|
Amid President Donald Trump's visit to the Middle East, we continue our interview with DAWN's Sarah Leah Whitson and _HuffPost_'s Akbar Shahid Ahmed about Trump's acceptance of a luxury plane gifted to him by the Qatari government, nuclear negotiations with Iran and Saudi Arabia, a less cooperative relationship with Israel and more.
|
|
(Third column, 8th story, link)
|
|
We look at President Donald Trump's diplomatic visit to the Middle East and discuss his administration's foreign policy in the region with Akbar Shahid Ahmed, senior diplomatic correspondent for HuffPost, and Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of DAWN. As Trump sells U.S. military power in the Gulf in exchange for investments in U.S. businesses, they warn that Trump's transactional business philosophy is spreading to the administration's dealings around the world. As Whitson puts it, "if you can pay, then you can play." This approach extends to the new Syrian government, as Trump pledges to lift sanctions on the country. However, explains Ahmed, while the thawing of relationships between the U.S. and Arab states has the added effect of divergence from tight-knit U.S.-Israel coordination, these changes can be attributed to Trump's "America First" agenda, rather than any concern for Palestinians, whom Trump is happy to allow Israel to "pummel."
|
|
We speak with 22-year-old Palestinian journalist Abubaker Abed in Ireland after he evacuated Gaza last month suffering from malnutrition and under threat for his reporting on Israel's genocide. Abed describes himself as an "accidental war correspondent" and hoped to become a sports journalist and commentator before the start of the war, but spent much of the last two years reporting on daily death and destruction. He says leaving Gaza was "a very agonizing decision" for him and that he feels tremendous guilt for now having access to food, water and medicine while so many Palestinians continue to suffer. "I can't really tell you that I'm safe here. I'm probably a physical survivor, but not an emotional survivor. The images that I took with me from Gaza are still haunting me," says Abed. "My whole family is still in Gaza, my friends, my colleagues. And all of them, I'm just thinking about them every single second all day."
|
|
We speak with journalist Mehdi Hasan of Zeteo News about the first 100 days of the second Trump administration, the ongoing Israeli war on Gaza, the suppression of pro-Palestine activism and more. Hasan is a former host for Al Jazeera and MSNBC who started his own news outlet last year. On _Zeteo_'s first anniversary, he describes his frustrations while working for mainstream outlets and says the U.S. media continues to ignore Palestinian voices in coverage about the Middle East.
"You are getting a very one-sided view of the conflict," Hasan says. "The real tragedy is that the media has been complicit in the Gaza genocide."
|
|
GOP senators mostly found creative ways to avoid criticizing the former president.
|
|
