Do you want to know what total impunity actually looks like? Look at Israel. It got away with a genocide in Gaza, and now it’s unleashing a similar genocidal campaign against Shia communities in southern Lebanon.

Right now, hundreds of thousands of Shia civilians are being displaced, bombed, and forced to flee. Their villages are emptied. Their homes are reduced to rubble. And Israel’s defense minister says they cannot return.

Where is the anger in the West, or in the Global South, or even in the Muslim world? Where are the emergency summits, the outraged headlines, the moral indignation that we saw when, for example, ISIS was carrying out a genocide against the Yazidis in Iraq and Syria?

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Think I’m being hyperbolic? First, consider the relevant sections of the 1948 Genocide Convention, which defines genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part” a “religious group,” including “killing members of the group” and “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”

Next, consider the recent reporting from both the New York Times and Drop Site News, which reveal how Israeli forces have issued evacuation orders across large swaths of southern Lebanon, explicitly targeting Shia communities who make up the majority of the local population.

Wouldn’t this be labeled “ethnic cleansing” if it were any other part of the world? Here is an entire population, an entire religious group, being targeted, displaced, and massacred simply because of who they are and where they live. The current Israeli approach to the Shias of southern Lebanon is collective, indiscriminate, and chillingly familiar: a community of innocents conflated with a security threat. “Every home in southern Lebanon, the Shia homes, are command and control centers,” an Israeli military spokesman told LBC radio in the UK last month, without offering a shred of evidence.

But it gets even worse.

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Here at Zeteo, we thought we could perhaps get through one work week without Donald Trump’s White House – once again! – calling me a “moron” for publicly stating objectively true things.

We were wrong. What was my crime this time?

On Thursday, Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, took to social media to claim that “Americans Agree that Operation Epic Fury Is an Overwhelming Success” – meaning the president’s disastrous war in Iran.

I pointed out that the senior Trump apparatchik was lying, and had in fact shared “an article showing only MAGA Republicans support the war.”

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In response to this, “@RapidResponse47,” a Trump White House propaganda account on Twitter blasted me as a “moron” and suggested I was “trembling too much at the idea that Americans support killing terrorists.”

Of course, that’s not what’s happening – civilians are suffering as a result of Trump’s regional bloodbath, and poll after poll shows this war is uniquely unpopular at home.

And the White House made clear how unpopular the war is with its own press release. In it, the administration pointed people to a relatively rosy Washington Post article that still notes more people “would prefer that the strikes stop than continue,” and that the paper’s average of recent polls show “Americans opposing US strikes 50% to 38%.”

Not exactly a ringing endorsement!

The Iran war – started by Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – is now entering its fourth week. It has been an unmitigated disaster from the beginning, and it’s strangling the global economy. The president appears to be preparing to deploy US ground troops to Iran, for a mission that looks like sheer suicide.

As we’ve reported at Zeteo, the war is starting to tear apart the MAGA elite, and is already a political catastrophe at home for Trump and the Republican Party – and they know it. And America’s allies have decided not to join us on this so-called “excursion.”

The president and his party want to silence anyone in the media willing to admit what a colossal shitshow this all is. We refuse to be silent.

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In recent months, the Trump White House has called Zeteo “a fake news blogsite run by left-wing hacks that no one should take seriously.”

The White House issued a statement calling one of our political correspondents “a deranged hack who couldn’t even hold a job at Rolling Stone and is now writing for a Greta Thunberg blog.”

And the Trump administration routinely comes after me, and tries to smear me as a terrorist-loving “moron.”

Clearly, Zeteo is getting under their skin.

But the only way we can fight back is together.

So if you’re able, please consider becoming a paid subscriber to Zeteo today to support us and help grow independent media. If you’re already a paid subscriber (thank you kindly!), you can also consider making a donation to Zeteo.

Every paid subscription, every donation, every financial contribution, big or small, sends a message to this authoritarian, warmongering administration and this country’s ruling party and its enablers that we won’t be bullied, we won’t be silenced, and we won’t stop telling the truth about fascism, genocide, illegal wars, and other moral and literal atrocities.

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The Trump administration wants to wear out everyone – in the media, in the opposition, in the electorate. They aren’t getting tired yet. Neither are we.

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My crime? Daring to point out that Donald Trump’s claim to reporters that Iranians are not only “among the most evil people ever on Earth” but that they also “cut babies’ heads off” is flatly false.

First, zero Iranians participated in the Oct. 7 attacks in Israel, and while Iran does have a history of supporting Hamas, there is no credible evidence – as even then-US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken conceded in 2023 – that the Iranian government was involved in those attacks. In fact, the US intelligence community believes Iran’s leaders “were surprised by the Hamas attack.”

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Second, no babies had their heads cut off on Oct. 7 – by Iranians, Palestinians, or anyone else. The macabre claim that Israeli babies were beheaded has been repeatedly investigated and debunked by everyone from Le Monde to Haaretz to CNN. It’s pure atrocity propaganda, originally used to justify mass slaughter in Gaza and now being bizarrely deployed to defend similar killings in Iran.

Trump isn’t the first US president to push the ‘beheaded babies’ hoax - Joe Biden falsely claimed to have seen pictures of the (fictitious) decapitated Israeli infants. But Trump is the first president to illegally attack Iran. And he is also the first president to viciously lambast and threaten the media for daring to ask questions of the people in power.

Right now, Trump and his cronies won’t stop attacking my colleagues and me as the conflict in the Middle East escalates.

Why?

They want silence.

They want fear.

They want journalists and media outlets who fall in line.

I’m not one of them. Zeteo isn’t one of them.

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If you’ve followed my work over the years, you know I’ve never been afraid to speak truth to power – whether it’s presidents, prime ministers, or billionaires.

But here’s the reality: when powerful people come after me, it’s not really about me.

It’s about intimidating anyone in the media who dares to challenge their lies and gaslighting.

And the only way we fight back is together.

So if you’re able, please do consider becoming a paid subscriber to Zeteo today to support us and help grow independent media.

If you’re already a paid subscriber (thank you!), you can also consider making a donation to Zeteo.

Donate to Zeteo

Every paid subscription, every donation, every financial contribution, big or small, sends a message to this authoritarian, warmongering administration that we won’t be bullied, we won’t be silenced, and we won’t stop telling the truth about fascism, genocide, and illegal wars.

Thank you for standing with Zeteo.

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Tucker Carlson’s interview with US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee has gone viral, with 2.5 million views on Twitter and almost 3 million views on YouTube.

It has also provoked a major global diplomatic incident, with more than a dozen Muslim-majority countries issuing a joint statement describing Huckabee’s comments defending Israel’s “biblical right” to take over the Middle East as “dangerous and inflammatory.”

Carlson’s tough questioning of Huckabee was a massive indictment of our mainstream media. Why can’t Sunday show interviewers ask follow-up questions when US officials make fantastical claims on behalf of Israel, in the way that Carlson did? Why can’t nightly news anchors ask pro-Israel officials to justify Zionist claims to the land of Palestine, in the way that Carlson did?

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Nevertheless, over the course of the two-and-a-half-hour interview in Israel, Huckabee made multiple false claims that even Carlson failed to challenge or rebut. Sounding more like Israel’s ambassador to America than America’s ambassador to Israel, Huckabee produced fake statistics and bogus timelines while misrepresenting his own record.

So here are the top 11 lies that Huckabee told Carlson, debunked by yours truly:

1.

TUCKER CARLSON: “Jonathan Pollard. I’m just going to show the name to you and have you explain.”

MIKE HUCKABEE: “I’m glad you asked. Interestingly, there’s been a lot of things about it. You’re the first person who has asked me about it, which I find amazing. So I’m glad you did.”

TUCKER CARLSON: “Really?”

MIKE HUCKABEE: “Yeah. The very first person.”

A brazen, easily debunked lie from Huckabee, within moments of the interview beginning. As journalist Yashar Ali noted, Israeli reporter Neria Kraus had already confronted Huckabee in January over his controversial meeting with Jonathan Pollard – the former US intelligence analyst convicted of spying for Israel. That was just weeks ago. And what did Huckabee do then? Exactly what he did with Carlson: attack the New York Times for reporting on it, dodge the question, and change the subject.

2.

“They were attacked again in 1956. They won the war. They were attacked again in 1967 by five countries.”

In 1956, the Suez crisis was the result of a British-French-Israeli invasion of Egypt. The war began on Oct. 29 when the Israeli Air Force launched a series of attacks on Egyptian positions across the Sinai – and not vice versa.

In 1967, the Six-Day War began on June 5 with the Israeli Air Force mounting a surprise attack on Egypt’s airfields – and not vice versa. The Israelis claimed it was a preemptive war to prevent an impending invasion by Egypt. Yet, in 1982, in a speech to the National Defense College, Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin admitted: “In June 1967, we again had a choice. The Egyptian army concentrations in the Sinai approaches did not prove that [President Gamal Abdel] Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him.”

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3.

“It was a declaration – an assumption and a declaration that was done by Lord Balfour in Great Britain. At that time, this land was under the British Mandate. And he said the Jews should have the land that was theirs from 3,800 years ago.”

The Balfour Declaration was issued by Lord Balfour, the then British foreign secretary and a card-carrying antisemite, in November 1917. The British Mandate, or administration of the territories of Palestine and Transjordan, did not begin until the San Remo conference in April 1920, after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in World War I. When Lord Balfour issued his declaration, Palestine was still part of the Ottoman Empire.

It is also worth noting here that the Balfour Declaration did indeed call for a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine, but also added that “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.”

4.

TUCKER CARLSON: “There are many more Christians in Qatar than there are in Israel.”

MIKE HUCKABEE: “That’s not true.”

It is true. There are almost double the number of Christians in Qatar (about 340,000 in 2020) as there are in Israel (about 182,000 in 2022).

5.

“Well, the only numbers we have come from this dubious entity called the Gaza Health Ministry. You know who that is? It’s Hamas.”

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Dear LeBron,

You have built a reputation, perhaps even a brand, on the idea that silence is complicity.

You made that clear in 2017 when you loudly condemned far-right violence in Charlottesville and dismissed Donald Trump as “the so-called president.” You made that clear in 2020 when you boldly wore your support for Black Lives Matter on your chest, as you took the knee with your teammates. You made that clear in 2022 when you passionately denounced the overturning of Roe v. Wade and said it was all about “power and control.”

You were right. Silence is complicity.

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So where has your voice been for the past two and a half years as tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza have been bombed, shot, and starved to death? As parents dug their children’s bodies out of the rubble with their bare hands? As doctors operated without anesthesia inside besieged hospitals?

Why have we heard nothing from you?

In fact, worse than nothing. This past weekend, we heard praise from you for the very same country that has been doing the mass killing and starving in Gaza. “Hopefully someday I can make it over there,” you said, referring to the state of Israel. “Like I said, I’ve never been over there, but I’ve heard nothing but great things.”

“Nothing but great things”... about Israel? Seriously?

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Quiz question: Which member of the Trump Cabinet has executed the most shameless series of political contortions – morphing from Trump critic to Trump sycophant – in a desperate bid to stay on the president’s good side?

Is it Vice President JD Vance, who once called Trump “America’s Hitler”? Is it Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who also compared Trump to Hitler and compared MAGA voters to the Nazis? Is it Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who described Trump as a “con artist” and mocked the size of his manhood?

My view? It’s Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s director of national intelligence (DNI).

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On Jan. 6, 2021, after an armed mob of Trump supporters attacked the Capitol and tried to prevent the peaceful transfer of power, Gabbard took to Twitter. The four-term Democratic congresswoman had officially retired from Congress three days earlier, but she wasn’t willing to turn a blind eye to the violent insurrection that had just occurred at her former workplace.

“Those who stormed the US Capitol today are criminals who must be condemned and denounced,” she tweeted. “They are not patriots,” she continued, before adding: “Nor are those who encouraged them.”

A few weeks later, she again denounced the “mob who stormed the capitol to try to stop Congress from carrying out its constitutional responsibilities” and called them “domestic enemies of our country.”

Got that? Gabbard was opposed not just to Jan. 6 insurrectionists but to those who “encouraged them” (Donald Trump!) and to their stated goal of preventing Congress “from carrying out its constitutional responsibilities.” Gabbard, who had publicly congratulated Joe Biden on his victory two months earlier, seemed to have no time for Trump’s election lies or MAGA’s conspiracy theories.

Fast forward to last week, and to Fulton County, Georgia. FBI agents searched the main election office there, seizing records and documents related to the 2020 election. And who should pop up in the background, in a baseball cap? Yes, Tulsi Gabbard.

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Tom Llamas – who replaced Lester Holt as anchor and managing editor of ‘NBC Nightly News’ less than a year ago – went to the White House for what NBC billed as an “extended interview” with President Trump ahead of Sunday’s Super Bowl.

It lasted 49 minutes.

And yes, once again, I watched every excruciating second so you don’t have to. (NBC also posted a full transcript online, in case you want to witness what a journalistic surrender looks like in print.)

I’ll be honest: I’m not sure what required more discipline – sitting through Trump’s typical torrent of lies and nonsense, or watching Llamas repeatedly let him get away with it. By the end, I couldn’t even tell who I was angrier at: the serial liar in the Oval Office, or the professional journalist sitting opposite him, nodding along as if “truth” is something subjective, or worse, partisan.

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The most damning part of the interview, however, wasn’t what Trump said. It was what Llamas never asked.

Because somehow – somehow – NBC News managed to air a 49-minute sit-down with the president of the United States and didn’t ask him a single question about the biggest story in the country right now: the latest Epstein files dump.

Not. A. Single. One.

I couldn’t quite believe it when I watched it. I had to go and check the NBC transcript. The New York Times found that Trump, his wife, and his property are mentioned more than 38,000 times across 5,300 of the DOJ Epstein files. So how does a top TV journalist sit down with the president for almost an hour and not ask him about any of that? Not ask him, for example, about the document in the files that includes sworn testimony, under penalty of perjury, from someone who alleged that Trump threatened to kill her if she exposed Epstein’s sexual abuse? Not ask him about his well-documented and close friendship with the most notorious child sex trafficker in American history?

To be clear: there was a single moment towards the end of the interview in which Llamas did mention the word “Epstein,” but Trump immediately interrupted him, talked over him, and changed the subject to the Clintons, after which Llamas… just moved on.

TOM LLAMAS: The Epstein —

DONALD TRUMP: — the Epstein thing, which turned out that I have nothing to do – and they did – about Epstein. And they said, “Do you think it’s terrible what” – you know, with the subpoenas and everything and they’re disobeying the subpoenas. And I actually said it’s a shame. You have an ex-president and you have, you know, the president’s wife and secretary of state. And I said it’s a shame. It is a shame.

Then there were the softball questions. With Trump, they’re the journalistic equivalent of gifting an arsonist a box of matches and asking him for his “thoughts” on fire safety. As I’ve argued before, far too many anchors and reporters interviewing this president seem incapable of resisting what I call the “opinion question”: soliciting Trump’s take on the news of the day, as if he were just another cable pundit and not the most powerful man on Earth – a man whose record demands scrutiny and challenge, not deference and chumminess.

Consider this sample of actual Llamas questions to Trump:

• “Mr. President, speaking of Minneapolis, what did you learn?

• “You said ICE made some mistakes. What – what were the mistakes?”

• “What should Americans expect going forward?”

• “Which cities are you headed to next?”

• “Most Americans say they don’t like how you’ve handled immigration… How do you change their minds?”

• “What’s your response to [Joe Rogan]?”

• “Have you ever used ChatGPT?”

• “Will you endorse in the 2028 presidential primary?

There were hardly any challenging questions at all. Zero follow-ups that put Trump on the defensive or caught him off guard. The proverbial Martian landing on Earth and watching this entire 49-minute interview would have no idea that this president is a serial liar, in the midst of multiple controversies and scandals, and has spent recent weeks hurling vicious racial abuse at non-white Americans and posting deranged conspiracy theories online in the middle of the night. On Wednesday evening, a deeply abnormal president was, once again, normalized by our mainstream and supposedly “liberal” media.

NBC News later produced an online “fact-check” of the interview, highlighting and debunking what the authors of that fact-check described as Trump’s “false, exaggerated or misleading claims” to Llamas.

But, I’m sorry, what is the point of producing a separate fact-check after the interview is over? Why not fact-check him in real time? Why not have an anchor who is equipped with the facts and willing to tell Trump to his face, during the interview itself, that he is making false, exaggerated, or misleading claims? Why do it in an online article afterwards that will likely get 1% of the audience of the televised ‘Nightly News’ interview, and which won’t affect Donald Trump in any way whatsoever?

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As CNN’s in-house fact-checker Daniel Dale has pointed out, it isn’t actually that hard to fact-check Trump in real time. Why? Because he tells the same lies, again and again, from one interview to another. So Llamas should have been ready for these particular gems from the president:

• “I inherited the worst inflation in the history of our country.” (FALSE!)

• “We have 11,888 murderers that [Joe] Biden and his group led into our country.” (FALSE!)

• “They allowed to come into our country people from their mental institutions, people from insane asylums.” (FALSE!)

• “I won three times.” (FALSE!)

And yet, as CNN’s Dale also observed in his own fact-check of the NBC interview: “Over and over, when the president repeated lies that were debunked months or years ago, Llamas responded simply ‘right’ or ‘yeah’ – or didn’t acknowledge them at all.” (Llamas said “right” more than 30 times and “yeah” more than 130 times, over the course of the interview.)

At one point, Trump falsely claimed that “very few” prices had not fallen over the course of his second term, and Llamas… agreed with his false claim. “Yeah, very few, I get it.”

At another point, Trump brazenly denied that he said he wanted to “nationalize” our elections, when we all heard him say it, but Llamas didn’t push back at all.

It gets worse. Once the sit-down part of the interview was done, Trump and Llamas did a tour of the Oval Office while the NBC anchor delivered this zinger: “Do you think at one point people will talk about you when they talk about presidents like Washington and Lincoln? Is that something you think is gonna happen?”

To call this a journalistic dereliction of duty is an understatement of epic proportions. If you get the opportunity to interview the president and you can’t ask about Jeffrey Epstein but can ask about ChatGPT, then you have failed at your job. You can’t claim to be holding power accountable if you won’t even ask the obvious question everyone at home is already asking.

But this isn’t just about NBC’s Tom Llamas. Or CBS’s Norah O’Donnell, who also did a truly awful job interviewing Trump in November 2025. Or former ABC correspondent Terry Moran, who told the president they could “agree to disagree” about a clearly doctored image Trump was holding up during a White House interview in April 2025.

This is about our mainstream media as a whole protecting access, rather than practicing journalism. This is about TV networks mistaking “we got the interview” for “we did the journalism.” Above all else, this is about a free press that is directly threatened by the president of the United States but doesn’t dare call him out to his face. They don’t want to risk losing the next booking, the next scoop, the next “exclusive.”

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Less than three minutes into my November 2023 interview with Mark Regev, then spokesman for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, on MSNBC’s Peacock streaming service, he became agitated and began interrupting me.

“The ‘Hamas-controlled’ Ministry of Health,” he interjected, after I cited figures from the Gaza Health Ministry on the number of Palestinians killed since Oct 7. “No, you can’t say that. You have to say the ‘Hamas-controlled’ Health Ministry… Please, tell the viewers the truth. That information is provided by Hamas.”

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Every time I tried to mention that 11,000 Palestinians had been killed in Gaza according to the Ministry of Health, Regev shouted back: “Hamas’s numbers! Hamas’s numbers!”

At one point, I noted how in two previous Israeli attacks on Gaza, in 2009 and 2014, “the Israeli military’s death tolls matched Hamas’s Health Ministry death toll, and the UN, human rights groups, all agree that those numbers are credible.”

“Those numbers are provided by Hamas,” the dead-eyed Regev replied. “There is no independent verification.”

That interview happened to be the first time I came up against this particular Israeli defense of their mass slaughter in Gaza: You can’t trust the Ministry of Health’s casualty figures because it is Hamas-controlled… it is Hamas-run… it is Hamas!

Nor, of course, would it be the last. Over the course of this genocide, I have debated supporters of Israel on cable news, on YouTube, on social media, and at live events. Former Israeli government spokesman Eylon Levy. Ex-Israeli military spokesman Jonathan Conricus. Retired US Army Major John Spencer. Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz.

Each and every one of them has pushed this line about the ‘Hamas-run’ Health Ministry in Gaza being unreliable, untrustworthy, unbelievable. Each and every one of them questioned, doubted, even dismissed the number of dead confirmed by the Health Ministry.

It was all a lie. A performance. Propaganda, plain and simple.

We now know that the casualty figures from the Gaza Ministry of Health are not just reliable, credible, and accurate – but that even the Israeli military agrees that they are.

Don’t take my word for it. Earlier this week, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported:

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Mehdi tries to thread the needle in his monologue, above.

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There was a time when Donald Trump believed the issue of Israel and Palestine could only be solved by Jared Kushner. “If you can’t produce peace in the Middle East, nobody can,” he told his son-in-law on the eve of his first-term inauguration in 2017, before bizarrely appointing the then-36-year-old property developer to lead on the issue.

Now, a year into his second term, Trump is pinning his hopes for peace in the Middle East on a much more experienced but even more controversial figure: 72-year-old Tony Blair.

Yes, that Tony Blair.

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From the BBC on Friday:

“The Trump administration has named US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and former UK prime minister Sir Tony Blair as two of the founding members of its ‘Board of Peace’ for Gaza.

Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff and the president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner will also sit on the ‘founding executive board,’ the White House said in a statement on Friday.

Trump will act as chairman of the board, which forms part of his 20-point plan to end the war between Israel and Hamas.”

Sorry, what? Putting Tony Blair in charge of any kind of peace effort in the Middle East is like making the arsonist the head firefighter; the burglar the chief detective.

This is the man who allied with George W. Bush to illegally invade and occupy Iraq – a war that led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Arabs, ripped an entire Middle Eastern country apart, and unleashed extremism and terrorism across the region. Remember: Blair didn’t just support Bush’s invasion back in 2002 and 2003. He was its chief promoter outside of the United States, enthusiastically peddling lies about weapons of mass destruction while cynically ignoring mass protests on the streets of the UK. He has never apologized for Iraq.

Then there is Blair’s record on Israel and Palestine itself, which should also disqualify him from this so-called “Board of Peace.” As the envoy to the Middle East for the so-called “Quartet,” a group comprising the US, the UN, the EU, and Russia, between 2007 and 2015, the former British prime minister achieved… basically nothing. Zero. Zilch. Nada. Palestinian officials called him “useless, useless, useless.” Even friendly Western diplomats concluded he was “ineffective” in the job and had “no credibility in this part of the world.”

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By the time he quit his Quartet role, the Israeli settler population in the Occupied Palestinian Territories had increased by more than 100,000. Blair’s bank balance increased too, with the former PM rather conveniently launching a consulting career at the same time as he became envoy to the Middle East. The Financial Times reported in 2015 that his “corporate roster has included PetroSaudi, an oil company with links to the Saudi royal family, JPMorgan and Mubadala, an Abu Dhabi wealth fund.”

Blair spent his time as Quartet envoy not just cashing checks from authoritarian regimes in the region, but pushing pro-Israel talking points. “When it comes to security, I am 100% on Israel’s side,” he said in 2010. He even gave a eulogy at former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s funeral in 2014. And, in terms of actual negotiations, as senior Palestinian official Nabil Shaath said when he resigned in 2015, Blair “never proposed anything that the Israelis didn’t agree to.”

Last year, even the Washington Post noted Blair’s “warm” relations with Benjamin Netanyahu and quoted an Israeli official as saying: “The Israelis really like Tony Blair.”

So this is the man whom Palestinians should now trust to oversee the rebuilding of Gaza? As well as their own eventual liberation from Israeli occupation? Really?

Blair’s record on the Middle East is one of repeated failures, brazen bias, and mass slaughter. Why on Earth should the bombed and besieged Palestinians of Gaza have their fate decided by a man already drenched in Arab blood?

Blair’s arrogance, hawkishness, and deference to Israel also symbolize everything that is wrong with the West’s approach to the Middle East. Whether it was Arthur Balfour’s support for Zionism in 1917, or Tony Blair’s support for genocide in 2025, the truth is we need less British colonialism and more Palestinian self-determination. Handing Gaza over to a board of new Western viceroys, including Blair of all people, would be yet another provocative chapter in the long book of injustices imposed on the Palestinian people.

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The international community should be holding Blair to account for one of the worst crimes of the 21st century – the illegal and catastrophic attack on Iraq – not gifting him with another high-profile gig in the Middle East. The former British prime minister should be headed to The Hague, not Gaza.

The people of that blockaded strip have endured two years of genocide, famine, and ethnic cleansing. Their suffering continues, day after day, massacre after massacre.

You think they want Tony Blair to save them? No, they want their freedom.

DON’T MISS IT:

Join Mehdi, Swin, Ro Khanna, Joy Reid, Jim Acosta, Sarah Matthews, and Miles Taylor for a special LIVE in-person event on Trump, ICE, Venezuela, Iran, Israel, and more, on Tuesday, Jan. 20 at the Howard Theatre in Washington, DC.

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To understand why Donald Trump just (illegally) attacked Venezuela and kidnapped the country’s president and his wife, you only need to look at this chart, which is based on OPEC numbers.

Trump didn’t attack Venezuela because it produces fentanyl. It doesn’t. He didn’t attack Venezuela because President Nicolás Maduro controls the Tren de Aragua gang. He doesn’t. He didn’t attack Venezuela because Maduro is the head of the Cartel de los Soles. It doesn’t even exist.

It’s about the oil, stupid!

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Don’t believe me? Think it sounds a little conspiratorial?

Well, here’s the thing: Donald Trump, the self-declared ‘peace president,’ the serial liar, also likes to say the quiet part out loud from time to time.

In 2003, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney at least pretended their illegal invasion of Iraq and toppling of Saddam Hussein wasn’t about Iraq’s oil. It was about democracy! WMDs! Al-Qaeda!

Donald Trump, weirdly, shamelessly, and luckily for us, has been brutally honest on the subject of Venezuela and his motivation for regime change in Caracas.

Here he is in his own words.

1. “Return the oil”

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It has been more than 10 years since Donald J. Trump came down his golden escalator in New York to become the most consequential national political figure of our lifetimes, and yet, 10 months into his second term as president, our mainstream media still has no clue about how to interview him.

Frustratingly, over the past decade, there has been a litany of televised embarrassments and car crashes involving prominent journalists and this particular president. With the exception of Jonathan Swan’s award-winning Axios interview with Trump during the pandemic, it is difficult to think of a single on-camera sitdown in which Trump was truly discomfited by probing questions, tough follow-ups, or forensic factchecks.

On Monday, Politico added its own offering to the mix, trumpeting a “wide-ranging” 45-minute interview with the president in the White House conducted by the outlet’s White House bureau chief Dasha Burns. This is the same Burns whom Trump berated on Air Force One just a few weeks ago while calling Politico “fake news.”

So what was Trump doing sitting down with her? “I mean, I’m doing this because you picked me as the man for Europe,” the president acknowledged to Burns midway through their conversation. Yes, Politico FIFA-ed Trump into giving them an interview.

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Having flattered Trump into an interview, Politico then flattered him with a series of softball questions. “Is it time for Ukraine to hold an election?” “Is there anyone else in the GOP that can energize the coalition the way you did?” Or my favorite: “I wonder, sir, what grade would you give your economy right now?” You’ll never guess what grade Trump gave to himself.

During the so-called interview, the president went on a racist rant against the Muslim mayor of London, and Burns said… nothing. He went on a racist rant against Somali-Americans in Minnesota, ending his tirade: “The Democrats are running some bad ships.” Burns’s response? “Speaking of ships, I do want to talk about boat strikes.” (I. AM. NOT. MAKING. THIS. UP.)

Trump, the biggest fabulist in modern American history, lied and lied and lied, with no pushback whatsoever from Burns. And, remember, Trump’s lies are repeat lies: he tells them again and again, from interview to interview, from stump speech to stump speech. Anyone planning an interview with the president should obviously be ready for “rigged election” and “I settled eight wars” and immigrants coming from “mental institutions.”

Here are 15 brazen lies that Donald Trump told during his 45-minute interview with Politico – the equivalent of one every three minutes. Yet Politico’s Dasha Burns failed to challenge, question, or debunk a single one of them. Her response in almost every case was to stay silent or… change the subject. It was a dereliction of journalistic duty by Burns and a holiday gift from Politico to the Gaslighter-in-Chief in the White House.

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In the video above, I pay tribute to my dad and explain why his story matters at a time when politics on both sides of the Atlantic is dominated by bigots and nativists. I lay out the ways in which his entire life’s journey is a rebuttal of Trumpism and Farageism.

The ‘Prince of Darkness’ is gone.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney died at the age of 84 on Monday, his family said, surrounded by his wife and daughters.

Like fellow war criminal Slobodan Milošević, Cheney should have died alone in a prison cell at The Hague. But, like the rest of the gang behind the invasion of Iraq (George W. Bush, Tony Blair, Donald Rumsfeld, et al.), Cheney never faced any legal or even political accountability for his war crimes over the past two decades. In recent years, he even became a hero in some liberal and Democratic Party circles after denouncing Donald Trump and endorsing Kamala Harris for president.

Yet the Bush-Cheney administration, between 2001 and 2009, was one of the worst in American history, overseeing skyrocketing deficits and tax cuts for the rich, the abuse of executive power and politicization of the Justice Department, the Hurricane Katrina debacle, and, of course, the global financial crisis.

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But it was the so-called “War on Terror” and the illegal invasion of Iraq, based on lies about “weapons of mass destruction,” that Cheney must be remembered for. It was Dick, more than Dubya, who was the driving force behind one of the bloodiest wars of the 21st century. Cheney was a hawkish ideologue – one of the most belligerent politicians of our lifetimes, despite dodging the Vietnam draft on multiple occasions (“I had other priorities in the sixties than military service,” he later said). It was Dick, more than Dubya, who was also the unapologetic architect of America’s post-9/11 torture regime.

It is difficult to quantify just how many people are dead because of Cheney. Thousands? Hundreds of thousands? Millions? The legacy media won’t tell us. They will likely engage in hagiography when it comes to covering his death because that is what the legacy media does when the powerful pass away. Reputations are laundered; careers are whitewashed; crimes are ignored.

Let us remember who Richard Bruce Cheney really was.

Below are 10 quotes from the former vice president that should define his horrific, blood-stained legacy: a litany of shameless lies and false predictions, as well as a total lack of regret or contrition.

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“I think I’ve made the case that I’m much more of an American, and much more of a patriotic American, than you are, Matt, and you’re just going to have to go whine and cry about it.”

I have spent the past week being told online that I am not a ‘real’ American, and that I should be denaturalized and deported, by a motley crew of right-wing pundits, MAGA influencers, and even two sitting Republican members of Congress.

My crime? Telling a podcaster in Dearborn, Michigan, that maybe Muslims should be able to broadcast the call to prayer from mosques in the United States if churches can ring their bells, and then explaining on Twitter that Muslim slaves were here in the United States from the very beginning and helped build this country.

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Matt Walsh, a far-right shockjock at Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire, got very triggered by all this and called me an “ungrateful little b**ch,” before producing a viral 13-minute video about me in which he called me many, many more names and claimed Islam and Muslims have nothing to do with America.

Above is my video response to Walsh, in which I educate him on the history of slavery, including Muslim slavery, in the United States; point out the many and varied contributions of Muslim Americans to this country; and debunk his lazy conservative talking points while laying out his own long history of odious, bigoted, and unhinged views. (Have you heard his ridiculous and racist hot take on Disney’s The Little Mermaid? Well, you’re about to!)

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As I discuss in my monologue above, who really is more of an American? Those of us who support free and fair elections and religious pluralism in this country, as intended by the Founders, or MAGA bigmouths like Walsh, who pine for Christian nationalism and (in his own words) “theocratic fascism” in the United States?

If you want to support the independent journalism here at Zeteo, and help us grow and continue to challenge the right-wing dominance of The Daily Wires et al, please do consider becoming a paid subscriber and getting access to all of our content. If you’re already a paid subscriber, you can also donate to Zeteo.

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Don’t miss Zeteo’s latest newsletter, First Draft:

There was a time when Donald Trump believed the issue of Israel and Palestine could only be solved by Jared Kushner. “If you can’t produce peace in the Middle East, nobody can,” he told his son-in-law on the eve of his first-term inauguration in 2017, before bizarrely appointing the then-36-year-old property developer to lead on the issue.

Now, nine months into his second term, Trump is pinning his hopes for peace in the Middle East on a much more experienced but even more controversial figure: 72-year-old Tony Blair.

Yes, that Tony Blair.

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In his 20-point “Comprehensive Plan to End the Gaza Conflict,” released by the White House on Monday, the ninth point jumps out from the text:

“Gaza will be governed under the temporary transitional governance of a technocratic, apolitical Palestinian committee, responsible for delivering the day-to-day running of public services and municipalities for the people in Gaza. This committee will be made up of qualified Palestinians and international experts, with oversight and supervision by a new international transitional body, the “Board of Peace,” which will be headed and chaired by President Donald J. Trump, with other members and heads of State to be announced, including Former Prime Minister Tony Blair.”

Sorry, what? Putting Tony Blair in charge of any kind of peace effort in the Middle East is like making the arsonist the head firefighter; the burglar the chief detective.

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In his rambling, incoherent, self-congratulatory speech to the United Nations on Tuesday, one particular “braggadocious” claim from Donald J. Trump stood out from the rest:

“I ended seven wars, and in all cases, they were raging, with countless thousands of people being killed. This includes Cambodia and Thailand, Kosovo and Serbia, the Congo and Rwanda – a vicious, violent war that was – Pakistan and India, Israel and Iran, Egypt and Ethiopia, and Armenia and Azerbaijan.”

He has been making this claim for a while in his brazen and desperate attempt to win a Nobel Peace Prize.

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The US State Department even put out this image on its Twitter account, in the wake of his UN address:

You have to admire the message discipline, but it’s all BS. It is, in fact, demonstrably untrue. Here are the facts:

CAMBODIA AND THAILAND

Cambodia and Thailand were at war, and Trump did indeed help secure a ceasefire. But the two countries have accused each other of ceasefire violations ever since. So Trump didn’t quite end that war, or address the root causes of the conflict.

KOSOVO AND SERBIA

Kosovo and Serbia were not at war. No shots were fired. No bombs were dropped. No territory was seized. So Trump didn’t end that war, as there was no war to begin with.

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CONGO AND RWANDA

The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Rwanda have been at war for decades, a brutal and vicious war, but their conflict still isn’t over. In June, the two countries signed a peace agreement in the White House that Trump called a “glorious triumph” – but it did not include the Rwandan-backed M23 rebel group responsible for so much of the violence. According to the UN, more than 300 civilians, including women and children, were killed in the DRC in July alone. So Trump did not end that war.

PAKISTAN AND INDIA

Pakistan and India did have a four-day conflict in May, which came to an end with a ceasefire. While Pakistan credited Trump for the ceasefire and then nominated him for a Nobel Peace Prize (the day before he illegally attacked Iran!), India has repeatedly rejected Trump’s claim that he ended the conflict as “baseless.” So Trump can’t take credit for ending that war.

ISRAEL AND IRAN

Israel and Iran were at war for 12 days in June. Trump may have pressured the two sides into a ceasefire, but he was also the person who, as one Israeli official put it to Axios, gave a “clear US green light” to Israel to attack the Islamic Republic in the first place. Trump not only blessed Israel’s bombing of Iran, but he then bombed Iran himself. So how on Earth does he get credit for ending a war he helped start and then participated in?

EGYPT AND ETHIOPIA

Egypt and Ethiopia, yes, have a long-standing dispute over a dam on the River Nile. But, no, the two countries were not at war. Again, no shots were fired. No bombs were dropped. No territory was seized. Oh, and their water dispute remains unresolved. So Trump didn’t end that war, as yet again, there was no war to begin with.

ARMENIA AND AZERBAIJAN

Armenia and Azerbaijan have been in a decades-long war. And Trump does deserve credit for bringing the leaders of these two countries to the White House in August to sign a peace deal. However, neither side has since ratified that peace deal, and Azerbaijan continues to insist that Armenia amend its constitution to remove references to the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region, which would almost certainly be rejected by Armenian voters. So Trump has maybe ended the war between these two nations, but then again, maybe he hasn’t! Also, the “president of peace” has since confused Armenia with Albania and called Azerbaijan “Aber-baijan.”

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Hear more of Trump’s rambling, incoherent tirade at the UN, and check out Zeteo’s other recent content below:

On Wednesday, we witnessed the horrific killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk while he was speaking at Utah Valley University. It was a shocking and unforgivable act of violence. At the time of writing, the shooter is still at large, and the motive for the murder is unknown.

But that hasn’t stopped Kirk’s fellow conservatives and far-right influencers from weaponizing his tragic death to attack Democrats and blame ‘the left’ for all of the political violence in the United States.

Donald Trump gave an incendiary televised address in which he railed only against “radical left-wing political violence.” Elon Musk claimed, “The Left is the party of murder.” His fellow ‘Silicon Valley bro’ Shaun Maguire said “the Left lectured us for the last decade about the dangers of violence from the Right” but “the danger was actually on the Left.” Katie Miller, wife of far-right Stephen, accused liberals of having “blood on your hands.”

Such rhetoric from the right is as dishonest as it is dangerous.

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Here are the actual facts for those with conveniently short memories.

• The man who targeted and killed Democratic state lawmaker Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark in their home in Minnesota in June was a Trump supporter.

• The man charged with the attempted assassination of Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor, Josh Shapiro, in April was a Trump supporter.

• The man convicted of orchestrating a series of shootings at the homes of four Democratic elected officials in New Mexico in 2022 was a Trump supporter.

• The man who tried to kidnap then Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and assaulted her husband, Paul, in 2022 was a Trump supporter.

• The men who wanted to hang Mike Pence on Jan 6, 2021, were Trump supporters.

• The man who killed the son of Obama-appointed District Judge Esther Salas in 2020 was a Trump supporter.

• The men who were convicted of trying to kidnap Michigan’s Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer, in 2020 were Trump supporters.

• The man who sent pipe bombs to the homes of Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, and other top Democrats in 2018 was a Trump supporter.

• The man who killed left-wing activist Heather Heyer after driving his car into a crowd of counter-protesters in Charlottesville in 2017 was a Trump supporter.

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There is no equivalent or even similar list of Obama or Biden supporters who have carried out murders, attempted murders, or violent attacks against Republicans or conservatives in recent years. In fact, according to statistics compiled by the ADL’s Center on Extremism, 2024 was the third year in a row in which all of the extremist-related killings in the United States were carried out by… right-wingers.

So conservatives can engage in as much faux outrage as they like over the supposed threat from ‘the left,’ but the facts, as they themselves often like to say, don’t care about their feelings.

For 22 months, we have been misled, gaslit, and lied to by hasbarists.

Since Oct. 7, 2023, the pro-Israel propagandists who dominate our airwaves and op-ed pages, and troll us online, have not only told one whopper after another, but have also relentlessly and cynically attacked any criticism of Israel’s assault on Gaza as antisemitic, pro-Hamas, and a ‘blood libel.’

And I happen to have had firsthand experience of these dishonest and defamatory tactics, in debates with the likes of Eylon Levy, Douglas Murray, Piers Morgan, and Alan Dershowitz.

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So what do I do to push back? I quote Israel’s most senior military figures to make my case – whether it is on genocide, ethnic cleansing, or the killing of kids. To my opponents, I cite the words of top generals who have, at one point or another, literally commanded Israel’s attacks on the Gaza Strip – whether in 2009, 2014, or in the wake of Oct. 7, 2023. Because it’s easy for them to smear and dismiss a leftist professor or a UN official as antisemitic or anti-Israel, but a decorated Israeli general and war hero? Much, much harder. Nigh impossible, I’d say.

Here are seven of the most damning, revealing, self-incriminating quotes from top Israeli generals that you should be aware of and that you can also deploy in any argument with the hasbarists.

1. DESTRUCTION OF GAZA

They say: “We’re not trying to destroy Gaza; we’re trying to remove the threat from Gaza.”

What does the Israeli general say? “Gaza will be destroyed,” Herzi Halevi, retired Israeli general and former chief of staff of the Israeli military, told his wife on the morning of Oct. 7, 2023.

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2. KILLING OF CIVILIANS

They say: “The IDF does everything possible to limit civilian casualties in Gaza.”

What does the Israeli general say? “For everything that happened on October 7, for every person on October 7, 50 Palestinians must die,” Aharon Haliva, retired Israeli major general and former director of the Military Intelligence Directorate on Oct. 7, can be heard saying in recordings broadcast by Israel’s Channel 12 TV station earlier this month. “It doesn’t matter now if they are children.”

The general can also be heard saying that Palestinians “need a Nakba every now and then to feel the price.”

3. KILLING OF CHILDREN

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Last month, I ticked off an item on my bucket list. I was finally interviewed by the one and only Jon Stewart.

I’ve had the opportunity to interview ‘The Daily Show’ host before, but this was the first time he was asking me the questions. On his podcast, ‘The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart,’ the comedian and I discussed corporate media, the Gaza genocide, and Donald Trump, and Stewart wondered aloud whether “the Democratic Party is ripe for a takeover” and “they just need to find the right reality host.”

My response? “Please, please, no reality hosts, I beg of you. Unless Jon, you’re thinking of throwing your hat in the ring, which I know many people want.. If that’s what you’re suggesting, we can talk about that.”

Stewart laughed. He didn’t deny that was what he was suggesting. He didn’t rule out throwing his “hat in the ring.” He didn’t recite some version of: “Don’t be crazy, Mehdi, I have no intention of doing that.”

There was a glint in his eye as he simply leaned his head back and… chuckled.

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The clamor for a Jon Stewart presidential candidacy is growing. And I’m far from the only person raising the tantalizing prospect of ‘Stewart 2028.’ Last November, two days after the Democrats lost to Trump, for a second time, the popular progressive YouTuber Kyle Kulinski tweeted: “JON STEWART 2028.” Last week, Kulinski said he continued to believe that “very few people are so uniquely positioned” to run for president “and I genuinely think he's one of them."

“I would love to see Jon Stewart run in 2028,” radio host Charlamagne tha God told Lara Trump, of all people, on her Fox show earlier this month, describing ‘The Daily Show’ host as “a change agent coming from the outside that’s really going to shake things up and somebody that I feel like can speak to all people.”

Stewart is not just a celebrity, Charlamagne explained to the president’s daughter-in-law, but a celebrity who has gotten “legislation and stuff passed before. We know where his heart is.”

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Democratic Party voters seem open to the idea of a Stewart presidential bid, too. Remarkably, in a poll in April, ‘The Daily Show’ host was tied with Gretchen Whitmer, JB Pritzker, and Josh Shapiro and ahead of Andy Beshear – all sitting Democratic governors who have been touted as possible presidential heavyweights come 2028. Imagine what those polls will start to look like if Stewart formally declares for 2028, or even announces one of those “exploratory committees.”

Full disclosure: I’ve been skeptical of a Stewart presidential candidacy in the past. Earlier this year, in an interview with ‘The Vanguard’ podcast, I said that “I remain to be persuaded. I am not against it. I’m not for it.”

But I am coming around to the idea. Yes, part of me wants Stewart to stay in comedy, to continue as the host of ‘The Daily Show’ and ‘The Weekly Show’ where he educates and entertains, and platforms vital voices. And part of me would love to see Stewart primary the Kushner-confirming, crypto-backing, genocide-supporting, war criminal-hugging, AIPAC-texting Cory Booker in his home state of New Jersey next year. But part of me now also thinks Stewart should consider running for president in 2028.

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