The Honest Take

"'Yeah, Israel probably did 9/11. I wouldn't put it past them.' That is one more thing people can put in their knapsack of arguments for why Israel is a uniquely evil country. And I'm just not sure how we're going to argue these people out of it."

That's James B. Meigs, and he has been arguing with these people for twenty years.

In 2005, Popular Mechanics did what almost no newsroom was willing to do: it took the 9/11 truther claims seriously enough to test them one at a time, and it published what it found. Meigs was the editor-in-chief. He spent the next two decades being told he was part of the cover-up.

Twenty-five years after the attacks, the same claims are circulating again — with one substitution. "The government did it" has become "Israel did it." Same anomalies. Same absence of evidence. New target.

Ben Chertoff, who managed the reporters on that Popular Mechanics investigation and ran its fact-checking, is joined by Meigs and by Michael Shermer — founding publisher of Skeptic magazine, a Scientific American columnist for eighteen years, and the author of Conspiracy: Why the Rational Believe the Irrational, Denying History, and Truth: What It Is, How to Find It, Why It Matters.

They take the machinery apart. Proportionality bias — the intuition that an enormous event must have an enormous cause, and that nineteen men with box cutters cannot be the whole story. Anomaly hunting, and why a handful of loose threads feels more persuasive than a mountain of settled evidence. The Gish Gallop, and why a claim you can make in one sentence takes three thousand words to refute.

And the part that should trouble everyone: how material that originated with Holocaust deniers and professional antisemites — a full-page New York Times ad in 2004, a seismic-spike claim traced to the American Free Press — ended up circulating among people who considered themselves liberal, progressive and open-minded, because they liked where it pointed.

Also in this episode: what happened to Tucker Carlson between 2012 and 2025. Why thermite and Building 7 refuse to die. How the goalposts moved from "made it happen on purpose" to "let it happen on purpose." Why every new story now routes through the Mossad. What it would actually cost to pay off everyone who would have to stay quiet. And what you say to a family member who believes this, without sounding condescending.

Guests: James B. Meigs, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, columnist for the Wall Street Journal's "Free Expression" newsletter, and former editor-in-chief of Popular Mechanics, where he ran the 2005 "Debunking 9/11 Myths" investigation. He also writes for City Journal and Commentary. Michael Shermer, founding publisher of Skeptic magazine and author of Conspiracy: Why the Rational Believe the Irrational.

If this episode was useful, a rating and a review genuinely helps other people find it.

Sources referenced

• • Popular Mechanics, "Debunking 9/11 Myths" (March 2005 cover story) — https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/a49/1227842/
  • Popular Mechanics, "Debunking 9/11 Myths — FAQs" — https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/a2043/4220721/
  • Debunking 9/11 Myths: Why Conspiracy Theories Can't Stand Up to the Facts — Popular Mechanics, edited by David Dunbar and Brad Reagan, foreword by James B. Meigs (revised and updated 10th-anniversary edition, 2011) — https://www.amazon.com/dp/1588165477
  • Debunking 9/11 Myths, original 2006 edition, foreword by Senator John McCain — https://www.amazon.com/dp/158816635X
  • James B. Meigs, "Tucker Carlson Goes Full Truther," City Journal, Nov 18 2025 — https://www.city-journal.org/article/tucker-carlson-911-files-conspiracy-theories
  • James B. Meigs, "Conspiracies All the Way Down," City Journal — https://www.city-journal.org/article/conspiracies-all-the-way-down
  • Michael Shermer, Conspiracy: Why the Rational Believe the Irrational (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022) — https://www.amazon.com/dp/1421449072
  • Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman, Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It? (University of California Press, updated and expanded edition) — https://www.amazon.com/dp/0520260988
  • Michael Shermer, Truth: What It Is, How to Find It, and Why It Still Matters (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2026) — https://www.amazon.com/dp/142145372X
  • ADL, "Unraveling Anti-Semitic 9/11 Conspiracy Theories" — https://www.adl.org/sites/default/files/documents/assets/pdf/combating-hate/anti-semitic-9-11-conspiracy-theories.pdf
  • HonestReporting — https://honestreporting.com
• More from Michael Shermer

• Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time — https://www.amazon.com/dp/0805070893
• The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies — https://www.amazon.com/dp/1250008808
• The Moral Arc: How Science Makes Us Better People — https://www.amazon.com/dp/1250081327
• Heavens on Earth: The Scientific Search for the Afterlife, Immortality, and Utopia — https://www.amazon.com/dp/1627798579
• Full catalog — https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B001H6MCNY

"CPJ has dozens of names where they claim the journalist died on a dangerous assignment, while the description says they died in their home. So use a little bit of logic and tell me — how can a journalist be on a dangerous assignment while they're in their own home?"

That is Leslie Kajomovitz, near the end of this panel.

On June 25, the Committee to Protect Journalists announced it was reviewing its own database of journalists killed since October 7. The reason was not an outside investigation. It was that Hamas and Islamic Jihad had begun publishing obituaries for their own fighters — and some of those fighters were already on CPJ's list.

CPJ has since removed eight people for taking part in hostilities, and another seven for not meeting its own definition of a journalist. The review cost the organization a board member: Nika Soon-Shiong, publisher of Drop Site News, was ousted as the audit went forward. The International Federation of Journalists quietly dropped eight terrorism-linked names from its own list and has still offered no explanation for why.

HonestReporting's research puts it further than CPJ has been willing to go: over half of the people on CPJ's October 7 War database are operatives or carry a documented affiliation with a terrorist organization.

And the number that gets least attention is CPJ's own. In its 2025 annual report, CPJ counted 52 journalist deaths in Gaza — and determined that only 18 of them were targeted by Israel. The other 34, by CPJ's own finding, were killed in the course of the conflict and not specifically targeted. Of the 86 deaths CPJ attributed to Israel worldwide that year, 31 worked for the Houthi public relations department's newspapers in Yemen.

Erin Molan puts it to the panel: why did so many organizations reach for the "Israel is hunting journalists" narrative, how did so many combatants get counted as press, what does it cost real journalists when the label is handed out this cheaply — and why has almost no newsroom that ran the original story gone back to correct it.

Panel: Salo Aizenberg, author and researcher and a HonestReporting board member; Leslie Kajomovitz, twenty-plus years in international news; and Gabriel Epstein, Senior Policy Associate at the Israel Policy Forum. Moderated by journalist and broadcaster Erin Molan.

Recorded live on August 5, 2026, as part of HonestReporting's Let's Get Honest series.

Sources referenced

• IFJ Silently Removes 8 Terrorism-Linked Individuals — https://honestreporting.com/ifj-silently-removes-8-terrorism-linked-individuals-from-slain-gazan-journalist-list/
• HonestReporting Calls on News Outlets to Correct Reporting on Data From CPJ — https://honestreporting.com/honestreporting-calls-on-news-outlets-to-correct-reporting-on-data-from-committee-to-protect-journalists/
• After HonestReporting's Research, CPJ Ousts Nika Soon-Shiong — https://honestreporting.com/after-honestreportings-research-cpj-ousts-nika-soon-shiong-and-admits-its-gaza-journalist-list-was-wrong/
• The CPJ Is Finally Acknowledging That It Called Gazan Terrorists 'Journalists' — https://honestreporting.com/the-cpj-is-finally-acknowledging-that-it-called-gazan-terrorists-journalists/
• Terrorists & Propagandists: CPJ's Annual Report — https://honestreporting.com/terrorists-propagandists-the-not-so-independent-journalists-included-in-the-cpjs-annual-report/
• How the CPJ Redefines International Law — https://honestreporting.com/how-the-cpj-redefines-international-law-to-designate-terrorists-as-journalists/

When most of us picture antisemitism online, we picture a swastika, a slur, a guy in a dark room. Matthias Becker will tell you that's the part that barely matters.

He's not a political scientist. He's a linguist. For more than a decade he has been reading the comments — not on fringe platforms, but under the BBC, The Guardian, Le Monde. His project, Decoding Antisemitism, has now been through 300,000-plus comments across Britain, France and Germany, and what it found is that roughly 80% of the antisemitism in those mainstream spaces never uses a slur at all.

It hides in a joke. In a rhetorical question. In a name dropped like a password. Below an article about George Soros, someone writes: someone should give George Soros a shower. No slur, no threat, nothing a keyword filter will ever catch — and everyone who needs to understand it, does.

Which means, as Becker puts it, that nearly every statistic you have read about online hate is built on sand.

This conversation covers what actually changed on October 7 — the shift from demonizing Israel to openly celebrating the murder of Israelis, and the overlap with misogyny he had never seen before. It covers his event studies of Charlie Kirk, the Capital Jewish Museum, the White House Correspondents' Dinner attack, and Dan Bilzerian's congressional run — where the single video that pushed back on him drew the most antisemitism of any in the set, over 50%. It covers why he thinks surveys can't measure this and comment sections can. And it covers what he now tells the AI companies, whose guardrails he is trying to help build.

He is, after ten years in the worst of it, not a cynic. His argument is that the same technology that lets one person manufacture a wave of propaganda is the first tool we've had that is powerful enough to read the flood back.

Related episode: Ashley Rindsberg, "Garbage In, Gospel Out: Wikipedia, Reddit, and the Battle Over Truth" — Becker names Wikipedia and Reddit on tape as the stumbling block feeding these models. Rindsberg's episode is how that pipeline got poisoned; Becker's is what it costs downstream — https://share.transistor.fm/s/cdb2fdb2

The guest

• Dr. Matthias J. Becker — AddressHate Research Scholar, NYU Center for the Study of Antisemitism · Editor-in-Chief, Digital Hate Review
• Decoding Antisemitism — the project site, including all six discourse reports
• Decoding Antisemitism Substack — where the event studies land first

The lexicon Ben names in the outro — this is the free, open-access one

• Decoding Antisemitism: A Guide to Identifying Antisemitism Online — eds. Becker, Troschke, Bolton, Chapelan (Palgrave Macmillan / Springer Nature, 2024, Open Access CC BY 4.0). 46 antisemitic categories, each with historical background and explicit/implicit examples — read or download free

His work referenced in the episode

• "Decoding antisemitism online: linguistic and multimodal challenges in the age of AI" — Frontiers in Communication, Jan 23 2026 — read it
• "Antisemitism Exploding on the Far-Right: The Conspiracy Theory Doesn't Need an Event Anymore" — The Algemeiner, May 7 2026. This is the Bilzerian study: ~3,000 YouTube comments across six appearances, 41% antisemitic on average, 23.6%–52% range, with the pushback video topping the set — read it
• "The Conspiracy Architecture Doesn't Need Jews: It Just Prefers Them" — The Algemeiner, Apr 28 2026. The White House Correspondents' Dinner study: conspiracy framing 6% → 25%, conventional blame 30% → 5% — read it
• "Celebrating Terror" — the case study his team published two weeks after October 7, on the online reactions to the attack. Available through the project's publications page

The new work

• AddressHate — the New York think tank he describes at 59:01, connecting discourse research, malicious-actor research and algorithmic-amplification research — addresshate.org
• Decoding Hate — the NYU successor project, expanding from antisemitism to anti-Asian and anti-Black racism and misogyny. Site was "about two months" from launch as of taping; not yet live at publication.

Related Honest Take episodes

• Ashley Rindsberg, "Garbage In, Gospel Out: Wikipedia, Reddit, and the Battle Over Truth" (Jun 30 2026, 43:04) — listen · watch. The direct on-tape connection: at 57:30 Ben raises Wikipedia and Reddit as the stumbling block, because they are what feed the models. Rindsberg's episode is how that corpus got captured; Becker's is the cost downstream, in the guardrails.
• Izabella Tabarovsky, "The Soviet Factory That Built Modern Anti-Zionism" (Aug 25 2026, 97:16) — listen · watch. Complementary: she traces where the vocabulary was manufactured; he measures what people do with it now, sentence by sentence.

The show

• The Honest Take · Apple Podcasts · Spotify · YouTube playlist
• HonestReporting — Instagram, X, TikTok, Facebook

In 2018, Izabella Tabarovsky walked past a protest on an American campus and recognized the signs. Not the sentiment — the sentences. She called her father in Russian and read them out. His answer: we've heard all of this before.

She grew up in Soviet Siberia, in a Jewish city with no synagogues, where the word "Jew" was a line on an internal passport and Jewish applicants to math departments were handed problems known as "coffin problems," because they would bury you. So she went looking for the paper trail — and found one. The Soviet Union didn't merely dislike Israel. It assigned the problem to research institutes and told them to build a scientific-sounding case against Zionism. The volumes they produced look like scholarship. They have footnotes, endnotes, citations to Hannah Arendt and to Herzl.

Tabarovsky sat in the National Library of Israel and checked those citations one at a time. They're fake. Real quotes turned to mean the opposite of what they meant.

From there the trail runs out of Moscow and into a UN resolution, into Mahmoud Abbas's Soviet dissertation, and into an American Communist Party book that a successor organization quietly serialized "for our young readers" one month after October 7th.

A conversation about where the vocabulary came from, why it outlived the state that built it, and what a nineteen-year-old is supposed to do about it now.

Her book is Be a Refusenik: A Jewish Student's Survival Guide, with a foreword by Natan Sharansky.

Related episode: Shai Davidai, "Elite, Educated, Antisemitic: How Academia Fosters Jew Hate." Tabarovsky traces where this vocabulary was manufactured; Davidai traces how the American university taught a generation to hear it as justice.

The guest

• Izabella Tabarovsky — X/Twitter · Substack, The New Refuseniks · Tablet contributor page · Wilson Center · London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism
• Book — Be a Refusenik: A Jewish Student's Survival Guide (Wicked Son, Nov 20 2025, foreword by Natan Sharansky) — Amazon · Barnes & Noble · Waterstones · Z3 announcement

Her essays referenced in the episode

• "Zombie Anti-Zionism" — Tablet, Jul 31 2024 — read it
• "Mahmoud Abbas' Dissertation" — Tablet, Jan 18 2023 — read it
• "The Cult of 'Antizionism'" — Tablet (on the ICSZ) — read it
• "The New Refuseniks" — Tablet, Jun 21 2021 — read it

People and things discussed

• Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism — own site · advisory board incl. Judith Butler · Fathom critique
• Ruth Wisse on antisemitism as political technology — Ask Haviv Anything ep. 138, "Why antisemitism works" — listen · Apple Podcasts
• Matti Friedman on the West's Israel cosmology — "Introduction to Gazology," The Free Press — read it
• Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth — Grove Atlantic
• Hasan Piker — ADL backgrounder · JTA interview, Apr 2026
• Shabbos Kestenbaum — X/Twitter
• Natan Sharansky in conversation with Tabarovsky, Be a Refusenik launch, Univ. of Haifa, Jul 2026 (71 min) — watch
• Long print Q&A, Hadassah Magazine, Aug 10 2026 — read it

The show

• The Honest Take · Apple Podcasts · Spotify · YouTube playlist
• HonestReporting — Instagram, X, TikTok, Facebook

In 1928, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem was a man in trouble — dogged by accusations of corruption and nepotism. So he told a story: the Jews praying at the Western Wall were coming for Al-Aqsa. It worked. The criticism dissolved, and a year later 67 Jews were murdered in Hebron, ending a Jewish presence there that had lasted millennia.

Journalist Yardena Schwartz spent years tracing that lie — from a box of letters in a Memphis attic, to the Mufti's wartime estate in Berlin, to October 7th, when Hamas named its attack the Al-Aqsa Flood. Her book is Ghosts of a Holy War.

This week marks 97 years since the Hebron massacre. In 1929, The New York Times reported it plainly as a massacre of unarmed Jews, and New Yorkers marched in protest. Those articles are still sitting in the paper's archive. Almost nobody has gone back to read them.

A re-release of the conversation that opened this show.

The guest

• Yardena Schwartz — website · X/Twitter · published clips (Muck Rack)
• Book — Ghosts of a Holy War: The 1929 Massacre in Palestine That Ignited the Arab-Israeli Conflict (Union Square & Co.) — publisher · Amazon · Barnes & Noble · Goodreads

Her reporting referenced in the episode

• "How the first Palestinian leader became a Nazi war criminal" — The Spectator, Dec 28 2025 — read it
• Review of Ghosts of a Holy War — The Jerusalem Post — read it

Books and films discussed

• Oren Kessler, Palestine 1936: The Great Revolt and the Roots of the Middle East Conflict — publisher
• Tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate — publisher
• Palestine 36 (dir. Annemarie Jacir, 2025) — Palestine's Oscar entry, US run via Watermelon Pictures — Variety review · Screen Daily

Background on what's discussed

• The 2017 Temple Mount / Al-Aqsa metal detector crisis — Wikipedia · Foreign Policy, July 2017
• Jerusalem and the Temple Mount status quo — ADL backgrounder

The show

• The Honest Take · Apple Podcasts · Spotify · YouTube playlist
• Original episode — audio · YouTube
• Companion article — "The Lie That Lit the Match"
• HonestReporting — Instagram, X, TikTok, Facebook

A sixth-grade teacher in an American public school gets flown to Doha. First class, five-star hotel. Nobody asks her for anything — they just send her home with some curriculum, some textbooks and a few maps.

Cliff May founded the Foundation for Defense of Democracies one week before 9/11. He'd spent a decade at the New York Times before that, so he knows how a story gets built. In this conversation he traces one lie from Soviet disinformation desks to "Israel pushed us into Iraq" to "Israel is dragging us into Iran" to whatever version is in your feed tonight — and argues it isn't a rumor problem, it's a purchase. An influence operation doesn't need you to say nice things about Qatar. It only needs you talking about somebody else.

A week before the towers came down, two people walked into Cliff May's office to tell him the country was asleep.

Jeane Kirkpatrick, Ronald Reagan's ambassador to the UN, and Jack Kemp, the former congressman and Housing and Urban Development secretary, had a thesis and nobody to test it. America, they said, was taking a holiday from history — the Wall was down, the Soviet Union was gone, and the country had decided it no longer had enemies. Then they read him a list: Beirut in 1983. New York in 1993. Saudi Arabia in 1996. Two embassies in Africa in 1998. The USS Cole in 2000.

"Is anybody looking at these and trying to connect the dots?"

He took the assignment. Nine days later he had an answer he hadn't gone looking for, and the rest of his career — he quit the New York Times and built the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

This conversation is about what he's watched since. Not only the conspiracy theories that trail every American war — the Jews were warned about 9/11, Israel pushed America into Iraq, Israel is dragging America toward Iran — but the habit underneath them: a West that keeps betting its adversaries will eventually come around. Iran in 1979 and China after the WTO already ran that experiment and already returned the result.

And then the part that costs money. May's argument is that the deflection is bought, not merely believed — and that an influence operation doesn't have to purchase silence about itself, only a different subject. He describes the offer made to junior people around Washington, the reach of that money into American K-12 classrooms, and why "don't talk about us, talk about the Jews" is the cheapest line item on the menu.

In this episode:

• Kirkpatrick, Kemp, and the memo that became FDD — written the week before 9/11 • Why he says the 1979 revolution in Iran was Islamic, not Iranian, and how al-Qaeda grew out of it • Misinformation versus disinformation, and why a platform now does for free what the KGB needed a service to do • Mearsheimer and Walt went looking for foreign influence over US policy — and walked past the largest source of it • What hundreds of billions of dollars actually buys in Washington • The sixth-grade teacher who flew first class to Doha, and the curriculum she brought home • Carlos the Jackal's prison book, and the coalition it argued for • 1979: the Iranian communists who joined the revolution and were jailed and executed by the state they helped build • Twelver Shiism, the Mahdi, and what "reconcile competing interests" means when the interest is death to America • Why letting China into the WTO was, in his words, a noble experiment that already returned its result • The cognitive war Israel is winning on the ground and losing on the screen • Yahya Sinwar: "I don't want a villa. I don't want a Mercedes." • Why he thinks the K-12 finding is more disturbing than the campus one

Guest: Clifford D. May is the founder and president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the host of the Foreign Podicy podcast. He spent a decade at the New York Times as a city reporter, a foreign correspondent in Africa, a Washington correspondent and an editor of the Sunday magazine. His essay "Know Thine Enemy" was published in April 2026. More at https://www.fdd.org

Mentioned in this episode: • Martin Kramer, Ivory Towers on Sand — https://iupress.org/9780253045041/israel-denial/ (note: link is a placeholder — see production notes) • John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, "The Israel Lobby" • Matt Pottinger, chair of FDD's China Program • FDD, Mapping Qatar's Footprint in the United States — https://www.fdd.org/qatarmoneyusa

The Honest Take is HonestReporting's interview show — going past the headlines to find out what's actually true about Israel and about the people covering it. Hosted by Ben Chertoff.

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Alana Newhouse founded Tablet Magazine in 2009 and has spent the years since arguing that the things holding modern life together have quietly come apart. Her 2021 essay "Everything Is Broken" gave that condition a name — flatness — and her March 2026 essay "Zionism for Everyone" turned the diagnosis outward: Zionism, she argues, is not a slogan or a grievance but a technology for national renewal, and the reason it enrages people has less to do with Jews than with what its success implies about everybody else.

Ben Chertoff sits down with her for a conversation that runs from why Gen Z readers demanded a print edition, to the line about envy that lit up Jewish Twitter, to whether the word "Zionism" should be retired, to what she'd tell a 25-year-old journalist trying to build something real in a collapsing media landscape.

Her answer to the last one is the same as her answer to the first: figure out what is distinct about you, build a vision around it, and jam on it every single day.

Alana Newhouse is the founder and editor-in-chief of Tablet Magazine, which she launched in 2009 and which relaunched in print in 2025 on the strength of demand from its youngest readers. She grew up in Lawrence, New York, and was educated at the Hebrew Academy of the Five Towns and Rockaway, Barnard College, and the Columbia Journalism School. Before Tablet she covered religion and then edited the culture section at The Forward, and edited Nextbook. Her 2021 essay "Everything Is Broken" introduced the idea of flatness and gave rise to what's since been called brokenism; her March 2026 essay "Zionism for Everyone" argues that Zionism is a technology of national renewal available to any people willing to use it.

1. Zionism is a technology, not a slogan. Newhouse's argument is functional, not sentimental: national renewal requires distinctiveness, a vision of the future, and ruthless pragmatism about getting there. Israel has all three, which is why it works — and why watching it work is unbearable for societies that have discarded all three.

2. Antisemitism is a symptom of a sick society, not a freestanding disease.When you ask what someone is actually feeling when they say Jews kill babies, she argues, what you find underneath is envy — and envy points at a lack in the person feeling it.

3. The fight is not really about the Jews. "The target here is the West. We are just in the way." The Jewish state is the first line of defense in an argument about whether any people is entitled to be particular.

4. Retiring the word "Zionism" would be a mistake. Against the argument that the term is a liability, she holds that it is not a marketing choice picked up recently and discardable now — it names something real and old.

5. Flatness is the underlying condition. The 2021 essay's diagnosis — systems optimized until all friction and texture are gone — is the same diagnosis she applies to nations that have sanded off their own distinctiveness. October 7, in her reading, was the shock that broke a lot of people out of it.

6. Diasporism is a costume. The revival of Bundist doikayt on the Jewish left is not, in her view, a Jewish argument at all — it's a Jewish door into an ideology the arguer already wanted.

7. The media collapse is an opening, not an ending. Legacy institutions are losing their monopoly, independents are inheriting the audience, and the two sets of norms are merging. She builds tools for the people who will do the work — "I make pens for creative people."

8. The method scales down to one person. Everything she says about nations she means about individuals: know what is distinct about you, build a vision around it, and show up to it daily.

Links

🎧 Listen and subscribe: https://podcast.honestreporting.com

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🌐 https://honestreporting.com

Guest:

• Tablet Magazine — https://www.tabletmag.com

• "Zionism for Everyone," Alana Newhouse, Tablet, March 2026 — https://www.tabletmag.com/feature/zionism-for-everyone

• "Everything Is Broken," Alana Newhouse, Tablet, January 14, 2021 — https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/everything-is-broken

• Alana Newhouse on 18Forty — https://18forty.org/podcast/alana-newhouse/

• Alana Newhouse on The Unspeakable with Meghan Daum — https://www.theunspeakablepodcast.com/p/alana-newhouse-flatness-broken-systems-tablet-magazine

Referenced in this episode:

• Daniel Gordis's response to "Zionism for Everyone" — https://danielgordis.substack.com/p/i-think-israelis-would-have-a-hard

• Irwin Kula's response, via Shaul Magid — https://shaulmagid.substack.com/p/irwin-kulas-response-to-alana-newhouse

• "Is jealousy the root of anti-Zionism?", Jerusalem Post — https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-893186

• Gil Troy on the argument for retiring "Zionism," Jerusalem Post, June 18, 2026 — https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-899675

• Columbia Journalism Review on the American Jewish press after October 7, January 2025 — https://www.cjr.org/world/front-row-seat-polarization-american-jewish-press-october-7-hamas-israel-zionist-coverage.php

Twenty-five years ago, sixteen people were murdered at the Sbarro pizzeria in Jerusalem. One was Arnold Roth's fifteen-year-old daughter, Malki. The woman who planned it is free in Jordan, wanted by the FBI with a $5 million reward on her head — and has never once said she's sorry. Arnold Roth on what the intifada actually was, why "suicide bomber" is the wrong phrase, and the thing he built in his daughter's name that is still doing good every single day.

On August 9, 2001, a young man walked into a pizzeria in the center of Jerusalem carrying a guitar case. It was a school holiday. The restaurant was full. A few minutes before two o'clock he pressed a button on his chest, and sixteen people were murdered — one of them Malki Roth, fifteen years old, a flautist who spent her holidays volunteering with severely disabled children because her own little sister was one.

Her father Arnold spent the next twelve hours not knowing where she was. He has spent the twenty-five years since trying to bring the woman who planned the attack to justice, and he is still trying.

Ahlam Tamimi was twenty-one. She was Jordanian, from a comfortable family, and she chose the target. She was sentenced to sixteen life terms, released in the 2011 Gilad Shalit exchange, and returned to Jordan to a hero's welcome — where she has lived openly ever since. She is on the FBI's Most Wanted Terrorists list. The United States has a five-million-dollar reward out for her. She has never expressed regret; she has said publicly that her only disappointment is that she didn't kill more.

In this conversation, Ben asks Arnold to do something he says he doesn't get asked to do often: not to make the legal case — he's made that a thousand times, and he makes it here too — but to describe what the Second Intifada actually was, for the benefit of people who chant its name and could not tell you a single thing that happened during it. More than a thousand Israelis were killed between 2000 and 2005 in a country of six million.

Also in this episode: the phone call from the BBC on the Sunday after the funeral, offering to pair him with the bomber's father for "contrasting views"; the four and a half years Tamimi spent hosting a weekly television program on Jordanian soil while already under US indictment; the AP crew that interviewed her in her own home; and why Arnold says he would simply walk away from the student at Columbia in a keffiyeh — not because he's given up, but because he thinks the entire problem has been misdiagnosed and the real fix is generational, unglamorous, and hasn't been invented yet.

And then the part he saves for the end. Asked what has kept him going, he doesn't talk about extradition. He talks about the seven days of mourning, sitting in his own house with his children, deciding to build something. What they built helps families keep severely disabled children at home instead of surrendering them to an institution. It is now in its twenty-fifth year. It is named after her.

Arnold Roth is an Australian-born lawyer in Jerusalem and co-founder of the Malki Foundation, which helps families keep severely disabled children at home rather than in institutions — the work Malki herself was doing the week she was killed. He has spent a quarter of a century campaigning to extradite Ahlam al-Tamimi, who is under US indictment, sits on the FBI's Most Wanted Terrorists list with a $5 million reward attached, and was released in the 2011 Gilad Shalit exchange alongside Yahya Sinwar.

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From this episode:

• The Malki Foundation (Keren Malki) — https://kerenmalki.org

• "A Beautiful Life" — the family's own account of who Malki was — https://kerenmalki.org/a-beautiful-life/

• FBI Most Wanted Terrorists: Ahlam Ahmad al-Tamimi — https://www.fbi.gov/wanted/wanted_terrorists/ahlam-ahmad-al-tamimi

• Rewards for Justice: up to $5 million — https://rewardsforjustice.net/rewards/ahlam-ahmad-al-tamimi/

• Times of Israel, June 2025 — the Roths deliver a 30,000-signature petition to the US Embassy in Jerusalem — https://www.timesofisrael.com/parents-of-sbarro-bombing-victim-urge-us-to-demand-hamas-terrorists-extradition/

• Times of Israel, June 2023 — the sixteenth victim, Chana Nachenberg, dies after 22 years — https://www.timesofisrael.com/woman-critically-injured-in-palestinian-terror-attack-22-years-ago-dies-of-wounds/

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She ran out of a Strasbourg grocery store so fast she left her purse in the shopping cart. Rawan Osman was in her mid-twenties, newly arrived from Lebanon, and had just seen four Orthodox Jewish men for the first time in her life. Then she went back down to face the shopkeeper — who smiled, helped her with her bags, and, as she puts it, "converted me from an enemy to an ally." She grew up in Hezbollah country in the Beqaa Valley and never met a Jew; with more than 850,000 Jews uprooted from the Arab world, she argues, there was nobody present to contradict what school, television and Al Jazeera taught her. She joins Ben Chertoff to trace how that machinery works and where it breaks: the Ramadan dramas, her cousins' khaki school uniforms, the seven years of reading it took before she could walk into a synagogue, why she thinks expecting Hamas or Hezbollah to disarm is "laughable" — and why she is nonetheless optimistic. "I cannot bring millions of Arabs. But we can bring Israel to them."

Key Takeaways

• The absence was structural, not incidental. She never met a Jew growing up, and she doesn't treat that as an accident of geography. With the Jewish quarters empty of its Jews, there was nobody in the room to contradict school, television and Al Jazeera. The propaganda worked because it was unopposed.
• Contact beats argument. Nothing she read broke the worldview. A shopkeeper who helped with her bags did. She frames the whole episode as a single interaction that "converted me from an enemy to an ally."
• Deprogramming is slow, and takes willingness. It took seven years of study before she could work up the courage to enter a synagogue — and she was willing to do so. That timeline is the basis for her flat rejection of Western assumptions about Hamas and Hezbollah laying down weapons: for men whose profession is fighting, she calls it "laughable."
• Media is the delivery system, and it's testable. The Ramadan dramas, Al Jazeera's launch, Qana on television. Her proposed test takes ten minutes, and anyone can do it: read the same Al Jazeera story in Arabic and in English.
• Erbil is the model. She points to Iraqi Kurdistan as the regional model for coexistence: a place that absorbed its minorities rather than erasing them.
• She is optimistic, and specific about why. The Arab world won't go to Israel, but Israel can be brought to them through social media and automatic translation. In the age of AI, a seventy-year information blockade is collapsing, and she says this plan isn't a far-fetched dream: "We already did it."

Notable Quotes

• "For the first time in my life I was sharing the same space with the Jew, the enemy — and for the first time in my life I asked myself, why is the Jew the enemy?" (0:06, and again at 16:20)
• "He converted me from an enemy to an ally." (15:54)
• "We in Hezbollah do not acknowledge political borders." — Nasrallah, in the video she found (17:05)
• "So it's laughable to listen to Westerners who assert… that Hamas will disarm." (38:47)
• "Israel is not going anywhere. No matter how much money you invest, no matter how many Al Jazeeras you open, no matter how many lies you tell." (47:49)
• "Nobody's interested in giving them the mic. The BBC won't talk to them. CNN won't talk to them. Al Jazeera won't talk to them." (56:42)
• "I have good news for you. We already did it." (58:38)
• "I cannot bring millions of Arabs… but we can bring Israel to them." (58:45)
• "The axis of resistance is not invested in the well-being of the Palestinian. If they wanted to liberate Palestinians, they would allow the liberation of their own people." (1:01:54)
• "Enemy to an ally. That's the whole argument, in a single moment. Contact beats propaganda." — Ben Chertoff, outro (1:03:26)

Guest Bio (for the feed)

Rawan Osman is a Syrian-born, Lebanon-raised researcher at the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs. She founded Arabs Ask, an Arabic-language forum where Arabs can ask the questions about Jews and Israel they cannot ask at home, and she is a central voice in the documentary Tragic Awakening. She has addressed the UN Human Rights Council twice, describes herself as an "Arab Zionist" and a recovered antisemite, and is converting to Judaism.

Links

🎧 Listen and subscribe: https://podcast.honestreporting.com

🎧 Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-honest-take/id1896315802

🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1pCnClcM4jiggKP46YZGjG

🌐 https://honestreporting.com

Guest:

• Arabs Ask — Arabic-language forum (Instagram)

• Times of Israel blog — https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/author/rawan-osman/

• Jerusalem Center, "Can Erbil Inspire a New Syria?" — https://jcfa.org/can-erbil-inspire-a-new-syria/

• UN Watch testimony — https://unwatch.org/testimony/speaker/rawan-osman

• Tragic Awakening (2024, dir. Rabbi Raphael Shore)

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Matti Friedman spent five years inside the AP's Jerusalem bureau. He explains the staffing anomaly, the peace offer that was ordered killed, and the Hamas censorship AP readers were never told about.

We throw around the phrase "media bias" as though it means a bad headline here, an unfair paragraph there. Matti Friedman is describing something much larger — and he's describing it from the inside.

From 2006 to 2011, Friedman was a reporter and editor in the Jerusalem bureau of the Associated Press: the biggest international bureau of the world's biggest news organization, feeding copy, photos, and footage to roughly 10,000 outlets worldwide. He came in from the left of the Israeli political spectrum with no particular critique of the press. It took him about two years to conclude that what the bureau produced wasn't really coverage.

The first thing that struck him wasn't ideology. It was arithmetic. The AP had around 40 full-time staffers covering a country that is one one-hundredth of one percent of the world's surface — more reporters than it had in China, and more than it had in all of sub-Saharan Africa.

In this conversation with Ben Chertoff, Friedman walks through what that machine actually did:

• The peace offer that never ran. In 2008, two AP reporters had Ehud Olmert's far-reaching two-state offer to Mahmoud Abbas — one of them had seen the map. They were ordered to drop it, because the story would have subverted the narrative the bureau was already committed to. Reporter Mark Lavie later called it the worst journalistic scandal of his fifty years in the business.
• The editor's note that never was. During Operation Cast Lead, the AP's correspondent in Gaza reported that Hamas fighters were dressing as civilians and being counted in the civilian death toll. Friedman put it in the story. Then came the phone call, and the detail came out. When Friedman proposed that AP disclose it was conforming to Hamas censorship — exactly as it discloses Israeli military censorship — he was overruled. Readers were never told.
• Why every outlet lands on the same story by the end of the day, without anyone coordinating anything.
• Why "the Israeli-Palestinian conflict" is the wrong name for the thing, and how the reframing away from "the Arab-Israeli conflict" quietly flipped who looks outnumbered.
• The Gaza bookshelf — the new literary genre in which Gaza becomes the lens for feminism, the climate, and everything else, and what it means that a very old idea is finding a very new audience.

Friedman's diagnosis isn't a conspiracy. It's a bubble, an incentive structure, and a professional identity that changed: reporters who, in his words, "didn't want to cover the circus — they wanted to be dancing bears in the circus."

Guest: Matti Friedman is a Canadian-born Israeli journalist and author. He wrote the widely discussed 2014 Tablet essay "An Insider's Guide to the Most Important Story on Earth," and he is the author of five books — The Aleppo Codex, Pumpkinflowers, Spies of No Country, Who by Fire: Leonard Cohen in the Sinai, and, new this year, Out of the Sky: Heroism and Rebirth in Nazi Europe, the story of the Jewish parachutists — Hannah Senesh among them — who escaped Nazi Europe for British Mandate Palestine and then volunteered to go back in. He writes from Jerusalem for The Free Press.

Mentioned in this episode

• Matti Friedman, "An Insider's Guide to the Most Important Story on Earth" (Tablet, 2014) — https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/israel-insider-guide
• Out of the Sky: Heroism and Rebirth in Nazi Europe (Spiegel & Grau, 2026) — https://www.spiegelandgrau.com/out-of-the-sky
• David Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition
• The Free Press — https://www.thefp.com
• The Times of Israel — Friedman's pick for a daily news wrap

Links

🎧 The Honest Take: https://podcast.honestreporting.com 📺 Full episode playlist: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLuF-lEHTGTw_RrfN9EP6pdWhgjMX7Fg5

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