But I think that, you know, I want to ask you, what does that charisma, what can that charisma do to a movement's ability to basically hold power accountable? And I think here's where it kind of relates to Zohra Mamdani.

So one of the things I say in that piece, which was that piece was really something else to write, because I remember what inspired it was specifically the you know, they did a Mamdani Obama photo op at a school to kind of promote a new reading program or a new school program under the mayor's leadership.

direction.

And I remember just seeing that image and it stirred so much in me because I remember when, of course, Obama was elected.

I was a college student and I was really like a lot of my activism and worldview was absolutely forged by the war on terror by the Bush administration.

I wrote, you know, very vividly remember, right, all of the horrors that we were living through in The early 2000s or everything from the Patriot Act, watching Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, the torture, like all of these things come out the way our civil liberties were being encroached on and completely dismantled.

This is somewhere where we've been before, even if maybe the president was a bit more, you know, he was sure he was funny, but he was also maybe a bit more polite about it than the current president.

Really? You're going to keep this person on?

So talk about that other direction.

Yeah.

And I think it's important to note, I'm not going to say that famous line, two things are two at once, but I think it's important to note that two things can be happening at the same time, right? Which is that Israel plays, again, an important function as a sort of military force.

militarism outpost for American imperialism and also that Israel itself as a settler colonial project really benefits from and also exploits certain weaknesses in the United States government and society and so on and so forth, not just there, but even in Europe, right? Those things can be happening at the same time.

They don't have to be separate or are not mutually exclusive.

But one thing that we see when we look at the relationship between the United States and Israel, especially starting in the 1950s, is that the United States saw Israel as, as I say in the video, not as an ally, not as an equal.

Because ally kind of insinuates that there's some level of equal mutual benefit there, right? There's a level like we're on the same...

And but you said something about the moments, I guess, in the relationship between the U.S. and Israel

Do you see the current coverage as a continuance of past trend, or is this something new?

[clears throat] Um, thank you so much for having me.

I'm really excited for this, um, conversation, and I think the more avenues and moments that we have to have this conversation, the better, because one of the reasons why this has happened is because of a collective failure for us to hold accountable our news media for the egregious similar behaviors that it's carried out previously, for instance, in the early 2000s with regards to the Iraq War.

Now, I think this is one of those rare cases where I don't like when people say, like, two things can be true at once, but this is actually one of those cases where there are two things that are certainly true at once, in that there has been a rupture and that this is another instance that is, it's part of a, a continuum, right? I mean, if, uh, a book I always recommend to people is Edward Said's, um, Covering Islam.

Covering Islam was written, I believe, in 1981.

It was following the Islamic Revolution in Iran.

And he really gives an incredible kind of breakdown of the architecture of Western, specifically American, but Western overall coverage of Muslims, Arabs, and, you know, populations that kind of fall under the Orient.

Um, Sana, I don't know how you think this actually changes, um, uh, uh, uh, you know, the way narratives are constructed about these spaces.

Yeah.

But in this case, as far as all the evidence that we don't have shows, is that there are, like you said, right, that there is no evidence of any kind of rape.

And in fact, to the point about, you know, KristofTalking about himself, like how difficult it was to get people to talk to him.

I mean, this is something...

I think it's important to note that sexual violence has been an intimate part of the Israeli occupation since even before the Nakba itself, right? There's a very famous Israeli documentary called Tantura, which talks about the massacre of Tantura by Zionist militias, people who become IDF soldiers, and they talk about their rape of, like, little girls and how they did that.

Like, this is something that's been a part.

I mean, there are, there are State Department memos from decades ago, two decades ago, a decade ago, which talk about the rape of little boys who are in Israeli detention centers.

But how should we be going forward as this conversation is not gonna go away, as AOC is being looked at as, as prospective left avatar for 2028?

Welcome, Sana.

Thanks for having me back, and I've got big shoes to fill.

So there's a lot-

This, this is my, this is my Monday morning coffee, this, everything you just described.

And I'm like, "Yeah, let's go for it."