← Let's Give A Damn
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- [00:00]
Gabor Mate
A wonderful Palestinian writer, Mohamed Al Kurd, who Chris has interviewed on his program, puts it this a universality that recognizes the Palestinian condition is the human condition. Palestine is a microcosm of the world, wretched, raging, fraught and fragmented, on fire, stubborn, ineligible, dignified. The lens we lend the Palestinian reveals how we see each other and how we see everything else. And that is why Palestine is the moral issue of the world. And sometimes you wonder what the hell world am I living in? Last year when there were pictures of skeletal children infants in Gaza, you know what the New York Times had an article about in their Sunday Front section? About a fucking farm in Israel where they grew caviar for export and how dedicated these workers were to still go to work despite the war to grow the caviar to export to Europe. And meanwhile Palestinian kids were starving. Times never mentioned what world I said to myself, are we possibly living in?
- [01:40]
Nick Lapara
Hello friends and damn givers. Welcome to the let's Give a Damn podcast, a show where I have conversations with incredible people who aim to lead the planet much better than they found it. Nick, I'm your host Nick lapara, and I'm so incredibly glad you're here. This episode of the podcast is brought to you by fans and friends of let's Give a Damn. In case you didn't know, let's Give a Damn is on Patreon. For just a few dollars a month you can help us make the podcast week after week after week. Creating and producing a podcast, especially as a self employed one man show, is not easy and it's definitely not cheap. So if you learned from the show and if you love this show, consider joining our Patreon. Visit patreon.com LetsGividam to learn more and hit me up at helloetsgivedam.com if you have any questions at all. Another way you can support this work is by purchasing some of our merch. When you buy a hat or a hoodie or a T shirt, remember that all items in our store have shipping included in the price already. Visit let'sgivadam.com store to support us in that way today. Now, I mentioned at the beginning of this podcast that this is a show where I chat with folks, interview them if you will, but this episode is a rare departure from that you see. A few weeks ago my friend and fantastic journalist Aaron Mate contacted me and asked if I wanted to help him produce an event with his dad Gabor Mate and Chris Hedges that would raise money for Mecca Middle East Children's Alliance. Last week we did that event and it was incredible. We did a sold out event for 800 people in person at the New York Society for Ethical Culture and hundreds more were watching online. We raised tens of thousands of dollars for Mecca. My artist friend Mona Miati performed and Gabor and Chris gave statements, had a conversation together and then answered some aud audience questions. The truly wonderful Lamis Mehana from Palestinian Youth Movement MC the entire evening. It was heavy but it was also a hopeful, hopeful evening. I produced the event and let's Give a Damn co sponsored the event and today we're bringing you the audio of Gabor and Chris's statements, their conversation and the Q and A. And I won't share any more about Gabor and Chris if you don't already know them because the following audio will begin with with Aaron Mate introducing them both. And please make sure to check the show notes for more on both of these incredible humans who time and time again show us what it looks like to consistently be on the right side of history. Before we begin, friends, a quick reminder as always that you can email me anytime and for any reason@ hello, let's give a damn dot com. You can ask questions, recommend future guests, tell me how much you love or hate the show. Anything goes if you I just love hearing from you. And don't forget if you prefer to watch your podcasts instead of listen to them, this full event, including Mona's music, will be on let's give it AM's YouTube in about a week or so. And there are many other podcasts on our YouTube as well, so make sure to go subscribe so you don't miss this event and any other podcasts we put out in the future. And now let's begin listening to these two legends, Gabor Mate and Chris Hedges, talk about Palestine as the moral issue of our time. Let's go. Thanks so much to everybody who's here who's watching at home. I want to briefly echo the appreciation to everybody who made this night possible. Nick Lapara of the let's Give a Damn podcast, Hiba Abubakr and Patrick o' Neill of Mecca, thank you so much for all of your selfless efforts to make this night possible. Thank you. Also to all the volunteers. Thank you. Also to Mona Miari who we saw performing earlier. Thank you Mona. We called this event tonight Palestine, the moral issue of our time. For obvious reasons, we're living through one of the worst crimes in human history, a genocide. And this is a particularly moral issue for those of us in the west because this genocide is being carried out with our government support. And I'm very grateful that tonight we can hear from two people who have been speaking out for Palestine for a very, very long time and who have inspired many others to follow in their footsteps, including me. Chris Hedges is a veteran journalist who spent years reporting overseas for the New York Times, including as the Middle east bureau chief based in Cairo. And I first heard about Chris Hedges in 2001 when he wrote a really pathbreaking article for Harper's Magazine called A Gaza Diary. And Chris, this was at the height of the second intifada. This is 2001. Chris went to Gaza and just reported on what he witnessed and laid bare the cruelty and the sadism of the Israeli occupying regime, including its fatal shootings of Palestinian children in Gaza. And I remember thinking when I saw Chris's byline, what is a New York Times journalist doing writing this? Because in the New York Times, as we've seen, as we know now, you aren't allowed to write about this. You aren't allowed to portray Palestinians as the human beings that they are. You aren't allowed to show the reality of the Israeli occupier. But Chris was clearly someone who was not putting his career first. He was putting the truth first. He was putting morality first. And for that, he paid the price. After he wrote that piece in Harper's, which actually he used his vacation time to do while he was on vacation from the New York Times, the Times banned him from writing about the Middle east ever again. And his fate was sealed a few years later when he came out against the Iraq war, which is another no, no at the New York Times. And soon Chris was basically forced to leave. So he's an example to so many of us, especially journalists, about how there are costs to speaking the truth. There are costs to integrity, but there are also great rewards. And Chris, because of his uncompromising journalism, has been able to reach people around the world with his voice of conscience. And that's expressed in his brand new book which has just come out called the Genocide Foretold, reporting on survival and resistance in occupied Palestine. So I'm very grateful that Chris is here with us tonight. My dad, Gabor, has been speaking out about Palestine since he was a very young man. He was 23 years old in 1967 when he realized that so much of what he'd been told about Israel and Zionism was a lie. And ever since then, he's been trying to tell the truth, no matter the consequence. And one of my earliest memories of my dad Telling the truth about Palestine came in 1989. He was in Palestine for the first time as part of a delegation visiting the occupied territories. And I heard him on the radio speaking about it and it was a very formative experience for me. I heard him weeping and talking about how he had been weeping at what he had seen. And my memory of that is that he was not just weeping at what he was witnessing, the brutality of the Israeli occupation which was then cracking down on the first intifada, but he was also weeping for his people and for the use of the genocide that he lived through in Nazi occupied Germany to justify the oppression of Palestinians, which has turned into a genocide today. So I'm very grateful that he is here as well to speak with us. And I'm going to play a clip from that interview and I'll bring up dad and Chris so they can hear it too. So coming up, Gabor mate and Chris Hedges.
- [10:16]
Chris Hedges
So.
- [10:33]
Nick Lapara
So, because 1989 is a long time ago, this is, we had to use AI to enhance the clip. So it's Gabor's voice plus AI and this is just a clip of him. This is in Palestine. Oh, and by the way, I missed the most important part. This night is especially significant for us as a family because dad Gabor was there in Palestine on a delegation organized by the Middle East Children's alliance by Mecca. So it's wonderful that we can be here tonight to support them.
- [11:01]
Chris Hedges
So.
- [11:05]
Nick Lapara
Here'S a bit of that interview.
- [11:09]
Gabor Mate
Dr. Matea, how did you find yourself in this situation? What are you doing there? It's a long way from Vancouver. I'm part of a delegation of health professionals sent by a Berkeley based foundation called Middle East Children's Alliance. For the last week or so, we've been traveling through the undified territories, refugee.
- [11:32]
Chris Hedges
Camps, villages, cities, trying to see the.
- [11:35]
Gabor Mate
Health conditions of Palestinians and especially Palestinian children. And I had been to a Mastet hospital here in Jerusalem just two days prior to the incident last night. When I heard about it, I thought I knew to go and witness it for myself and to speak to the people and to speak to the medical staff. What, in your conversations with these people, what has been the impact on you as, as a doctor? Mr. An, I'm Jewish, I'm a doctor, I'm a human being. I've been crying for the past two.
- [12:08]
Chris Hedges
Three days, even before.
- [12:12]
Gabor Mate
Because of what you've seen. There aren't any words for it. And, and I don't think there's anything.
- [12:21]
Chris Hedges
I can say to people when I.
- [12:22]
Gabor Mate
Come back that could the feeling for what I've seen. I went today to. I won't even say that I'm not going to. I'm sorry. I'll. I'll stop here. Doctor, you will be criticized for speaking out, perhaps in some quarters. I'm sorry about that. I know that I will be. I already have been. People feel that by criticizing Israel, you contribute to anti Semitism or you're someone being a traitor to your people. I don't believe that. I believe that antisemitism is far more served by people keeping silent, especially Jews keeping silent or such a thing that the whole world can perceive to be. To be an injustice and an affront to humanity. I think, furthermore, that the people who criticize I feel sad for them. I really do. I'm not angry at them anymore.
- [13:11]
Chris Hedges
I used to be.
- [13:13]
Gabor Mate
I think they don't know and they may not want to know, but I hope for their sake and for the salvation of their own humanity and the humanity of this country here that they open their eyes. Dr. Matei, it's good to talk to you tonight.
- [13:32]
Chris Hedges
Thank you. Good luck.
- [13:35]
Gabor Mate
Dr. Gabor Matei is with the Middle East Children's Alliance. He spoke from Jerusalem.
- [13:43]
Nick Lapara
So here, so here to speak now in support of the Middle East Children's alliance. And we hope you'll join us in supporting this wonderful organization on top of what you've already given. Please join me in welcoming Gabor Mate.
- [14:09]
Gabor Mate
Well, good evening. I hope you can hear me. I said in a clip that I'm not angry anymore. The hell I'm not angry. I'm totally enraged. I make my living really speaking the truth as I see it about human development, about trauma, about childhood, about illness, about health, what it means to be a human being. And I'm usually very confident and comfortable that I can convey in my words my understanding and perceptions of the world. In this case, I feel completely inadequate to actually put into words what I feel, what I see, and also what I perceive many human beings are going through right now. Simply the words escape us. When in my adolescence, I first found out about the Nazi genocide of my own people, literally almost every day when I would think about it, my head would spin. Literally, my head would spin. I think, how is this even possible? And I feel like I'm back. But that adolescent, almost naive incomprehension about how this, what we're witnessing can possibly be going on. It's a real privilege to be on the stage with Chris, whose work I followed for many years, who's been, as Aaron pointed out, Such a beacon for truth in such a dark, dark world. Every era seems to have its moral touch point. And the theme tonight is Gaza as the moral issue of our time. In the 19th century, there was the question of freedom in Poland. Actually, in the 20th century, amongst other major events, you might say that the Spanish Civil war in the 1930s was a moral touchstone. Where you stood on that issue told you where you stood about on the world in the 1960s, 70s, it was the Vietnam War. But all those situations, as much as they concentrated the issue of human morality and human ethics, there was something somewhat different about them in that, at least in the Spanish Civil War and certainly in the Vietnam War, there was a fighting chance. And now we're seeing the slaughter of civilians and children and kids being amputated without anesthetics and being starved. And the press has always lied, but the lies have never been more egregious and the silence has never been more deafening than it is today. And since I can't quite find the words, let me quote a Muslim, an Arabic writer, Omar Ol Akkad, who in his wonderful, wonderful book, one day everyone will have been against this, says the following. The moral component of history, the most necessary component, is simply a single question asked over and over when it mattered, who sided with justice and who sided with power. What makes moments such as this one so dangerous, so clarifying is that one way or another, everyone is forced to answer. And Palestine is the issue of our time. Where you stand on that issue tells you whether you've got a heart that's even open and functioning. Because you see, in the Western world, we value knowing with the mind, with the intellect, and with the intellect you can make all kinds of arguments about who started what and who's responsible for what. But to be even asking as to where the truth lies means that you completely cut off from your heart and from your guts. So there's ways of knowing that combine the gut and the heart and the mind. And as somebody said, without the gut and the heart informing the mind, we're nothing but genius level reptiles. And those genius level reptiles are running our world right now. A wonderful Palestinian writer, Mohamed Al Kurd, who Chris has interviewed on his program, puts it this. A universality that recognizes the Palestinian condition is the human condition. Palestine is a microcosm of the world. Wretched, raging, fraught and fragmented, on fire, stubborn, ineligible, dignified. The lens we lend the Palestinian reveals how we see each other and how we see everything else. And that is why Palestine is the moral issue of the World. And sometimes you wonder, what the hell world am I living in? Last year when there were pictures of skeletal children, infants in Gaza, you know what the New York Times had an article about in their Sunday Front section? About a fucking farm in Israel where they grew caviar for export. And how dedicated these workers were to still go to work despite the war to grow the caviar to export to Europe. And meanwhile Palestinian kids were starving that the Times never mentioned. What world I said to myself, are we possibly living in? Haaretz, the Israeli newspaper that not infrequently tells the truth, or some of the truth at least, caused the current situation a war of the generals against the children. And in Haaretz there was an incredible article by Gideon Levy. You know, the Jewish organizations, the Holocaust memorial industry, they recognize what they call righteous gentiles. These are non Jews that helped Jews during the horror of the Second World War. Well, one day, if they ever recognize righteous Jews, Gideon Levi will surely have pride of place. And in a recent article, I can't even know how to tell you this, he describes a visit by an Israeli TV presenter, an influencer, a fashion influencer who, protected by the Israeli army that she's completely in love with, visits this Palestinian village in the West Bank. And she reports, I had such admiration for these soldiers who had to put up with screaming grandmothers and screaming babies, whose homes they had to enter at night and they could still hold on to their humanity. Who makes up this stuff? I mean, you think you're living in la la land, but it's serious. And this is what our press and our politicians and our culture shows to us all the time. Now, here's what Omar Al Akkad writes about our civilization. And I'm quoting these people extensively because. Because really I don't have the words, but thank God they do. And Omar writes, to preserve the values of the civilized world, it is necessary to set fire to a library, to blow up a mosque, to incinerate olive trees, to dress up in the lingerie of women who fled and then take pictures. To level universities, to loot jewelry, art banks, food. To arrest children for picking vegetables, to shoot children, for throwing stones, to parade the captured in their underwear, to bake a man's teeth and shove a toilet brush in his mouth, to let combat dogs loose on a man with down syndrome and then leave him to die. Otherwise the uncivilized world might win. Then that's the world we're living in. And the Passover recently, the Jewish holiday. The New York Times writes About what? The missing person at the Seder table, at the Passover table, and whose dad is the Israeli hostage in captivity in Gaza. Not missing from anybody's table are the thousands of Palestinians, including multiple hundreds of children who have been for decades kept in Israeli jails and tortured. Children. Tortured. They recently released a man who was 13 when he was arrested, with no weapons. No weapons. And he was charged with attempted murder. He got 10 years. Now he's 10 years later, they released him. Mentally ill, a broken person. Those people are never mentioned. Two years ago, two and a half years ago, I was in the west bank working with Palestinian women who'd been tortured in Israeli jails. And let me tell you, they gotta hand it to the Israelis. They really know how to torture people. They've developed certain skills. That's one of them. And this is of course being documented by Israeli Physicians for Human Rights, all kinds of Israeli witnesses, international organizations. Never talked about in the Western press the fact that the head of the orthopedic surgery at Al Shifa Hospital, who was a perfectly healthy, vigorous 50 year old man, was captured and six weeks later he died without his underclothes on, with blood streaming from his rectum, with his ribs broken. Never reported in the North American press. It's just beneath our attention. Well, what does that tell us about Palestine as the moral issue of our time? The Dutch American writer Jacob Riis, who wrote this book on the tenements of New York, in fact, there was a best seller back in the 1890s. He said, the world forgets too easily, easily, too easily what it does not like to remember. And that forgetting is instantaneous. And, you know, I don't know how this is going to end. All I know is that all the speaking that Chris has done, all the wonderful people that he's interviewed, all the interviews that I've been invited to speak on, the millions of people that have seen us and other people speak online has not saved a single finger of a single Palestinian child. It does mean that we have to hold on to a sense of morality and possibility that goes beyond the present moment. I like to think. Well, let me tell you one more thing. I recently wrote the foreword to a book by a Palestinian psychiatrist. Her name is Dr. Salma Jabbar. She was head of mental health for Palestine. But she was too honest and too sharp in her criticism of the traitorous Palestinian Authority. So she no longer has that position. But in her book, you know what she writes? She writes, how do I deal with the suicidal depression of an 82 year old man who came to me for help when the house that he built with his own hands. Now, 20 years later, he's being forced to dismantle with his own hands. Do I give him Prozac for his depression? I have no idea what the answer that history will finally declare on current events. What I do know. What I do know is that, well, there was this Jewish sage a hundred years before Jesus. His name was Hillel. And he said that the task is not yours to finish the task of healing the world, but neither are you free not to take part in it. And I think that's a choice we can all make in the present moment. We don't know how it's going to end. And none of us, I hope it's otherwise. But none of us in our lifetimes may see justice the way we like to see it. But by God, we can make a contribution, however big, however little that is, and we can make sure that Palestine is never, ever, ever forgotten. Thank you.
- [29:46]
Chris Hedges
Thank you. And it's a tremendous honor for me to be here with Gabor, one of the intellectual and moral giants of our time. This time next week, I will be in Cairo with the great cartoonist Joe Sacco, who wrote Palestine and Footnotes in Gaza. And we will be beginning our book on the genocide by interviewing Palestinians in Cairo, a book my publisher, who's made handsome profits off me in the past, Simon and Schuster, has already told me they don't want. My old office in Gaza is a pile of rubble. The streets around it, where I went for coffee, ordered Maftoul or Manakiche had a haircut, are flattened. Friends and colleagues are dead or more often, have vanished. Last heard from weeks or months ago, no doubt buried somewhere under the broken slabs of concrete, the uncounted dead in the tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands. Israel has made Gaza a wasteland, 50 million tons of rubble and debris. Rats and dogs scavenge amid the ruins and the fetid pools of raw sewage. The putrid stench and contamination of decaying corpses rises from beneath the mountains of shattered concrete. Palestinians, 90% of whom are displaced, risk death from unexploded ordnance Left behind after 18 months of airstrikes, artillery barrages, missile strikes and blasts from tank shells, and a variety of toxic substances, including raw sewage and asbestos. Israel, supplied with billions of dollars of weapons from the United States, Germany, Italy and the UK created this hell, and it intends to maintain it. The blockade of all food and humanitarian aid since March 2, that's more than 60 days, has resulted in outbreaks of hepatitis A caused by drinking contaminated water. Ailments such as scabies malnutrition 60,000 children show signs of malnutrition. 57 Palestinians have starved so far since March 2, most of them elderly and children. Starvation, widespread nausea and vomiting. Palestinians in Gaza live in makeshift tents encamped amid these slabs of concrete. Many have been forced to move over a dozen times. Nine in 10 homes have been destroyed or damaged. Apartment blocks, schools, hospitals, bakeries, mosques, universities Israel blew up Israel University in Gaza City and the Turkish Palestinian hospital on March 21 in controlled demolitions. Cemeteries, shops, offices all have been obliterated. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East UNRA estimates that clearing Gaza of the rubble will take 15 years and cost between 40 billion and $50 billion. But any rebuilding of Gaza, Israel and the Trump administration have decided will not be done for the Palestinians. And Israeli organizations, including the far right Nakala Organization, have held conferences to prepare for Jewish colonization of Gaza once Palestinians are removed. This is the last chapter of the genocide accentuated by the decision by Israel's Security Cabinet to occupy all of Gaza and remain there indefinitely while emptying the northern part of the Gaza Strip completely of Palestinians. It is the final blood soaked push to drive the Palestinians from Gaza. No food, no medicine, no shelter, no clean water, no electricity. Israel has turned Gaza into a Dante esque cauldron of human misery where Palestinians are being killed in their hundreds and soon again in their thousands and tens of thousands or they will be forced out never to return. This final chapter marks the end of Israeli lies. The lie of the two state solution. The lie that Israel respects the laws of war that protects civilians. The lie that Israel bombs hospitals and schools only because they are used as staging areas by Hamas. The lie that Hamas uses civilians as human shields while Israel routinely forces Palestinians captive Palestinians to enter potentially booby trapped tunnels and buildings ahead of Israeli troops. The lie that Hamas or Palestine Islamic Jihad are responsible, the charge often being errant Palestinian rockets for the destruction of hospitals, United nations buildings or mass Palestinian casualties. The lie that humanitarian aid to Gaza is blocked because Hamas is hijacking the trucks or smuggling weapons and war material. The lie that Israeli babies are beheaded or Palestinians carried out mass rape of Israeli women. The lie that 75% of the tens of thousands killed in Gaza were Hamas, quote unquote terrorists. The lie that Hamas, because it was allegedly rearming and recruiting new fighters, is responsible for the breakdown of the ceasefire on March 18, a breakdown that has seen more than 2,300 Palestinians killed, 6,000 injured, adding to the official death toll of 52,000, with, of course, thousands, perhaps tens of thousands more. Under the rubble, Israel's naked genocidal project is exposed. The few remaining food kitchens will close within days. Now that the UN's World Food Program and UNRWA's food stocks have run out, mass starvation will follow, along with deaths by disease caused by contaminated water and food, and scores of killed and wounded each day under the relentless assault of bombs, missiles, shells and bullets. Nothing, if Israel has its way, will function. Bakeries, water treatment, sewage plants, hospitals, distribution centers, clinics. Less than half of the 53 emergency vehicles operated by the Palestine Red Crescent Society are functional because of fuel shortages. And soon there will be none. Israel's message is unequivocal. Gaza will be uninhabitable. Leave or die. And the images from Gaza during the past 18 months were awful. But what is coming now will be worse. It will rival the most atrocious war crimes of the 20th century, including the mass starvation, wholesale slaughter and leveling of the Warsaw ghetto in 1943 by the Nazis. October 7th marked the dividing line between an Israeli policy that advocated the brutalization and subjugation of the Palestinians and a policy that calls for their extermination and removal from historic Palestine. What we are witnessing is the equivalent of the moment triggered by the annihilation of some 200 soldiers led by George Armstrong Custer in June 1876 at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. After that humiliating defeat, Native Americans were targeted for extermination with the remnants forced into prisoner of war camps, later renamed reservations, where thousands died of disease, lived under the merciless gaze of their armed occupiers, and fell into a life of immiseration and despair. Expect the same for the Palestinians in Gaza, dumped, I fear, in one of the world's hellholes and forgotten the expansion of Greater Israel, which includes the seizing of Syrian territory in the Golan Heights, southern Lebanon, Gaza, of course, and the occupied west bank, where some 40,000 Palestinians have been driven from their homes and which I expect will soon be annexed by Israel as being cemented into place. But the genocide in Gaza is only the start. The world is breaking down under the onslaught of the climate crisis, which is triggering mass migrations, failed states, catastrophic wildfires, hurricanes, storms, flooding and droughts. As global stability unravels, industrial violence, which is decimating the Palestinians, will become ubiquitous. Israel's annihilation of Gaza marks the death of a global order guided by internationally agreed upon laws and rules, ones often violated by the United States in its imperial wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, but the one that was at least acknowledged as a utopian vision. The United States and its Western allies not only supply the weaponry to sustain the genocide, but have struck the demand by most nations for adherence to humanitarian law. They have carried out attacks against the only nation, Yemen, which has tried to halt the genocide. The militarized drones, helicopter gunships, walls and barriers, checkpoints, coils of concertina wire, watchtowers, detention centers, deportations, brutality and torture, denial of entry visas, apartheid, existence that comes with being undocumented, loss of individual rights and electronic surveillance of are as familiar to the desperate migrants along the Mexican border or attempting to enter Europe as they are to the Palestinians. And the message the Global north has given to the rest of the world is this. We have everything and if you try and take it away from us, we will kill you. Thank you. I want to start by asking you about the Holocaust.
- [42:03]
Gabor Mate
Yeah.
- [42:05]
Chris Hedges
All of almost every university had Holocaust studies. Adorno, of course, Teodor Adorno said that the whole purpose of an education was to prevent another Auschwitz. And yet with all of these studies in the midst of this genocide, none of it seems to have penetrated within the society itself. And I'm wondering why. And then I want to ask you, how does one teach morality? And even if morality can be taught.
- [42:47]
Gabor Mate
Yeah. Well, the first thing to notice, and again, this is nothing, Ulavazi mentioned in the Western press that there are at least six Israeli Jewish internationally renowned scholars of genocide and the Holocaust who have former members of the Israeli Defense Forces, academics who have called the current situation in Gaza genocide. These are Jewish scholars. You never hear them quoted. What you always hear quoted as. It's a blood libel to even make the comparison. That's the first thing. The second thing is, as Norman Frankenstein has pointed out so beautifully, much of the intention of the Holocaust academia has got nothing to do with trying to change the world's relationship cruelty and unfairness. It's to establish a sense of Jewish exceptionalism so that we're the perpetual victims and that everything we do is justified. Everything that's done to us is an outrage. A case example is Germany, where Germany is often lauded as the country which has taken responsibility for its actions. Unlike say, Japan, which is still to acknowledge that it prostituted Korean women in the service of the Japanese forces in Korea and China. Well, that's true. Germany has pleaded mea culpa. But what have they learned? Nothing. It's in Germany that it's least dangerous for a Jew to speak about Palestine. Jews are arrested in Germany for calling for justice for the Palestinians. So teaching about the Holocaust teaches nobody anything. And the point is twofold. One is you cannot teach morality. Morality is a natural human attribute that arises when people's human needs as children are met, number one. Number two, you can preach about morality in the service of the most nefarious causes. And that's what we're seeing right now. So that, and as I'm sure you've heard this statement before, the. The Hebrew word for the Holocaust is Shoah. And there's an old saying, there's no business like Shoah business. It's been exploited to the hilt. And you know, I'm somebody whose grandparents died in Auschwitz, who nearly ended up there myself. And I'm sick of it. I'm sick of hearing about it, not because it didn't happen, but because what it has been pressed into the service of. Now, I'd like to ask you a.
- [46:13]
Chris Hedges
Question.
- [46:16]
Gabor Mate
Which is you mentioned the Warsaw Ghetto and one of the leaders of the Warsaw Ghetto, Merrick Edelman, who survived the war and became a cardiac surgeon or cardiologist and a real fighting fighter for liberty, supported the Solidarity labor movement, always stood for Palestinian rights. Needless to say, when he died, nobody in Israel mentioned a word about it or very little. But during the Warsaw Ghetto after that, desperate resistance was crushed. The Germans went to the ghetto, burning down all the homes, all the houses, and Jews would jump out of the windows to their death to escape the fires. And the Germans called them parachutists. Utter contempt for these human beings as they went to their death. Now, I've seen the same thing in Israel now, not just the cruelty, not just the everything you described, but the contempt. Have you seen that anywhere else? You've covered Sarajevo and the Bosnian horrors, you've covered Salvador and the death squads, you've covered the Middle East. What do you make of this incredible contempt? Do you have any, have you thought about it?
- [47:57]
Chris Hedges
Yeah. You have to linguistically render people non human before you kill them.
- [48:01]
Gabor Mate
Yeah.
- [48:02]
Chris Hedges
So this is why the current rhetoric around the Trump administration is so dangerous. It took four years of hate filled speech before you got any Serbs to cross into Bosnia to begin the genocide. And I think when you read the early history of the Nazis rise to power from 1933 to 1938, at least, Claudia Kunz writes about this. Hitler had to back off from going after the Jews rhetorically. I mean, you had Kristallnacht, you had the brown shirts and the Nuremberg Laws. That's why language is so key. And you know, you're right that every. But once you, once you linguistically render people into, quote, galants, to be human animals, and once people believe it, then it becomes, and we read about that in the death camps. The way, you know, when they interviewed Lipton's great book on Nazi doctors, they didn't look at them as human. And that was true in every war that I covered. Although you take human beings, and I would say the other thing is that you build this bizarre kind of worldview where evil is embodied in another, and that when you eradicate the other, you've eradicated evil. And that, of course, what it does is actually expand our own propensity for evil. And I think it's interesting, as you know, I graduated from divinity school, but I think in all of the great religious texts, there's an, including the Quran. When the Prophet writes about jihad, he writes about three types of jihad, but the most important jihad is the battle to curb the evil within us. That's why I think Primo Levi is such an important writer, because, and Levi argued over and over that we, you know, that they were bastardizing or missing the true lesson of the Holocaust in that we can all become Rumkowski, the Jewish collaborator who led the Lotz ghetto. But yes, language, language is key. And, you know, watching the way Trump and his minions use language to describe immigrants, to describe, you know, the radical leftists were moving very swiftly and it's not a long step from the linguistic dehumanization to violence.
- [51:00]
Gabor Mate
It's interesting you mentioned Trump because a couple of days ago in Washington, D.C. i was there for an interview with Al Jazeera, and the person being interviewed right after me was Mary Trump, who's Donald Trump's niece. And it's very interesting. I mean, she's documented the incredible trauma in that family. But she writes something very interesting which I think is very relevant to what you just said. She said in her book the Reckoning, Mary Trump writes, and you gotta get. She comes from the same family. Same family. And she writes, we are a nation shackled by our cultural imperative to move from the pain of war, mass death, disease, and government sanctioned barbarity in the name of peace or healing or a return to normal, when all we've really been doing is preserving the unchecked impunity of the powerful to inflict pain again, again and again. This is Mary Trump.
- [52:26]
Chris Hedges
I want to ask you about despair because I think for all of us who've spent, spent seven years in and out of Gaza, and you were right, I think in your speech to cite that sense of futility that we all feel despite all of the energy many of us in this room put in to battling this genocide. Yeah, I know. I find a kind of solace having been raised in a religious household that, you know, we're not finely judged by our what we empirically achieve, but what we strive to achieve. But despair is something, you know, a lot more about than I do. And you know, I'm sure there's many like me in this room who struggle with it daily.
- [53:26]
Gabor Mate
Well, I feel despair all the time. Not all the time, but frequently. So despair is a perfectly normal emotion. So is hatred, by the way. These are perfectly normal emotions in the face of what we're dealing with right now. But let me read you something that might put it into perspective. This is somebody writing a long time ago, but he might as well be writing about Gaza. He says greed, hatred and delusion of every kind are unwholesome. Whatever action a greedy, hating and deluded person heaps up by deeds, words or thoughts that is unwholesome. Whatever. Such a person, overpowered by greed, hatred and delusion, and his thoughts controlled by them, inflicts under false pretexts upon another by killing, imprisonment, confiscation of property, false accusations or expulsion. That is all on Hohenzel. Who do you think is writing here? It's the Buddha. Oh wow, 2,500 years ago. And he's talking about expulsion, torture, confiscation of property, false accusation, killing, imprisonment. The Buddha, 2500 years ago. Why am I saying this? Not to minimize in any way or to dismiss the importance of the present moment, but human beings have been dealing with this for a long time. And what is actually amazing and what is to be celebrated, this is my antidote to despair, such as it is. What is to be celebrated is that in the face of thousands of years of that kind of history, people still love the truth, people still love liberation, people still love freedom, people are still committed to justice, people are still outraged when they see these patterns arise and arise and over again. So that in addition to the despair, there's that real humanity that has never been extirpated and never will be. And that's my, for what it's worth, that's my antidote to despair. This is a long term story and we can all make a contribution. And I think the response to despair, for God's sakes, do something however little, however limited, but do it. Because it's the absence of agency, lack of activity, lack of engagement that really engenders despair.
- [56:22]
Chris Hedges
Yeah, well, you know, all of these protests and these wonderful, courageous students who are our nation's conscience, who set up these encampments, to be honest, would appear at the edge of Columbia or Princeton. It was my therapy, really, quite literally. You know, I owe those students so much and I admire them so much, and some of them are with us tonight.
- [57:03]
Gabor Mate
Well, should we turn it over to the audience for some questions? Okay. Meanwhile, let me read you. This is a night full of readings. This is Gideon Nevi mentioned this recently, but I was aware of this for quite a while. A couple of years ago, three years ago, I went on a podcast with a Hollywood actor and comedian whose name is Mayim Bialik. And Mayim Bialik is one of the most fervent and ignorant and contemptuous supporter of Zionism you'll ever find. But that never came up in our interview. And I didn't know that about her at the time, otherwise, frankly, I would not have gone in her place. We just talked about the stuff I usually talk about. Now. Mayim Balak had a great, great, great grand uncle or grandfather called Haim Nachman Bialik who wrote a poem called the City of Slaughter. And the City of Slaughter was a poem that described these pogroms, these anti Jewish massacres in the city of Kishinev in Russia, or I think in what's Ukraine now in 1905. I'm going to read you the first two stanzas of Mayim Bialix, who's a great supporter of genocide. I'm going to read this poem by her distant antecedent in the Bialik family. It's called the City of Slaughter. And Gideon Levy recently printed this about Gaza. Here's the poem, the beginning of it. Rise and go now to the city of slaughter. Into its courtyard wind your way there with thine own hands, touch with the eyes of thine hand, and with the eyes of thy head. Behold on tree, on stone, on fence, on mure clay. The spattered blood and dyed brains of the dead proceed to the ruins the split walls reach where wider goes the hollow, and greater grows the breach. Pass over the shattered earth and attain the broken wall whose burnt and barren brick whose charred stones reveal the open months of wounds that no mending shall ever mend and nor healing ever heal. This is Bialik writing about Kishinev. My God. He's writing about Gaza. And his great great granddaughter, whoever she is, cheers it on. That's the world that we're living in.
- [60:13]
Chris Hedges
Let's first of all Hear it for.
- [60:15]
Gabor Mate
Chris and Dr. Mate.
- [60:29]
Chris Hedges
We would like to take some questions now from the audience.
- [60:31]
Gabor Mate
So if you have any questions, please.
- [60:33]
Chris Hedges
Please feel free to line up. We have microphones here and here. We'll try to get through as many as we can. So please be mindful of the time you are taking and try to ask your question as soon as possible so we can start over here with this first question. Hello, first and foremost, thank you so much, both of you, for speaking with us today. It's an honor to be here. I am Palestinian American, and my voice is shaky because I lived under Israeli occupation and apartheid and witnessed horrific things as a child, things no child should ever have to witness and see with their own eyes, including watching bombs being dropped on homes, knowing that there's children and families inside of those homes. And so being a survivor of Israeli occupation and apartheid and coming back to live in the United States, there was a lot of trauma that was stored into my nervous system. And what was left with me was a lot of survivor's guilt. And, of course, over the last five years, I've spent it doing a lot of healing. And, of course, a lot of your work, Dr. Gabor, has been just immensely helpful. And while I've been healing my nervous system, that survivor's guilt remains. And so the question is, is how do we break that generational trauma with our children?
- [62:11]
Gabor Mate
All right, I got it.
- [62:12]
Chris Hedges
Yeah. While continuing to.
- [62:13]
Gabor Mate
Don't go away.
- [62:14]
Chris Hedges
Yeah, okay.
- [62:16]
Gabor Mate
Thanks for the question.
- [62:17]
Chris Hedges
Sure.
- [62:18]
Gabor Mate
Let me ask you a question. I survived the Holocaust. My grandparents died. Tell me that I'm guilty. Tell me that I'm guilty.
- [62:33]
Chris Hedges
You're guilty.
- [62:35]
Gabor Mate
Do you believe that?
- [62:36]
Chris Hedges
Of course not.
- [62:40]
Gabor Mate
Then why do you believe it about yourself?
- [62:43]
Chris Hedges
That's a good question.
- [62:44]
Gabor Mate
Think about that one. Either I'm guilty, in which case we both are, or neither of us is. But it can't be the fact that you're guilty and I'm not. It's one or the other. Which one would you like to choose?
- [63:02]
Chris Hedges
Yeah, thank you.
- [63:05]
Gabor Mate
Okay. Yeah, thanks.
- [63:07]
Chris Hedges
Thank you.
- [63:07]
Gabor Mate
Thank you.
- [63:17]
Chris Hedges
We can take the next question on this side to the left. Hello. My name's Hassan. Over here in the corner. I became a father in November, just after October 2023. Since then, I have seen dead children, starving children, mutilated families every day while I feed and dress my son. And I feel a lot of hatred. We talked about hatred today. I feel a lot of hatred. But I also, maybe because of some despair, I feel maybe delusional hope. That delusional hope takes the shape of changing Geopolitics. I hope for the rise of the Global South. I almost feel like it can't be any worse than what we're experiencing now. It can only be better. I feel that they probably have the moral authority on their side. I'd like to get your opinion on how much of this is accurate and how much of it is maybe just, you know, hope. Do you feel that the world from a non Western led order would be better?
- [64:35]
Gabor Mate
Yes.
- [64:48]
Chris Hedges
The Global south endured its own holocausts which are not acknowledged by the perpetrators. The Herero, the Namaqua, the Armenians.
- [65:04]
Gabor Mate
The.
- [65:04]
Chris Hedges
1943 Bengal famine in which 3 million Hindus died.
- [65:12]
Gabor Mate
Do you want to mention what Churchill said about.
- [65:14]
Chris Hedges
Yes, he said obesely people who have a beastly religion. Winston Churchill was the prime minister at the time. And of course Native Americans and African Americans have suffered Holocaust. But the West. And Ami Cesare, in his book Discourse on Colonialism, said the reason the Holocaust resonated in the west is because it was done against white people what had been done against the coolies in India and Africans and Indians and the global South. I don't think it's any accident that Yemen, courageous Yemen, has fought because we forget the mass starvation, the epidemics. There was a siege on Yemen, of course. The United States is now again bombing Yemen daily. We were bombing Yemen by proxy through Saudi Arabia. They understand very well not only what's happening to the Palestinians, but they understand who we are because of their own experience. And Pankaj Mishra just wrote a very good book, the World After Gaza, I think it's called. Right. He's brilliant, brilliant scholar. His book Age of Anger is also brilliant. But he makes this point and I think we are seeing a move, you know, a kind of division that can't be bridged. I've been in the Middle east quite a bit since the genocide began. This will be my third trip to Egypt. I was in the west bank last summer. Jordan. I've been in Qatar twice doing broadcasting for Al Jazeera, both in Arabic and English. I. I do think that we are seeing the rise of the global south assert itself at the same time. If you haven't figured it out yet, Trump and all his grifters and yahoos and Christian fascists are doing a pretty good job of imploding the American empire. They're going to take a lot of people down with them, but that's what they're doing. So, yes, we are entering a world where the kind of hegemony of both Europe and the United States is no longer enforceable. And I don't know how after this genocide, any figure from the uk, from Germany, from the United States is going to be able to stand up and talk about American virtue or the rule of law. I think we've been exposed for who we are.
- [68:16]
Gabor Mate
You might recall many of you that famous quip of Mahad, of Gandhi, who was asked what he thinks of Western civilization, and he said, I think it would be a good idea. Okay, thank you.
- [68:36]
Chris Hedges
We can go here for our next question.
- [68:38]
Gabor Mate
Stage right.
- [68:39]
Chris Hedges
My name is Nood and I'm a retired Christian minister.
- [68:47]
Gabor Mate
I'm not hearing you. Sorry.
- [68:54]
Chris Hedges
My name is Nozomi Ikuda and I'm a retired minister. And it's embarrassing to even say that these days. Really, most of the people I work with are secular or, you know, from a variety of religions. But. And I have a lot of respect for the Kairos Palestine statement, but I really feel like we're in such a crisis, it's maybe time for another Kairos document. And so I'm just putting that out there for people of incredible moral and intellectual leadership like you to maybe ponder that idea. And anyway, thank you both so much for all of your work.
- [69:36]
Gabor Mate
What kind of document?
- [69:39]
Chris Hedges
You can explain it. Well, back During World War II, the Bonhoeffer and those folks wrote a document about standing up to Hitler as part of their faith. In 1985, South Africa, there was a document about apartheid. 1992, there was one in the US about the invasion of Christopher Columbus. There's also one about Palestine. There's one from the Americas also. But we're in such a fascist moment, I mean, overtly fascist moment, that to me, it feels much more like, I mean, I didn't live through the Third Reich. I mean, I was a baby during McCarthy. But it feels to me much more like, you know, Hitler than it does McCarthy. Anyway, I just think we're in a very devastating moment. This fascist movement uses the veneer of the Christian faith. Yes, they're heretics. Of course they're not Christians. Jesus didn't come to make us rich. And you didn't have to suffer through three years of Harvard Divinity School as I did to figure that one out. No, I wrote a book, American the Christian Right and the War in America, for which I took a lot of heat for. And I think the liberal church failed by not calling these people out for who they were in the name of tolerance, which is a word Martin Luther King never used. It was our job, and we gave them a kind of religious credibility that they should not have. My Great mentor at Harvard, James Luther Adams was at the University of Heidelberg in 19 was 80 when I had him 35 and 36 he dropped out. He joined Niemoller in the Confessing underground Confessing church. But he, in the 80s when I was in school, likened these figures to the so called German Christian church which was a Nazi creation. And if you look at the ideological roots of Trump is brainless. I mean they give him the sharpie and you know, they put it in front of him and he signs it, but the people behind them are not, they know very well what they're doing. And if you look at the ideological roots, the two major figures are Rusas Rushdouni who was a Nazi sympathizer, but the Nazi legalist Carl Schmidt. And once you explore where these people are coming from, these are not tangential relationships with fascists, but they're rooted in fascism. But yes, they, and I think it's incumbent upon those of us who come out of the church. I mean statements are good, but you know, we really have to begin to assert ourselves because we didn't stand up when we should have. Hi, I just returned from Gaza two weeks ago as a humanitarian worker and the. So just yesterday the United Nations Humanitarian country team put out the statement of rejecting the plan for Israeli military administered aid. So my question is what does morality and solidarity look like for these humanitarian organizations or institutions? And what then should regular people like us do who still want to help humans living in Gaza from your perspectives?
- [73:47]
Gabor Mate
You know, I really wonder about that myself because like even an organization like Middle East Children's alliance for whom this benefit is being held tonight, if there is Israelis really decide that they're going to be the spigot that's either open or closed for humanitarian aid, food, medicine to get into Gaza. How's anybody going to force it through when the rest of the world allows them to maintain that control? So I don't know. I wish I knew the answer to that. When we donate money, I mean, I'm not trying this to discourage anybody, on the contrary. But in this world that we're heading into, how we can even ensure that the pittance that we can put together will even get through. Do you have any answer to that, Chris?
- [74:42]
Chris Hedges
Well, clearly they want to use aid as a weapon. And it reminds me of Mark Edelman's wife. Alina Margolis was also a doctor and a founder of Med Saint Dumont. She lived in my apartment when she worked in the refugee camps. She was also in the Warsaw Ghetto, but Marek. And there's a wonderful book by Hannah Kroll called Shielding the Flame where she interviews Marek about all of these moral dilemmas. And he talks about when you reach a level of starvation, how the Nazis would entice people onto the trains by giving them, I think it was three loaves of bread and I think marmalade. And even though people, you know, I suppose on an intellectual level knew. But if you reduce people to a level of starvation and you wield the sources of food, then food itself becomes a weapon, which is precisely what the Israelis are attempting to do. The militarization of aid is not an Israeli invention, by the way. Usaid, let's not sugarcoat what that was, was very much weaponized in the interests of large corporations in the American empire. But this is just a disastrous move because it will just become another weapon in Israel's arsenal to manipulate and I fear, push the Palestinians probably into the northern Sinai.
- [76:17]
Gabor Mate
Yeah, I think we just keep pushing and talking and advocating and donating and have some trust that they can't do everything that they want to do. Thank you.
- [76:33]
Chris Hedges
We can come over here for our next question.
- [76:35]
Nick Lapara
Hi, my name is Edmond Willella.
- [76:39]
Chris Hedges
I wanted to ask Chris, I mean, you're an award winning journalist and I.
- [76:42]
Nick Lapara
Want to get your thoughts and thank you for bringing up. Okay, thanks. My name is Edmond Bilella and I want to thank you both and it is an honor to be here and to be in the presence of all of you. I'm blessed by being here. Chris, I want your thoughts.
- [77:06]
Chris Hedges
You know, as an award winning journalist.
- [77:08]
Nick Lapara
How do we break through the bubble? I mean it's. And thank you for bringing up auto defeat of the mind in one of your lectures because there's this cacophony of propaganda and of misinformation. And I look at my colleagues, I'm in social work and you know, they completely buy what they're told.
- [77:23]
Chris Hedges
And I'm not sure I blame them.
- [77:25]
Nick Lapara
Because if you start with those premises, you're going to get to those conclusions. And I'm not really sure how do we somehow try to introduce a counter discourse? I mean, I'm taking major heat. I'm considered an anti Semite for being here. I mean, I mention your books and like people say, I never thought you'd be an anti Semite and I'm cleaning up the language. So, you know, if I post that, I'm here on Facebook, I don't know what will happen.
- [77:49]
Chris Hedges
People's heads will explode.
- [77:50]
Nick Lapara
But so your thoughts on how to break through, how do you create a counter Discourse.
- [77:54]
Chris Hedges
Well, there is a counter discourse. One of the. I hope you all know Aaron's great work. But of course, the mainstream has made war on it. So you have figures like myself, Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald. We were all mainstream, but we were pushed out. We didn't, because we wouldn't sell out. And now these large media platforms, you know, are meta, and they use all sorts of algorithms, demonetizing every way they can. But I think that the reason of that ferocity is that most people understand, and you even know that from the opinion polls. And Gabor mentioned, you know, the New York Times, several examples, they know they're bankrupt. And I mean, look at the. You know, the New York Times is now running story after story, you know, in surprise about what's happening when they spent all of this time demonizing the student movements, all of the protests. And it wasn't, you know, I was angry just because journalistically it was completely untrue. I was at the Columbia. I was at Princeton. You know, on Friday nights, they would put out a tarpon. The Muslim Muslims would have their prayers and they'd have Shabbat on the same tarp. This is the world we want to create. And so they led with this lie and repeated it over and over, which, of course became the fertilizer for the attacks that are now taking place. So, you know, all we can do. And there are journalists out there that do it. We were just talking before we came on here about my great friend Robert Fisk, 44 years, the Middle East. His book the Great War for Civilization remains, I think, the best book on the modern Middle East. You just have to keep fighting back. Joseph Roth, the great Austrian journalist who saw the Nazis for what they were in the 20s and then was completely banned and blacklisted and driven from the country. He once said, I feel like a mouse squeaking against an avalanche, but squeak we must. And there are people that will hear it. But you're right, a lot of people won't, because the truth is always hard to hear. But they're out there, and we don't need that many. You know, we just need a few more people like we have here tonight, and we can create a lot of problems for them.
- [80:41]
Gabor Mate
There are a couple of things I want to add is we have to be wise to their tricks. Now, for years, this is before October 7th, whenever the new York Times mentioned Hamas, it would de rigueur add, Hamas is an organization that denies the right of Israel to exist. Okay, now, first of all, that wasn't even Quite true. But even insofar as it was when they mentioned the Likud, in whose constitution it's forbidden to think about a non Jewish state between the river and the sea, they would never say Likud is an organization who denies the right of the Palestinian state to exist. But we just take it for granted. Even now when they report the number of Palestinian dead, they say according to the Hamas run Gaza Ministry of Health. They never say according to the Trump run American Ministry of Health or the. Or the Likud run Israeli Ministry of Health. These little tricks that get under our skin without even us noticing it. That's the first point. Second point is I read the biography or the memoirs of Albert Speer. Speer was an interesting character. He was Hitler's architect and friend and also his economic master. And he spent 20 years in Spandau Jail as a war criminal after the Nuremberg trials. And Speer, whether genuinely or disingenuously, but he writes the following. He said, everybody's saying, everybody's asking, what did you know? What did you know? But he said, that's the wrong question. He says the right question is not what did you know? But what you could have known if you wanted to. And he describes two incidents when Muntz, he was in one of these factories of Krupp or Tyson, one of these German megacorporations who still exist, where they used slave laborers. And he ran into some of these slave laborers and he asked them, would you rather be here or in the camps? And they looked at them with absolute horror. And Shabir said, I never asked them why. And he describes another incident where some German Wehrmacht general is talking to Speer. And Speer says, I'd like to go see what's happening in the east sometime. And the general said, what if you do, don't go to the East. And Shabir said, I never asked why. But the difference is that there was no alternative media. There was no YouTube TikTok, there was no Chris Hedges. There was no Gwen Greenwald. There was no Mattibi, There was no Aaron Mate. There was no Amy Goodman. There was just the mainstream media. Now there are, at least for now, all these alternative sources. People have a lot less excuse not to know now than they ever did in Nazi Germany.
- [84:27]
Chris Hedges
I know that we can listen to.
- [84:29]
Gabor Mate
You both speak all night, me personally, but I think we only have time for one more question.
- [84:33]
Chris Hedges
So we'll go over here to the left of the stage. Thank you. My name is Maryam Al Rashid. I'm an international law lawyer in New.
- [84:42]
Gabor Mate
York, here, Manhattan, immediately in October of 2023. When after October 7th, right here.
- [84:51]
Chris Hedges
And thank you.
- [84:52]
Gabor Mate
It feels very small to say to both of you for being here.
- [84:55]
Chris Hedges
That's more gratitude than anything else.
- [84:59]
Gabor Mate
I spoke up immediately.
- [85:01]
Chris Hedges
This is my area of law and specialty in October of 2023 in Manhattan. So you can imagine last 18 months.
- [85:09]
Nick Lapara
How great that's been in big law.
- [85:12]
Gabor Mate
A great deal of fun.
- [85:13]
Chris Hedges
What I found most frustrating.
- [85:15]
Nick Lapara
I'd like to hear both of your.
- [85:16]
Chris Hedges
Views on this, on how people in the audience and those who are live streaming and hearing this or anyone else who watches. I traveled to a Gulf state not.
- [85:31]
Nick Lapara
Very long after, less than a year.
- [85:33]
Gabor Mate
After October 7th, and let's just say.
- [85:39]
Nick Lapara
Well within, well before that, the genocide had began.
- [85:45]
Gabor Mate
It was genocide.
- [85:48]
Nick Lapara
And all I got were thank yous.
- [85:49]
Chris Hedges
Thank you.
- [85:50]
Nick Lapara
Wow.
- [85:51]
Chris Hedges
In Manhattan, speaking up. Oh my goodness, thank you so much. You must chapeau all this nonsense.
- [85:57]
Gabor Mate
It frustrated me.
- [85:58]
Chris Hedges
I wanted to say, don't thank me, speak up. So I'm curious knowing especially Mr. Hedges, what you went through at the New.
- [86:07]
Nick Lapara
York Times and the corporate betrayal that.
- [86:12]
Chris Hedges
Happens, how you encourage people to not.
- [86:18]
Nick Lapara
Empower, but for them to feel in.
- [86:22]
Chris Hedges
As a verb, in their power to speak up with others as more voices.
- [86:27]
Nick Lapara
Means more power and less of the.
- [86:31]
Chris Hedges
Bullying on the other side. That's where I found it most frustrating. I'd like to hear from both of you how you would advise others who are scared to speak to start mobilizing even more and more because now is.
- [86:43]
Gabor Mate
The time to do that. You know, I'll let Chris answer that in more detail. But I don't encourage anybody to do anything. And I'll tell you why not. They can't fire me. I don't have a job. I can say whatever I want. But I know physicians at universities in Canada, in the U.S. who've lost their jobs. I can't tell anybody to jeopardize your job. And that's their call. I tell them to follow their conscience and to consider their situation. But I'm in no position to tell somebody else who faces punishments and sanctions that I don't face as to what they should do with their lives. And Chris and I were just talking tonight about a common, very courageous physician friend of ours who's under. She's being, she's being threatened with 10 year suspension. She's a wonderful physician, totally committed, and she's facing the end of her career.
- [87:47]
Chris Hedges
But they're threatening. This is Rupa Mara. They're threatening to revoke her medical license.
- [87:51]
Gabor Mate
That's Right. So the answer is, I don't tell people what to do. I don't know how you would answer that one.
- [88:00]
Chris Hedges
I think that's right. I think that. I mean, I did. I have been kind of pushed out of one institution after another. But I think it again goes back to the fact that my whole worldview, and I'm not alone in this room comes is grounded in my religious tradition. So I grew up with a father. He was a World War II veteran. He had been in North Africa in the war, came back from the war a pacifist, became a minister, was very involved in the anti war movement and the civil rights movement and the gay rights movement in the 1970s. My uncle was gay. My father had an understanding of the pain of. Of being a gay man in America and especially the cruelty of the church. And I think this got back to the first question. I don't think you can teach morality. I think that because morality, I think, is driven. And again, to your point about intellect, it's driven by empathy. When you read the Plague by Camus, the doctor talks about a nights of endless defeats. But he can overcome that empathy. And coming out of a religious tradition, then you understand that these institutions, as the theologian Paul Tillich said, are inherently demonic and they will crush you. I mean, empire almost always wins. I mean, that's what history shows us. And yet you have these figures. I was in Salvador with Oscar Romero. So my father was finally told to stop speaking out about equal rights for the GBLT community. And instead he organized an Easter service for the GBLT community in the city of Syracuse, where his church was. And he came and got me. And he said, well, this will probably be the last time you ever hear me preach. And he said, marriage is a sacrament. It's not a reward for being a heterosexual. And any church that doesn't honor the sacrament of marriage does not deserve to call itself Christian. And they did fire him. Well, that was profoundly affected me. And when I was called into the New York Times for denouncing the invasion of Iraq, I'd been given a written reprimand. And I'm not going to pretend it was easy. It wasn't. I mean, not only would I have been finished, but I was now blacklisted. I mean, I was. No journalistic enterprise was going to hire me. But when I sat in that office, I realized I had a choice, and that was to pay fealty to my career. But to do so would be to betray my father. And I couldn't do that. And I remember walking out of the New York Times and I think articulating for the first time what it was my father had given me. And that was freedom. I did not need the imprint tour of the New York Times to tell me who I was. I knew who I was. I was my father's son.
- [91:17]
Nick Lapara
Friends, thanks for joining me today to find links for everything mentioned in today's conversation and to keep up with all things let's Give a damn, visit letsgivadam.com Please share this episode with a friend. Please leave us a five star rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. And please show up next week. We have many more incredible conversations coming your way. You can reach out anytime and for any reason@hellosgivadam.com keep giving a damn my friends. I love you all. Bye for now.