The Times’ caution came at a turning point in US coverage of the war in Gaza. Some of the largest Western media outlets, many of which have tried for years to cover the war through a removed lens — and have been shut out from reporting independently in the territory by the Israeli military — now appear nearly singularly focused on the widespread hunger in the war-torn zone.

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In recent days, NBC News and CNN both ran stories with shocking visuals of malnourished children, along with numerous segments about the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza and Israel’s restriction of aid coming into the area. The New York Times columnist Ross Douthat shifted his stance to write of “how Israel’s war became unjust.” And center-left writer Matthew Yglesias posted that “Since the start of Donald Trump’s second term, Israel has pivoted tactics in Gaza in a direction that is provoking mass famine. These new tactics have prompted condemnation from people who had not condemned earlier tactics.” This was a shift from earlier in the war: A researcher at Syracuse found that in the first nine months of the war, CNN’s digital coverage was notably supportive of Israel. This week, a CNN producer described the situation as “absolutely catastrophic,” with “no access to food, clean water, or medical care” and “bombings [that] never stop.”

The alternative media spaces, intensely attuned to young audiences left and right who are increasingly hostile to Israel, have shifted more dramatically. Joe Rogan reportedly turned down an opportunity to have Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on his podcast, while podcast host Theo Von told Vice President JD Vance in June that he believes Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. Piers Morgan, now a YouTube sensation, moved from defending Israel to brutally grilling its diplomats, writing that they’d crossed a line.The Nelk Boys, a goofy, right-leaning Canadian YouTube outfit, embarked on a kind of apology tour after their own softball interview with Netanyahu: It was a moment they would “always regret,” one of the group’s founders, Kyle Forgeard, told the Egyptian comic Bassem Youssef, who they invited on the show to reprimand them after an enduring wave of backlash from their audience. The group should have pressed Netanyahu “100 times harder,” Forgeard said.

Even The Free Press, the most high-profile independent media outlet with a friendly attitude towards Israel, acknowledged the alarming food shortages in Gaza, referring to it in one piece as a “hunger crisis,” and acknowledging in another that many Palestinians had not eaten meals in days (which the publication blamed on Hamas, and, to a lesser degree, Israel).

This shift comes as the American public turns against the Israeli campaign, with just 32% backing the action in Gaza, a new low, according to Gallup.

And while the Times took heat over its update last week, the existence of a major New York Times story, with all its accompanying urgency, seemed to illustrate a shift in coverage away from a focus on conflict between two sides equally and towards one about the suffering of Palestinians.

Zeteo founder Mehdi Hasan said there had been a “clear tonal shift in media coverage and political reaction.” Ryan Grim, the editor of Drop Site News, a digital news outlet that has covered the war from a perspective critical of Israel, said he sensed a shift from the legacy and broadcast outlets that had often made painstaking attempts to weigh both the Israeli and Palestinian sides with equal measure.

“I think for the normal media they see that we are witnessing a crime of historic proportions and are beginning to ask how they will look in retrospect,” Grim said.

The popular, pro-Trump influencers known as the “Nelk Boys” got an earful from comedian Bassem Youssef during a recent discussion about the influencers’ softball interview with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

In recent months, the prime minister has sought to make inroads with right-wing podcasters to combat a growing bipartisan outrage in the U.S. toward his government’s stranglehold on Gaza, which has left 60,000 dead, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. One such effort, a recent softball interview with the Nelk influencers, drew criticism from across the political spectrum for having the appearance of blatant propaganda.

To give you a sense of how soft an interview it was, the chat at one point shifted to a discussion of Netanyahu’s preference for Burger King over McDonald’s, which interviewer Aaron Steinberg called the Israeli leader’s “worst take.” The podcasters also platformed Netanyahu’s claim that Hamas is stealing food aid, a claim that senior Israeli military officials have said is unsupported by evidence.

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After that interview, one member of the Nelk crew, Kyle Forgeard, said Netanyahu’s team “gave us a script to ask [questions] but we didn’t really follow it.” Then, during a subsequent podcast featuring Egyptian American comedian Bassem Youssef, who is a staunch critic of Israel, Forgeard expressed regret about the interview, saying that “we should have grilled [Netanyahu] 50,000, 100,000 times harder” and “it’s something we can’t get back.”

Youssef responded that the men (who are in their 30s despite the juvenile name) don’t deserve a pass for their ignorance and that they need to stop infantilizing themselves.

Youssef said:

I’m not absolving you from your trip. You guys are not little kids. You are f—ing 30 years old, right? People in your age have families and they have a career, and … you need to stop. I’m just saying this because you’re my little brothers, but you’re not little, right? You need to stop infantilizing yourselves, like, ‘We’re just stupid people doing stupid stuff.’ You’re 30 years old, and you need to be aware of what’s happening in the world, and that your reach and your platforms mean something and it affects people.

Youssef denounced what he called “a total lack of critical thinking” during the content creators’ exchanges with Netanyahu.

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Watch the clip here:

The lesson here about not becoming a dupe for authoritarian regimes is one that others in the pro-MAGA podcast ecosystem would do well to heed — assuming they want to influence public dialogue in a positive way (which is obviously a pretty big assumption). Between these MAGA podcasters regretting their pro-Netanyahu propaganda and other Trump-supporting podcasters — like Joe Rogan and Andrew Schulz expressing feelings of betrayal as Trump deals with the Epstein Files scandal — evidence abounds that the podcast community is little more than a credulous vector for manipulative rhetoric.

This article was originally published on MSNBC.com

NEW YORK — Queens Councilwoman Tiffany Caban and Queens Assemblywoman Claire Valdez were among dozens of protesters arrested Friday at a pro-Palestine demonstration at the Manhattan offices of New York Sens. Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand, according to city and police officials.

The demonstration, organized by the Jewish Voice for Peace organization, was held to protest Schumer and Gillibrand for recently voting against a measure that would halt U.S. arms shipments to Israel amid the war in Gaza. Their votes came as Israel — which is waging a war to eradicate Hamas in retaliation for the terrorist group’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack — has faced international condemnation for blocking critical aid like food and medicine from getting into Gaza, where the United Nations says starvation, especially among children, is becoming widespread.

Caban got her hands zip-tied before being escorted onto a decommissioned MTA bus with other protesters after refusing calls from NYPD officers to disperse from the lobby of the senators’ office building on Third Avenue, her spokeswoman, Arden Dressner Levy, confirmed.

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Levy said Caban, a democratic socialist who represents western Queens in the City Council, was taken into custody for “participating in civil disobedience” to demand that “Israel stop starving Gaza.”

“Israeli attacks in Gaza have created the highest rate of child amputees in the world. Israel is blocking food, medicine, and baby formula from entering Gaza. Israel is systematically destroying Palestinian life and society, and Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand are writing the checks,” Levy said. “Never again is now.”

Valdez, a fellow democratic socialist who also represents western Queens, was also put in zip ties after being arrested.

While being led onto the bus, Valdez told reporters the U.S. and Israel must stop “starving Gaza.”

“Any politician who’s not doing something about it is failing New Yorkers,” she said.

Spokespeople for Schumer and Gillibrand didn’t immediately return requests for comment.

_____

There is a famous scene in “Schindler’s List,” where Liam Neeson, playing Oskar Schindler, looks at his personal possessions and realizes that he could have saved more Jews from death. Schindler looks at his gold Nazi Party pin and laments he could have saved one more person if he had sold it off.

The Jews he did save, however, quote from the Talmud, telling him, “He who saves one life, saves the world entire.”

Countless books, movies, tv shows, plays, documentaries, museums exhibits, speeches and more have been dedicated to teaching Americans about the Holocaust and how to identify the warning signs so that it can never happen again. So it is perplexing and angering to many Americans that they should see the treatment of Palestinians in Gaza and be told that this doesn’t qualify as a genocide.

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The New York Times ran a column by Bret Stephens in which he argued that it is not a genocide, on the grounds that a genocide would be “more methodical and vastly more deadly.” But the idea that a genocide can only qualify as a genocide if it mirrors the horror of the Holocaust goes against the very teachings that countless survivors, professors, scholars and artists have warned us about. Martin Niemöller’s poem “First They Came” was an explicit warning that you cannot wait to hit some magic number before a mass killing becomes a genocide.

The Rohingya genocide has resulted in 43,000 deaths at most, and yet we have no problem calling it a genocide. The same goes for the Yazidis, Bosnians and other victims of death campaigns over the years. It’s a bizarre argument for the Israelis and their supporters to make, that the killing of Palestinians is not genocide just because it could be so much worse.

Even stranger is the notion that genocides have to be “methodical.” Yes, the Holocaust showed a new level of human hatred when the Nazis turned executions into an organized process like something one might see in a factory. But as we saw in Rwanda, that is not always the case. The same can be said for the Armenian genocide, where forced deportations included death marches and mass starvation in addition to mass executions.

And speaking of mass starvation, we turn to Gaza. After the horrific Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, Israel did kill thousands of civilians (mostly women and children) via bombings while claiming it was fighting the terrorist group. This was an already weak argument, because many other countries have fought terror groups and insurgencies over the last two decades while going out of the way to minimize civilian deaths (or at least trying to). Today, even Israeli organizations are accusing their government of making little effort to differentiate between civilians and terrorists and allowing the civilian population to be starved to fight terrorism.

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In the history of the world, sieges have been used to break people’s will. But in the modern era, one has to question the morality, let alone the effectiveness, of starvation as a tool of war. Even now, historians are even looking back to reevaluate man-made famines or forced starvations to see if they qualify as genocides.

During the Siege of Leningrad, the Germans used mass starvation as a weapon to force the capitulation. One million Russians were said to have starved to death during that siege. The Holodomor famine in Ukraine is labeled a genocide because it was man-made, by the Soviet regime, used in part as a weapon to weaken Ukrainian independence movements. One can even make an argument that the British mass-export of foods away from indigenous people, as in the Irish famine and Bengal famines, qualifies as genocide.

The Israelis have every justification to fight a war against Hamas. The organization has always governed Gaza in bad faith, and the people who suffered the most were the people who voted them in during the 2000s, thinking that it would help them.

But Israel’s argument that as a consequence anything goes — that withholding food and medicine from Gaza and shooting at people who try to get food somehow hurts Hamas — is ludicrous.

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It is even more insane to insinuate that those who are looking to end the suffering of civilians are Hamas supporters. Is Mandy Patinkin a Hamas supporter because he has spoken out against Israel’s actions?

Hamas, a terrorist organization, will be a threat as long as it has a supply of weapons and the illusion of political power. A great way to undermine them would be to provide Palestinians with the security, prosperity and peace Hamas has failed to deliver. Families in Gaza don’t care about politics — they care about keeping their children alive.

It’s these pictures of starving children that Israel can’t argue with. The control of access points and reported massacres of civilians at food stations fall in line with many of the genocides mentioned above. We can argue about one-state versus two-state solutions all day. We can argue the best way to combat Hamas and eradicate its power. We can easily agree that Israel has every right to defend itself. But, because most Americans received the education we did about the Holocaust from survivors, teachers, artists and academics, we can also argue that what’s happening in Gaza qualifies as a genocide against the Palestinians.

We were taught “Never Again” to make sure it never happens again. That’s why millions of Americans, from all backgrounds, have accused Israel of genocide.

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Jos Joseph is a Marine veteran who served in Iraq and a graduate of the Harvard Extension School and Ohio State University. He currently lives in Anaheim, Calif.

Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill.

US President Donald Trump ordered the deployment of two nuclear submarines Friday in an extraordinary escalation of what had been an online war of words with a Russian official over Ukraine and tariffs.

Trump and Dmitry Medvedev, the deputy chairman of Russia’s security council, have been sparring on social media for days.

Trump’s post on his Truth Social platform abruptly took that spat into the very real — and rarely publicized — sphere of nuclear forces.

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“Based on the highly provocative statements,” Trump said he had “ordered two Nuclear Submarines to be positioned in the appropriate regions, just in case these foolish and inflammatory statements are more than just that.”

“Words are very important, and can often lead to unintended consequences, I hope this will not be one of those instances,” the 79-year-old Republican posted.

Trump did not say in his post whether he meant nuclear-powered or nuclear-armed submarines. He also did not elaborate on the exact deployment locations, which are kept secret by the US military.

But in an interview with Newsmax that aired Friday night, Trump said the submarines were “closer to Russia.”

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“We always want to be ready. And so I have sent to the region two nuclear submarines,” he said.

“I just want to make sure that his words are only words and nothing more than that.”

Trump’s remarks came hours after Russian President Vladimir Putin said Moscow had started mass producing its hypersonic nuclear-capable Oreshnik missile, and could deploy them to Belarus, a close Russian ally neighbouring Ukraine, by year-end.

The nuclear sabre-rattling came against the backdrop of a deadline set by Trump for the end of next week for Russia to take steps to ending the Ukraine war or face unspecified new sanctions.

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Despite the pressure from Washington, Russia’s onslaught against its pro-Western neighbor continues to unfold at full bore.

An AFP analysis Friday showed that Russian forces had launched a record number of drones at Ukraine in July.

Russian attacks have killed hundreds of Ukrainian civilians since June. A combined missile and drone attack on the Ukrainian capital Kyiv early Thursday killed 31 people, rescuers said.

Putin, who has consistently rejected calls for a ceasefire, said Friday that he wants peace but that his demands for ending his nearly three-and-a-half year invasion were “unchanged”.

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Those demands include that Ukraine abandon territory and end ambitions to join NATO.

Putin, speaking alongside Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, said Belarusian and Russian specialists “have chosen a place for future positions” of the Oreshnik missiles.

“Work is now underway to prepare these positions. So, most likely, we will close this issue by the end of the year,” he added.

– Insults, nuclear rhetoric –

The United States and Russia control the vast majority of the world’s nuclear weaponry, and Washington keeps nuclear-armed submarines on permanent patrol as part of its so-called nuclear triad of land, sea and air-launched weapons.

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Trump told Newsmax that Medvedev’s “nuclear” reference prompted him to reposition US nuclear submarines.

“When you mention the word ‘nuclear’… my eyes light up. And I say, we better be careful, because it’s the ultimate threat,” Trump said in the interview.

Medvedev had criticised Trump on his Telegram account Thursday and alluded to the “fabled ‘Dead Hand'” — a reference to a highly secret automated system put in place during the Cold War to control the country’s nuclear weapons.

This came after Trump had lashed out at what he called the “dead economies” of Russia and India.

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Medvedev had also harshly criticized Trump’s threat of new sanctions against Russia over its war in Ukraine.

Accusing Trump of “playing the ultimatum game,” he posted Monday on X that Trump “should remember” that Russia is a formidable force.

Trump responded by calling Medvedev “the failed former President of Russia, who thinks he’s still President.”

Medvedev should “watch his words,” Trump posted at midnight in Washington on Wednesday. “He’s entering very dangerous territory!”

Medvedev is a vocal proponent of Russia’s war — and generally antagonistic to relations with the West.

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He served as president between 2008-2012, effectively acting as a placeholder for Putin, who was able to circumvent constitutional term limits and remain in de facto power.

The one-time reformer has rebranded over the years as an avid online troller, touting often extreme versions of official Kremlin nationalist messaging.

But his influence within the Russian political system remains limited.

In Kyiv on Friday, residents held a day of mourning for the 31 people, including five children, killed the day before, most of whom were in a nine-storey apartment block torn open by a missile.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said only Putin could end the war and renewed his call for a meeting between the two leaders.

“The United States has proposed this. Ukraine has supported it. What is needed is Russia’s readiness,” he wrote on X.

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