
The obviousness of the injustice of it.
And yet the language that Israel uses, like the quote that you just read, you know, that the Palestinians are defending the board, that the Israelis are defending the borders against these hordes of Palestinians, unruly Palestinians who are, you know, helping to the destruction of the state of Israel, unarmed people, nurses, medics, journalists, children, every single one.
And the thing that the language they use, the Israeli discourse and the Israeli media, even by people who are considered liberal in Israel itself, it is taken for granted.
Yes, they are all members of Hamas, therefore it's OK.
And so you feel like the line of logic is so misconstrued, you can't even counter it anymore.
It's just ridiculous.
Yeah, well, and I mean, that's the whole thing is it's too ugly to say it all out loud in English to its conclusion that, look, if we let in the children of Gaza, we would lose our super duper 80, 20 percent Jewish majority and unlimited power, therefore, over the minorities inside Israel.
And they would rather kill children first.
And Nikki Haley says, yep, I completely agree.
This logic is just solid and we will do everything in our power to make sure that those children and handicaps don't make it to Israel.
So and well, and now I know this is quaint and silly, but it's against the law to murder people.
And, you know, there are even laws of war and laws of occupation.
And that's something else we're going to talk about here in a minute is your other article about Stop Calling It Occupation.
But in these circumstances, you know, the deal is that there has to be an imminent threat to life for shooting in self-defense.
So in other words, they're civilians.
But if they were civilians all with machetes or all with hand grenades or whatever, then you could shoot them in.
But they're not.
So you can't.
That's right.
Yes, of course.
But Israel's logic is it even goes beyond that, the it's not the threat of life is the threat of the demographics, the demographic threats.
That's why Palestinians have been referred to as demographic threat.
In fact, the language, again, back to the issue of language, the demographic threat of the Palestinian population means that we breed too fast and therefore we represent a threat.
And that threat eventually will be will become a bomb.
Therefore, we are the demographic bomb.
And so it's this kind of language that you are damned if you do, damned if you don't.
If you are fighting with weapons, you are a terrorist.
If you are fighting with any form of violence, you are a terrorist.
And nobody says anything when you are, you know, killed or whatever.
But but even if you don't, even if you protest peacefully, we know that your intention is to overwhelm the Jewish majority of the state and mess up with our numbers.
Therefore, you are a threat.
You are a terrorist because eventually you will create the kind of demographic bombs that is going to overwhelm the state of Israel, change the dynamics, change the numbers.
And you are going to be treated the same way as if you actually were carrying a weapon.
So whether you fight violently or not, it makes no difference because ultimately the results is going to be the same.
This is the Israeli logic.
And the sad thing is that it's embraced.
I mean, it's embraced like, you know, in in mainstream media here in this country.
Nobody comes and says, wait a minute, this is messed up.
It doesn't make any sense.
We should not even be, you know, repeating the Israeli or quoting the Israeli viewpoint on this issue anymore.
But it's not.
It's actually being received as if it's quite logical.
And Israel has some serious concerns because Israel has the right to maintain its Jewish majority.
And, you know, we can't just wait for things to change organically.
And, you know, yeah, yeah.
Well, you can't maintain apartheid forever and ever.
And things will just change.
There will has to there will have to be some mechanism right to enforce that kind of change.
Right.
And so and this is.
Yeah.
And this is why, you know, we we Palestinians must continue finding new ways to resist and to mobilize.
And in my opinion, really the popular mobilization and and not when I say nonviolent option, I don't mean that because of any sort of judgment on on Palestinian resistance, but really from a practical point of view, I think exposing this kind of discrimination and racism and injustice to to a global audience, to create the kind of mechanism that can really put the kind of pressure needed on Israel to relent is what is really needed at this stage.
You know, and I think at an international level, this is really happening.
I mean, the fact that you had a week or so ago a team like Argentina, the national team of Argentina, refusing to go to play in Israel.
I mean, this is really, in my opinion, this was one of the greatest, most satisfactory steps that achieved by the BDS movement, by the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement.
When you have a country like Argentina saying, no, we are not going to validate Israeli the Israeli occupation, Israeli apartheid, we're not going to play against Israel.
And we know it's not because out of the good heart of the Argentinian team, I think Messi in particular, the captain, you know, he's been in Israel.
He played soccer with Benjamin Netanyahu before.
So I really don't think it was something about the moral upbringing of Messi and others.
It's because of the pressure of millions of people on the Argentinian team around the world.
And they said, no, we are not going to play in Israel.
Benjamin Netanyahu was furious.
He called the Argentinian president trying to dissuade him and nothing happened.
You know, the Argentinians refused Shakira just a few days earlier, refused to go and perform in Tel Aviv.
All of these things are registering among the ordinary Israelis because they are not used to this kind of treatment.
You know, this is far more important than an academic not wanting to go and lecture in Israel or refusing to collaborate with an Israeli university, because this hurts the ordinary Israelis, those who have been living day after day completely unaware that there is even a movement of solidarity with the Palestinians anywhere in the world.
Now they are beginning to feel it.
This has to multiply.
It has to happen at a larger scale in order for us to reach that, you know, a moment where Israel could, in fact, be pressured enough to do so.
Now, what Nikki Haley is trying to do at the United Nations, back to Nikki Haley, what the US is trying to do financially is to prevent any boycott movement from registering as far as the Israeli economy is concerned.
Nikki Haley is doing her very best at the Security Council to make sure that whatever pressure that's being staged by the overwhelming majority of of of humankind at the United Nations does not make an iota of difference as far as the Israeli occupation, Israeli apartheid and colonization of Palestine is concerned.
So we are and I hate to say this, but the predicament here is not Israel alone.
It's rather the United States, the United States government, the Trump administration, the previous administration and the coming administration.
As long as the United States continue to see its role as the protector of Israel, it's going to be very, very difficult ending this situation in any positive way.
Yeah, man.
Well, I'll tell you what, I do think, you know, the BDS thing is certainly taken off.
And, you know, I wonder, I mean, I guess part of it is, of course, that it reinforces the Israeli narrative that the Israeli government and media saturate the public with over there, which is, you know, boo hoo, the whole world's against us.
But I think, you know, when this issue is so controversial, even among Jews, then you know that the reason why is because what the Israeli government is doing is wrong.
It's not because of, you know, nobody's picking, you don't see a bunch of Irish picking the English's side, you know what I mean?
There would have to be a reason why a damn good one.
That's right.
But, you know, Israel is living with this kind of ghetto mentality.
I mean, the whole idea of building walls, you know, they know they know darn well that these walls are not going to protect them if indeed the issue is protection.
I mean, we're talking, you know, we keep talking about the apartheid wall, the so-called separation wall in the West Bank, which is mostly built on Palestinian land in the West Bank, privately owned Palestinian lands.
But there is actually a wall around Jerusalem.
There is a wall around Gaza.
There is a wall around the Sinai Desert from the southern border.
And now they are building a wall around Gaza from the sea.
Right.
So there is this idea that walls are going to protect us.
But in reality, they are actually willing themselves intellectually and politically.
I think the wall really has more of a psychological impact than an actual physical impact.
Like the Great Wall of China.
I mean, we know it didn't really help against the so-called barbarians.
In reality, it just basically fortified this image among the Chinese at that time that they are safe and their emperor is able to protect them.
And, you know, if you think about it from a psychological point of view, it maybe is creating that kind of impact amongst Israelis and fortifying the image of, you know, the world is against us.
But on the other hand, it's also blocking them from actually seeing what they are doing.
You know, I met many Israelis in my life and I met many Israelis who, you know, became eventually with time anti-Zionist and anti-occupation and they walked wholly into the Palestinian side.
And I'm always intrigued by the process of getting there from that point to this point.
How how what what is how could you not see it?
You were in your 30s, you were in your 40s, in your 50s.
How could you not see that what you were doing was absolutely horrific?
You do the occupation, the subjugation, the oppression of another people, the robbing of their lands.
And how can you not see it?
And believe it or not, many of them actually didn't.
It is the thing that that kind of, you know, gets that light bulb, you know, going in their head.
It could be something so irrelevant or silly, but but somehow they are living in this war mentality.
That's why I'm saying that the war has psychological and intellectual impact.
It prevents new ideas, new thinking, new comparisons only when maybe they get to leave or a particular situation happening.
And then they realize, wait a minute, this is completely unacceptable.
And that's when they start thinking beyond the limitations, intellectual and political limitations that they are subjected to as children growing up in that place.
You know, so this is why I say regardless of whether BDS is going to enforce or reinforce that existing idea that the world is against us, it doesn't matter.
Let it reinforce it temporarily until it reaches the critical mass.
Yeah, that is going to wake them up eventually.
But we can't just wait on them to wake up on their own.
And Israeli, Israeli intellectuals, the like of Ilan Pape and others, they say it themselves.
Israel will only wake up under immense international pressure, not on its own devices.
All right.
Hang on just one second.
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Yeah, you know, Gideon Levy gave a great speech where he was saying that not in a million years are the Israelis going to snap out of it themselves.
But if the Americans told them, the game is up, get the hell out of the West Bank, and I really mean it this time, or we'll just cut you off, and we'll stop protecting you in the UN, and we'll quit with the $4 billion a year welfare money and all this stuff, that they would have righteous indignation until about lunchtime, and then after that would be capitulation, the closing of the settlements, the IDF would have to go get the settlers and get them the hell out of there, and the game would be over.
And they know it.
But that it's got to come from the outside.
And I don't know if anyone had followed up and asked him, well, what if the Europeans were really united about it?
I think his implication was it would definitely have to be the American government that changes its tune.
But that once they did, then never mind your dumb beliefs, reality's kicking in.
You cannot take the West Bank without American cover.
So get out.
Right.
And I don't think the Americans are also going to do it, you know, just snap out of it and say enough is enough.
I think the other dynamics would have to follow.
I mean, you saw their position regarding South Africa.
We were like one of the last countries in the world, alongside Israel, that continued to support apartheid South Africa until the very, very end.
Nelson Mandela was still on our terrorism list.
The Congress terrorist list did not remove him from being a terrorist, Nelson Mandela, until 2008.
That's years and years after he was released and he was a president and he was no longer a president and he retired.
And he still was on the terrorism list.
So, you know, I don't think if the American people are aware of what is happening in Palestine and there is a strong enough popular movement and a critical mass that is needed to change the mindset of ordinary Americans, that the government will continue to do as it pleases.
And Nikki Haley will go so unabashedly, use a veto power against unprotected people in Palestine and get away with it and just, you know, be perceived as some sort of a hero.
But they are they are taking advantage of that.
Most Americans just don't understand what's happening, you know.
Well, and, you know, I mean, ideologically speaking, it's almost like the neocons and the lacunics are a red herring, right?
Because if you just and it's sort of I think this is all caught up in the argument of one state versus two state solution and all that, because it it makes sense for a lot of liberal Zionists.
They think this part of that transition, I guess you're talking about, to think that, oh, man, they're totally against the occupation.
They think, you know, it's too bad Rabin died and give up the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and let the Palestinians have peace.
And that if they had done that all along, if, you know, after if they'd given the West Bank and Gaza back in 68 and said, come on, all right, let's work this out and whatever, that things basically would have been more or less OK.
They wouldn't have been perfect, but it would have been a hell of a lot more sustainable than the current situation.
And I guess it's really the the one state answer really comes from, I think, the change of ideas there that really, no, it's not the right wing lacunic settler expansion policy that's the problem.
It's Zionism itself.
And that really, at some point, how do you separate these things anyway, if the entire Labor Party's in on it with Likud?
And what difference does it make, then, when it's the entire consensus of the Israeli government over these decades now that, no, apparently you can't have Zionism that's willing to leave well enough alone and just take 72 percent and leave 22.
They won't leave the 22.
They have to be made to leave the 22.
And since, I guess, that's just not working, instead, it's time to abandon the idea of having a Jewish state there at all.
It's time to just have equal rights for everyone.
As you've written in your recent article, it's not really an occupation anymore.
I mean, the siege, whatever, you can quibble about how we define that in Gaza.
But on the West Bank, it's colonized.
It's taken.
It's already been annexed.
It already is part of Israel.
When we frame it that way, then there's only one answer, and that is equal rights for everybody and take all the Jewishness out of the law and just let people be people like America's secular constitution, that kind of thing.
That's very correct, Scott.
I think it's important that we remember that the term military occupation is not a swear word.
We use it in a negative context.
But in reality, it's an international law term.
It's a term that was designated initially by the Hague's regulations in, I think, 1907.
And it was reemphasized again in the Four Geneva Convention in 1949, and again and again and again ever since.
And the reason that they created this term is to say, listen, we don't want anybody to militarily occupy anybody else.
But if this happens, there has to be some sort of rules to ensure that the human rights are respected and the humanitarian rules are applying during that brief period of occupation until the issue is being sorted out and whatever conflict or whatever problem is being resolved.
And we go back to the way things were prior to that military occupation.
So military occupation is actually a legal term, and it's used specifically to help resolve a conflict, not to perpetuate a conflict.
In the case of Israel, this has been going on for 51 years.
So the issue of this being a temporary occupation has been resolved by the status quo of this being, you know, no, it's not a temporary issue anymore.
Israel has, you know, was established in the ruins of historic Palestine in 1947-48.
Israel occupied, continued the ethnic cleansing, and it took the rest of historic Palestine, the remaining 22 percent of historic Palestine, in 1967.
And since then, it has annexed much of the West Bank to build its illegal settlements in violations of international law and to bring its own population to the West Bank to live there permanently in violations of international law.
It annexed East Jerusalem in 1981, also in violations of international law.
All of these things have been happening ever since, and we are still using the term military occupation.
What military occupation?
What humanitarian laws that have been respected?
What temporary military presence that has taken place and ended?
None of this has taken place.
For the last 70 years, the Zionists have been on a reversible course of colonizing all of Palestine, and they have succeeded.
They have taken all of it now, 100 percent of it.
If you continue to talk about military occupation, so how do you explain what happened prior to 1967?
What is that exactly, the colonization of 78 percent of Palestine?
Is that not up for debate anymore because it doesn't qualify as military occupation?
So what I'm arguing in the article is that enough is enough.
All of the people who have been colonized throughout the 70 years, they are all Palestinians.
You want to call some of them Arabs or Arab citizens of Israel, and some of them you call them Palestinians, occupied Palestinians, besieged Palestinians.
They are all Palestinians.
They are all of them.
Muslims are all Palestinians, and they have been colonized over the course of 70 years.
And to resolve the issue of the Palestinians who have been colonized 70 years ago and which resulted in the exodus of millions of refugees, and the Palestinians who are living in Gaza, or the Palestinians living in annexed Jerusalem, or the Palestinians who are living in the West Bank divided between various arbitrary military zones, area A, B, and C, you have to look at the fundamental question of colonization.
You can't just pretend that each outcome of the problem has to be discussed and resolved separately and no resolution happened in the first place.
You have to look at the problem fundamentally as that of a colonization problem carried out by a secular colonial state.
Colonialism can only happen with violence, and it needs a violent ideology, and Zionism is a violent ideology.
And you have to address that original sin.
You have to address the fundamental problem of that secular colonial ideology in order for you to really start talking about finding a solution that can only happen through coexistence, through one democratic secular state for all of its inhabitants in Palestine.
There can be no other solution to the so-called conflict but this.
Here, here.
All right, well, can we talk real quick about Razan al-Najjar?
I'm sure I'm saying her name wrong, but this young nurse that was killed in the Gaza Strip, and she's really become a symbol of the Palestinian side of this, and was, of course, ridiculously smeared by the IDF spokesman.
But anyway, could you just talk a little bit about her and the symbolism of her murder?
Well, Razan al-Najjar is a descendant of a refugee family from Palestine, from historic Palestine.
And I have been following Razan as I've been following other young Palestinians at the border, the kind of language, trying to understand the kind of language that's been used by these young people.
She's a volunteer.
She's a volunteer medic with a medical organization that is known of being a secular organization, does not get any funds from the Hamas movement or the government, or it's an NGO.
It gets its funding from international sources, including the European Union.
But what really interested me about Razan is that the fact, despite the fact that she's only 21 years old, she had this really quite mature and developed political discourse.
She speaks a language that is, that's really quite new.
I mean, the fact, you know, when one of the videos she had, she spoke about, you know, maybe our society is traditional enough that would say, no, women should not be on the front line helping the wounded, you know, let the men do this.
And she would say, no, absolutely not.
I will do this despite of the Israeli soldiers and snipers, but also despite of any, you know, of my own society saying it's not appropriate for me to do this.
As a woman, I can do not just as much as men are doing.
I can do a lot more.
I was really quite impressed with this, that there is this kind of changing language and women are empowered enough in Gaza, they can do this.
And here she goes in one of the instances she was helping a wounded person that was shot by the Israeli snipers before she was shot right in the chest, right in the heart by an Israeli sniper and died at the spot.
It is it was really kind of a it wasn't entirely surprising for us because we have seen children and handicapped people being shot and killed in the spot.
But Razan, you know, kind of the energy she had, she is she is an empowered, beautiful, strong, smart, articulate woman who is challenging not just the snipers, but the norms of her own society taken on this responsibility of helping the wounded and to be killed herself in such a savage way.
It was really it broke the hearts of so many people.
But it's now being used as a symbolism, not just of the Israeli brutality, but also Palestinian defiance as well.
Yeah.
You know, she had just gotten a bit of news coverage in the week or two weeks right before this happened.
I wonder if she was specifically targeted and assassinated.
I wouldn't be surprised if that's the case, because we know that Israeli soldiers have, you know, there are tons of cameras there.
Anybody at the border will tell you that they are taking photos.
Drones are taking photos from the sky.
They analyze the information.
They know who is there, you know, who is quite active, who's there more present than others.
And, you know, so they are taking people out based on some sort of a calculated mechanism.
So, of course, they knew very well who Razan was before he killed her.
Well, and you're right, though, that, you know, the the imagery of of her position, you know, as you said, young and pretty and wearing a white, you know, medical coat and all of this, just very telegenic on Twitter or TV.
And then so part of that and back to the start of this is when it comes to the narrative, there's not much room for her in the story of what's going on in Israel, Palestine, on TV, in the United States or even in the newspapers.
And I'm not exactly sure the count, but I know certainly at first I read some things by Phil Weiss, where he was going through and making sure in The New York Times and The Washington Post, they didn't cover it at all or not until a few days later.
And then they buried it and, you know, built in some smear.
She was no angel or some nonsense, you know.
Well, actually, what The New York Times have done even worse, what Nazar said in an interview, Razan, rather, she said that I am a human shield for the wounded.
When she was asked, are you being used as Hamas for by Hamas as a human shield?
She said, I am a human shield for the wounded.
And that's really what the job of a medic is, of a doctor.
You know, you stand there, you protect the wounded.
And The New York Times actually quoted her saying, I am a human shield.
And that was that was the IDF smear.
They started in The New York Times, just straight parroted it from the IDF spokesman.
Exactly.
Just shameless.
A human shield, as though, yeah, she's saying she's a hostage with a terrorist gun at her back or anything like that.
And you know what the IDF also did was they put out a video of someone hands her a smoking tear gas grenade and she makes a face at it and then she throws it into an empty field away from the people she's with.
And they're like, aha, look, here she is throwing a tear gas canister.
But it's like, wait, who shot it at her in the first place?
Where does she get it from?
What are you talking about?
That's the best they can do.
But they go with that.
Go with that.
Publish that.
Anyway, I'm sorry, man, Ramsey, thank you for coming on the show.
Everybody, please read everything that Ramsey writes.
It's all really great stuff.
It's at original.antiwar.com slash Ramsey-Baroud and at RamseyBaroud.net and Palestine Chronicle.
And that includes Israel's premature celebration.
Gazans have crossed the fear barrier and the colonization of Palestine, rethinking the term Israeli occupation.
And then the brand new one that I did just have in front of me, which we're going to be running tomorrow, which is Palestinians need urgent protection from Israel.
And thank you again.
Oh, and the book brand new out is called The Last Earth, a Palestinian story.
Thanks again, Ramsey.
Thank you for having me, Scott.
Take care.
All right, you guys, and that's the show, You Know Me, Scott Horton dot org, YouTube dot com slash Scott Horton Show, Libertarian Institute dot org.
And buy my book.
And it's now available in audiobook as well.
Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
Hey, it's endorsed by Ron Paul and Daniel Ellsberg and Stephen Walt and Peter Van Buren and Matthew Ho and Daniel Davis and Anand Gopal and Patrick Coburn and Eric Margulies.
You'll like it.
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