News Brief - NYT, BBC, Guardian: Starvation in Gaza Doesn’t Really Count if Victim Has ‘Preexisting Condition’
Citations Needed | August 27, 2025 | Transcript
[Music]
Nima Shirazi: Welcome to a Citations Needed News Brief. I am Nima Shirazi.
Adam Johnson: I’m Adam Johnson.
Nima: We do these News Briefs in between our regularly scheduled full-length episodes of Citations Needed. And this one is actually coming to you from our little summer break in between our season eight and season nine. We’ll come back with more episodes of Citations Needed for our ninth season next month. So thank you, everyone, for joining us in the meantime.
And today, we really want to talk about a recent spate of media covering up the now undeniable genocide in Gaza, as more and more organizations really apply that label accurately providing all the possible evidence that you could ever have, including intent laid out very clearly by Israeli officials, undeniable evidence on the ground of ethnic cleansing and genocide going on in Gaza. This has been said, obviously, for months, if not years, by groups who know what they’re talking about, and also Palestinians living and surviving this on the ground. So you’ve seen major media here in the United States really kind of wiggle out of the genocide label, especially when it comes to the deliberate mass starvation of people in Gaza, the idea that people are starving to death, which is documented, which is real, which is undeniable, we have now seen a lot of media articles come out trying to talk around that clear and horrifying fact. And so we’re going to talk about some of those articles.
And we are joined today by friend of the show and return guest Beatrice Adler-Bolton. She is the co-host of the Death Panel podcast about the political economy of health. And she is the co-author with Artie Vierkant of the book Health Communism: A Surplus Manifesto, which was published by Verso Books in 2022. So, Beatrice, welcome back to Citations Needed.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton: Hi. Thanks so much for having me.
Adam: Yes, thank you so much for coming on. This overlaps a lot with what you do and what you work on, and the underpinning logic of this, which is perceived as some kind of gotcha or media scandal, which we’ll get into, undergirds the idea that there’s tiered life. There’s sort of life that is expendable, and there’s life that is somehow important. And obviously, in the show, we deal a lot with these tiers. And this unfortunately follows the bottom of the bottom tier, which is a racialized subject, a subject on the wrong end of US imperial and Israeli imperial needs and decrees. And, added to that, people with medical conditions, which vary based on the needs of the particular propagandists, that sees them as being their starvation over months and months of siege warfare, and specifically in the total cutoff of anything going into Gaza beginning in early March of this year, their deaths are seen as not as important or not evidence of mass starvation per se.
So I’m glad to have you on to talk about that. It’s a really important topic, because, as you noted offline when we were talking, it subtly reinforces the sort of eugenicist logic of a lot of how we handle the hierarchy of humanity, and does so in this kind of faux-persnickety, fact-checky kind of way. So I want to begin by talking about, well, we’ll get to the Free Press piece. That’s obviously the most egregious version. But I want to begin by talking about the New York Times. The New York Times issued a correction on a July 24, 2025 piece entitled, quote, “Gazans Are Dying of Starvation,” unquote, which takes till paragraph five before it even mentions Israeli responsibility. But setting that aside, the sub headline read,
After 21 months of devastating conflict with Israel, Gaza’s most vulnerable civilians —
I guess Gaza is having conflict with Israel?
the young, the old and the sick — are facing what aid groups say is impending famine.
Unquote. So what’s ostensibly a kind of sympathetic story falls directly into this sort of category that we’ve discussed in the show and I’ve written about before, which is treating it like a natural disaster. Israeli responsibility is mostly obscured or downplayed. But setting that aside, this led to outrage from your typical Zionist crybully groups who like to portray the New York Times as part of some pro-Hamas conspiracy to solicit empathy from Western audiences, which, of course, the implication of that is that they’ll put pressure on Israel to stop starving people. God forbid they stop bombing them, but that’s kind of off the table of the appropriate liberal registers.
Nima: So to make this even more clear, let’s talk about what the article itself said, and then we’ll get into the correction that was issued. So again, as Adam just said, the article published on July 24, 2025 by the New York Times was headlined, “Gazans Are Dying of Starvation.” And the story included an example of an 18-month-old child named Mohammed Zakaria al-Mutawaq, who the paper reported was diagnosed with severe malnutrition. Now, the Times story also included a photograph of Mohammed’s mother holding a skeletal and clearly starving-to-death baby, Mohammed. The Times wrote this, quote,
Mohammed’s mother, Hedaya al-Mutawaq, 31, said the toddler’s father was killed last October when he went out to seek food.
“I walk the streets looking for food,” she said by phone, her voice barely audible. The charity kitchens she relies on to help feed Mohammed and his brother, Joud, 3, cannot always help, and they go hungry. “As an adult, I can bear the hunger,” she said. “But my kids can’t.”
Mohammed, she said, was born a healthy child. “I look at him and I can’t help but cry,” she said.
“We go to bed hungry and wake up thinking only about how to find food,” she added. “I can’t find milk or diapers.”
Mohammed was diagnosed with severe malnutrition by the Friends of the Patient clinic and Al-Rantisi children’s hospital, she said, but there was little they could do. On a recent visit to the clinic, she said, “they told me, ‘His treatment is food and water.’”
End quote. So that is the way that the New York Times itself told this one story out of hundreds of thousands out of millions of stories to, you know, kind of personalize the deliberate starvation campaign that Israel has imposed on Gaza.
Now, five days after this story’s publication, on July 29, 2025, the Times appended an editor’s note to the end of the story. The note read this, quote,
This article has been updated to include information about Mohammed Zakaria al-Mutawaq, a child in Gaza suffering from severe malnutrition. After publication of the article, The Times learned from his doctor that Mohammed also had pre-existing health problems.
End quote. The Times added a paragraph to the story, the original story, that now read this, quote,
Mohammed, according to his doctor, had pre-existing health problems affecting his brain and his muscle development. But his health deteriorated rapidly in recent months as it became increasingly difficult to find food and medical care, and the medical clinic that treated him said he suffers from severe malnutrition.
End quote. Now, this correction, the idea that you would need to put this in because it fleshes out the story of a starving and skeletal Mohammed, is clearly done with one intention in mind, to make it seem like, Well, he wasn’t really going to do that well anyway, and the starvation campaign may not be solely responsible for what has then happened to him, for his death. So Beatrice, I’d love for you to kind of comment on what you are seeing as major media like the New York Times backtracks on what even honest stories they do decide to tell, just in case one might get the impression that Israel is doing something on purpose.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton: Yeah. I mean, these so-called “updates” don’t correct the story, right? They correct the reader. They discipline the reader to accept preventable death as inevitable, to see systemic violence as merely misfortune by biological destiny, and it really also highlights the vulnerabilities without context in order to create propaganda. It shifts responsibility away from the perpetrators, which of course, is the genocidal Zionist state, and onto those that they are harming. Every comorbidity is presented without a structural framing, and that offers us a lesson in sort of how complicity is manufactured. Because when you see an update like the New York Times ran coming back to mention a child had a pre-existing health issue, the right question to always ask is, If there had been access to food, medicine and care, would this child almost certainly be alive? If the answer is yes, then only the siege, only the famine, is causal. Comorbidities don’t absolve responsibility. They only highlight additional vulnerability. Right?
The point here is that starvation and blockade act as necessary conditions for these deaths, no matter what the New York Times or anyone else is asserting. Whatever else was going on in a child’s life, those other factors only became fatal because access to food, formula, water, and healthcare was deliberately stripped away, withheld as a weapon of war. And that’s the difference between talking about risk multipliers and then pretending that malnutrition is irrelevant. The first is just honest epidemiology, and the second is intentional misdirection.
Nima: Yeah.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton: When the difference between life and death is a blockade, the blockade is the cause. Everything else, the comorbidities, pre-existing conditions, individual circumstances, is secondary and a risk factor that only matters because the siege makes it even more deadly. And every preventable death, every act of compounded vulnerability, is traceable to the intentional deprivation at the hands of Israel. And a child’s pre-existing condition is not some sort of loophole in this law of causality, right? Under siege, vulnerabilities are transformed into death sentences. Impairments do not kill in and of themselves, these policies do. Famine is not natural. It’s a predictable, manufactured outcome of blockade and deprivation. Israel has said multiple times over the last 10 years that they’re going to put Gaza on a diet. Every statistic of suffering is proof that the state is weaponizing scarcity against Palestinians deliberately.
Adam: Yeah, because I think they did the similar with the Al-Ahli hospital bombing on October 17, 2023, where these corrections, these updates, whatever you call them, are then viewed as evidence of not only some kind of victory, like, Oh, they corrected the record, but then there’s always sort of a whiff of conspiracy, like, they’re pro-Hamas. They’ve been discovered. They always like to say ‘admit,’ ‘New York Times admits,’ there’s sort of this confessional element, right? And then that becomes the story. And then, of course, that reinforces this idea that somehow this starvation in Gaza is some kind of myth, is some kind of antisemitic, whatever you want to call it, and that those corrections serve that purpose. They sort of serve only one function, or updates, or whatever, or added context.
Nima: Right. Just so you know, a number of Polish Jews in Auschwitz had asthma, and so therefore you can’t just claim that being in a concentration camp or being put to death by poison gas or in ovens was the cause of death, because, hey, they also maybe had some comorbidity to begin with. This is the purpose of this. It’s completely genocidal.
Adam: Yeah, and the New York Times wasn’t alone. The Guardian published a similar, quote-unquote, “update,” noting that one of the starving people they profiled had cerebral palsy. BBC also published an ‘update’ about a Gazan woman who was flown to a hospital in Italy. They published a, quote, “clarification” on August 18 that was, quote,
This article’s headline originally said that Marah Abu Zuhri died of malnutrition, with the introduction stating that she suffered a cardiac arrest and died on Friday. The headline has been amended to remove the reference to malnutrition being the cause of death in what the hospital described as a “very complex clinical picture”.
Unquote. The woman who had died was only 20 years old, and the BBC itself reported that she had, quote, “suffered severe loss of weight and muscle,” and the Italian media reported that she, quote, “was suffering from severe malnutrition.” Could this have at least contributed to the cardiac arrest of a 20-year-old? It’s known that malnutrition, of course, leads to cardiac arrest, but of course, the BBC, I guess, because they couldn’t prove it beyond a reasonable doubt, had to issue this clarification that severe malnutrition was somehow incidental to her, a 20-year-old dying of cardiac arrest, to say nothing of the, again, constant bombing and displacement and all the other.
So this is now a thing. This is sort of a media thing. And again, there is obviously eugenicist subtext to this. And I want you to talk about that. Talk about this idea that, when someone dies with some kind of comorbidity, even if the comorbidity is caused by an underlying malnutrition or lack of food, right, which a lot of these are, like rickets, etc. And of course, cancer is, you can’t fight cancer while you’re starving. Anyone who’s ever had the misfortune of dealing with someone with cancer–
Nima: And when every single hospital has been destroyed.
Adam: To say nothing of the fact that every single hospital has been destroyed, right? But even setting that aside, talk, if you could, about this idea that people with so-called “comorbidities,” that their starvation to death somehow doesn’t count.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton: Yeah, this is like classic eugenicist logic, right? The idea and the subtext, and actually the topline here also is that some bodies are just naturally weak or naturally defective, and therefore their suffering is somehow inevitable or less morally relevant here. It’s like an obvious point, but it has to be said, right, that this is not neutral journalism. And each child’s story, or each person’s story, is being used to downplay the impact of the genocide as a whole. Whether a child has cerebral palsy or rickets, whether it’s something that they’re born with, in the case of cerebral palsy, or something that’s directly caused by lack of access to food and nutrition, like rickets, all of these conditions are presented as exceptions or anomalies, rather than connecting it to victims of the genocidal regime that creates and exacerbates and weaponizes vulnerability.
And ultimately, what we see here is that by isolating these impairments from the general material conditions in which they’re occurring, as you’re saying, if you have cancer and you’re living in Gaza, and all of the hospitals have been destroyed, and even beyond that, for years, Gaza has been under siege. For years, blockades have been preventing necessary medications from getting into Gaza. They have been preventing people with conditions that need treatment at other hospitals from getting out of Gaza. So this isn’t even something that started in October of 2023, right? This is something that has been going on for a very long time. So if we think about what is the material conditions of a pre-existing condition in Gaza, right, you have to think about the entire Zionist Israeli project and the entire longstanding genocidal approach to restricting access to healthcare as a weapon of war.
Palestinian public health scholar Danya Qato talks about how settler colonialism has to be thought of as the ultimate sort of pre-existing condition for Gaza, right? You can’t think about any of these frameworks that are being held up as exceptions outside of the context of the siege and the famine. So ultimately, what’s being implied is that disabled children, disabled people, people with pre-existing conditions, are outliers whose visible starvation is biologically self-explanatory. It’s both ableist logic that naturalizes preventable death, right? But it’s also this kind of comorbidity gambit, where they’re smuggling in this trick of, if someone had an underlying condition, then the proximate cause, which is the settler colonial occupation of Palestine, doesn’t count.
Nima: Yeah, and just to add some numbers to this, Beatrice, when you talk about pre-existing condition, right, the idea that colonialism and occupation is a pre-existing condition that stretches much farther back than just the past two years, farther back than just October 2023. I just want to make clear that Gaza has been militarily occupied by Israel since 1967, and that 40 years after that, in June of 2007, Israel instituted a blockade and a full siege of Gaza that has not ever been lifted. It is an indefinite, if not at this point, permanent siege and blockade of the millions of people living there, and so any kind of medical resources, any kind of basic ways that people live their lives, whether it is construction materials, whether it is toys, whether it is school supplies, whether it is food and of course, yes, whether it is medical equipment or medicine itself, all of this has been severely restricted by an occupying power, not only for over 50 years, but in a very, very stark way, explicit way, for nearly 20 years. And so starting the clock at just October 2023, of course, does not at all tell the full story here on purpose, right? That Gaza had everything it needed, and then October 2023 happened. No, of course not. It has been under siege for decades and decades. And so when you talk about how, you know, people are starving now, that is all part of a pre-existing condition that is decades in the making and maintenance.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton: Right. And I think a lot of people are looking for like, a declaration of, We’re doing eugenics, right, or We’re explicitly saying that these people don’t count because they’re vulnerable. But eugenics does not arrive in a kind of goose step. It’s not a broad performance. It arrives in footnotes, or, as we’re seeing here, is quote-unquote “context” explaining why certain children’s stats supposedly don’t count. It arrives in reporting that emphasizes comorbidities and vulnerabilities and pre-existing conditions without talking about this broader pre-existing condition of the siege of Gaza.
And it’s an also quietly sanctioned hierarchy of whose lives are worth mourning, too, and whose voice on Palestine is even believable. What we see in this moment is that these updates also become a kind of discipline ritual that’s applied overwhelmingly to Palestinian testimony. You see editors really overcorrecting, attempting to perform some sort of cynical neutrality, which ultimately just creates even more asymmetry. We see Israeli military claims get just reproduced via stenography, and then Palestinian claims get clarified, right? And the pattern enforces who gets believed. Palestinian mothers are rendered unreliable unless they have Western outlets and state-adjacent experts validating their statement. And it’s ultimately epistemic colonialism dressed up as fact-checking and due diligence.
Adam: Yeah, because it’s part of a broader regime of dulling liberal outrage. Any time you think there’s going to be some kind of galvanizing moment, like a kind of George Floyd moment or something where liberals decide they wake up and care about racism, but in this instance, they care about genocide, whether it’s the Al-Ahli hospital bombing, whether it’s the killing of Hind Rajab, whether or not it’s, you know, there’s sort of these moments that could have been a galvanizing moment to say, All right, it’s time to shut this down. You’re done. There’s this very sophisticated, surgical media bully campaign done by pro-Israel groups that basically takes the language and the logic of so-called “neutrality,” and then weaponizes it to kind of stem it. So then the New York Times says, Well, I mean, again, I’m assuming good faith. I think, to me, these people, it’s not good faith, but assuming good faith to say, Well, we’re just adding context. How could that hurt? But again, if you read their reporting on whether it’s Russia’s invasion of Ukraine or October 7, there’s not a bunch of context where this person who was kidnapped or killed, Well, they were a soldier, and they, you know, in 2022 they were reprimanded for beating a Palestinian. There’s no context that sort of mitigates, that blunts that outrage when it’s the baddies. When it’s Israel, however, everybody’s in search for context.
This regime is also very, very common, you’ll see, they’ll have some story about children being killed en masse in the New York Times. Of course, again, it’s, Israel’s responsibility is obscured and drowned and mentioned on paragraph 17. But then they’ll say, Well, Hamas hides in schools. Hamas is known to hide among civilians. They have a throwaway line. It’s like, aside from the fact that it’s not true in any meaningful sense, it’s certainly not more true than the IDF, which hides among the civilian population in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. It only has one function, which is to say, Oh, well, okay, never mind. I guess I’m not that upset. And like this sort of faux-neutral, faux-more context can’t hurt, clearly serves one purpose and one purpose only, one political purpose, one manifest purpose, which is to take the liberal who would look at that story of starving children and galvanize opposition to the starvation campaign, put pressure on the White House, pressure on Congress to finally stop selling arms to this genocide and say, Well, you know, okay, well, that person had cerebral palsy, so, you know, that doesn’t really count, I guess. Maybe the starvation is not as bad as they’re making it out to be. And then we’re all supposed to act like this is some kind of apolitical fact-checking exercise, when clearly it’s not. And the reason we know this is because there’s 800 groups who light up the phones at the New York Times and personally lobby and call and go on MSNBC and whine, the New York Times was unfair to us. There were slightly critical of our genocide. It’s like police unions. Just constant fucking crying all the time.
Nima: Narrative discipline. This has the purpose of having narrative discipline. And that if the narrative strays at all, there are myriad groups that launch these campaigns to then discipline the editors and the reporters in these major papers, and then we see the, you know, complete capitulation of those newsrooms to, you know, kind of get back to the status-quo-dominating narrative. So this all has to do with discipline.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton: Yeah, and this mirrors historical frameworks used to justify mass violence against undesirable populations. And you know, ultimately, this is not an original playbook, to invoke eugenics in order to say that there are bodies that, because they don’t fit a certain template, are implicitly less worthy of concern or political outrage. We saw this in the context of George Floyd, where pre-existing conditions, Eric Garner, the invocation of a pre-existing condition, making someone’s murder at the hands of police therefore not valid is a classic playbook.
We saw this in the context of Covid from, everything from the idea that the only people who were dying were people with pre-existing conditions very early on in the pandemic. There was a piece of reporting in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel where they said, We’re going to have to study if the people dying from Covid are people who were going to die anyways. And they coined this phrase, “deaths pulled from the future,” which is something we’ve returned to a lot at Death Panel, because it’s a horrifically poetic way of thinking about this relationship between state power and grief and mourning and validity of whose suffering and death matters. And we even saw this point sort of cause a lot of outrage within disability communities at the time, but Rochelle Walensky, when she was director of the CDC, in a press conference, said, Well, we have this very encouraging news that the vast majority of people that have died of covid were already unwell to begin with.
And so this is a playbook that we have seen for, not just even recently in the context of all the examples that I’ve given, but for generations and generations. I mean, Jim Downs, who’s a fantastic historian of race and slavery, has done a really great book about how the very foundations of epidemiology and public health are based on these ideas of certain bodies and certain populations being inherently more disposable.
Nima: Well, yeah, and I mean to return to my analogy from before, concentration camp inmates in Nazi Germany, or, you know, during World War II across Europe, certain people were marked wearing a black triangle, which identified them as disabled people. So again, this classification of who is kind of in this idea of a tiered humanity, it wasn’t just political prisoners and Roma and Jews and communists, etc. Also, you know, people who were classified as disabled were also marked in a certain way. And of course, looking at that now, we’re like, That is genocide. That is horrendous. That cannot be defended. And yet this is what we are effectively seeing in these major media corrections and updates.
Adam: Yeah, I want to move on to the Free Press, quote-unquote, “investigation,” which I think was vulgar, even for regular Free Press standards. The Free Press somewhat famously published a piece in May saying that mass starvation in Gaza is a myth. Then in July or early August, they tried to get ahead of it and said, Actually, there’s some starvation. But then wrote this kind of mitigating piece to get ahead of all the horrific images that were coming out. But then Olivia Reingold wrote a piece called, quote, “They Became Symbols for Gazan Starvation. But All 12 Suffer from Other Health Problems.” Unquote. Okay, well, never mind then.
Nima: This was published on August 17, 2025. Very recent.
Adam: Very recent. So talk about this piece. It basically accused major outlets of journalistic malpractice by overstating the severity of famine, by quote-unquote, “omitting” “context” about victims’ pre-existing conditions. They outlined their methods in one particularly sociopathic, and this wouldn’t meet the editorial standards of a middle school newspaper. Quote,
We simply ran the story subjects’ names through Google Translate to get the Arabic spelling, then searched those names in Arabic-language media. Even a quick scan of the results revealed that many of these children suffer from muscle atrophy, head injuries, or other serious medical conditions that help explain their emaciated appearance. (In some cases, the relevant information was available in English, too.)
Okay. Well, thank you. I’m glad you don’t have to hire an Arabic speaker, because you, of course, no doubt, don’t know any, unquote. So, wow. I mean this, yeah, sorry, I’m just going to let you talk about this. I’m not even going to ask you a question.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton: Oh, God, it’s like, where to start with this piece? I mean, the framing itself, just from the get-go, is immediately suspect, right? In the title of the piece, “But All 12 Suffer from Other Health Problems.” This is a really interesting example, because it’s not just disciplining the reader, but it’s also attempting to kind of discipline journalistic coverage of the famine at all, which, by the way, has also been officially declared. ICJ officially declared that Gaza is in famine conditions. The UN has officially certified Gaza as being under famine conditions. But what we’re seeing in this manufactured doubt campaign, it’s not really fair to say that this is an article or even journalism, right? As you pointed out, Adam, it’s essentially armchair reporting done via Google Translate. But the Free Press is basically insisting that all famine coverage must be clarified, and the goal isn’t accuracy, of course, it’s propaganda. They’re demanding these caveats and then they’re weaponizing those caveats as proof that the original coverage was as they’re implying, almost intentionally misleading. It’s a very dangerous two-step maneuver of forcing this caveat and then brandishing that caveat as evidence of bias.
You know, I think one of the things that is most disgusting about this piece is, not only is there this strong, forward, leading text of, Some bodies are weak. Some bodies are defective. There’s a particular line where she writes that,
in every instance, they were already facing grave situations because of their health, irrespective of any third-party action.
Explicitly weaponizing language by saying that the children’s bodies themselves need to be blamed for their own suffering, not Israel’s blockade, not the genocide, not the decades-long siege of Gaza. And you also have, again, the local Arabic reporting being treated as unreliable and Free Press is portraying itself as the contextual authority on famine and also on the bodies of these Palestinian children. Right? They’re saying over and over and over again, repeating ad nauseam, the various diagnoses.
I think the most glaring and cynical example is Maryam Dawas, who was featured in one of these photographs. And they write that Maryam’s case is, quote-unquote, “not typical,” not because of a diagnosis that she has, but because of a suspected undiagnosed illness. So they don’t even have a diagnosis to lean on in this case, but they’re still holding up the possibility that there could be something else wrong with Maryam, other than famine, as a way of discrediting all claims to famine and malnutrition, right? And the implication is that if a child is even suspected of being sick for any reason, they cannot categorically be a victim of systemic starvation. It’s absolutely eugenic Nazi logic, right?
Because the idea is, well, if, and I can’t believe this has to be said explicitly, but I think you really have to say it here was, is the underside of what they’re implying is that the healthy children under these conditions of siege and blockade with, you know, the, quote-unquote, “diet” that Israel has put Gaza on would be fine, right? That this is an amount of food that is fine for a healthy Gazan, but is not fine for a Gazan with a pre-existing condition. So the idea is that, both this is a kind of propaganda campaign where the folks in Gaza who are sharing their suffering and their testimony publicly are obviously not the authority here, the Free Press and Google Translate are the authority, because if it’s not passing through a white, Western lens, then can’t be real, right? But you also have the idea that’s very implicit here, that the conditions of siege and blockade and famine would be totally fine on a, quote-unquote, “healthy” body, right? So therefore it’s not famine, because they’re restricted to a point where it’s, quote-unquote, “survivable,” right?
And you also have the story in the Free Press piece of Hamza Mishmish, who is a 25-year-old, who is someone who has cerebral palsy. This is presented as an example of just extreme exaggeration. And it also talks about the fact that if he were to die, it would be less significant, because he’s lived with cerebral palsy his whole life, right? You have the instance of Mosab al-Debs, who was paralyzed after a head injury that was caused by a Zionist bomb itself. And they’re using the injury caused by the military assaults on Gaza since October 7 and saying that that injury caused by the IOF is, in and of itself, enough of a pre-existing condition that the famine caused by the IOF cannot possibly apply here. I mean, it’s like, it’s so heinous. And the obsession over and over in this piece is, This is about accuracy. This is about having some sort of journalistic standards in place. And ultimately, all it is is just using medical conditions as a smokescreen to imply that the conditions of famine would be fine if people weren’t, quote, “already unwell to begin with.”
Nima: Now, I just want to talk about one other kind of aspect of this, which is, when there is appropriate backlash to articles like this, like the Free Press article, which does this, you know, eugenics logic, the authors of these pieces then become the victims, right? They kind of ascribe to themselves victim status while denying that from actual victims of genocide, and so in the example of the Free Oress, one of the authors, so the piece was written by Olivia Reingold and Tanya Lukyanova. And Olivia Reingold, in response to some of the backlash that she was then receiving after publishing this egregious piece, wrote this on Twitter. Quote,
Over the past few days, I’ve received thousands of hate comments, death threats, oh and my childhood best friend broke up with me due to my “morals.”
You know what? I just bought a Star of David. That way people can just say it to my face.
End quote. The implication here, of course, being that anyone who has a problem with this genocidal content that she is publishing, and especially her longtime childhood friend, just being crypto-antisemites, you know, for years and years and years, you know, kind of foundationally to their friendship relationship her, you know, childhood best friend was actually just like a secret Nazi.
Adam: Yeah, it was a secret crypto-antisemite waiting for the right time, and it just happened to align.
Nima: Yeah, exactly, that, you know, now just sort of deciding to spring her vile hatred upon poor Olivia, apropos of nothing, this kind of depravity in even responding to the very justified backlash to writing something like this, is in itself, doing this victim inversion. Beatrice, talk about how inverting victimhood is also part of a eugenicist project.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton: Yeah. I mean, this is the kind of classic pivot of victimhood to identity shield to silence critique cycle, right? It’s about protecting genocide by forwarding a kind of feelings-based PR. But you know, I think one of the things that’s most disgusting about this is that she’s like, Oh, I’ve bought this symbol to deflect criticism of my famine denial, and that doesn’t make what she’s doing any better. Buying a symbolic token to deflect criticism of famine denial does not erase the harm that you’re doing. It only amplifies the kind of shamelessness of the PR operation that you’re involved in. A $353 Dainty Diamond Star of David necklace cannot make journalism that erases suffering any less ableist or morally bankrupt? I don’t think it needs to be said. But criticizing the instrumentalization of disability and the denial of Palestinian famine is not antisemitism. This is just plain fact. This is an ethical imperative that’s rooted in anti-fascist principles in opposing systems that value some lives over others, and it’s foundational to any kind of framework of justice.
To imagine that, you know, if you’re like, I’m speaking from the position of someone who lost many family members in the Holocaust, who has a disability, right? Who, in the context of the genocide in Europe during World War II, would have been a target, right? There is nothing about my identity that makes my critique safe. You do not need to be speaking from a position of someone who is disabled or who is of Jewish descent or context to make these critiques. Her implication that merely naming the eugenicism and the ableism and her framing is antisemitic is part of the classic playbook.
I always think back to the work of Eli Valley when you see this. Eli has this great character that he draws called Diaspora Boy, which is a kind of like nebbish personification of the Jewish Diaspora versus like the Zionist Superman character, whatever. But this is part of the kind of ultimate playbook of Zionism, which is to imply that all criticism is not just anti-Zionist, but is antisemitic, but also that the sort of eugenics framework actually can’t be separated from Zionism. There is a rampant ableist framing to so many internal policies within Israel as a state. There are many instances where the culture of ableism is just ingrained in the Zionist state as well. So this is one of those kind of instances where we’re seeing just like, a kind of baseless invocation of antisemitism in order, again, to do this victimhood pivot to silence critique and, you know, just basically saying that this is a shield for eugenics and famine denial, for apartheid, for settler colonialism.
And it’s really important that, regardless of your identity or perspective, that you hold a line against this, because ultimately, the goal of this is both to create a eugenic test for who counts as a famine victim, right, but also to create a chilling effect. By pre-coding this as antisemitism, the actual content and context, famine, blockade, disability, denial of healthcare resources, genocide, that becomes no longer discussable, and the conversation shifts from children starving under a siege, a decades-long siege, to a journalist’s wounded pride and accessory choices.
And the function of the victimhood pivot is that it makes solidarity harder to articulate by framing it as antisemitism in disguise, right? And at the same time, this posture shields something that’s very deeply dangerous, which is that this article is intended to have a chilling effect. It’s intended to discourage other people from writing and talking about the genocide and the famine in Gaza. The idea is that if editors run famine stories without these caveats, they’ll be harassed until they’re corrected, right? And so stories get written more cautiously or not written at all. And the result is a form of casual, structural censorship that’s disguised as defensive victimhood and journalistic neutrality.
Nima: Well, Beatrice, it is always so incredible to have you on. Thank you for joining us on this News Brief. I’m sure we will be talking to you again soon. We’ve been speaking, of course, with Beatrice Adler-Bolton, co-host of the Death Panel podcast, which is about the political economy of health. She is also the co-author with Artie Vierkant of the book Health Communism: A Surplus Manifesto, which was published in 2022 by Verso Books. Beatrice, it is always such an incredible pleasure, honor, and also education to have you on Citations Needed. Thank you again for joining us today.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton: Oh, thank you so much, and so excited for season nine. Can’t wait.
Nima: Thank you, Beatrice. I want to remind all listeners that we are currently on our inter-season break. We’ll be back very soon with the next season, season nine of Citations Needed. Guaranteed 100% ornery, so stay tuned for that coming in the fall. We will have more full-length episodes, more News Briefs, more Ask Me Anythings, more live shows, stuff like that, more giveaways. So stay tuned for season nine, coming at you very soon, but until then, thank you all, of course, for listening to Citations Needed. You can follow us on Twitter and Bluesky @citationspod, Facebook Citations Needed, and become a supporter of the show through Patreon.com/CitationsNeededPodcast. We are 100% listener funded, so all of your support is so incredibly appreciated, but that will do it for this News Brief. We hope everyone is enjoying their summer. We will be back to you very, very soon, but until then, thanks for listening. I’m Nima Shirazi.
Adam: I’m Adam Johnson.
Nima: Citations Needed’s senior producer is Florence Barrau-Adams. Our producer is Julianne Tveten. Production assistant is Trendel Lightburn. The newsletter is by Marco Cartolano. The music is by Grandaddy. Thanks again, everyone, for listening. We’ll catch you next time.
[Music]
This Citations Needed News Brief was released on Wednesday, August 27, 2025.
