| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
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It's a huge benefit. | |
| I hope that all these streaming services carry C-SPAN as well because it's an important service to the American people. | ||
| I'm actually thrilled that this time in Washington Journal, I'm getting a lot of really substantive questions from across the political aisle. | ||
| Our country would be a better place if every American just watched one hour a week. | ||
| They could pick one, two, or three. | ||
| Just one hour a week, and we'd all be a much better country. | ||
| So thank you for your service. | ||
| Coming up, Zatayo Editor-in-Chief Mehdi Hassan's speech on President Trump's approach to Israel and the Palestinian territories. | ||
| While accepting an award from the Arab Center for his work in journalism, he talked about the President's Israel-Hamas peace agreement and the future of Palestinians. | ||
| This is just under 20 minutes. | ||
| At this point, I would like to basically move to the most important part of being here to honor a special guest of honor and for the first time in our history on the 10th anniversary, offer our ACW Excellence Award that is being launched this year for the first time. | ||
| The ACW Excellence Award will be presented from now on annually to individuals who embody the values of Arab Center and demonstrate excellence in one of several categories related to advancing academic scholarships, promoting human rights and democracy, challenging the mainstream ideas, and elevating justice-based policy and research focusing on the Middle East and North Africa. | ||
| This year's honoree and recipient of the inaugural ACW Excellence Award needs no introduction anywhere on this planet, if I might add that. | ||
| My staff didn't put that in there, but I will add it. | ||
| He is the ultimate debater, my favorite debater in the history of mankind. | ||
| Mehdi Hassan is the founder and editor-in-chief. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
| He's the founder and editor-in-chief of Zeteo, a media company dedicated to independent journalism and unfiltered news. | ||
| He hosts head-to-head on Al Jazeera English, writes as a columnist for The Guardian, and hosts Mehdi Unfiltered on Zetayu. | ||
| Previously, as most of you know, he hosted the Mehdi Hassan show on MSNBC, was a senior contributor at The Intercept, presented the Al Jazeera program up front, and served as a political director at the Huntington Post, UK. | ||
| Mehdi is the author of Win Every Argument, and he does, so he speaks from The Art of Debating, Persuading, and Public Speaking, which was published in 2023, and the editor of the Milibands and the Making of a Labor Leader, 2012. | ||
| He received the Services to Media Award at the British Muslim Awards in 2014, was named one of the 100 most influential Britons on X, and is included in the Muslim 500, the world's most influential Muslims. | ||
| He earned a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics from the Christ Church University of Oxford. | ||
| I am indeed honoured to present the 2025 ACW Excellence Award to Mehdi Hassan for his commitment to media excellence and journalistic integrity. | ||
| Mehdi, please. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| Congratulations, Peace Johnson. | ||
| Thank you for that. | ||
| Thank you so much for that kind introduction. | ||
| I wasn't sure if you were going to reach back to my high school transcripts. | ||
| Not sure if I need those out there. | ||
|
unidentified
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I didn't have a copy. | |
| Thank God. | ||
| Good afternoon. | ||
| Asalaamu Alaikum. | ||
| Thank you to the Arab Center DC for the work that you do in this town, one of the hardest towns in the world to do the kind of work that you guys do, to take the kind of stances you take. | ||
| Thank you so much for this award. | ||
| I didn't realize it was the inaugural award. | ||
| No pressure on me and the people who come after me. | ||
| I appreciate this award for journalistic integrity, commitment to media excellence. | ||
| It's not an award I think I deserve. | ||
| And so I do want to dedicate this award today to Anaso Sharif and Hassam Shabbat and Maryam Abu Dhaka and Roshdi Sarraj and Bilal Abdullah. | ||
| All of those very brave, courageous Palestinian journalists who were murdered, murdered by Israel for trying to tell the truth about a genocide. | ||
| A genocide that we are told is now over. | ||
| There is a ceasefire. | ||
| Say thank you to Donald Trump. | ||
| That is what we've been told for the last week or so. | ||
| Even though Palestinians are still being killed almost every single day by the occupying Israeli forces in the Gaza Strip. | ||
| As the saying goes, in the Middle East, a ceasefire means Palestinians cease and Israelis fire. | ||
| For over two years now, Gaza has been a ledger of extremity, a horror show. | ||
| The mass killing of civilians, of children, the systematic destruction of infrastructure, the forced displacement of nearly two million people, the killing and jailing of journalists and doctors and aid workers, the weaponization of hunger, the undermining and ignoring of international law. | ||
| We have witnessed a genocide in real time on our phones, on our screens. | ||
| A genocide as testified to by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch and Bet Salem and Physicians for Human Rights Israel and Doctors Without Borders and the UN Commission of Inquiry and UN Special Rapporteurs and the UN Special Committee and Israeli Holocaust historians, the International Association of Genocide Scholars and even the former deputy director of the Mossad, General Amram Levin. | ||
| It is a genocide, undeniably, and the job of journalists in a time like this is not to moderate our vocabulary or hold our tongues. | ||
| It is to say what is going on accurately, to name the reality we are in. | ||
| When I launched Zateo, a small, stubborn news organization, now growing fast, half a million subscribers, I'm sure everyone in this room. | ||
| When I launched Zateo, I did not have an MBA. | ||
| I had no experience of running a business or running anything. | ||
| I can barely run a bath. | ||
| But I did have a simple mission, to speak freely about the biggest issues in the world right now, to be able to say the G-word, genocide, the F-word, fascism, in a way that our legacy media organizations, our so-called mainstream media outlets, are so afraid, so unwilling to do. | ||
| I called my company Zateo because Zatayo is the ancient Greek word for seeking out, inquiring, searching for the truth, which is what we try and do day in, day out, in a way that the mainstream media has stopped doing. | ||
| At Zatayo, we ask difficult, uncomfortable questions. | ||
| What does accountability look like? | ||
| Why the double standards? | ||
| What about international law? | ||
| Why aren't we hearing from Palestinian voices? | ||
| I founded Zatayo, frankly, because I was tired of being told that the truth can't be told. | ||
| That journalism can't be done any other way. | ||
| That speaking out will cost you. | ||
| Zateo exists to rebut all of that, to counter all of that, to allow my colleagues, our contributors, and I to speak freely and bluntly about what matters, both at home and abroad. | ||
| I know your event today is called Trump and the Middle East, a second term review. | ||
| So let me throw my 50 cents in. | ||
| Let me briefly review it for you. | ||
| I know the panel will have done a much better job before I arrived. | ||
| I'll come back to the Gaza peace plan. | ||
| But more broadly, it is pretty simple to summarize what Donald Trump's second term on the Middle East has been like. | ||
| I know I'm at a think tank event right now. | ||
| We just saw the video, The Explainer, The Tributes. | ||
| Think tanks where people are paid literally to think, to analyze, examine, formulate. | ||
| But Donald Trump doesn't require any of that. | ||
| I promise you. | ||
| At least George W. Bush and the neocons had a vision for the Middle East. | ||
| It's not one I agreed with. | ||
| It was one drenched in blood, came with bombs. | ||
| But it was a vision, undeniably. | ||
| Trump doesn't believe in visions. | ||
| Trump believes in transactions. | ||
| He also quite likes bombing himself. | ||
| We don't talk about that often enough. | ||
| This is a president who, in his first nine months in office, has dropped bombs on Iran and Syria and Somalia and Yemen and of course given lots of bombs to Netanyahu to drop. | ||
| Bombs that he didn't even know the names of, he told us at the Knesset the other day. | ||
| But look, once you strip away the slogans and the memes and his desperate childlike desire for a Nobel Peace Prize, his nine-month record in office so far on the Middle East is built around three pretty simple, three pretty obvious pillars. | ||
| Embrace Israel, embrace dictators, get paid. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| Embrace Israel, send them endless arms, allow them to stay in Gaza forever, call for Netanyahu to be pardoned, and crack down on pro-Palestine dissenters here at home. | ||
| That's embrace Israel. | ||
| Embrace dictators. | ||
| He just went to Egypt, where he met the man he calls his favorite dictator, General Sisi. | ||
| He praised his quote, fantastic leadership and low crime rates. | ||
| Sisi has over 60,000 political prisoners behind bars. | ||
| That's embracing dictators. | ||
| And get paid. | ||
| The Saudis, the Qataris, the Emiratis have all figured out that the way to Trump's heart is through his wallet, through his bank balance, through his myriad businesses. | ||
| And can you blame them? | ||
| He's made it so easy to bribe a sitting president of the United States on issues not just of foreign policy but national security. | ||
| So please, I would urge you all, spend your time and money and staff looking at the big issues in the Middle East. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But you don't need to spend that much time figuring out Donald Trump. | |
| He is not playing 3D chess. | ||
| He's not. | ||
| He's embracing Israel, embracing dictators and getting paid. | ||
| It really is that simple. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But wait a minute, Mehdi, what about the peace plan that he got? | |
| Well, it isn't a peace plan. | ||
| First of all, let's just be clear about that. | ||
| It's a ceasefire plan, which is barely holding. | ||
| And he has no plan for Palestinian statehood, Palestinian self-determination, Palestinian freedom. | ||
| In fact, if you want to judge the Gaza plan, I would argue that there are five very clear tests that have to be passed. | ||
| People keep saying to me, why won't you credit Trump? | ||
| Why won't you praise Trump? | ||
| Five tests. | ||
| Let's see if he actually passes them. | ||
| Number one, civilians test. | ||
| Does this plan protect Palestinian civilians? | ||
| Not so far this week. | ||
| Number two, the law test. | ||
| Does it conform with international law? | ||
| Does it allow Palestinians to retain control of their own land? | ||
| Does it forbid Israel from using aid as a weapon of war? | ||
| Collective punishment. | ||
| Again, not looking good this week. | ||
| They've already halved aid going into Gaza. | ||
| Number three, the geography test. | ||
| Does the plan stop the geographic erasure of Gaza? | ||
| Does it allow Israel to hold on to land in the form of buffer zones and security perimeters? | ||
| Well, right now they control a majority of the strip. | ||
| Even under a best case scenario, they keep what 18% of Gaza and you have Bizalos Motrich telling us we will settle on that land. | ||
| There will be Jewish settlers back in Gaza. | ||
| Number four, the accountability test. | ||
| Where is the teeth in this plan? | ||
| Who enforces this plan? | ||
| If Israel violates this deal like it has almost every other deal, what happens? | ||
| What happens the next day? | ||
| Does the US, does the EU, does the UN send a sternly worded letter? | ||
| Good luck with that. | ||
| And number five, the root cause test. | ||
| Does this plan address the fact that the Palestinians are a people with a right to freedom, a right to sovereignty, a right to return? | ||
| A plan that rebuilds the houses in Gaza without rebuilding the rights of the people of Gaza, I'm sorry, is just a plan for another war, the next war. | ||
| So let's keep our collective eyes on Gaza as Trump moves on, as the media moves on, as the world moves on. | ||
| Israel wants to go back to October the 6th, to an unsustainable, untenable, unjust status quo. | ||
| That's where we seem to be heading, depressingly. | ||
| But I want to be hopeful. | ||
| I do. | ||
| I try. | ||
| Not just because any deal, even temporarily, that prevents Israel from killing kids every day is not a deal that should be dismissed out of hand. | ||
| Not just because the Palestinians are the most resilient people I have ever come across in my 46 years on this planet, but because attitudes here in the US, where we are, the capital, are changing. | ||
| They really are. | ||
| A recent New York Times poll found that for the first time ever, more Americans sympathize with Palestinians than they do with Israelis. | ||
| Not a poll result I ever thought I would see in my lifetime. | ||
| I'm also hopeful because independent journalism is showing us a different way to cover this conflict, this genocide. | ||
| Not just Zatayo, where we have writers like Deanna Butu and Mosab Abu Toha and Daniel Levy and podcasters like Naomi Klein and Owen Jones and Barsim Yousuf, all of them saying on the Middle East what you will never hear heard said in the mainstream media. | ||
| But there's also drops out news. | ||
| My former colleagues at the Intercept set that up fantastic reporting on Gaza. | ||
| Please do support drops out news. | ||
| There's my old friend support independent media. | ||
| My old friend Joy Reid, ex-MSNBC host, doing fantastic work including on Gaza in her new endeavour. | ||
| You see podcaster Jennifer Welch just the other day grill Corey Booker on his ties to APAC. | ||
| You see podcaster Van Lathen just yesterday grilling Gavin Newsome, Governor of California on his ties to APAC. | ||
| The media is changing and I'm delighted to be a part of that change. | ||
| I hope leading some of that change on the independent side. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Because for me, hope is not a mood. | |
| Hope is a method. | ||
| Hope is a discipline. | ||
| Hope is action. | ||
| Hope is doing something about a situation that looks bad and needs changing. | ||
| That is what I am about. | ||
| That is what I hope you are all about. | ||
| That is what Zatteo is about. | ||
| That is what ACW, the Arab Center DC, is about. | ||
| Together, we are about changing the conversation here in DC, here in the United States, and across the world. | ||
| So thank you again to the Arab Center DC for this award. | ||
| I treat this award, I hope, not as a pat on the back, but a push to do more, to work harder, to speak louder. | ||
| Not that that's possible, but my wife would say. | ||
| Thank you for reminding us all with the existence of this award. | ||
| That journalistic integrity is not what you claim or brag about. | ||
| It's what you hold on to when you're under pressure and under attack from the people in power. | ||
| And I say to them, you will not silence me, not on this issue or any other issue. | ||
| Zatteo is here to stay. | ||
| I am here to stay. | ||
| And the truth, whether it's about genocide abroad or fascism at home, will not be suppressed. | ||
| Thank you very much for your time. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And thank you for this award. | |
| Thank you again. | ||
| Thank you so much. Thank you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Why are you doing this? | |
| This is outrageous. | ||
| This is a kangaroo quarrel. | ||
| Fridays, C-SPAN presents a rare moment of unity. | ||
| Ceasefire, where the shouting stops and the conversation begins. | ||
| Politico Playbook chief correspondent and White House Bureau Chief Dasha Burns is host of Ceasefire, bringing two leaders from opposite sides of the aisle into a dialogue. | ||
| Ceasefire on the network that doesn't take sides. | ||
| Fridays at 7 and 10 p.m. Eastern and Pacific, only on C-SPAN. | ||
| Democracy is always an unfinished creation. | ||
| Democracy is worth dying for. | ||
| Democracy belongs to us all. | ||
| We are here in the sanctuary of democracy. | ||
| Great responsibilities fall once again to the great democracies. | ||
| American democracy is bigger than any one person. | ||
| Freedom and democracy must be constantly guarded and protected. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We are still at our core a democracy. | |
| This is also a massive victory for democracy and for freedom. |