The Future of Gaza With Abubaker Abed; Journalist Sam Husseini On His Physical Expulsion From Blinken’s Briefing & Biden’s Gaza Legacy
Palestinian journalist Abubaker Abed describes life in Gaza as Israel continues to destroy hospitals, schools, and entire communities. He shares stories of hope and resilience ahead of a ceasefire, and discusses what life would look like in a "Free Palestine." PLUS: Journalist Sam Husseini details his physical expulsion from Blinken's press briefing and what the episode says about the deferential press corps.
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Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight, the Israeli National Security Cabinet of Benjamin Netanyahu approved today the terms of the ceasefire deal for Gaza that President-elect Trump pressured the Israelis into accepting.
There is widespread relief and even jubilation in Gaza, understandably so, that they will now have at least some respite.
From 15 months of relentless bombing and slaughter and destruction and constant fear of imminent death.
But nobody with any minimal knowledge of that conflict, let alone the people in Gaza who know Israel better than anyone, fully trusts that this really will result in a permanent sensation of Israeli aggression.
Netanyahu, in fact, is trying to assuage his right-wing base by saying that they intend to restart the war once they get some of their hostages back.
One of the most dangerous things to be in Gaza over the last 15 months has been to be a journalist.
The Committee to Protect Journalists estimates that 166 Palestinian journalists have been killed in Gaza since the start of the Israeli bombing and invasion.
At least some of them, if not most, were deliberately targeted due to their vital work, especially with no Western journalist being permitted to enter unless embedded with the IDF.
And obviously the people who were chosen to embed with the IDF were chosen precisely because, to put it mildly, they have no interest in reporting on Gaza, only mimicking Israeli propaganda.
One of the Gazan journalists who has gained prominence for his courageous work over the last 15 months is Abu Bakr Abid.
Only 22 years old, he has used his fluent, actually quite eloquent English, to become one of the most important voices, telling and showing the rest of the world what is actually happening in his homeland.
Originally tending to be a sports journalist covering Palestinian and global soccer, his life was upended when Gaza started to be destroyed and he directed his journalistic skills and passion to telling that story.
We spoke to him a bit earlier today in a recorded interview about life in Gaza over the past 15 months, whether they now have any hope for a cessation of these attacks and a rebuilding of their society and a return to some segment of normal life.
We talked about the view in Gaza of Israelis and how they understand their broader struggle for freedom as well as their view of the United States.
And all I can really say, I could summarize it further, but what I can really say is that Abu Bakr is an extraordinary person.
It's one of the reasons why he's gained so much prominence and attention and affection.
And this is really one of the most affecting interviews I've ever done.
I really hope you'll listen.
Then, longtime independent journalist Sam Husseini was physically dragged out of a State Department briefing yesterday for the crime of directing questions, adversarial questions, the only kind journalist is supposed to ask, at Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
He did so rather than waiting for permission to raise his hand, knowing he would never be called on because he doesn't work for a large corporate media outlet.
Sam is with us tonight to talk about why he found the questions he posed to Secretary Blinken about Gaza so vital and couldn't wait until he was given permission to raise his hand.
He also talks to us about why he rejects this incestuous and friendly deference that most corporate journalists give to top US officials like Blinken.
And to these pompous protocols they establish, and most of all, what all of this says about the U.S. corporate media generally, and its coverage of the U.S. government's Israel and Gaza policy specifically.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
Abubakar, it's really great to see you.
It's great to speak with you.
We're so thrilled to have you on.
I've been really admiring your courageous and important journalism throughout this entire 15 months under the most difficult of circumstances.
So I really think there's nobody better to talk to about where we are in Gaza, what the likely future of Gaza is, everything that's going on there, than you.
So let me begin by asking, just kind of...
How you're doing, I think a lot about people in Gaza, including especially the people who have survived, and what they've gone through over the 15 months, and how it's probably impossible to imagine it, but how are you doing personally at this moment?
Like, what has your life been like?
Well, it's been literally night-farish.
Like, every single day really held so much pain, so much.
You know, suffering.
But yeah, we really managed to go through all of that and survived and hopefully the ceasefire will continue until Gaza is rebuilt again.
But every single day, in every single day, we felt that we were alone.
We felt we went through what was unimaginable, what was unbearable.
We had to go through salvation many times.
We had to shed tears of our loved ones or our friends and our family members even.
And every day we really felt that we were stripped of our humanity.
We were stripped of, you know, the human values of anybody because that is what the world accepted and tolerated to happen to us over the course of the past 15 months.
We, personally speaking, the very little things that you cannot really imagine, such as the basic human rights, like having a sip of water, clean water, and having just a bite of food like any other people across the globe, they were not found.
And most of the time this was to me, and for Palestinians here in my area and all across the Gaza Stubb, It was fantasy.
They were just a part of their fantasy that they could no longer have that type of food, have that clean water, and feel that dignity, because most of the people here have been eternally displaced.
I wasn't displaced, to be honest.
But even the circumstances that I went through personally, given the fact that I was someone struggling with his weak immune system, I really went through hell, literally hell.
I was trying to find proper medications, but unfortunately I did not.
On a personal note, my parents were also sick, so I had to take care of them.
And even sometimes, and probably most of the time, I had to cook, I had to do...
I had to do the washing.
I had to do everyday chores instead of my mom and my parents because they were sick.
And they're still sick because Israel has been banning medications from entering Gaza.
This is just, you know, the notice operandi of the Israeli entities since the outbreak of the war.
It really went ahead with the dehumanization of Palestinians.
It really suffocated us, subjugated us, and occupied us.
In this time, it has always been doing this, but this time it's different because we've never seen something monstrous like this.
We've never seen something violent.
Vile, atrocious and barbaric like this in our lives.
It is the Holocaust of our time and we went through it.
And speaking about myself, it's just like I'm just a young man.
I didn't have any political affiliations to be going through this.
But I went through this and just like people at some points during genocide were bereft of hope.
But I never lost hope because hope...
It's the means of life.
It's a way of life.
And for me, it wasn't needed.
And it was never going to be possible that I would lose hope in such a, you know, at the beginning of a war or even at any point because it's just the start of my career.
It's just the start of my life.
And there are still more beautiful things to look at.
There is still a glimmer of hope.
There was always a glimmer of hope in my side.
To cling on to all the time with my family and with everyone.
But to be honest, I was very much traumatized.
I was very much brutalized.
And I was expecting my death every single second, even right now, until the ceasefire gets underway or takes into effect two days later.
I don't know if I will make it even for some day.
This is the same feeling.
It's a mutual feeling among all Palestinians across the British territory.
That's one of the things I wanted to ask you about.
As you referenced, this is not exactly the first time the Israelis have bombed Gaza, including in your lifetime.
You're 22, I believe.
You've had many other bombing campaigns.
Probably the worst one in your lifetime, I imagine, was 2014, though nothing even remotely on this scale in terms of endurance, in terms of the destruction, in terms of the indiscriminate disregard for human life.
And one of the things I've often thought about, and again, I don't think anybody who's gone through what you have gone through and unfortunately are still going through until these planes really stop flying over Gaza and dropping bombs and shells and the like, is the loss of security.
Everyday human beings wake up.
Security is the thing we most need.
It's the thing we search for.
It's the thing we rely on.
We assume that we're going to be okay throughout the day.
We don't think we're going to die throughout the day.
And yet you have had that completely robbed from you, as have everybody in Gaza.
By seeing how easily and indiscriminately your own life can just be extinguished and it's only by virtue of luck that you survive from one day to the next.
How do you go about, and maybe you haven't had time to think about this yet, but how does anybody in Gaza, including yourself, go about reclaiming that sense of security, that kind of mental base and foundation that everybody needs just to kind of leave aside security and start thinking about other things in life?
Because simply, I would say that we are indigenous to this land, and we want to fight, and we never accepted and defied Israel's plans to ethnically cleanse every single one in Gaza, because there were growing fears since the start of this war that we would be exterminated and taken out of Gaza to different areas of the Middle East.
But we defied this, and we always stuck together.
And that feeling of the governess, of dignity, of freedom, sometimes probably we don't have that sense of physical freedom, but we have that mental freedom, which is.
That we are in this land.
We love it.
We have a deep connection with it.
And I can tell you from here that every single day, our connection with Gaza, with Palestine, because Gaza is a part of the liberation.
Gaza is the first distance of the liberation until Palestine is free.
Every single day, our connection with the land and...
Our hearts, I mean our love for Palestine and for the land has always been consolidated every single day and at the same time what we really we have We had that belief and still have it.
We know that nothing could break us.
That's what we've been instilled into.
Okay, we've been through wars before.
The past four or five wars where many genocides were made, but now this is the biggest genocide.
It's the Holocaust of our time.
We're talking about...
Staggering numbers among people in terms of the casualties, in terms of the housing units leveled up to the ground, in terms of the decimation of every aspect of life in Gaza.
But when we see Gaza, as I told you, and we look at Gaza, we know that there is a massive scale, a scale of massive destruction.
But yet we know that there are still things, beautiful things to look at and to behold.
And that's what really always made us go on and never ever stop or surrender.
Because this is the game, the mental game that the Israelis are trying to play.
And they cannot play on our feelings because we are always together, we're always united.
And here, we don't talk about political affiliations.
We talk about that Palestine is for Palestinians.
We know and we understand, realize the feeling that over the past times and over the past wars, many of our loved ones were killed, many of our family members were killed, including our grandparents, our parents, our brothers, sisters.
Many of our friends and colleagues, yet we know that we are still sacrificing to get back to our lands.
But the problem is that the whole, the entirety of the world let us down, disappointed us, but we never, we never ever think about, thought about surrendering or giving up our freedom, our soul.
We're a united soul because we wanted, we very, very much desired being back to Palestine.
And we want to sacrifice.
If we are not going to laugh at that moment, that lifetime moment of the liberation of Palestine, then the next generation as well.
That is the structure and the composition of the Palestinian society.
That's what makes and strengthens the social fabric.
of the Palestinian society, which is that everyone is here for Palestine.
Every single one, from the children to the elderly.
We hold the same story.
We hold the same narrative.
This is our homeland.
We have been reprised, subjugated, oppressed, but we never let the enemy see us down or see us in a different way than just being hopeful and being so optimistic.
And we are going to fight back against this occupation, colonialism, and imperialism backed almost by almost the entire world, particularly the U.S. Yeah, I think in the U.S. and in Europe, that's where the support for Israel, the unstinting support for Israel resides.
resides.
There's obviously a lot of places in the world that have vehemently condemned the Israeli aggression, the genocide, the war crimes as a lot of countries see it.
But the most powerful countries in the world, such as the U.S. and Western Europe, have obviously supported everything that's been done to Gaza.
Let me ask you, in terms of this ceasefire that has now been approved by the Israeli National Security Cabinet, it, obviously approved by the Gazan side as well and by Hamas.
There, I know, was a lot of jubilation, probably still is a lot of jubilation, just in the mere prospect that this destruction and bombing and violence is going to stop for however long it stops, the first real respite that you've had in 14 months.
But on the other hand, there's a lot of concern among people who are supporters of Gaza and the people who live there that the intention of the Israelis is to get their hostages back in large numbers and then concoct some reason why they have to resume an attack on Gaza.
What is your view on the likelihood that that will happen?
And is that dampening the happiness and relief that people there feel this prospect that it might start again?
I mean, yeah, we're expecting everything because Israelis might renege on this ceasefire deal and might, you know, Quite trick the other side and just resume the attack and resume the genocide as it was before and maybe even in a sharper version.
However, it is still...
I mean, a temporary, as I said, it's still a temporary reprieve from the incessant horse, particularly children.
We're talking about most of the Gaza population, half of the Gaza population is children.
So this respite is very much needed for them first, and then for the families to gather again.
All those displaced people who have been internally displaced and forcibly displaced from their homes in northern Gaza, which are now piles of rubble.
Their homes are now piles of rubble.
So they don't have even anything to go back to.
But after 14 months, if the Israelis are going to just take the hostages back and then resume the fighting, it's going to be one reason.
There's one reason for this, which is the The silence, the definite silence of the international community that has been allowing this.
And the major role of Muslim media manufacturing the genocide in the past 14 months, because were it oriented for them, for the Muslim media, mainstream media, this war might have been stopped much, much earlier, and this bit all might not have been with that staggering figures.
But because everyone is against Gaza, everyone thinks that everyone in Gaza, most of the West think that people in Gaza are Hamas, the vast majority.
And this is the narrative that Israelis are trying to narrate the outside world.
But it will be a huge setback and a type of mental torture.
If Israel was young, it's genocide because you cannot just have a couple of days or a couple of weeks and then the attacks continue.
Okay, we're resistance.
We never ever lost hope at all.
We're going to continue that.
But in the end, it's a game between the two sides and just the Palestinian people have been the most sufferers of this conflict, which is not a conflict.
It's a U.S.-Israeli genocide.
But again...
What we really want is that it's enough for the Western community and the international community to stay silent in as many as war crimes.
There is no way that this will be returned at all.
There's no way that there are going to be more killings and more horrifying scenes inside Gaza.
And that's just the funerals after funerals and mothers waving over the parties of their children.
And fathers even murulate over their loved ones.
Corpuses inside the hospital, inside the morgue and in Gaza's graveyard.
Let me just tell you one thing here.
If you look here, most of the people who are killed in the so-called, say, the humanitarian zone in Khanimis and central Gaza are being buried in the rebellious graveyard where people mourn their deaths.
But if you look at the graveyard, the graveyard has been bulldozed several times just to absorb that inundating number of casualties and number of corpuses by people.
So corpuses are being canned, literally canned in tiny graves because the graveyard is just a very tiny space for people.
You're talking about here in Deir al-Bala, more than 25,000 people have been buried inside it.
There is no way that people are still being killed every single day and in mass and people are still being taken to hospitals and just those hospitals who have been too increasingly overcrowded during every single day over the course of this genocide.
There's no way that there are still going to be casualties inside and there are still going to be more tears, more bloodshed and more bloods.
It's plashed all over every inch of Gaza's hospitals.
There's no way that the world can allow it.
But as a matter of fact, the entire world let us down.
This would be possible.
But someone has to stop Israel from continuing and resuming the Holocaust, the most monstrous and bloody Holocaust of our time.
Yeah, for sure.
Let me just zero in on one thing that you said.
You talked about this demonization campaign that has been carried out against the Palestinians in the West, this perception that anyone who lives in Gaza is automatically some terrorist, probably some primitive person who only thinks about religious fanaticism and killing people.
And I remember this demonization is very common in the West for anybody that the Western governments want their populations to attack.
But I remember one time a few months ago I pointed out that Gaza is a place that has among the highest literacy of any population in the world, has some of the best academic institutions, some of the...
Surgeons and medical care workers, many of whom have been killed, have been among the best regarded in the world.
There's a large system of education and advanced academic institutions, most of which have now been destroyed, along with libraries and the like.
Can you talk about the importance of education and study and work and career that is embedded within Palestinian culture and in Gaza specifically?
Of course, you're right, because, I mean, there's been a deliberately systematic attack on educational figures inside Gaza, including educational institutions.
Every single university in Gaza has been reduced to Rappel, except the Palestinian and Polish here in Dar al-Bala, which has been turned into a shelter for thousands of displaced people since the outbreak of this genocide.
But the importance of this...
Is that we can really have the words to go after the word, to go after the word and speak with them about what is happening right now.
And you can see just like the generation of journalists right now inside Gaza are very young.
Those generations are holding this responsibility right now just for the sake of the liberation, just for the sake of showing people the truth, showing the inside the world the truth.
So this is really A huge significance that we know that Israel has been deliberately targeting during this genocide.
But we want to, even during this time, love people and love teachers.
We've held initiatives to resume education for children, particularly for children, and even universities resumed online education for those who haven't been deprived of their education during this time.
At the same time, we know that whatever happened and has happened, there's no way that people can be...
No way at all.
People can be deprived of their education because we are going to build generations after generations until, as I told you, until the main and ultimate goal is achieved.
And we have words, we have our tongues, our words, our pens and pencils, like Dr. Fethel Arif was deliberately targeted and assassinated in December 2023.
We have our words to fight back against this occupation until the very last moment of our lives, until Palestine is free.
But the social fabric and the unity and the strength of this community...
It's absolutely built on the education of those generations, specifically the younger generations like me and even the younger ones.
We are talking about more than two years.
People haven't been educated and just there have been some intensified efforts to resume.
Education online for all people, but still we can see that there are still some tinted educational tents for children to meet their teachers, speak with them.
Sorry, speak with them face-to-face and to learn from them face-to-face inside the camps.
That's why we are, as I told you, there is quite an unbeatable, literally an unbeatable mentality here everyone has in Gaza, and we are being told all this time that education plays a major role, plays a major role in taking this Palestinian cause out of the world.
Defending is by our words and even when we talk about it much more like in detail.
This education, we always have been occupied and besieged inside Gaza.
We're not allowed to move outside.
A few people were allowed to move outside.
Most people, the vast majority of people were not allowed.
So we searched, we really conducted our research papers, we built our schools together, we built our universities together, just to make sure that everything about Palestine...
Is going to be put in the right way and that Palestine is living in our hearts and our hearts will always bleed for Palestine.
That's why education is really important, no matter how many people, how many professionals and professors Israel has killed during this genocide.
We're talking about around 500 people, even more, that Israel has killed during this time.
But again, the next generations will replace, will be the successors, and will hold the same story, the same hope for the younger generation.
That's why, again, this is the same reason why the Palestinian people are unbeatable, are resistant, are steadfast, and they will never be beaten at all.
One of the lessons that I thought the West had learned, that the United States had learned after the attack on September 11th in New York and Washington, was that if your idea is you want to eliminate certain anti-American resentments and hatred that was that if your idea is you want to eliminate certain anti-American resentments and hatred that drives those kind of attacks, the worst thing that you can do is what the United States did, which is go into those countries and those regions and bomb them
is go into those countries and those regions and bomb them continuously, kill huge numbers of innocent people, including children, over many years in many different countries, because obviously that is going to create just natural human behavior, is going to create a lot of anger and hostility and a desire to resist is going to create a lot of anger and hostility and a desire to resist and fight against the country that is bringing
When October 7th happened and the Israelis said we're going, and it was very clear that they were going to unleash a kind of violence that we haven't seen, at least in this century, at least it was clear to me, the argument was, well, we need to go and eliminate extremism, we need to go and eliminate Hamas.
and yet every time I hear somebody...
In Gaza speaking, and that certainly applies to everything you've said so far, I hear this increased determination to continue to resist Israeli attempts to be repressive or to use violence to break the Palestinian spirit or to drive you out of your homeland.
Has the last 14 months, what impact has that had on the feelings and views of Palestinians with regard to Israel?
That there can be no peace, because this war has just created a generation that is desperate for revenge.
We've seen here a lot of children who have lost their entire families.
You cannot really come to those youngsters or children and tell them that your family, that when they grow up, that your family has been killed, who killed them.
Israel has killed them, so this young boy will grow with that sense, with that sensation of revenge in the future.
That's why Israel, by death, has killed every attempt for peace.
And this is not the first time.
It has always been Israel's norm to block peace and tackle every effort to create peace in the Middle East, particularly in Palestine.
There have been previous attempts and...
1976, different in previous years, it also occurred.
And many times before, the Israelis simply refused that.
We heard, because we heard many of those Israeli officials and Israeli Prime Ministers, and they clearly stated that they didn't want peace with Palestinians, and they clearly stated that they wanted to conquer and colonize Palestine completely, every inch of Palestine.
But when it comes to our side and we want to resist, we become the tourists.
Let me tell you one thing the West is not aware of.
Like, tell one of the Western people who are with the genocide, who are pro-genocide, tell them that if your grandparents were expelled from their lands just some years ago, and you took your weapon or you took your and you took your weapon or you took your power years after, and you went back to the homeland of your grandparents and defended and attacked that person to take back your land.
Tell them, ask them this question.
Are you a terrorist?
You're not a terrorist.
It's as simple as that because we are defending our homeland.
And again, there is no...
We know that in all international laws, resistance is legitimate in terms of occupation.
Israel is an occupying power.
Israel is an occupying colonial state that is exterminating an entire population and that has stated and has clearly talked about its genocidal intent in Gaza and no one in the world stood in its face.
Now when this happens, And we are resisting, because there are many forms of resistance, and we are resisting this occupation.
Just the West will go up and the Western media will erupt to say that Palestinians are tourists.
Palestinians are going to wreak havoc, not only in the Middle East, but they might go to Europe and other continents across the globe.
This is literally insane.
That's why we go back to the same point, which is the double standards of the Western community, the hypocrisy of Western officials and leaders, which has played a major role and made for what is happening right now in Gaza.
And if this ceasefire deal is sabotaged, the main reason undoubtedly and equivocally is going to be the Western leaders who have agreed upon this.
I mean, like, why?
Like, why don't we have, why don't people in the West support our right to defend ourselves?
If Israel has a right to defend itself, why Palestinians don't have the right to defend itself?
We go again, we go again, because it's just that the Western community does not see Palestinians as humans, they see us as subhumans, and they see us that we are just a lower class, and that this sort of...
White supremacist community is why Palestinians are still suffering.
It's why we are still being genocided and being exterminated every single day.
This is the main point people have to talk about.
Support our right to resist the occupation.
Support our right because we went to all international laws.
We asked the United Nations to get back to our lands.
The United Nations has tried many ways.
And under its auspices, nothing has changed.
Israel has denied and has blocked again every attempt for peace to prevail across Palestine.
Israel was the main reason that this ceasefire could have been achieved much, much earlier, back in July, and even just a few days after October 7th.
Israel is the main reason.
But people are seeing Israel as the noble people and the Palestinians.
All the evil people.
That's the vision that needs to be changed.
That's why I believe, as a young man, a genocide was not needed to tell you the truth.
It was your moral duty.
You don't have to be morally bankrupt.
To talk about other people's human rights, you just have to be human.
We saw, over the course of this genocide, a lot of people in the Muslim community selling their consciences and selling their humanity just to satisfy their political leaders and to satisfy Israel's hunger to kill people inside Gaza and to kill Palestinians.
Palestinians have always been The most sufferers of any continental cosmic world.
The U.S. has backed Israel in every possible way, has financed this genocide.
People are afraid to talk about this.
I saw yesterday how the two journalists Max and Sam were died after the press briefing.
No one talked about that.
Although there were many journalists inside the press briefing room, no one stood up against Blinken, Secretary of Blinken, and said a word and just let one word of justice out of their mouths.
Why are they doing this?
This is the main problem.
People are, in the West particularly, are claiming that they are human, that they are the peak of humanity, the peak of human rights, and all of those human rights have secured rights of every single person across the globe.
But it's not only about Palestine, it's also about Sudan, it's also about other more generalised categories of the world.
The same rules do not apply for those categories including us.
And this conflict has just started over the summer.
It has been for 76 years.
We still have pain in our hearts.
We still have pain to vent.
We still have anger to vent on the actions, on the murderous actions of the Israelis that have grown this sensation of revenge.
It's enough.
Like, what did I do with this war?
I'm still, like you can hear right now, the hovering sounds of the war brings above me.
And I don't know, again, as I told you, I don't know if I'll make it until someday.
This is just a mutual feeling.
This is the horror that the Israelis have created, have really created inside Gaza.
And the feelings of panic inside our hearts.
And all of this will not be forgotten at all.
People don't have to forget it.
Even if this war ends, people...
We must not forget the role of the Western media coverage, must not forget all those political leaders who supported the genocide, who did not support Israel's right to defend itself, but supported the genocide unequivocally, and supported the extermination of an entire nation, an entire population, and this will go on.
I believe that even if Trump was unbrokered in this deal, He must not be, I mean, praised so much because he was responsible for the normalization process between all countries, among all countries in the Middle East, because if this normalization did not happen back in 2018, the Arab countries would have the courage to, and would have the spine, to help Palestinians and to stand with them against, in the face of extreme adversity.
But because Trump was the main reason of Israel furthering its But let's see what will happen in the West Bank, because he promised that Israel would have the...
The plan would have the green light to expand its settlement inside the West Bank and to resume, as you said, to resume its genocide once the hostages are back to Israel.
You're absolutely right, and there's no denying that most of the West, certainly Western governments in particular, in the kind of ruling classes in the capitals have been I'm
And I'm a little reluctant to even say this because it sounds like I'm asking you, someone who's sat through 15 months of hell every day, to kind of see a silver lining.
It's not really that.
But as somebody who has paid attention to this issue for a long time, who's been very, very critical of Israel for a long, long time, I do think that although Western governments are still as pro-Israel as ever before, the younger generation in the West, in Europe, and especially the United the younger generation in the West, in Europe, and especially the United States, have seen for the first time the true face And the key role that our governments play in enabling Israel to carry out these atrocities.
And in many ways, the cause, the Palestinian cause, has become, for students, for a lot of young people, and even people throughout the population, the kind of cause of the generation, much like Vietnam was two generations ago, the cause of opposing apartheid South Africa was in the 1980s.
There's massive marches in Western cities, unlike I've ever seen before.
I think people are talking more about and are more aware of the Palestinian movement and the Palestinian cause.
Is that something that you've been aware of?
And does that give you any hope that this Western support on which Israel depends can start to be weakened?
Absolutely.
It gives me so support because, as I said, there is a very much developing and growing awareness of the Palestinians.
Because in the West, one of the younger generations like me, now they understand.
Because when you look past the time, in the past time, we look at the past time before this genocide started, you see that Israel was the oppressed and Palestine is the oppressor.
This situation or equation has been upended now with this genocide happening.
That's why, or this is the reason, the cause, why I believe that those younger generations, when they take, for example, take higher positions to more of their countries, they can really make something for Palestinians.
They can really, I mean, spread hope among Palestinians that Palestine will be free.
So it gives me so much hope, of course, because there has been so much awareness among people, among the younger generations.
We saw the university protests.
We saw...
The demonstrations, we saw the boycotting, the divesting, and all these forms of support and solidarity with the Palestinian people and with us over the course of this aggression, this 3-day aggression.
I mean, it's very important, it's very essential that we have This support for the young generations, it really pleases me and pleases everyone here.
We saw, even during, we watched during this time how Palestinians reacted to the protests in universities.
But the West really, I mean, really didn't like that and really fought back against it.
And there are not now, no protests are allowed.
To be held inside the West's universities, particularly the U.S. So we go back to the same point.
It's just the same point.
We are quite reiterating what we have been saying, which is that the West is trying to make sure that Palestine is not going to be feasible in any spot in the world.
That's what they want.
That's why...
They want Israelis to flourish, to thrive, but for Palestinians, they want them all the time.
They want them all the time to be marginalized, to be ostracized, and to be taken off this entire world and not be as humans, as any other one across the globe.
And they will continue doing so because, as I said to you, there are still people.
We need quite a time to change the thinking, the vision of those people who have been supportive of this genocide and who have been staunchest allies of Israel.
We need to change their perspectives.
This is impossible because they are easy to be, I mean, to be bought by money.
And they are easy to just regurgitate as we use propaganda all over the course of time because, okay, it's money, and, like, what does Palestine give to me?
But their humanity in their consciences, they feel that it's not important to be morally well, good, sorry, and to have morals, to be principled.
They don't think it's really important.
And they really believe that if they make money, I mean, and they are feeding upon our suffering, then that's what they want.
This is the main objective of the Muslim community.
But the younger generations, who I'm still seeing, until this moment, they're opposing the genocide.
They are still supportive of every Palestinian.
They hope.
I see many people protesting against their governments, tackling their government's actions and supportive actions of Israel.
This is really very hopeful and very optimistic and upbeat.
And it makes Palestinians believe that one day we'll live in a free world away.
And a free world from, particularly from those Western corrupt leaders.
That's what we want.
Because it's not only affecting us.
Sometimes we feel that the word, the mentality and minds of people, the minds of people is occupied by what they have been.
Installed into by their teachers, by their governments, by their communities during the past years.
Now, the situation is different.
Everything is different.
People have different thoughts.
This is a key role in securing permanent peace.
Permanent freedom and latitude for every single Palestinian who has been going through a lot, who has been going through different wars and now a genocide.
This is very, very essentially fundamental.
And this is just, again, I believe that this genocide, although we lost a lot, is going to usher in the liberation of Palestine.
This is going to be the first step.
There is a sense of DJ view that people, you know, that people lived through wars before and they were lit down.
But this time, things are different.
The equation is different.
And we are going to resist again together no matter what happens in the next few days.
All right, that's a perfect segue to what I have as my last question, Josh.
Just out of respect for your time, we'd love to have you back.
But you've spoken a few times about this.
Desire for peace, the fact that it's the Israelis who sabotage that possibility.
You've said a few times in several answers, including this last one, this idea of the liberation of Palestine and a free Palestine.
What does that mean to you?
What does that future realistically look like in a world where Palestinian liberation is achieved, where Palestine is free, and where peace prevails in the region in which you live?
Again, peace cannot be achieved without Israel being dismantled, I believe so.
And we have to make sure that this point is very clear, that we don't have any problems with the Jews themselves.
Israel does not represent the Jews.
We've seen many Jews speaking out against Israel, and we've seen many of those Jews opposing the genocide in Gaza.
So it's a different matter here when we talk about the Jews and we talk about Zionism.
Zionism, which is Israel right now because it's their government, it's their entity, is causing and wreaking havoc in the region.
The first step to do is to dismantle it.
And if we dismantle it, we have long-term peace.
This can be very feasible.
Now, to a different time, to a different matter which is, or issue, that if Palestine is free, what does that mean?
It's been 22 years.
Five wars, including the Holocaust, I never felt that I was free.
I remember Glenn very, very well when my friend, who was killed last December, December 2023, and I were watching videos on YouTube of people living outside the world, and we were wishing, like, we needed to go outside Gaza.
We needed to live this life.
Like, when...
Are we going to live that type of life and have all these lifestyles and all this happiness and that we have freedom to go anywhere around the world?
But before October the 7th, even, because we are now getting back to just what Gaza was before October the 7th, this is what the ceasefire is going to secure for Palestinians.
But, you know, because I said to you, this is just a tiny reprieve from the horrors from what we've been going through.
But Palestine is a free simply means that every Palestinian has the right and has themselves.
To determine what they want to be in the future.
They have the right to go around the world, to travel around the world, to do research, meet people, socialize with different people, have their time.
I don't remember, like, even the outlets we had before this genocidal assault on the Casa Strab, the outlets were very limited.
We had only a few stadiums, the sea, and a few restaurants.
What does life mean?
What did life really mean?
When most of the people, most of the people inside Gaza were not working, they were unemployed, and most of the people didn't have even a source of living to provide the families with everyday lunch.
And what life meant when the vast majority of university students didn't have the ability to afford the tuition fees, people are not aware of that.
They think that Gaza was just the nicest.
Full of luxury before this war.
But this is not simply not true.
But if Palestine is free, I haven't seen my homeland in Beytaraz.
I'm still a refugee inside Deir el-Bala.
People know that I'm a refugee inside Deir el-Bala.
That's what I named my United Nations itself, which is that I'm a refugee in Deir el-Bala.
My hometown is Beytaraz.
I haven't seen it at all.
My parents haven't seen it at all.
This, if we see it, even Jerusalem itself and the Al-Aqsa Mosque, we haven't seen those agricultural lands and archaeological sites and those beautiful places, markets and houses and buildings.
We haven't seen them at all.
So what is the meaning of freedom?
What is the meaning of...
I mean, self-determination, when you don't have the ability to go around or to go outside Gaza to another town in Palestine.
So this is the meaning of liberation.
This is why Palestine must be free, because as a young man, it's been 22 years of extreme horror, of extreme suffering, of nonstop.
Pain of non-stop anguish.
Our agony is literally indescribable.
The pain is simply unfathomable, has always been unfathomable.
And to me, it's just a very, very unbelievable thing that we are surviving this genocide, that I have survived, that a lot of people here in Gaza have survived.
The 5th war on Gaza, a lot of newborn babies who were born during this war, or this genocidal war on the interleague territory, haven't made it.
They were born into it, they were born during it, and they were killed in it as well.
This is just indicative of what it means that Palestine is going to be free.
What it means to sacrifice until the last day, for making it possible and real, and for making our dreams come true, that Palestine is going to be free.
It's going to be securing every rights for us.
It's going to be securing the hope of Palestinians and the liberation they have been always waiting for and craving.
And we are going to see our loved ones, our members and family members.
I know a lot of families who are separated, like a family.
Some of them are living inside Gaza.
The others are living in West Bank.
This is caused by Israel.
I know many of those Nakba survivors who went through Nakba, went through Naksa, and different escalations, numerous escalations, and now they have gone through four wars, and now they're a genocide, and they are still making it.
This is our heritage.
This is our legacy.
This is our history that we are going to take all the time with us when we grow, when we build the next generations, when we bloom like flowers and like yellow roses in the most beautiful garden, which is for us, Palestine.
Well, I've expressed this before.
A lot of Western journalists like to herald themselves for confronting risk and being courageous, what you're doing.
And have been doing over the last 15 months is the real example of that.
I really hope, first of all, that you stay safe.
I want to thank you for all the great work that you've been doing and I'm sure will continue to do.
We really appreciate your taking the time to talk to us and we would love to have you back on again and continue to give you a platform and have your important words be heard as much as we can.
Thanks so much.
You're so welcome.
It's been my pleasure for sure.
And thank you for standing with us.
Thank you for standing with Palestinian journalists, because most of the people there, where you are at the moment, have let us down and simply have sold their humanity just for some money and just for absolutely nothing.
So thank you so much, and it was really lovely to talk to you.
Yeah, you too.
Hope we do it again soon.
soon.
Bye-bye.
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Sam Husseini is a longtime independent journalist who is a regularly credentialed journalist attending State Department briefings and other government agencies.
His clips often viralize because he confronts State Department officials, even secretaries of state and their personal spokespeople, with the kind of adversarial, difficult, aggressive question journalists should ask of such officials, but most in that room refuse to do so.
That's the reason they often get called on more than he does.
Yesterday he went to...
A State Department briefing, which was billed as a press conference from Secretary of State Antony Blinken, but was really structured to be more of a going-away party that the corporate media claps for him and pays homage to him.
His last press conference, where he, as an honorable official, exits the august office of Secretary of State, and that's how most corporate journalists treated it.
Sam did not.
He went there along with Max Blumenthal, another independent journalist.
Intent on asking questions that would not have been asked of Secretary Blinken whether they got called on or not.
And when they began to do so, when they began just simply doing a journalist's job of asking questions, the State Department spokesman, Matthew Miller, who strongly disliked Sam Husseini, who had stopped calling on him because of offense that he took at some of the questions, directed the...
The security, the armed security, the agents of the state inside the State Department to go over to Sam and physically remove him for the crime of asking questions.
He wasn't being obnoxious.
He wasn't screaming out accusations.
He was confronting the Secretary of State with questions that he really hasn't answered yet but ought to have done so.
Here was the scene that was actually played around the world as an image of The difference between American claims about press freedoms and how they actually treat journalists, like Julian Assange, for example, who aren't deferential and polite but who instead fulfill the journalistic mission of asking adversarial questions.
And I want to thank my colleagues, in particular Jake Sullivan, Bill Burns, Brett McGurk, for their remarkable skill, tireless dedication over these many months.
Will you recognize the Geneva Conventions apply to the Palestinians?
And again, I'm happy to address questions when we have a chance.
I'm happy to address questions in a moment.
Thank you.
As we celebrate the return of hostages in Gaza, including Americans, as we look to relief for the people of Gaza, I'm also thinking of all those U.S. citizens who are held wrongfully, who are hostage in countries around the world.
Do you know about the Hannibal Directive?
Miller says he doesn't know about the Hannibal Directive.
Do you know about the Hannibal Directive?
I want him to answer my questions.
He's going to speak for an hour.
He gets to make lots of speeches.
Let him answer some questions.
Let him answer some questions instead of making another speech every day.
Sir, would you like to be escorted out?
Go away.
You don't have the responsibility to tell me where to go.
Do you want to be squirted out or not?
I want him to answer questions.
I'm a journalist.
I'm not a potted plant.
Everyone will have an opportunity to ask a question in just a minute.
Thank you.
Miller has explicitly told me he will not answer my questions.
I'm justified in what I'm doing.
I have no greater pleasure in this job than...
Crossing off a list I carry in my pocket the names of those who have been arbitrarily detained and unfairly held hostage, unjustly held hostage, and bringing them home, returning them to their families, returning to their loved ones.
Finally, I just wanted to show you this morning...
Get your hands off me!
Get your hands off me!
Answer a damn question!
Do you know about the Hannibal Directive?
Do you know about Israel's nuclear weapons?
Everybody from the ICJ, I was sitting here quietly and now I'm being manhandled by two or three people.
You pontificate about a free press.
You pontificate about a free press.
You are hurting me.
I am asking questions after being told by Matt Miller that he will not answer my questions until I'm asking questions.
Please, sir, respect the process.
We'll have an opportunity to take questions in a few minutes.
Wasn't the point of the May 31st statement to block the ICJ orders?
You blocked the ICJ orders?
Please, sir, respect the process.
Thank you.
Respect the process.
Respect the process.
Everybody from Amstein International to the ICJ is saying that Israel is doing genocide and extermination and you're telling me to respect the process.
Criminal!
Why aren't you in the hay?
Unsurprisingly, essentially nobody in that press room stood up and defended Sam, him, objected to the mishandling of him as he was actually carried out by four different armed guards, one by each of them.
And one of the very few people in corporate media who actually did notice that and voiced his concerns about that was the deputy editor of Reuters, Barry Malone.
Who went to Twitter and said this, quote, Did not a single other journalist protest when a colleague was being manhandled out of the room?
The answer is no.
Not a single other colleague did.
And that's because they don't actually consider independent journalists colleagues.
The only people they recognize as colleagues, as people deserving of defense, are other employees of corporate media.
People who work for gigantic media corporations.
That's the reason why, whenever Donald Trump would post some mean tweet, About Wolf Blitzer or Jim Acosta, they would act as though the free press had been destroyed, that the First Amendment was on fire, and yet none of them cared when an actually adversarial journalist,
Julian Assange, was put into a dungeon and was forced to rot away for the crime of actually doing journalism because they don't see Julian Assange as a colleague because he doesn't work for a large media corporation, and he actually treats U.S. officials the way they're supposed to be treated, not as honored friends and people.
To whom you pay your utmost respect.
And that was the dynamic that prevailed in that room.
We've seen it so many other times before.
We were able to talk to Sam today about the experience he endured being actually manhandled, not just in the room, but outside of it.
The reason he found it so urgent to go in and confront Secretary Blinken with the questions that he asked, what he thinks of the prevailing climate in that press room, in the press briefing room in general, and what the role of the corporate press is, as well as his specific views about the U.S. support and financing of the Israeli destruction of Gaza.
Sam's one of those guys who has been out this a long time.
He really believes in the journalistic mission.
He really embodies the journalistic spirit.
You can follow his work at Substack, as you'll hear at the end, which I really hope you will.
He does truly intrepid and independent reporting from going to that press briefing every day to just working around Washington like a shoe leather reporter does.
And we were happy to have him on our show and speak to him.
We sat down with him just before the show aired, just a couple hours before.
And here is our discussion with him.
Sam, it's great to see you.
We really appreciate your taking the time to talk to us about your very...
Much discussed confrontation yesterday at the State Department with Secretary Blinken and Matt Miller and their security goons.
So we really appreciate your being here.
Thanks so much for inviting me, Glenn.
So the video of your asking questions that a journalist not only is permitted to ask but almost required to ask if you're confronting a U.S. official has been very well seen.
We're going to show it right before.
We talked to you as well.
But it did look like the security guards at the State Department were being very physically aggressive with you.
I mean, they actually carried you out of the room, despite the fact that you weren't really resisting physically.
You didn't initiate any physical violence.
You were just kind of staying in your seat because it was your right to.
How are you?
Did you make it through that okay?
Or are you unharmed?
How are you feeling after that?
It's funny.
After it happened, I got a couple of calls from some activists who've been through things like this, and they told me to see a doctor immediately because you might not realize the trauma that your body might have been through.
And I kind of schlepped it off and said, okay, maybe I'll try to see a doctor in the next couple of days.
By the evening, I was feeling quite sore.
And the real physical harm wasn't done so much in that room as afterwards.
And then they took me around the building the long way around, which had the net effect of them pushing me around a great deal.
I wasn't resisting in any way whatsoever at that point.
I just wanted to get out of there, and they roughed up my shoulder quite.
Harshly.
My doctor is actually recommending that I not do any interviews, but I didn't want to cancel on you, Glenn.
We appreciate that.
Sure.
I'm okay, but...
Had a very hard time sleeping and so on.
You know, I feel ridiculous talking about this, considering, you know, you just interviewed Abu Becker from Gaza.
I mean, what the hell am I going through?
But just to answer your question, that's where...
No, no.
No, I mean, you know, I think that the scenes of a journalist being carried out of the press briefing room when asking about one of the most horrific wars, if not the most horrific of our lifetime, certainly of the 20th century, the 21st century, simply for asking questions.
You have every right to speak up, and that's why we think it's so important that we talk to you today and have people understand exactly what happened.
Let me ask you, you've been at countless...
Press briefings from the State Department over the last several years, the last many years, you've had the opportunity a lot to question the State Department spokesman Matt Miller about U.S. support for the Israeli destruction of Gaza.
It seemed like, just having watched you so often, that you, kind of knowing that they were leaving, felt like you really needed this last opportunity to demand accountability and answers from them.
Finally, and especially it was not Matt Miller, but Secretary Blinken himself, about what it was that they had done and whether this was weighing on their conscience, how they justified it to answer questions and be transparent.
Was that part of how you went there or felt in the moment that it was kind of an obligation to not let him speechify or have this kind of party in honor of him as he walked out the door, but instead to really confront him about the things he's been supporting?
Well, part of the dynamic was the fact that they went from avoiding my questions for many years to outright totally blacklisting me the last several months.
You know, I just had a relatively minor comment where I called out Matt Miller on his smirking.
It was a question, actually.
I said, you're smirking.
Are you aware that you're smirking?
When he was talking about the news, responding to a question about the Lancet estimate of 180,000 dead in Gaza.
And he had this smirk on his face.
And I said that.
And ever since then, they have not called on me.
And I went up to him several months ago, back in November, and said, you know, what's up?
And he's like, he basically said, we're not calling on you, that that was effective policy.
So having been so blackballed, you know, I mean, I've taken, you know, very aggressive approach in terms of asking questions in the past and not been treated like this.
For example, under the Trump administration, when they brought in Elliott Abrams in the first incarnation of the Trump administration, bringing on these so-called neocons.
They had Elliott Abrams in there.
And I hollered out a whole bunch of very aggressive questions.
And they, to their credit, very deftly avoided responding and boxed me out.
But they didn't, you know, bring in the, you know, however many so-called security people to literally carry me out of the room.
These guys just had this totally goonish approach to how they were going to respond to my admittedly aggressive, but I think appropriately aggressive questioning under the circumstances.
Let me ask you about that.
I think the video, one of the versions of the video that I saw earlier today, but not yesterday, shows very clearly that it was Matt Miller summoning the security guards and directing them over to you and directing them to remove you using physical force.
It didn't just happen organically.
I think the argument that people have made, and not just in this instance, but other similar ones like it, is that, look, these are top-level U.S. government officials.
This is an organized press briefing.
There's a process and a structure to it where he gets to speak for as long as he wants, and only once they give you permission to ask questions.
Do you get to ask questions and you have to sit and wait your turn in deference to the protocols and the kind of ceremony, the theater that they've created?
Why did you find yourself unwilling to wait until what they designated as the question and answer period before asking your questions?
Well, I mean, even the BBC in the description of this refer to it as Blinken, me interrupting his speech, because it seems so much not like an actual news conference.
You know, he's supposed to go up there and ask questions.
He hasn't been in there in over a year.
They actually called this thing an hour ahead of time, making it almost impossible for independent people who don't have an office in the press building to make it there on time.
I managed to do that because I was keeping a very sharp eye out, and Max Blumenthal was doing the same.
So they have an entire structure to pretend to have this open discourse when it's actually manipulated at every stage.
And in my case, it was manipulated to the extreme and explicitly so.
I was told they would not take my questions.
What am I supposed to do?
Be complicit in my own silence and the silence of the people who rely on me to ask tough questions?
Seeing as I am able to get into that room, I'm not going to do that.
I'm going to use the First Amendment as vigorously as possible.
I didn't throw my shoe at him as much as he might have deserved it.
I didn't throw anything at him as much as he might have deserved it.
I asked tough questions.
I used my voice.
I asked him about the Geneva Conventions, which they are refusing to apply to the Palestinians in total contravention of international law, but they won't admit it.
That's basically U.S. policy.
And he wouldn't answer.
And then I asked about the Hannibal Directive and he wouldn't answer.
And then they brought the goons out on me.
And so I just, you know, laid out as articulate as I could under those circumstances.
My questions, they are, it's all access journalism.
And unless you're, you know, quite deferential.
They will do everything to undermine you.
And I'm not deferential.
I ask vigorous, tough questions.
And if they don't permit that, then I have to come up with creative ways of attempting to make that happen.
Deference is not usually, being deferential to government officials in particular is not, at least in my estimation, typically a characteristic or personality trait that one associates with a good journalist.
Particularly the kind of favored journalists in the room, the people who work for the large media corporations who typically get to sit in front, who are always called on first, who they favor precisely because they won't ask about the Geneva Conventions or the Hannibal Doctrine.
What was the reaction of those people in that room when you were dragged out physically simply for doing your job?
Did people stand up and defend you or object to your being carried out?
How did the reaction of what are supposed to be your journalistic colleagues play out?
No, I mean, a bunch of them took out their phones and videotaped it.
I got a couple of calls afterwards from, I don't know, two journalists, I suppose.
But no, other than that, it's been complete silence.
I think that there is a massive careerist.
Aspect to journalism.
I'm sure you've said that a thousand times, Glenn.
And, you know, I mean, it even applies to the foreign press, to the Arabic press, you know, their Gulf-funded media and so on.
So even if people see Arabic journalists, that doesn't mean that they're actually giving voice to what needs to be given voice to in this context.
So, you know, I mean, I tried I've tried repeatedly to put out tough questions that are well researched.
My big question yesterday was about the origins of this so-called ceasefire deal.
People claim that this ceasefire proposal had its origins with...
The Biden statement on May 31st.
Yeah, what happened just before May 31st?
What happened just before May 31st was the ICJ orders from the South Africa genocide case on May 24th, when the International Court of Justice said that Israel must stop its assault on Rafa, must stop all genocidal actions.
This whole ceasefire process that they've used as a sham, as a farce.
To draw people out was all initiated as a way of preventing the UN from acting on those orders from the International Court of Justice.
It's been a farce from the get-go.
And it's very frustrating seeing no one else ask fundamental questions like that that show how manipulated.
The propaganda and the pretense is coming from the State Department and other quarters.
It's been an incredibly well-orchestrated genocide from beheaded babies to get you to a place where so many people justify mass violence, false stories about beheaded babies, so that people say, oh, well, Israel's got to do what it's got to do.
In effect, justifying the slaughter of hundreds, if not thousands, of actual babies.
It has been incredibly well orchestrated.
And, you know, Blinken, as I was getting dragged out, said, trust the process.
Trust the process.
You know, it's ludicrous to me.
You know, somebody's literally carrying out, or, you know, at minimum, pivotal.
Critical in Israel carrying out this mass slaughter, extermination, genocide campaign, and he's telling you to trust the process.
I presume that you saw, and by the way, I should note that there was a prominent journalist, an editor, the deputy editor of Reuters, in fact, who previously worked at Al Jazeera.
Who, I don't know if you saw, today went on Twitter and condemned the journalist in the room for not having spoken up on your behalf and for basically sitting by silently.
I'll send that to you if you haven't seen it.
I wish I had his name.
We'll show the tweet in the intro before the segment.
But that is an example of somebody who actually did speak up for you.
That is inside the corporate media, clearly.
But most of them, of course, did not.
Now, speaking of those who did not, I don't know if you saw this, but there was a CNN....segment on what happened, and these two very standard CNN personalities who read from the teleprompter inside the CNN studio, who I'm sure think they're journalists or tell themselves that they are,
even though they've never once confronted anybody or broken a story, referred to you not even by name, but saying that you were this cringy activist that went to the press briefing and had some kind of insane outburst and had to be carried out.
They don't consider you a journalist.
They didn't call you a journalist.
They called you instead an activist.
And we're very critical of that because, of course, in their minds, the role of a journalist is to treat certainly people like Tony Blinken with great respect and deference.
I remember having gone through something very similar when we first broke the Snowden story.
The very first article the New York Times ran after the first story was kind of a who is the reader story.
And the headline was anti-surveillance blogger at the heart, anti-surveillance activist at the heart of the story.
And then people were angry about it and they changed it to anti-surveillance blogger, anything but journalist, even though we were reporting the most important story, certainly in that year, if not in many years.
Having been a journalist for so long, having done so much work, having confronted people in the adversarial way that is the ethos of the journalistic spirit, does that bother you when these kind of like blown-dry studio teleprompter readers at CNN look down upon you that way, don't even deign to name you and call you an activist?
It bothers me only in so much as I realize what they're doing.
They're attempting to hide from the American public what's actually going on.
They're attempting to hide from the American public how murderous U.S. policies.
They're attempting to hide from the American public what actual journalism could look like.
They're not naming me, not because they don't know my name.
Of course they know my name, because they don't want the...
There's still a segment of the public that isn't online and isn't on Twitter like you and me, Glenn, that they don't want them Googling my name and signing up to my substack, God forbid, and getting independent sources of information.
They don't want that.
So it annoys me insofar as I realize how they're acting in a way that manipulates the American public, but certainly not any of my...
Sense of self-worth is damaged by a bunch of apparatchiks from CNN saying bad things about me.
Yeah, I know your role in life is not to win the approval or the compliments of CNN personalities.
By the way, the deputy editor-in-chief of Reuters who spoke out in your defense is Barry Malone.
So I think it was important.
It actually surprised me that he did so.
Let me ask you.
Yeah, absolutely.
Let me ask you.
This last question, which is, clearly the decorum in that room is that we always respect U.S. officials, no matter what they're guilty of, in a way that no journalist would pay deference to, say, Vladimir Putin or a Hamas leader or someone from the Iranian government or North Korea, any declared enemy of the United States.
States, and it's always based on this perception and this belief, this almost religious-like belief embedded in the U.S. media, that U.S. officials don't commit evil acts.
They maybe make mistakes, but they always are acting with good motives and for that reason deserve this decorum and deference.
Now, clearly you did not embrace that when it came to Secretary Blinken, and I don't think he deserves that either, but why don't you?
Thank you.
Well, I don't know that any official deserves such deference, but I think particularly an official who's actively engaged in orchestrating a genocide deserves absolutely no...
I mean, I think that my stance was moderate.
Just, you know, I'm a journalist, but I'm a human being.
And simply to be in the presence of somebody who's committing horrific acts...
Troubles the soul to abide by any sort of decorum, to be totally honest with you.
More generally, my personal experience at the press briefings over the last several years has been, you know, I am not treated like other journalists.
Other journalists, you know, if we're on a certain topic and somebody says, follow up.
On that topic before they switch to another topic, that will oftentimes be respected by the spokesperson.
That was not the case on many an occasion.
In my case, I was regularly avoided and, as I said earlier, for the last many months, completely blackballed.
So this pretense of being...
You know, polite is, there's something gruesome about it to me.
And I think, you know, so long as you're, you know, not standing up and just calling people names and so on, I think in general, if you're sticking to the facts, as I do, the more contentious and used conference is, the more peaceful the outside world.
That is, if everybody's sitting there schmoozing and getting along and chuckling, then there's probably a greater chance of more horrific violence going on in the real world outside.
So I very much am in the camp of, you know, rage, rage against that sort of way of being.
Yeah, and unfortunately what you just described, this kind of schmoozing, this like constant giggling and viewing each other first and foremost as colleagues and friends and only theatrically as people whom you treat adversarily very much defines most of the Washington press corps. this like constant giggling and viewing each other first and And I think that's the principal reason why it's so rotted today.
And one of the things that produces is that anyone who doesn't accept that model...
Becomes an outsider.
You can't stay in these outlets if you don't.
Because you're an outsider, you don't really get viewed as a real journalist.
There's no solidarity for you.
It's the reason why they acted like a mean tweet from Donald Trump about Wolf Blitzer or Jim Acosta was the collapse of press freedom while none of them cared that Julian Assange was sitting and rotting in a prison for doing the job that they're too cowardly and incapable of doing.
And I'm really glad there are still journalists like you who use those press briefings for what they're supposed to be for, which is getting real answers.
I followed your work for a long time.
I know you do a lot of your work on Substack, but just tell people...
Who aren't following you yet and who should be where they can be following your journalism?
If they go to husseini.org, they'll see a LinkedIn tree, and the top of that is my substack, which is husseini.substack.com, and they'll see some of my other projects that they might be interested in, like Vote Pact, which is like a left-right getting-together thing, and a new project of mine called The Papers Project, which hopes to build Well, Sam, congratulations on a job well done yesterday.
As I showed you, you were headline news all the way in Brazil with that now iconic photo of you being dragged out by four separate security guards, one by each of your limbs, kind of a real manifestation of what happens to press freedom of journalists who actually do their job.
So it may not have been the most pleasant thing, but I'm nonetheless glad you did it.
I hope you take care of yourself.
Follow your doctor's advice.
Don't do any more interviews.
I'm glad you ignored him for this interview, but don't do any more.
