Useful Idiots

In March 2023, Ret. Gen. Keith Kellogg told Congress that it's the "acme of professionalism" to use Ukraine to fight Russia because that "takes a strategic adversary off the table" without "using any US troops."

He’s now Trump’s special envoy to Russia and Ukraine. And he’s changing his tune:

“Risk levels are going way up,” he said this week after Ukraine carried out drone strikes on four Russian airfields. “When you attack the Russian nuclear triad, the risk level goes up.”

And he’s right: according to President Trump, Putin said on a phone call this week that “he will have to respond to the recent attack on the airfields.” This new risk, on top of the hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians killed so far, is making hawkish proxy warriors regret their provocation.

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This week’s Thursday Throwdown showcases hypocrisy, lies, and regrets all across the media spectrum: Republicans are now admitting that the “Big, Beautiful Bill” that “wouldn’t touch Medicaid” will, in fact, cut Medicaid. Jonathan Greenblatt of the ADL (short for Apartheid Defense League) said the quiet part out loud, insisting that social media companies should remove anyone who doesn’t support Israel. An embarrassing Fox News guest thinks he’s funny when singing a song about how he doesn’t like children’s educator Ms. Rachel. And former Biden Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre is the latest to jump ship from the Democratic Party, announcing she is now an Independent.

Everything’s terrible and everything’s ridiculous. Watch with Katie and Aaron so you can laugh instead of cry at it all.

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Join Katie in Vienna at the first Jewish Anti-Zionist Congress on June 13-15: https://www.juedisch-antizionistisch.at/en

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Watch the full, unpaywalled interview with Muhammad Shehada here:

Palestinian writer and analyst Muhammad Shehada returns to Useful Idiots once again to give an update on Gaza, Israel’s cynical and sordid fake aid scheme, and how the US is benefitting from keeping the genocide going.

Useful Idiots: Among countless Israeli atrocities in Gaza, there was the emergence of this so-called aid mechanism, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, basically an Israeli front group setting up a site in Southern Gaza to give meager amounts of aid to Palestinians desperate for food. We saw these horrific scenes that were reminiscent of the Nazi Holocaust, people caged, people being fired at, Palestinians reportedly being kidnapped while going to wait for this aid. What should people know about this whole fake aid mechanism?

Muhammad Shehada: To put it mildly, if you combine together the movies Mad Max, Fallout, Minority Report, and Black Mirror, you would get exactly this scenario. It's basically a fenced concentration camp that is run by American mercenaries surrounded by the IDF. They established a number of checkpoints leading up to these concentration camps.

Whenever I ask any friend in Gaza, ‘Would you go there?’ they said, ‘You would have to be completely out of your mind to step a foot into that trap.’ They saw it as bait rather than anything to do with humanitarian aid, because to get there, you have to cross a number of Israeli checkpoints where you can be kidnapped or detained at any moment without any explanation. And that's the last your family would ever hear of you.

Useful Idiots: Why did Israel create the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation?

Muhammad Shehada: The way this organization functions, it establishes four heavily militarized fenced hubs or concentration camps, all in the very south of Gaza. This is the most obvious exploitation of food as a way of luring people away from northern Gaza, as a way of forcible transfer, or mass expulsion. And it coincides with them saying that they have plans to conquer all of Gaza and concentrate the entire population beyond the Morag corridor, basically on the borders with Egypt.

Another concern is the clear risk of mass internment. And that is something that the United Nations and every single humanitarian organization has warned member states: Do not fund this ploy. Do not fund this Israeli shield organization.

They explicitly say there is a clear, credible risk of mass internment in which Israel would confine people in inhumane conditions, in fenced cages. What we saw in pictures, basically people being herded like cattle into feeding pens under the boiling sun of the desert, surrounded by sand dunes and IDF tanks and troops and mercenaries, waiting endlessly. Either you get a package of food, or you get shot dead, or you get kidnapped, or you get maimed.

Useful Idiots: What are you hearing from your friends and family who are still in Gaza?

Muhammad Shehada: I get messages everyday from colleagues, from family, from friends, literally begging me for an answer. When is this coming to an end? Is there any hope soon?

And I try to make up things. I try to give them some false hope from time to time. But I ran out after twenty months of telling them, ‘Okay, Netanyahu's government is about to collapse.’ ‘The EU is about to speak up.’ ‘Trump might be convinced otherwise.’ And then they see it ten times not happening. I lost words. The worst sentence that I can say to someone in Gaza is ‘stay safe.’ It feels insensitive, obtuse, and cruel. It's like mocking them because there's literally nothing to do to stay safe.

Everyday I see another report where someone walking on the street got hit in the head with a loose shot fired by Israel or someone got hit by shrapnel. And with all of this, the worst part is to know that there's no end in sight.

I had a conversation with an Israeli journalist recently. I asked her, “If Hamas is dismantled, the hostages are returned, and Gaza is fully disarmed, would Israel lift the blockade on Gaza?” And her response was, “You think that Israel would feel safe living next to Gazans after everything we've done to them? Now they have a revenge incentive.”

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Our full discussion with Muhammad is unpaywalled. Help spread his important message by sharing this interview, and follow Muhammad on Twitter @muhammadshehad2

Plus, catch this week’s Thursday Throwdown: CNN Claims ‘Free Palestine’ Protests CAUSED Israeli Embassy Staffers Shooting

Useful Idiots is an audience-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

“What I saw in his eyes,” claimed Jonathan Epstein, a witness of the aftermath of the shooting of two Israeli embassy staffers in Washington last week, “I saw the same thing in his eyes that I saw in the eyes of all the [student] protesters at Columbia. Nothing different between him and them.”

The CNN anchor interviewing him apparently felt no need to push back on these outrageous claims. But that’s normal for CNN: in the wake of the shooting, Dana Bash, who has never commented on the “Death to Arabs” chants or any of the countless hate crimes pro-Israel supporters have committed against Arab-Americans, had a similarly racist take.

“You heard the alleged killer saying ‘Free Palestine,’” she said on CNN’s Inside Politics. “We hear that on college campuses, and there are a lot of people who have been worried that that has been turned into a call to arms and violence. Others claim that it’s not.”

During a week in which Israel has burned children alive in schools and hospitals and kept starving refugees fenced and trapped in the hot sun, drawing serious comparisons to Nazi concentration camps, it’s more clear than ever that the ‘others’ she sarcastically mentions are correct: it’s not a call to arms. It means Free Palestine.

Also in this week’s Thursday Throwdown: the former Biden official who sponsored Israel’s genocide in Gaza is CALLING OUT the Trump administration (for not warmongering hard enough against Iran), another conservative British politician accidentally spills the truth about the US, and even staunch Israel supporters are abandoning the newest lie about the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a fake aid fund set up by Israel and the US, because it’s so fraudulent they don’t want to be associated with it.

It’s a tough week to be watching the news. Watch with Katie and Aaron so you can laugh instead of cry at it all. Thanks for supporting independent media, subscribe to watch the full episode here:

Subscribe for the full episode at the bottom of the page. Watch a free preview here:

Two Israeli Embassy staffers were shot and killed on Wednesday evening by a man who yelled “Free Palestine.” The man allegedly wrote a manifesto, and it isn’t clear yet what his motives are, his mental state, if he was a lone actor, or as our guest today puts it: “crazy.”

That guest is Useful Idiots fan-favorite Professor Norman Finkelstein, who gives his analysis of the shooting, beginning with a historical connection he made in his initial reaction.

Useful Idiots: Let's start with the top news in the US: the shooting of two Israeli embassy officials outside an event in Washington, DC. What we know so far is that the alleged shooter chanted Free Palestine. There's also a manifesto that's been purported to be written by him, although we haven't confirmed that. With so much going on in Gaza, atrocities day by day, it feels a little inhuman to talk about two deaths in Washington when there's thousands of deaths going on in Gaza. But what is your reaction?

Norman Finkelstein: Well, my first reaction is that you have to have the facts and make a careful evaluation on the basis of the facts. When I first read about it this morning, I thought it had occurred at the Israeli consulate. And I assumed it was a Palestinian who had committed the action. And my first reaction was to remember the [Polish Jewish] fellow Herschel Grynszpan, who assassinated the second-level diplomat in the German legation in Paris in 1938.

He reacted in sheer horror at what was being done to the Jews. And he did an act. Of course, the Germans called it an act of terrorism, and that's what triggered Kristallnacht. I'm not aware of any [historians] who condemned him for the act, even though you could say it was not a very smart thing to do because it triggered Kristallnacht.

So that was my initial reaction. But then that turned out to be wrong because of two things. It didn't occur in the Israeli consulate. It occurred in front of a Jewish museum in Washington. And secondly, it's unclear at this point whether the alleged perpetrator was even aware that these two people worked in the Israeli consulate. So that throws a large number of variables into the equation. There seems to be this big disconnect between a sophisticated manifesto and a fellow just going randomly in front of a Jewish museum in Washington and attempting to assassinate two people who presumably he thought were Jewish.

So everything remains foggy now. I would say for me, the bottom line is it could have been a nutty guy. That's always possible. It could be a smart guy with a crazy project. It could be a crazy guy with a crazy project.

Useful Idiots: Let’s talk about Israel itself. You have Israeli politicians openly talking about how every baby in Gaza is our enemy. And unfortunately, these views are widely held. What are your thoughts on Israel right now in terms of its place as a unique society on the spectrum of lunacy, of collective insanity in the same way that Nazi Germany was an example of outright collective insanity? Where do you situate Israel in that right now?

Norman Finkelstein: All the demons in Israeli society, which they had to repress, all the demons rose to the surface after October 7: they had moral license to publicly espouse. It was there. If you scratch the surface with any Israeli, their loathing and contempt for Arabs in general and Gazans in particular, it was there. So there was a veneer of being civilized and what October 7 did was it enabled the Israelis to free themselves from that veneer and for all the demons to rise to the surface.

On the other hand, I would say Israelis, unlike Nazi Germany, don't have the pretense or the pretext that they didn't know what was happening. Now, I'm not saying Germans didn't know. They may not have known about the death camps. They knew about the concentration camps. Did they know about the systematic extermination? There is debate about that.

In Israel, everybody knows. Israel has the highest usage of the Internet of any country on Earth. The Israelis were posting on social media what they were doing. The Israeli soldiers were posting and boasting of what they were doing. Every Israeli knew and knows exactly what's happening. What has happened since October 7, it is incorrect to describe it as a state project. That's incorrect. It's a national project.

Every poll taken since October 7 has shown that roughly 95% of Israelis believe that Israel is using enough or too little force in Gaza. I do think that at least in the current world, let's say since World War Two, this is in a class all its own. The sheer numbers, since the twenty-first century, it's unique in every category. There's just nothing like it.

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Subscribe to hear the full interview with Norman Finkelstein – 50 MINUTES longer. Norman reveals the “main enabler” of the genocide, calls out the New York Times for its coverage of the Israeli embassy shooting, discusses his debate with “that thing called Destiny,” and gives his prediction for how quickly Israeli crimes will be forgotten.

Plus, catch this week’s Thursday Throwdown: Trump Finally Calls Out Genocide… in South Africa

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After a year and a half of “genocidal intent” being shown clearly by Israeli politicians saying things like “every baby in Gaza is an enemy,” “we are cutting off the water supply to Gaza,” and killing babies is a “pastime,” as well as constant footage of Israeli attacks against civilians in schools, hospitals, and apartment buildings, it was finally time for Trump to stand up this week and say clearly: This is a genocide.

The only problem is: he said it about White people in South Africa.

Somehow, despite zero evidence and all South African political parties refuting it, Trump claims that White people are being killed and having their land stolen. In a contentious meeting with the South African President this week, Trump pointed to a video in which one far-right politician made a speech pushing for taking occupied land back. He also showed footage of what he called mass graves marked by crosses in South Africa – although it was quickly pointed out that this was merely a symbolic protest without any actual bodies. That’s all the evidence.

So if a political push to take land and a protest are enough to count as genocide, then what, Mr. President, is Israel doing in Gaza?

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Since it’s too ridiculous to listen to him (although we do watch a video where he touts a $175 billion plan for a Golden Dome, we can’t help it), we turn instead to his second-in-command: Secretary of State / National Security Advisor Marco Rubio, who gets scolded by two senators in a Senate hearing.

The first, Democratic Senator Jacky Rosen, yells at him for not being enough of a neocon. She’s mad that he won’t go to war with Russia and isn’t backing Israel enough. It seems the two-party system is working smoothly as ever.

The second, Democratic Senator Pramila Jayapal, gives a legitimate reprimand in criticizing his detainment of Mahmoud Khalil, who was illegally kidnapped from Columbia University, and who is still locked up and not even allowed to meet his newborn son. Rubio gives the smarmiest, most self-righteous answer you’ve ever heard. It’s worth it to hear Katie and Aaron’s reaction.

This week’s Thursday Throwdown is jam-packed with vomit-inducing politicians and pundits, all selling their souls in the most embarrassing ways possible, from MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough to Homeland Security Head Kristi Noem. Watch with Katie and Aaron so you can hopefully laugh instead of cry at it all.

Thanks for supporting independent media, subscribe to watch the full episode here:

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Subscribe for the full episode at the bottom of the page. Watch a free preview here:

During Trump’s weird Middle East trip this week, in between fawning over US-labeled terrorists, receiving lavish gifts, and spilling the tea on his cute new crush, he made an interesting speech that perked up the ears of anti-war activists.

“A new generation of leaders is transcending the ancient conflicts and forging a future where…people of different nations, religions, and creeds are building cities together, not bombing each other out of existence. We don't want that.

And it's crucial for the wider world to know this great transformation has not come from Western interventionists or flying people in beautiful planes giving you lectures on how to live and how to govern your own affairs.

No. The gleaming marvels of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi were not created by the so-called nation-builders, neocons, or liberal non-profits like those who spent trillions and trillions of dollars failing to develop Kabul, Baghdad, so many other cities. Instead, the birth of a modern Middle East has been brought by the people of the region themselves.”

We spoke with award-winning journalist and media critic Sana Saeed to ask: Is any of this actually true? Will Trump really end the era of neocons, and does his refusal to include Israel on this trip signify a change in policy? Subscribe to hear our full conversation with Sana, and find a preview of our talk above.

Useful Idiots: What are your thoughts on Trump's recent visit to the Middle East and the idea that this is a new era, that Trump is circumventing both neocons and Israel, and that things are really shifting?

Sana Saeed: Israel is not on the back burner. Even Trump himself has said everything that's happening here is actually good for Israel. This whole idea that Trump is no longer interested in Israel as an ally is an interesting thing to say as we still continue to aid the bombs that rip apart Palestinian families in Gaza. Palestinians continue to be starved by the Israeli government, backed and supported by the U.S. government. And we continue to see the repression of speech, pro-Palestine speech, anti-genocide speech, here in the United States.

And so people are really missing what is happening here: Zionists are not being pushed to the side. They're being brought back in, but it's going to be through a way which is normalized and clandestine initially. Just give it a few weeks, maybe a month, and it's going to be obvious what's going on.

Useful Idiots: Trump said interventionists and neocons have not helped free the Middle East. And that's the extent of his critique of them. He doesn't, for example, explicitly call them out for destroying societies by invading them like the Iraq invasion. He said we don't want bombing in the Middle East but he's supporting bombing people out of existence in Gaza. It doesn't sound to me like the sea change that some people are taking from this.

Sana Saeed: I'm old enough to remember when President Obama gave the Cairo speech. He was saying what the future of the region could look like, what the relationship between the United States and Middle Eastern countries could look like. I think words are nice, sure, but nothing that Trump is actually saying is accurate.

We have to understand that intervention is not simply military. Intervention looks like a lot of different things, including economic intervention. Trump is saying ‘no Western intervention, no nation builders coming in and telling you how to run your countries.’ That's also a very clear message that we're not going to tell you how to treat your citizens. We're not going to tell you how to treat the dissidents in your countries. We're not going to tell you what to do with all these weapons that we're selling to you and giving to you. We're not going to tell you to do any of that because so long as we have a business agreement, we're good. So long as you've normalized with Israel, we're good.

The purpose is to assure regional Gulf allies, in particular the UAE and Saudi Arabia, that don't worry, we’re not coming for you on human rights abuses. We're just interested in the bottom dollar line. I get the desire for excitement, but we have to remember that these countries are not allies on our side either. If our side is anti-imperialist, is anti-genocide, is for Palestinian liberation, these are not the countries that are on that side.

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Subscribe to hear the full interview with Sana Saeed on how the New York Times skillfully justified Israel bombing a hospital this week, a media critic’s guide to reading an IDF propaganda tweet, and an explanation of the unfolding conflict between Israel-backed India and Pakistan.

Plus, catch this week’s Thursday Throwdown: Meet Trump's Awkward New Crush

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