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For this week’s episode of Useful Idiots, we’re focused on the moral issue of our time: Israel’s genocide and starvation siege against the people of Gaza.

Firs up is our interview with two doctors, Dr. Mohamed Nour and Dr. Ahmed Twaij, who recount the horrifying methods of torture Israel uses against other doctors and nurses who have bravely attempted to give care in Gaza.

Doctors and nurses have to go through these checkpoints. And some of them would get picked out of the line. They would be made to go wait in another holding area.

One of them, I remember he said to me, “I got taken behind the building. I remember seeing two hundred men all completely naked with their hands in plastic cuffs on and blindfolded. They took all of my belongings, made me naked, no boxers, nothing. I remember sitting there for hours. Then they took us into a building and we were just beaten for another couple of hours.”

Then they get transported to a prison in Israel: “We got packed into the truck. It was like we were chickens. We weren’t picked up and sat down, just shoved in the back of a truck.”

When they get to the prison, the plastic cuffs get changed to metal cuffs. And the blindfold stays on. They'd be given a small area, one meter by two meters. And they get put in a certain position. And they stay in that position, like on their knees, essentially, for twenty hours a day. “We were allowed to lie down for four hours a day.”

There's one toilet between, I don't know, a hundred of them. I asked, “How did you go to the toilet?”

“They picked us up and took us to the toilet with our cuffs. There's no kind of tissue, no water, nothing. And we had to pull our pants back up ourselves and then go back and sit down.”

Another said to me, “I remember we got to have a shower once a week and it was always cold water. I'll never forget that because one day a prisoner cried out, ‘Why is it always cold? Why is it always cold water?’ And then we heard him scream because they'd thrown boiling water over him.” And no one's checking, right? Who's going there to check what's going on in the Israeli prisons?

But outside of the Israeli torture prisons, life isn’t much easier. Pulitzer-Prized Poet from Palestine Mosab Abu Toha says that worse than the bombs, the violent soldiers, and the machine guns is the hunger.

The ‘aid’ they're getting from the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation [a fake humanitarian organization set up by Israel and the US] includes massacres because Israelis and mercenaries have been shooting at people. These are death sites.

People go to these sites in the very early hours of the morning before they open, hours and hours there waiting for the gates to open. Then the people who are running these sites would turn on a light which is a signal that now it's time to go. And they would go in, and then there would be another sign that it's shut. So anyone who stays there for five minutes, for ten minutes, they would be shot at, they would be killed.

They tell me: “The problem now is not the airstrike, it's not the drones, it's not the bombs, it's just that we don't have food.” People want to eat, even if they are going to be killed. They can't stop the killing, but they can't just stay in their tents while their children are crying out of hunger. Can you just imagine you're sitting in a tent and there are F-16s and drones in the sky that could drop a bomb and kill you, and you're sitting there for twelve hours and there is no food, there is no water. What do you do?

I was listening in the background when Samah, six years old, was in a tent with my mother-in-law in Gaza City. She was crying. She said, ‘I want to eat. I'm hungry. I'm hungry.’ And then my mother-in-law told her, ‘Samah, just be patient. When it's sunset, we will have some food. Just try to drink some water.’

Little babies had to fast for twelve or fifteen hours because the fathers and the brothers are outside looking for food knowing that they could not come back with anything or they could not come back at all.

A takeaway that was highlighted in both interviews was what we could do to help, not just as journalists, activists, poets, or doctors, but as people in our everyday lives. Mohamed explains:

I don't think it's okay for people not to talk about this. When I say people, I mean the general public. People who are going to work, watching Netflix, going out to the theatre, whatever. In years to come, being silent on this issue is going to be something people will really, really regret. The fact that we should at least have spoken about this.

We should be talking about it everywhere, at work, at schools, wherever, to say this is not acceptable. And so at the very least, we can all say, ‘look, we spoke up against this. We did as much as we could do for this issue, and we tried our best.’ I think everybody should be able to say that.

Thank you for supporting independent media. Help us tell the stories of the people in Palestine by sharing this interview.

Plus, catch this week’s Thursday Throwdown: Hunter Biden FLAMES George Clooney & Establishment Dems: “F*ck them!”

The media has gone off the rails this week.

We start our Throwdown with Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia student kidnapped by Trump’s ICE and imprisoned for over 100 days. After finally being released, he isn’t backing down: he’s taking yet another brave risk to make his voice heard in an effort to fight against Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

But how does CNN, supposedly the adversarial network to Trump’s draconian rule, treat Khalil? With racism, aggression, and as always, the big question: “But do you condemn Hamas?”

“It's disingenuous,” Khalil responds in his ever-diplomatic way, “to ask about condemning Hamas while Palestinians are the ones being starved now by Israel. You’re not condemning October 6, where 260 Palestinians were killed by Israel before October 7. So I hate the selective outrage of condemnation because this wouldn't lead to a constructive conversation.”

Aaron adds on: “There were atrocities committed by Hamas on October 7, and they can ask him to condemn those, but they didn't. They asked him in a very general, broad statement: Do you condemn Hamas as a broad entity.

“What does that mean? Do you have to condemn Hamas for running the Gaza Health Ministry? And are you supposed to condemn people for exercising their right to resist? If you want to say: Do you condemn the killing of innocent civilians? That's a fair question. But then, as he pointed out, you have to apply that to Israel as well, which killed infinitely more innocent civilians.”

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We then turn to Hunter Biden, who in an interview this week unleashed a tirade against George Clooney, Pod Save America, David Axelrod, and other Dems who coast off their names and famous relationships. He had a lot to say:

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Larry Charles, who’s worked on some of comedy’s most influential and successful projects, from Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm to Borat and Bruno to The Arsenio Hall Show, tells everything about his forty years of blood, guts, and laughter in the new book Comedy Samurai.

Including the juicy stuff, which he shares with us on Useful Idiots: as an activist against genocide and for Palestinian rights, what is it like to work with notorious Zionists Jerry Seinfeld, Sacha Baron Cohen, and Bill Maher? And as a Jewish writer in Hollywood, how did he escape the Israel propaganda machine when his friends didn’t?

Useful Idiots: You're very political. Do you ever struggle with making sure your politics don't get in the way of comedy?

Larry Charles: Well, I think my bottom line is it needs to be funny. And I bet I've been exploring that relationship between things that aren't supposed to be funny that I would then rise to the challenge of trying to make funny. And of course, political issues are amongst them.

Working on Fridays as my first job plunged us into the political world. Some sketches were more successful than others in terms of funniness and/or in terms of insight, but we were not at all censored. And I never have felt since that time that I was censored in terms of exploring politics through comedy. I love the idea of trying to bring those two worlds together, even when they're not on the surface supposedly funny, because there's always an angle.

I was a big political cartoonist fan and I did political cartoons in high school. So I've always been looking for that juxtaposition, that interesting synthesis between politics and humor.

Useful Idiots: You have visited Palestine, and you've been very vocal on the issue, especially since Israel started attacking Gaza after October seventh. Now, you've worked with some people who have made some of the most influential comedies ever: on Seinfeld with Jerry Seinfeld, Borat and Bruno with Sacha Baron Cohen, and others too who have very different views than you when it comes to the issue of Palestine. I'm curious how you navigate that, how incredibly creative partnerships can not transcend to being in alignment on really fundamental political issues.

Larry Charles: The propaganda machine is able to seduce you, you get sucked in very easily. And you believe that Israel is your birthright. And those kinds of things were not questioned at all when I was a kid. And I'm sure for Bill Maher or for Jerry or for