The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated as soon as possible.

Michael Fox: Hi Mark.

Marc Steiner: Hey Mike, how you doing? Good to see you.

Michael Fox: Good to see you.

Marc Steiner: What do you got for us today?

Michael Fox: All right. So late last fall I visited this place that I think you’ll appreciate for this episode. Sprout Plaza at the University of California campus.

Marc Steiner: I know exactly where you were.

Michael Fox: So it’s a beautiful blue sky out. Leaves are changing colors. It’s a crisp autumn afternoon and in front of me is this big long stoic building marble, four big long Roman columns at the top of a row of stairs. This is the administration building here at the University of California Berkeley and this is called Sproul Hall. And that is important because this was literally ground zero for the free speech movement of 1964 here at the University of California Berkeley. Like the Plaza where I’m at right now, which is Sprout Plaza, was where you just had daily marches, protests, speeches just constantly happening.

I think it is really poignant that on the ground in front of Sprout Hall, someone has written in chalk, Trump must go now, refuse fascism. And it’s chalked up in two different locations here. People still staking out their territory, demanding their right to speak their voice. I was there to get a sense of the feeling being there and kind of the legacy today. And of course this was ground zero for the free speech movement. And Mark, that’s something you know a couple things about.

Marc Steiner: A little.

Michael Fox: So just to kick this off, how would you define the free speech movement for those that don’t know or don’t remember?

Marc Steiner: Well, I think you got to take a step back with the free speech movement, Mario Savio and the rest because they came out of the civil rights movement. That’s the roots of this. The roots of this is in Mississippi and Alabama and Louisiana and SNCC, the student unviolent coordinating committee and people putting their lives on the line to end segregation in the south and to register people to vote. So those are the roots of the people who created the free speech movement. And people came out of that movement in the south with black and white in different parts of the country and created things that were spawned by their work in the south
As with Mary Osavio was as well, who was a philosophy graduate student at Berkeley. And so that was also all throughout the country at that moment on the campus as I was and on the East Coast and around the country universities were clamping down on the ability for students and faculty to speak out against the war in Vietnam, which was just beginning and to talk about civil rights and racism and more. And so the locus of that, the central part of that erupted on Berkeley’s campus with a free speech movement that kind of gave birth to free speech movements across the country. So it was the beginning of the volatile 60s given birth by the civil rights movement.

Michael Fox: I was trying to make this connection to the past, right? What does it mean for people there today?

Yaseli Mendez: Yeah, I mean it’s very impactful.

Michael Fox: And so I spoke with this one student, Yaseli Mendez. She grew up in Mexico. She’s a third year psychology student. It is scary at

David Hollinger: Times.

Michael Fox: I asked her, what does it mean to be studying here and to be on this campus in this place that was so important for free speech and for this movement around the country?

Yaseli Mendez: So crazy. I was raised in Mexico and free speech is not very tolerated there. There’s a lot of violence against speaking out. And so being in a country specifically Berkeley where it’s like, wow, free speech was born, I feel very lucky to be here. Yeah.

David Hollinger: That’s awesome.

Michael Fox: I spoke with another really interesting student.

Gabriel Alou: Gabriel Alou, L-O-U.

Michael Fox: He’s a senior history student and he told me how history is still so important. Clearly he’s a history student, but not just for the free speech movement, but he made this connection to what free speech means, but also the history of struggle in the United States.

Gabriel Alou: We talk about woman suffrage movement. We talk about Malcolm X. We talk about Martin Luther King about the black rights. And also we talk about the fundamental human rights. I feel like everybody has the right to like freedom of speech. Everybody could express their ideas and thoughts. I feel like-

Michael Fox: And he said, “We still need freedom of speech. We still need a free speech movement.” It’s something that he still appreciates today. And he said something that I thought was really interesting in that everybody should be able to have their own political opinions.

Gabriel Alou: Give opinion, but you do not need to raise it to a level of conflict. Our speeches should not be something that’s division or more of a unity. Yeah, because United States is a country of immigrants. Yeah. So the main goal of free speech is for us to have different opinions from different countries. We’re coming together to make the country better but not worse.

Michael Fox: But his analysis I thought was really, really powerful and so important because he’s talking about we should be coming together, we should be focusing on the positive. And I think that’s such a great segue for this episode, Mark, because a lot of what we’re going to be doing today is talking about the powerful and the positive stories of the past and how movements have stood up and lifted up the voice and shared their voices and lifted up and stood for free speech going back hundreds of years.

Marc Steiner: I think one of the things people have to recognize though is that the battle for free speech and the belief in freedom of speech has been at the core of the fundamental debates on what democracy should be in this country from the beginning,
Whether it was the differences between Adams and others in the founding father, if they call the founding fathers or whether it’s going down to Trump wanting to arrest people and filing all these ridiculous lawsuits to stop people from speaking or this tradition act of 1798 all throughout American history, this has been a battle. And I think that there’s precedence for limiting speech and there’s precedence for expanding speech in the history of this country. And I think we are now at the precipice in the beginning, not in the beginning, I think we’re in the middle of the start of a major battle over free speech in America and this time being pushed to limit it by the right wing in America and unless they’re criticizing you because you’re black or you’re left.
And I think that that’s why this discussion is so timely and important because we’re in the throes of a battle to protect freedom and speech in this country and it’s flying under the radar for most people. It’s not being seen at all. I want to welcome everybody to a special podcast series that I’m co-hosting with my colleague and dear friend, journalist Michael Fox, about one of the core freedoms of our nation, our freedom of speech. The right to speak one’s mind is a cornerstone of our democratic principles. That precious freedom is under assault, under threat and this series is the battle for free speech, a new multi-part narrative podcast series brought to you by the real news with your hosts. I’m Mark Steiner And

Michael Fox: I’m Michael Fox. Over the coming weeks, we’ll be taking you on a journey to understand the important role that free speech has played in US history and the fight being waged over it today.

Marc Steiner: And in our last episode, we looked at the attacks by this administration of President Donald Trump on our free speech. People are being silenced, fired, even jailed for voicing their opinions and their views. This is a threat. Today, our country faces the greatest threat of free speech in decades and in this series, we’ll cover the battles being waged over free speech here in the United States, at home, and abroad.

Michael Fox: In today’s episode, we’re diving into the past to look at how the fight for free speech has been at the core of organizing and struggle for change in the United States. From

Marc Steiner: The abolitionist movement to end slavery and the civil rights to end segregation to the free speech movement of the 1960s.

Michael Fox: So Mark, I’ll be honest, I’m particularly excited to have this conversation with you today because you actually lived some of these moments actively. For those who don’t know your work or history, can you just give us a quick sense of who you are?

Marc Steiner: I’m old. No. So I started my activism when I was like 13, 14, 1960, when I was first in the civil rights movement here in Maryland, in Cambridge, Mississippi in the South with Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committe. And in 65 when I went to college, I was part of Students for Democratic Society leading the chapter at College Park in Maryland and we were taking the message from and the struggle from the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and bringing it East to have that same fight in College Park at American University at Georgetown and George Washington to bring that fight to the East Coast that took place also in Columbia when the Columbia University was taken over by Mark Rudd and the free speech movement there. So this is essential to what developed the movement of the 1960s was a battle for free speech on campuses and in the civil rights movement and to end segregation.
So the roots run deep and now we’re facing it again.

Michael Fox: Yeah. I want to continue where we started at the top amid the free speech movement at Sprout Plaza at the University of California, Berkeley. I want to go back to that moment and I don’t know if you know this, but I got my start in journalism over two decades ago, just up the street from there at KPFA. It’s the Pacifica Radio Station in Berkeley. And many, many years ago they produced this pretty incredible audio documentary about the free speech movement. They were on the ground recording and I just want to play a clip or two for you really quick right now. Yeah,

Marc Steiner: Of course. Please do. Yeah.

Recording: If you have the strength here, which you have to stand in the administration and say, “We want free speech on campus, you can have for the rest of your lives the strength to stand up whenever you say, whenever you see something you don’t like, you don’t believe in segregation or to say to the government, I don’t believe in war.” And you really have to do it
You could never believe such a thing could happen at the University of California where this many students would said they’ve had enough and they’re going to stand up right now. This university is so rough and so corrupt at its base that a simple demonstration by students asking for free speech will cause this university to collapse on outside pressure. I asked you if you can stand there and so listen my support for it.

Michael Fox: You know Mark, you and I interviewed UC Berkeley history professor David Hollinger.

Marc Steiner: Yes,

Michael Fox: Right. And he was a student at the university at the time and I asked him to take us back to that moment.

David Hollinger: Well, okay. The Sproul Plaza where Alsavio and various other worthies would be speaking And the

Speaker 3: University which is the complainant will not press charges.

David Hollinger: Now you’d have several thousand, of course proud assessments are often contested, but I can remember times when it was shoulder to shoulder all the way from Bancroft, which is the closest street to the south all the way up to say their gate, which is the part of the campus that enters the other buildings back to where the stairwell goes down to the lower level. So I don’t know, were there five or 6,000 people at those rallies? I think there might have been, but it was this feeling that we really did have this act together and there were a number of rallies like that. I would say the anti-war rallies were bigger than the free speech rallies, but they were part of the same thing. The free speech rallies began small and gradually increased over time and among the things that helped them actually, helped them grow
Were these faculty members that used to show up and speak. The issue that brought it up was the remarkably myopic perspective of the regents of the University of California and the administration, which was to prevent speech on campus that advocated political action. And so as a result, all these rallies would occur right at the edge of the campus. So you’d stand up like on the street and then you’d have a couple thousand people on the campus listening. And so the idea was this is absurd. We ought to be able to speak on the campus about political advocacy. So this is what triggered it and more and more people got involved and it’s true that the civil rights movement experience of the south was very important. There were lots of people, not only Mario Savio, but others who’d been involved in Mississippi summer so the connection was there because what kind of political adequacy did you want?
Well, we were advocating against racism.

Recording: I’m not here to destroy something. We’re all here to try to build something. Why don’t you help us?

Marc Steiner: And then that movement spread across the country. It was in Chicago. It was College Park, Maryland. It was at NYU in Columbia. It was across the United States of America that spread like wildfire, which is not often reported enough. It wasn’t just Berkeley. It took over campuses across the country and that melded into not just free speech, but free speech when it came to standing up against the Vietnam War. So all those things are really connected and there’s one piece of this people don’t talk about a lot, which is when in the student nonviolent coordinating committee in the south and SNCC, when Stokely Carmichael and some of the other leaders told the white folks who were in the Civil Rights Movement to go back to your campuses, go back home and organize and that’s part of what gave birth to all of this. And so it’s a rich history and it’s sadly relevant to this moment we’re facing today.

Michael Fox: What you brought up, Mark, what you bring up about how this spread at other universities campuses and people who were protesting elsewhere is so profound. When you saw this kind of erupt from the East Coast where you were and you saw this kind of blowing up in Berkeley, what was the context? What did you feel kind of on the other side of the country that this was happening in Northern California?

Marc Steiner: It was an inspiration I think for people across America. It was the beginnings, not the really beginning because the beginnings really weren’t with the Civil Rights Movement, but it was part of the explosion out of that movement, especially in majority white campuses across the country and white communities to stand up to the war and to stand up for free speech. And so really it was the birth of what we call the movement and the anti-war movement, all came out of this. And I remember as a young person just being enthralled by it and part of it

Recording: Is a possibility of reconciliation.

Michael Fox: You know what’s fascinating, Mark, because it seems like 60 years later people are still grappling with the same question, kind of the same struggle. Students and teachers on university campuses block from protesting or being silenced and fired over Palestine or Charlie Kirk like what we looked at in the last episode. Mark, what came out of the free speech movement? What was one and what did it mean for civil rights, the anti-war movement that would kind of explode across the country?

Marc Steiner: It gave birth to a number of things. The leading student force of the 60s, the late 60s, mid late 60s was the students for Democratic Society, SDS. And in many ways it was born out of the Port Yuran statement and Tom Hayden and all that rest, but it was born out of free speech movements.That’s what exploded the student movement across country. Part of the birth of it was a free speech movement that was deeply connected to the civil rights movement. And I think that the changes we saw in America in part came out of that time and out of that movement. It also was the reason we had this reaction today to fight back against free speech.

Recording: We have breaking news just into our newsroom this morning. Leaders at the University of Tennessee have fired a professor for her social media posts. Taken to jail, is included in a federal law. Are saying something about the deceased Charlie Kirk.

Marc Steiner: They wouldn’t say that directly on the right, but that’s what’s happening. So this is like taking America back, we’re breaking America backwards. And as a reaction to what the free speech movement gave birth to.

Michael Fox: One of the things I’ve been grappling with for this series, in particular this episode is the definition of a free speech. What does that actually mean? Today, while we’re looking back at social movement and activist organizing the free speech movement, abolitionist movement, how would you describe, what would you define free speech as taking this kind of historical look back?

Marc Steiner: We can say a lot of things about American democracy and its flaws. It’s always in a battle with itself. Freedom of speech is one of those things, one of those ideas, one of those principles that has unleashed revolutionary forces not just in America, but across the globe. The right to say what to organize and stand up, the right to say what you want to say, the right to use that to build movements. And I think that it is really at the core. Part of the essence of the early movements in the ’60s was a concept called participatory democracy that really galvanized both SNCC and SDS and other movements of people in their teens and 20s. The idea that the core of our country starts from the community, starts from the ability for everybody to say what they want and participate in this democracy as an equal.
Democracy in the beginning of this country was a democracy for white men of property, but the principles they believed in for themselves were universal. I mean, it inspired the abolition movement. It inspired the free speech movement. It inspired early union organizing in the late 19th century and early 20th century. Those principles, these white men who kept for themselves were actually universal principles.
And gave birth to all the movements who we see.

Michael Fox: Mark, let’s dive into this past. Let’s dive further into this past. Can you take us back to the 1800s to the abolitionist movement? How were people organizing demanding the end of slavery and what did free speech have to do with this?

Marc Steiner: Well, I mean, I’m not that old. I wasn’t there then, but I fantasized that I was. And so the battles that took place, especially from say 1830s to the Civil War, even earlier than that, free speech was under attack, especially when it came to the enslaved of Africans in our country. And it led to real violence. When people stood up to talk about ending slavery, they were attacked. They were killed. They were beaten. They were jailed. Thanksgiving. Free speech was dangerous to your life being a person who stood up and talked against enslavement.
And I think though that what the abolition movement did was take the words of the founding fathers of America and made them universal. Didn’t quite include women yet, but it made them universal. And I think people don’t realize that the movement to abolish slavery, the abolitionist movement in America really changed democracy forever. It was one of the major turning points. We’re still battling it in some ways, but I think that, look, I mean newspapers that came out to fight against slavery in America were burned to the ground. People were tarred and feathered. People were killed, but it gave birth to something that changed America fundamentally. And people, I think, don’t realize how deeply important the abolitionist movement was to our democracy, to our future, to our country.

Michael Fox: But even in the north, and that’s been something like researching for this podcast, Mark, which was kind of shocking to me is that you even had situations where people were in the north and they were still being attacked abolitionists in the north calling for an end of slavery all over. I interviewed this woman recently and I’ll mention her several times in today’s episode. Her name is Marianne Franks.

Mary Anne Frank…: I’m a law professor at the George Washington Law School and I’m also the president and the legislative and tech policy director of a nonprofit organization called the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative.

Michael Fox: And she talks a litle bit about this. She wrote a book in 2024 called Fearless Speech: Breaking Free from the First Amendment in which she talks about how during the abolitionist movement it was really abolitionists who were pushing the definition of free speech were rethinking of it in different ways because up until then, basically the First Amendment basically said, “Well, Congress shall pass no law prohibiting the freedom of speech.”

Mary Anne Frank…: So the assumption that everyone made based on that reading, and that’s a fair reading, is that it only applies to the federal government and it only applies in this really narrow sense that Congress literally can’t pass laws that say, “You can’t say that or you can’t say this. ” So that when you had states saying, “We don’t like this kind of activism or these kinds of expression that suggests that slavery is wrong or bad,” that was not really seen as a First Amendment issue because it wasn’t even conceptually or doctrinally possible.

Michael Fox: So that’s why you had states, for instance, that were banning abolitionist literature. There’s the great postal campaign where abolitionists send hundreds of thousands of material to Southern states, basically demanding the end of slavery, et cetera. And then states started to ban this material. They were literally prohibiting abolitionist from sending abolitionist material in the mail. But since it was the state and not Congress, then the state said, “Well, we can do this because it doesn’t fall under First Amendment.” But then abolitionists were pushing it to this other level. And so Marianne Franks talked about this one story about Elijah Lovejoy, abolitionists, Presbyterian minister, newspaper editor, journalist.

Mary Anne Frank…: He very firmly read the First Amendment as a protection of his free speech. One of the most poignant things about his story as he is continuing to move states, move cities because every time he establishes his newspaper and writes about the horrors of slavery and advocates for abolition, he’s attacked and he has to move again

Michael Fox: And so on November 7th, 1837, a mob catches up with him at his home in Alton, Illinois.

Mary Anne Frank…: And they are at his doorstep and they are saying, “You have to stop writing about slavery.” And I can’t remember the exact quotation, but he says that he has the freedom to speak in this way and he will use that freedom as he sees fit. And he says that right before the mob shoots him to death.

Michael Fox: This was the violent retribution for speaking out, but there was this new vision of what free speech should mean or what it could mean for others for change for social justice in the United States.

Marc Steiner: And I think that the newspapers that were printed at that time, like The Liberator or Freedom’s Journal were attacked violently. They were abolitionist papers, but they aren’t really at the core of what really led to freedom of the press, really led to the battle for free speech because they stood up against a horrendous violence and a horrendous nature of slavery to push the boundaries of free speech to end enslavement of African people in our country. And I think that people don’t always get that connection between free speech and the abolitionist movement. And also what you described are also the roots of the Trumpian right in the struggle that we’re facing today. What we’re facing today is like not so much of a redux as it is the growth of both moments in our country and we’re at that place. We’re head to head.

Michael Fox: Mark, I want to bring us to just the year after Elijah Lovejoy was killed Philadelphia and just to set the scene to remind people Philadelphia at the time just wasn’t just another city on the East Coast. Before 1800, it was the capital of the United States. It’s where the founders signed the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and they did that all in a place called the Pennsylvania State House or what we now call Independence Hall. It’s in downtown Philadelphia and just two blocks away in 1838, the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society built Pennsylvania Hall.

Mary Anne Frank…: Where you had all of these luminaries coming together who were staunch anti-slavery advocates and they were also advocates for women’s rights. And those are two of the most controversial positions you can take at the time, but you had all of these people wanting to come together, use their own money to build this incredible building that was supposed to become a communal hall for speaking freely and they referred to the freedom of speech in that way.

Michael Fox: And this was of course to be a place for abolitionists to come and meet and debate because at the time, like what you were talking about there, it was hard to find places to have large meetings because there was so much backlash against the abolitionist movement. So it was a big three-story building, several stores on the first floor. There was an abolitionist bookstore, another store that sold products not produced by slave labor. There were meeting rooms, a large auditorium, and it opened in May 1838, this is another one of those stories that I talked with Maryanne Franks about.

Mary Anne Frank…: And that it was going to be for the first time that the America would really speak freely. Black people and white people would mingle together, women and men would mingle together. There would be lectures, there’d be discussions, there’d be a bookstore. And it was such an incredible moment in American history that I think most people never read about because what happened when the people of Pennsylvania, and not just in Pennsylvania, there was all of these white-owned presses that were speaking about the abomination of Pennsylvania Hall in their Southern newspapers and advocating for people to go and fight for their rights against what was happening in Pennsylvania and all these flyers that were put up around Philadelphia by people who were saying that there are Obama and Nations going on at this particular hall and you should do something to stop it. And so for the first week or so when they were having their incredible lectures and there were all of this incredible progressive mingling of society, again, kind of living up to the aspirations that the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights actually articulated and people were furious about it.
The white mobs were furious about it. White businessmen were furious about it. And what happens as I recount is that they get so agitated that they burn the entire building down and they break in, they’re breaking in with stones. They start helting the building with stones as some of the speakers are speaking.

Michael Fox: And in her book, Mary Anne Franks talks about this one moment where Angelina Grimke, she was an important abolitionist and women’s rights activist. And she was literally speaking as mobs are trying to break in to stop her and she kept going.

Mary Anne Frank…: And she just incorporates it into her speech and talks about how we, she says, that we who are speaking the truth have nothing to fear. They’re the ones who should fear and tremble. But when they leave, the mob breaks in and sets and opens all the gas jets. And before you know it, this incredible monument to true free speech, expression, equality has been burned to the ground.

Michael Fox: This monument of free speech went up in smokes at the hands of white mobs and white supremacists and supporters of slavery. It’s just this crazy moment where you see this glimmer of hope of what could be, of people coming together to stand for what we dreamed the United States could actually represent literally almost 200 years ago and it’s burned to the ground within days of being built.

Marc Steiner: And what was the consequence? What happened of that act?

Michael Fox: I mean, the abolitionist movement clearly continued to organize, but there was fear around speaking out.

Mary Anne Frank…: And I think to some extent that was a very powerful kind of dampening of this moment that free speech and democracy were intertwined. I think it really did a lot to erase that from memory or put such a scar on that memory that that really wasn’t the way it was articulated for some time. And even when you saw the later abolitionist movements taking up the cause, I don’t think they so much talked about it in terms of free speeches. They just said, “This is about humanity. This is about evil. This is about a compact with the devil,” as they called the Constitution for its concessions to slavery.

Michael Fox: What’s so important is for us to remember these moments, to champion these moments, and also remember the backlash, which has been continual, but how people have continued to respond and continue to organize and would not bow down to the powers that be or the violence pushed by white supremacists, which has continued to be pushed by white supremacists in the United States.

Marc Steiner: Right. And I think that when you talk about Maryanne Franks, it’s interesting. When you mentioned her name, I remember her book, Fearless Speech. And I think that is the battle of the moment that we face in terms of fighting for free speech in America. I mean, I don’t think people realize how under threat it really is at this moment. I think that we are in a moment where as happened before in American history where freedom of speech is under attack. And I think that this notion of fearless speech is an important one to wrestle with.

Michael Fox: It is. And I want to take a second to dig in a litle bit deeper before we move on. Sure, please do. Yeah. About what this idea of fearless speech actually means. So she got this idea actually from lectures from Michel Fuku in the 1980s where he talks about the Greek concept of Paracia, which basically means saying it all. It’s freedom of speech, but speaking truth for the common good and speaking truth in a moment that it could potentially even put myself into danger. So the idea is that an ancient Greece mark, this was the most important speech that was needed to preserve democracy.

Mary Anne Frank…: It’s not just that you get to say whatever you want. The Greeks did have a word for that too, this kind of idea that you could just say things without consequences, but the Greeks didn’t seem to think that that was the particularly valuable form of speech. They thought the most valuable form of speech was the kind of speech where you had to speak in your own voice. That was the first qualification, which is you can’t pretend to be a devil’s advocate or take on a role or just do it for rhetorical purposes. You had to commit to it. And they said you also had to be speaking to or about something that was more powerful than yourself as the speaker, someone in power, some force in power and you could not be praising it because praising it is possible, of course, you can do that, but that isn’t fearless.
To be fearless about the way you speak about power is to criticize it. And it’s fearless because that creates a risk to you because once you criticize people in power, you are in danger that the people in power are going to hurt you.

Michael Fox: And so she says, “This is so important because usually kind of like in society, we kind of lump all forms of speech together.”This is in particular, we’ll talk about this in the next episode, but over social media, this is a big deal. Oh, everyone has their right to speech. But what she says is that we need to understand fearless speech juxtaposed with reckless speech. And what she describes as reckless speech is all of kind of the famous free speech cases you could imagine, KKK’s right to spread their message, Larry Flint, Neo-Nazi speech, whatever it might be, it is not fearless.

Mary Anne Frank…: These are not people who are taking a burden of speech upon themselves and actually taking a risk that they will be hurt by the people in power because they’re reinforcing power.

Michael Fox: And often people actually get hurt from their speech, but they’re not the ones who are getting hurt. So one example she gives here is the famous 1969 Supreme Court case of Clarence Brendanburg.

David Hollinger: The honorable the Chief Justice and the Associate Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States.

Mary Anne Frank…: Where he is full clan regalia doing a march around a burning cross, got the Bible at hand talking about how black people and Jews need to be removed from the country. Now that is not the kind of speech. I mean, literally someone in a mask who is proclaiming these things and stirring up dehumanization and rhetoric against people who are objectively speaking more vulnerable in society. And in the wake of those kinds of rallies, people did get lynched. They did get attacked. And the entire question of Brandenburg was how closely related do his words have to be to the attacks for it to be illegal and the answer that his words weren’t close enough. But forgetting the doctrine for a moment, that’s reckless. You are putting this out into the world fully knowing that the people that it’s going to hurt or the people that it puts in danger is not you, it’s someone else.
And there I thought that is a really important distinction that I would like to emphasize.

Michael Fox: And so what her book really emphasizes and what we see time and time again is how fearless speech is actually attacked or silenced or pushed aside or banned, whereas reckless speech is then supported again and again. But her book is interesting because she tries to kind of get away from our understanding of free speech as kind of first amendment, because there’s been a lot written. If you look at most of the books that are written about free speech today, and I have been reading many of them lately, Mark.

Marc Steiner: I’m sure you have.

Michael Fox: But if you look at most of the books that have been written about free speech, they’re all talking about, well, what’s constitutional, what’s not constitutional, what’s defended by the First Amendment, what’s not defended by the First Amendment. And what she tries to do in her book is say, “Okay, that’s all good and well, but let’s actually talk about what free speech should mean beyond the First Amendment. And how do we define this in a different way? And how do we then kind of support and champion those struggles that are standing up for fearless speech?

Marc Steiner: People kind of whittle down free speech meaning I can belittle you if I want to. It’s my right to do. ” And I think that not to go too far afield here, but I remember back in the ’80s, in my days in graduate school when I was still too old to be there, that we were wrestling with Michelle who calls fearless speech and the lectures he gave at Berkeley and how that really is at the heart of her work and at the heart of what it means to be able to stand up and fight for human rights and justice and a democratic and free world in fearless speech.

Michael Fox: Were you having conversations then about Fuko and his lectures in the 1980s? Were you all talking about that and kind of what that meant?

Marc Steiner: Oh yeah. Oh yeah. I mean, not to digress into this too deeply, but my intellectual mentor back then was a Holocaust survivor named Avram Engelman who founded Antioch here on the East Coast who actually lived in Paris and was in one of Stalin’s camps as well. So this was a major part of his being and he actually studied and worked for Co. So it was like I was one step away with my mentor, Al Engelman. Yeah, so I’m very familiar with all that.

Michael Fox: Wow, amazing, Mark. Amazing. So I want to start to move us slowly in the timeline, the chronological timeline, because there’s another important episode that happens. This is after the Civil War that I think is really important in terms of understanding this question of fearless speech, reckless speech, and how people have used free speech in the past to stand up. And so I want to go to 1890s Memphis, Tennessee.

Marc Steiner: Okay.

Michael Fox: Population, roughly 65,000 people, a third of the residents are black and there is of course incredible racism. This is Jim Crow laws are mandating segregation across the Southern United States and lynchings against black men are just so common. And just to put this into perspective, during the 1890s, someone is being lynched somewhere in the Southern US every other day.

Marc Steiner: That’s right.

Michael Fox: So it’s just a terrifying moment and one woman in particular is pushing back. Her name is Ida B. Wells.

Marc Steiner: And

Michael Fox: Again, I spoke with Mary Anne Franks about her story as well because she was a black teacher, turned journalist and really a muck rager and her focus was on denouncing the lynchings.

Mary Anne Frank…: She got really consumed by the horrors of lynching because she experienced what had happened to some people that she knew and in neighborhoods that she lived in and suddenly that became what she really felt that she needed to communicate to the public. And as you might imagine, this was not received well and it was particularly an editorial that she wrote about the horrors of lynching where she wasn’t just talking about how lynching was a bad thing. She was saying, “Here’s what I think is actually going on with the problem of lynching.” And this was something I think had not really been expressed before, certainly not by a black female journalist, but she says the story that we keep hearing about these lynchings is that the men we’re told, the black men who are usually the subject of these lynchings that they’ve done something horrible to white women, that they’re raping white women.
And she says, “Here’s what my research has shown,” because she went and she would follow on these incidents and she would gather information about them and ask questions. And she said, “What I think is happening and what seems to be happening in these places is that there’s a problem of competition.” And she says, “And it’s not just economic competition, but that’s a big part of it. It just so turns out that many of the victims of lynching are people who are black men who were running businesses that were in competition with white businesses.” But then she suggests there’s a much more intimate form of competition when she says it’s not about, in many cases, sexual violence against these white women, it was consensual relationships. And that I think is really what drove the mob around her at this time from being very angry with what she was saying to being enraged in a way that was incredibly destructive.
It was because she said, “I believe that black men are not raping white women. I believe that there are consensual relationships happening between black men and white women, and that is why lynching is actually happening. It’s a sexual vengeance project. It is why so often we see that these men are tortured in these ways that are very sexual and very physical. And it really did seem to just animate the worst possible forces where she was in Memphis to drive them to that same kind of mob rage that we saw with Pennsylvania Hall.

Michael Fox: She’s writing these stories for her paper, The Memphis Free Press, and a series of white newspapers responded with editorials advocating a violent response or calling for people to do something about it. And in the end, they burn the Memphis free press to the ground.

Mary Anne Frank…: So again, you see that same sense of all- consuming rage about the publication of this idea and you can certainly see it in the way that the white newspapers talked about her editorial. They would reprint her editorial and talk about how unbelievable it was that somebody would make such horrific accusations. And it’s so reminiscent in ways of the Pennsylvania Hall reporting after Pennsylvania Hall was burned, there were a lot of editorials in Southern newspapers where they might say something about how well it’s a shame that this incredible building was burned to the ground, but not only were these radical ideas being stated in this hall, but also white women and black men were seen leaving together and sitting together. And you could see that this was really something that was animating so much of a part of what was animating this kind of mob hatred, this real censorship was that sense of you cannot speak to that.
You cannot speak to this idea that the black races and the white races might be mingling voluntarily together.

Michael Fox: I think this is another such powerful message and reminder of regardless of the response and the violent backlash, people are standing up, people are speaking their voices, people are demanding to be heard and this is clearly fearless, fearless speech.

Marc Steiner: Now when you mentioned her, I’m just going to throw this in as well. I mean, she was one of the most amazing Americans that ever walked the face of the earth. She was fearless. I mean, in what she wrote in the movement she helped build, she helped found the NAECP. She stood up … Lynchbobs tried to kill her. They killed people around her and lynched them, but she never stopped. I mean, this is a woman who I think most Americans don’t know but should know. She was one of the great heroes of our entire history and just fearless, a woman, a black woman in that period to stand up the way she did. So yeah, I mean, she’s one of those people, whenever hear her name, Ida B. Wells, my next line is say her name.

Michael Fox: Mark, bring us up in the decades, right? Walk us into the 1950s, into the 1960s and the civil rights movement. You participated directly. How important was free speech for the civil rights movement? What did this mean?

Marc Steiner: Two things. I mean, A, the roots of the civil rights movement people don’t really often give credit to was World War II. And Truman announced the official surrender.

Recording: This is a solemn but glorious hour.

Marc Steiner: It was Black men coming back from the war throughout the South and throughout the United States standing up saying, “We just fought for this country. We’re not going to live in segregation.” Those are the roots of the movement where black veterans of World War II. We often forget that. That led to Little Rock in 1954 to start slamming down racial segregation of schools. When I was a kid in the 1950s, Baltimore, we were all in segregated schools. And I remember the first time black kids came into our elementary school. I was in the sixth grade. And so it’s not ancient history. Well, maybe some people might think I’m ancient, but it’s not ancient history.

Michael Fox: That’s incredible. For other generations, that seems like that was lifetimes

Marc Steiner: Ago. Yeah. I mean, I was just very lucky to have been living then and have the mother that I had who stood up to racism and crossed the line early and my father, who was the first white doctor in Baltimore to integrate his waiting room and it was that recent. White doctors made black patients come in at the end of the day or early in the morning and leave. So it’s a history that has defined this country and the battle against it has defined this country, the struggle for a different world. But I think that what we’re seeing in America now is really a pushback against all of that. That’s what the Trumpian right is. It’s a decisive pushback against free speech and against civil rights and how those two worlds are intermarried. As I said before, the free speech movement in America was born of the civil rights movement.
The struggles are connected, which is why the battle against racial equality and the battle against free speech are also connected.

Michael Fox: Mark, I want to dig just a little bit deeper into this because what is it about free speech that was so important for the civil rights movement, for the anti-war movement? Is it the idea that we should be allowed to stand up and to speak for what we believe? We should be allowed to protest and to change the structure, the inherently racist structure of the country. What is it about free speech in particular that is so important to these movements at the time?

Marc Steiner: That’s a really interesting question. I mean, again, I may go back to start what I said a little while ago. When America started with free speech, it was free speech for white men of property.
That’s how it began. But it was such a universal principle that everybody embraced it and fought for the right to have free speech. And I think that’s something we forget. What the founding fathers did was unleash a democracy for themselves, but what the unleashed was a passion for democracy among everybody else and that redefined … It was a long struggle. And I think people know often make that connection. And I think that what you talked about earlier, which was the violence against those who really pushed it in the early part of the late 19th century, something most people don’t see or know the deaths that came place for fighting for free speech.
I think now we’re in that battle again. We really are. I mean, for me, it’s not a question of Republicans or Democrats. It’s a question of the anti-free speech movement, the anti-free speech movement, the racist movement, capturing one of the America’s parties and pushing this very dangerous agenda for the future. Let South be confused, the Democrats are all good and Republicans are all bad, but we have to be realistic about what’s happening to us right now. It almost seems to me to be, in terms of free speech, akin to when the right wing in Germany ceas power in 1933. And I think that we have to look at that history and understand what we’re facing.

Michael Fox: When we spoke with David Hollinger, he had this really interesting thing to say exactly about this is how Trump today is using the narrative of free speech to censor and using the narrative of free speech for his own means, attempting to derail our definition of free speech when it’s only for himself. Well,

David Hollinger: What happens is that Trump uses a lot of generic ideals like merit and free speech and diversity and he claims that he represents them and that the academic establishment has betrayed those ideals. And so free speech is somehow that’s not allowed unless it’s enunciating the stuff that he wants to advance.

Michael Fox: So free speech for my people is what Trump is saying, but if you’re not one of me, if you’re not with me, then you’re against me and you don’t deserve to have free speech. And of course, I think this is part of that same contradiction, this same push and pull that you talked at the beginning that goes, that is historic throughout the history of the United States. But I think it is fascinating today how Trump’s attempts to take the universities for himself and use this discourse around free speech, his own definition in order to support himself or bolster himself weaponizing the different departments of the country. It is clearly a terrifying moment and another reason why this moment of free speech of trying to define what this is and remember the movements that have stood up and fought for everything that’s made the United States great in our history and why it’s so important now.

Marc Steiner: People have to realize also it’s a constant struggle. It’s never over and it never will be over probably and that the movements you’ve raised here, like the abolitionist movement was so key to expanding our democracy. It was such a threat to people in power and the destruction of that movement, I always say the destruction of freedom in the South and its roots in the abolitionist movement in the 1870s gave birth to 90 years of sheer terror against the black world in America. And it was the civil rights movement that went back to the roots of America, freedom of speech for everybody to break the back of that and try to build new America. And what we’re seeing now is a reaction to that. Was it in Spanish. It’s not over. It’s never over.

Michael Fox: Mark, I have a question about the legacy of the free speech movement today and thinking about, particularly around universities and campuses, would you say that we’ve actually been rolled back some of the gains, the rights to be able to stand up and speak out at university campuses, which were one, which were so important clearly during the anti-war movement, anti-Vietnam movements, what that’s always meant up until now, but it almost feels as though all of that has been rolled back so much in terms of like the government backlash against pro- Palestine protests on campus or saying anything about Charlie Kirk clearly. Would you say that things have been rolled back to even before the time of the free speech movement in the 1960s?

Marc Steiner: I would say they are attempting to roll it back. It has been rolled back completely, but universities are running scared. They’re terrified. I mean, huge chunks of money for universities comes from the federal government and that’s what Trump is threatening them with, taking that money away. And so the university systems either have to stand up and fight it with a threat of losing their money or cowtow to it and roll over.

Michael Fox: This is interesting because this is one of the things that David Hollinger brings in. He says, “This is the hill to die on.

David Hollinger: Given what the Trump administration is trying to do to universities to reduce them to vocational and technical institutions, to deprive them of the critical role that universities have traditionally played in fomenting democracy, they really are trying to do that. So that means that this is the hill to die on. The universities are right. This is the hill to die on. This is the worst crisis that we’ve had since 1916, 17, 18, in terms of the political opposition to universities when Charles Beard resigned at Columbia and there were a whole series of quarrels over World War I. This is by far the worst thing that’s happened since then and universities are much more central to American life than they were at that time. They have a lot more authority, they affect many more things. So it’s important that we take a stand and I’m very glad to see that many of them are, but not all.

Marc Steiner: This is the tip of the iceberg because Trump and his minions on the right see attacking the university systems, not just as killing freedom of speech, which is the subtext to it, but as a first salvo in controlling their power by limiting and shutting down freedom of speech in universities. And it’s not really given enough play in the press.
When the National Socialist Party took power in 1933 with a minority of the vote, I might add, but they built a broad coalition, everything they did in the beginning was subtle. They didn’t come in one fell swoop and turn the whole place into a dictatorship overnight. They built it slowly and they created one of the most horrible societies the world has ever seen, killing 11 million people in Europe, in concentration camps. So what I’m saying that is, is that we have to be really very watchful and careful about what we’re facing. This is just the beginning. It’s not the end. And people say it can’t happen here. Well, it can happen here and it has happened here before, especially if you’re black or indigenous. And so I think we are, as I said before, we’re on a precipice and I think we cannot underestimate the moment that we face.

Michael Fox: Mark, I want to Bring in Mary Anne Franks one more time.

Marc Steiner: Please do. Yeah.

Michael Fox: And I want to talk about the First Amendment because for me, this was a really powerful … It’s a controversial point in her book, I feel like, but I think we need to discuss it and I think it’s important to grapple with because in our conversation and in her book, she talks about how racial justice advocates and social moments have succeeded in the history of the United States, have succeeded in the past despite rather than because of the First Amendment or First Amendment protections. And so she says, imagine an alternative America.

Mary Anne Frank…: Where from the beginning we took the concept of free speech in the way that Elijah Lovejoy took it, which is to say, we have to recognize if freedom of speech means anything, it is the freedom to criticize what we are doing, what the powerful people are doing in our society. And the most important thing for us to articulate at that time is slavery. And close on its heels is the subjugation of women. Imagine if that had really been allowed to sort of take … If Pennsylvania Hall had never burned down and it really did become a temple of humanity where people began to see that things that they were deeply wedded to, ideas that they had always grown up thinking were correct if they really had been challenged by other ways of thinking if that had been allowed to flourish. I mean, think about how radical and revolutionary that would’ve been.

Michael Fox: Could that and so many other experiences have actually shifted the discourse within the United States enough to stop the Civil War, she asks. Instead, you have the Clarence Brandenburg version of what it means to be radical. So KKK, Neo-Nazi, those are the guys who are embraced and protected.

Mary Anne Frank…: We skipped the part where it actually becomes the norm that slavery and all forms of racism and sexism are evil and wrong. Instead, it goes from becoming the way that society’s constructed to, “Oh, he’s saying something very edgy that’s probably making you uncomfortable, but for that reason, we should protect it. ” And it’s like there’s nothing in between. And so at that point it gets quite literally the KKK gets a second life and a third life. And it’s partly because it’s revitalized through these perversions of the concept of free speech to say, “Well, we must be allowed to say these things now that slavery has been abolished. We fixed things in terms of racial injustice and now it’s all gone too far. And so we are going to be the old guard who is going to be talking about how things used to be. ” And then immediately that’s what gets so much protection, gets so much rhetorical resources and protection.

Michael Fox: And she brings this one other moment. She talks about this, which I think is important. She talks about the white supremacist play and then movie, the 1915 movie, The Birth of a Nation, right? Yeah. So it sparks riots every place and lynchings.

Mary Anne Frank…: And you get one of the first sort of showdowns between the NAACP and the ACLU, where the NAACP is saying, “This is going to get people killed.” And the ACLU saying, “You really need to understand that if you’re trying to advocate for censorship, it’s going to hurt you too at some point.” And it’s one of those moments in the book where I’m trying to articulate the expression on my face when I read this, this idea of the NAACP being lectured by the ACLU, by the white director of the ACLU saying, “It’s going to come around and hurt black people. The law isn’t going to work for you if you advocate for restrictions now.” And the obvious point being that the law has never really worked for black people. Of course, it’s going to be used against them. It has been this entire time. That whole premise of the, well, don’t censor the radical white supremacist speech because it’s going to mean that you’ll get censored too, completely erases the fact that radical abolitionist speeches we were just talking about has always been censored, has always been suppressed.
So it’s this kind of retelling of history that is so perverse because it’s also this kind of lecturing that says, if you just had a sophisticated enough view of speech and just enough confidence in the American people, you would understand that we just need to allow this kind of material to flourish so that you will be saved as much as the white supremacist will be saved.

Michael Fox: And so I feel like this is such an important point and really powerful because she said this and it had to take a double take. The fact that social movements, abolitionist movement, the fact that the civil rights movement, the fact that they were successful not because of the First Amendment, but actually despite the First Amendment, but because of free speech, but free speech the way that we consider free speech, not free speech as according to say the Constitution and whatnot and that white supremacists have always gotten the benefit of the doubt and everyone else has gotten shut down, but people continue to stand up.

Marc Steiner: That’s interesting. It really is. It would take a lot to explore what you just said and what she said because the alternative theory is if you shut that down, then we’re next to be shut down.

Michael Fox: Exactly.

Marc Steiner: It’s really difficult. I mean, I know that battle around the ACLU and the NAACP and it’s a core battle and I understand both positions. The oppression of black people in America saying this has to be banned and stopped because it’s attacking us and formating violence against us and the ACLU saying one of the bedrock rights in America is the right to say what you want to say, even if it’s disgusting and full of hate. So it’s a difficult discussion. We could do a whole series just on that. Really? You know? I mean-

Michael Fox: Totally.

Marc Steiner: I’ve had this debate over decades around the First Amendment, what’s the First Amendment say? Congress shall make no law representing an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof or abridging the freedom of speech or of the press or the right of the people peacefully to assemble and to petition the government for a redress of grievances. That’s pretty broad. So that’s a very difficult question. I’ve been fighting racist and neofascist my whole life since I was a boy, since I was maybe 11, 12, 13 years old. And so I’m passionate about it, but it’s a really difficult nut to crack.

Michael Fox: What I come back to here is what you said at the beginning about the contradiction at the root, at the core of free speech in the United States and the conflict and the battle over what it means today, but what it’s meant and what it’s always meant and how there has always been this push and pull. I think what’s the most important thing for me now is for us to understand what is at the root of this battle and for us to be able to define it like when we talk about fearless versus reckless speech,
This is not a concept that people understand, but it’s a concept that we should understand because when we go out and speak truth to power or people are standing up in the streets, they should understand and know that they are participating in something that goes back, this idea of speaking out goes back thousands of years. It’s not just right now and that they have this support and this backing even if the First Amendment hasn’t always worked in their favor or has often supported white supremacists at the same time as it’s silenced those fighting for social justice or those fighting for equality. So I think you’re absolutely right that this is a hard, hard nut to crack, but it’s still a conversation we have

Marc Steiner: To have. We do. Because the reckless think they’re fearless.

Michael Fox: Yes.

Marc Steiner: I mean, it really is tough. It really is. So now I have to go home and think about all this.

Michael Fox: Mark, I want to close with someone else I spoke with recently.

Fara Dabhoiwala: Fara Dabhoiwala. Well, I’m a historian at Princeton, but I used to teach at Oxford University in England.

Michael Fox: His book, What Is Free Speech? The History of a Dangerous Idea was published last year. I’ll be bringing him in more in future episodes, but I really appreciate his analysis for this episode and where we’re headed. He told me free speech has always been about power.

Fara Dabhoiwala: Both in the theory and in practice, we see that today, what voices are silenced or elevated is about power. It’s a noble ideal because everyone can appeal to it and throughout history, as my book shows, those without power and those who are attempted to be silenced have also appealed to it from abolitionists and early feminists onwards into the present day. So that’s the good side of why it’s a dangerous idea. And we should all be shouting from the rooftops that right now free speech rights are being trampled upon. The First Amendment is being completely disregarded in the United States and the rest of it. But I think that the real global battle here is about how to deal with the communications revolution that we’re living through and how to deal with the power of media companies, the unfettered transnational power of basically of American media companies.

Michael Fox: And I’d say not just media companies, but tech companies, social media, AI firms, and that’s where we’re headed next time.

Marc Steiner: And next week we go to Silicon Valley. Look at the internet, social media, artificial intelligence are transforming the way we communicate and what it all means for our right to free speech.

Michael Fox: Hi folks. Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed today’s podcast and you like this series, please do us a favor, go to your podcasting app and give us a like, a follow, a subscribe, or tell a friend about it and leave us a comment or a review. It really helps to spread the word about the show and the state of free speech in the United States today. You can find more of my work on my Patreon page at patreon.com/mfox. Also, please make sure to sign up for the Real News Network’s newsletter so you never miss an episode. You can find that at therealnews.com or you can click on the link in the show notes. If you’d like to find out more about the stories we talked about today in this episode, we’ve added some links in the show notes there as well. The Battle for Free Speech is a production of The Real News.
Thanks for listening. See you next time.

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Marc Steiner:

Welcome to the Marc Steiner Show here on The Real News. I’m Marc Steiner. It’s great to have you all with us. And just once again, we’re looking at Israel-Palestine and the disaster that’s happening there to bring you the intimate details of what people are facing and what can be done. And we’re talking today to Robin Anderson, who has The Complicit Lens, which is an incredible piece of work. Robin is Professor Emerita of media studies at Fordham University, award-winning author of a dozen single and co-authored books. Her work examines films, television, media coverage of war, the environment, politics, and elections. And she edits the Rutledge Focus Book series on media and humanitarian action and serves as project centered judge and contributes to the annual state free press and joins us here today and this latest book we’re talking about is The Complicit Lens: US Media Coverage of Israel’s Genocide in Gaza.

And Robin, welcome, good to have you with us.

Robin Anderson:

Thank you for inviting me.

Marc Steiner:

Going through all this work that you did on media coverage and what’s actually happening in Israel-Palestine. I want to get to the bottom of things first and why the major media in America is so complicit in telling the lies about what’s happening in this war. I mean, there have been decades and decades of anti-Semitic stuff about the Jewish control of the media. That’s not it. There’s something really fundamentally deep about what’s going on here and why they are willing to tell the lies they’re telling and push the agenda they’re pushing. So let’s start there.

Robin Anderson:

Yeah. Well, the theme through the book is exactly what happened in the US media to just actually compel them to completely abandon their basic role as journalists. And I think the Israeli lobby is a big one. I devoted an entire chapter to talking about the influences in the New York Times and a few other press, but they’ve been watched and monitored by a group called Camera, by honest reporting. Just as students and faculty have been doxed, if they get identified, many of them have by Canary mission, they will call up their employers and they will tell them not to employ them and that has happened in numerous cases. So it’s not only journalism, it’s kind of the civil society and the public sphere and our discourse has for years been very constrained. I’m not sure that US journalists anymore, even though they’re supposed to be the seasoned professionals at some of the most prominent and legacy media, I’m not sure they know the background anymore of Israel.

I’m not sure that they understand really the international rules of war because if you’re blocked by the directives such as the New York Times and CNN, if you have your editors openly telling you to cover the press in a certain way, which is what we have, we had it at the CNN and the New York Times, and those are very influential legacy media sources. If we have them doing that over a period of a few years, you’re not proficient anymore really in understanding the rules of war or the Geneva Conventions. And then when you leave those basic core understandings out of coverage, either through self-censorship, editorial censorship, or simply just ignorance, you can’t tell the story.

Marc Steiner:

I want to get very specific here, the stuff you’ve written about in terms of the New York Times and CNN and exactly what they did, exactly what the leadership has told their reporters what they can and cannot do and how can they even be possible. But this is really explain that in greater depth.

Robin Anderson:

Well, I think that was so shocking and I think the intercept, well, a number of articles came out on the intercept, but CNN was putting all of its copy through its Jerusalem Bureau and the IDF had eyes on that stuff and CNN tried to play it down and say, “Oh, really? They hardly had anything to say.” And the staffer who had leaked to the intercept this information said, “Oh yes, every single word was shaped by Israeli censors.” So they told them, “No, there are things you can and cannot say. You can’t say genocide.” That’s a taboo word. But the really weirdly obscured things that a lot of us began to notice where you couldn’t identify Israel as the perpetrator of the dropping of 2000 pound bombs. So you couldn’t say you just had to say explosion. So a lot of people identified these headlines and indeed the press did not identify that these were Israeli bombs until the Israelis themselves would say, “Oh, okay.

Well, we got a Hamas commander.” As soon as they said they got a Hamas commander, then you could justify any loss of human civilian life and then you could talk about Israel having done the bombing. So lots of very strange things like that, that you can actually … So what I did in a couple chapters is look at the coverage and compare them to these directives. New York Times, same thing. New York Times was more explicit about pulling out any of the principles really of international law about occupation when the New York Times staffer that leaked it to the intercept said, “How can you not talk about occupation?” That is at the core of the conflict. We’re not able to represent this more accurately without talking about the occupation, but they couldn’t talk. So a lot of them, refugee camps, that’s very, very important. You have to know that these people in Gaza, many of them were refugees or the descendants of refugees that were victims of the Nakba.

So all of that background history allowed them to start the war at October 7th, say, “This was only Hamas. It came from nowhere, the evil of Hamas and therefore all of the subsequent reporting was either justified or retaliatory. They started it and they didn’t start it. There’s a long history of how Israel was constantly actually committing war crimes already before October 7th.

Marc Steiner:

So there’s a lot of what you said here. Before we get back to Israel and Hamas, which I’d like to do, given what you’ve written, what do you think the political dynamic is that allows the journalistic leaders and others in those two organizations, CNN and New York Times? Look, I read the New York Times every day and every Sunday. I mean, I’ve been doing it for the last 40 years.

Robin Anderson:

Sorry to hear that, Marc. Really.

Marc Steiner:

There’s a lot of good stuff from there, but this is not one of them. What the dynamic is that allows that to happen.

Robin Anderson:

Right. Well, I actually devoted an entire chapter to the New York Times and you really have to look at their Jerusalem bureau. Their Jerusalem bureau over a period of years has been shaped to be very Israeli focused and Israeli-centric. So right off the bureau in the New York Times in Jerusalem sits atop on the air above a house where a BBC reporter, a Palestinian BBC reporter had to leave his house, put his wife and children in a taxi, leave their things and never come back. So right away the New York Times has a vested interest in no right to return. That’s a major issue for Palestinians, the right to return.

And right away, well, wow, that geostructural bias, if they had the right to return, the New York Times, the House that they spent money on that Thomas Friedman presided in and all of these other bureau chiefs stayed there admitting that many times their children were in the IDF. And for one, Elizabeth Kershner, who’s still writing for the New York Times, her husband was intimately involved with doing PR for the Israeli military. So these are conflicts of interest of all sorts. At one point, one of the public monitors for the New York Times said, wow, wouldn’t you get a different point of view if you had somebody in the West Bank that could really see what the settlers did to people and all that. So if you get a different view of the situation, but they never did that. In fact, they listened to a canary mission, either a canary mission or an honest reporting briefing that criticized one of their photojournalists and he was fired from the New York Times well before October 7th.

So they got rid of Palestinian journalists at the same time they kept nurturing this very individualized point of view from Israel.

Marc Steiner:

So a couple of things here, but I want to take a step backwards for just a minute to explain to the people listening to us what the Canary Commission is. You’ve referred to it like three or four times here. People need to understand what it is.

Robin Anderson:

It’s originally an Israeli based organization that monitors students and faculty and other kind of people canary mission and has docs people and students and faculty at university campuses and many times it has resulted in students being sanctioned and faculty being sanctioned. Of course, I wrote about this happening at Hunter College in the book. Honest reporting is basically a propaganda organ, which not only creates their own media, propagandized media, but that also puts pressure. And this is external pressure coming into newsrooms and into universities where they’ve got no business in these kinds of civil society venues and institutions of higher education and legacy media that is supposed to know how to manage its own electoral boards and its own electoral staff.

Marc Steiner:

What you bring out in complicit lens, I mean, has very frightening in terms of what it means not just for Israel, Palestine, and what’s going on there, but for the future of media in this country. It’s not new that the media is influenced by people who own the media. That’s been a battle forever. Sometimes winning, sometimes losing, but it’s been a battle inside the media forever. But what you’re describing here is something pretty frightening. And I think that the whole … It’s one of the reasons I think they don’t really cover the opposition inside of Israel from Jewish Israelis saying, no, we’re not participating and why they don’t cover those things as well and what life is like inside of Palestinian villages. So I think this is a really, what you’ve written, what you put together is important for people to wrestle with in terms of how you get your information.

How do we know what’s really happening?

Robin Anderson:

Well, one of the reasons, as a consequence of this type of reporting, the media has lost legitimacy, terribly lost legitimacy, but young people particularly who don’t look at legacy media, if I was in front of a class and I asked my students who read The New York Times this morning, nobody would have. So they’re getting their information from their handheld devices and that’s where they’re getting their news and they were on their handheld devices when Palestinian journalists were being killed in large numbers for documenting things on the ground. So we as Americans, we had these two different realities really. We had the documentation and the visuals, the testimony, the aftermath, the pictures of rubble and the suffering and the Palestinians. And that I believe really accounts for so much of why the United States is now rejecting the state of Israel and for a very long time, the majority of adults in the United States has not wanted our government to send weapons to Israel.

So we caught onto that. And I think in this barrage of propaganda, I think it’s notable that we have resisted it and I think that’s really incredible on the part of the American people. In terms of I would like to talk about how we fix this and I believe-

Marc Steiner:

That was my next question, but go right ahead, please. I

Robin Anderson:

Believe these journalists and these editorial boards, they need to be held accountable. They really do. The three Israeli leaders including Isaac Hertzag, the president of Israel to kind of a figurehead Netanyahu’s the prime minister.

Marc Steiner:

Right, but the president doesn’t have much power inside the Israeli structure. Well,

Robin Anderson:

He’s coming to New York City. He’s coming to New York City and he’s being hosted and honored by the Jewish religious seminar.

Marc Steiner:

Yeshiva or Union Theological?

Robin Anderson:

Union theological

And he’s going to be here in May and a UN commission found that it is very likely that he is responsible for inciting genocide. So the rules of genocide, very much part, you can’t have a genocide without a language that incites it. And these people were inciting this language and saying how Hamas was animals by extension Palestinian people and Herzog came right out and said, Palestinian civilians are guilty. So I think he shouldn’t be coming to New York City at all. I think he should be being hauled up in front of the Hague. At one point in the CNN, one of the staffers said, “Many of us noticed that our anchors didn’t have much pushback, if any, to these Israeli leaders who at a time, and here’s the language of the incitement statute is it has to be a time of great tension. You have to be a public figure and you have to have a platform, a legitimate … You have to be on a mainstream media platform and they all fit that bill.

So that’s what we call incitement. And as the CNN staffer said, we came very close to that by not challenging these demonization of the Palestinian people, which also is another theme that goes throughout the book is over and over again,

Marc Steiner:

Palestinians

Robin Anderson:

In frame and in adjectives and in every way were dehumanized over and over again.

Marc Steiner:

Yeah. And as I was reading what you wrote, I thought about my friends in Israel-Palestine on both sides and how I remembered distinctly this big fight that took place when one of my friends who was an Israeli, these were theater people and I used to do theater with Israeli Palestinian companies. I said something about Palestinians and he spit on the ground. And then a fight ensued between him and one of the women in the company over that spit who was also Jewish. And people don’t realize how deep the divide is, I think, inside Israel. It’s not evenly split, but it’s a deep divide over where everything is going.

Robin Anderson:

I think recent polls that have come out of Israel have shown that the majority of Israelis thought that all of the Palestinian civilians were guilty as well and they were a threat. They’ve been propagandized now for a very long time, even though the newspaper Haretz is one of my major sources because after October 7th, when they called in the Hannibal directive,

Marc Steiner:

Which

Robin Anderson:

Is just kill everybody, don’t let anybody take any hostages. We don’t want to negotiate. When they called that in, you had Israelis pilots in Apache helicopters indiscriminately bombing the festival grounds when Hamas was trying to get their hostages, of course that’s a war crime. It’s true that Hamas committed some war crimes, committed war crimes. Nothing could compare, however, to what Israel has done. And at the time, what’s so fascinating is that the demonization again and again of Hamas, particularly in Palestinians as animals, they justified and served to cover up and to be the beheaded baby stories. As Richard Sanders, the filmmaker said, it wasn’t what Hamas did. It was what they didn’t do that the media reported on. So Hamas was guilty. They made stuff that was really over the top saying that Hamas did so they could carry out the genocide. And I think over time that the Israeli people have been incentivized and propagandized to believe that.

Marc Steiner:

When you look at American media coverage as you do with intensity, and it seems that it’s changed significantly over the last 10 years, talk a bit about your analysis about why that is and why- Oh Mark,

Robin Anderson:

I’ve been writing about media and war for an awfully long time.

Marc Steiner:

Yes, you have. Yes, you have. Yes, you have. That’s why I asked you the question.

Robin Anderson:

I see this whole … I think one of the really big changes was when the US media embedded with the troops during the war on terror. This did two things. It showed you one side of the war, the US soldier’s side and emphasized that side because they were right there over the shoulder. And then the other thing is they allowed them to talk about it as if it were a reality show. And so we had these entertainment frames coming in with the war on terror, first a reality show, the invasion. Then of course there was the rescue of Saving Private Lynch, which was just the movie plot to Saving Private Ryan. And then you had all of the first person shooter game soldiers would come back and help them with the technology, help them with making it look like real shooters. So for a long time, the whole beginning of the 21st century, war was turned into entertainment by our media.

Sadly, what happened in Gaza was that it was so horrible. The media tried something else. Well, I’m just going to say what the Israelis say and have this outlandishly pro- Israel coverage, but people had their alternative information sources and they were looking through their handheld devices at the suffering of the people in Gaza. And I think they understood finally that war is not a game. It’s not fun. It’s not exciting. It’s horrible. It’s destructive. It kills people. It puts them in conditions of catastrophic no water, no food and no hospital. One of the things that I read and was the hardest chapter for me to write, Mark, was the hospital chapter, Israel’s destruction of the healthcare system and the attacks on El Shifa and all the subsequent hospitals. And it was so outrageous the way the media covered that, just distortions and one-sided. And those are the real things that I would really like to see them held accountable for that

Marc Steiner:

Kind of thing. And I’ve covered some of that with doctors from Palestine in Gaza talking about what’s been going on. I’m curious how you think we get to that point where they’re held accountable and well, let me just stop there because the other part is a much deeper question that we may not have time to get into. Well, I’ll say it anyway, which is that hatred of Jews just bubbles below the surface in our world. Antisemitism just bubbles below the surface. This is exploding it.

Robin Anderson:

That’s right.

Marc Steiner:

Absolutely.

Robin Anderson:

And I put that in a number of places in the

Marc Steiner:

Book

Robin Anderson:

About how this is really building antisemitism. The way that antisemitism is defined as you cannot say anything against the state of Israel implies that all Jews now are for the state of Israel. That implies that it’s a monolithic community.

Marc Steiner:

And it’s not.

Robin Anderson:

And it is absolutely

Marc Steiner:

Not.

Robin Anderson:

It’s not. And so when Jewish people are against the genocide, that gets lost in that equation. And now everybody’s going to look to the Jewish people as having perpetrated a genocide. And I think that’s a real problem.

Marc Steiner:

And in terms of the media coverage itself, one of the things I thought about as I was reading what you wrote, it shows the power of the media to influence the world in extremely negative and dangerous ways.

Robin Anderson:

Yes. So as long as the perpetrators are genocide, as long as the global elites, as long as the West unquote can look at a newspaper and stay in this beltway, if you will, this beltway bubble or stay … I think the New York Times and legacy media know that young people who are anti-genocide, they know they’re not watching them. All they care about is the elites and the governments and the congressmen who are under the same influence that the media is. 82% of our Congress people take money from APAC, both Republicans and Democrats. We know the influence that this Israeli lobby has had and that is now becoming toxic. That’s beginning to change. And now we’re going to have the anti-APAC primaries. You take APAC, you’re going to get primaried.

Marc Steiner:

But you have APAC along with the conservative Christian world together are really pushing this agenda.

Robin Anderson:

They

Marc Steiner:

Absolutely

Robin Anderson:

Are.

Marc Steiner:

Yeah.

Robin Anderson:

Christian Zionism and Christian nationalism and white supremacists. I mean, I was just writing something about Pete Hegthest, Christian Crusade cross on his chest and as Jesuit priest said in the Pope, this is not Christianity. This is a cartoon version. This is actually a war game, Crusader Kings. This is actually gaming again, this twisted version of Christianity that now is marked that this is at the White House and Trump thinks he’s God and it’s really horrible.

Marc Steiner:

So before we have to close, I’m curious all that you’ve written, and I really do encourage people to read this, it’s incredible analysis that you put inside your work that we’ve only touched the surface so we may have to do this again. How do you see this unfolding in terms of our future, in terms of resistance to it and what it might all pretend?

Robin Anderson:

Well, I think we need to act to preserve alternative media in every way, independent and alternative media and the internet. We need to really focus on that. We need to find the parallels between AI narratives and the kind of empire boomerang that we have going on where so much that has happened in Gaza is now being repeated, if you will, in Lebanon and now the media just isn’t covering it. But I think we really need to look carefully at more of the mechanisms and interconnections that drive the media and that drive the military industrial complex. We’ve now also are entering an era of elite capture where billionaires, the Ellison family is now controlling CBS and they may well control other outlets. And I think these are incredibly dangerous and I think we need to focus our attention there. And I think holding legacy media for their coverage of Gaza Responsible is really primary.

I mean, maybe this is a fantasy of MindMark, but I see my book. I have fantasies of somebody holding my book at the Hague and calling out the media at the International Court of Justice and actually telling them for the rest of us how they manipulate the media frames.

Marc Steiner:

That could happen. I mean, I could see that happening. That’s a good idea. I like that idea. I think this is really important to explore in greater depth and also the contradictions that are involved and the dangers involved in this on so many levels. And I think that I want to encourage people, if you have a chance just to check out the book, The Complicit Lens, US Media Coverage of Israel’s Genocide in Gaza, it’s really worth kind of wrestling with and looking at, plus the articles you’ve written you can find that we’ll be linking to here in this interview. And Robert Anderson, I do hope we stay in touch. You have a lot to say. We’ve barely touched the surface what you have to say and I look forward to many more conversations.

Robin Anderson:

I do too, Mark. Thanks so much, Brad.

Marc Steiner:

Thank you for being with us today. Once again, let me thank Robin Anderson for joining us today. We’ll be linking to her work and check out her book on Gaza. It’s entitled The Complicit Lens: Our Mainstream US Media Covered Gaza. And in the coming weeks and months, we’ll be delving more deeply into all of this. And thanks to David Hebdon for running the program today, audio editor, Stephen Frank, for working his magic, Rosette Sowali for producing the Mark Steiner show, the Tylers Keller Rivera for making it all work behind the scenes and everyone here at the real news for making this show possible. Please let me know what you thought about what you heard today, what you’d like us to cover, just write to me at mss@threwnews.com and I’ll get back to you right away. Once again, thank you, Robert Anderson, for joining us today.

So for the crew here at the Real News, I’m Marc Steiner. Stay involved, keep listening, and take care.

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Marc Steiner:

Welcome to the Marc Steiner Show here on The Real News. I’m Marc Steiner. It’s great to have you all with us. As we begin our conversation, it’s important to remember that since October 7th, 2023, when the Gaza War began after the kidnapping of Israelis, 73,000 Palestinians have been killed. Over 20,000 of them being children and the land itself has been totally devastated. The program today is dedicated to the Nakhba. The day of remembrance when almost a million Palestinians were forced to flee from their homes, forced to flee for their lives, to live the rest of their lives as refugees. One of those people is my guest today, who was a child when she and her family were forced to flee their home during the Nakba. Dr. Ghada Karmi is a physician, author of numerous books about Palestine, Israel, and the state of Palestinians. Her latest work is a novel called Mojana, a novel of medieval Baghdad.

And Ghada, welcome. It’s good to see you. Good to have you with us.

Ghada Karmi:

Thank you. I’m very glad to be here.

Marc Steiner:

So Ghada I… I’ve been covering Israel-Palestine for years now and been involved since I was a child since I’m Jewish, that family in Israel, Palestine, and then my Palestinian friends over the years as well. So it’s gigantic part of my life. And I’m just saying that to say I don’t think I’ve ever experienced a moment as dire as the one we face now, other than the Nakba itself, that we’re in that kind of moment. Could you describe just analytically where you think we are, what we’re facing when it comes to Israel-Palestine, this moment?

Ghada Karmi:

First of all, I agree with you. I don’t remember a time as bad as this and you say excluding the original Nakba, I would not exclude that because I think what I’m seeing now is worse than the Nakba that I lived through as a child in 1948. It is actually worse because always previously I never really believed in my heart of hearts that Israel would last for long, that it would survive and that we would not be looking at a situation where as in my case, because I was evicted with my family in 1948, I never believed that in my lifetime I would not be able to return to my homeland, which would be the same as saying that the state of Israel would have been terminated. That’s what I always lived by. And I think all Palestinians live with that hope in their hearts.

However, I have to tell you, for the first time in all those years, I have begun to doubt that.

Marc Steiner:

As you were speaking, one of the things I thought about as a young man, a very young man, I was in the Zionist groups. The last one was in Karsha Mahatzeer with the Marxist Scionists who believed at that time in a binational state where everybody lived together in peace. I raised that only to ask you in all your life as a Palestinian woman, as a scholar, as an activist, is that dream gone completely where people you think could live together in that space, have we actually, because of the oppression and Palestinians, completely terminated that possibility?

Ghada Karmi:

Yes. I have advocated for what I would call one democratic state

Marc Steiner:

Solution

Ghada Karmi:

For many years. Be careful not by national, not by national.

Marc Steiner:

Got you. I understand.

Ghada Karmi:

Indeed, I don’t recognize that there is another nation in Palestine. I don’t. And for many, many years, my vision for the future has always been that we Palestinians would return home to Palestine. We and our children and grandchildren, we would return that, number one, as a matter of priority. And number two, the question of what is to be the future for the settler community because this is really what we Palestinians think of Jewish-Israelis. They’re settlers and children and grandchildren of settlers apart from the very small minority of originally indigenous, what we called Arab Jews. The rest came from outside. So what is to be done with them has been a secondary matter, but I’ve always believed that it would be only a right, humane and moral to invite them to stay if they would like to stay with us in a democratic state framework and enjoy equal rights and equal citizenship with us.

If they’re not prepared to do that, then they must leave. And that is really my vision for the future. Now I have to tell you, as you point out so rightly, I’ve begun to doubt that because I look at the Israeli Jewish population since the Gaza genocide and we look at opinion polls and we see that a majority of ordinary Jewish people in Israel are in support of the genocide. They support the destruction of the Palestinian people. And I cannot, as an activist, ask my fellow Palestinians to contemplate embracing people like this and saying, “Why don’t we live together?” And we can forget the past, we can get on. It’s not true. It’s no longer true.

Marc Steiner:

When I think about this, I spent years working in the anti-apartheid struggle around South Africa and places like South Africa, like Israel, there’s two alternatives. A, is either the Jewish population in Israel, Israel-Palestine is wiped out or they’re forced to leave or there’s one democratic state. There’s a poster I have on my wall that I got in Cuba in 1968. It’s a map of all of Palestine, all of the Holy Land. And on one side is the Palestinian flag, the other’s an Israeli flag. And down the front it’s written one state, two people, three face. Do you think that’s an absurdity?

Ghada Karmi:

I don’t think it’s a possibility, no.

Marc Steiner:

Okay. Tell me why.

Ghada Karmi:

I don’t. You see the Jewish Israelis are settler colonialists. That’s what they are. So it’s like saying, if you rephrase it, you are saying the flag of the indigenous population, Palestinians and the flag of the settler colonists, Jewish Israelis. Now, how would you then imagine these two communities living together in an arrangement where the rights of the colonists are equal to the rights of the indigenous people? That is not the case. Now, South Africa is confusing. I respect your activism on South Africa and correctly so, but South Africa, you see the majority of the population were indigenous.

Marc Steiner:

Correct.

Ghada Karmi:

They were indigenous natives of the land. The minority of whites had come as settler colonists in the same way as Jewish Israelis, but much, much further back. Now, the disparity in numbers in the South African situation makes it a nonsense to say to this minority of whites, “You must have your own space and we have our own space.” It’s a nonsense. So of course it made sense. Here with Palestine, the problem is that it’s about half and off. So if you discount the exiles and the refugees who are living outside the area altogether, what you end up with is a 50% Jewish population, 50% Palestinian Arab population, but it doesn’t alter the basic nature of the Jewish population who are settler colonists and their descendants. Now, that’s not acceptable. I cannot, as a Palestinian, be asked to accept these people as equivalent to myself, especially given the suffering that they have caused for us Palestinians and especially in the last three years.

I mean, it’s not moral, it’s not right, it’s not human to ask the victims, which is us, to take account of the victimizers and say, “Well, no, nevermind all is forgiven. Let’s all live together.” It can’t be done.

Marc Steiner:

I’m very curious. I’ve read a lot of your writing and work you’ve done over the years and looking forward to talking about your latest work another day. So then what do you see as a solution? How do we get to a place where the out of destruction of Palestinians is stopped, the murder of Palestinian people is ended and we come to a place of peace. How do you see that happening?

Ghada Karmi:

Well, good question. I can’t see it happening, not given the present circumstances. And by that I mean not just the murderous Israeli leadership and to a large extent, the population, not just that, but the support that Israel still enjoys after all this, you can wonder, be astonished at the continuing support that this genocidal state still enjoys without that support. Now there’s an argument. Now, if you could actually work on the support end that the Western states and particularly the United States, if you could work on them and get them to give up on Israel, then I think there’s a very great hope that the whole thing will come to an end. But given the current arrangement where you’ve got a powerful Israeli state supported, funded, shielded by the West, which is very powerful, this combination, you can’t expect a small people like the Palestinians, given their friends who are many in the world, even men, you cannot expect them to fight that kind of setup.

It’s not possible. So your question is really a very good question. How do you do it? I wish I knew the answer. I know what it would take. I know the mechanisms which you’d have to remove in order to get that result. I wouldn’t know how you could persuade Western countries that are addicted, it seems to me. They are addicted to Israel or the idea of Israel. It’s quite remarkable. How can you get them to give up their addiction? I honestly don’t know.

Marc Steiner:

That’s really an interesting way to put it. I’ve never thought about it in the way you described it as an addiction. The piece I wrote that didn’t sit well with many of my fellow Jews was if there had never been a Holocaust, there would never be in Israel.

Ghada Karmi:

That’s true.

Marc Steiner:

And that is the reason that it exists. I mean, the United States refused to let Holocaust victims in. People went to Palestine took what wasn’t theirs and created a place for themselves. It’s refugees creating other refugees. I wrestle with this as well about how we end it. And I got exceedingly frustrated trying to find an answer. And I’ve had hundreds of interviews with people around this issue over the decades, but I’ve never felt that we’re at a moment that we are A, as I said, on a precipice of total disaster for both Israelis and Palestinians. And I don’t see how you stop that collision from happening.

Ghada Karmi:

Nor do I. Because if I go back to an earlier answer I gave you,

Marc Steiner:

Which

Ghada Karmi:

Is how do I feel at this moment? Well, I feel very, very hopeless because for the first time in my life I’m contemplating the physical end of Palestine. That’s something I never, ever thought would happen. But given the license that Israel has to do whatever it likes, it’s currently continuing this genocidal attack on Palestinians in Gaza and it’s continuing the ethnic cleansing that it’s getting away with on the West Bank.

So if it’s allowed to do that unhampered and nobody stops it and nobody’s strong enough on our side to fight it and to stop it, I can’t see any other future other than that they will succeed in emptying the land of a majority, let’s say not everybody, but a majority of Palestinians. So it’s looking pretty bleak, I have to say. And of course my concern is with the Palestinians, but you mentioned Israelis and I agree with you. I think Jewish Israelis don’t have a future. They don’t have a future now. Whatever they do to the Palestinians, they’re finished because imagine what is the future for Israel? What is it? Given it’s now completely exposed as a utterly belligerent state which cannot survive without perpetual war. It cannot. Now, how on earth can you imagine a future for its people with this way of life? Unless they accept at some point that they are actually like other people and they must settle down and stop fighting other people and killing them unless they accept that.

I don’t see any future for them at all. So even though they’re not my primary concern- Yeah, no,

Marc Steiner:

Right. I understand. They’re right. No, I do understand.

Ghada Karmi:

They don’t have a future and we certainly don’t have a future, not given the current situation.

Marc Steiner:

I had no idea the direction our conversation was going to take today, though I’ve been reading a lot of what you’ve written. I’ve been in touch with friends in Israel who are Israelis and family and friends who are Palestinians who live in Ramallah and other places in the West Bank, people I’ve known forever. And a bleakness took over in those conversations over the last week, thinking about you coming on as well. And so that’s why the tenor of my questions and discussion is because of what I see as a real hopelessness that we’re facing at this moment. For me, it’s the question I ask them is, how do we who have been so oppressed oppress another? How do we let that happen? Yeah. So do you think the era of dialogue and hope are really over?

Ghada Karmi:

Look, I’m reluctant to say anything is absolutely over.

Marc Steiner:

I understand. Yes, I understand.

Ghada Karmi:

Yes. But having said that, you ask the question which says, how can people who’ve been oppressed be so oppressive? Well, I can think of a mechanism which explains all of this.

You see, one of the self-defense postures that people can adopt when they are persecuted is to create an idea that they are very special and that they are better than other people. The fact that they’re being attacked by lesser people can be made to feel not so painful if you are encouraged to believe that you are special, that you are being attacked by a load of barbarians who don’t understand how special you are and how superior you are to them. So this idea of superiority I think has taken over with many, I was going to say most Jews, whether in Israel or out of Israel, that that is the mechanism. That’s how it was created, I think. So we end up with a situation where the oppression that Jews were subjected to was met by this feeling of we’re better than them. Okay, they can kill us, but we know we’re much better.

Now, if you carry that kind of mentality into Israel-Palestine, you’ve created a population of Jewish-Israelis who really do think they’re supremacist, that they are special, and that everybody else around them, the Palestinians first and foremost, are lesser human beings. So you can do with them what you like. It doesn’t feel that you’re oppressing them like you’re oppressing them because they are subhuman anyway. So that I think is one explanation that interests me a great deal and I would want to put forward to explain, as you say, this depressing reality that the people who underwent the Holocaust, or some of them did, or their children, their descendants can behave in the same way, by the way, as the Nazis. So that would be what I would say to that.

Marc Steiner:

So you’ve lost your home, been forced out of the country of birth and you’ve been teaching and working in medicine and as a scholar all these years, which is not easier to do given the situation that you face and face. And when we see Donald Trump in the White House who is probably around Israel, Palestine, Palestine, Israel is probably one of the worst presidents we’ve ever had and only kind of pushes the neofascist control inside of Israel itself and agrees with it with Netinyahu and his crew. How do you see it ending? I don’t often answer this question, nor do I get confused about how to ask the question very easily. But after years of being in a struggle, bringing Israelis and Palestinians together, running camps, fighting to end the occupation, all the things to come to the moment we’re on now, I really don’t know where we go.

I don’t know how we find the road to peace because it’s between the two people who are at odds and between the Israelis, oppression of the Palestinians.

Ghada Karmi:

Yeah, it’s very difficult to see. Now you could imagine a number of scenarios which would end it. I don’t know how likely any of them are or how likely or in what order they might happen, but you can see, you can see a way in which the whole thing would change. Let’s take Iran supposing that things become much more acute or dramatic with Iran, with President Trump, in my view, obeying Israeli orders and bombing the hell out of Iran. Now Iran will bomb the hell out of Israel,

There’s no doubt about that. So now imagine a scenario in which that happens and the Israelis cannot continue to hide behind no internet, no showing of anything, no publicity, no information about the damage that’s being done. It’s already, I gather Tel Aviv and other areas in Israel are badly damaged already by the bombing by the missiles from Iran and this could be very, very much worse to a point where the state seesis to function. If you add that to the fact that fewer and fewer young Israelis will volunteer for the army, which is already happening. And if you add that to the fact that the economy, which is not badly affected now as we speak, but will become affected in the future. So if you take a number of these factors together and don’t forget Hezbollah, which is also lobbying missiles over the border at Israel, that’s one possible scenario that could happen.

Now, I can imagine another scenario in which unbelievable as it seems at the moment, Donald Trump actually realizes the danger he’s in domestically and drops Iran and drops Israel in it and withdraws, just withdraws. So there’s another way because the main support for Israel, of course, is the United States. So if something threatens that, then Israel has finished, it’s had it. So that’s another possibility. Now, how likely all these are, I don’t know. I add to that a third factor which we are seeing, which is the level of popular support for Palestine and an accompanying disenchantment with Israel, particularly in the United States. Now, where does that lead? I don’t know, but here’s another potential which could make things very difficult for the Israelis. Looking at the situation in general and wondering which bit or maybe more than one of these scenarios could come together and would make an enormous difference to the outcome.

Now, if you then add the internal factor in Israel that is nevermind all this stuff from outside internally Israeli society is split.

Marc Steiner:

Yes.

Ghada Karmi:

There is a problem between the Orthodox, the right-wingers and the liberal-

Marc Steiner:

The secular population. Yep.

Ghada Karmi:

Yeah. And the Haredeme of the Docs which refuse to fight for the army and then maybe force to fight and that’ll create a hell of a big problem. So it’s like a cocktail of impending disasters, any of which or some combination of which would bring about the end of the current awful situation we have.

Marc Steiner:

There’s also one other factor in that you can’t forget that Israel’s also a nuclear power.

Ghada Karmi:

Yeah. I haven’t forgotten.

Marc Steiner:

No, no, I’m sure you have not. I don’t mean you’ve forgotten. I mean, we cannot forget that that exists and that if Israel feels its back is completely against the wall, it’s going to use that power.

Ghada Karmi:

Yeah. And that is really a real possibility. That’s what I meant by I hadn’t forgotten because it often crosses my mind that Israel is mad enough, honestly, it’s psychotic enough to do something like that.

Marc Steiner:

Yeah. I mean, one of the stories in Jewish history is about the Massada.

Ghada Karmi:

Sure.

Marc Steiner:

And it’s in the consciousness of everybody who’s Jewish. You grow up with that, just like you grew up in the Holocaust or my grandparents who suffered the pogroms and were almost killed by the Kasaks. So all that’s an oppressed consciousness and I can see the powers within Israel, especially the right wing powers with Israel, saying if we’re going to die, they’re all going to die.

Ghada Karmi:

Yes, yes, yes, yes. Very well put. And I tell you, it’s a terrible fear that I have. It’s Samson all over again. And in Arabic, the whole Samson story has a line in it on me and on all my enemies and perfectly illustrates the situation. Yes, it’s very frightening. I don’t know what we can do except to express our fear of such an eventuality

Marc Steiner:

And we have to keep fighting for the alternative. We have to keep fighting for the peace to happen and to make- Of

Ghada Karmi:

Course.

Marc Steiner:

Of

Ghada Karmi:

Course.

Marc Steiner:

You can’t give up.

Ghada Karmi:

Yes. But I need to say when you’ve said before earlier in this interview, you said again, you said about peace. Look, peace can only come about if people understand what the problem is as well as me, that there’s a tremendous amount of obfuscation, of confusion, of sentimentality, of all kinds of things have been chucked at this story. The Bible, the Holocaust, all these factors mean that in the end, people are actually confused. What does peace mean? What would it mean? Now in my terms, the only peace that I can envisage is one where we Palestinians go home. It’s very, very simple. We all have to go home. And of course, if we go home, then the whole structure of the current state of Israel automatically changes and in my view, for the better.

Marc Steiner:

The right of return. Gadakaria, I want to thank you for the work you do. I want to talk to you next about your latest book and I want to thank you for joining us today. It’s been an important conversation and I deeply appreciate you to being with us today.

Ghada Karmi:

It was a great pleasure for me to talk to you.

Marc Steiner:

Once again, I want to thank Dr. Ghada Karmi for joining us today for the work she does and we’ll be linking to her work, which is extensive. And thanks to Cameron Granadino for running the program today, audio edits received from Frank for working his magic, Rosette Sewali, for producing the Marc Steiner Show and puting up with me and the titles, Kayla Rivara for making it all work behind the scenes and everyone here at The World News for making this show possible. Please, let me know what you thought about what you heard today, what you’d like us to cover. Just write to me at mss@therealnews.com and I’ll get right back to you. And once again, thank you joining us today. So for the crew here at The Real News, I’m Marc Steiner. Stay involved, keep listening and take care.