Watch the full, unpaywalled episode here. Thanks for supporting independent media.

Healthcare workers are being targeted and killed by Israel in Gaza. This hasn’t stopped American doctor Tanya Haj-Hassan from repeatedly going back.

“I think it's normal to have some fear for your own safety,” she tells us. “You're going into a war zone where essentially there is indiscriminate killing of everybody. But at the same time, our colleagues have been enduring this for fifteen months straight. And it's intolerable and unbearable to watch it from the outside.”

Despite the oath she and every other doctor took to care for people, Tanya describes a "Palestinian exception": “When you work in the American healthcare system, you aren't given the freedom to show solidarity with Palestinian healthcare workers, with the Palestinian people, with patients, to express outrage about the intentional targeting of the healthcare system and healthcare workers. And you are either directly or indirectly attacked if you show solidarity in this way. True solidarity means risking something. And I can tell you as someone who's working in the North American healthcare system that we are silenced, and that when we speak out, we pay the price.”

But to Dr. Haj-Hassan, remaining silent isn’t an option. “Being silent in the face of the intentional decimation of an entire healthcare system, the intentional killing and targeting of healthcare workers, the intentional detention and torture of healthcare workers for no other crime other than providing healthcare is complicity.”

So, Tanya shares the harrowing stories of her time in Gaza, and while it’s very hard to hear, it is more important than ever to bear witness to the crimes committed against the Palestinian people.

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“You just finish mourning the loss of somebody you know,” Tanya shares, “and then you receive the next bit of news. And I think that's characteristic of everything we've been witnessing since October of last year. Just as an example, on Christmas Day, five journalists in a press marked vehicle were killed by a direct airstrike. A day later, Kamal Adwan Hospital is raided and burned down. Dr. Hassan Abu Safiya, the director, is, we're told, beaten and taken away to Israeli prisons.”

Dr. Hassan Abu Safiya, who was photographed bravely walking towards Israeli tanks, was already injured by Israel. His son had already been murdered by Israel. Yet he refused to leave the hospital. His pleas for help to the international community were ignored. His hospital was destroyed. And now he is reported to be in the notorious Sde Teiman prison, where Dr. Adnan Al-Bursh was killed and, according to witnesses, essentially raped to death.

Dr. Haj-Hassan continues: “And if it happened anywhere else in the world or it had happened in isolation, you'd have time to report on it and to share it with the world. But you just you move on the next day.”

Tanya also talks about pushing back on a CNN reporter and explaining that this is not some natural humanitarian crisis. This is genocide. And she reacts to the hateful smearing of child-educator and youtuber Ms. Rachel who is being called an antisemite for saying "children have the right to live." And Tanya debunks the malicious claim that children in Gaza aren't really freezing to death.

Listen to and share this interview with Dr. Tanya Haj-Hassan. Thanks for your support of independent media and healthcare workers.

And if you subscribe, you’ll also get this week’s Thursday Throwdown: CNN Drunkenly Admits It’s Fake News

“The 2024 election fried our brains – the Democrats couldn’t hold a primary because they were too busy holding a body upright.”

A drunk Anderson Cooper hides under his umbrella, grimacing as comedian Whitney Cummings roasts Dems and CNN itself, live on air during CNN’s New Years Eve celebration. Things only got more awkward from there:

“It was amazing that the pro-choice party didn’t give their voters one when it came to the presidential candidate,” Cummings goes on, “Kamala was forced on us so hard you’d think she was patented by Pfizer.”

More silence from the CNN hosts, who seem to now be wishing they hadn’t just taken shots on air. How, in a world where CNN is so lax on facts that the network just allowed a correspondent to fake a prisoner rescue in Syria, do they let on a comedian who outs them for refusing to cover Biden’s cognitive decline and the Democratic Party’s lack of a primary process? Must be the booze.

So we flip over to CBS where the panel there is actually admitting this blunder (coverup) openly – what is going on?? Is 2025 a new year for corporate media? Will they start telling the truth? Will Thursday Throwdown become an outdated relic?

Luckily, the rest of this week’s episode proves there’s still a lot of BS for us to cover. From Fox News’ coverage of the homelessness crisis, in which their expert who argues that the unhoused are criminals who want to be homeless is revealed to have been arrested for stealing funds during his tenure as Homeless Services Consultant, to Antony Blinken’s farewell tour in which he shows off his wonderful acting skills, to some rare Useful Idiots coverage of lefty-media infighting, there’s more than enough craziness on the news waves to fill hours of Thursday Throwdowns to come.

Watch it with Katie and Aaron so you can laugh instead of cry at it all. Thanks for supporting independent media, subscribe to watch the full episode here:

Watch our full interview with Norm Finkelstein from October 11 here:

“I think the reasonable conclusion is that Gaza is no more. There's nothing left in Gaza.”

Monday the 7th marked one full year of genocide in Gaza, the darkest era of a decades-long occupation by Israel, which has now begun to spread into the broader Middle East region.

This week we’re joined by Gaza expert and Useful Idiots fan-favorite Norman Finkelstein to look back on this genocidal year.

Norm points out that this is not, as Western and Israeli media claims, an “Israel-Hamas war.” This is not war. This is genocide. And Israel is not targeting Hamas; they are killing civilians, destroying civilian infrastructure, and picking off journalists, health workers, and children.

“I read this letter,” he tells us, “from sixty-five physicians from around the world who gave testimony as to what they observed. And every one of the physicians testified that the children who were coming into the hospital had bullet wounds to the skull or to the chest. No shrapnel. It wasn't bombs and shrapnel. It was targeted bullet wounds to the skull and to the chest of children. What does that have to do with war?”

“There were fifty-four disabled children who used the school in the convent complex. They fired two shells at it. What does that have to do with war?”

Norman also recalls meeting Hezbollah members, and shares what he got wrong about the organization. “Israel, he says, “is willing to kill for material benefit, and Hezbollah and Hamas are willing to die for survival” He also recounts his time meeting Hamas leaders, and explains Israel’s unfair advantage:

“Israel is the entrenched, concentrated manifestation of Western imperialism. It's got deep roots. It's got the whole Western system behind it, that Western system which won't let go. It will nuke China before it lets go of its global dominance. And in order to defeat it, it requires a very long-term struggle and intense calculation.”

Subscribe for the full interview where Norman explains this despair, and the generational hopelessness which lacks historical precedent.

“Our generation,” he laments, “has, for good reason, lost the belief, the conviction that we have the force of history behind us. That we have the force of justice behind us. Our generation believes there's a good chance we'll be defeated. There's a good chance we're not going to win.”

But that doesn’t mean we should give up.

“The only thing I can say as a conclusion is you never know. You can only know one thing for certain: If you do nothing, it can only get worse.”

It’s that certainty that he says keeps him going. “If you resist, there are moments where it looks very grim. And then there's that folk song, it's always darkest before the dawn. It's this hope that keeps me carrying on. It's always darkest before the dawn.”

“There's another reality. There's something in the human constitution that simply can't do nothing. In the face of such death and devastation, you just can't.”