Useful Idiots

Remember a time when mafia politics were a backroom secret, making headlines only when an informant leaked audio to a scandal-hungry public?

Those days are dead.

On Fox News this week, a plot was hatched straight-to-camera, detailing how, in order to kneecap “socialist” NYC mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, they would blackmail current Mayor Eric Adams out of the race.

“It has to be a head-to-head of Cuomo vs Mamdani,” schemes the Fox panel. “And it has to be Eric Adams who drops out. Frankly, I think it’s great that business leaders are pouring money into this race, our city really depends on getting rid of this person.”

Then they begin to hatch their plan: “Why don’t they sit down with Eric Adams and say, ‘either we’re going to provide you with a wonderful sinecure job and you happily get out of the race, or we’re going to make your life absolute sheer hell.”

And all the while during these live-to-the-nation backroom dealings, a banner hangs over the panel’s heads that says:

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For this week’s episode of Useful Idiots, we’re focused on the moral issue of our time: Israel’s genocide and starvation siege against the people of Gaza.

First up is our interview with two doctors, Dr. Mohamed Nour and Dr. Ahmed Twaij, who recount the horrifying methods of torture Israel uses against other doctors and nurses who have bravely attempted to give care in Gaza.

Doctors and nurses have to go through these checkpoints. And some of them would get picked out of the line. They would be made to go wait in another holding area.

One of them, I remember he said to me, “I got taken behind the building. I remember seeing two hundred men all completely naked with their hands in plastic cuffs on and blindfolded. They took all of my belongings, made me naked, no boxers, nothing. I remember sitting there for hours. Then they took us into a building and we were just beaten for another couple of hours.”

Then they get transported to a prison in Israel: “We got packed into the truck. It was like we were chickens. We weren’t picked up and sat down, just shoved in the back of a truck.”

When they get to the prison, the plastic cuffs get changed to metal cuffs. And the blindfold stays on. They'd be given a small area, one meter by two meters. And they get put in a certain position. And they stay in that position, like on their knees, essentially, for twenty hours a day. “We were allowed to lie down for four hours a day.”

There's one toilet between, I don't know, a hundred of them. I asked, “How did you go to the toilet?”

“They picked us up and took us to the toilet with our cuffs. There's no kind of tissue, no water, nothing. And we had to pull our pants back up ourselves and then go back and sit down.”

Another said to me, “I remember we got to have a shower once a week and it was always cold water. I'll never forget that because one day a prisoner cried out, ‘Why is it always cold? Why is it always cold water?’ And then we heard him scream because they'd thrown boiling water over him.” And no one's checking, right? Who's going there to check what's going on in the Israeli prisons?

But outside of the Israeli torture prisons, life isn’t much easier. Pulitzer-Prized Poet from Palestine Mosab Abu Toha says that worse than the bombs, the violent soldiers, and the machine guns is the hunger.

The ‘aid’ they're getting from the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation [a fake humanitarian organization set up by Israel and the US] includes massacres because Israelis and mercenaries have been shooting at people. These are death sites.

People go to these sites in the very early hours of the morning before they open, hours and hours there waiting for the gates to open. Then the people who are running these sites would turn on a light which is a signal that now it's time to go. And they would go in, and then there would be another sign that it's shut. So anyone who stays there for five minutes, for ten minutes, they would be shot at, they would be killed.

They tell me: “The problem now is not the airstrike, it's not the drones, it's not the bombs, it's just that we don't have food.” People want to eat, even if they are going to be killed. They can't stop the killing, but they can't just stay in their tents while their children are crying out of hunger. Can you just imagine you're sitting in a tent and there are F-16s and drones in the sky that could drop a bomb and kill you, and you're sitting there for twelve hours and there is no food, there is no water. What do you do?

I was listening in the background when Samah, six years old, was in a tent with my mother-in-law in Gaza City. She was crying. She said, ‘I want to eat. I'm hungry. I'm hungry.’ And then my mother-in-law told her, ‘Samah, just be patient. When it's sunset, we will have some food. Just try to drink some water.’

Little babies had to fast for twelve or fifteen hours because the fathers and the brothers are outside looking for food knowing that they could not come back with anything or they could not come back at all.

A takeaway that was highlighted in both interviews was what we could do to help, not just as journalists, activists, poets, or doctors, but as people in our everyday lives. Mohamed explains:

I don't think it's okay for people not to talk about this. When I say people, I mean the general public. People who are going to work, watching Netflix, going out to the theatre, whatever. In years to come, being silent on this issue is going to be something people will really, really regret. The fact that we should at least have spoken about this.

We should be talking about it everywhere, at work, at schools, wherever, to say this is not acceptable. And so at the very least, we can all say, ‘look, we spoke up against this. We did as much as we could do for this issue, and we tried our best.’ I think everybody should be able to say that.

Thank you for supporting independent media. Help us tell the stories of the people in Palestine by sharing this interview.

Plus, catch this week’s Thursday Throwdown: Hunter Biden FLAMES George Clooney & Establishment Dems: “F*ck them!”

Your can support us and independent media here!

The media has gone off the rails this week.

We start our Throwdown with Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia student kidnapped by Trump’s ICE and imprisoned for over 100 days. After finally being released, he isn’t backing down: he’s taking yet another brave risk to make his voice heard in an effort to fight against Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

But how does CNN, supposedly the adversarial network to Trump’s draconian rule, treat Khalil? With racism, aggression, and as always, the big question: “But do you condemn Hamas?”

“It's disingenuous,” Khalil responds in his ever-diplomatic way, “to ask about condemning Hamas while Palestinians are the ones being starved now by Israel. You’re not condemning October 6, where 260 Palestinians were killed by Israel before October 7. So I hate the selective outrage of condemnation because this wouldn't lead to a constructive conversation.”

Aaron adds on: “There were atrocities committed by Hamas on October 7, and they can ask him to condemn those, but they didn't. They asked him in a very general, broad statement: Do you condemn Hamas as a broad entity.

“What does that mean? Do you have to condemn Hamas for running the Gaza Health Ministry? And are you supposed to condemn people for exercising their right to resist? If you want to say: Do you condemn the killing of innocent civilians? That's a fair question. But then, as he pointed out, you have to apply that to Israel as well, which killed infinitely more innocent civilians.”

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We then turn to Hunter Biden, who in an interview this week unleashed a tirade against George Clooney, Pod Save America, David Axelrod, and other Dems who coast off their names and famous relationships. He had a lot to say:

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Larry Charles, who’s worked on some of comedy’s most influential and successful projects, from Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm to Borat and Bruno to The Arsenio Hall Show, tells everything about his forty years of blood, guts, and laughter in the new book Comedy Samurai.

Including the juicy stuff, which he shares with us on Useful Idiots: as an activist against genocide and for Palestinian rights, what is it like to work with notorious Zionists Jerry Seinfeld, Sacha Baron Cohen, and Bill Maher? And as a Jewish writer in Hollywood, how did he escape the Israel propaganda machine when his friends didn’t?

Useful Idiots: You're very political. Do you ever struggle with making sure your politics don't get in the way of comedy?

Larry Charles: Well, I think my bottom line is it needs to be funny. And I bet I've been exploring that relationship between things that aren't supposed to be funny that I would then rise to the challenge of trying to make funny. And of course, political issues are amongst them.

Working on Fridays as my first job plunged us into the political world. Some sketches were more successful than others in terms of funniness and/or in terms of insight, but we were not at all censored. And I never have felt since that time that I was censored in terms of exploring politics through comedy. I love the idea of trying to bring those two worlds together, even when they're not on the surface supposedly funny, because there's always an angle.

I was a big political cartoonist fan and I did political cartoons in high school. So I've always been looking for that juxtaposition, that interesting synthesis between politics and humor.

Useful Idiots: You have visited Palestine, and you've been very vocal on the issue, especially since Israel started attacking Gaza after October seventh. Now, you've worked with some people who have made some of the most influential comedies ever: on Seinfeld with Jerry Seinfeld, Borat and Bruno with Sacha Baron Cohen, and others too who have very different views than you when it comes to the issue of Palestine. I'm curious how you navigate that, how incredibly creative partnerships can not transcend to being in alignment on really fundamental political issues.

Larry Charles: The propaganda machine is able to seduce you, you get sucked in very easily. And you believe that Israel is your birthright. And those kinds of things were not questioned at all when I was a kid. And I'm sure for Bill Maher or for Jerry or for

“Honestly,” says MAGA influencer Charlie Kirk, who up until recently led the charge to release the Epstein Files, calling it a coverup by the Democratic Deep State, “I’m done talking about Epstein…I’m gonna trust my friends in the administration.”

And that’s it. Years of conspiracy, alleged crimes against children, and predators allowed to run free – dropped. Why?

Because also this week, Trump said this about Epstein:

“He’s dead. He’s gone. All it is is certain Republicans got duped by

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We have another Useful Idiots Double Header this week: former CIA officer and whistleblower of the CIA’s torture program John Kiriakou on the Jeffrey Epstein hoopla; and Visiting Assistant Professor at Clark University’s Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies Marta Havryshko, on why she believes that Ukraine is becoming a dictatorship.

First up is John Kiriakou, the only person to serve jail time for the CIA’s illegal torture program. He didn’t participate in the program, he only committed the crime of telling the public about it.

Now, John is focusing his sleuthing skills on the Jeffrey Epstein case. If anyone’s got the dirt, it’s John Kiriako.

Useful Idiots: You said that you feel material was probably destroyed. Can you elaborate on that?

John Kiriakou: At the CIA, even though there are laws like the Federal Records Act, which specifically says you cannot destroy documents, they destroy documents all the time.

After Congress specifically told the Director of Central Intelligence that he had to preserve the MKUltra documents, he went back to headquarters and they destroyed eighty percent of the tens of thousands of pages of documents that they had. So now we don't really know what is true about MKUltra.

Same thing at the CIA with the torture videos. As soon as word leaked that there were videos of Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed being tortured, [CIA Director] Gina Haspel put them in an industrial grinder and destroyed them.

So why would we think that the FBI would be any different, especially when it comes to allegations that some of the most powerful and some of the wealthiest men in the world are implicated in the scandal? I could absolutely see the FBI destroying documents.

Useful Idiots: What is the relationship between Epstein and Israel? And what do we know about who was on the plane, and who engaged in sex crimes?

John Kiriakou: Alexander Auctions of Maryland got the Epstein Black Book. They didn't say who had it, but they put it up for auction. It has everybody in it. Why in the world would that be in private hands? Why is that not in the FBI, being investigated and poured over? Why are the the manifests for the Lolita Express not being poured over? Why are they not questioning every single person who flew to the island?

The real question in my mind is who was Epstein working for? And I've thought about this a lot. I can only conclude that