Speaker 1: You don't have to have his website and a link that people have to click on, you can just say stuff and you could get attention. You don't need to be Breitbart to do that anymore.

Brooke Gladstone: Does the rise of X, signal the fall traditional right-wing outlets? From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger. Also on this week's show, in Russia, a funeral and election, and a journalist in prison.

Speaker 2: It's hard to see your friend and colleague on the front page of a magazine. I think he just wants to be writing the stories. I think he wants to be in Russia reporting about this repression.

Brooke Gladstone: Plus, the importance of nuance to distinguish between terms like anti-colonial, decolonization.

Speaker 3: There's a lot of these words flying around. There are many people who are not using them in a way that furthered the debate or even informed people.

Micah Loewinger: It's all coming up after this.

Brooke Gladstone: From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger.

Joe Biden: My fellow Americans, [applause] the issue facing our nation isn't how old we are, it's how old are our ideas.

Micah Loewinger: An energized Joe Biden speaking at the State of Union on Thursday.

Joe Biden: You can't lead America with ancient ideas.

Speaker 4: Joe Biden delivered what has been described in the press so far as feisty, fiery, heated.

Speaker 5: You can tell how well he did by how annoyed Republicans are this morning.

Sean Hannity: A very different Joe Biden. I might call him, jacked-up Joe.

Micah Loewinger: Sean Hannity of Fox News, who until now has preferred the sleepy Joe epithet, a coinage from Donald Trump or, 'my predecessor', as Biden called him 13 times on Thursday. Now we've entered a new phase of the race with Super Tuesday behind us and Nikki Haley out, Trump can finally start raising money like the GOP nominee. Just kidding. He's been at it for months.

Speaker 6: Donald Trump's campaign is parlaying an embarrassing precedent into much-needed cash. The former president surrendered yesterday at Atlanta jail. Here is the mug shot.

Speaker 7: Trump's face is already making its way onto T-shirts and coffee mugs.

Speaker 8: Donald Trump launching his own limited edition, Trump digital trading cards.

Speaker 5: His new Trump-branded sneakers. They are painted gold. They are named "Never Surrender high-Tops". I can't make this up guys, and they sell for just under $400.

Micah Loewinger: Despite all his merch sales and donations, Trump's campaign fundraising is lagging behind Team Biden. He's also on the hook for $83 million for defaming E. Jean Carroll and $355 million for fraudulent business practices in New York. Adding interest and other penalties, NPR estimated he owes $600 million, enter the world's second-richest man.

Speaker 9: Check out this headline from the New York Times. Trump's seeking cash infusion meets with Elon Musk.

Speaker 10: Elon Musk is in a unique position to come close to erasing that deficit almost single-handedly.

Micah Loewinger: Writing in The Washington Post this week, columnist Philip Bump argued that "it's not money that Elon Musk is contributing to Donald Trump. These two kindred spirits have other reasons for teaming up".

Philip Bump: I think it's important to recognize that they are reflections of each other. That Donald Trump was a business person who increasingly embraced right-wing politics and then moved into the political realm. Elon Musk was a business person and has increasingly embraced even further right-wing rhetoric and is becoming more of a political actor in part through his purchase of Twitter, which is now X. It is that similarity in both trajectory and landing points that made it natural that the two of them would at some point in time put their heads together.

Micah Loewinger: Musk tweeted that he was "not donating money to either candidate for US President". Musk isn't going to give Trump money, right?

Philip Bump: Well, there's a lot of wiggle room in not contributing to candidates. He could potentially donate to a Super PAC. He could start his own super PAC, which is supporting Trump. He could do things like work out some way of allowing Trump to advertise on his platform relatively inexpensively. There are lots of ways in which he can provide economic value to Trump.

Micah Loewinger: Why would Elon Musk help Donald Trump financially?

Philip Bump: Well, that's the central question. Elon Musk views himself as sitting above the intellectual fray, that he understands the world in a way that others don't. He views himself in the world as the prime mover. If you're Donald Trump, and you're trying to get Elon Musk to give you money, probably the worst way to do it is to try and bring him on board team Trump.

Elon Musk doesn't want to be on anyone else's team. He wants to view Donald Trump as being on his team, make Donald Trump part of his collective. I do think that it's important to note that Elon Musk by virtue of his ownership of X, really does sit on top of a conduit that is really important for Donald Trump and not a financial one, but one that is centered on public attention.

Micah Loewinger: If I were Donald Trump and I were following what has very clearly happened to X since Elon Musk took over, I would say to myself, "Seems like this guy's already pretty aligned with me. Just look at his tweets."

Philip Bump: Elon Musk purchased Twitter, now X, in part as a reaction to this right-wing idea that moderation on Twitter had become something that was an impediment to conservatives. Now, that moderation that Twitter and others like Facebook had implemented, was a response to an increase in abusive and toxic behavior and misinformation that emerged during 2016, in part because of Donald Trump's supporters. That was viewed by the political right as being an imposition on conservative ideology.

Musk reacts to that, buys Twitter/X, and then lifts that moderation. Elon Musk by purchasing this social media platform, has reverted it to this platform that was in 2016, when it was so advantageous to Donald Trump.

Micah Loewinger: Not only has he reverted it, but the guy who owns the platform, who was the most followed person on the platform with over 175 million followers, is himself spreading right-wing conspiracy theories this week in particular about immigration.

Philip Bump: This week, he has embraced this idea that Democrats are trying to bring immigrants into the country so then they can vote. We've seen him do this in the past, using, for example, when he elevated this associated press story, that Biden wanted to create a pathway to citizenship for people who are in the country and who are not yet citizens.

Micah Loewinger: This is an article from 2021.

Philip Bump: That's exactly right. Before he assumed President. The article basically said, "Joe Biden, when he soon becomes president is going to introduce this proposed bill", and so he did. He introduced a proposed bill for a pathway to citizenship and it went into the house and nothing happened, but that's what Musk is using, to say, "Oh, look what Biden's trying to do because they're trying to get all these Democratic voters."

It's just fundamentally dishonest and one wonders whether or not Elon Musk recognizes this as dishonest, but either way, it's advantageous to Donald Trump's position on the way immigration should be addressed.

Micah Loewinger: On Tuesday, he posted that Biden had committed treason. The so-called treasonous act was a new program, which would allow Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans. If they had a sponsor in the US, and they passed a background check to work lawfully in the United States for two years. Hardly sneaking people in.

Philip Bump: Yes, exactly. Treason has a very specific definition, which is that you have to aid an enemy of the United States that the United States is at war with. It makes no sense. It's obviously just rhetorical, and it's obviously Elon Musk's knee-jerk reaction to having immigration increase in the United States. Now, there's an irony here, of course, which is that Elon Musk is himself an immigrant to the United States, who has celebrated the fact that he did so by following the standard procedure, but this is exactly that policy.

This is something that was authorized to have people come to the United States as immigrants and be able to be successful here for a period of time. This gets turned around by Elon Musk into something that is evidence of Joe Biden's secret plan to support the United States.

Micah Loewinger: This brand of conspiracy theory is super hot right now in the right-wing media. According to Media Matters, in just the last couple of months, we've heard it on Fox.

Speaker 11: The Democrat Party, the US government gets what they want, which is a new wave of immigrants, perhaps future voters.

Micah Loewinger: On One America News Network.

Speaker 12: If illegal aliens turn residents, turn citizens, turn voters would vote Republican, you and I would not be having this conversation. That is their agenda. They're trying to change the electorate because they cannot win without importing more Democratic voters. That's a whole ballgame.

Micah Loewinger: On Newsmax.

Speaker 13: How many of you feel better, that to start with, Democrats are pushing to let foreign nationals cancel out your vote, but only on local elections?

Micah Loewinger: On right-wing radio.

Speaker 14: This is revolution by illegal immigration Mr. [unintelligible 00:09:10].

Micah Loewinger: It sounds a lot like the great replacement theory.

Philip Bump: Exactly. The great replacement theory puts forward that there is this cabal that is trying to bring new people to the United States to replace those that are here. On the face of it, doesn't really make any sense. Over the course of the past decade or so, we've seen that there is not necessarily a consistent pattern voting for Hispanics living in the United States.

It is not the case that even if you were to have a number of immigrants and create a pathway for them to become citizens to vote, those aren't Democratic voters. That's just simply not how it works. This is not a function of the Biden administration. The path to becoming a citizen takes years and years and years. There's no blanket thing that Joe Biden can do to turn these people into voters. Even if he were to do so, the odds that they vote Democratic are not as high as being presented

Micah Loewinger: After Fox's $787 million settlement with Dominion and the ongoing Smartmatic defamation case, you'd think that right-wing media would be way more careful about these voter fraud claims this time around, and yet these conspiracy theories sure sound like fodder for claims to delegitimize a possible Biden win in November.

Philip Bump: Yes, I think that's true, but I also think that more broadly, this fits into the way in which the political right have tried to delegitimize democratic voting in general, doing things like insisting that the reason young voters like Democrats isn't because they're particularly concerned about climate change, or gun control, or things along those lines, it's because they're being brainwashed by the high school teachers and their professors.

It assumes that if you are someone who supports the Democratic Party, you are necessarily being misled in some way, convinced by Hollywood or by ads, or by CNN or MSNBC, to vote in a particular way that if you weren't simply a rational person, you wouldn't. They have to cheat, they have to try and bring in these non-white always has been the subtext here, people to come into the United States and turn them into Democrats, because of course, once again, they're just going to vote Democratic as Democrats are all sheep. This is just a way of increasing the size of the flock.

Micah Loewinger: In 2020, the right-wing media were obsessed with the vote-by-mail conspiracy theory, that people who wanted to vote from home would be taking advantage of a system to nefariously vote extra times or what have you. This year, it's the undocumented immigrants conspiracy theory that has emerged thus far. There's still plenty of time for other fear-mongering messages and conspiracy theories to rival this one, but could you compare and contrast how this election feels compared to 2020?

Philip Bump: Back in 2020, we heard a lot of similar conspiracy theories about what was going on with crime, that the social justice protests that unfolded over the summer, some of which culminated in acts of vandalism and destruction. Most of them didn't, as we all know by now, that that was span as being this horrible thing that presage what was going to happen under President Biden. Fox News night, after night, after night, would show the same footage of acts of vandalism in New York City.

You'll still here today, Republicans talking about how cities were burned to the ground and destroyed in 2020 and just simply detached from reality, but I think that's the role that immigration is going to play this time. The migrant crime wave. This is already something that Donald Trump and Fox News have picked up. This idea of migrant crime as being something that needs to be tracked independently.

Micah Loewinger: We started the conversation talking about Elon Musk and his growing coalition with MAGA activists, the MAGA leader Donald Trump himself, and the movement at writ large. This transformation of X/Twitter comes at a time when, interestingly right-wing media seem to be really struggling.

New data released last month from the writing using traffic data from Comscore, showed that, for the top right-wing sites, only Newsmax has gained traffic since 2020, and just about everyone else has lost a lot of traffic. Fox is down 24%. The Blaze is down 60%. Breitbart is down 87%. This is worse than the dips and traffic we're seeing for mainstream outlets like CNN, 20% dip. New York Times 22% dip during the same four-year period.

Are conservatives spending less time reading about politics, or do you think as David French argued this week in The New York Times, conservative right-wing readers are increasingly spending their time on Elon Musk's X or other right-wing social media?

Philip Bump: I think it's probably more the latter. One of the things that we saw over the course of the past 15 years or so is you had Fox News, this behemoth on the right. It started to be challenged from the right by sites like Breitbart, and eventually sites like the conspiracy site Gateway Pundit. You had these people who were willing to feed the demand of further right content.

Donald Trump was successful in 2015, 2016 I would argue, because he echoed the themes that were emerging from that further right world of conservative media and conservative thought. He would frequently cite articles from Breitbart, and so on, and so forth. What happened is that social media made it so that you could move very easily even further right. You didn't have to put together a website, you didn't have to put together a news article with an extensible reporter reporting it out, you can just say stuff, and you could get attention.

One of the better-known people in the conservative social media world is this guy who calls himself Catturd. He sat down for an interview with Tucker Carlson and the interview revealed that he didn't really know that much about politics, but he just has this ability to respond in real-time to what's happening and frame things in a way that is viewed appreciatively by the right, and it's made him very successful. You don't need to be Breitbart to do that anymore, and you can gain clout.

Even because of the way that Musk has set up the platform now, you can get money from it. That is an unusual driver of the decline that we're seeing among conservative media outlets. It is extremely bad to have one of the principal drivers of the national conversation be a guy named Catturd who gets retweeted by the President.

Micah Loewinger: Philip, thank you very much.

Philip Bump: You bet.

Micah Loewinger: Philip Bump is a columnist for The Washington Post, and the author of the weekly newsletter, How to Read This Chart.

Brooke Gladstone: Coming up, before we argue about conflict in Palestine, we have to talk about colonization and colonialism and know the difference.

Micah Loewinger: This is On the Media.

Micah Loewinger: This is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger.

Brooke Gladstone: I'm Brooke Gladstone. Here's President Biden on Thursday night.

Joe Biden: To the leadership of Israel, I say this. Humanitarian assistance cannot be a secondary consideration or a bargaining chip. Protecting and saving innocent lives has to be a priority. As we look to the future, the only real solution to the situation is a two-state solution over time. [applause]

Brooke Gladstone: Since October 7th, many have been grasping for ways to explain or even describe an intractable crisis in Palestine spanning generations. To that end, three words are being deployed over and over again, colonialism, decolonization, and liberation.

Speaker 14: They were pushing for a free independent Palestine. They are pushing for decolonization, land back, et cetera.

Speaker 15: Decolonization, free Palestine, that equals the slaughter of Jews.

Iyad el-Baghdadi: I felt that there's a lot of these words flying around, and there are many people who are not using them in a way that furthered the debates or even informed people.

Brooke Gladstone: Iyad el-Baghdadi's forebears left what is now Tel Aviv in 1948. Today, he's a Palestinian human rights activist, a writer, and co-author of The Middle East Crisis Factory. In November, he wrote a thread on Twitter X, clarifying what terms like colonialism and decolonization really mean and why muddling them can be risky.

Iyad el-Baghdadi: To colonize means we just established a colony. If we go to Mars, for example, and we establish a base over there, we can say it's a Mars colony. Colonialism, on the other hand, to colonialize, is really an exercise in hegemony. It's a mode of domination. This is where a society might have existed for its own sake, but through the deployment of immense power, immense hegemony, you can turn it into something that doesn't exist for its own sake.

Brooke Gladstone: Colonialism, he says, comes in two flavors. First, the extractive kind.

Iyad el-Baghdadi: In extractive colonialism, the objective is to extract wealth away. You need a labor class, you need people to work the fields, you need people to work the plantations, you need them subjugated but you don't need them dead.

Brooke Gladstone: Then the second, settler colonialism, where the colonizer wants the land without the people, and that el-Baghdadi says describes what happened in Palestine.

Iyad el-Baghdadi: In settler colonialism, the colonizer here wants the land for expansion for a new settlement, displacing the natives. The tools of hegemony over here are much more brutal because we don't need those people to be there.

Brooke Gladstone: The word that's most muddled, and he says dangerously so is decolonization. It's too often confused with another term, anti-colonial.

Iyad el-Baghdadi: Not every anti-colonial movement is decolonial. Anti-colonial simply mean opposed to the presence of colonialism. Anti-colonial movements themselves can fall into the same patterns of the colonizers. They can start to have a worldview which is built upon these colonial concepts. Decolonization, on the other hand, the way that I approach it, is that it's not really about removing people, it's about removing supremacy.

There's no longer colonizer and colonized, there's simply equal citizens in one state. This, of course, does not erase the inequities of the past, but this is the only light that can lead us towards the future.

Brooke Gladstone: You argue that there are two main models of settler colonialism, and understanding the nuances of these models is key to reckoning with Palestine. There's the Algeria model and the South African model. They both been applied to Palestine.

Iyad el-Baghdadi: Algeria was colonized by the French for a period of around 134 years. The model followed by the Algeria independence movement was mainly a military approach, make the colony unlivable until they leave. Algeria managed to accomplish that eventually in I believe 1962. In the South Africa model, the colonial situation was resolved by creating a democracy that included both the previously colonized and the previous colonizer  in a democracy.

One person, one vote, everybody has the same citizenship, the same rights. Whether you pick the Algeria model or the South African model, the kind of movement that you build is going to be very different. 21 years ago in a 2003 interview Ehud Olmert who at the time was Sharon's Deputy Prime Minister, actually referenced the Algeria model and the South African model in reference to Israeli plans to withdraw unilaterally from Gaza.

This is literally what he said. "More and more Palestinians are uninterested in a negotiated two-state solution because they want to change the essence of the conflict from an Algerian paradigm to a South African one, from a struggle against occupation in their parlance to a struggle for one man, one vote. That is of course, a much cleaner struggle, a much more popular struggle, and ultimately a much more powerful one. For us, it would mean the end of the Jewish state."

Brooke Gladstone: He's saying basically that there cannot be a two-state solution?

Iyad el-Baghdadi: Because it was perceived that Palestinian statehood would be a lethal threat to the Jewishness of the state. This was where the current impasse, where we have a status quo, where it's neither Algeria nor South Africa, but both, the pre-October 7th reality was not something that Israel stumbled into, but an accomplishment of two generations of Israeli politicians. It was a conscious choice.

October, 2004, senior advisor to Ariel Sharon, it says the significance of the disengagement plan, which is pulling out from Gaza, is to freeze the peace process. When you freeze that process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state and you prevent a discussion on the refugees, the borders, and Jerusalem. Effectively, this whole package called the Palestinian state with all that it entails, has been removed indefinitely from our agenda.

Brooke Gladstone: What would be the result of pursuing the Algeria model in Palestine? Because a big part of the Palestinian movement doesn't acknowledge Israel's right to exist.

Iyad el-Baghdadi: They don't. Algerians were fighting around the same time that Palestinians were fighting, but Algerians won. Many Palestinians got this impression that yes, we have to do the same thing that they did. My position, of course, the position of many others is that French-Algeria is not Israel. There are many, many reasons.

Brooke Gladstone: For one thing, the French had a place to go. They could go back to France.

Iyad el-Baghdadi: Yes. Meanwhile, Israelis have nowhere to go. Also, at the height of French colonialism in Algeria, I don't think the French non-natives exceeded 20% of the population. They were always a minority. In the case of Israel/Palestine, it's half and half. Israel was founded by Holocaust survivors. They were escaping a millennium of European antisemitism. This changes the psychological dynamic.

These are two peoples locked into a cycle of trauma, traumatizing each other, but also traumatized. We can't lose our humanity when we actually approach this conflict.

Brooke Gladstone: As far as the pro-Palestinian movement that still thinks about Algeria, just make Israel unlivable and they'll all leave. You say it's a dead end.

Iyad el-Baghdadi: I'm saying that it's not desirable. The objective is not simply to defeat Israel, it's not simply to liberate Palestine. It is also to give us a country that we can live in. A country that is liberated into a pile of rubble, into a whirlpool of pain, into pools of blood, that is not a livable country. The mistaken idea that in the conception of many Palestinians, but also pro-Palestinians, this is still the Israel of 1948.

This is still an Israel which is basically mostly European, white settlers, Jewish people coming basically from Europe. This is not the case now, this is not today's Israel. More than 60% of Israelis today have at least full or partial Middle Eastern heritage. Basically descended from Middle Eastern Jews. The whole idea that this is still a white settler colony, it's not true anymore.

Brooke Gladstone: You wrote that decolonization doesn't mean removing people, it means removing domination, and that's why South Africa is a helpful model.

Iyad el-Baghdadi: Because it is rooted in values such as equality, coexistence, humanity, integration. On the other hand, there is a demographic reality here. It's true that even in South Africa, the white population were also a minority, the fact that we are talking about a demographic reality where we have roughly 50% Palestinians, 50% Jewish people, the premise of equality here is far more applicable.

We have to think in intergenerational terms because really I see a lot of Palestinians, but also Israelis now asking the questions like, how can we live with these people after what they have done? There's two ways that I respond to this. The first is tough luck, you're going to live with these people, and the question is how? There are babies who are going to be born tomorrow between the river and the sea, some Jewish, some Palestinian.

We have to ask ourselves, what do we want for them 20 years of 30 years from now? Do we still want them to be doing what we're doing right now? We would've failed them? We would've failed our own children.

Brooke Gladstone: Many people discuss Palestinian liberation as a clean reversal of 1948, The Nakba. Edward Said, the late prominent Palestinian American scholar, warned that obsession with the past will doom a movement.

Iyad el-Baghdadi: Yes. I think this difficulty of imagining the future is itself an impact of trauma. The Nakba being an ongoing trauma, it started, but it never ended. When you don't mourn the past, it remains in your present and it blocks your vision of the future. Time only goes forward. We cannot undo the past. We have to be informed by the past, inspired by the past, and maybe sometimes the past is a cautionary tale, but in the end, time only moves forward and liberation itself has to only move forward.

Brooke Gladstone: You have observed that people who have been systematically excluded end up as nihilists or architects. You were a stateless refugee until last summer.

Iyad el-Baghdadi: Yes. Me being a stateless refugee my entire life has given me this innate, almost automatic radicalism. I'm 46 years old. I was a stateless refugee until last summer. My family left Jaffa in 1948. It was my great-grandfather, my grandfather, and my father who was a toddler at the time.

Brooke Gladstone: Jaffa which is now Tel Aviv.

Iyad el-Baghdadi: Exactly. This was four generations of statelessness. What that does to you is that you know that there is nothing worth preserving for you in the current world order, but then there's a very important distinction here in how we speak about this. We can either say, it cannot be reformed, it must be destroyed, or we can say it cannot be reformed, we have to build a replacement. The first I would say is nihilistic. Well, I just want to destroy it.

Changing the world, this kind of decolonial vision is a task for entrepreneurs, for architects, not for nihilists. We have to have the imagination to build that mass movement premised upon equality, premised upon solidarity, and premised upon humanity. People are starting to think that there is no future in which a Jewish person and a Palestinian person can live together in peace in one country, but this is exactly why we have to double down on it.

I don't think I'm the one who's dysfunctional for thinking that democracy and humanity is the only thing that can win. I really think that anybody who thinks that anything else can fix this is the one who's dysfunctional.

Brooke Gladstone: What do you think a viable movement for a Palestinian liberation would look like?

Iyad el-Baghdadi: Look, this is not only going to be about liberating Palestinians. Ultimately, this is also about liberating Jewish Israelis. It's really about humanizing both the colonizer and the colonized. Maybe I'm not the right person to speak about this, but when I speak to my Jewish Israeli friends, they say that they are not free because they're living in this entity, which is always scared. If you have to kill that many people in order to feel safe, that means you're never going to feel safe.

Colonialism is not only brutal to the colonized, but also to the soul of the colonizer. This decolonial movement should be led by the colonized, but this movement has to center both peoples, building a future for both peoples. This is not going to be something that we're going to fix in 10 years or 15 years. I'm thinking 20 years and above. You ask me a question like is the Algeria model possible or not?

Even if we acknowledge that it's possible, it's going to require rivers of blood, a lot of destruction. As a Palestinian, I want a country that my children and grandchildren can live in with full dignity, with freedom, not a country without Jews.

Brooke Gladstone: If you listen to the rhetoric of some of the members of the current Israeli government and the leadership of Hamas, there are a lot of similarities. Neither of them would really cotton to the South Africa model.

Iyad el-Baghdadi: This is true. There is a paradigm of partition and segregation and domination that's premised upon this idea of ethnic nationalism. There's another paradigm here, I don't want to talk about the one state solution, but the paradigm here. The paradigm is an integration paradigm. It's about equality, it's about integration, it's about coexistence.

My premise is that this paradigm is the only thing that can move forward. The path in front of us from here, from post-October 7th is the state of sustained crisis, and actual zeroes on where anything the Israelis get, they're going to get by taking it away from Palestinians or taking away Palestinians, and anything that Palestinians can get, they're going to have to get it by taking it away from Israelis. The strategic nihilist is only a reflection of something much deeper, which is the cycle of trauma that we're locked into. Current politicians, current movements, et cetera, who are locked into this old way of thinking, all they're going to give us is more of the same. More bloodshed, more conflict, more violence, more war. Palestinians, their backs are to the wall. They're being starved. They're being bombed. They feel like the only thing they could do is fight back.

We live in a two state solution world. We live in a world in which we have for 75 years we decided that the solution over here is partition and domination. We have two paths. One path is completely blocked. The other path is intergenerational and it's very steep, and it's going to take a lot of work, but at least it can get us there. The history of the Jewish people is very long, very well documented history and a very proud history.

The state of Israel, this phase of history which is marked by ethno-nationalism, is only one chapter. I want Jewish people to thrive in the Middle East, in their native region, for a very long time. Maybe the prerequisite for that is to give up on this idea of ethno-nationalism, and to embrace each other's brothers and sisters without questions of who belongs and who doesn't belong.

Brooke Gladstone: Up until this summer, you were stateless?

Iyad el-Baghdadi: Yes.

Brooke Gladstone: What happened?

Iyad el-Baghdadi: Well, I was granted Norwegian citizenship last summer. I remember that moment of time, and I had to actually go to a government office to give up my refugee's travel document. I don't think a little tiny booklet has ever felt this heavy in my hand. It felt to me that I'm not gaining a new identity or a new citizenship, but giving up an identity. It almost felt like a betrayal of my ancestors who never made it, and many Palestinians who never made it.

I remember waking up the next morning somewhere in Norway is beautiful, and I live very central in Oslo, and walked up to the terrace in my apartment, looked out in all directions, and I got this sense of immense love, a physical feeling of love all over my body. I was able to say to myself for the first time, "This is my country and these are my people, and together, from this place of safety and prosperity and privilege, we're going to do everything that we can to heal our world."

Brooke Gladstone: Iyad, thank you very much.

Iyad el-Baghdadi: Thank you, Brooke.

Brooke Gladstone: Iyad el-Baghdadi is a human rights activist, writer and author of the book The Middle East Crisis Factory: Tyranny, Resilience and Resistance.

Micah Loewinger: Coming up after two years of war in Ukraine, a close up view of 20 excruciating Days in Mariupol.

Brooke Gladstone: This is On the Media.

Micah Loewinger: This is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger.

Brooke Gladstone: I'm Brooke Gladstone. It's just over two years since Russia launched a full scale invasion of Ukraine, and there's no end yet in sight.

Speaker 16: Ukrainian troops filmed themselves as they withdraw from Avdiivka exhausted after the longest and perhaps the bloodiest battle of the war so far.

Speaker 17: Zelensky said his soldiers had been outgunned 10 to 1, and made an urgent appeal for more weapons from the international community.

Brooke Gladstone: Next week in Russia, polls will be open for a full three days, enabling citizens lots of time to vote in Russian President Vladimir Putin for a fifth six-year term. All of Putin's potential challengers have been eliminated by legal means or extralegal ones, like Putin's best known nemesis Alexei Navalny, who died under extreme duress in an Arctic penal colony on February 16th. His body was laid in the ground on March 1st and two weeks later, Russians are still paying their respects.

Valerie Hopkins: People have been streaming into the graveyard every day while it's open and lining up and waiting to lay flowers.

Brooke Gladstone: Valerie Hopkins is an international correspondent at The New York Times, covering Russia. She says that the mound of flowers on Navalny's grave has grown so large that you can barely make out the wooden cross atop it.

Valerie Hopkins: Some of the places across Russia where people went to lay flowers, they were asked to show their passports and some people were arrested on the spot. Others had law enforcement bodies coming to their homes later. I think it's quite a testament to how beloved Alexei Navalny was, that people are trekking out to a southern suburb to really show their support for someone that the Russian authorities consider to be a terrorist and extremist, and still people are coming.

Brooke Gladstone: More than 400 people have been detained across Russia for publicly paying tribute to Navalny.

Valerie Hopkins: In the same week, one of Russia's best known human rights activists, Oleg Orlov, was sentenced to two and a half years in jail because of his opposition to the war. This is someone who was part of a group of people who won the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize. He's 70. He was sentenced for the crime of what's called, "repeatedly discrediting the Russian armed forces."

Brooke Gladstone: March 29th will mark one year since Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich was arrested while doing his job in Russia.

Valerie Hopkins: Evan is on the cover of this week's time magazine, and I'm so grateful, but I think he just wants to be in Russia reporting about this repression.

Brooke Gladstone: Hopkins says that Russians fear a new mobilization after the election as Russia's Ukrainian quagmire drags painfully on, but as war fatigue and other global conflicts push Ukraine's front line further and further from the media spotlight, a film that palpably conveys the invasions brutality is up for an Oscar. In February of 2022, Mstyslav Chernov, a video journalist for the Associated Press, went to Mariupol, the critical port city on Ukraine's southeastern edge, just 35 miles from the Russian border.

He arrived an hour before the first bombs hit the city would turn off. Chronicled over the next three weeks is captured in the documentary 20 Days in Mariupol. He was there as a reporter. Only a fraction of his footage actually made it to the outside world, but when it did, it hit hard.

Speaker 17: AP reporters on the ground showed the world a mass grave in Mariupol.

Speaker 18: I'm talking about narrow trenches in Mariupol with babies bodies in-- AP journalists that have been there.

Speaker 19: Seen so many fakes. Who wins the information war? The one who is the--

Speaker 18: Do you really, truly believe this? Do you truly believe what you're saying?

Brooke Gladstone: At every moment we get to see what he sees, and warning, that's pretty disturbing.

Mstyslav Chernov: We immediately started hearing explosions on the outskirts. There were flashes of light you could see from the window. It was still dark. The battle was largely happening on the outskirts of the city, and military bases and the trenches that were built there for years. For a while it was calm. There was no panic. Some people went to work and it was quite surreal because I had a feeling that something horrible is coming. Judging by just how Russia deals with cities that it tries to attack, how it was with Grozny, how it was with Aleppo.

Brooke Gladstone: Early in the film, you meet a panicked woman crying, "Where shall I go? What shall I do?" To calm her down, you tell her to go into her basement, they won't shell civilian areas and of course they do. Later you see her at a shelter and she reminds you of your not so great advice, and you say, "I'm sorry."

Mstyslav Chernov: I feel like I am telling the story of the community that I'm part of, and sometimes it is hard for me to decide what's best, to keep filming or just to try to help. That's a core thought, which I wanted to come through my narration that I am not a distant narrator. At the same time, I didn't want to impose my emotions on the audience.

Brooke Gladstone: In describing their trauma, you're also describing your own. It's evident in your simple words of description, but behind it, so much weariness.

Mstyslav Chernov: That is something that probably all the Ukrainian journalists feel and all probably all conflict journalists feel.

Brooke Gladstone: One of the most horrendous moments includes the aftermath of a maternity hospital bombing. Incredibly hard to watch. One very pregnant, very injured woman is carried out on a stretcher. We don't know her fate, but then at a second hospital, you find the doctor who treated her. She said that her pelvis had been shattered by the explosion and that the mother and baby died.

Mstyslav Chernov: Her name was Irina. They said she screamed, "Kill me," when they brought her. She knew her child was dead.

Brooke Gladstone: You see nurses getting sniped at, so many dead babies. The kind of thing that a news consumer in America would never see on television. What do you think about American mores when it comes to war of violence?

Mstyslav Chernov: It is crucially important for the war coverage not to be sanitized in any way, because if people see only, let's say, light version of the events, they tend to accept war and it's just unacceptable. We didn't sanitize anything when we were editing.  I remember when Russia shut down MH17 airplane over Donbass nine years ago.

Brooke Gladstone: The Malaysian airliner.

Mstyslav Chernov: Yes. The Malaysian Airlines. I was one of the first journalists at the scene, filmed with 100 of bodies scattered across the field and melted plastic with human bones. It was horrifying. Most of those images never made it to screens because it was really too difficult, but I think if we would be filming this now, we could show much more. The limits to what international outlets are showing to their viewers have changed. There's just too many war crimes, it's just impossible to ignore it.

Brooke Gladstone: You're not worried about numbness or empathy fatigue in viewers.

Mstyslav Chernov: It's important to find balance. You cannot just bombard audience with blood and tears and expect people to care all the time. It needs context to show how people react and how they feel.

Brooke Gladstone: Speaking of reaction, there were a few moments in the film where you hear people expressing disdain for you and the crew being there, and then we saw a lot of people feeling quite the opposite.

Mstyslav Chernov: For most of the people, it was a chance to even just send message to their relatives. People would just come up to us on the street and ask to film them. Then they would just ask us, is Ukraine still exist as a country? How is Kyiv doing? How is Kyiv? Is Ukraine army resisting? Other people came and said, please keep filming. I think this also gives us good understanding of how not just a physical military siege works on psychology of people. It's also an information siege that destroys the society.

Brooke Gladstone: Which brings to mind that when Global TV used some of your footage, Russian officials specifically labeled the footage you were able to get out from, say, the bombing at the maternity ward or the mass graves, as propaganda.

Mstyslav Chernov: They said we are information terrorists and that we staged everything. I think it's a part of the story because the story is not only what happens on the ground is the ripples of the information that is going across the planet influencing people.

Brooke Gladstone: There's a moment in the film that might have not worked at all, because you leave the present moment and you offer a montage of the terrible trials of the Ukrainian people in recent history.

Mstyslav Chernov: I think about all this country has been through over the past eight years, all that I filmed, revolution of Dignity, Crimea's annexation, Russia's invasion of Donbas.

Brooke Gladstone: The accurate smell of violence.

Mstyslav Chernov: MH17.

Brooke Gladstone: Seems to waft off the screen.

Mstyslav Chernov: Donetsk Airport siege, war that seems endless. We keep filming and things stay the same. Worse even, propaganda turns everything upside down.

Brooke Gladstone: That interlude offered some really essential context.

Mstyslav Chernov: It is coming after very hard moments, heartbreaking moments. I felt like we all needed time to reflect and prepare for what's coming next.

Brooke Gladstone: You've mentioned elsewhere that the footage was not taken to be a film. It was simply news dispatches.

Mstyslav Chernov: But further the siege went more we realized that we were the only ones who were sending anything from the city, any information, any footage. More I knew that I need to capture every minute. There are so many stories I was just told about or I got firsthand but was not able to film because I was hiding, I was afraid. That is a regret too, probably I just need to write those stories. I guess that's the only way to tell them.

Brooke Gladstone: You need to tell them all?

Mstyslav Chernov: They're so important somehow to be told. There's a story of a woman who is sitting in a corridor after we witness a birth of her child in the hospital, and before we find out that we are surrounded.

Brooke Gladstone: They aren't sure whether the child is alive and they keep smacking it and rubbing it, and then suddenly this triumphant.

Mstyslav Chernov: The doctors told me that birth is just like a ray of life from heaven for them. We walk back to the entrance of the hospital and I meet a woman who tells the story of her children that were killed by a shell in their basement. I have the footage of those children. It's not in a film. We thought it would be just too much, but later on we found her and we know that they buried their children in the yard of their house.

Then they left the city through the green corridor and they came back to rebury the children, and they didn't find them in a place where they were supposed to be. They went through these hundreds of bodies that were just piled up near the hospital to try to find the bodies of their children and they did just before they were dropped in the mass grave, to be lost forever, and they gave them a proper burial.

Brooke Gladstone: I'm wondering about the policeman who helped you for a while, Vladimir, who asked to make a statement in front of the camera.

Vladimir: Russian troops commit war crimes. Our family, our women, our children need helps. Our people needs help from international society. Please help Mariupol.

Brooke Gladstone: I think every war reporter, maybe every reporter faces this question eventually, and they have to find an answer. Do you really believe you can make a difference?

Mstyslav Chernov: I faced that question exactly in 2014 while filming the MH17, and I thought the war is going to stop when the world sees this footage. It of course didn't. It just got worse. I don't have a lot of illusions about direct power of journalism. We are soldiers, we can't change the course of events. All we can do is just keep telling everyone about them, but there is something that was done.

Some families found their loved ones because they saw them in the photos and in the videos, and they were able to locate them in a city and extract them and save their lives. Authorities have used what we filmed to negotiate the green corridor, which also saved lives. This is like immediate direct effect that we can do. Whether we have an impact in the long term, I don't know.

I guess we'll see much later when we look back, but again, even if it just remains in history, even if the film remains as an evidence of what happened in the first days of full scale invasion, that's already a lot because we judge the world around us by watching news and reading headlines and through our screens. We understand our past through cinema, through documentary films, feature films, books. That's where these films are important for generations that are to come.

Brooke Gladstone: What do you want viewers to take away from this?

Mstyslav Chernov: I definitely want viewers to take away hope, and they do.

Brooke Gladstone: Viewers take away hope from this film?

Mstyslav Chernov: Despite so much desperation, hope is coming through because people see how Ukrainians resist, how they survive. That desperation does not give us strength to keep going. Hope does.

Brooke Gladstone: What do you think is the most hopeful moment in your film?

Mstyslav Chernov: The birth of a child. After what we've seen, after all the children that have died, knowing that this is just a tiny fraction of what happened, seeing that a child was born and it's healthy, and now we know this child survived, that is the most crucial moment for me in the film and the most hopeful one.

Brooke Gladstone: Thank you so much.

Mstyslav Chernov: Thank to you.

Brooke Gladstone: Mstyslav Chernov is a journalist and director of the 2023 documentary, 20 Days in Mariupol. He's also a novelist. His latest is called The Dream Time. [piano]

Micah Loewinger: That's it for this week's show. On the Media is produced by Eloise Blondiau, Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark-Callender, and Candice Wang, with help from Shaan Merchant.

Brooke Gladstone: Our technical director is Jennifer Munson. Our engineers this week were Andrew Nerviano and Brendan Dalton. Katya Rogers is our executive producer. On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger.

 

Copyright © 2024 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.