It Could Happen Here Weekly 135 02:59:10

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Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode, so every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions.

It's Riot Time, when it could happen here. This is the podcast that you're listening to. It's about... This one's kind of about bad things. This is about a bunch of riots in the past. I'm your host, Bia Wong. With me is James and Garrison. Aloha. Hi, man. So, one of the kind of...

I don't know. The trends of 2024. Is everyone looking at this year and going, this is 1968 again. There's campus occupations that are anti-war protests. There is a Democratic National Convention that is expected to be extremely hot. And so, one of the things that we are doing in the run-up to the Democratic Convention is we are going to go do some episodes about 1968. And we are eventually going to do episodes about the Columbia campus occupations and about the DNC, but

Unfortunately, in order to do that, we have to – well, I say unfortunately. This is actually not unfortunately. This mostly rules. I don't know. Some of it's bad. But in order to talk about this, and this is the part of this whole thing that has been completely forgotten, right? There's become this kind of like –

I don't know. State cult isn't quite the right word, but there's become this sort of like professional institutional history of 1968 where like all of these universities like proudly have banners from like 1968 protests and

Everyone has been incredibly willing to embrace the legacy of the anti-war movements and the campus occupations. And insofar as they tell people not to embrace things, it's this stuff about – you hear this constant screaming about don't repeat the 68th convention. But there's one part of this story that is just gone, has been excised from the historical record. It is extremely clear that no one wants you to remember it whatsoever.

And that is the Holy Week Uprising. Do you two know, have you two heard of the Holy Week Uprising? Not before you started talking about it in our work meetings. I'm familiar with it. I've covered it in US history courses before. Not as that name. I think people might be more familiar with it if you describe the events. Yeah, so the other name for it is the MLK Riots, which is a week. I mean, okay, so it's... Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay.

Yeah, so, okay, so, and I should be clear about this. Okay, so there are really two things going on here. There is one, the, actually, it's usually thought of as about a week, but it's actually longer than that. There's like a couple months of rioting in various places over the assassination of MLK. The other thing that's going on here is a wave of urban rebellion, and when I say urban here...

I'm not just talking about, you know, like Watts or Detroit or Chicago, like these like giant urban cities, which is, which is how, you know, insofar as anyone ever talks about writing in this period is about these large urban centers.

No, they are rioting in Milwaukee. The most intense fighting that we're going to talk about in this episode happens in York, Pennsylvania. In this period, it's about 1963 to roughly by 1971, 72, it's kind of over. There are a staggering number of urban uprisings. I'm going to read a quote from a book called The Great Uprising, which is about this sort of period.

Between 1963 and 1972, America experienced over 750 urban revolts. Upwards of 525 cities were affected, including nearly every one with a Black population over 50,000. The two largest wave of uprisings came during the summer of 1967 and during Holy Week in 1968 following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.,

In these two years alone, 125 people were killed, nearly 7,000 were injured, approximately 45,000 arrests were made, and property damage topped $127 million, or approximately $900 million in 2017. You can even stretch this out to like...

Can I just give you the spin? I put on this in my history class and then we can continue. Yeah, go for it. Yeah, okay. So the way I perceive this is the process of decolonization begins in the colonies and it comes back to the metropole, right? And we see this physical decolonization in places like Algeria, right? And then the impact of witnessing that returns to the metropole along with the theories that

If you want to say they decolonized the mind, I think that's an acceptable way. And this sort of struggle, even the aesthetic of the Battle of Algiers is present in some of these uprisings. And you can stretch it out to, I like to talk about Wounded Knee, but the second occupation of Wounded Knee in 1973, I think you could also see that as part of this decolonization struggle. At least that's my angle on it.

Yeah, and I think there's definitely a lot of, like, I don't know, there's a lot of inspiration taken there. I think the way it's usually seen in the US is as this is the sort of, I don't know, it's kind of as it's seen as this kind of, this is where everything went off the rails after the civil rights movement, which isn't what happens. Yeah, and the other way I think it's seen, and this is, I don't know, a lens that is kind of useful to talk about this, but kind of isn't.

is about the sort of quote-unquote long 1968. So, you know, we're going to be covering a lot of 1968 stuff on this show. You know, so like there's obviously there's 1968 in France. I think if you want to look at the origin point of the sort of like wave of uprisings that are specifically 1968 and that aren't sort of like the decolonization arc,

I think it probably starts in China with Jen, with the January storm in 1967. But on the other hand, sort of, and this is, you know, one of the things about this period is everything is happening so much at the same time, right? Like we, we have a lot of experience about this, but like, you know, as the January storm, so the January storm is, is part of the culture revolution where Mao kind of loses control, right?

And Mao kind of incites a bunch of these, like a bunch of workers in Shanghai to take the city. But then they actually take the city and they run the party out, they run the PLA out. And for a brief period of time, Shanghai has just been taken by its working class and is not being run by the party. And there's this whole...

Like, you know, massive series of struggles and kind of struggles. But the thing about the sort of the way 68 is understood is, you know, even some people will even include that. But these riots, specifically the Holy Week riots, are almost never talked about as part of this process, which I think they obviously are. And I think...

Part of the reason we're talking about them now is that you can't understand the Columbia campus occupations. You can't understand the kind of politics that's going to come after this. You can't understand the DNC. You can't understand the rise of black radicalism. None of this is comprehensible at all unless you understand these riots because this was the uprising that sort of kicked everything off. Also, this is a very hard thing to write about because –

Like this, I've had the time of my life trying to put this together because this thing should be like 35 hours and I don't have 35 hours. I have 30 minutes. So that being said, let's get into why these are happening. So obviously there is the civil rights movement happening. You know, 1965, you get you get the Voting Rights Act. We've had some civil rights acts. But comma, if you are.

Like, you are a part of the black working class in 1960s America. A, society is still unbelievably racist. Like, they're, like, you know, the...

On a very basic level, there's a bunch of people walking around calling you the N-word. You are restricted to the shittiest jobs available, assuming you can find work at all. One of the biggest ones, and this is something that was a very big focus of the kind of later civil rights movement that kind of has been erased from the historical memory, was the struggle over housing. I'm going to read another thing from The Great Uprising.

SNCC field worker John Baptiste, who took over for Robinson and Hanson, described many of the homes in the Second Ward – this is in Cambridge, which is one of the places where there's really intense rioting, both. We'll talk about this in a little bit, but both in 63 and in 67. Described many of the homes in the Second Ward as nothing more than converted horse barns, corn cribs, and company shacks, which lacked hot running water, flush toilets, and electricity.

Separate and independent investigations by federal officials confirmed Bautista's claims. We were shown block after block of tottering single-family frame structures, often lined along dirt roads and generally with little or no setback, which is like they're directly on the street, right? Like you open your door and you're on the street.

crowded almost against each other and on small lots sometimes of no more than 50 or 60 foot depth reported one u.s department of housing and urban development official these dwellings were obviously obsolete and in disrepair with tumbling porches and steps many were without inside toilets and in several instances the outside privy served more than one family hot water is rarely available and several are without inside water overcrowding is a common pattern

So, you know, this is the kind of like this. This is one of the centers of these struggles that these people are living in, like 1930s barns. And this, you know, there is there is a sort of staggering amount of anger about this. And the other the other aspect of this is that, you know, OK, so these people are living in like places that are not fit for human habitation.

Also, they're – on average, 56% more of their income goes to rent than white people pay to rent, which means that – and this is also –

One of the things that's happening in this period is that there's a bunch of money for white people that the government is giving them, are giving people loans and subsidies and tax credits to go buy houses. None of this is happening for black people. So what you have is a situation where if you are black, basically all of your money is being absorbed into rents. There is no possibility of you saving or saving to buy a house other than the sort of ramshackle shit that you're in.

Like the conventional civil rights movement, right? You're sort of like nonviolent marches. This hasn't done shit to deal with any of these problems. You're also dealing with really, really intense labor discrimination, you know? And I mean, these are things like, like there's this kind of like example in Baltimore where, you know, you'll, you'll, you'll have union locals that are literally all white locals, right? Yeah.

And they will cut these deals with management where they'll be like – well, management will hand hiring and firing power over to the unions. And the unions go, oh, great, okay. And this is a negotiated thing between the two. The unions are like, okay, only unions can work at – only union members can work at the shop, which in theory is good. But in practice, what this means is because these are all white unions, right? They've now created a system by which you can just not hire black people ever. Yeah, the Brianna Wu method.

Yeah. It's a reference to a terrible tweet that hopefully people haven't seen. Oh, God. Yeah. And, you know, the other things that are sort of happening here, right, is so in theory, desegregation is supposed to be happening. In practice, that shit is not happening. People are making people are doing these like, you know, like white progressives are giving these speeches about how like segregation is like ending where we're like integrating quickly and it's not happening.

And all of this kind of, you know, all of this sort of fuel and also and obviously the sort of immediate spark of a lot of of a lot of these uprisings, particularly in 67, is that as as happens today, you know, you all statistically have lived. I don't know why I say statistically. All of you have lived through this. All of you probably have been to at least one protest. That is, this is that the cops just murder people. And all of this sets off.

a set of kindling and is going to lead to a simply staggering wave of uprisings. But first, do you know what won't lead to a simply staggering set of uprisings if you buy them? It's the production and consumption of created needs as described by Herbert Marcuse. That's right, James. Yes. For more on that, here's these ads.

So we are back. All right, so let's start actually talking about some of these riots. Okay, so I've mentioned before that these riots are happening in a lot of places that are not typically considered. And we're actually not going to talk... Sort of stunningly, for thinking about this, we're not going to talk about the Watts Riots, which are probably the biggest and most famous of the riots in this period. We're not going to talk about Detroit either, even though that was another really big one, because...

You can go out and you can find a bunch of people kind of talking about these. We are going to start in Omaha, where... Where all good things begin. Yeah, but again, this is something that's very important, is that this is not just a sort of uprising of the urban ghettos, which is how it's very explicit. This is literally the language that is used at this time to describe what's happening here. But no, this is happening in, again, Cincinnati...

And Omaha is interesting because it has one of the very, very common – one of the other big sort of rallying points in this era is price gouging. So if you're in one of these like 99% black communities, like the one white person who is there is the shop owner.

And the thing the shop owner is doing is the shop owner is gouging you for food because you don't, you know, you don't have any other options to buy food from. So they're going to gouge you and they're going to give you like the worst products you can ever, you've ever seen in your life. And so by 1966, people are just fed up with this. There start to be sort of protests, like specifically at these white stores. There's a bunch of people, you know, throwing rocks at the cops, you know,

Yeah, and so, you know, so, I mean, okay, the other thing that's very important to understand about these places is that these riots don't just start out of nowhere, right? These are mostly places where there have been existing civil rights movements, and they kind of just ran into a stonewall. You know, one of the big things in this period, too, and this is something that, like, you know, this is what MLK and the Poor People's Campaign was sort of working on at the same time.

Time was, you know, these demands for job programs. And so people are, you know, marching around. They're doing like pickets. Omaha like has Malcolm X come speak at one point. He's talking about like, you know, like you get these protests, people like marching outside of Safeway saying like we want jobs. And these protests start getting attacked by the police.

And this is something that, you know, this is something that that has been happening to these nonviolent sit-ins. I'm going to read a passage from the book. Then the burnings began from their Omaha police. Wallace's quote unquote goon squad and spectators began to beat the protesters out of the auditorium using batons and metal folding chairs reeling from the attacks. African-American youth retaliated in the streets.

So like, like they'll be in meetings with community, with like, like the mayor or whatever. And these fucking mobs will start just beating people with chairs. The goon squad, you say? Yeah. God reminds me of the we've been running ads to Freeland and Peltier a week, but the the guardians of the Aglala nation literally call themselves the goons.

I'm guessing not the people participating in this particular beating. No, no. Many such cases in this era. Yeah, and this gets to another aspect of these riots is that a lot of them aren't started by rioters. They're started by a bunch of like a white mob showing up and attacking people. And so, you know, in Omaha, and this is something that we're going to see a lot, that is something that kind of doesn't happen as much now is like,

They just the cops just fucking kill people in the streets when protests are happening in Omaha. They like they just they murder a kid with a riot gun. And this, you know, this sets off like sort of, you know, the patterns that we're sort of used to seeing of like these sort of escalating riots. And this is a very kind of familiar riot, right? Like, I think we've all we've all had the like, OK, so the police attacked a bunch of people. So it caused a riot kind of thing. Yeah. So now a riot starts. Yeah. Yeah.

And this is a relatively non-violent riot, which is to say that people are mostly throwing stones and Molotovs. That is absolutely not true of a huge amount of the rest of these riots, and particularly as we sort of get closer to Holy Week. Something that is very important about the 68 riots that is not true about any riots that we've ever lived through is that not only are people extremely well-armed, they are...

The state's monopoly on violence in 1968 is nowhere near as powerful as it is now. People will just fucking shoot.

And one of the constant things you read about when you're reading about these riots is that is, you know, every police account has police like like screaming about snipers. And like, I didn't believe this. Right. So I was reading this. I was like, OK, whatever. Other police. Right. They talk about snipers all the time. You see this in radical accounts, too, where people will talk about like, well, yeah, like the National Guard and Watts will be talking about how they're taking sniper fires. They'll start shooting machine guns and like the ruse of build buildings. Right. But.

No, it turned like this was real. People actually were like doing this. And, you know, I, I, I was, I was really sort of like, like on the, on the fence about this. Like, what's this? What was this actually happening? And then the next thing I read was an interview with a guy who'd been a black nationalist and starts talking about how they, they, they, they, they were using all of their dynamite stores and how they didn't have fuses for the dynamite. So they had to like, they had to plant the dynamite and then retreat across the street to shoot at the dynamite. So the dynamite would go off. Yeah.

It sounds like a fun exercise. Yeah, it was nuts. The kind of stuff these people were doing is really staggering. Like you say, the state just didn't have that same monopoly on violence. Cops didn't have the overwhelming force that they do now. They didn't possess tanks.

and like it was a lot harder to trace gun purchases in 1960s because not everyone used credit cards so it made it a whole lot easier for folks to have and keep guns yeah well the other thing is like you know this is something that in some of the this is something that played into some of the NAACP like chapters in the south that were sort of like black working class chapters is that like

So if you were an NRA chapter, you could just buy at a really cheap bulk rate a, like, surplus M1 Garands from the U.S. Army and ammo, and they would just sell it to you. Yeah, you can still buy them at a pretty cheap rate through the CMP. Yeah, but you could buy, like, really large quantities of them as long as you were sort of, like, you know, there was this kind of, like, popular, like,

like gun marksman culture that we don't like we have an in like our gun culture is kind of insane and this was like a very different thing from yeah definitely and you had like like Rob Williams was the the are you familiar with Rob Williams yeah

Yeah. Yeah. He wrote a book called Negroes with Guns. He was the leader of the NRA chapter in Monroe, but then also a member of the NAACP, which the NRA has pivoted a long way from what it was. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and part of what's happening here is people are just kind of picking up whatever institution they have and using it to build a movement. It's a tool. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

So, all right, we're going to move on from Omaha and Cincinnati. So we're going to start talking about some of the, I guess you'd call the uprising proper. So I guess before we fully head into this, it should be noted that it's generally, I talked about this before, there's generally, the way these riots are understood is as a thing that is discontinuous from the civil rights movement. And that's just not true. A lot of the civil rights movement,

Like things that people now think of as like nonviolent campaigns weren't like a lot of the stuff in my fucking like a lot of a lot of the fights in Louisiana like are just straight up riots. Yeah. And one of the important sort of bridge figures here is Gloria Richardson, who's I wish we could do like an entire episode about her right now, but that'll have to wait till later. She is a civil rights activist in Cambridge.

And her movements, like, you know, like she is in a lot of ways that like kind of dedicated to nonviolence, but she's very explicit that we're going to do armed self-defense. And a lot of the stuff that she leads, I mean, this is, you know, getting back to like 1963, like the civil rights stuff that she's doing is extremely effective. And a lot of it is just straight up riots, right?

To the point where there's a very famous thing for the civil rights era called the Treaty of Cambridge, where she and her people agreed to stop rioting and the city agreed to completely integrate. But by the time you get to 1967, they haven't done it. And so the riots started off in Cambridge again, and you have this incredibly sort of hot situation.

like summer over the course of 1967 this is there's there's this like enormous wave of riots and you know like cambridge's famous one but like detroit's another big one and this i know this should have given people warning that there there would be you know giant uprisings if anyone did anything to mlk but apparently it didn't and uh you know i you know what else uh it won't i don't know set off i've already used the you know what else won't set off massive waves of uprisings

I really didn't prepare good enough pivots for this. What won't assassinate a civil rights leader? We can't promise that. We really cannot promise that. No, companies would never do anything like that. What are you talking about, James? Certainly not the meal kit delivery service that we can't mention by name. All right, we are back. So, all right, it is now officially time for Holy Week. So on April 4th, 1968, MLK is...

Giving is, you know, like he is preparing to support a bunch of striking sanitation workers and they fucking kill him. Who the they is, is kind of unclear. MLK's family later sued the U.S. government to make the government prove that they didn't have they weren't involved in the assassination. The government paid them one dollar instead. So, you know, make of that what you will. But what did happen is that, you know, he was he was killed by white people.

And this detonates a fucking nuclear weapon in the US.

you know, reading accounts of me, it reminds me of the, the first week of the George Floyd uprisings in 2020. Not a lot of people remember this. There's this picture of this guy in Philly with an Elmo, like wearing, wearing like an Elmo, uh, like head. Yeah. And he has his fist raised and he's standing in front of a bunch of things of fire. Like this, this is, this is what that looks like. I'm going to read a quote from one of the people who was people who was there. I mean, I was sad when I first heard the news of King's death, but not,

But not like the world around me. The city was burning, and I'm walking through the city, and the city is burning. And that's what we wanted. This was our time. I mean, fire all around my house. I mean, my house almost got caught on fire when I was living because 7th Street, the whole block was burning. And it was just, we thought we were in a war. Again, simple. Simple. One of the interesting parts about this is that a lot of civil rights leaders, and this is not just true of, like, obviously, the moderate civil rights leaders are trying to tell people not to riot.

But even like Stokesley Carmichael like comes out to the crowd and tries to go like, please don't like don't riot. Don't do this. And the crowd basically tells him to fuck off and does it anyways. And the fact that they killed MLK who was, you know, MLK was, I mean, like even at that time, like the sort of living human symbol of nonviolence. Right. But he was also the symbol of sort of cooperation of nonviolence.

of this belief that you could do sort of peaceful integration. This is something that MLK is kind of like, even he's kind of getting cynical about by 68, but the fact that they killed him, it is a kind of psychological blow that I don't think we've ever experienced before.

Like maybe if you took like Trump's election like at the same time as the 2020 uprising, that like maybe, maybe kind of captures what people are feeling in this moment. And I want to read another account. I want to read an account that's – it's sort of secondhand account by this priest. It's like a Catholic priest in a largely black area. This is from the Great Uprising.

Yet other observers saw the uprising as a clear protest against the persistence of racial inequality. Father Richard Lawrence, an activist priest whose Catholic parish served many blacks, recalled encountering one of his parishioners on the street after the revolt had begun.

"'Father, you don't understand. I know you've been with the demonstrations and all that sort of thing,' the parishioner explained to Lawrence. "'But you were born white, and you can't really totally understand. I mean, I've done this civil rights thing too, you know it. I've been there. I've been to the marches, I've been to the rallies, you name it. Nobody's listening,' his parishioner continued. "'Murdering Dr. King was just the last straw that nobody's listening. We can go on demonstrating as long as we want. No one will listen.'"

I don't know what to try next, but maybe blood flowing in the streets is what it takes. Maybe some of his blood with some of my blood flows in the streets. Then maybe the man will listen. Maybe not, but I've got nothing left to try. I don't care if I got killed. I've got two kids and I'm not going to have them come up in the world I came up in. I'm just not going to have it. And this is, I think, a really important part of these riots is that these are people who had fought.

who had fought for a decade, over a decade, I mean, it's about a decade and a half of struggle. They've done everything. They've done strikes. They've done boycotts. They've done sit-ins. They've voted. They got the right to vote, right? They marched. They did civil disobedience. And, you know, the product of this is that they're living in a dilapidated house with a shitty job, and then they fucking killed MLK. And the country burns.

The National Guard straight up is – there are just straight up military occupations in an enormous number of cities. D.C. is occupied by the 503rd Military Police Battalion, the National Guard, and famously the 82nd Airborne. So the regular U.S. Army is being sent into these cities. The level of sort of burning here too, and this is the thing that's I think kind of the most famous part of these riots is –

They burn staggering parts of cities. There were, I mean, just like unbelievable numbers of buildings are burned and people, people sort of people, people go out to fight. People are, people are shooting at the police. The police are shooting back at them. I mean, there's, I wasn't able to find the footage. One of my friends was telling me about,

Like there's, there's footage from, from news people in New York of like a guy shooting outside of a window and they have footage of like a police, like SWAT team. Basically, I think it's like still pre-swap, like a police, like team coming in, just killing him.

And, you know, I mean, Richard M. Daly famously has a – who's the mayor of Chicago – has a shoot-to-kill order. You know, his words are, quote, shoot to kill any arsonist or anyone with a Molotov cocktail, and, quote, shoot to cripple or maim anyone looting any stores in our city. Jeez. It's really fucking bad. And, you know, this is something that's about these riots, right? Yeah.

Okay, if you look at even the watch riot, or if you look at 2020, if you look at like 2014, like the Baltimore uprising in 2015, there were like people having a good time. Like this is always the thing in riots. There's always like someone who's like having a great time. Fucking no one. I read like dozens and dozens and dozens of interviews of people from people from the Holy Week uprising. Every single person involved in this is having the absolute worst time of their lives.

That's like on every single side, right? Everyone is fucking miserable. And, you know, but part of what's happening here too is these are – these uprisings are also about Vietnam because, you know, a lot of these people either have been sent to Vietnam or like their families have been sent to Vietnam. Black people are dying at an unbelievable rate in Vietnam, right?

And these people come back and they're like, well, we're going to fucking die anyway. So I'd rather die. I'd rather go out fighting the cops than, you know, than, than dying in Vietnam. And, and also, you know, I've, I've been talking a lot about kind of like the, the snipers in the windows, but one of the most common ways people get killed. Well, okay. Probably most common ways they get trapped in a burning building, which is terrible. But one of the other really common ways is that these are, these are,

gunfights. We kind of saw this in 2020. There are white store owners are popping out of their businesses to take potshots at protesters. One of the people that they interviewed was a guy who had been walking past a store, and the guy had pulled out a gun and shot him. He had managed to knock it off, but the guy next to him got shot, so he took out a bolt off and burned the store down. This is a lot of the dynamics of this, right? Or like

It's not just that people are furious. It's not just that people sort of, you know, like people want this world to burn. It's that like they are very directly responding to the fact that the like white people also fucking lose their minds when this starts happening. And you get this degree of sort of urban conflict that kind of, you know, we don't really have this now. Not here. Yeah.

Yeah, like, even our riots are, like, largely nonviolent. Like, people don't shoot it out with the cops or each other in the same way that... Like, you know, it happens sometimes. Like, this is happening fucking all over the country. Like, this is happening in, like, you know, like fucking small-ass cities in the Midwest. There are people getting in gunfights, right? You know, and so eventually...

Okay, so the other very important thing about this that's really interesting and not remarked upon very much is that, okay, so like obviously the police in Chicago go fucking feral, right? The National Guard commanders come in and like the general of the National Guard goes, okay, you motherfuckers, you're going to kill someone. None of you are allowed to have loaded weapons. You're not allowed to have loaded weapons. And I mean, these guys don't stay like they have bayonets.

on their rifles. This used to be a thing. Like they used bayonets as a form of like, like a weapon. They just fucking stab you with a bayonet and their bayonets were ordered to be covered. And because of this, the guard doesn't actually kill anyone during this, during the 68 riots, unlike the 67 riots where they fucking murdered a bunch of people. And this was a really smart decision by the national guard people, because if they had started actually shooting into these crowds, um,

Like, this wouldn't have been one week of really intense rioting that ends with the Civil Rights Act, which we'll talk about. Well, it doesn't end with the Civil Rights Act, but like, you know, it sort of gets that. This would have been like apocalyptic on a scale that I don't think anyone kind of like has the capacity to imagine. But instead, they kind of, you know, there's these really intense riots. They kind of wind down over the course of a couple of months and escalate.

Like they kind of they wind down faster in a lot of ways than 2020 did. But on the other hand, that is not the end of these riots. And the thing I want to close this episode on, well, we're going to talk about actually, OK, let's talk about the Civil Rights Act first, because it is a very, very weird piece of legislation. So like five days in to now, seven, a week into the riots, Congress passes the Civil Rights Act of 1968.

And this is a very, very weird piece of legislation. I mean, it's obviously something that's been frantically scrambled out because there are just straight-up armed uprisings in a huge portion of the United States. And Congress's response – so they passed the Fair Housing Act. That's probably the most famous part of this bill.

It is very – I mean, it has done – it's not like a perfect piece of legislation, but it has done a staggering amount of good, right? And it is, in some sense, a direct answer to the protesters' demands, right? Like, it does improve discrimination of sort of housing. But it's also – okay, there's a bunch of stuff about the Bill of Rights applying to indigenous people that –

Is good, but we'll cover that. I don't know. Maybe if we do an occupation episode, we'll talk about that more later. That's kind of outside the scope of this one. But the other part of it is this absolutely deranged like conspiracy thing about like because like the line, you know, the line here as it was in 2020 that this is all being caused by outside agitators.

So part of this thing is what's known as the Riot Act, which is – it bans, like, quote, travel and interstate commerce with the intent to incite, promote, engage, or participate in or carry out a riot. It's not used very much, but this is, like, straight up a conspiracy theory, right? It's a conspiracy theory about what happened in the 1967 uprising in Cambridge, right?

So like that, that uprising, like that's the thing that produced Spiro Agnew, who was like a Nixon's deranged VP who Nixon picked to be so deranged that no one would assassinate him because assassinating him would put Spiro Agnew in charge. But like Agnew, Agnew had been like a liberal, like he'd been a liberal Republican.

But then there were these riots in Cambridge in 67. And the narrative that comes out of it is what happened was a black power leader named H. H. Rapp Brown came in, gave a speech, and then there was like riots. Right. And this is this is the standard line for like 70 years. What actually happened was that he gave a, you know, rap gives rap. Brown gives a very militant speech. Right. Like he does give a speech telling people to burn a school down. Like he's saying you need to like five people. But then everyone just goes home.

As H. Rapp Brown is dispersing, this young woman asks to be escorted home. She doesn't get beat up by the police. H. Rapp Brown and 30 people are like, okay. They try to go home. The police walk up to them and start shooting them with shotguns. H. Rapp Brown gets hit by a fucking shotgun blast. It was after that that the rioting started. That's what actually happened. The memory of it is that it was like, oh, these black nationalists came in. They started this riot.

And like this literally is now law in the U.S. And this is this is very famously at the end of this episode, we're going to talk about who this was used against. But before I need to do that, I need to make it clear that these riots don't end in 68. Right. And in fact, I think the one that is the most intense of these is York in York, Pennsylvania, which I promised you the beginning of this episode we were going to do. And that is in 1969. Because, again, like the conditions that cause these urban uprisings like haven't changed.

So, you know, like the immediate flames of sort of like of the Holy Week uprising, like of this rebellion by MLK sort of, you know, eventually trickle out, but there's just more of them. So this is another one. One of the things you come across when you research this is that like every single – the conventional like –

accepted public narrative about why these started they're all wrong this one so it's generally attributed to this black kid lying about being set on fire and like that did happen but this kid's like 14 right but what actually happened was that there were two black guys talking to a black police officer and two members of this like white power white supremacist street gang like walked up and shot them both and this kicks off

a series of shootings, brickings, and fistfights between black and white people all over the city. And this is also the other kind of riot in this period. We don't really have this anymore, but there are places where just effectively straight-up race wars start. One of the things that happens here, and this happens in a lot of cities, is there'll just be a bunch of white people in a van driving around shooting at people out their windows.

And we sort, you know, like this happened in Portland, right? But it was like, they were shooting paintballs. These guys are just shooting actual guns, like out their windows, any black people they see on the street, right? There's, there's a, so a crowd of like, eventually like protests start and like this, this crowd of like pretty well-armed black people and this, uh, and, and, and like a line of cops are facing each other. And, uh,

you know, this is one of these, there's two sides to the story. The cops claim that the crowd just started shooting at them. Like everyone in the crowd claims that the cops shot at them first and they started shooting back. And so there's just this fucking shootout between the cops and this, this giant crowd. There are like, there are reports of cops like just set up on the rooftop of a factory, just shooting everyone they can find like white gangs or firebombing black houses. One of the, I don't like, and it's a, that like should be infamous, but like, I've never fucking seen talked about anywhere is, uh,

uh a a fucking police armored truck there's a bunch of people who have like come out to their lawn to figure out what the fuck is going on and a police armored truck rolls up and just starts shooting them and so you know people and people start shooting back and there's a bunch of like like people eventually get sort of tried for this and one of the you know one of the things people talk about is like yeah there's like 20 guys in their houses like having a shootout with this armored car because the armored car has just fucking started murdering everyone

And, you know, the sort of remarkable thing about this, I mean, one of the remarkable things about this is that literally the day before this happens, all of these cops had been at a police training seminar about the best way to respond to civil unrest. Amazing. And the police seminar, and they are correctly, because this is actually, if you are the police, the best way to handle one of these sort of uprisings, you know, they're told in no uncertain terms, the best way to do this is do not confront the crowd, do not shoot at the crowd, do not

I like, you know, okay, like do you like containment, but don't go, don't like walk up and fight them because that will make people fight them back. And then literally the next day they are having running shootouts with like the entire black population of this town. And, you know, like York is a place that has had civil rights movement stuff before this. It's also has, you know, again, like it has, I mean, just literal white power, like street gangs who the police are in. I mean, the police literally just call them the boys.

Like that's how that's how that's how tight these people are. Right. But and this is the thing, you know, one of the notes I want to close on is that like a lot of the focus and I get why people focus on this. A lot of the focus from sort of radical accounts of this period is about, you know, because these riots, these uprisings like these are this is the crucible in which sort of black power is forged in.

And so there's a lot of attention paid to sort of like black power, like people who are going to become black power leaders and people influenced by these movements like doing armed self-defense. And that is true and that is important, but also just regular ass people are also doing this, right? Like the guys, the 20 guys who are having a shootout with a police armored vehicle are

They are just like some of them are Vietnam vets, but like they're just they're they're just regular people who saw the police fucking roll up like into like roll up on a fucking house and start shooting people. There is a sense in, you know, in this period that the thing that guns are for are to protect you from the government. Right. And people actually believe this like JFK.

There's a really good article in Strange Matters called The Double Counterinsurgency that's about this that talks about how JFK literally gives a speech where he talks – again, who is a liberal – gives a speech about how, yeah, we need guns to defend ourselves against the tyranny of the government. And yeah, if you are a black person in York in 1969 and you are watching the police from an armored vehicle shooting people on their front lawn –

The response people had was, okay, we're going to die here or we're going to die in Vietnam. And so I'm choosing to die here fighting the cops. And that's important, I think, because a lot of what we're going to talk about next are these student radicals. And everyone now looks at these student radicals and goes, these people were insane. These people were stupid. These people didn't understand what was happening. There was no way a revolution was ever going to happen.

And they're wrong. Those people are fucking wrong. What these people were watching, right? They were watching this. They were watching hundreds of cities going into open revolt. They were watching people having shootouts with the cops. They were watching people. People tended not to shoot at the National Guard because people had enough military experience to realize that if you try to shoot the National Guard, you're not going to win because they have machine guns and stuff. But people did it still, right? There are still numbers of this. They are watching this.

They're watching armed uprisings in basically every major and minor, and not even major, every minor American city has one of these. And these people assume that this is the revolution and that this is the opening stage of the revolution that is coming. And they weren't wrong to think that. It didn't happen.

But it's not that these people were sort of naive or foolish. They had the same rational reaction to what they were seeing that the FBI and the Nixon administration did. And I think that's the place I'm going to close. So I think the next one of these episodes is going to be about the Columbia student occupations. But the one after that, well, I might do basic skating there, but we are eventually going to get to the DNC part. And I promised you the...

thing about the people who were charged under the riot act yeah so the people who are going to the most famous people who are going to be charged with this like interstate riot shit are the Chicago seven seven people arrested at the Democratic National Convention so when we come back in however long it takes to do the rest of the 1968 so if we do before we get to that we will come back to to this civil rights act fucking over a bunch of people's lives I look forward to that

♪

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Hi everyone and welcome to the podcast It Could Happen Here. It's a podcast about the world falling apart and people putting it back together. Today we've got a little bit of both. I'm joined again by Mick and Rose. This time we'll be discussing the treatment of migrants inside the European Union and specifically the treatment of migrants by the government of the Netherlands at a place called Terre Apple. Welcome to the show guys. Thanks for joining us. Thanks. Good to be back.

Thanks for having us. Thank you. It's good to have you. I wonder if you could begin, we were talking about this before you recorded, and I think it's very, obviously the migration laws in Europe are very different, but so are the situations with like regard to shelter and just like facilities with the US being so big, we have them dotted all over the place. So you were just explaining that this is a place where anyone who wants to register for asylum in the Netherlands has to go. Is that right?

Yeah, so that's almost entirely right. So everyone who arrives in the Netherlands and wants to ask for asylum has to go to this village all the way on the northeastern border with Germany. And that's where the only registration center is for most asylum seekers. I believe only people who do family reunification can go somewhere else.

But yeah, we have like one registration center for the entire country. And yeah, yeah. I mean, we have a tiny country, but it still became a huge bottleneck because it was the only one. So it didn't work out that well. Apparently, and that's why we're talking about it, right? So just so people understand where these people are in their asylum journey, like they've entered the EU, right? Yeah.

And then they've traveled to the Netherlands, which is a country where they want to claim asylum. Is that right?

Yeah, exactly. So basically they arrived at their final destination. So most people that I met in InterApoll had already been traveling for weeks, months, sometimes years, depending on how much money and luck they had usually. So yeah, they would have either crossed the Mediterranean Sea or gotten into Europe through Turkey or Belarus. And then they would have crossed many, many borders and many, many border guards and fences and

And they would have gotten stuck in places for weeks or months before they could move on again. And people who would actually go to the registration center in the Netherlands, that means they wanted to ask for asylum there and probably stay there. Right. That would be their country of residence going forward. So...

Can you explain? I mean, I'm looking at pictures of it right now. It's not hard. If you want to look up pictures, you can spell it T-E-R-A-P-E-L. But can you explain the condition set? Because looking at it, it's atrocious from the pictures I can see.

Yeah, I mean, I saw many pictures before I went there myself. It's basically just a tent camp. So, I mean, it's a shelter, right? So it's like it used to be an army base. It can hold 2000 people. It has loads of like small housing units where people live. It has like a lot of offices for all the registration steps and like the immigration service, the police, the shelter organization, like blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

But so like one and a half year ago, there was a lack of shelter in the whole country, but specifically also in Terapeu. And yeah, somehow the authorities decided that the solution would be to just leave people on the fields that was inside of the register in front of the registration center.

And so there was just an informal camp. Like people were sleeping outside for weeks or months, not even in tents, but they would have like huge kind of banners or tarps that would kind of provide some shade. So it was like midsummer. It was a very dry summer, which for us was crazy lucky. The climate activists were not happy, but we were happy. Yeah. So yeah, people were just like,

laying on the ground and that was, yeah, there were some tap water, there were like Dixies for toilets that were obviously gross. And so, yeah, what you would see if you Google it, you just see people lying on the field and just being there for extended periods of time. But when I personally went there the first time, it was kind of worse than what I expected it to be because I think the level of neglect was not visible on photo or on video.

So people would come to us and tell us that they had like, show us really big wounds that were infected or people would come and tell us like, Hey, I had a heart attack a few weeks ago. I need this medication or I have diabetes or whatever. So there was just this dystopian situation of this enormous facility that can hold thousands of people and then a big fence around it. And then people with,

clearly like very serious medical conditions just standing in front of the gate and the security guards just being like no maybe like a staff member will show up today maybe not but like we don't care how dangerous the situation is or something yeah just the fact that there was like no proper

place to wash there were no toilets the food was like yeah i worked in camps across the borders uh across the european borders and i've seen a lot of like horrible food but like in their apple they just decided to rent uh yeah like if you have like um

a party or something you just rent this place that will just sell fries so they were just giving fries to people like every single day jesus yeah just i mean just just pre pre-packed food from the supermarket would be more healthy than just fries every day for a month right so

Yeah, so just a level of neglect, lack of care, even more than what you can see on the pictures. Yeah, and a complete failure of the government to address their basic rights and needs. How long can people expect to spend in that situation then? They have to go there, right? If they want the asylum, they have to go there.

Yeah, so the irony was that the only way to get shelter was to be there and then be without shelter for you wouldn't know how long. Right. Yeah, I mean, sometimes it was hours, especially for the women and children. They would usually be let in in the evening. But yeah, men, definitely days. Sometimes if they were not lucky, weeks. And it was just also so unclear how...

So people would just not get any information. They would be there and then all of a sudden hear someone shout and all start running towards where the shout came from because maybe they would be let in or...

Yeah, I don't know, like guards would just shout at them in Dutch and then be like, why don't you understand me? Or like it was all just like consciously like it's so unnecessarily chaotic and therefore also like people pushing around police getting like intimidating and violent. And yeah, just this very chaotic and disrespectful approach to people.

Yeah. It's worryingly similar to what we see in open air detention sites here. Like, um, they'll do that. People are outside there too. They have next to no shelter there too. We volunteers make the food, so it's better than that. Yeah. They'll turn up in a bus. Like I've seen them turn up in a bus and just shout run. And like, if you understand English, you

You run, if you don't stand English, you see everyone else running, so you run. And then they can only take 30 people and you've now had more than 100 people come stampeding across, like, just, you know, they've got to grab their bags and everything. And it's, yeah, completely unnecessarily chaotic and cruel. And then once they're let in, what can they expect from that? They're staying in like a barracks or something while they're processed? Yeah.

Yeah, so it was very, very chaotic. I think it took them like almost a year to actually process everyone because they would just, if a municipality would say like, oh, I have space for 100 people, they would just randomly put 100 people in a bus and leave.

drop them there. And then a year later it would turn out that they were never properly registered or something. But yeah, I think there was a night shelter not so far away from Ter Apel. So that was always late in the evening. There would still be a few buses going to that night shelter. That was just a big sports hall, I think, full of beds, bunk beds or stretchers

And yeah, no privacy, just like hundreds of people in one room. The lights would stay on all night for safety reasons, but of course that's also very cruel too. Yeah. And then if people would get registered, they would be usually sent to like a temporary or like emergency shelter because there was such a huge shortage of regular shelters.

So some people were living in sports halls without much privacy for like half a year or a year, or some people are still there to be honest. Yeah, that's crazy. It's atrocious. Talking of atrocious, unfortunately, we have to break for ads. We'll do that.

Okay, we're back. I hope you enjoyed this advent. And we're talking about Terraple, this, I guess, migrant reception registration center in the Netherlands. One thing I saw when I was sort of doing some reading about this recently was that babies born to mothers or people in the Terraple Asylum Center are seven times more likely to die in or around Perth. That is shocking.

So is there just no access to medical care? Are people delivering babies in this asylum centre? Well, I think the excuse of the government is that they didn't have proper care during the pregnancy because they were still travelling. Of course, that is often the case. But still, it's insanely high.

seven times more people dying. And especially when this super chaotic situation occurred, like, yeah, we would have people in the field that we were suspecting they were getting like hypothermia or some sort of strong physical reaction to the tough conditions they were facing. But they could be dropped in the night shelter, kicked out again in the morning, being back on the field.

staying on the field for a few nights again going for one night to a night shelter being transferred to an emergency camp for two days being transferred to another emergency camp for three days and during this time there is no coherent medical care right yeah and of course it would usually be a little bit better for women and especially pregnant women so they would try to put them in a more stable place and like not move them around that much but trying is yeah

they would not always actually manage to do that. So there have definitely also been complaints of people, especially pregnant women, still being forced to move to a different camp really close to the date that the baby was expected to come. And yeah.

That definitely doesn't help. So, I mean, the care on the field was absolutely horrendous. I think women were usually not exposed to it that much because we do. Yeah. There's also this weird sexism in migration that men can always suffer more, which is not always true, especially if you're not filtering out the really thick men either, because I was definitely a lot more healthy than a lot of the men walking around there. Yeah.

But yeah, at least in the case of like pregnant women, I think they would be moved out pretty quickly. But yeah, it was chaotic. And then also you have like,

of course you have a lot of people who speak Arabic or Farsi or Tigrinya, but you also have people who speak a language that is only spoken in a province of a country, you know, like it's very hard to get proper translation for like all the possible languages of people that apply for asylum. Yeah. But yeah, I mean, I definitely think the conditions are,

especially when there were so many people living in really bad emergency shelters or even on the streets, did not help babies at all. Yeah, or anyone, I guess. No. Can...

You explained then, like, this situation arose about a year ago, I think, right? So you were part of a group of people that were able to respond to help, at least, I guess, make it a little bit less terrible. Can you explain a little bit about the group, about what you were able to do?

Yeah, so I mean, we just, so I was already a part of Migrate, which is an organization that, like, I personally worked on the borders, like providing food and clothes and stuff like that to people on the move. And Migrate is more like also more an activist organization, so organizing protests or campaigns and stuff like that. So we just like went to see what was going on.

And then we very quickly realized that it was worse than it looked, but also that there were so many basic things that were not being done by the government that we were actually able to do. So, yeah, we just asked around a lot for hours and hours, like, what do you need? What's going on? What is missing? Like, what is what is your primary issue at this moment? And one of the main things people were saying was like the food is fucking driving them insane. Like, yeah, yeah, just insane.

the lack of flavor, but also just the lack of health and people would just get diarrhea and stuff.

And then it turned out, of course, that there were already some people around that wanted to do stuff. So we just had a big call. And then it turned out that there was like this squad where they had a big kitchen and they were like, yeah, of course you can cook here. And then there was another like former squad where they also had a big soup kitchen. And then I was like, okay, this is like, it was a big like media storm. It was a big thing for the Netherlands that this was happening because we have this like

yeah, idea that we are perfectly organized and blah, blah, blah. And that's like all the bad things happen on the border still like at the, like with a very clear role of our politicians, but like somehow, yeah, there's not much talk about that. So it was, it was like on the front page every single day for weeks. So I thought, yeah, like because the people that were already trying to do something, they were like, how can we get enough money for the groceries and how can we get volunteers? And then, yeah, I was like,

we'll manage. If there's one thing I learned from the borders, if you start doing something, people will come and join. And we first said, okay, let's just cook two times a week, one time in this squad and another time in the other squad. And then it's super doable. And then basically we started and

it's yeah, there was just no way back. So yeah, we said like, okay, let's send out food twice. And then, yeah, I just went like day and night being on the field and quite quickly we moved to food distribution every day because there were so many people in the area that wanted to cook. There was like an Islamic group, there were churches, there were like, yeah, from all over the country, people were coming into action. And yeah, so first we did food.

Kind of because people really wanted it, but also kind of because we just knew how to do it. Because we had some people who had a big kitchen and some experience cooking in large quantities. And then quickly it became colder and rainy as well. So we started to move towards sleeping bags and ponchos and just big distributions. And then we also started to hand out tents. And then we got into a whole fight with the municipality and the police because they were constantly confiscating the tents. Yeah.

But yeah, we just started with what we like thought would be feasible to do, I guess. And then it kind of escalated really quickly to, yeah, us being kind of responsible for a lot of basic needs of everyone on the field and also us monitoring, like informing journalists, because like the government would be like, oh no, there's nobody there on the field right now. And then we would just like,

for five minutes and be like no one yeah so we also quite quickly like became a big like part of the whole political debate where like the government was saying one thing and we were saying another and like they were all the time trying to pretend that nothing was wrong and everything was fine and

Yeah. Yeah. But I think it's, it's such a common, sadly, a common experience, right? Just being like, A, the government is lying to you. Like you can see this with your eyes that you're being lied to and B, like they're just going to leave these people. If we don't do something, no one will. Something that we've had here, we see it, as you say, every border in Europe, more or less, right? Like it's just a consequence of the way that like

neoliberal capitalism has decided to deal with migration, which is to be as cruel as possible and to make it as hard as possible for people.

I wonder, like you've been organizing there at least in this place for like a year. I think I want this to be instructive for people because like we've been organizing here too and we've learned a lot. Are there things that you've learned that you think other people could take from the organizing or like, I know make you, you also are part of like organizing in your like area and

If either of you have things that you've learned about specifically organizing to help migrants, I'd love to hear them. Oh, so many things. I'm probably going to forget some of the things I've learned. Well, I think one thing that I've learned and that I've learned over and over and over again is that if you start doing something, you will find people who will join. And I think that's one of the scary things when you see a gigantic problem. And even if you know a concrete thing that you can do about it, it's still...

Yeah, there is a lot of things that you cannot do as a single human being. But I found this true in many countries across the world that if you just start and you say that you're doing it, people will actually join.

And I found that especially painful in Ter Apel that we were on this field and there had been so much media attention and there was nobody there. Everyone was speaking about it and no one was doing anything. And it was kind of depressing to witness that and to feel that nobody, it felt like nobody cared, right?

But as soon as we just started with the small thing, like, okay, you can donate groceries, you can come help cook, you can come help do the dishes, like concrete things that you can do. Yeah.

We were like, I think we got like a thousand people who wanted to volunteer with us, which was like way too much. We never got back to all of them because it was just insane. We did not need a thousand people to cook food for 200 people. So like, yeah, but we just started. And I think, yeah, I think that was really helpful. Or I think that can be very helpful if you're thinking about doing something like start small, but, but,

Don't be afraid that it will not kind of grow because people will join and people will make it into something bigger. Yeah. Also a great lesson that I learned. Well, it's very basic and understandable actually, but like try to make, yeah. My experience is usually with like a mass distribution. So you have hundreds of people, you have,

food or blankets or whatever something that people really need and it's like so important to to really plan the distribution well and to really inform and discuss with people

Because that's one thing that also happened in Fair Apple that at some point people were just dumping shit on the field and they were actually causing fights and causing tensions between people. Because you cannot show up with five sleeping bags when hundreds of people are in desperate need of a sleeping bag. That's kind of inhumane. I get that people have good intentions and I get that it could potentially mean that five people are less cold.

But like, yeah, some sort of shelter is a basic necessity. So you cannot give that to a few and not to others. So, yeah, I think like the first time we did the distribution in Toronto, I was kind of scared because people were spreading, like there was a lot of rumor about like, oh, it's so violent and these people are like blah, blah, blah. And

And of course, I kind of didn't believe it because I worked with migrants for a long time and I know that they're human beings, you know, and they're not so like shockingly different than... But I've also learned that you need to be... They did not learn at all to trust anyone there because like people were lying to them. People were telling them they would get shelter in the night, but they would not. People would say that they would see a doctor and they would not get to see a doctor. So like the...

I think it's really important if you want to help people that you take them seriously and that you build up some trust. So for example, we, we went, the first time we cooked so much food, we were like, it's, we cannot make it run out. You know, like we want everyone to get as much as they want and more. Yeah. Even if we have to trash, because like these people for once have to get the feeling that it's,

Like that we're there for everyone. So if you make if you do a mass distribution, you usually make like lines and people have to like wait for their turn. But we spent hours just telling people like, hey, we're going to give out food. There's so much food. You know, don't worry. Like it's chill. And then also actually live up to that, of course. Right. Make sure that there is enough food.

Yeah, and try to make it fun. It's kind of awkward because I kind of feel awkward about putting people in a line and telling them to wait. Because you're kind of bossing them around.

But yeah, if it goes well once and everyone just feels like, hey, here I don't have to fight to get to the front and here I can just chill out and we can make a chat with each other and we can just, you know, smile and like wish each other a good day. Then, yeah, I think it's also really important to try to make distributions kind of fun or at least as chill as possible and to like,

try to not make it another survival of the fittest moment because that is exactly what the state is pushing people into and that is what I don't want people to get into yeah I think that's very true like we've definitely learned a lot of those similar things I can't uh like put enough emphasis on planning before you just show up and do a distribution like we're

We had so many fucking chaotic... People are fucking hungry and they've had to fight to get fed for the duration of the journey, be that days, weeks, months or years. They're doing what they understand to be the necessary thing. Yeah, and it's absolutely not humane to just...

recreate that that mode you know like it's amazing to be able to to create a nice atmosphere where people can relax and feel safe and feel finally treated like equally and somehow like fairly again even if it's just for a very simple meal but it's yeah it's

I mean, you can already get moody if someone jumps in front of you at the supermarket, you know? Like, I can get moody with that, but it's like that, but then, like, way more extreme and for actual, yeah, things that you need to survive all the time. Like, it's, yeah, it's hard to imagine, I guess, if

If you've never really been in a survival situation, but yeah, it can be so much fun. Also, maybe that's another good one because I remember people were feeling sorry for me a lot when I was working there. Like, Oh my God, this must be so hard. And I mean, it was fucking hard sometimes. Like I have literally been standing there like,

pushing away tears and being like, no, I'm fine, but I'm not fine at all. But also it's fun. Like you're just joking around and you're making each other happy and you feel like you're part of something bigger and you feel, I think it's very empowering to be like the state is fucking it up and we can actually do it better.

Yeah, very much so. Like, I think it's very like affirming, right? Like to be like, we don't need like anyone telling us what to do. We don't need anyone trying to control us. Like we can take care of these people ourselves without creating mechanisms of control. And like, I think for me, that was one of the reasons I really enjoy doing it is that like me and my friends can care for these people more.

And it's like, I don't know, from my perspective, like I've had conversations with hundreds of people from all around the world. Like we would do things like play music while people waited for food. If we had a friend who was able to play music, you know, we had enough, enough people. We'd always recruit people from among the migrants to help us with food distribution, which turned out to be great because like they taught us different things.

words in different languages and like uh you know i can say hot sauce in like 25 languages now and like it was the important parts yeah yeah right there real stuff but yeah it was very and then like i remember one night it was like in september it was so cold one of the colder nights it was in september and it was just about freezing and like

There were very few of us back then. My friend had some guitars and drums and we parked the van to block the wind and everyone sat around and played the guitar and they played us different songs. We had all these really happy moments. It's not like we sit around crying all the time. No, not at all. It's very empowering, I think. I think it's important what you just said that also a lot of work can be done by people themselves.

So I remember a volunteer being like, "I want to give out the food." Whereas these guys were giving out the food every day and they had this whole routine and they were much faster. And also it's not about you feeling good about... Yeah, not there to help you. Yeah. Listen to people, really spend a lot of time understanding what people need and what they want. Because it's really often not what you expect.

And yeah, make sure that people can also do stuff themselves. And also like, for example, if we would have tents, but not for everyone or blankets, but not for everyone, instead of making like a very rigid decision of like, you get it and you don't. It's so useful to just talk to people and just be like, hey, sorry, this is the situation.

Or yeah, like there were a lot of fights because families were always allowed to go first, but it was not really clearly communicated by the government's like hand facility and stuff. But when we were just discussing with them, like, Hey, how can we make the distribution more chill? They were like,

well, can women and children and elderly people just go first? And I was like, yeah, sure. I mean, it's not really any of my business. Like, yeah. And then if everyone just understands it and it's kind of clear and understandable and explained, it's like so much more chill. Whereas if you're just shouting at people and

assuming that they will not understand or assume that they will be selfish, you are also forcing people into that role. Yes. And I think it's really beautiful if you can snap out of that and you can, yeah, you can just be somewhat equal, even though like legally you are in a completely different situation.

Yeah, totally. So what you're telling me is that if you talk to people and treat them as human beings, that has positive results for bad situations? Yeah. This is a hot take. A very hot take. Breaking news. I don't have nearly the amount of field experience that Rose has. But

Another thing that I think is really important to highlight is that it's not just the necessities. I was part of, I did first aid at the No Border Camp near Trappel last summer. And some of the activists there did

a really admirable job. I think they did not go to Terre Apple because it was too politically hot at the time. So they went to different centers where migrants were living and they handed out toys and they hired a bouncy castle for the kids to play on. It was really...

it was really basic in the sense that it didn't need like massive funds or incredible amounts of organization that you need bureaucracies to handle. It was just people thinking of ways like, hey, how can we make these people happier or more comfortable or at least forget for like a few hours about like the situation they're in? Because

Our media likes to dive onto every time there's a fight in a migrant center. But it's rarely discussed that if you put a lot of people in a stressful situation on top of each other, there will be tensions and there will be fights, which is, I think, a

we don't cover that enough. Right. No. And also nobody really cares because I think it's, it's one of the most beautiful things for me as well. I said the solidarity that people show each other and like,

Yeah, you don't even see it half the time, but people give each other like their waterproof jackets. Or I remember one night, it was a horrible night in Fair Apple and we didn't expect people to be there. And all of a sudden there were hundreds of people and they hadn't had food since the morning. And then people in the camp, they all get microwave meals and they kind of hate them.

But they all had kind of a stash. So they all started to heat up microwave meals and bring them outside. And they were actually way more able to provide food on such a short notice than we were. And it was not the best food, but everyone had food. And they were even sharing it with us. And we were all just so glad to be eating after 10 hours in the rain and in the cold. Yeah.

And yeah, people, yeah, I don't know, carrying luggage for someone who has like, it's all the time you see people standing up for each other. And I think that is honestly an amazing thing. And maybe more tough situations bring that out somehow more as well. Like it's easy for most people in Western societies to be very individualist and live very isolated. And yeah. Yeah.

non-fulfilling lives but then if you are in this kind of situation in some ways it can also bring out the best in people yeah i think so like we were just talking about before we started how like uh yesterday i was out helping down by the border and uh i ran into two mauritanian guys who had carried a chinese man with a leg injury for two days like and they couldn't even share the same language and like that walk is no that hike is no joke like i do that with a big backpack full of water

that's hard and I do a lot of hiking but I wasn't carrying another human you know but it can actually yeah really bring out some incredible acts of kindness and uh

I wonder, guys, we're running close to the end of our signed time. If people want to help, either to say they're in the Netherlands and they want to come and help or if they want to help in a financial way or maybe they can do some remote sort of help, maybe they can respond to the thousand volunteers via email for you. Yeah. How can they do that?

Yeah, donations are always welcome. We're currently not working in Ter Apel, but it doesn't look good. So usually the influx is highest in summer and early autumn. And we have a far-right majority in parliament since a few months. So we're fine.

Wouldn't be surprised if we have people out on the streets again. Also, I think there's a very big chance that the shelters for undocumented people might close.

So we would have a lot of people on the streets then. So we need a lot of solidarity networks and a lot of things, like a lot. Um, yeah. So like, yeah, financial support is always welcome, but I think it's also really important that people think about what they can do in their lives and that it is also something that they can manage inside of their lives. So like not everyone can drop everything and yeah. Um,

move to the other side of the country or whatever. But if you can host one person or if you can support someone else who's hosting, like there are ways I think, I think Migrate does not have like all the options to volunteer, but like we, we really hope that there will be a lot of networks of solidarity that, yeah, we just need them across the country, I think. And I do think there's like a serious risk of like more criminalization of aid workers,

We were also criminalized for handing out tents. I got a letter that said that I risked like three months of imprisonment for handing out tents. Wow. Yeah. Jesus. Good democracy moment. Yeah, we need that.

European social democracy model that everyone's talking about. Yeah, we are just doing great. Yeah. Yeah. And so like tents were constantly confiscated and stuff. And it was intense there because people had to be there to get shelter, which they legally were entitled to. But it is a bigger trend. So regular homeless people will also see their tents confiscated or smashed without them getting an offer to get into a shelter. Right. So I think the criminalization in our case was a bit extreme because we

most of the criminalization had to do with at least a very fake relationship with like smuggling or people crossing borders. Whereas like handing out fences, like the most humanitarian basic thing that you can possibly do. And somehow they still thought it was a good idea to criminalize that. Yeah. I think we need to like prepare for the fact that our borders and our migration policies are going to get more cruel. And that the only thing that we can do to help is like

really strong networks of solidarity and resistance and that we might sometimes risk prison time but that we still probably need to do it because the option the alternative is that we're just letting people be destroyed in this system i think that's very very good uh mick do you have anything to add where can people follow you find more ways to support ways to show solidarity

I think what I plugged last time, like the Abolish Frontex campaign, find your local activist group. Or start it, because we... Exactly, exactly. Even if you're just one person, that's like...

Yeah, like through social media you can find a lot of people. Find your local squad. They will be willing to help. Yeah. Oh, and maybe what you just said, like there's every year a no-border camp somewhere in the Netherlands. So that's also a good place to start. Yeah. Yes. You can find them on Instagram, I think.

I'm not on Instagram. I don't know. Yeah, it's there. That's definitely an option. Atmosphere is great there. I don't, I'm not on the social. So you can't find me if you want to. I'm sorry. And well, I'm also like Rose, you said, I do some stuff with like a first date collective. So if you guys, if you are doing something and you're like, hey, we could use some people with,

some degree of medical training, reach out to me. You have my contacts because that is the kind of thing I will most definitely get, um,

well excited is the wrong word if shit hits the van it's our apple we could really use some first aid as well then yeah yeah yeah reach out uh i will uh i will gladly come over there and with all the medical supplies that are scattered around my room yeah that's i think that's a good illustration though right to finish up like uh

everybody has a skill that we can use like you might not think you do but you probably do like someone knitted hats for us you know if you're a person who likes to knit and we had people who didn't think they had much to offer and then came and just made sandwiches and they created a method for making sandwiches in bulk that like allowed us to make more sandwiches more quickly like everybody has a

Even if you want to be the person who washes the blankets and that's a massive task. That means somebody is warm at night. Yeah, that's an insane task. And also like maybe the more intimidating tasks, like I think it could be intimidating to be like, oh, we're going to, I don't know, hundreds of men and everyone says they're scary. But indeed, there's also so much things happening in the background, like collecting blankets, getting clothes, getting groceries, like everything.

There are so many layers to it. And it can also be that you collect 10 blankets, but hundreds of people collect 10 blankets, right? So you're always part of something bigger. I think that it's always very good to think that if you're faced with a big problem, it's very hard to get to the solution of it. But at the same time, it's very easy to do a tiny thing about it.

And I think it's much more useful to do that tiny thing than to be like, oh, I can never get to the real solution of this problem. And in the end, you will kind of get to it by doing that with more and more people and actually building up collective power and resistance. Yeah. About the collecting thing, like... Yeah.

For example, I know my parents still have like old toys from when me and my brother were younger. If you're in an area with a refugee center, you could always just give those toys to the people there. If you have old children's books or something, people can use that to get a grasp on the gibberish that is the Dutch language. These little things also matter a lot. And it's something very impactful that you can do that doesn't take much of your own effort.

Yeah, it's very low threshold. Right. And it makes a huge difference. It makes someone feel cared for and welcome. That can make all the difference in the world. What is, can you just spell out the Migrate website for us? Migrate.org. Perfect. It's like migration is great. Migrate. Migrate. Yeah. All right. Thank you so much, both of you. Thanks. Thank you for having us.

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Welcome to It Could Happen Here, the show about things falling apart. And often what's falling apart is kind of our general agreed upon sense of what reality is. And that's kind of what we're talking about here today. We're going to talk about the latest batch of new transgender conspiracy theories. And to join me in this exciting journey is Mia Wong. Hello, Mia.

You know, why is it that whenever we're covering transgender conspiracy, it's not like conspiracies that trans people made up. It's always conspiracies about trans people. It's like, can we never get one that like... Not often. I can't remember the last time I had like a positive Pride Month episode.

Which I feel kind of bad about, but I don't know. It's still an interesting topic, and I've not seen this discussed as much as it should be. And, you know, last week, I really thought I was going to have, you know, a difficult work week researching Trump pornography. I thought that'd be like, you know, the low part of my month. But it turns out spending three days sifting through mass shooter data is actually much worse than...

Much worse than looking through Trump porn. Can I recommend that you two spend your time listening to a bunch of writers talking about the absolute worst time of their life? Much better.

All right, so let's get into it. We're going to talk first about video games. I'm going to quote a tweet from a kind of failure of a far-right influencer, which is exciting because we're mostly going to be talking about successful ones. But there's this guy named Ben Ku, UK flag in bio, so opinion immediately discarded. But he has said a few days ago, quote, acting

Activision's Call of Duty has added transgender bullets to the game in honor of Pride Month, so you can literally play as a transgender mass shooter, unquote. This tweet was almost ripped word for word by Ian Miles Chung. Basically said the exact same thing, except he said roleplay, not play. Extremely funny.

And I did not realize the bullets themselves identified as trans, but good for she, her, they, them, I guess. So we started to see this claim repeated through the anti-trans far-right grifter media space, right? Libs of TikTok said that, quote, Call of Duty is now enabling kids to roleplay being a literal trans terrorist. And for some reason, whenever Libs of TikTok writes terrorist, she asterisks out the O's.

I don't know why, but this started to pick up steam. There was an article in Glenn Beck's The Blaze, quote, Call of Duty Pride Bundle lets players simulate murder using trans flag adorned guns and bullets. I'm so excited for these people to find out about Counter-Strike. There are going to be literally so many, so many articles that just have the video clip of the thing it plays at the end where it says terrorists win. Yeah.

The Quartering wrote, Call of Duty is selling trans pride bullets, what every mass shooter wants.

So what's going on here? Because this, you know, if you're not as online as some other people are, you know, this is maybe confusing. Why are they saying that trans people are all mass shooters now? What's going on? And, you know, and also, if you're thinking it's kind of odd that there would be a Call of Duty update where you can literally play as a transgender mass shooter and shoot transgender bullets, you would be right. Because that never happened. It's false. No way.

Not this time. We created it. Not this time. No, not this time. So let's get into what's really going on with this Call of Duty Pride update, and then we'll discuss why so many of these far-right influences are pushing this kind of trans-terrorist story. So on June 1st, Activision did release an update for the terrible new Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3.

It contained anime mecha skins and seven free weapon skins themed after various pride flags. Now some would argue that the mecha suits are essentially also pride themed, but I digress. For this pride weapon camo pack, it will color your gun with the flag of your choosing. One of the said flags is the blue, pink, and white trans flag.

Yet, if you apply the trans skin to any of the regular guns in the game, the bullets will not be transed. So what gives? Without the transgender bullets, how is anyone supposed to literally roleplay a mass shooter like Libs of TikTok and Ian Miles Chung say we can?

So it turns out these quote unquote transgender bullets were in fact not intentionally added to the game in honor of Pride Month and are most likely a bug that affects one single gun when one exclusive attachment is equipped. I'm going to quote from Kotaku, quote, Modern Warfare 3's M4 came with a special soul harvester weapon blueprint, which includes a skin and a specific attachment for the M4 and quote unquote tracer rounds, which are colorful ammo options that also leave traces of different visual effects like paint splatters or rose petals.

This special blueprint was for people who spent $100 to purchase the Vault Edition of the game. Based on Kotaku's testing, it appears the quote-unquote trans bullets only appear when applying the transgender flag camo skin on this specific weapon blueprint. It's unclear this is a bug. At one point during testing, the bullets in the cartridge were only the pink colors in the flag, or is just an extremely idiosyncratic reflection of how Call of Duty's complex shader system interacts across thousands of items and cosmetics.

During testing, any other camo skin applied to the M4 Soul Harvester blueprint resulted in bullets in the cartridge changing the color to match that skin, unquote. Now, I do think it's a little bit silly that there's so much uproar about these trans-colored bullets, but...

Not as much about, like, just a trans-colored gun. Like, why is the bullet the big thing? And we all know that you can't play as a mass shooter in Call of Duty. You play as a war criminal. And most transgender war criminals are just drone pilots or work for Raytheon. If you want to play a mass shooter game, you can just play GTA V or Hitman, where you play as cis men.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know about the Russian terrorist airport level. Don't at me. I don't care. Anyway, there was a great article in former Tucker Carlson project, The Daily Caller, with the headline, Pride Month finally comes for one of the last bastions of manhood. And the opening tagline is gamers. They targeted gamers. Oh, no. So anyway, anyway.

What's really at play here with this trans mash shooter stuff? This is just another beat in the rhetorical strategy that conservative anti-trans influencers have been building over the past year and a half, using a mix of cherry-picked data, bad stats, and often outright lies to convince people that there is an increasing epidemic of transgender mass killing attacks sweeping the nation. When discussing this Call of Duty pride pack, libs of TikTok said, quote,

With the uptick in actual trans violence we've been seeing, it's alarming that Call of Duty would introduce this. And a Blaze article read, quote, "...critics have suggested Activision Blizzard may want to reconsider given the recent mass shootings executed by LGBT radicals. There have been multiple mass shootings executed, attempted, or at the very least planned by transvestites and LGBTQ radicals in recent years."

So this Blaze article begins by listing four alleged instances of these trans mass shooters. Two of these simply never happened, as the alleged transgender individuals, a trans guy and a 56-year-old organ Nazi, were arrested after they made concerning posts online. And the other two, which did happen, these were shootings,

Except these were never actually done by trans people. It's a made-up tale. It's a total fabrication. It never happened. It never happened. This one was invented by a writer. So, although this transgender mass shooter narrative might not be real, do you know what is real, Mia? Is it capitalism? It is. And capitalism is fueled, at least currently, by the products and sponsors that support this podcast.

Okay, we are back. Now, trying to frame every new mass shooter as some like crazed leftist of some variety is an old tactic popularized by the likes of Andy Ngo, which is, you know, ironic considering the fact that political extremist related killings for the past 10 years are commonplace.

overwhelmingly done by individuals tied to right-wing extremism. The ADL puts it at 75%, whereas leftist extremism, which is categorized as including anarchists as well as black nationalist groups, are responsible for just 4%. Most of the rest they categorize as Islamic violent extremists, including the 2016 Pulse nightclub massacre targeted against queer people in Orlando, while

Although one could argue that that is also right wing extremism. Like they are also right wingers. Like it's like, yes, it turns out the ADL might have some troubling, some troubling ways of collecting data breaking news. Anyway, regardless of the actual facts, lying about the political demographic of mass shooters is an old tactic employed by far right content creators to gain clicks and influence the talking points of more popular media figures and politicians.

And now, the past few years, we've seen a new iteration of this tactic, where in the confusion and chaos of the first few minutes and hours after a shooting, anti-trans influencers will do everything they can to frame an alleged or suspected shooter of being transgender, often using out-of-context social media posts, doctored photographs, photos of other people, or just pictures of like long or dyed hair to affirm that a mass shooter must actually be transgender.

Now, even if this claim is like widely debunked later on, most of the people that follow these far-right accounts won't be hearing about that. So all they need to do is use this brief window of chaos to seed the idea into people's minds. And if you do this thing frequently enough after each new mass shooting, then it's pretty easy to create a false perception of this increasing trend. Now, this style of propaganda has been largely spearheaded by Chaya Raitrek using her Libs of TikTok account.

Here's another quote from her. But this sort of rhetoric has been spread by many other online figures in this orbit, like disgraced BuzzFeed writer Benny Johnson and chronic poster Ian Miles Chung. Their rhetoric has been spread by sitting politicians, Donald Trump Jr. and Elon Musk, and

Now, to clarify, people have been lying about the gender identity of mass shooters for like a long time. It's one of the oldest jokes on 4chan. But what's been going on the past two years is something different. And it requires a little bit more in-depth examination of this propaganda trend. Now, to get into more specific examples here, I like to break down a common meme format used to spread this type of false propaganda.

It's usually about five pictures of mass shooters with text next to each picture that reads something like the Nashville shooter identified as trans, the X shooter identified as trans. So it'll just list all of these people that allegedly are mass shooters and allegedly identified as trans. Now, police did identify the Nashville Covenant School shooter as a trans man.

that we have to take their word for it. They've released no other info on that. Typically, this is seen as like the first legitimate mass shooting done by a transgender individual.

And for the past year, we've been waiting for more and more context to come out about this mass shooting and its possible motivations. So I'm not even going to really discuss this one right now. We'll just say, sure, this is a trans person who happened to do a mass shooting and leave it at that, even though it's not totally clear. I mean, I do. I want to add one thing briefly, which is that like trying to find out information from the police about a mass shooting is such a crapshoot. Like,

They just, you know, they'll be like an initial flurry of press releases or whatever. And then they just will never talk about it again until maybe the trial. And sometimes you get something from that. Well, and in often cases for mass shooters who often die, there is no trial. Yeah, yeah. If they're dead, like. But even keeping this Nashville incident as a legitimate mass shooting done by a person who happens to be trans is.

When talking about this meme, the thing is, is that with these five pictures that are on this meme, most typically three out of the five people that have their pictures here aren't even trans. Not this time. It never happened. It's false. It never happened.

It's a fake. It's fiction. Now, most famously, we have the Colorado Springs shooter Anderson Lee Aldrich, who killed five people and injured 25 others at a queer club in 2022. Later on, his lawyer claimed that the shooter was non-binary, which I believe is a disgusting and disingenuous attempt to get out of the more than now 50 hate crime charges that the shooter is facing. And this opinion is shared not only by the DA, but also all other legitimate extremism researchers.

Prior to these claims in court, there was no indication whatsoever that the shooter was non-binary or used they/them pronouns. However, they did own rainbow flag shooting targets, ran a neo-Nazi website that posted gun training videos, and was known by online acquaintances to frequently post racist and homophobic content. Now, I should clarify, when I say shooting targets, I don't mean that it's pride-themed shooting targets. It's that the people that you are shooting are painted like they are gay.

So, there you go. Now, pictured next in the meme is someone with purple-colored hair labeled as the Denver shooter. This person is not trans, has never claimed to be trans. He just has dyed hair. He killed one person in a school shooting that he planned with a 16-year-old trans guy. That's not even a mass shooting!

Correct. We will get into this later because the definition of mass shooting is getting stretched liberally here. Now, the third person pictured, who isn't trans, changes more frequently in different versions of the meme that you can find online.

One version includes someone referenced as the Philadelphia shooter. This is referencing a shooting spree that resulted in five people being killed. This shooter had previously posted photos of himself cross-dressing in women's clothes, and this was used by figures like Marjorie Taylor Greene to claim that the cis male shooter was actually, quote, another trans shooter.

The family of this shooter referred to him as a quote-unquote biblical extremist, and he often posted bizarre Christian spiritual conspiracy theories and was an outspoken fan of Tucker Carlson. In another version of the meme, posted by Chaya Rychek, she identifies the Uvalde school shooter as trans and includes a picture of a trans woman holding the trans pride flag. This was posted in January of this year.

Elon Musk replied to the tweet with two exclamation points. Now, in the hours after the Uvalde school shooting, pictures of two or three different trans women were used to falsely label the shooter as trans, with at least one of these trans women being from New York, the other from Georgia. Both these women received a great deal of harassment after the shooting. Arizona Congressman Paul Gozar tweeted that the shooter was, quote, a transsexual leftist illegal alien, unquote, which is frankly amazing because every word in that sentence is wrong.

We made this one up. It's a made up tale. It's a total fabrication. It never happened. It never happened. Now, the other person in this meme that is typically accepted to be trans is the Aberdeen shooter. Now, I'm going to just quote from the Washington Post here, quote, In 2018, in Aberdeen, Maryland, a 26-year-old shot and killed three people at a pharmaceutical distribution center before turning the weapon on themselves.

The sheriff said the shooter had been diagnosed as mentally ill in 2016. A close friend reported the shooter, quote, suffered from bipolar disorder and struggled since early in high school with severe depression, partly connected to their feelings of not being accepted when they first came out as a gay teenage girl and later as transgender, unquote. By most accounts, this is a transgender guy who began transitioning shortly before the shooting, unquote.

Pronouns and stuff are unclear. They also worked at this distribution center a few weeks prior to them doing the shooting. This incident's typically not categorized as a mass shooting because only three people were killed, excluding the shooter.

Now, one of the more recent attempts at this transgender terrorist psyop was in the aftermath of the shooting at Joel Osteen's megachurch in Houston earlier this February. The shooter was a 36-year-old woman carrying her 7-year-old son, sadly both of whom died along with one other person. Just hours after the shooting, far-right accounts like Libs of TikTok and End Wokeness claimed that she was transgender, pointing to documents where she used the name Jeffrey.

Now, Chaya Rychek called the shooting, quote, another act of trans terrorism. We need to have a national conversation about the LGBTQ movement turning youth into violent extremists, unquote. Didn't she literally say that exact thing with the last one? Yeah. They don't even come up with new tweets. They really just have the same five tweets in rotation. Marjorie Taylor Greene called her, quote, a trans from El Salvador, unquote. Uh.

Missouri Representative Josh Hawley, Marco Rubio, and Elon Musk all posted about this quote-unquote epidemic of trans violence. These claims were boosted by Donald Trump Jr. and Ted Cruz. Fox News ran a whole story with a headline about the shooter being transgender. And guess what? She's not trans. She is a cis woman who gave birth to a child and has always identified as a woman.

It just appears that she was given a masculine name at birth and later changed it to a more feminine name. The far-right content sphere created so much uproar that the police had to do a whole press conference about how the shooter was not trans.

And after the police and lawyers clarified she was not trans, Fox News changed their claim, now saying on air that the shooter, quote, identified as both genders and was, quote, a biological woman who sometimes identified as a man named Jeffrey, unquote, which just isn't true. Jesus Christ. But the thing about this one is that it wasn't just far right influencers in Fox News who ran with this transgender narrative.

MSNBC jumped on very early to say that the shooter was, quote, a Hispanic transgender woman who, quote unquote, identified as a woman, unquote. It's totally made up. Pure fiction. It's fiction. It's fiction. We made it up. MSNBC, more like MSNB shit. Great, great one, Mia. Great, great one. I'm doing great this morning. Do you know what's also doing great, Mia?

Is it the products and services that support this podcast? They're pretty consistent. Yeah, they are still around. And here you can listen to their important messages.

All right, we are so back. So there's so many more cases like the ones that I've talked about, right? The reason I started working on this episode in the first place was due to far-right accounts claiming that a man named Jared Rivieras, who killed his 70-year-old roommate and went on a mass stabbing spree last month outside of an AMC theater and a McDonald's in Massachusetts, was claimed to be a, quote, mentally ill trans terrorist by Libs of TikTok. And...

A trans activist, quote unquote, who's a man who thinks he's a woman, which is a line Libs of TikTok loves using.

Now, Jared claimed to be an artist and a model, but was actually like this really weird, like grifter entrepreneur. He kind of reminds me of that weird Canadian cat killer, Luke Magnanata, who like created a whole bunch of fake posts to like pretend to be famous and like create like fake fans. It's very similar to this case. And later, this guy, Luke in Canada, also killed a gay man. Very similar cases, honestly. Jared here,

Again, he's like pretending to be like a international entrepreneur. He looks like this weird like hippie surfer dude with long bleached hair. Jared's father is a wealthy Christian therapist who looks very similar. And anti-trans influencers have pointed to the word she on Jared's Instagram profile. But Jared's actual gender identity is really unclear. He's never pictured wearing women's clothing. He would frequently post shirtless buff selfies online.

Jared has never claimed to be trans or a woman and has never used transgender language or iconography. Jared did file a name change request last April, but it was to change his last name. He goes by Jared. That same month, April, so two months ago, Jared sexually harassed a model at a Beverly Hills hotel saying that he wanted to have kids with her and proposed to her saying, I'm going to be a good husband. You're going to be my wife, unquote.

This person simply, we have no reason to think they're trans. They do this, they do like weird like art stuff. And I don't know, they're like California Beverly Hills poison brained. And it seems to, they seem to have gone through some kind of mental health breakdown, which resulted in them killing their roommate, two dogs, and stabbing like six or seven people in Massachusetts. Yeah.

But another trans terrorist, sure, why not? In January of this year, an Iowa teenager opened fire at a school, killing one person and then himself.

Again, the usual suspects were super quick to label him as another trans terrorist. Elon Musk saying, this is happening a lot. Something is deeply wrong. This kid largely seemed like a regular Gen Z liberal. He listed his pronouns as he, they. He posted things like nominally in support of trans people. He used the hashtag gender fluid a single time in a TikTok video filmed with what appears to be a trans friend of his. He also posted on Reddit two years ago.

that he didn't want to transition because he didn't, quote, want to look ugly. He never specifically identified as trans. This is just kind of a tragic case. I don't know what the deal with this kid was. They seemed deeply confused and upset and killed someone and then killed themselves. It sucks, but it's not a mass shooting and it doesn't

It doesn't link to anything being a pattern of transgender terrorism. Yeah. That does not stop someone like Donald Trump Jr. saying, quote, the modern LGBTQ plus movement is radicalizing our youth into becoming violent extremists. Per capita, is there a more violent group of people anywhere in the world than radicalized trans activists? Given the tiny fraction of the population they make up, it doesn't seem like anyone else comes even close. We have a lot of claims like this.

Which is why I need to start talking about statistics, my least favorite thing.

Because this sort of messaging is repeated a lot. We have this post from, I think, Benny Johnson or Donald Trump Jr. I can't tell which one because, unfortunately, it got deleted before I was able to log who did it. So apologies for that. But it's a very similar sort of thing, saying there's been at least five mass attacks by transgender people since 2018. Considering the group makes up less than 0.5% of the population, that's a massive overrepresentation. We'll get into that in a sec. Oh, boy.

Often when these people are talking about this, this trend of trans mass shooters, they're focusing specifically on the period of time between 2018 and 2024, because largely a lot of conservatives think that trans people were kind of like invented around 2018. That's when they first started to kind of like notice that people were trans. Uh,

which is something we've talked about before in terms of like the arc of homophobia and transphobia in relation to like gay marriage and like a few other things. This is something we've reported on consistently on this show. So they're very often only looking at data from select years.

And as we've discussed here, they largely inflate the number of quote-unquote mass shooters as well as the number of mass shooters who they call transgender. They will often very loosely define what a mass shooting is when it suits them and then very strictly define it when it doesn't.

In the Blaze article about that Call of Duty pride pack, they say, quote, trans-identifying suspects' share of public mass shootings nationwide over the 2018 to 2023 period is reportedly well over seven times their share of the population, which links to a very sketchy right-wing crime stats website that doesn't publish any of their data. So, sure. Oh, great.

So there is a few different ways to categorize what a mass shooting is. There's no universal definition for what makes a mass shooting versus a mass killing. So different groups categorize things kind of differently.

The mass killing database is a partnership between the AP, USA Today, and Northwestern University. And it defines mass killings, quote, as the intentional killing of four or more victims, excluding the deaths of unborn children and the offenders, by any means within a 24-hour period. Their database currently lists 590 such killings since 2006.

James Alan Fox, professor of criminology and law at Northwestern University, who manages the database, has said, quote, you can count the number of transgender and non-binary shooters on one hand. They're actually underrepresented, unquote. And again, it's possible that because of how successful the right has been at the PSYOP, when you're counting these number of transgender and non-binary shooters on one hand, that's also super overrepresented because they're most likely containing like the

the Colorado Springs shooter and a lot of these other people. Now, trans people on average are reported to make up about 1% of the U.S. population, but that number is steadily growing. We got to pump those numbers up. Those are rookie numbers. Now, it's also just kind of unclear what that number actually is. That's the current one from the U.S. Census Bureau and kind of an average doubt because a lot of stats of people

people older than 25, say the numbers are like around 0.5, 0.6% versus people under 25, reportedly it's like 1.5%. So, you know, I'm just going to say around 1%. Now, under most criterias for mass killings, only one incident, the one in Nashville, qualifies for inclusion.

Another data source called the Violence Project has recorded data on mass shootings in the US since 1966. They more narrowly define a mass killing as four or more people killed in a public unconnected to other criminal activity. Their current database has 193 entries. A spokesperson for their organization told Reuters that the 2023 Nashville shooting quote, is the first case of a trans perpetrator in their database per their methodology.

Another more broad data collection project is called the Gun Violence Archive. I'm just going to quote from Reuters here. Quote, the Gun Violence Archive, which began collecting data on gun violence in the U.S. in 2013, recorded more than 4,400 mass shootings in the last decade. Its definition of a mass shooting is four or more people shot, resulting in injury or death, excluding the perpetrator.

Of those, quote, the number of known suspects in a mass shooting which are trans is under 10 for the last decade, which translated to 0.11% of the 4,400 shootings, unquote.

which is about nine times lower than cis people per capita if we use the 1% trans population stat. And even using the more conservative mass killing data set, the rate of this sort of violence by trans people is far lower than what would match our population margin. I'm going to add in a short quote from the Washington Post to kind of add in some context here.

"The Gun Violence Archive methodology would allow for inclusion of the Aberdeen and Denver cases. With 0.6% of the population, one would expect at least 16 mass shootings to be conducted by people identifying as trans in the past five years. Instead, there are just three possible cases cited by most conservatives." So after looking over all of this data, it would actually appear that transgender people are less likely to commit a mass shooting than cis people.

even by some of the more conservative estimates. The other side of this is that not only are trans people less likely to, you know, do this sort of violence, they are way more likely to be on the receiving end than cis people. Per the National Archive of Criminal Justice data, LGBTQ plus people are more than twice as likely to be a victim of gun violence than their cisgender and straight peers. According to the National Archive of Criminal Justice,

According to the Human Rights Campaign, 29% of transgender youth have been threatened or injured with a weapon on school property compared to 7% of cisgender youth. So even for school shootings, you are so much more likely to face gun violence at school if you are trans. Transgender, non-binary, and gender-questioned people have reportedly higher rates of being impacted or knowing someone who's been impacted by a mass shooting compared to their cisgender queer peers.

This is, you know, a data average, but it's usually around 22% to 19%. And this whole topic gets so much more like dark and grounded when you know that 320 trans people were killed last year, according to data from the annual trans murder monitoring report, which is like, it's so dark that we even have something called the trans murder monitoring report. Oh,

Also, we need to mention this because I don't think people – this is really badly understood by people who aren't trans, but those numbers are always significant undercounts because those projects are people scraping basically news reports or trying to find the families of victims. And there are a lot of people who get killed who –

The only people who know are their friends, and those people fucking either aren't talking to the press, or the press just never, like, covers it, or, you know, the police give their dead name and never talk about it, so they just are dead, and everyone thinks they're cis. Yep, and just in the United States last year, 33 trans people were murdered, and again, this is a vast undercount, like Mia said.

Meanwhile, you have all these people on the right who will talk about all of these alleged mass shootings by alleged trans people. And one of their favorite lines when they try to affirm that a shooter is actually trans is, quote, watch how quickly the story will now disappear, unquote. Which is just ironic for a few reasons. One, because that's how news works, is that we move on to a new thing. But...

Also, it'll probably disappear as well because they're not actually trans. In the case of the Uvalde shooter, in the case of the Make a Church shooter from last year,

Yeah, people move on, but also they're not going to keep harping on your weird conspiracy theory because it's a weird conspiracy theory. It's not true. Even if this is, even if they were right, which they are not, it also is just like, imagine in like 1920, you're like, we have a problematic rise in left-handed mass shooters. And we're like, well, yeah, because there's more left-handed people. There's going to be at least some level of correlation statistically. Yeah.

Again, these people act like trans people were only invented in 2018 and are just like slowly like recruiting in numbers, which, hey, you know, at least we are kind of slowly recruiting. And like the actual goal of this rhetoric beyond just, you know, altering the fabric of reality is,

Is to just encourage violence against trans people. That is what they're doing. It's to see trans people as a threat so that you feel justified in doing violence against them. Just a few weeks ago, a very popular gun YouTuber made this joke where they were talking about, you know, getting ready to shoot a T-word. And they stopped and they were like, oh, sorry, I mean a school shooter. Wink, wink. So like...

They're trying to use school shooter to be a dog whistle for trans people. This is all just to justify violence. That's all this is doing. And to some degree, it's working. Just last week, a trans kid was assaulted in the men's bathroom at school and reportedly one of their teeth exploded. This was a trans girl who was using the men's bathroom like all of these freaks want them to, and she still got assaulted. I think it's super important when talking about this sort of unreality propaganda is that like...

These people like Libs of TikTok, Ian Miles Chong, they're not just like falling further into a delusional conspiracy theory. Same thing with Elon Musk, right? It's easy. I think it's easy to be like, oh, they just actually like legitimately are like falling into this like conspiratorial delusion. And it's not that.

What it is, is they are actually intentionally crafting reality. It's not them falling victim to this unfortunate delusion. They are choosing which version of reality to believe in because it's the one that they want. And that's what they're doing. And they want it to be a reality where more people feel comfortable assaulting and killing trans people. That's the actual goal of this propaganda. We need to be very clear about this, about what's sort of happening here, which is one of the fastest ways...

to get a group of people to commit a genocide is by convincing them that they are all about to be killed, right? This is one of the things behind the Bosnian genocide. This is one of the things behind Rwanda is if you can convince a lot of people that their neighbors are about to fucking kill them, that's how you get them to do the genocide because the thing that they believe is that like, oh, this is self-defense, like these people are about to kill us. And that is the kind of reality tunnel being mobilized here is a called genocide, right?

And the other side of this that I think is so grim is that there used to be a time as a society where we attempted to explain why there were mass shootings, right? This is something that I remember living through. If you go back to 2016, 2017, 2015, there used to be people other than these just genocidal fascists attempting to explain why –

why these shootings were happening. The actual data on trans mass shooters and how few of them there are is quietly devastating to a lot of the theories that used to be sort of bandied about, right? Theories that this was about sort of objection, the theory that this was about this, you know, like sort of de-industrialization and like the consequences that this has had on people and that there were, you know, it was this sort of like downward social mobility that was causing this violence, right? If any of that were true, there would be a fucking million mass shooters. Because again, the trans poverty rate is,

Like it's around 30%, right? For the rest of the country, it is like a quarter. Well, it's not a quarter. It's like a third of that much, right?

you there should be if it was just purely a product of like material conditions there would be a lot more trans men shooters but there aren't because again you know the actual theory that fits this data and fits also the behavior of of all of these people like all of these sort of fascists trying to explain mass shootings as being about trans people the thing that it fits is this is the theory that this is basically the replacement of clan rallies right we don't have we don't have collective lynchings anymore we have individual ones right

And all of these fucking people are trying to make sure that there's just more lynchings and that these lynchings are, you know, it's like, it's their, their sort of like armed follower fanatics go and shoot a bunch more trans people in a nightclub.

And then, you know, once that happens, they will disavow it by saying, oh, hey, this nightclub shooting was – this is actually done by a fucking trans person. And they'll keep doing this until they have enough political power to openly come out and claim that all of these people were their fucking revolutionary heroes in their new fucking pantheon of the fascist state.

And there was that trans boy who was assaulted in the bathroom a few months ago and died days later in the hospital. There's this, it keeps happening. And I didn't want this to be like a depressing episode. I wanted this to break down a conspiracy theory I've been seeing more frequently, talk about, you know, what's fueling it, actually go over the instances that are included in it to kind of, you know,

Debunk, for lack of a better term, this sort of rhetoric. And just so you can be more aware of it when you see it, because often you'll see this, you know, this meme with five pictures, you'll see a copypasta version of it. So just being aware of what this is, what this rhetoric is trying to do.

And the, you know, unfortunate fact that trans people are far, far more likely to be a victim of gun violence and mass shootings. Yeah, than cis people. Than cis people and are actually less likely to participate in such violence, statistically speaking. So yeah, that is the episode today. Not meant to be depressing, just meant to be informative. But, you know, when it comes to me, those things often overlap.

Many such cases. I hope you have a good Pride Month. Stay safe and stay dangerous.

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Hello and welcome to It Could Happen Here. This is Shereen and today we are going to be talking about the current quote-unquote peace plan that was presented by the U.S. and what they say is their attempt to end the genocide in Gaza. They call it a war and I call it what it is, which is a genocide.

Earlier this month, Joe Biden announced what he claimed was an Israeli peace plan to bring about an eventual ceasefire in Gaza. But according to journalists and anyone with eyes, the new plan is almost indistinguishable from previous plans proposed by Hamas. We're going to get into the details of the U.S. plan in a little bit, but first I want to address the immense loss of Palestinian life that has led up to this plan.

Because if the plan is successful, it would usher in a ceasefire to a genocide that has killed more than 37,000 Palestinians, which is a very low estimate, and the majority of these deaths are women and children. Not only have Palestinian children been brutally slaughtered for months, but Gaza now has the largest population of child amputees in the world.

In November, children in Gaza hosted a press conference, in English, to beg the world for life. It's June now. And all we've seen since then is massacre after massacre.

And while I think drawing attention to the children and the women who have been slaughtered is immensely necessary and important, I also want to emphasize that Palestinian men are not expendable, and not mentioning the immense loss that we have suffered across the board with men included implies to the world that Arab men are not worth mourning, not worth saving nor protecting, that they are all terrorists or terrorists to be, who are simply killed as casualties in the quote fog of war.

I also think that the mention of children is specifically used as a way to at least try to make the world empathize and fucking feel something about the lives that have been stolen. Parents literally hold up the limp and decapitated bodies of their babies, and it's broadcast worldwide. And yet the dehumanization of Arabs runs so deep that such graphic displays of horror and death are considered normal. No one bats an eye.

It is insane that 274 Palestinians were slaughtered for four prisoners of war who could have been released in a prisoner exchange, exchanges and deals that Israel has repeatedly rejected. We will get into this more in this episode. And people are celebrating this shameful military operation, which U.S. troops were a part of, and ignoring the Palestinians that were killed and murdered in the process, further emphasizing that Palestinian life is not as important as Israeli life.

by a huge margin. In case you didn't hear the details about this operation that I'm talking about, U.S. and Israeli troops infiltrated a refugee camp in trucks disguised as humanitarian aid to Trojan horse their way into further massacring and maiming people who were already being forcibly starved. Are you hearing this? One more time, they infiltrated a refugee camp in trucks disguised as humanitarian aid.

Israeli special forces were also disguised as Palestinian refugees looking for a place to live when they entered the buildings where they thought the hostages were being held.

Remember in January when there was also video evidence of the IOF pretending to be medical staff in a hospital and then shooting and killing unarmed doctors, nurses, and patients? Oh, and then there was the discovery of at least three mass graves at El Shifa Hospital, where bodies including many wearing scrubs were found zip-tied and buried in piles. Israel has been doing this for months and years and decades, and they've been getting away with it for months and years and decades.

No one is hiding how they feel anymore. They are out here showing us with their actions. It's not ambiguous. It is not confusing. They are making it very simple. They are making it crystal clear. Palestinians do not matter. And Israel's intention is to continue their ethnic cleansing of Palestine. What's happening in Gaza is not about the hostages. And it has never been about the hostages. If that isn't clear to you by now, you have not been paying attention.

A few things about the hostages. Hamas has repeatedly offered since last year to release all hostages in exchange for Israel releasing all Palestinian prisoners. As of November 1st, according to Human Rights Watch, Israel held nearly 7,000 Palestinians in its prisons, and many of those held captive by Israel are not convicted of any crime.

At least 3,660 Palestinians being held in Israel are under what is called administrative detention. An administrative detainee is someone held in prison without charge nor trial. Without charge. No crime committed. I want to take a moment to bring up a report that came out recently that's not getting nearly enough attention. It's truly horrific and I don't know how people are just glossing over it.

But the New York Times recently reported that Palestinians are being tortured and abused in Israeli prisons. Two journalists from the New York Times spent three months interviewing Israeli soldiers as well as Palestinians who were detained at one particular prison. I'm not going to pretend I know how to pronounce it. It's spelled S-D-E space T-E-I-M-A-N, Sed Teiman. I'm just going to go with that.

But essentially, Israel is carrying out a policy of systematic torture in this army base. And this army base has been used as a detention camp for Palestinians from the Gaza Strip. This was all confirmed by a New York Times investigation. Reports of abuse at this site had already emerged in both Israeli and Arab media. And this was followed by outcries from local and international rights groups about the horrific conditions there.

Apparently, it was mainly used as a, quote, makeshift interrogation center, but now it has become a major focus for the accusations that the Israeli military has mistreated its detainees, including people who were later determined to have no ties to Hamas or any other armed groups. The investigation revealed that at least 1,200 Palestinian civilians were detained at this site in, quote, demeaning conditions without the ability to plead their cases to a judge for up to 75 days, and that the

and additionally denied access to lawyers for up to 90 days. Eight former detainees, all of whom the military confirmed were held at the site and spoke on the record, said they had been punched, kicked, and beaten with batons, rifle butts, and a handheld metal detector while they were in custody. Others said that they had been forced to wear a diaper while being interrogated, and that they had received electric shocks during their interrogation.

According to the New York Times, most of these testimonies were corroborated by interviews conducted by officials from the UNRWA, the UN Agency for Palestinian Refugees. The agency interviewed hundreds of returning detainees who reported widespread abuse at this site, as well as other Israeli detention facilities, including the beatings and the use of an electric probe.

An Israeli soldier who served at this site also disclosed to the New York Times that his fellow soldiers often bragged about beating detainees, and he observed many instances of such treatment.

He was speaking on condition of anonymity to avoid prosecution, but he said a detainee had been taken for treatment at the site's makeshift field hospital with a bone that had been broken during his detention, while another person was briefly taken out of sight and then returned with bleeding around his ribcage. I strongly urge you to read the New York Times piece in full. It details the most horrific things I've read in recent memory.

I would be remiss to not mention at least a few of them just so you understand the severity. But this report essentially proves that Palestinians are experiencing sexual violence and have experienced sexual violence in Israeli prisons. This is one example. Mr. El Hamlawi, a senior nurse, said a female officer had ordered two soldiers to lift him up and press his rectum against a metal stick that was fixed to the ground.

He said the stick penetrated his rectum for roughly five seconds, causing it to bleed and leaving him in unbearable pain. A leaked draft of the UNRWA report detailed an interview that gave a similar account. It cited a 41-year-old detainee who said that interrogators made him sit on something like a hot metal stick that felt like fire. And he said that another detainee died after they put the electric stick up his anus.

Dr. El-Hamlawi also recalled being forced to sit in a chair wired with electricity. He said he was shocked so often that after initially urinating uncontrollably, he then stopped urinating for several days. He said that he, too, had been forced to wear nothing but a diaper to stop him from soiling the floor. Ibrahim Shaheen, 38, a truck driver. He said he was shocked roughly half a dozen times while sitting in a chair.

Officers had accused him of concealing information about the location of dead hostages, which ended up having no connection to him at all. Another man, Mr. Bucket, said that he was also forced to sit in a chair wired with electricity, sending a current pulsing through his body that made him pass out.

Mr. Beckett also said, along with other detainees that corroborated this, he only received roughly three meager snacks on most days, mostly bread with small quantities of cheese or jam or tuna. The military said the food provisions had been approved by an authorized nutritionist in order to maintain their health. But according to several of these detainees, that's not nearly enough, and they lost more than 40 pounds during their detention. Again, I urge you to read the report in full.

It needs more attention than it's getting, but it is horrific. And this is proof of the vile mistreatment of Palestinians. And it's from the New York Times. If you need a source that you quote unquote trust more than Al Jazeera or something, which makes no sense. But for those who do, there it is.

Now, let's go back to the topic at hand. We were talking about the hostages and how Hamas had offered many times in the past to release all the hostages in exchange for releasing Palestinian prisoners. And despite Hamas's offers, Israel has never agreed to any deal which involves the release of all Israeli hostages. On October 9th, 2008,

Two days after October 7th, Hamas offered to release all the civilian hostages in exchange for the IOF not entering the Gaza Strip. But Israel rejected that offer, and many hostages have died since then, which could have been avoided if Israel cared. A few stats.

105 Israeli hostages were freed via a temporary ceasefire in November of last year. Four other hostages were released by Hamas. Three hostages were killed by IOF, quote, friendly fire because the IOF considered them a threat as they were waving white flags. During four Israeli, quote, rescue missions, one hostage was killed. One soldier was saved.

In what Israel called Operation Golden Hand on February 12th of this year, two hostages were saved and at least 94 Palestinians were killed. And then on June 8th, what is now being called Operation Arnon, four Israeli hostages were rescued and at least 274 Palestinians were killed. In a statement released after the attack, Hamas said,

In exchange for them, the four Israeli hostages, your own army killed three of your own captives in the same attack, one of them holding a U.S. citizenship.

And it must be mentioned that the Israeli attacks on Gaza have also killed an unknown number of hostages in Hamas captivity, as well as the at least 37,000 Palestinians killed since October 7th. Relentlessly bombing a tiny strip of land where Israel knows its hostages are located doesn't really indicate that Israel gives a shit about the lives of the hostages. The hostages are pawns being used in a disgusting political game.

And I have seen several unhinged and deranged comments about this latest operation, which again killed 274 Palestinians, including children, in the process of saving four hostages. The comments range in severity and psychopathy, but a lot of them are basically saying, how else were they supposed to get the hostages back? And Israel must rescue its people by any means necessary, and that this is what you get when you mess with Israel.

But after reading the previous numbers, it is an absolute fact that the only mass release of hostages has come through ceasefire and prisoner exchanges. More hostages have been killed by the Israeli army than rescued by them. A ceasefire deal means freed hostages without mass death. And so if Israel really cared about the lives of these hostages, why on earth wouldn't they agree to a deal that can guarantee their safety?

I want to take a quick tangent only to mention that the number of Palestinians killed in Gaza is most likely far, far greater than the reported number, because the infrastructure that was used to document the death toll has been decimated, along with nearly everything else in Gaza. The number 37,000 also does not include the thousands and thousands of Palestinians buried underneath rubble who are unable to be found nor retrieved.

The health ministry's director of international cooperation in the West Bank, Dr. Yasser Bozia, says he works closely with ministry colleagues in Gaza. When he spoke with NPR in late January from his office in Ramallah, he said an estimated 10,000 people were missing and presumed dead under the rubble in Gaza. But even that number was low.

It's like a snowball, he said. It's only an estimation. The actual number is much, much higher. Bozia and doctors in Rzee say the death count published by the health ministry also largely excludes people who have died from a lack of adequate treatment, disease, and other impacts from the war, like hunger. The death toll only includes people killed by the, quote, occupation bombardment, he said.

The health ministry describes its casualty figures as those resulting from Israeli aggression. Bozias has a colleague in Gaza told him that the only way to really know how many people have died is to count the number of people still alive compared with the population of Gaza before October 7th. He said that because of the continued brutal genocide going on in Gaza, it is impossible to have the real number. It will only be revealed after the violence has stopped.

The death toll also does not make clear how many militants are among the dead. Israel says its forces have killed more than 10,000 fighters in Gaza, but Israel has also not provided any sort of evidence or detailed information to back up its estimate. In every interview every Israeli correspondent or spokesperson has given, they always give a number for the estimated fighters or terrorists killed in Gaza, but they're very unsure about how many civilians have been killed.

And now to go back to the U.S. peace plan that is basically identical to previous peace plans proposed by and agreed to by Hamas. What does this U.S. plan propose?

This plan has three stages. The first stage proposes to involve a six-week ceasefire during which the Israeli army will withdraw from the populated areas of Gaza. Hostages, including the elderly and women, would be exchanged for hundreds of Palestinian prisoners. Civilians would also return to all of Gaza, with 600 trucks carrying humanitarian aid flooding the enclave daily, Biden said.

The second phase would see Hamas and Israel negotiate terms for a permanent end to hostilities. Biden said, In the third phase, a permanent ceasefire would follow, facilitating the reconstruction of the Gaza Strip, including 60% of clinics, schools, universities, and religious buildings damaged or destroyed by Israeli forces.

This plan is nearly identical to a previous plan that Hamas had already agreed to on May 6th, a deal which Israel ended up rejecting. We will talk more about that deal later on, but for now, let's focus on the U.S.'s plagiarized version of this plan and who supports it. But first, let's take an ad break, and we'll be right back. Okay, and we are back. So soon after the announcement of the U.S. deal, Hamas said that it views the proposals in this deal positively.

This week, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken arrived in the Middle East on his latest trip to the region, which he said will focus on Washington's Gaza truce proposal and the future of the Palestinian territory. Blinken met Egyptian President el-Sisi in Cairo on Monday, repeating U.S. calls for Hamas to accept the truce deal.

Speaking to reporters before leaving Egypt, Lincoln squarely blamed Hamas for prolonging the quote-unquote war, saying that Hamas is an outlier in the region for not agreeing to the U.S. deal. He told reporters, My message to governments throughout the region, to people throughout the region, if you want a ceasefire, press Hamas to say yes.

Blinken arrived in Israel later on that same day and met with Netanyahu. He will further hold talks in Qatar and Jordan this week. The State Department said Blinken reaffirmed the quote, ironclad U.S. commitment to Israel's security during his meeting with Netanyahu. A curious note is that while Blinken portrayed the truce plan as Biden's proposal, when Biden made the deal public initially, he said it was an Israeli plan.

This could be just a little slip because Biden is very old, or it could be a slip that just confirms what we've all known to be the case all along. That the U.S. and Israel are one and the same, especially when it comes to their political interests and military power. And while U.S. officials have insisted that Israel agree to this proposal, various Israeli officials, including Netanyahu, have vowed to continue fighting until the elimination of Hamas.

Just days before Biden announced his initiative, a top Israeli official said the military would fight in Gaza until at least the end of the year. On the other hand, Hamas has said that it will only agree to a deal that would lead to a lasting end to the war and the full withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza. Hamas reiterated its position on Monday after its political chief Ismail Haniyeh met with officials from the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a smaller armed group, in Doha.

Hamas said in a statement, Hamas previously called for a explicit commitment from Israel to a lasting ceasefire.

And despite the lack of clarity in the Israeli position, Biden administration officials have repeatedly said that Hamas is the only hurdle to ending the war in Gaza.

The U.S. blaming Hamas for prolonging what it calls a quote-unquote war, again, not a war, a genocide, is ridiculous. Hamas has accepted previous peace deals. It has offered previous peace deals. Israel has been the one to reject them. And then the U.S. comes along and just repackages one of these previously agreed-on deals that Hamas had endorsed and has the audacity to then blame Hamas for obstructing peace. Just give me a break.

Additionally, the U.S. truce plan does not outline plans for the future of Gaza after the war, but the U.S. government has said that it would not accept Hamas rule in the territory. The Biden administration says it wants a quote, reformed Palestinian authority, aka the PA, to eventually govern Gaza.

But the Israeli government has ruled out allowing the occupied West Bank-based PA to govern Gaza, with Netanyahu likening Fatah, the dominant faction in the PA, to Hamas. Other support for the plan has come from some Israeli politicians, as well as the families of the hostages and the international community.

Benny Gantz, a centrist member of Israel's three-man war cabinet and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's principal rival, spoke positively of the proposal and asked his two colleagues in the war cabinet, Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Galant, to convene to discuss the, quote, next steps.

Gantz had previously threatened to leave the cabinet by June 8th if no plan for Gaza beyond the war had been agreed on, and on Sunday, June 9th, he officially announced his resignation. Gantz's resignation does not immediately pose a threat to Netanyahu, who still controls a majority coalition in parliament, but it does mean that the Israeli leader becomes more heavily reliant on his far-right allies.

Gantz said that Netanyahu was making, quote, total victory impossible and that the government needs to put a return of the hostages seized on October 7th by Hamas above political survival.

Gantz is a popular former military chief, and he joined Netanyahu's government shortly after the Hamas attack in a show of unity. His presence also boosted Israel's credibility with its international partners. Gantz has good working relations with U.S. officials. Gantz canceled a planned news conference the night of June 8th, after the four Israeli hostages were rescued from Gaza earlier in the day, which again was Israel's largest operation since October.

Another reminder that 274 Palestinians, including children, were killed in the assault. Another Israeli politician who supported the U.S. peace plan was opposition leader Yar Lapid, who also promised to support the plan, pledging support of his party Yesh Atid, which translates from Hebrew to There is a Future, if those from ultra-nationalists and far-right parties withdraw support.

United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres also endorsed the plan, as have many of Israel's political allies, including the UK and Germany. So who doesn't like the plan? Much of the opposition to the peace plan has come from within the Israeli cabinet. Netanyahu said any initiative that did not include a, quote, elimination of Hamas' capacity to govern and make war was a non-starter.

In his announcement on Friday, May 31st, Biden seemed to indicate that he regarded Hamas's presence within Gaza to have been so downgraded that a repeat of October 7th was impossible. As expected, the ultra-nationalists and extreme right members of Netanyahu's right-wing coalition, which includes Itamar Ben-Gavir and Bezalel Samotrik, threatened to withdraw from the government and cause its collapse if the proposals were accepted.

So as far as Israel's politics are concerned, it seems like the outcome may end up depending on what Al Jazeera describes as, quote, parliamentary arithmetic. The far right in ultra-nationalist parties hold 14 seats, while Gantz's bloc only has 8 seats, meaning the far right has far more influence on a prime minister who wants to stay in power. As for Lapid, his 17 seats are offered as support only in what pertains to the peace proposals.

This leaves Netanyahu reliant on the far right bloc. As far as the deal being accepted, that is still not clear, despite what the U.S. says. The families of Israeli hostages are putting pressure on the government to accept the deal, as are some parts of Israel's political class. But pressures to reject the deal are just as strong, and it will remain to be seen whether Netanyahu chooses his own survival or the return of the hostages.

But if one thing is clear, it is that Netanyahu does not really care about the hostages, because the IOF under his command continues to bombard areas where the hostages can be held. And may I remind you that the IOF have already killed Israeli hostages that they have mistakenly identified as threats. Speaking of threats...

I'm kidding. There is no ad break and there is no threat. That's the end of part one. And if you want to listen to part two, tune in tomorrow talking about the history of Hamas and how we got here. So yeah, see you then. Free Palestine.

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Hello and welcome back to It Could Happen Here. This is Shireen, and today we are continuing our conversation from yesterday where we talked about the U.S. proposed peace deal for Hamas and Israel. That looks suspiciously like a deal Hamas had already agreed to just a few weeks before that, and Israel did not agree to. We had ended part one talking about how the IOF literally killed their own hostages when they mistakenly thought they were threats.

And I ended saying, speaking of threats, and I'm going to continue because that's what professionals do. So, since October 7th, Israel has described Hamas as an existential threat, saying that it needs to destroy the group and won't stop the violence in Gaza until it does so.

But I would argue that most people who are pro-Israel or Western Zionists in general don't actually know anything about Hamas other than thinking they're this big bad evil that has to be eradicated by the quote, only democracy in the Middle East, which I hope by this point people realize is a sick joke.

Hamas is suddenly being talked about on every news channel, and anything even remotely pro-Palestine is now labeled as pro-Hamas, when most people in this country I would argue most likely had never even heard of Hamas before October 7th.

Labeling something as pro-Hamas truly just means nothing. As far as Israel is concerned, the UN is Hamas. In May, Israel's ambassador to the UN, Gilad Erdan, said in an interview with Israel's army radio that the UN has, quote, turned into a collaborator with Hamas. Maybe even more than that. A terror organization unto itself. Wow. Israeli leadership has just continued to one-up themselves when it comes to saying the most insane fucking shit.

And then according to Zionists, the college campus protests that were calling for a literal end to genocide are also pro-Hamas. Earlier this month, a lawsuit was filed in Virginia by a U.S. law firm and an Israeli legal group who have teamed up to sue two organizations involved in recent college campus protests, the American Muslims for Palestine and National Students for Justice in Palestine.

They accused these groups of collaborating with Hamas to serve as their, quote, propaganda division in the U.S. Arson Avtrosky, the CEO of the International Legal Forum, who was working with this U.S. legal team of Greenberg-Tarrig and the National Jewish Advocacy Center, he called the American Muslims for Palestine and the National Students for Justice in Palestine, as well as all the protesters supporting Palestine, most of whom are students, as, quote, the foot soldiers of Hamas.

If I was going to go through everything that Israel and Zionists have labeled as pro-Hamas, this episode would never end. But I hope it's clear that this label and accusation isn't based on any real sort of evidence or proof. And it is only a way to scare people into blindly supporting Israel in quote, defending itself, big quotes there, against this growing evil spreading across the globe and invading our campuses. When in reality, there would be no Hamas without Israel.

Although Hamas eventually grew into being the most active armed resistance group in Gaza, it definitely didn't start that way, and it wouldn't have even had the power to grow the way it did if it weren't for intentional actions by Israeli leadership that started decades ago. Before we get into a timeline of the recent Hamas peace deals that have led to this very similar deal that the U.S. proposed, all deals that again Israel has rejected, I want to make sure we at least have an understanding of what Hamas even is.

Hamas, which is an Arabic acronym for Islamic Resistance Movement, would not exist today if it wasn't for Israel.

American and Israeli politicians are always saying the same thing, how dangerous and evil Hamas is, without mentioning how Israel itself helped create Hamas. The TLDR of it all is that Israelis helped turn a bunch of fringe Palestinian Islamists in the late 1970s into one of the world's most notorious militant groups. This isn't a conspiracy theory, it's a confirmed fact.

Former Israeli officials such as Brigadier General Isaac Segev, who was the Israeli military governor in Gaza in the early 1980s, have openly spoken about this.

After his tenure, Segev told a New York Times reporter that he had helped finance the Palestinian Islamist movement as a, quote, counterweight to secularists and leftists of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, a.k.a. the PLO, as well as the Fatah Party, which was led by Yasser Arafat. Arafat, too, referred to Hamas as, quote, a creature of Israel.

Hamas was officially founded in 1987 at the start of the first Palestinian Intifada, or uprising, against the Israeli occupation. But its beginnings actually started much earlier. Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. The Brotherhood had been repressed by Egyptians in Gaza prior to 1967. But once the Israelis invaded and occupied the Gaza Strip, they chose to encourage this group of extremist Islamists.

The dominant Palestinian political force in Palestine at the time was the PLO, and it was deemed a threat to Israel. And so Israel sought to undermine its power. The PLO is a nationalist coalition which was centered around the secular Fatah party led by Yasser Arafat. By empowering Yassin and the Muslim Brotherhood, Israel thought they could divide the occupied Palestinian people and eventually rule over them by playing them against each other.

Secular Nationalists vs. Religious Islamists In 1978, Yassin wanted to officially register his Islamic Association, which was basically the precursor to present-day Hamas. The Israelis jumped on the opportunity to help make this happen. Yassin built and grew a network of Islamist social institutions across Gaza, funded largely by Israel. Avner Cohen is a former Israeli religious affairs official who worked in Gaza for more than two decades.

In 2009, he told the Wall Street Journal, Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel's creation. Back in the mid-1980s, Cohen even wrote an official report to his superiors warning them not to play divide and rule in the occupied territories by backing Palestinian Islamists against the Palestinian secularists. He wrote in his report, I suggest focusing our efforts on finding ways to break up this monster before reality jumps in our face.

Clearly, his superiors did not listen to him, and Hamas was the result. To be clear, Israelis had helped build up a militant strain of extremist political Islam in the form of Hamas and its Muslim Brotherhood precursors and allowed it free reign in order to quiet any chance of progress in Palestine. And then, when it became convenient for their Zionist narrative, the Israelis tried to bomb, besiege, and blockade it out of existence.

David Hashem, a former Arabs affairs expert in the Israeli military who was based in Gaza in the 1980s, said the quote original sin was Israel's support of Yassin in the 1970s. He said, when I look back at the chain of events, I think we made a mistake. But at the time, nobody thought about the possible results. Yeah, no shit. The only American politician that I know of who has ever referenced how Israel is responsible for Hamas's creation is Ron Paul.

In 2001, on the floor of the House, Ron Paul said, Hamas was encouraged and really started by Israel because they wanted Hamas to counteract Yasser Arafat. Speaking of Arafat, not only did he himself tell an Italian newspaper that Hamas is a creature of Israel, he also said that the former Israeli Prime Minister, Yassak Rabin, admitted this to him, calling it a, quote, fatal error.

Yassin was eventually assassinated by an Israeli airstrike in Gaza on March 22, 2004. Silvan Shalom, former Israeli vice prime minister, said after Yassin's death that, quote, Sheikh Yassin and his organization, Hamas, are responsible for the killings of more than 400 Israelis. When actually, no. Israel is clearly largely responsible.

David Long, a former Middle East expert in the U.S. State Department under Ronald Reagan, told journalist Robert Dreyfuss, I thought the Israelis were playing with fire. This, of course, is not a unique development, as there have been dozens of instances of unneeded and malignant U.S. intervention in other countries for its own gain. And since then, Hamas has killed far more Israelis than any secular Palestinian militant group.

Israel built up Yassin and Hamas as a rival to Arafat's Fatah. Then they killed Yassin, and then they doubled down in making Hamas Israel's worst enemy. An enemy it would use to justify to the entire world that it was not only okay but necessary to control and massacre millions of Palestinians in the process of destroying this threat.

Israel spent more than 20 years helping build up Hamas, and then spent another 20 years trying to destroy it. All of this is to say that aside from the purposeful assistance from Israel in creating Hamas, that Hamas wouldn't even exist if it wasn't for the Israeli occupation. There would be no resistance, because without the ethnic cleansing and forced violent occupation, there would be nothing to resist.

In the process of bolstering this militant group, Hamas also became the main armed force behind the Palestinian resistance. And many view Hamas as the only group even attempting to defend Palestinians in the face of Israeli occupation. And the organization itself has changed over the years, especially in the last decade. It seems like Hamas was and is increasingly trying to establish a more favorable status quo for the Palestinian people.

Hamas's leaders were shaped by the hard realities of a brutal occupation, which was marked by mass arrests of Palestinians, the expropriation of Palestinian lands, and control of their resources. More than half a million Palestinians were arrested and tried in Israel's military-run courts between 1967 and 1987, and over 1,500 Palestinian homes were demolished, and thousands of Palestinians were forcibly deported, aka ethnically cleansed.

After Hamas won the 2006 elections in Gaza, its leader Haniyeh said the group accepted a state on the 1967 borders as well as all the decisions taken by the PA and the PLO, but there were no takers. Hamas leaders also backed the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative that called for the following, the withdrawal of Israeli forces from territories occupied in 1967.

the right of Palestinian refugees to return to the homes they had been forcibly displaced from since 1948, and the formation of a sovereign, independent Palestinian state in return for Arab recognition of Israel. But Hamas's offers were repeatedly dismissed by Israel and ignored by Israel's Western allies, including the U.S., despite Washington's claims of playing the role of a, quote, honest broker in the conflict.

Tariq Bakoni, author of Hamas Contained, The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance, told Al Jazeera, Hamas has always said that they are ready to offer a truce and to stop targeting civilians if the Israeli occupation removes its settlers. At least 750,000 Israelis live in hundreds of fortified illegal settlements and outposts across the occupied Palestinian territories of the West Bank and East Jerusalem,

The vast majority of which are again built illegally, either entirely or partially, on private Palestinian land. And thus they violate international law. One of the more infuriating and frankly incredibly stupid talking points that Zionists have when it comes to talking about Hamas is the 2006 election where Palestinians elected Hamas as their appointed leadership. I want to remind everyone of a few things.

The Gaza Strip has a very young population. Most of the inhabitants in Gaza are under 15 years old. The largest population group in Gaza are children between the ages of five and nine years old. This population wasn't even born yet, let alone old enough to vote in 2006. And furthermore, leadership does not indicate your right to live a life, your right to not be killed.

If you're in America, and Trump is your elected president, and you hate Trump and maybe other foreign entities hate Trump, do you deserve to die? No, you don't. The resistance fighters in Hamas are not the ones who wrote the original charter. They're not the ones who established Hamas in the first place. They're young people that are joining the most active armed resistance to defend Palestine. It's their only option.

And Palestinians have tried other non-violent forms of resistance against this occupation. In 2018 to 2019, there was something called the Great March of Return. It started on March 30th, 2018 and ended December 27th of 2019.

Every Friday for those years, Palestinians in Gaza demonstrated and protested along the border fence between Israel and Gaza for a right to return to their homes and to demand an end to the Israeli blockade in Gaza. During this time, the Israeli army killed a total of 223 people. Over 3,601,000 people, including nearly 8,800 children, were injured.

This is after a peaceful attempt at demonstrating, after a peaceful attempt at trying to resist occupation. They're still shot and killed. They're shot with the intention to kill. Expecting Palestinians to be pacifists when it comes to resisting a brutal, violent occupation that has been now almost a century long is very small-minded and entitled and frankly wrong. Palestinians have the right to resist.

Armed resistance is legal under international law when it comes to resisting and occupying power. What does this mean? Maybe you've heard that train of thought before. Let me explain it to you. Let's go back in time a little bit.

The General Assembly of the United Nations, the UNGA, which was once described as the collective conscious of the world, noted the right of peoples to self-determination, independent, and human rights. As early as 1974, Resolution 3314 of the UNGA prohibited states from any military occupation, however temporary. Hmm, curious. Israel has been doing that for decades now.

In the relevant part of the resolution, the resolution not only went on to affirm the right to self-determination, freedom, and independence of peoples forcibly deprived of that right, and particularly peoples under colonial and racist regimes or other forms of alien domination, but it also noted the right of the occupied to, quote, struggle and to seek and receive support in that effort.

The term armed struggle was implied without precise definition in that resolution and many early other ones that upheld the right of indigenous peoples to evict an occupier. Again, the right of a indigenous people to evict their occupier.

But the imprecise language was changed on December 3rd, 1982. At that time, the WNGA Resolution 37-43 removed any doubt or debate over the lawful entitlement of occupied people to resist occupying forces by any and all lawful means.

The resolution reaffirmed, quote, And although Israel has tried time and time again to

to recast this ambiguous intent of this precise resolution trying to place its now nearly century-long violent brutal occupation in the West Bank and Gaza beyond this resolution's application,

The declaration itself proceeds to be very explicit in its language when it comes to Palestine. Section 21 of the resolution strongly condemned, quote, the expansionist activities of Israel in the Middle East and the continual bombing of Palestinian civilians, which constitute a serious obstacle to the realization of self-determination and independence of the Palestinian people.

That's what I mean. And that's what many people mean when they say that Palestinians have the right to resist and armed resistance is illegal under international law. I want to bring that up because even if Hamas does not reflect the viewpoint of some Palestinians, Hamas is also the main armed resistance group that has been fighting against the IOF in defending Palestine, Gaza in particular, against Israel. And they have a right to do that.

Clearly, as international law states, regardless. Let's go back to talk about the history of Hamas and how they amended their charter in 2017. In 2017, Hamas formally amended its original 1988 charter. The new charter holds that armed resistance against an occupying power is justified under international law.

And while the 1988 Hamas charter had been widely criticized for its anti-Semitism, the 2007 document states that Hamas's fight is not with the Jewish people, but with the Zionist project. And as you should realize by now, anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism.

The new charter also announced once again that it would accept a Palestinian state on the 1967 borders. This would recognize, in effect, a two-state solution, and therefore the existence of Israel as a legitimate entity. This was proposed even as Israel continued to insist that it can no longer allow Hamas to exist, and as Israeli politicians, led by Netanyahu, repeatedly ruled out a two-state solution.

Hamas political leader Khaled Mashal said at the time, The Hamas thinking from the very start was clear. We are not facing a religious war. Hamas, ever since its inception, realizes the nature of the struggle against the Israeli occupier, that it is not a struggle because they are Jews, but because they are occupiers.

Israeli officials dismissed the new policy paper as lies. In a video, Netanyahu symbolically and dramatically threw the document into a trash bin, saying it was an attempt to deceive the world. Through its actions, which span across decades, Israel has not shown any interest in a political agreement, whether with Hamas or other Palestinian political parties, like Fatah, which governs the occupied West Bank. Sari Arabi, a Ramallah-based political analyst, told Al Jazeera,

The issue is not about Gaza. It's also not about whether Israel or Hamas started the war. There are daily killings and assaults in the occupied West Bank. There are attacks on the Al-Aqsa Mosque. There are prisoners and checkpoints. The people in Gaza are refugees. They were isolated and separated from the rest of the Palestinian people.

And the vast majority of Gaza's population are refugees who were forcibly expelled from their homes and villages in the 1948 Nakba by Zionist militias. Many political analysts also blame Israel for the failure of the Oslo Accords, signed in 1993 and 1995, between Israel and the PLO, which was representative of the Palestinian people at the time.

The agreements led to the formation of the PA, an interim five-year governing body meant to lead to an independent Palestinian state, comprising of the occupied territory of East Jerusalem and the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. However, 30 years into its existence, the PA has failed to create a state in the face of Israeli occupation, illegal land grabs, and settlements. And then Hamas took control of Gaza from the PA in 2007.

While there was initial support for the Oslo Accords among Palestinians, the failure to reach a final peace agreement by 1999 and the growing settlement projects, particularly under Netanyahu, left many disappointed. In a leaked video in 2010, Netanyahu boasted about how he made sure the Oslo Accords did not succeed.

The hopes of the Oslo Accords turned into despair as Israeli policies under successive governments continued to undermine the PA and its aspirations. Today, the PA has limited administrative rule over pockets of the occupied West Bank, while Israeli settlements, which are again considered illegal under international law, have grown rapidly.

The settler population in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem has grown from 250,000 Israelis in 1993 to more than 700,000 this year.

In his talk with Al Jazeera, author Tarek Barconi said, the Israelis wanted Oslo because that's how they maintain their colonization, by maintaining the facade of a peace process. Hamas was showing a mirror to the Israelis to say, if you're actually talking about the possibility of ending the occupation, then end it.

That was their offer, instead of the 1993 Oslo Agreements, that they would stop armed resistance if Israel let Palestinians be in the eastern side of Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza. When we look into the history of Hamas, we see that its political leadership has over the years proposed numerous long-term truces or ceasefires to Israel in exchange for the realization of a sovereign, independent Palestinian state.

But Israel has rejected those offers, arguing that Hamas could not be trusted to adhere to any long-term ceasefire, and insisting that any proposal for a short-term pause in fighting were insincere, and strategically aimed only at helping the armed movement regroup from losses.

I've said this before, but it bears repeating. Every Zionist accusation is a confession. The reality is that Israel is the one who cannot be trusted to adhere to any long-term ceasefire, as we have seen time and time again. Here is a summarized timeline of the most recent peace deal attempts that have been proposed since October 7th, since the genocide in Gaza started.

In January 2024, Netanyahu rejected a Hamas proposal to end the war and release more than 100 captives held by the group in exchange for a withdrawal of Israeli forces, the release of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, and recognition of Hamas governance over Gaza. And then on May 6th, Hamas said it accepted a Gaza ceasefire proposal, which was put forward by Egypt and Qatar.

This deal would come in three stages that would see an initial halt in the fighting, leading to lasting calm and the withdrawal of Israeli troops from the Palestinian territory. It would also ensure the release of Israeli captives in Gaza, as well as an unspecified number of Palestinians held in Israeli jails.

The framework of the agreement, in brief, is the release of all Israeli captives in the Gaza Strip, civilians or military, alive or otherwise, from all periods, in exchange for a number of Palestinian prisoners held by Israel as agreed upon, and a return to a sustainable calm that leads to a permanent ceasefire and the withdrawal of Israeli forces from the Gaza Strip, as well as its reconstruction and the lifting of the siege.

Hmm, it seems a little familiar, doesn't it? But Israel, unsurprisingly, did not agree to this proposal. Instead, it bombed Rafah, which made the Israeli government's message clear. There will be no permanent ceasefire. Israel's bombing of Rafah was justified by Israel as a way to disband Hamas battalions and seize control of the Gaza-Egyptian crossing, which Israel accuses Hamas of using to smuggle weapons into Gaza.

But humanitarian groups were quick to point out that a closure of such a crossing would only lead to further disastrous consequences for the more than 1 million Palestinians living in Rafah, the majority of them displaced from other areas of Gaza, who fled to Rafah after being told by Israel that it was a quote-unquote safe zone. Israel said at the time that the terms of the May Hamas ceasefire deal differed from previous proposals it had seen.

But analysts believe that the wider issue is that Israel is not willing to agree to a permanent ceasefire, even after Hamas releases all Israeli captives. Omar Rahman, an expert on Israel-Palestine with the Middle East Council for Global Affairs, spoke about this in May, saying, The last couple of days have proved that Israel was not really negotiating in good faith.

The moment that Hamas agreed to a deal, Israel was willing to blow that up by commencing their assault on Rafah. The goal was to destroy Gaza in its totality. And then on May 31st, the U.S. announced its own ceasefire proposal that Biden said would lead to a quote, lasting ceasefire in the Gaza Strip.

He said the proposal involves three phases, the first of which would last six weeks and would include a full and complete ceasefire, as well as the withdrawal of Israeli forces from all populated areas of Gaza. Again, this peace plan is almost indistinguishable from the one that Hamas agreed to on May 6th.

A quick reminder that only 25 days before this announcement on May 6th, Hamas had agreed to a ceasefire proposal by Egypt and Qatar that is almost identical to the one Biden announced on May 31st. And Israeli leaders rejected that initiative.

On June 7th, Israel rejected the UN's resolution of its own hostage deal offer, which was a permanent ceasefire in exchange for release of all hostages. A reminder that the only mass release of hostages has come through ceasefire exchanges, and that a ceasefire deal means freed hostages without mass death.

It boggles my mind that there are still people defending Israel and saying all this Palestinian death is for the hostages. Because again, if Israel cared about their lives at all, they would agree to a deal because that deal can guarantee the safety of the hostages. But they do not care about the hostages. Every time Israel rejects a deal, they are telling you that.

And yet their supporters are too entrenched in the lies and propaganda of Zionism to ever see clearly.

So, just to summarize, the U.S. proposed a ceasefire deal, which was almost indistinguishable from previous plans agreed to by Hamas. And then, while seemingly waiting for Israel to accept the deal, the U.S. launched a military operation and committed more war crimes to murder hundreds of Palestinians, and they did this by hiding in humanitarian aid trucks.

While deceiving the world and the Palestinians into thinking that they were trying to formulate a ceasefire agreement, the U.S. helped Israel plan and carry out its massacres. This is what peacemaking looks like to the United States. A ceasefire deal is the absolute bare minimum and it is nowhere near enough. The removal of Netanyahu is nowhere near enough.

He's being set up as the fall guy and scapegoat for Israel, skirting the responsibility of what the Israeli state has done to Palestinian people since 1948. The fight for Palestine is a liberation movement which demands nothing less than the full dignity, freedom, and security of all who live under this violent military occupation. It's a demand to end Israeli apartheid.

And until that happens, Israel will continue to get away with the Nakba that started in 1948 and continues today. The Nakba never ended. Israel will continue to get away with the genocide and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people until Israel and its apartheid is dismantled. A ceasefire is the absolute bare minimum to achieving that.

And that, my friends, is our episode for today. Please keep sharing and learning about what is happening in Palestine and don't stop talking about it. Free Palestine.

Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. This is Malcolm Gladwell from Revisionist History.

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