A Trauma Surgeon's Story From Gaza

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Welcome to Pod Save the World.

I'm Tommy Vitor.

I'm Ben Rhodes.

Ben, I'm feeling emotional today.

There's some reports out that Bill Belichick,

my former head coach, might be engaged to his much, much, much

younger girlfriend.

Is this your redirection from talking about the absolute dismantling of the Celtics that the Knicks did on the

right through it?

Yeah, yeah.

Yep, you did.

Congratulations to Bill Belichick.

The age

difference notwithstanding.

Yeah, you probably shouldn't 3x or 4x your significant other.

Everyone should read about the Bill Belichick, Jordan Hudson, saguts quite.

I think she's younger than Jalen Brunson, just to connect this to the Knicks in some way that I can.

How are you feeling?

When's the next game?

It's tomorrow night.

So the night that this podcast airs, the Knicks will be winning game one against the Pacers.

Is it in New York or in India?

It's in New York.

We are somehow hosting the Eastern Conference Finals.

And I'm reliving my teenage years when we played the Pacers like, you know, four times in the conference finals.

Should we do a GoFundMe to fly you out to a game?

I don't think that the collective listenership, as large as it is, could pay for a ticket at Mass Square Grant.

I saw that a bad seat for game one of the NBA Finals is over $2,000 already.

It's crazy.

It's great.

I guess there's a lot of rich people in New York.

Bill Belichick, though,

if he's listening.

Congratulations, Bill.

He listened to me.

And, you know, you could pick up a ticket.

Mozlotov, Bill, to new beginnings.

We have a great show today.

We're going to close the loop for you on Trump's corruption tour in the Middle East and his major Syria policy changes.

We're also going to fill you in on the latest background we've learned about the Qatar's 747-sized bribe of the administration.

Lots of interesting information there.

Then we will talk about the shocking politicization of intelligence by Tulsi Gabbard, a wave of oppression in El Salvador, the latest just ungodly awful news out of Gaza, and why parts of Europe, countries in Europe, are condemning the Israeli government's latest actions.

We'll talk about Trump seeming to give up on brokering peace in Ukraine and some big elections in Portugal, Romania, and Poland.

And then we've promised that we will talk about Eurovision.

So we shall do that.

And then Ben, you just did our interview today.

What are folks going to hear?

Yeah, I talked to Feroz Sidwa, who is a trauma surgeon who has done two stints in Gaza.

So this is like a really important conversation that I think everybody needs to hear about what it's like to be

in the middle of it in Gaza.

And

we hear some really harrowing stories.

We hear details that we never get to see about what it's actually like in Gaza.

We talk about the

likely undercount of the death count.

We talk about the fact that, you know, I mean, just to give you a taste of the interview,

you know, Faroe said his entire time there, he maybe saw one combatant.

on the Hamas side.

It was mainly children that he was treating.

We hear about some children.

We get to know something about some of those children.

So I really hope people stick around for this because it was one of the hardest but most,

I don't know, necessary conversations I've had in a long time.

Yeah, I mean, I wasn't in the interview, but I spent five minutes or so talking to him beforehand, just chatting.

And

it's really valuable to hear someone's firsthand experience like that.

Like we see it on the internet all day long.

You see the videos.

You see the

read the stories.

Sometimes they're so awful that there's like a part of your brain that wants to disbelieve it.

You know what I mean?

Because the horror is so real.

But to have someone be like, I was a surgeon in a hospital and the following things happened to me.

I don't know.

It's just, it hits in a different way.

Well, yeah.

I mean, one of the things we talk about is that, you know, what he saw, what he experienced, the people he interacted with, the nature of the injuries he treated all point to why

people are not allowed to see what's happening in Gaza, why we don't have press on the ground in Gaza a year and a half into this.

So

that makes it even more important to hear stories like his because it's the only first-hand testimony that

we can get absent.

Yes, obviously some heroic reporting from Palestinians that we see on social media, and that's

immensely valuable, that kind of witness.

This is from inside a hospital, though.

So I think it's a unique perspective.

Yeah, absolutely.

All right, Ben.

Well, we're going to talk about that.

We're also going to talk about some political developments in Gaza.

But let's start just by closing the loop on this Middle Eastern corruption bonanza from our president, Donald Trump.

So the big news that we talked about last week was Trump promising to lift the crippling sanctions on Syria that were left over from the Assad regime.

Actually, I think the first sanctions by the U.S.

on Syria were from like the 1970s.

So there's decades of sanctions on this country.

Trump met with Syria's interim president, Ahmed El-Shara, in Saudi Arabia last Wednesday.

The Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman joined them, as did Turkish President Tayyib Erdogan via telephone.

Here's a clip of Trump on Fox News talking about his meeting with Al-Sharra.

I said, let's give him a chance.

I met the leader.

I met the new leader and

a handsome guy, by the way.

Young, handsome.

And I said, you know, you have quite a past.

Got a tough past.

But when you think about it, are you going to put a

choir boy in that position?

I don't think so.

You know, it's going to be a little bit tough.

It's a tough place.

So you're willing to give him a shot.

You You know, the way they say it's a nasty neighborhood.

It's a rough neighborhood.

And

I thought he was really, yeah, I thought he was terrific.

Tough past is one way to describe being a senior Al-Qaeda leader.

Ben, this is not the most important thing we'll discuss, but I just would like you to imagine for a minute Brett Baer's face if he was interviewing Barack Obama and Obama was like, yo, that Al-Qaeda guy, handsome guy.

You could fucking get it.

Handsome guy.

Really good-looking guy.

What do we do?

Why does he have to gild the lily about like the

it's like he's he's on a casting call for everything so after the meeting Trump spoke to the press on Air Force One He claimed that Al-Shara agreed to join the Abraham Accords, but said they first have to get themselves straightened up.

We'll see.

The big question, though, for the Syrian people are all about sanctions relief.

What does it mean in practice?

When will it happen?

Secretary of SUC, Marco Rubio, I don't know.

I don't know if that one works.

He met with Syria's foreign minister last week.

Afterwards, he talked about sanctions.

Here's a clip from from Mr.

Rubio.

The core of these sanctions are statutory under the Caesar Act.

I've had members of Congress and both parties ask us to use the waivers authorities in that law,

and that's what the President intends to do.

Those waivers have to be renewed every 180 days.

Ultimately, if we make enough progress, we'd like to see the law repealed because you're going to struggle to find people to invest in a country when

in six months sanctions could come back.

We're not there yet.

That's premature.

I think we want to start with the initial waiver, which will allow foreign partners who wanted to flow in aid to begin to do so without running the risk of sanctions.

I think as we make progress, hopefully we'll be in a position soon or one day to go to Congress and ask them to permanently remove the sanctions.

The look on your face is preempting my question.

So Rubio there is mentioning the Caesar Act sanctions as were passed by Congress in 2019.

Chris Murphy actually mentioned this to me last week as being a hurdle.

So Rubio there, he's sort of talking about a phased approach to lifting sanctions that will first allow foreign governments to get aid into Syria.

That will probably not lead to an immediate private sector investments.

You've also heard Qatar and Saudi Arabia say that they'll pay off Syria's debt to the World Bank, which will allow the World Bank to re-engage with Syria.

So, that's a good thing.

I saw the Syrian government also just signed an $800 million deal with an Emirati-based logistics company to develop their port, so hopefully, that will help with some imports and exports.

But, Ben, I guess my question for you is: do you think this goes far enough?

Is it unrealistic to think businesses would kind of rush into Syria and start investing anyway?

And therefore, this makes sense?

Or what do you think?

First thing is,

looks notwithstanding, if you think about Ahmed Al-Shara,

like seven months ago or somewhere in that neighborhood, he was like on a truck like coming south from Idlib.

Think of the journey this guy's been on

to go from there.

I mean, not since, I don't know, the last time a revolutionary had this level of success in this short amount of time.

So he's doing something right.

But in terms of the sanctions, so people understand how this works, when you have legislative sanctions, Congress pass sanctions, what they often do is they require a sanction, but they give the president a waiver.

So the president can essentially say, well, this law is on the books, but I'm waiving this law for 180 days.

And that means I won't sanction anything that kind of flows in during this period of time.

I think that is sufficient to get in a lot of immediate needs.

And you've had Qatar and other countries, probably Gulf countries like Saudi, willing to kind of put in some money to pay salaries, to start to rebuild things, to just kind of get the place up and running.

I think the waiver is certainly sufficient for that to happen.

The question, though, is the kind of investment a business makes requires kind of planning out a few years, right?

And a business is probably not going to invest if there's the uncertainty that sanctions carry.

I went through this with Iran, to some extent with Cuba.

And as long as the sanctions are still on the books, anything that's kind of a multi-year investment is probably chilled.

And so

it's a positive step.

And again, it'll allow for the kinds of things that, you know, will make life better right away and let the Syrian state kind of get up off the ground.

I would like to see them within the next 180 days try to lift the sanctions, right?

So why not just do the waiver and use that period to do the work on the hill?

Because I don't really know, you know,

Rubio didn't like say what he's looking for.

You know, there's no clear list.

So I just think if these guys continue to say and do the right things or enough of the right things, and again, perfect can't be the standard here.

It's not going to be perfect.

No government's perfect.

Ours is certainly not perfect.

But I'd like to see them just get this off the books.

Look, the Caesar Act was passed, again, because Caesar was a photographer who captured horrific human rights violations in Syrian prisons.

Like, those prisons are closed.

Those people are out of prison.

Like, the basis for those sanctions is gone.

This is a good start, but then let's lift the sanctions and hope that Democrats, not because Republicans, you know, not the Democrats listen to us necessarily, but more likely than Republicans, I hope Democrats choose to vote for the right thing here in lifting these sanctions.

Yeah, I think it's clearly the right thing to do.

This is the first meeting between a U.S.

president and a Syrian leader in 25 years.

Just remarkable, chilling.

But to your point, I mean, 90% of Syrians are currently living in poverty, according to the UN.

There's desperate immediate need.

Hopefully that will start to address some of it.

It's also worth noting that Syria is experiencing a ton of violence right now.

There was a car bomb that exploded near a police station in eastern Syria over the weekend.

They killed three people.

The day before, Syrian forces raided an ISIS hideout in Aleppo, killing several.

There's been sectarian violence in a region run by the Druze minority.

There's been violence against the Alawites back in March.

So there's like a lot of simmering tensions in sectarian minefields that will be,

that will will increase, right?

That tension will increase if there's just no economic opportunity and people are starving.

If there's a smaller, you know, if there's very little resources, people are more likely to fight over those scarce resources, right?

I mean, you have to let activity start to resume.

You have to kind of normalize politics, and you can't do that under sanctions.

That's right.

So, Ben, as you know, me, Lovett, and John share in office.

We have Fox News on all day long just because it's, I don't know, it's just funnier.

Yeah.

It's much, much meaner to Democrats.

But you also just, you can't overstate the degree to which Fox is state-owned media.

They take, like, we just were watching the Golden Dome announcement.

Yeah.

They took it live.

He said nothing.

It was complete nonsense.

Most days include some sort of like gauzy hour-long feature about a cabinet secretary.

Here's an example of a part of one from Monday.

This was Fox News host Will Kane interviewing former Fox News weekend anchor turned Secretary of Defense, Pete Hexeth.

This was not planned.

This is embarrassing.

No, I think it's beautiful.

It's friendship, well, all the way to the Pentagon.

So that was them talking about how crazy it was that they wore the same tie.

It's hard-sitting stuff.

Hard-sitting stuff then.

So, but, you know, you and I both had some experience with Brett Baer over the years.

He's become kind of like the...

the alpha of all the betas.

You know, he's like the lead propaganda.

He's like that guy in Russian media that we see like

that toxic host who's always like yelling at a panel of people.

Yeah, yeah.

And so Brett, he is so dedicated to his craft of propaganda that he even followed Trump to the UAE and to Qatar, and he did softball interviews with the leaders there.

That, in a roundabout way, will get us to the latest on the story of Qatar gifting Trump a 747-8.

So thanks to the New York Times and CNN, they did some real reporting on this.

They figured out that the backstory for how this plane happened entails Steve Gwitkoff specifically approaching Qatar about getting Trump a new plane, and he did so at Trump's request.

Apparently, Qatar also gifted the same kind of plane, the 747-8, to President Erdogan of Turkey back in 2018, which bought them a bunch of goodwill.

So maybe it's like a gift bag thing.

It's like Derek Jeter back in the day with his dates, allegedly.

So, Ben, here is a clip of the Qatari prime minister talking about this plane bribe fiasco with Brett Baer and then with Bloomberg at the Qatar Economic Forum.

But I was told that you wanted to address the gift that Qatar was giving to the U.S.

government, to the Defense Department of this jet.

Well, I see that this story is making a big story in the news.

Unfortunately, I see that this story is taking a different direction and is being more politicized while it's a normal government-to-government deal.

What was the purpose?

What is the purpose of this gift?

I don't know why people

are thinking about it, about that this is considered as a bribery or considered as

something something that Qatar wants to buy an influence with this administration.

Were you convinced by those rejoiners?

Well, but the other thing about that, though, if you connect the reporting, if you're Qatar

and your literal survival kind of depends on the U.S., I mean, just look at a map, like it's pretty vulnerable, right?

And there's a U.S.

airbase there.

And Steve Wickoff comes to you and is like, hey, nice plane you got there.

Yeah, I like your plane.

I think my boss, the president of the United States, would like your plane.

The same guy that blockaded you the first time around, you'd probably be retrofitting that plane, you know?

Coughing that sucker up in the middle.

Although apparently the Qataris have been trying to sell the plane since 2020 because it's just too big.

It costs too much to operate.

It's like kind of too gaudy.

And I think, according to the Times report, they initially thought.

that when they flew this plane to Florida for Trump to check it out, that it was in the context of a sale.

But Wickoff apparently believed it would be a gift.

Ah, okay.

Interesting.

The plot thickens, right?

Interesting stuff.

Yeah, so it's like, oh, yeah, what's the price of that?

Well, it's X.

It's funny.

We had a different price in mind.

It's free, you know?

It really has the vibe of like a Joe Pascia closing the door and be like, Nazi, you can't leave.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean, this whole thing is just, it's just so obvious.

I mean,

the grift is so massive and so in plain sight that there's really nothing you can say about it.

I I mean, I will say, like, the Qataris are pretty savvy people.

Like they, you know, Al Jazeera runs there.

Like, I doubt that they're shocked, shocked that this is a big story in American politics and media, you know?

Like, of course it is, you know, it's Air Force One.

I mean, it's the most iconic

call sign in the world, you know?

It's so stupid.

There's also all this reporting that what it would cost to retrofit the plane might.

would like ultimately cost half quarter

double.

Of course it would because I mean, you know, I don't think it's revealing anything, but I mean, just being on Air Force One all those years, like it can do, you know, it can do evasive maneuvers, right?

If there's some attack, it can refuel in the air.

It must probably need like all kinds of encryption for secure communications.

Like, there's a reason it takes Boeing a long time to build a new Air Force One.

And so either they're not going to do that kind of retrofitting, in which case it won't have all the security that you would want the U.S.

president to have flying around,

or it's going to end up costing kind of roughly the same to the taxpayer anyway.

So

this is just like a pure ego thing.

But Wickoff is so perfect.

I mean, why is the Middle East peace envoy like negotiating gifts from welfare governments?

Well, I think it's because he has a pre-existing relationship with them.

They bailed out one of his businesses back in the day.

So yeah, the whole thing feels gross.

And again, we know this is now an old story, but it's such a staggering bit of corruption that it's, I think, important to just remember that this is still going gonna happen like I think they're still gonna give Trump this plane He's still gonna take it with him to his grave and they'll still you know these countries will plow money into Trump coin and they'll still I mean they'll give money to Trump kids for you know what I saw today Eric Trump apparently this week is in Vietnam They're having talks about I think opening maybe another Trump tower

Somewhere in the capital.

I think there's also there's reports that Eric may be attending like a groundbreaking ceremony for a Trump golf course while he's in Vietnam.

And by the way, this is all happening, though, as the Vietnamese government is negotiating, trying to negotiate away their 46% tariffs.

I mean, that's what this is.

Like, the reason Trump wants to have this dial that he can turn up and down around tariffs and all these things is that each one of these things is a massive profit opportunity, right?

So Vietnam has like a sword hanging over its head of like, what, 47% tariffs?

And it's like, well, in the next 90 days, you could, you know, plow, you know, a ton of money into some Trump golf course and have Eric there and tell him what a business genius he is that you want to have the Trump people running a golf course and a hotel in Vietnam.

Of course you're going to do that if you think you want relief from tariffs.

So this is going to be such a massive wealth transfer to the Trump family for doing fucking nothing.

Oh, I'm sorry.

There's a...

The Vietnam just gave the Trump family the green light a $1.5 billion golf development project, and they're talking about building a skyscraper in Ho Chi Minh City.

So we're double dipping here and Eric's going to go come to town.

I wouldn't give Eric Eric Trump 20 bucks to go across the street to get a fucking sandwich.

You know,

if you have a 47 tariff hanging over your head, you give him a billion and a half dollars for a golf course.

You do what you got to do.

You give him a skyscraper, you give him a 747, we move on with our lives.

It looks ridiculous.

It is bad news.

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All right, we're gonna switch gears a little bit because it's more serious stuff, Ben, because this is another big story that I think is a huge deal and it's not getting covered enough.

Um, so the context is: as we've discussed, Trump has invoked the Alien Enemies Act to speed up the deportation of Venezuelan migrants.

The administration basically wants to set up this parallel immigration process with no due process or checks and balances to just race people out of the country.

And the results, as we've all discussed, is that about 240 migrants are now rotting in hell in El Salvador.

To justify invoking the Alien Enemies Act, Trump had to declare that the Venezuelan government is controlling Terne de Aragua, which we'll call TDA going forward, directing this.

The Trump administration is saying the Maduro government is telling TDA to invade the United States, basically.

Yeah, conducting.

And using them as an arm to conduct war against the United States, because that's what the Alien Enemies Act is about.

Now, the problem is the intelligence community looked at alleged ties between the Maduro government and TDA and determined that the Maduro government is probably not directing their movements or operations within the United States.

This assessment is likely to create some major legal issues for the Trump administration's lawyers as they defend this policy in court.

So you might wonder, how did Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, react when her workforce released this assessment that spoke truth to power and

had a different assessment than what Trump was stating in his talking points?

Well, first, her chief of staff tried to pressure the analysts into changing their conclusions.

They've refused.

So last week, Gabbard fired the head of the National Intelligence Council and his deputy, and then had the nerve to say that she did so to, quote, end the weaponization and politicization of the intelligence community.

So, Ben, the outcome from the cherry-picking of intelligence that led us into the Iraq War was obviously far worse and more catastrophic and long-lasting than what we're talking about here.

But just in terms of the naked politicization of the intelligence community itself, I would actually argue that what Tulsi did here is worse than Dick Cheney just like cherry-picking things he wanted.

I mean, they literally went to these guys and said, change your assessment.

And when they refused to change their intelligence assessment, they fired them.

Yeah, this is a huge story.

on so many levels.

Because first of all, yes, the history of presidents going shopping for the intelligence they want in the United States is not good.

That's how you get the Vietnam War.

That's how you get the Iraq war.

Bad to do that.

The second point is, before we even get to TDA, this is going to send a message to the entire intelligence community that on whatever issue it is that you're being tasked for analysis on, if you don't provide the information that validates Donald Trump's worldview, like you're going to be out of the job, right?

So the message in firing these people isn't just that we want want analysts to write a report on TDA that confirms what we say.

It's that whatever the fucking topic is, we're not here to give impartial facts.

We're not here to understand what's happening in the world.

We're not here to avoid mistakes by the U.S.

government.

We are here to tell Donald Trump whatever he wants to hear.

Yeah, it's a head on a pike, to warn future truth tellers not to do it.

Basically, hang it in front of the fucking intelligence community.

And by the way, I see that Telsi Gabbard is pulling the production of the PDB into the DNI's office, not at CIA.

But

then, on the TDA issue itself, this is a huge deal because they have used, we've talked about this in other contexts, but they continually use national security.

I think they studied this in the last few years and they realized that national security authorities are the most powerful shortcuts to the president having a kind of emergency powers, right?

So in this case, the emergency power is we can basically deport anybody that has like a tattoo or whatever.

We can just call somebody Trende Aragua and we can deport them even if we don't have due process, even if we don't have evidence.

But they're also using national security authorities to put tariffs on people.

Going forward, if they can draw these kinds of connections, they could use those authorities to do basically anything.

Far end, extreme end,

we can't hold an election because it's a national emergency, or we have to invade such country because they're at war with us.

Or, you know,

like you can basically claim whatever powers you want if you're saying we're at war with a foreign government with this, you know,

this proxy fighting us.

Can Can I ask you a quick question?

How many national emergencies do you think Trump declared in the first 100 days?

Oh, that's a good pop quiz.

I'm going to guess

50.

Eight.

Which is still, I think, more than any other president in this period of time in history.

But they include things like a national emergency to impose sanctions on the International Criminal Court.

Well, but

the reason I said 50 is actually, I was thinking more outputs and inputs, right?

Because the national emergency has been used to do far more than eight things, right?

That's how they're deporting all these people.

That's how they're tariffing all these countries.

And then the last thing I just want to say about this Tommy is that the idea that the Venezuelan government is directing TDA like some terrorist state-sponsored terrorist organization is absolutely fucking insane.

There's no way that's happening.

If you know anything about Venezuela, if you know anything about these gangs, the most you could find is that there are probably some corrupt dudes somewhere in the Maduro government who like are on the take from TDA right and and they do business with them which is nothing like you know Iran directing hisbullah or something you know and that's how what they're trying to portray as happening is just not happening and I they can't find anybody to say it's happening but they're gonna keep looking until they find someone who will just make shit up for them it's completely absurd and and as we discussed the result is they are sending human beings to this gulag in El Salvador.

And the Cato Institute did a recent review of all these men who had been sent down, and they found that 50 of the guys now in Sukkot, in this prison in El Salvador, came to the U.S.

legally and never violated any immigration law.

So, this rushed, half-assed, fucked-up process is just sending innocent people to rot.

This is what's so grotesque about the whole immigration approach you're taking, too, is that most of these, you know, Venezuelans had temporary protected status in this country.

Haitians had temporary protected status in the country.

That means that they were here legally.

So, like, when you say they didn't commit crimes, what you offer in your back is, is, well, it was a crime to come here.

Right.

Well, it wasn't, you know, because they were granted legal status.

So this is, this is really fascist stuff.

Yeah, it really is.

And before we move on, speaking of fascist stuff, we wanted to highlight the escalating attacks.

in El Salvador itself against the press and human rights organizations by Naya Bukele's government.

So over the weekend, the Washington Post wrote about this trio of investigative journalists from an independent outlet called El Faro, which is Spanish for lighthouse, who joined four other colleagues who'd previously fled the country country after reporting on these alleged deals between Bukele and the country's gangs.

And then on Sunday, authorities arrested Ruth Lopez, a lawyer at the human rights organization, Christo Saul, who has publicly accused the Bukele government of corruption.

Ruth's colleague Noah Bullock, who's been on the show before, sent us a voice memo just offering some more context about this wave of repression.

Here's a clip.

My colleague Ruth, she's the head of our anti-corruption unit.

And so she's led a team that's investigated over 15 cases of corruption during the Bukele regime.

She's a person who's super credible in the country and really well loved.

She's one of the most visible and consistently critical voices.

So the big takeaway from this is that the Bukele regime is no longer worried about appearances.

And a lot of that, I think, has to do with this being probably the worst three months of his whole two presidential administrations.

his popularity has dropped from like above 80% down to like 50%.

When you have people expressing dissent and you lose control of the narrative, then the regime begins to act and use the repressive power that it has.

Like just in the last week, there were

about 20 different people who were detained

illegally, clearly political motives behind it.

Three journalists who revealed or did an interview with gang members

talking about their partnership with them, had to flee the country.

One of those 20 people who were detained has already died in custody of the state.

It has a lack of access to medicine.

On top of that, Bukele announced

a Russian-style foreign agents law that would put a tax on NGOs.

Sunday night with the capture of Ruth, what's really surprising is that

in attacking her, they're not going after the weakest link.

She's one of the best connected, most credible voices in the country and internationally.

And

so they're trying to silence a powerful voice.

So that's who the U.S.

government's in bed with, Ben.

You know, Marco Rubio's flying down to hang out with Bukele.

Calling him like such a great friend.

Yeah, Trump's welcoming into the Oval Office.

Like, this is the government we are now closest with in the region.

Yeah, I mean, these are the people Trump likes.

He's strongmen around the world.

I mean, the one thing that I think is interesting,

well, more than one thing in that clip, the fact that Bukele's popularity is dropping.

I don't think countries like El Salvador want to be like some subsidiary of the Trump organization.

I mean, the guy is so, let's just like, let's go at the world's quote-unquote coolest dictator this way.

This guy is such a tough guy that he's basically like a bag man for Donald Trump.

That's not strength.

He doesn't look like a strong man, like sitting there kissing Donald Trump's ass and like taking direction from Stephen Miller.

I shouldn't say this because I, you know, in case I end up, you know, but I'm just seriously, like, this is

like this is just a sign of like, you know, we'll get to the elections later in the thing, but like Trump is not exactly like a brand you want to associate with.

I mean, you can do it in the Gulf because, you know, there's no opposition there.

But I think it's going to, people are going to find in other parts of the world that hitching your wagon to this is not the best move.

Yeah, look, there's no doubt that Bukele

took some really drastic unconstitutional steps to address an acute need, which was a murder rate that was like shockingly high.

I think it went from 51 murders per 100,000 people in 2019 to 1.9 people per 100,000 in 2024.

So you can't overstate how important that

increase in security and safety is for people on the ground.

But the poverty rate in El Salvador went from 26.8% in 2019 to 30% in 2023.

So it'd be like people can't find work.

They can't find food.

You can't just continuously arrest people

until poverty is solved.

That's just not how it works.

I mean, he'll try that.

But I mean, because people want security, but then they want security to be a pathway towards like a more prosperous society and like more return of freedoms, right?

And so he's following the same pattern.

All these people are like, wow, look, this right-wing, hard right-wing crackdown politics is successful.

Well, the first couple of years it is, but then once it's like a like a repressive police state that is impoverished because of corruption and everything else.

Like, then all of a sudden, people are like, well, actually, no, I want something different than that.

Yeah, I want different leadership.

All right, Ben, we're going to switch gears here and talk about the situation on the ground in Gaza.

So, you're obviously going to hear a lot more about the humanitarian situation for ordinary people in Ben's interview.

But there's some big political developments we wanted to cover, too.

The biggest news is that Israel has launched a massive new offensive into Gaza.

On Monday, Netanyahu said that Israel is, quote, moving toward full control of Gaza.

As of this recording, the New York Times says that Israel had not yet begun this long-awaited military advance, which would involve thousands of ground troops, but the IDF has ordered the evacuation of Gaza's second-largest city, Con Yunis, which is in line with their plan to displace people into a humanitarian zone and then begin this invasion.

The international response to this ground offensive has been swift and harsh.

The UK, France, and Canada released a joint statement, which reads in part, we strongly oppose the expansion of Israel's military operations in Gaza.

The level of human suffering in Gaza is intolerable.

They also said, quote, Israel must halt settlements which are illegal.

We will not hesitate to take further action, including targeted sanctions.

So, really, like, you know, expanding the things they're criticizing and including threats.

David Lammy, a friend of the pod, UK Foreign Secretary, announced the suspension of trade talks between the UK and Israel.

Here's a bit of his speech to Parliament where he talks about all this.

The government has always backed Israel's right to defend itself.

We have condemned Hamas and its abhorrent treatment of the hostages, and we have stood with families and demanded their loved ones be released.

It's morally unjustifiable, it's wholly disproportionate, it's utterly, utterly counterproductive.

Whatever Israeli ministers claim, this is not the way to bring the hostages safely home.

Good for Lami there.

I think there's been a lot of pressure from the left in the UK for the Labour Party to step up and do and say more.

So good to hear him do that.

So, Ben, like, we just talked about this war for so long that you kind of run out of words for how terrible things are.

Like, just to lay out a couple facts,

as we speak, the Israeli government has had a near-total blockade of Gaza for about 11 weeks.

A top UN official named Tom Fletcher said that 14,000 babies in Gaza could die in the next 48 hours if aid doesn't get in.

Airstrikes have drastically ramped up in advance of this new ground offensive.

There are

sites like Dropsite News have done a great job of recirculating clips from Palestinian journalists of the aftermath of these airstrikes, and it's as bad as anything you've ever seen.

People are being displaced for the third, fourth, 15th time.

And let's just be honest, like as Lamy said there, Ben, Israeli hostages are far more likely to die as a result of this operation and the starvation of people in Gaza than to be saved by some military campaign.

So it's just there's no military rationale for this war.

There's no moral justification for it.

This is Netanyahu continuing the slaughter of human beings in Gaza for political reasons so he can appease his kind of right-wing base and government.

And meanwhile, like frenemy Donald Trump is working on an ethnic cleansing plan that would send a million Palestinians to live in exile in Libya.

Yeah, I

there's no military rationale for this, right?

Hamas is not like fighting.

There's absolutely no

threat that is being addressed by this military operation, right?

I mean,

this is a population that lives in a place that has been entirely destroyed, right?

Like almost every structure destroyed or damaged.

You've had, you know, I talk about it in the interview, but like the death toll is much higher than

they can report anymore.

It's probably like somewhere over 100,000 people.

They have not let any food into the Gaza Strip.

Now they may let a dribble in, right?

They're just killing these people.

And they're mainly almost entirely killing civilians at this point, you know?

And so I have to say, Tommy, like I talked to Faroz and he said,

everybody in Gaza expects to die, right?

That's a genocide.

Okay.

And and people don't like to hear that term, but I don't really know what other, what the military rationale is to starve

children and bomb innocent people in tents and just kind of keep moving this war around and and and keep talking about ethnic cleansing people to other places like what I do I'm out of words to to describe what is happening you know and I think the reason you see some of these governments saying these things is because they know what's happening and you know they're they're creating a bit of a record you know that they were calling this out because I just don't know what to say about about this anymore.

You know, I mean, I didn't mean,

I just don't know what else to say.

Listen, I'm with you.

Like, I bet listeners to the show have probably not, you've heard us talk to really smart human rights lawyers about the genocide filing in the case by South Africa at the International Court of Justice, the elements that go into a determination of genocide.

But like I've not thrown around the term because I think it's the worst thing you could ever accuse someone of.

And you want that,

you want to do so in a way that's based in fact and the letter of the law uh and also you to be mindful of the history of

the i'm mindful because i haven't

no no i know i know and and so but just so no folks know but like in the in the like in the present convention and human rights genocide means any of the following acts committed with the intent to destroy in whole or in part a national ethnic racial or religious group that involves killing members of the group causing bodily harm and mental illness to members of the group preventing births or forcibly transferring children but to constitute genocide, there must be proven intent on the part of the perpetrators to physically destroy a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group.

I think what you just said is the key point.

When you start talking about starving an entire population,

what else

is that?

I'd like, I mean, honestly, at this point,

because again, I'm not a human rights lawyer, right?

And so I'm not making some like legal determination here.

The question I have is: what are they doing?

Because they're not rescuing hostages.

These are not like hostage rescue operations.

They're not, I mean, they've killed the leadership of Hamas.

Like I don't,

like, there should actually be an onus on Netanyahu

and these Israeli ministers to describe

why are you starving people?

Why is there no aid getting in?

Why are you doing ground operations for the umpteenth time in these, what is the purpose of this?

Because nobody can describe a military purpose anymore.

And sure, they say it's because they have to release the hostages.

That is not what is happening here.

This is not about hostages.

Because you would get the hostages out by doing a deal, right?

That's been well established.

Even Trump says that, right?

So I just, like, this is just me saying, like, I don't know what else is going on here.

Like, I don't, the Israeli government cannot provide like a military rationale for

starving children, bombing civilians, and doing ground operations in Gaza a year and a half after October 7th.

And when you read the words of like top Israeli officials, like cabinet ministers, like the finance minister, Smotrich, he said that Israel's goal is, quote, destroying everything that's left of the Gaza Strip.

We are conquering, cleansing, and remaining in Gaza until Hamas is destroyed.

What is that?

I mean, what is it?

How does that overlap with the definition you read?

Yeah, pretty well.

I mean, well, there's an entire other definition, which is just ethnic cleansing.

Yeah.

Well,

That's actually, you know, that's very clear.

Yeah.

There's a version of that happening.

It's horrifying.

And again, like, Israel allowed five trucks into Gaza on Monday.

On Tuesday, I think they let in 93 trucks.

I think the human rights, at this point, people are so,

they're starving so much that they need like 500 a day.

Yeah.

And despite a couple trucks getting in or 93 plus five trucks getting in,

no aid has been distributed, according to the UN.

Like, what is going to happen to these kids?

Like, babies.

Babies, children.

I mean, J.D.

Vance apparently was considering visiting Gaza this week.

He decided against it.

Axios reported that was because he didn't want to be seen as endorsing this latest offensive.

If you're offending the state, if J.D.

Vance is offended, he claimed it was logistics.

That is bullshit.

You have nothing better to do.

You're a fucking vice president.

And that's my suspicion about these statements

is that people, we can't see what's going on inside.

But some of these governments, you know, they have intelligence agencies.

I think people are aware that what is happening now is like next level, even from what we've seen, you know, and

that's why we're, I mean, that's why we're having an uncomfortable conversation about it right now.

Yeah, I mean, like, there were obvious reasons where, like, the weeks after October 7th, that Israel would launch some sort of military and intelligence.

We are a year and a half into this thing.

Like, the leaders of Hamas are

more than that, actually.

We're, you know, over a year and a half.

Yeah, the only way we're getting hostages home alive is through a deal.

Yeah.

And Netanyahu just won't cut one because it doesn't serve his political ends.

Yeah.

It is what it is.

Also, the other major conflict, Ben, is the war in Ukraine.

Last week, we previewed these Trump-endorsed talks between Ukraine and Russia in Turkey.

Those are their first direct talks since the invasion started.

Trump was in the Middle East.

He was pushing for the talks to happen.

He at first suggested he might join the talks himself.

And then, of course, he didn't show up.

Putin didn't show up.

And then Trump defended Putin for not showing up, which is just...

Perfect.

The talks accomplished very little.

They agreed to exchange 1,000 prisoners.

That was the largest prisoner swap yet, but this Reuters headline summed it up well: quote: Istanbul peace talks lay bare chasm between Ukraine and Russia.

Then on Monday, Trump talked with Zelensky on the phone.

Then he called Putin for two hours, and then he did a conference call with Zelensky and leaders from Germany, France, Italy, Finland, and the European Commission to kind of like sync up on what had been said.

In short, this call accomplished absolutely nothing.

It was like talks about starting talks.

Trump got no concessions from Putin.

It doesn't sound like he pressured him in any way.

My takeaway then is that Trump is sick of of this process.

He wants out of it and he wants to push it onto the Vatican.

Is that too cynical?

Am I missing anything?

It seems like

he's sick of it and he realizes that his plan

is going nowhere because his plan was essentially to come in and pressure Ukraine to end the war.

And the Ukrainians agreed to everything Trump pressured them to do, and then Putin just ignored Trump.

And Putin

clearly doesn't feel any pressure from Trump.

I mean, that's what's what's amazing.

I mean, it is, you know, I'm not like putting on like, you know,

resistance hat here, but, but, I mean,

Trump, like, loses his shit.

Kind of Mueller time dollar somewhere, if you want.

Well, no, but the thing is, is like Trump loses his shit when anybody disrespects him.

Putin is totally disrespecting him, and he won't even say a bad word about him.

You know, he won't even like say that it's his fault.

He won't even say the things about Putin that he says about Zelensky, you know.

And

if Putin doesn't feel like the cost to him doing that is some big new package of military assistance to Ukraine or something, something that would be materially bad for Russia, Putin has no incentive to stop what he's doing, which is really escalating the war.

We've seen like waves of drone attacks.

We've seen like grinding on the front line here.

And it does feel like Trump's, rather than pivoting to pressuring

Putin, he's probably going to look to just offload this back to the Europeans.

And then the question is, if that happens, does he cut the Ukrainians off anyway?

And

we don't know the answer.

I I think what Ukraine's been trying to do is go to the extra mile to appear reasonable, right?

Zelensky goes to Turkey.

Exactly.

Putin doesn't show up.

Zelensky agrees to a 30-day ceasefire.

Putin doesn't.

I think what Zelensky and the Europeans are hoping is that if it's so clear that Russia is the reason why this Trump peace effort failed,

that they'll continue to provide weapons and intelligence to Ukrainians.

We don't know the answer to that yet.

Yeah, I think there's like $3 billion worth of military assistance that's ready to go, and Trump just won't send it.

I do think the intelligence piece is probably the biggest thing that's under discuss.

And if Trump cuts off intelligence cooperation fully with Ukrainians, that will be devastating for them.

Then it also seems like Putin is floating to Witkoff and then to Trump some kind of vague opportunity for increased trade between the U.S.

and Russia.

But before the Russian invasion in 2022, the full-scale Russian invasion, U.S.

exports to Russia accounted for 0.3% of total U.S.

exports.

Imports were about 1.1% of total U.S.

imports.

So, like the big countries, we're talking big dollar numbers, like $36 billion in 2021.

But it's not, it's like not enough to juice the U.S.

economy.

And Putin is just clearly stringing Trump along.

I mean, Dmitry Peskov, his spokesman, said that there cannot be any deadlines

for these kind of like memorandums they're going to put together about restarting talks because the devil is in the details.

So they're just giving themselves like a string it out forever plan.

I'm with you.

I think, I guess all I wonder is, I hope the Europeans have come to grips with the fact that Trump is walking away from Ukraine and they are doing what they can to prepare in the little bit of time they're getting here from this stupid process.

Yeah.

But like the part of the problem here is that nobody really knows because Trump, like they, they don't,

like you've got Trump, he's got some play he's running.

You've got J.D.

Vance

who, you know, in the J.D.

Vance version of history, I mean,

this all happened because, you you know,

NATO membership was dangled for Ukraine.

Well, you know what?

We've now removed that.

And Putin is still fighting the war, you know?

So that turns out to not be correct, right?

And then Marco Rubio is out to lunch.

Steve Witkoff is just flattered he gets to be in the room with Putin.

Got a painting.

And got a painting.

But the point is that nobody knows.

At least just kind of guessing, like, what is Trump actually doing here?

Like,

if this fails, like,

nobody knows what his plan B is.

Doesn't feel like there's a lot of consultation going on with the the Europeans about, you know, if X happens, then Y will happen.

And that's what's so strange about this is it's like it hasn't been like a methodical effort to develop a peace strategy.

It's basically been like, you know, chasing like Putin is Lucy with the football and like Lucy pulls back the football and then Trump goes and kicks Zelensky in the balls.

You know, like that's what all we've seen.

And

so it's hard to see where it's going.

If again, if what ends up happening is we end up cutting cutting off Ukraine without a peace deal, then Putin is rewarded for sticking it to Trump and Zelensky is punished for agreeing to all the terms that Trump demanded that he agreed to.

I mean, he didn't agree to all of them, but he agreed to the ceasefire ones.

And the minerals deal and stuff, too.

This is not the art of the deal.

I mean, to use a...

No, this is just a mess.

It's a failed negotiation.

He said he would end the war in 24 hours.

Obviously, that hasn't happened.

He seems fed up.

All his cabinet members are whining about it because they had to do their jobs for 100 days.

Because it's not as simple as JD Vance's hit on the all-in-pod would make it seem.

Yes, that's exactly right.

And meanwhile, all of Europe is terrified.

Speaking of Europe, Ben, this past weekend, Europe had three elections we wanted to highlight.

So there are elections in Romania, Poland, and Portugal.

Let's start with Portugal.

On Sunday, Portugal's center-right Democratic Alliance, which is led by Prime Minister Luis Montenegro, they won a snap election.

It was the third election in three years, which sounds really annoying.

annoying.

And it will allow the ruling party, the government, to continue as a minority government.

But the biggest and most worrying story coming out of the results was the rise of the country's far-right Chega Party, which means enough in Portuguese.

This party was founded only six years ago.

Chega got 22% of the vote.

They might surpass the second-place finishing Socialist Party for the number of parliamentary seats.

And again, just for context, Chega went from having one lawmaker in 2019 to probably about 58 now.

The last time a far-right party held this much sway in Portugal, it was a nationalist dictatorship.

Not good.

A little fascism back there, yeah.

So in Poland, Rafal Trzykovsky, who is aligned with the Prime Minister Donald Tusk, narrowly won the first round of an election where the second, third, and fourth place were just taken by the far right.

There's going to be a runoff in Poland on June 1st, so that's another very important election to watch.

And then in Romania, the Bucharest mayor, Nikashur Don, took almost 54% of the vote, which was surprising.

He beat a Christian nationalist named George Simeon, who had won the first round.

It has been, as we've discussed on the show, a crazy six and a journey month in Romanian politics.

Journey in Romanian politics.

So like last year, there was this, a different far-right pro-Russian candidate named Kaleen Georgescu.

He won the first round of their election back in November of 2024.

The results were annulled because of concerns about Russian interference.

Georgescu was banned from running again by Romania's constitutional courts, which led to the second election.

So, Ben, just like stepping back, there's a couple of trends here that seem interesting to me.

I would love to know what your thoughts are out of all of this.

One, across Europe, you're just seeing like this unsettlingly large chunk of the electorate voting for far-right populist parties.

It's like 20 to 40% of the vote in a lot of places, including scary parties like the AFD in Germany, but also Chega.

Two, you're seeing incumbents just getting...

smoked in a lot of places.

Voters are very open to new parties, including parties that were literally created just a few years ago.

The thing that was interesting about Romania, though, it was sort of hopeful to me that the new party doesn't have to be nationalist and anti-institution.

Like Don is pro-NATO, he's pro-EU.

But I don't know, what did you take away from

these three elections?

I mean, it's an interesting picture into the kind of fluidity of politics in Europe right now in the sense that, okay, you have these very worrying signs about the rapid evolution and growth of the far right,

as we see in Portugal.

But on the other hand, like, I didn't see that outcome in Romania coming.

I didn't either.

Like, I thought the far-right guy was going to win in Romania.

And that makes you, again, question, is there some reconsideration of a full move to the far right, kind of post-Trump election, post-kind of seeing, you know, there's something sobering about getting right up to the edge and looking over?

I mean, because what we've seen in the...

Yeah, well,

what I've seen in Europe, we've seen, we saw it in France, right?

Like, most notably,

people kind of, these far-right parties grow and grow and grow and they kind of get right to the edge of taking power.

And people kind of look over that cliff and they're like, well, maybe let's just dial back a little bit, right?

Yeah, it's like, I want to protest vote for them, but I don't really want them to run.

I don't really want them to run stuff.

Now, Poland will be interesting because we had the center-left coalition win.

This is, and that's already the parliamentary majority.

The question is, do you get a president aligned with that?

So the Polish runoff will be really important to watch because if the center-left can win, which will be hard, because if you add up all the numbers of the different parties, like, you know, they're not winning right now.

But then that would kind of consolidate a positive trend in Poland.

But the point is, it's fluid, it's push and pull.

The far right can't quite make it over that hump in most places.

And you got to hope that they're receding a bit.

And the Romanian election might indicate that because people are like, yeah, you know what?

Maybe this isn't the right protest vote.

To your point, I mean, like traditional social democratic parties are not doing great.

There may be an opening for like some enough parties on the left.

Not a bad name, by the way.

Enough.

Like, I'd vote for the non-far-right version of enough in this country at this point you know yeah yeah what's like a how do you say off in romania

off elites yeah you're the the describing the politics as fluid i think is spot on and kind of at times even internally incoherent like yeah you have a pro-NATO pro-EU uh a candidate winning in Romania but there was a February 2024 survey that found that less than 20% of Romanians think they should continue providing support for Ukraine.

So it's like hardly like a globalist spring.

These are not resounding endorsements.

Either way, though, the far right is getting traction, but they're not getting like some resounding endorsing either.

Like people are just, they're not happy with their political choices is what's interesting.

Yeah, I mean, the big issue in Romania, it remains one of the poorest countries in the EU if you look at GDP per capita.

Actually, Poland is pretty far down there, too.

I mean, the number one, the highest.

Do you know what the number one rated country is in terms of per capita GDP in the EU?

I'm quizzing you a lot.

I'm going to say it's Liechtenstein or Liechtenstein.

Luxembourg.

You nailed it.

And then Ireland is.

I knew it was one of those little guys.

Ireland?

Yeah, good for you, Ireland.

I'm sure they have all that tax revenue from all our

tech companies there.

Yeah, it probably drives out the GDP.

But like the Romanian population from 1990 to 2024, Romania's population declined by about 4 million people because there were just no job opportunities and the labor market stagnated.

So it was a tough life.

The last thing I saw that was interesting, did you see that?

Have you been to Romania?

I've not been to Romania.

No, no.

I'd like to go.

Live show.

Yeah, yeah.

Pavel Dorov, remember the CEO of Telegram?

Of course.

He said that the French government came to him and asked him to silence conservative voices in Romania.

The French government denies that, but I thought that was interesting given the context.

Did he say that from his prison cell in France?

Maybe.

I bet he escaped.

We should check up on that guy.

I didn't even know what happened to him.

Yeah, I don't remember either.

They arrested him.

Did they let him leave?

I don't know.

We'll dig it up.

Okay, well,

we just assigned ourselves some homework for the next show.

Okay, we're going to do something a little bit different this week.

We're going to go to Ben's interview with Ferro Sidwa about what what it was like for him being a trauma surgeon in the Gaza Strip.

And then after that interview, when you come back, you'll hear a very stupid segment that Ben and I recorded about the Eurovision contest.

I barely know what it is.

But it was a great, if you want to see us hear us or see us embarrassed.

Yeah.

Well,

let's

tease the sauna.

Yeah.

Yeah.

When I say stupid, I mean funny because we don't know what we're talking about.

Exactly.

And you'll hear us just sound like idiots.

Also, if you're in D.C.

on June 6th, check out John Lovett with the Bulwarks, Tim Miller, and Sarah Longwell.

They're hosting a big live show and fundraiser at the Lincoln Theater in D.C.

They'll be celebrating pride by venting, pre-gaming, commiserating, laughing, venting some more, and most importantly, raising money for the Immigrant Defend Center, which represents Andre Hernandez, Romero, and others who have been disappeared by our government to El Salvador without any due process.

So get your tickets now at crooked.com slash events.

Also, the Crooked Store has got lots of new merch, including new designs for a classic friend of the pod T.

If you're looking for some new Crooked merch, go now, crooked.com slash store.

This show is sponsored by BetterHelp.

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Okay, I'm very pleased to welcome Dr.

Feroz Sidwa to the podcast.

He's a trauma surgeon based in Stockton, California.

He's volunteered in Gaza twice, most recently this past March at the Nasser Medical Complex in Conyunis.

He's also volunteered in Ukraine, Haiti, Zimbabwe, and Burkina Faso.

Faroz, thanks so much for being here.

Welcome to the podcast.

Thanks.

Nice to be here.

All right, so I want to get to asking you to kind of compare

the two times you've been in Gaza.

But let's just start at the beginning.

What took you to Gaza?

I mean, like, how does a trauma surgeon from California end up in European hospital in Conyunis?

Yeah, yeah.

So the first time

the

humanitarian sphere is like completely disjointed, totally disorganized, as you can imagine.

And

so

I got an email from the Society of Critical Care Medicine, which is just a professional society that I'm part of, and

letting people know that if you want to volunteer in Israel after the October 7th attacks, this is how you can do it.

And if you want to volunteer in Gaza, this is how you can do it.

And

that call for volunteers, the call for volunteers was to work with the WHO in Gaza

because you can't really work with the Ministry of Health directly because you'll be considered, you know,

because, yeah, exactly, you'll be considered working with terrorist organizations.

So

that call went out through the Palestinian American Medical Association.

So I contacted them and they sent us over.

And at that time, we went to Cairo.

We could take a whole bunch of supplies with us and stuff because the Rafa gate was still open, but now obviously not.

So obviously, we want to focus on your experience there.

And I guess it is worth contrasting here.

So how would you compare the two different times you spent there?

I assume that, you know, just as someone who's following this,

what was already not a significant amount of healthcare infrastructure

has basically been destroyed.

But what did you see differently the last time you were there from the first time?

Yeah, so the first time I went, I was at European on the eastern edge of Con Yunis.

And at that time, European Hospital, like most of the hospitals in Gaza, was a displaced persons camp.

So there were 10,000 to 15,000 people sheltering on the grounds of the hospital, but then also within the hospital, like lining the corridors of the hospital.

There were families living in tents because it's better to live inside than outside, have some electricity, something like that.

So like women were cooking pita bread in the emergency room during mass casualty events.

Women, you know, there were people trying to drain out, you know, canned vegetables in the ICU sink.

Like it was a total disaster.

There was no way for a hospital to function this way.

And

so that is

the fact that that wasn't going on when I went back this time.

I went from, I got, I entered Gaza this time on March 6th and I left on April 1st, if I remember right.

And so when I went back, every hospital in Gaza has been forcibly

emptied at some point.

And

when people have been allowed to come back in, the administration and the Ministry of Health have kind of decided together that we're not going to let Palestinians camp in the hospital anymore.

They don't have anywhere to go, but at the same time, there's just no way for them to,

the hospital can't function like that.

Even though it's sheltering people, it's not being a hospital at that point.

So Nasser, I went back to Nasser Medical Complex, which is on the other side of Conyunis.

And

the thing that was better was that Conyunis, or that Nasser was not a DP camp, so the hospital could actually function.

But everything else was worse.

I arrived during the ceasefire, you know, March 6th to April 18th was still ceasefire time.

And we were seeing trauma cases for sure, like one or two people shot every day.

Sometimes it was from Israel, some Israeli forces, sometimes it was actually because there was a dispute going on between two families in Conunis and the Hamas government couldn't suppress it like they normally would.

But the other types of trauma cases we were seeing were people who were, there was no widespread bombing going on at this point.

So the other type of trauma we would see was from bombings that had happened like six months ago, and people's homes would collapse on them when they tried to go back.

And the main thing was actually to retrieve their loved ones' bodies, but also like to try and get their possessions out, you know, if they had cash that had been in the building when it had been destroyed, things like that.

And

yeah, so, but the but unfortunately, you know, the destruction of Gaza was far, far more severe.

When I was there, the first time, the Battle of Conunis was still going on.

Like, Israeli troops were basically moving from north to south um and uh the hospital was constantly shaking even though a european hospital is on the outskirts of cones um the the hospital was just literally swaying back and forth almost the entire time there were windows broken on the third floor um

one of the guys i went there with mark pearl mutter he was thrown into a wall by an explosion broke one of his teeth um you know so it was it was the it was close up when i got back to Nasser, or when I went when I went to Nasser from the 2nd to the 18th, there was no bombing at all.

So it was, you know, there was shooting, but not bombing.

So it was relatively quiet.

But then after the 18th, when, you know, at 2.30 in the morning, about the Israelis resumed the really widespread bombing of Gaza, mostly to kill Hamas's political leadership, they said.

And

that was the biggest, that was the start of the biggest mass casualty event I've ever seen in my life.

Like I was a resident during the Boston Marathon bombing, and it doesn't even,

that was like an order of magnitude off of what we saw on the 18th, and then not just the 18th, but going forward.

And who, like, what kind of who how many people that you're treating are children, are civilians?

I mean, I mean, how

take us inside of like the kind of

the pace and the kind of patients you're seeing.

Yeah.

And the kind of injuries you're seeing.

Yeah.

Well, so, yeah.

So at Nasser, when I went this time, everything was after March 18th, everything was explosions.

There were, I don't actually, I'm trying to think, maybe, or, you know, actually, the only shootings that I saw after March 18th that I I can remember off the top of my head were from a helicopter gunship.

Not like, you know, not small arms or even medium arms, but really big, big weapons.

And of course, all those people died.

But the

types of injuries that we were seeing were mostly explosive and shrapnel injuries.

Now, if a bomb just shreds someone to pieces, they're dead.

There's nothing we can really do about it.

But the types of injuries we can do something about are injuries, basically, you know, shrapnel injuries from the neck down to the pelvis.

And then the arms and legs, obviously.

But those aren't those usually are less life-threatening just because you can amputate someone's arm if you need to or their leg.

And yeah, in terms of children,

because

I'm trained in trauma surgery, which means my job is mostly to stop people from bleeding to death.

So, because of that, during mass casualty events, I go to what's called the red zone, like the red triage area, where the most severe patients are coming.

And I would say most of those patients were small kids, not like 17 and a half year olds, but like, you know, pre-teen children, like, you know,

12 and under.

That's not because most of the injuries are actually in children, but most of the severe injuries seem to be in children, if that makes any sense.

And it kind of tracks because, you know, if you expose you or me to a bomb versus a five-year-old, the five-year-old's going to be much more seriously injured.

So, yeah, we were dealing with a lot of injured children, unfortunately.

Well, you wrote a piece for The Times last fall in which you talked about surveying 65 healthcare workers like yourself.

And of them, 44 said they, quote, saw multiple cases of pre-teen children who had been shot in the head or chest.

I mean,

that should be jarring to people.

How are these children being shot like this?

Yeah, so this was

all of this, so

that survey was done mostly of people who were in Gaza during the ground invasion.

In other words, when there were Israeli troops in the vicinity of the hospitals that they were working in.

And

I think that's just what explains it.

I mean, there are,

it's unfortunate, but every society's army has people who are sadistic or cruel and will do things like that, like

shoot a child in the head.

But yeah, no, the large majority of us did regularly see children shot in the head or the chest on a regular basis.

Like for me, I was there,

like I said, March

25th to April 8th of that year.

And every day, like on average, I saw one kid shot in the head every day.

And that's despite the fact that I'm not even the person they call for this.

Like, I'm not a neurosurgeon, right?

So that's not, I'm not, it was just, I happened to be there.

So I'm sure there were many more.

But, but, yeah, you know, what explains it, I don't, I, it's, it's conjecture on my part, so I'm not, I don't know exactly what explains it.

But I think

with the, you know, the October 7th attacks were a shocking atrocity to to israelis especially um

and

there was also a lot of atrocity propaganda that happened afterwards you know the beheaded babies the the widespread rape and these kinds of things that there isn't any evidence for so when you've got a

When you've got an army that feels like it's fighting for its national survival against people who are constantly being called animals and vermin and other such things.

And furthermore, there's a humongous power disparity.

Like, it's like, you know, like the Palestinians have basically very, very, very little means of self-defense.

Less than one Israeli soldier has been killed per day in Gaza since the invasion started.

And so I think Israeli soldiers just have the opportunity to do these things if they want to, and it's kind of clear that the Israeli army is not going to stop them from doing it.

So, yeah.

You know, I want to come back to that, but to just stay with the circumstances for the Palestinians, the death count seems low to me, and most people that have evaluated this think it's I mean, what is your assessment?

I'm not asking you to give me a count, but is there h how do you even keep track of the number of people who are being killed?

Yeah, so this is important for people to understand.

In the media, it's often said the Hamasteran Ministry of Health says this many people have been killed, but it doesn't distinguish between combatants and civilians.

That's all accurate,

but it's a little bit misleading.

Firstly, I don't know, I literally don't know anyone, with one exception, I don't know anyone who has treated a combatant in Gaza.

Everyone I treated in both the first time and the second time I was there, everyone came in with their family.

And you can say whatever you want about Hamas.

No one thinks they're dragging their wives out to the battlefield.

That's silly.

So I suspect that combatants are not even really counted

in that group.

But

it's basically 100% 100% civilian casualty that we're seeing.

I'm sure there's one fighter somewhere in there that we just can't see, but that's not the common situation.

There is actual data on this question of like just sticking with violent deaths, forget the starvation and the disease and the other things.

But just sticking with violent deaths,

there was a study that was just done in The Lancet, which is a major British medical journal.

And what they showed, so they got the Ministry of Health's entire database, not the aggregate numbers, but literally line by line, person by person data.

And they compared that to a survey that had been done and

social media postings.

And they kind of did what Air Wars does, where they needed two points to verify that somebody had been killed, like a social media posting and a survey or a social media posting and the Ministry of Health data, something like that.

And they found that even just sticking to violent deaths, the Ministry of Health was undercounting publicly verifiable deaths by 40%.

So there's that aspect of it.

On top top of that, there's the major question of

what's broadly called famine, but usually people think of famine as meaning there isn't enough food, right?

But famine really encompasses more than that.

It encompasses displacement,

lack of water, like drinking water, lack of sanitation and hygiene infrastructure, lack of food, obviously,

and lack of health care as well.

And these are all things that are under direct and sustained attack

during this assault.

So, yeah, so no, nobody knows what the death count is because people aren't allowed to study it.

It's important for people to understand that with $50,000 and about three weeks, we could answer that question.

Like not me, but a public health researcher.

The U.S.

government could answer that question.

It probably could.

It probably has access to Israeli intelligence reports about what's actually going on.

But

the

they probably could, yeah, or at least they could give some sensible, some sensible number beyond what what it is.

But, but, you know, even just like a

you could have an academic from Yale or Hopkins School of Public Health or Harvard School of Public Health answer that question literally in three weeks with 50 grand if the Israelis would just allow this study to be done, but they won't let these people in.

So that's it's just one of those things about our own society that that's how little we care about how many people they're killing.

Yeah, their humanity.

I mean,

so I, you know, so we're talking about a death count that, you know,

could somewhere be in the neighborhood of 100,000.

But I want to talk about wounded people.

I mean, you're a trauma care person.

You save somebody's life.

You stop them from bleeding to death.

Look, if I was shot or got shrapnel in me,

not that that's going to happen here.

I imagine I'd recover for a long time in a hospital and then I'd have some kind of home care.

And I'm trying to imagine people that have kind of come through the hospital and out, and they are people with horrific wounds.

They've lost limbs, they've lost blood, they are at risk of infection.

And they're just turned back out into tents where they're dropping more bombs.

I mean, what is your, look, when we hear about famine, lack of aid, what do you think about the patients you treat, about how and where they're recovering?

Yeah, well,

yeah, so we, we, uh, there's a, there,

how are they recovering?

Honestly, a lot of them are not.

We see, we very regularly find wounds with maggots in them, like not from, not in the hospital, but people coming in from, from outside, although at European, we did find them in the hospital as well, just because it was so overcrowded.

But

if you walk around in Gaul, like I like, I walked between,

there's a, I was at Nasser Medical Complex, and Amal is the Palestine Red Crescent Society's headquarters in Conunit.

So I walked between the two.

It's maybe like a mile or a mile and a half.

And when you're walking around, you see tons and tons of people with amputations, but they still have like cotton dressings on them and they're just soaked.

I mean, like, it's just like they're obviously infected.

There's no, no, two ways about it, but they're just trying to power through and deal with it, you know?

And yeah, I mean, obviously there's no rehabilitation.

There's no, like, you know, one of the things actually that's kind of

remarkable, I saw a report from, it might have been Save the Children, I can't remember, but it's actually, it's very difficult to assist

disabled children, but also disabled adults, simply because there are very few flat spaces left in Gaza.

Like places where you don't have to, well, you where you can lie down, but also where the, the, the, one part of the floor isn't like this and another is, is bent and crooked and like just because everything has been bombed and run over by military vehicles.

And it's just the, um, and, and a lot, you got to also like, a lot of these people are living in bombed out

homes.

Like, the, the, two walls are missing or the floor is unstable or whatever.

So if you have to, like, climb up a, a, a destroyed and slanted roof to get into your second floor apartment because the stairs have been destroyed and then you're, there's rubble everywhere like it's just like yeah it keeps the rain off of you but uh like a lot again you actually see this when you're walking around people actually like picking someone up putting them on their back and then trying to ascend up like a mountain of rubble to get into their apartment um it's it's it's wild yeah but yeah there's there's the the ability for people to recover from these injuries because like like you like you were kind of saying the stopping someone from bleeding to death is the like baseline yeah of medical care.

That's not real medical care, right?

I mean, you didn't die, great, great, but like you're not going to recover.

You're not going to thrive just because you didn't bleed the death if your arms are broken and you're, you know, blah, blah, blah, you have a head injury, whatever it might be.

The recovery and the rehabilitation and the reconstructive operations are super, super important.

And none of that can be done in Gaza right now.

Literally none of it.

Well, and you're not a mental health person, you're a trauma surgeon, but

what is the mental state, the scale of trauma of the kind of families you're seeing?

Yeah, it's terrible.

I'll tell you that almost every health,

I mostly talked to healthcare workers in English, right?

Because I don't speak Arabic, unfortunately.

So I mostly talked to physicians and nurses while I was there.

I will tell you that with very few exceptions, all of them expect to die.

They all expect their families to die.

They all expect their children to die.

It's kind of a weird

thing to be to be sitting there.

I'll tell you a story.

When I was talking to an anesthesiologist named Nazar, really, really sweet man,

goofy, kind of chubby-faced guy, you know,

he's a nice guy.

And his family lives east of European hospital.

So

now they must have been evacuated from their village permanently.

But he has five.

five, I'm pretty, five or six, I can't remember, anyway, five boys.

And I was just having coffee with him.

It was Ramadan, so people stay up late having coffee and stuff like that.

So I was having coffee with him.

And, you know, we're just, everyone just banters back and forth.

It's just casual conversation.

And at some point, he's, he starts telling me he's kind of making fun of his wife.

He's, oh, my, you know, my wife, she just can't do anything for herself.

She can't go to the market by herself.

She can't discipline the boys by herself.

Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And then he goes, when I'm martyred, I don't know what she's going to do.

And I can still, like, you know, we're kind of sitting across the table.

He had his little cup of coffee, like, you know, a little

Arabic coffee cup, and he's got his big belly and he's sitting there with his hands like this.

And then, you know, sometimes you say something that you don't expect is going to kind of trigger an emotional response in you.

And he kind of looked down at the table and his voice started to quiver.

And he just said, you know, like, what, what is this?

What, what, what kind of life is this now?

And that, that kind of

resignation

to a fate that's just awful is

extremely widespread.

You see it, like, actually, I forget if it saved the children or somebody else, but maybe it was UNICEF.

One of these children's groups found that about 50% of children, small children, not again, not 17 and a half-year-old voice, but small children in Gaza are actively suicidal.

That's extremely unusual.

I actually remember at European Hospital, it was shocking to me how many kids regularly said, and again, this is all three translators because I can't understand it, but how many kids regularly said, why couldn't I have died with Sarah when she might, my sister, when she died?

Why couldn't I have died with mom?

Why do I have to be the only one that's alive?

Why do I have to feel my leg hurting so bad?

Like, this was very common, and it is extremely unusual.

Like, have you ever met a suicidal five-year-old that's not outside of extreme psychiatric disease?

That is not common at all.

Um, even

in other war zones, you know what I mean?

Like, that it's not, um, it is not

that is not a

well-described response for children.

But, you know, you can, I'll tell you another story just about their mental state.

There was a, I met a cardiologist that I can't remember his name now, but he has four small children, or four children, excuse me, one small girl who's four or five years old.

They live in Rafah.

And this was during ceasefire time.

They live in Rafah.

And

there are Israeli sniper towers now in the Philadelphia corridor, the border between Gaza and Egypt.

And one of those towers was firing into Rafah, and some of the bullets came into their home or their apartment.

So the whole family hit the deck, but the four or five-year-old girl, who, like, you know, if you think about it, her only conscious memories are from this war, right?

Like, that's all she can remember.

She was just dancing around in a circle, like singing to herself.

And they were like, you know, you know, I don't remember her name, but you know, Sarah, what are you doing?

What are you doing?

Come here, come here.

And she's, no, no, don't worry, mommy.

The bullets are all the way up there.

Because they were hitting above the, so these parents had to like bear crawl over their child and tackle her to try and keep her safe.

You know, it's kind of like a kid walking out into traffic, you know, but

the traffic is bullets.

But the

so yeah, what this kind of

prolonged and really dramatic,

extensive experience with death and misery and starvation and hunger and

lack of cleanliness and displacement and fear, like seeing your parents afraid all the time, you know, what that is going to do, what that's going to do to

the half of Gaza that is children is not clear.

But it's already having a dramatic and very noticeable effect.

Well, I mean, I want to ask you one kind of political question.

I'm going to ask it this way.

I mean, you're American, as you said, and

so you represent America in your own way.

You're in Gaza as an American providing this assistance.

And you know that the bombs that are being dropped on the people you care are American bombs.

What is it like to be an American in this place treating people whose wounds are almost entirely with American-made weapons?

Yeah, it's weird.

I'll tell you two stories about that.

So the first one was on March 18th.

That's when the widespread bombing resumed.

2.30 in the morning, the bombs go off.

The door to our

living quarters was blown open and smashed into the cabinet behind it.

It kind of woke us all up.

We're like, holy crap.

So we ran down to the ER and started working.

The first,

well, the first two kids that I saw were dead, so they were on their way to dying.

But the first one that we could save, she turned out to be a five-year-old girl named Sham.

And

Sham had she had injuries to her left chest and her belly.

It turned out that her spleen was bleeding and her left lung was torn, but she also had a wound to her, the left side of her face that had traveled through the left side of her.

It was a piece of shrapnel that had traveled through the left side of her brain, but it stayed on that side, so it's a recoverable injury.

And actually, she did quite well from that standpoint.

She didn't talk for,

she left the hospital, I think, two or three weeks later, but she didn't, after like six or seven days, she started talking again and using the right side of her body again.

But anyway,

I still remember, like, I, because, you know, we're looking, it's just a room full of kids lying on the, and there were adults too, but mostly full of kids lying on the ground.

And you're just trying to pick out like which one should I start with.

You know, these are triage decisions.

There's a way of doing them, but it's still pretty overwhelming at the time.

But so I find this little girl, and I look at her, and she's not breathing properly.

So I do a jaw thrust.

Like, if you've ever done like a CPR class, they teach you, you know, you just pull the jaw forward.

That lets somebody's, because they're kind of obstructing their own airway by doing that.

And all these kids are lying on the ground and kids have big heads.

You know, they're just getting pushed down like that.

But anyway, so I draw thrust her.

And she starts breathing again.

So, oh, good.

Okay.

This is one we might actually be able to save.

So I tell the nurses, like, get ready to, let's intubate this girl.

Just stuff we have to do.

So I just have to stand there holding her jaw up for, you know, three, four, or five minutes, something like that, while they're getting set up to do the stuff we need to do and trying to make space and things like that.

I still remember while I was looking at her, and I'm just looking at this wound bleeding on her face.

It's not bleeding badly, but I'm just looking at it.

And I just, I remember thinking, like, did I pay for this shrapnel or did my neighbor or did their neighbor?

Like, it's weird.

Like, it's, it's kind of wild, you know.

I mean, it's, it's not

like, nobody wants shrapnel to be in this little girl's brain.

Like, literally, no one.

Yet, we're doing it.

It's just very odd, you know.

Um,

so that was one thing.

Um,

but the uh, the other was that on uh, so the last operation I did on March 18th was in a kid named Ibrahim Barhoum.

He was a 16-year-old boy.

And

on March 23rd, he was ready to go home.

He had injuries to his colon and his rectum from shrapnel.

So we repaired them and we gave him a colostomy where the colon's coming out to the skin.

And he's 16.

Most 16-year-olds would be pretty pissed off about this, but he was pretty chill about it, actually.

He was a nice kid.

And

on the 23rd,

it was the evening.

And day he had done pretty well that day.

Now he was eating, he was walking around, like his gut was starting to function, in other words.

So I was like, okay, he can go home the next day.

Great.

So at like, I don't know, probably 8.30 or 9 at night, I went, we used to live on the fourth floor of the hospital, and the surgical ward, the men's surgical ward was on the second floor.

So I left our little living quarters after Ifdar, the evening meal in Ramadan, and went to, so I'm walking to the stairs and I walked past the ICU on the fourth floor.

And there was a doctor, I think her name was Hanib.

She grabbed me and she was like, Froze there's a kid named Muhammad that was transferred over here from another hospital.

He's bleeding to death.

Like he needs to go to the operating room.

So I took a look at him.

That took about 10 minutes and

he was bleeding.

So I just told them, look, you guys get the operating room going.

I'm going to go change Ibrahim's bandages, talk to his family about how to take care of this colostomy, and because he's going to go home the next morning, and then I'm going to come back up here and we'll take care of this kid's case.

And like literally, as I walked out of the ICU, Ibrahim's room exploded.

The Israelis fired a missile at, it's probably a drone-fired missile, but who knows,

at the room

killing Ismail Barhoum, who they said was the prime minister of Gaza.

And Ibrahim, because they're distant cousins and they have the same last name, so the nurses had put them into the same room just to make family visits and stuff easier.

And

so Ibrahim was killed as well.

And, you know, I

so the whole hospital went unlocked.

Actually, when I actually didn't even realize that the bomb had hit the hospital, I just felt like all the other ones, but the Palestinians somehow knew right away.

So they like grabbed us and like put us in like the foreigners and put us in the safer corner of the hospital, they thought.

But after about an hour, the administration lifted the lockdown to the hospital because, you know, they don't know if like, are we going to get invaded?

Is there going to be another bombing?

Who knows?

They lifted it after about an hour.

So I ran down to the ER to see if there was anybody that needed to come up.

for an operation because this kid Muhammad still needed to go to the OR.

And when I was down there,

three or four guys ran down with a body in a sheet.

Because you couldn't evaluate people

in the blown-up ward.

It was just a disaster.

So they ran down

the stairs with the body.

And so I said, no, no, go to the trauma base.

So I followed them in.

And when I pulled the sheet off, I recognized Ibrahim's abdomen.

He had been eviscerated.

The sutures were torn open.

His bowel was outside.

His colostomy was torn.

But I recognized him from his abdomen.

Shit, you know, like this, this like 16-year-old boy who I should have just sent him home that day, you know, instead of waiting.

But the

so yeah, so you know, that kind of thing,

it weighs on you a little bit, but it's it's more just like the

like

you know how senseless all of this is.

You know, it's not making anyone safer.

You know, it's not doing anything to help anyone, yet we're all just sleepwalking into doing it.

There's a frustration.

There's a book, last question I'm going to ask.

There's a book called Dispatches by a great Vietnam War correspondent, and he describes, I think it's Michael Hur coming back to New York.

And he's just been in Vietnam for like a year and he's at like a bar or something.

And he wants to stand up on the table and shout at everybody like, what the fuck are you doing?

Do you know what's going on there?

I mean, do you must, do you feel that way?

Like you're back in California, it's sunny outside, and people are walking around.

And meanwhile, we're paying for this.

Yeah.

Like, do I wish people would pay attention more?

Yeah.

I mean, I guess we're doing that.

Yeah, yeah, you're right.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But at the same time,

I have never talked to a normal.

My chairman where I work is a fairly right-wing guy, Trump voter,

evangelical Christian guy.

He's a very decent human being in his day-to-day life, but he and my politics would not line up at all.

But very good.

He's actually, he's our chairman.

He's a great guy to work for.

But

when I went to Gaza the first time, he was like, oh, just be careful.

You know, he's kind of implying that these Muslims are crazy.

You got got to watch out you know when i came back though he came to a presentation that i did at the hospital just for like our little local research day about gaza and when i you know i just showed the the people i treated and what i saw and afterwards he was like froze I had no idea this stuff.

This is awful.

Like, this is crazy.

You know, yeah.

And he was like,

I always thought, you know, we were the good guys and the Israelis were the good guys.

It's, it's the, the radical Islamic blah, blah, blah.

You know, all of it, you know, not that Al-Qaeda is good, but, but, or even like, not that Hamas is like a bunch of great, nice people.

But the, but, you know, he, as soon as he saw what was actually going on, it was totally untenable for him to continue to, to support.

He just couldn't.

And

the vast majority, I think with like maybe one exception of normal human beings that I've talked to, and other people, not people who have some partisan interest, but just normal people,

are just appalled by this.

They just can't understand it.

You know, what the hell?

Why, why, why on earth are we doing this?

And so, but that's the reason that so much of this is hidden.

You know what I mean?

Like, that's the reason that

I'm so excited.

Exactly.

No one who is a truly objective observer is allowed to go.

And like, the only people who are allowed to go are, you know, they're embedded with the Israeli military.

A lot of them are just kind of weird,

you know, like kind of neoconservative, odd, strange people.

The few reporters that do go in with the Israeli military and are serious actually still come out with shocking stories.

Like, I don't know if you remember, there was a CNN reporter who went in

and saw the Israelis destroying a cemetery.

And so he asked him, why are you, that's,

how could that have any military?

Oh, well, there's a tunnel right underneath.

He said, oh, can you show?

No, no, it's too dangerous.

Please show it to me.

So they did.

And just by simple aerial footage and geolocation, it's pretty easy to see that they were not under the cemetery at all.

They were just destroying the cemetery to destroy a cemetery, to humiliate people, to

obliterate their cultural heritage, to make people really feel like we don't belong here.

We have to leave, in other words, there's nothing left to stay for.

And

so it's just, so I think people want to,

I've never lost my faith that people at their core are

decent.

Yes, we have, maybe, maybe somebody has this or that view of abortion.

We can talk about stuff all day long, no problem.

But at their core, nobody is in favor of blowing up children.

At their core, no one is in favor of making an entire society homeless.

Nobody is in favor of

obliterating hospitals, of killing a 16-year-old boy in his hospital bed.

No one's in favor of this stuff.

So that's why,

yeah,

yes, do I want to scream at everybody?

Yeah, for sure.

But I also recognize that the reason they're not screaming themselves is because they don't know what's going on.

And if they did, they'd be appalled by it.

And so that's why I try to get get out there.

Well, look, thanks so much for joining us to let people know what you saw.

And thanks for the work you did over there.

How can people follow what you're doing?

Oh, I'm on Twitter at just Feroz Sidwa or at FerroSidwa.

And then on

Instagram is FSidwa if they want to watch it.

I'll put that in the notes too.

All right, Feroz, thanks so much for joining us.

Thank you.

Appreciate it.

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Final topic here, Ben.

So, our producer, Michael, excellent producer.

He's the world's biggest Eurovision fan.

The guy just will not stop talking about Eurovision.

He will not stop singing the songs.

And we promised him that we would cover it.

So what comes next will be as new to us as it is to you, the listener.

So Michael, this is your canvas.

This is your paint.

Let rip.

Okay, open up Slack.

No shit.

I'm reading the script for the first time.

All right, Ben, let's have a little fun.

The Eurovision finals were over the weekend.

I'm assuming you were glued to Peacock watching.

Me too.

I actually have no clue what happened, and our team has taken full advantage of that.

We're going to play a little game here.

We're calling Ursula von der Leyen's Spotify Raps.

The team has pulled a few clips from some particularly notable entries, and we're going to guess which country these crimes against humanity, I mean, Diddies came from.

Heads up.

We're watching videos, so you can check out what we're reacting to if you hop on YouTube.

And also, thank you, everyone who's been subscribing to Pod Save the World on YouTube.

As I've said a million times, we're getting our asses handed to us by the right wing when it comes to YouTube.

People are searching for political news or foreign policy news, and they're getting horrible takes by some fucking incel over at TPUSA.

And when you subscribe to Pod Save the World and Pod Save America, it really helps us serve as good information in the algorithm.

So, thank you for watching this.

But the audio of these Eurovision clips is a lot of fun too.

So, we'll play it for you here.

All right, let's roll clip number one.

Life may give you lemons when dancing with the demons.

No streso, no streso, no need to be depresso.

Miamore,

mi amore, espresso, macchiato, macchiato, macchiato.

Please give me the stuff.

Yeah, I think we got enough.

Okay, wait.

Why?

Are these the best people from the countries?

Like, I thought these were supposed to be like the cream of the crop here.

Well, what country do you think it was from?

I should know the language.

I mean, I saw some Italian in there, but

I was saying macchiato or something, so I don't know.

It was Estonia.

Estonia?

Okay, okay, yeah, yeah.

I'm going to put some facts.

I don't speak Estonian or Italian.

There's some facts in the Slack for you, Tommy.

Here are some facts, Ben.

So the song title was Espresso Macchiato.

Two facts worth noting.

The singer is named Tommy Cash.

That's cool.

An Italian lawmaker wanted to ban this song because of its Italian stereotypes and because it, quote, conveys a message of a population tied to organized crime.

Does it?

Yeah,

I didn't get any ordinary.

I don't know.

I mean, my Estonian is not good, so I don't know.

Yeah, I didn't get any organized crime vibes from that.

I just got some strange vibes.

I just got some bad singing.

All right, next clip.

This is more what I expected from your mom.

Yeah, this is what I expected.

This woman's singing in a giant set of lips.

Yeah.

She's serving something.

Okay.

That wasn't bad.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That was sure.

It's fine.

Where is she from?

Oh, shit.

I didn't.

I wasn't prepared for this game.

Lithuania.

I'm going to stay in the Baltics here.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Malta.

Malta.

Malta.

All right.

This one was very controversial.

And Tommy, you're going to, I'm going to make you read why.

Okay.

I'm going to tell you why this is controversial.

So the song title was serving.

This one was controversial.

It was originally called Kant,

which means singing in Maltese.

And the lyrics originally went serving Kant.

Obviously, this sounds similar to a word the Brits throw around a lot.

The Guardian describes this as a queer or drag slang phrase, roughly meaning to express boldness.

It was deemed a little too risque by the competition by the European Broadcasting Commission.

So the song was retitled Serving, and the lyrics reworked to Serving

More like serving.

Serving.

I mean, I kind of liked it.

Yeah, that's fine.

That was good.

Malta's a pretty conservative society, though.

Have you been to Malta?

I've never been to Malta.

No, I've never been to Malta.

We should make a list of places to go.

We clearly have no ear for languages.

I apologize in advance, everybody.

Yeah, I can't learn languages to save my life.

Okay, that was great.

All right.

Let's hear another.

That's a beauty.

Are these people fucking with us?

Is that like a liar?

What do you call those guitars?

I know.

It's kind of cool, though.

I mean,

it's pretty good.

Yeah, it was like ABBA meets a Renaissance fair.

It's called a Saz, which is a long-necked lute native to the region we're talking about.

I'm going to put that in.

let's go with

let's go with Romania.

I'm going to go with or like somewhere in the Balkans.

I don't know.

I'm going to go with Bosnia.

Okay.

Adribajan.

Okay.

There you go.

I mean, we clearly know nothing.

We nailed that one too.

Host of COP29.

So.

Yeah, right.

So they solve climate change.

That song is called Run With You.

It is a trans it does go hard from kind of a boy band vibe, although the harmony kind of falls off a bit there.

Am I the only one who heard it?

It's like, I want to fuck with you.

Yes, I heard run, yeah.

I thought I heard rock with you, and I thought it was just a ripoff of

like uh,

uh, I liked it, it was good, yeah,

I can fuck with that.

The Saz is a long-necked lute native to the region, okay?

Very good.

Um, all right, only two more: the torture will be done soon.

Okay, goodness, Azerbaijan.

Let's hear the next clip.

When you let me go,

I'm barely steady afloat.

I'm floating alone.

Still, I'm holding on to

that you fall aboard.

Dramatic.

Wow.

We went from kind of an in-sync motif to like a drowning opera star.

Drowning, yeah.

yeah.

Huh.

Okay.

Are we guessing where that one was?

I don't know.

I'm going to, this water, I'm going to put it in like Scandinavia.

You know, I'm going to put it like on a, I don't know, like a Swedish or

I don't know, somewhere.

It feels like Northern European Scandinavia.

Okay.

Sweden.

Yeah, I'll stick with Skinner.

Sure.

You can say Scando.

Okay, I'm going to say Austria.

Very good, Tommy.

Oh, I got it.

Yeah, you got it.

And yeah, I think the heavy ocean imagery in in the video is

trying to throw you off because Austria is landlocked.

Yeah, obviously.

Didn't Austria win?

Yes, you ruined the game.

I mean,

no, it's fine.

I'm not that out of it.

No, they did win.

That person won.

That person won.

He's a counter tenor named JJ.

We didn't have time to play it, but the song takes a really hard turn into EDM at the end.

So

it was good.

It's a real fun one.

JJ Braddick's not bad.

All right, last one.

Almost over, guys.

Are these guys in a sauna?

Is that like a sauna?

Those have a sauna by the fire.

Are they wearing towels?

Sauna.

That one was like

Men at Work meets Borat.

Yes.

Meets something happening, an event in Poland.

Meets me in a sauna.

Yeah, meets something.

I'm going to say Poland.

I mean, I'm just like literally just picking European countries at this point.

Poland's a good guess.

I mean, who has a sauna culture?

I mean, once again, I keep going back to Northern Europe.

Go for it.

I'm going to say

I'm going to stick with Sweden.

Eventually I'll be right.

Nailed it.

Oh, I got it.

Yeah, they love it.

They love a sauna in Sweden.

They do love a sauna.

The song is called Bara Bada Bastu.

The group that sings it is from the Swedish-speaking minority in Finland, but is a celebration of the sauna.

The song transcends borders.

This is the first song from Sweden, actually in Swedish, since 1998.

The other entries have all been in English.

That is interesting.

All right, that's it.

Austria won.

Israel came in second.

It was close too, wasn't it?

It was close.

They won the popular vote, but not the professional music jury.

Is the popular vote like people are voting online or something?

Or is it like an electoral college?

Yeah, I think you text or something, and you're not allowed to vote for your own country.

Wasn't there once again a big controversy over Israel?

Were people trying to ban them?

Yeah, always.

Clearly, not.

I mean, if they won the popular vote,

clearly wasn't that widespread of a...

I mean, there was a protest, I know, but they won the, you know,

people clearly didn't hold it against these people.

It's true.

That's true.

I don't hold it against these people either.

I have to say.

It's a complicated question whether we should be banning Russian athletes.

Yeah, I kind of have a problem with, because

I don't know.

Would you like to be held accountable for everything that our fucking crazy government does?

I mean, I wouldn't.

I'd prefer not.

Yeah.

Okay.

Well, listen, that was a fantastic Eurovision segment.

Please send all your

questions, concerns, comments to Michael.

He's in the Slack.

He'll answer all of your questions.

Discorders come to Michael.

I'm sorry, I didn't mean Slack.

I meant Discord.

Yeah, at me in the Discord.

And I'll see you there.

Thanks again to Feroz Tidwuf for joining the show and for all the amazing, brave work he's done in Gaza and elsewhere.

And thank you all for listening.

Ponte World is a crooked media production.

Our senior producer is Alona Minkowski.

Our associate producer is Michael Goldsmith.

Our executive producers are me, Tommy Vitor, and Ben Rhodes.

Say hi, Ben.

Hi.

The show is mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick, Jordan Kanner is our audio engineer.

Audio support by Kyle Seglin and Charlotte Landis.

Thanks to our digital team, Ben Hefcote, Mia Kelman, William Jones, David Tolls, and Molly Wilbell.

Matt DeGroote is our head of production.

If you want to get ad-free episodes, exclusive content, and more, consider joining our Friends of the Pod subscription community at crooked.com/slash friends.

Don't forget to follow us at Crooked Media on Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter for more original content, host takeovers, and other community events.

Plus, find Pod Save the World on YouTube for access to full episodes, bonus content, and more.

If you're as opinionated as we are, please consider dropping us a review.

Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East.

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These Doritos Golden Sriracha aren't that spicy.

Sriracha sounds pretty spicy to me.

Um, a little spicy, but also tangy and sweet.

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It's time for something that's not too spicy.

Try Dorito's Golden Stracha.

Spicy,

but not too spicy.

On New Year's Eve, 1969, three men snuck into Chip Yablonski's childhood home and gunned down his family while they slept.

They killed them.

They killed them all.

Chip was convinced that the president of the United Mine Workers, one of the most powerful labor unions in America, was behind the murders.

And I'm saying, hang on, you son of a bitch, because I want you to get your just desserts.

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