The Chris Hedges Report Podcast

There is growing evidence that in the chaotic fighting that took place once Hamas militants entered Israel on October 7, the Israeli military decided to target not only Hamas fighters, but the Israeli captives with them.  Tuval Escapa, a member of the security team for Kibbutz Be’eri, told the Israeli press, he set up a hotline to coordinate between kibbutz residents and the Israeli army.  Escapa...

Text Originally Published Nov. 11, 2023 The Executioner’s Song - by Mr. Fish DOHA, Qatar: I am in the studio of Al Jazeera’s Arabic service watching a live feed from Gaza City. The Al Jazeera reporter in northern Gaza, because of the intense Israeli shelling, was forced to evacuate to southern Gaza. He left his camera behind. He trained it on Al-Shifa hospital, Gaza’s largest medical complex. It i...

Democratic Reps. Cori Bush, Rashida Tlaib, André Carson, Summer Lee, and Delia Ramirez  introduced  a “Ceasefire Now” resolution on October 16th to halt the siege on Gaza. The resolution calls on the Biden administration to demand an end to the Israeli attacks and send humanitarian aid to Gaza. Eight other Democrats signed on as original co-sponsors, and an additional five have since sponsored the...

This article is read by Eunice Wong , a Juilliard-trained actor, featured on Audible's list of Best Women Narrators . Her work is on the annual Best Audiobooks lists of the New York Times, Audible, AudioFile, & Library Journal. www.eunicewong.actor Text originally published Oct. 8 Children of Gaza - by Mr. Fish Dear child. It is past midnight. I am flying at hundreds of miles an hour in the darkne...

Narrated by Eunice Wong Text originally published Nov. 3, 2023 Bad Moon Rising - by Mr. Fish I covered the birth of Jewish fascism in Israel. I reported on the extremist Meir Kahane , who was barred from running for office and whose Kach Party was outlawed in 1994 and declared a terrorist organization by Israel and the United States. I attended political rallies held by Benjamin Netanyahu, who rec...

As a member of the US Congress for 16 years, Dennis Kucinich gave over 500 speeches warning about the consequences of US wars against Afghanistan, the Balkans, Iraq, Iran, Libya and Syria. He also spoke out for the imperative of peace in the Middle East, on behalf of Israelis and the Palestinians.  He met with leaders of many countries who were grappling to keep their nations out of conflict and c...

Narrated by Eunice Wong Text originally published Oct. 28, 2023 A Bird in the Hand - by Mr. Fish During the siege in Sarajevo, when I was reporting for The New York Times, we never endured the level of saturation bombing and near total blockage of food, water, fuel and medicine that Israel has imposed on Gaza. We never endured hundreds of dead and wounded a day. We never endured the complicity of...

Narrated by Eunice Wong Text Originally published Oct. 22, 2023 Made in Israel - by Mr. Fish Israel, with the backing of its U.S. and European allies, is preparing to launch not only a scorched earth campaign in Gaza but the worst ethnic cleansing since the wars in the former Yugoslavia. The goal is to drive tens, most probably hundreds of thousands of Palestinians over the southern border at Rafa...

Narrated by Eunice Wong Originally published Oct 18, 2023 Liar Liar - by Mr. Fish Israel was founded on lies. The lie that Palestinian land was largely unoccupied. The lie that 750,000 Palestinians fled their homes and villages during their ethnic cleansing by Zionist militias in 1948 because they were told to do so by Arab leaders. The lie that it was Arab armies that started the 1948 war that sa...

On October 7 Hamas fighters broke through the security barrier separating Gaza from Israel. They attacked army outposts, villages, an outdoor concert venue and Kibutzim. Some 1,300 Israelis, many of them civilians, were killed. Some 150 Israelis, in cluding women, children and the elderly, were taken as hostages and transported back to Gaza.  Israel says 1,500 Hamas militants, most young men who m...

Narrated by Eunice Wong Post originally published Oct. 14, 2023 This Way for the Genocide, Ladies and Gentlemen - by Mr. Fish I have been in urban warfare in El Salvador, Iraq, Gaza, Bosnia and Kosovo. Once you fight street by street, apartment block by apartment block, there is only one rule — kill anything that moves. The talk of safe zones, the reassurances of protecting civilians, the promises...

Stephanie Gibaud in June 2008 was ordered by one of her managers at the UBS Bank in Paris to destroy all her computer files that related to customers with offshore accounts in Switzerland. The order came in the wake of the 2007 American banker Bradley Birkenfeld’s disclosure of client information to the U.S. Department of Justice that suggested the bank was facilitating massive tax evasion schemes...

Narrated by Eunice Wong Text originally published Oct. 8, 2023 Out of Sight, Out of Mind - by Mr. Fish The indiscriminate shootings of Israelis by Hamas and other Palestinian resistance organizations, the kidnapping of civilians, the barrage of rockets into Israel, drone attacks on a variety of targets from tanks to automated machine gun nests, are the familiar language of the Israeli occupier. Is...

Narrated by Eunice Wong Text Originally published Oct. 1, 2023 Protest (Assemby Required) - by Mr. Fish There was a decade of popular uprisings from 2010 until the global pandemic in 2020. These uprisings shook the foundations of the global order. They denounced corporate domination, austerity cuts and demanded economic justice and civil rights. There were nationwide protests in the United States...

"I was first introduced to the idea of political poetry on October 18, 1970, about midnight, in an all-night Harvard Square corner bookstore,” Doug Rawlings writes.  “A few months before that encounter I had returned from the war in Viet Nam.  To say that I was confused and angry is an understatement.  I was also somewhat lost.  Then on that fateful night I found this wonderful collection of poems...

John F. Kennedy’s last battle, cut short by his assassination, was the effort to build a sustainable peace with the Soviet Union. Jeffrey Sachs, professor of economics at Columbia University, in his new book “To Move the World” chronicles the campaign by Kennedy from October 1962 to September 1963 to curb the arms race and build ties with his Soviet counterpart, Nikita Khrushchev. Sachs looks at t...

Narrated by Eunice Wong Text originally posted Sept. 16, 2023 Business is Booming - by Mr. Fish “We came, we saw, he died,” Hillary Clinton famously quipped when Muammar Gaddafi, after seven months of U.S. and NATO bombing, was overthrown in 2011 and killed by a mob who sodomized him with a bayonet. But Gaddafi would not be the only one to die.  Libya, once the most prosperous and one of the most...

The United States, like many industrialized countries, has undergone a corporate coup d’état in slow motion, cementing into place a system of control the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin calls inverted totalitarianism. Inverted totalitarianism retains the institutions, symbols, iconography, and language of the old capitalist democracy, but internally corporations have seized all the levers of p...

Narrated by Eunice Wong Test Originally Published Sept. 10, 2023 The Enlightenment - by Mr. Fish I am standing in a classroom in a maximum security prison. It is the first class of the semester. I am facing 20 students. They have spent years, sometimes decades, incarcerated. They come from some of the poorest cities and communities in the country. Most of them are people of color.  During the next...

Craig Murray, the former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan, was removed from his post after he made public the widespread use of torture by the Uzbek government and the CIA. He has since become one of Britain’s most important human rights campaigners, a fierce advocate for Julian Assange and a supporter of Scottish independence. His coverage of the trial of former Scottish First Minister Alex Salmo...

Narrated by Eunice Wong Text originally published Sept. 3, 2023 Welcome In - by Mr. Fish Corporate capitalism, defined by the cult of the self and the ruthless exploitation of the natural world and all forms of life for profit, thrives on the fostering of chronic psychological and physical disorders. The diseases and pathologies of despair — alienation, high blood pressure, diabetes, anxiety, depr...

Many Americans are aware of the campaigns of voter suppression, the difficulties in registering to vote, how casting a ballot can often be cumbersome and time consuming as well as the flawed mechanisms used to count votes. Hundreds of laws have been passed by state legislatures to address these issues following the debacle that marked the 2000 presidential election. The absurdity of the Electoral...

There are few intellectuals who have been as attacked, censored and blacklisted as long and as ruthlessly as the Middle Eastern scholar Norman Finkelstein. He has been hounded out of universities, denied speaking engagements, had his books and scholarship either ignored or dismissed. It is surprising, perhaps, that Professor Finkelstein’s latest book is a savage attack on identity politics. He lik...

The Crucifixion of Julian Assange - by Mr. Fish I dedicate this sermon to my mentor at Harvard Divinity School, Bishop Krister Stendhal . Prophets are notoriously difficult people. They are not saints. They are people of agony, as Rabbi Abraham Heschel writes, whose “life and soul are at stake.” The prophet is moved by human anguish. Prophets are not soothsayers. They do not divine the future. Inj...

There is scant evidence that William Shakespeare authored the plays and sonnets attributed to him. But questioning the authorship is an unacceptable heresy among Shakespearean scholars who liken it to believing the moon landing was faked. These scholars have built their academic careers on the foundations of the Shakespearean myth, writing long biographies that are almost all based on hypothesis a...