I've fallen behind so I'm just now discovering that Atlas Obscura has some sort of partnership with Canadaland. Like, pleaaaase. I thought you were cool, AO. Also I'm seeing that Canadaland has some animal lover podcast--these seem like a ludic departures from news? And Canadaland is now pushing ads from Acast, one of the mid-size podcasting networks (possibly the largest international one? though much smaller than iheartradio/Clear Communications)... This smells like Brown is looking at expanding beyond his news/current affairs/politics niche. I wish him to step on rakes all along the way. Too bad his timing is perfect, as Spotify has mostly exited the space and VC predators have realized that there's nothing viral enough to wreck with their money, other than Gimlet media and whatever else Spotify had bought.

I'm this close to stop listening to Backbench--I miss Fatima Syed there.

Another super niche Canadaland annoyance--I listen to most podcasts at 1.3 to 1.5x, but Jonathan Goldsbie already speaks at 1.5x, so I have to slow down my Canadaland playback speed to 1.x when his episodes come on, and then I have to remember to re-accelerate Canadaland when someone else is hosting.

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I'm really loving the Empire Podcast, which I've just recently started listening to, from the beginning. William Dalrymple and Anita Anand have an excellent chemistry, and I'm absolutely dying for Anand's voice. They're both stellar historians... Even though obviously they prepare their episodes, it's amazing how they can just riff off the cuff on various historical tidbits, and how their podcast will turn on a dime to deal with current events within the context of their current historical topic.

I've posted a two-hour-long podcast interview with Tareq Baconi a few weeks ago, describing the history of Hamas and how it came to its current political posture. I've also listened to Baconi being interviewed on a few other podcasts and TV shows, but always from a friendly perspective. This week, Baconi was interviewed by the New York Times' Ezra Klein from what I would call the liberal Zionist perspective, possibly the most insidious of all. Here Baconi shines even more. Here's a salient excerpt.

Ezra Klein:

When I try to think about what negotiations between Israel and Hamas would look like, this kind of sits at the center of it for me. Israel’s view is that Hamas will not accept the existence of a state that is majority Jewish, right, a state that is built on that line. And it sounds a little bit to me like you’re saying that however you describe that, that is also Hamas’s view. And so there is a kind of ineluctable conflict here.

And I think sometimes about what this might look like 100 years in the future, if you imagine in an optimistic world that something happened and there was a negotiated settlement, and you had two states living alongside each other and those states had lived in peace for some time, and you could imagine immigration opening up between them and so on. But that’s not where we are.

We are in a place where there has been mass butchery of Israeli civilians by Hamas, mass bombing and killing of Palestinian civilians by Israel. There have been decades-long history of suicide bombings of Israeli children and buses and elders, decades-long bulldozing and sniping and shooting of Palestinian lives.

These are not peoples who feel safe next to each other. So the idea that there’s going to be free movement between them, it doesn’t feel realistic. I mean, people want to live in security first.

And if you’re going to accept that Israel is not going to do anything that it feels compromises its security, and Hamas has given it every reason to believe that its security would be compromised by Hamas having more permeability into its borders, I guess I don’t understand how you get from there to, well, we can dismantle the Jewish state, and people will live alongside each other. I don’t understand, then, how tactics and ends match up here, because you’d have to first convince people that security is possible, and I see almost everything here as having been doing the opposite.


Tareq Baconi:

I think that’s a really important question, and it’s one that I think about often. And there’s a few things to say here. The first is that the notion of security has been limited to Israelis, that there is only an interest in Israeli security. And this has been an underpinning demand of the peace process and all forms of diplomatic negotiations.

Nowhere is the idea of Palestinian security mentioned, even though we are talking about a nuclear power and an advanced military that’s occupying a people with no state and without a military.

And when we’re talking about security, we’re only talking about Israeli security. I appreciate that’s not how you framed it. I’m saying that this is how it’s framed in the peace process and in negotiations. So that’s part of the problem, that here, we only talk about security for one set of people.

The other is that, again, the fear that the colonized people will do to the colonizer what the colonizer has done to them is not limited to Israeli fears. Whites, white Afrikaners, feared what the Black South Africans would do to them if apartheid was dismantled. And white Americans feared what would happen to them if Jim Crow was dismantled.

Yet, we had to dismantle those systems. And the idea that security could only be provided by maintaining those systems has been disproven. And if there’s anything that we can learn from Oct. 7 is that the idea that Israeli Jews can be safe while apartheid persists is shattered now. It was shattered in the most horrific and bloody way, but it was shattered.

So the idea that security can be produced by maintaining this oppressive rule over Palestinians, we can’t go back to that thinking now. And so everything you outlined is exactly the line of questioning we should be asking.

Now that we understand not only historically and in other contexts, but specifically in Palestine Israel, that there can be no security while apartheid persists, what are the alternatives? And I don’t think we’ve even begun asking those questions.

* * *

Seriously, the whole interview is like this. Ezra Klein shooting hellfire missiles from the Zionist liberal F-16 and Baconi glancing it all off like it was mere sand thrown his way, using the power of the throw against itself, like the most accomplished judoka do. I think I'll have to listen to this interview 5 times to fully absorb its brilliance. (There's a whole transcript at the linked page, if audio is not your thing.) Go to Pod.link to find your favourite podcast player's link to this episode

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#PodcastFriday is a tag where people recommend a particularly good episode from a podcast. The point of this tag is NOT to recommend entire podcasts--there are too many podcasts out there, and our queues are already too long, so don't do that. Let's just recommend the cream of the crop, the episodes that made you *brainsplode* or laugh like crazy.

Jesse Brown has become a hasbara troll, so I've decided to give Canadaland a "humanitarian pause" on Patreon.

Ali Abunimah: Obama's deadly silence

[A]s more than 2,400 Palestinians have been killed or injured -- the majority civilians -- since Israel began its savage bombardment of Gaza on 27 December, Obama has maintained his silence. "There is only one president at a time," his spokesmen tell the media. This convenient excuse has not applied, say, to Obama's detailed interventions on the economy, or his condemnation of the "coordinated attacks on innocent civilians" in Mumbai in November.
[...]
Obama's comments in Sderot echoed what he said in a speech to the powerful pro-Israel lobby, AIPAC, in March 2007. He recalled an earlier visit to the Israeli town of Kiryat Shmona near the border with Lebanon which he said reminded him of an American suburb. There, he could imagine the sounds of Israeli children at "joyful play just like my own daughters." He saw a home the Israelis told him was damaged by a Hizballah rocket (no one had been hurt in the incident).

Obama has identified his daughters repeatedly with Israeli children, while never having uttered a word about the thousands -- thousands -- of Palestinian and Lebanese children killed and permanently maimed by Israeli attacks just since 2006. This allegedly post-racial president appears fully invested in the racist worldview that considers Arab lives to be worth less than those of Israelis and in which Arabs are always "terrorists."
[...]
Similarly, we can expect that the American university professors who have publicly opposed the academic boycott of Israel on grounds of protecting "academic freedom" will remain just as silent about Israel's bombing of the Islamic University of Gaza as they have about Israel's other attacks on Palestinian academic institutions.

There is no silver lining to Israel's slaughter in Gaza, but the reactions to it should at least serve as a wake-up call: when it comes to the struggle for peace and justice in Palestine, the American liberal elites who are about to assume power present as formidable an obstacle as the outgoing Bush administration and its neoconservative backers.

I'm back from spending the holidays in Québec City.

Toronto Star: Protesters condemn Israeli violence. Lame article, but a witness to it nonetheless. Globe and Mail: Canadians take to streets to protest air strikes

Israel is trying to re-establish its manhood: Israel Reminds Foes That It Has Teeth [NYT], Israel's Shock and Awe by G&M's Patrick Martin.
Trying to 'teach Hamas a lesson' is fundamentally wrong by Tom Segev through corvus

All that the WaPo can think about is how this is distracting the U.S. from paying attention to Iran. Sigh.

The neighborhood bully strikes again from Haaretz.

Kucinich criticizes Israel; wants U.N. probe

Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) is calling for a United Nations investigation into Israel’s attacks on Gaza, criticizing Israel for a disproportionate response to Hamas rocket attacks.

The criticism stands in stark contrast to the statements of other Democrats, who have offered near-unanimous support for Israel amid the latest violence in the Middle East.
[...]
President-elect Obama has yet to weigh in on the violence, although top adviser David Axelrod on Sunday noted statements Obama made over the summer that respected Israel’s right to defend itself.

Why would Israel bomb a University? from E.I.

Ali Abunimah, from Electronic Intifada and reprinted in the Guardian: We have no words left:

Ehud Olmert, Israel's prime minister, pleaded that Israel wanted "quiet" - a continuation of the truce - while Hamas chose "terror", forcing him to act. But what is Israel's idea of a truce? It is very simple: Palestinians have the right to remain silent while Israel starves them, kills them and continues to violently colonise their land.

As John Ging, the head of operations for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, said in November: "The people of Gaza did not benefit; they did not have any restoration of a dignified existence ... at the UN, our supplies were also restricted during the period of the ceasefire, to the point where we were left in a very vulnerable and precarious position and with a few days of closure we ran out of food."

That is an Israeli truce. Any act of resistance including the peaceful protests against the apartheid wall in the West Bank is always met by Israeli bullets and bombs. There are no rockets launched at Israel from the West Bank, and yet Israel's extrajudicial killings, land theft, settler pogroms and kidnappings never stopped for a day during the truce. The western-backed Palestinian Authority of Mahmoud Abbas has acceded to all Israel's demands. Under the proud eye of United States military advisors, Abbas has assembled "security forces" to fight the resistance on Israel's behalf. None of that has spared a single Palestinian in the West Bank from Israel's relentless colonisation.
[...]
Israel is no doubt emboldened by the complicity of the European Union, which this month voted again to upgrade its ties with Israel despite condemnation from its own officials and those of the UN for the "collective punishment" being visited on Gaza.
[...]
Diplomatic fronts, such as the US-dominated Quartet, continue to treat occupier and occupied, coloniser and colonised, first-world high-tech army and near-starving refugee population, as if they are on the same footing. Hope is fading that the incoming administration of Barack Obama is going to make any fundamental change to US policies that are hopelessly biased towards Israel.

With governments and international institutions failing to do their jobs, the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions National Committee - representing hundreds of organisations - has renewed its call on international civil society to intensify its support for the sanctions campaign modelled on the successful anti-apartheid movement.

Now is the time to channel our raw emotions into a long-term effort to make sure we do not wake up to "another Gaza" ever again.

For now, I'm waiting for Israel to mistakenly bomb a hospital.