The Chris Hedges Report Podcast

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Text originally published Feb. 18, 2024 Assange - by Mr. Fish LONDON — If Julian Assange is denied permission to appeal his extradition to the United States before a panel of two judges at the High Court in London this week, he will have no recourse left within the British legal system. His lawyers can ask the European Court of Human Rights ( ECtHR ) for a stay of execution under Rule 39, which is...

The media landscape in the U.S. is collapsing as journalism outlets at the national, state and local levels close or gut staff. One-third of the country’s newspapers have shut down and two-thirds of its newspaper journalists have lost jobs since 2005. An average of 2.5 newspapers closed each week in 2023, compared to two a week in 2022. The decimation of local news outlets is even worse, where pap...

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The Israeli attacks on Gaza has included systematic attacks on Gaza’s cultural and educational institutions. Israel has damaged or destroyed all 12 of Gaza’s universities. Some 280 government schools and 65 UNRWA-run schools have also been destroyed or damaged, often resulting in dozens of fatalities. About 133 remaining schools are used to shelter those displaced by the assault. More than 85 perc...

Text originally posted Feb 8, 2024 Let Them Eat Dirt - by Mr. Fish There was never any possibility that the Israeli government would agree to a pause in the fighting proposed by Secretary of State Antony Blinken, much less a ceasefire. Israel is on the verge of delivering the coup de grâce in its war on Palestinians in Gaza – mass starvation. When Israeli leaders use the term “absolute victory,” t...

Time and time again, the human rights attorney Noura Erakat writes, we see evidence of the law’s assumed insignificance in the dispossession of Palestinians. Great Britain remained committed to establishing a Jewish national homeland in Palestine despite its legal duties as the Mandatory Power to shepherd local Arab peoples to independence. The Permanent Mandates Commission remained committed to t...

Text Originally posted Jan. 26, 2024 Red Ink - by Mr. Fish The International Court of Justice (ICJ) refused to implement the most crucial demand made by South African jurists: “the State of Israel shall immediately suspend its military operations in and against Gaza.” But at the same time, it delivered a devastating blow to the foundational myth of Israel. Israel, which paints itself as eternally...

Craig Mokhiber, director of the New York office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights resigned on October 31, stating that “once again we are seeing a genocide unfolding before our eyes and the organization we serve appears powerless to stop it.” He noted that the UN had failed to prevent previous genocides against the Tutsis in Rwanda, Muslims in Bosnia, the Yazidi in Iraqi Kur...

Text Originally published Jan 21, 2024 Blood Brothers - by Mr. Fish Joe Biden’s inner circle of strategists for the Middle East — Antony Blinken, Jake Sullivan and Brett McGurk — have little understanding of the Muslim world and a deep animus towards Islamic resistance movements. They see Europe, the United States and Israel as involved in a clash of civilizations between the enlightened West and...

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The cartoonist Joe Sacco invented nonfiction graphic journalism, marrying rigorous and detailed reporting with illustrations that leap off the page and give his stories a texture, depth and power that is hard for most writers to match. He pioneered this work with nine issues on the Palestinians living under Israeli occupation from 1993 to 1995. The nine comics, later published as the book Palestin...

The Israeli army, known as the Israel Defense Forces or IDF, is integral to understanding Israeli society. Nearly all Israelis do three years of military service. Most men continue to serve in the reserves until middle age. Its generals often retire to occupy senior positions in government an industry. The dominance of the military in Israeli society helps explains why war, militaristic nationalis...

“Religious nationalism is to religion what National Socialism was to socialism,” warned Leibowitz, who died in 1994. He understood that the blind veneration of the military, especially after the 1967 war that captured the West Bank and East Jerusalem, was dangerous and would lead to the ultimate destruction of democracy. “Our situation will deteriorate to that of a second Vietnam, to a war in cons...

Text Originally Published Dec 29, 2023 Never Again and Again and Again - by Mr. Fish Israel’s lebensraum master plan for Gaza, borrowed from the Nazi’s depopulation of Jewish ghettos , is clear. Destroy infrastructure, medical facilities and sanitation, including access to clean water. Block shipments of food and fuel. Unleash indiscriminate industrial violence to kill and wound hundreds a day. Le...

Text Originally posted Dec 17, 2023 Birth of a New Nation - by Mr. Fish Israel will appear triumphant after it finishes its genocidal campaign in Gaza and the West Bank . Backed by the United States, it will achieve its demented goal. Its murderous rampages and genocidal violence will exterminate or ethnically cleanse Palestinians. Its dream of a state exclusively for Jews, with any Palestinians w...

Few individuals did more to shape modern cinema than the actor, director and producer Charlie Chaplin. One of the greatest of all comic mimes he also pioneered cinematic techniques and story-telling. His films, with his iconic role as the beleaguered little tramp with baggy trousers, moustache, cane and bowler hat, were not only comic masterpieces, but unflinching looks at poverty, unemployment, c...

Text originally published Dec 23, 2023 Bearing Witness - Mr. Fish Writing and photographing in wartime are acts of resistance, acts of faith. They affirm the belief that one day - a day the writers, journalists and photographers may never see - the words and images will evoke empathy, understanding, outrage and provide wisdom. They chronicle not only the facts, although facts are important, but th...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit chrishedges.substack.com No single individual did more to shape modern cinema than the actor, director and producer Charlie Chaplin. One of the greatest of all comic mimes he also pioneered cinematic techniques and story-telling. His films, with his iconic role as the beleaguered little tramp with baggy trousers, moustache, cane and bow...

Originally posted on Dec 8, 2023 Universal Misery - by Mr. Fish I knew Dr. Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi, the co-founder of Hamas, along with Sheikh Ahmed Ismail Yassin. Al-Rantisi’s family were expelled to the Gaza Strip by Zionist militias from historic Palestine during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. He did not fit the demonized image of a Hamas leader. He was a soft spoken, articulate and highly educated p...

Fifty years ago, the United States embarked on a path of mass incarceration that has led to a staggering increase in the prison population. Today, almost 2 million individuals – disproportionately Black Americans – are incarcerated in our nation’s prisons and jails. The prison population has grown 500% since 1973, the year America began to sharply increase its prison population. The social, moral,...

The Palestinians are human laboratory rats to the Israeli military, intelligence services and arms and technology industries. Israel’s drones, surveillance technology — including spyware, facial recognition software and biometric gathering infrastructure — along with  smart fences , experimental bombs and AI-controlled machine guns, are tried out on the captive population in Gaza, often with letha...

The conflict between the Palestinians and Israel, which has reached a terrifying crescendo with the savage obliteration of Gaza, is the outcome of a 100-year-old colonial occupation by Jewish Zionists in Israel backed by major imperial powers, starting with the British and a century later with the United States. This century-long assault by Israel has one objective – to force an indigenous people...

Trucks circling the campuses of Columbia University and Harvard University publicly list the names and show the faces of students who signed a letter calling on the university to cut ties with Israel. These trucks are now being parked in front of students’ homes. Another truck is at the University of Pennsylvania calling on university president Liz Magill to resign, following complaints the univer...

Text originally published Nov 12, 2023 Blood Meal - by Mr. Fish CAIRO, Egypt: Bassel al-Araj, a Palestinian resistance leader, shortly before Israel’s 2014 invasion of Gaza, laid down the fundamental rules for warfare against Israel.  The rules by al-Araj, not a member of Hamas, provide the Palestinian lens for the incursion by Israeli forces in Gaza. While Israel’s superior firepower — its air fo...