[111] Extremist.

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*For the audio version, scroll to the bottom of this post.
Last Tuesday, Lindsay and I traveled back to Michigan. It was election night. I watched CNN on our second flight of the day, from Denver to Detroit.
I only watch CNN on election nights.
The producers of CNN turn politics into a sporting event.  They provide perspectives from "both sides." As if there are only two sides.
CNN pundits are charismatic and they have “takes” - which might be what they actually believe, but it might not be. Because the point of these shows is to turn the substance of the debate into sound bites and clips for social media click-bait.
CNN is not serious journalism. It is entertainment - and propaganda.
CNN is a corporation. It produces profit. It runs on ratings. It caters to the red-blue culture war that was created by corporate elites. The primary role of CNN is to protect the agendas of the wealthy and powerful.
CNN is, in fact, a right-wing institution. Because the debates it facilitates are regulated by default assumptions animated by neoliberal capitalism, the goodness and innocence of America, and allegiance to Israel.
These ideologies have always worked against the interests of the poor and working class – and those who do not live in the West. In other words, they do not protect most people on the planet.
From the perspective of the poor and working class and non-Western people, the continuation of a profit-driven healthcare system is extremist.
So is the huge Pentagon budget and the American military perpetually invading sovereign countries.
So are ICE detention centers and private prisons and the militarization of police.
So is the promulgation of Israel’s “right to defend itself” from an occupied population enduring a century-long genocide.
It is extremely rare to hear hosts and guests on CNN confront any of this conventional wisdom. The political debates on CNN are confined. Like cage matches.
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The producers of CNN weaponize identity to do their dirty work. They hire Black folks and other people of color to promote their corporate-sponsored agenda.
There is a limit, however, to CNN's diversity. During the two hours that I watched CNN on election night on a flight from Denver to Detroit, not a single host, guest or panelist was Muslim, Arab or Palestinian.
On election night, CNN ran a segment where Rep. Ro Khanna debated Van Jones on the Senate race between Abdul El-Sayed and Haley Stevens. Rep Khanna is an Indian-American Congressman from California who once worked for the Obama Administration. He endorsed Abdul in this race.
When the subject of Israel and AIPAC came up, Ro Khanna made sure that he condemned Hamas before he talked about defunding Israel.
Ro Khanna plays by the rules of the u.s. establishment. He knows that anyone who criticizes Israel about anything, must first condemn Hamas and call October 7 a "terrorist attack."
A couple weeks ago, in an interview with a non-corporate media outlet called Drop Site News, Ro Khanna got raked over the coals by journalist Jeremy Scahill. Because Ro Khanna refused to admit that Palestinians have the right to armed resistance against their occupier under international law.
Ro Khanna made it clear, however, that he believed that Israel did have the right to respond violently after October 7 - but that Israel just took it too far.
Ro Khanna turned the question about rights under international law into a question about tactics and strategy. He said that he is on the side of Gandhi and MLK. He said he believed in nonviolence. Because it's the only thing that works.
There is a reason that Ro Khanna did not answer the actual question.
Because the only correct answer to the actual question is that Palestinians do have the right to armed resistance under international law. The correct answer is crucial because it clarifies who the occupier is - and who is actually being occupied.
If you don’t clarify who is occupying who, then you can turn October 7 into a terrorist attack that just came out of nowhere. You can turn Palestinians into monsters who just want to wipe Jewish people off the planet. You can turn the occupier into the victim.
This non-clarification has played out, over and over again, on every single corporate-sponsored media outlet since October 7. This is how CNN, MSNBC, Fox, The New York Times, The Atlantic and many others have manufactured consent for this ongoing genocide.
Over the past thirty-four months, a lot of wealthy elites have profited from this ongoing genocide. Just as they have profited from the occupation of Palestinians for decades.
Van Jones, the Black man who CNN propped up to represent Haley Stevens in the debate against Ro Khanna, talked about how he’s been spending a lot of his time talking to young voters in Michigan. Jones said that young voters supporting Stevens are afraid of Abdul. Because he supports a total arms embargo on Israel.
Van Jones said that “Israel might have overreacted to October 7,” but if Israel does not have an Iron Dome defense system, then “it’s open season on Israeli children.”
Pundits like Van Jones do their dirtiest work with asides like these - asides that hosts let slide. As if they somehow align with truth, love, moral logic and international law.
Holocausts and genocides are justified by letting these asides slide.
I do not know how much Van Jones is getting paid to say these sorts of things, but on CNN, he is portrayed as a moderate voice of reason. However, from the perspective of most of the people on the planet, his anti-Palestinian asides are nothing short of “extremist.”
The brutal irony is that, on election night, CNN hosts and pundits used adjectives like “brash” and “combative” and “extremist” to describe Abdul El-Sayed. They also minimized the role that Palestine has been playing in the primaries.
On election night, more than one pundit dismissively characterized those who care about Palestine as “single-issue voters.” As if Palestine is not one critical piece of a whole platform that demands liberation for all people.
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On the day after the election in Michigan, Dr. Suleiman Hani posted a compelling six-point analysis on the outcome. This is an excerpt:
In a period when voters assume as a baseline that every politician has a price, not having one is itself a platform. The genocide in Gaza is a present moral emergency, a litmus test for many American politicians, and it belongs at the center of our politics if some politicians are being funded to facilitate it; the reason it moved votes in Michigan is that it had become a legible test of whether anyone in public life still means what he says.
Abdul is not a perfect candidate. But he does pass what has become - for many voters on the left - the moral litmus test for public office. Palestine is, in fact, not a single issue. It is the single issue in a candidate's platform that signals everything else they will stand for - and stand against.
Because whoever funds you runs you.
Dr. Suleiman Hani is a resident scholar at the University of Michigan and the director of the largest English-speaking Islamic seminary in the world. I first encountered him at a University of Michigan conference in the Spring that was called “Islamophobia After Gaza.”
At the one-day event, Dr. Hani presented some of his research and experience at Harvard.
He said that gauging Islamophobia on university campuses is not just about which students are being protected, but which students are given power and a platform.
He said that, on campuses, the groups committed to equity all fell apart after October 7. Because they could not extend human rights to Muslims and Palestinians.
He said that their façade of objectivity crumbled.
He said that at Harvard, where he did his graduate studies, they created a taskforce, and facilitated mandatory trainings on antisemitism, and gave Muslims a prayer space in one of the buildings.
He said that Harvard also shut down its Peace and Conflict Studies program and had zero tolerance for any students who publicly demanded that the university divest from corporations profiting from the genocide in Gaza.
Everything Dr. Suleiman Hani said on that day in Ann Arbor, Michigan made sense. But none of his work will ever be reported on CNN.
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On election night, after our flight landed in Detroit, we Ubered back to our condo. Kareem picked us up at the airport in his Dodge Durango. When we got in, we thanked him and told him that we were waiting to hear good news about Abdul El-Sayed.
He did not seem to know what the hell we were talking about.
In broken English, Kareem explained that his English is not so good. He told us that he is a lawyer who grew up in Jordan and came to the u.s. with his family a decade ago.
Kareem spoke fast, in broken English, waving his hands, showing us photos of his wife and kids on his phone, as he weaved through a maze of I-94 construction.
Kareem told us that his wife died four months ago.
In broken English, waving his hands, he said one night she felt sick, and went to sleep early, and the next morning, when he came in to wake her, she was not breathing.
It was heart-breaking.
Kareem did not tell us why he immigrated to America. Perhaps the reason is so obvious that it did not need to be explained.
This year, Israel cut Jordan’s water supply in half because Jordan’s government criticized Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
This week, Jordan hosted an emergency meeting of ministers from Arab and Muslim countries because Israeli settlers have been attacking the al-Aqsa mosque and Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. Muslims have serious concerns that settler extremism will continue to ramp up this Fall during the Israeli election and the major Jewish holidays.
More than half of Jordan’s population is already made up of Palestinian refugees. Many more Palestinians will be pushed into Jordan as Israeli settlers seek to uproot them out of the West Bank in the coming months.
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By the time Kareem got us home, only about half the votes had been counted. Four hours after the polls had closed in Detroit, Abdul was clinging to a one-percent lead.
I kept refreshing CNN to get updates. It wasn’t helping the votes get counted faster.
When I woke up the next morning, CNN and most other corporate media outlets said that the race was still too close to call. A couple hours later, Abdul El-Sayed was declared the winner.
Six outside groups spent $62 million on Haley Stevens. The biggest was AIPAC, which spent $32 million.
One of the panelists on CNN claimed that criticizing AIPAC money is antisemitic. He said, as an aside, that AIPAC is funded by Jewish-Americans.
No one on CNN called him out for ridiculously oversimplifying the situation, or for using this aside to conflate Jewish-Americans with support for a genocide - which sounds awfully antisemitic.
Haley Stevens had a nine-to-one spending advantage over Abdul – and she lost.
What happened?
Dr. Hani says that on-the-ground organizing was crucial. Every constituency in Abdul’s coalition mattered: autoworkers, nurses, Black Detroit, young voters, Jewish organizers working within their tradition, and Muslim voters in Dearborn and Hamtramck and Canton and Sterling Heights.
Can Abdul El-Sayed actually beat the Republican in November?
He most definitely can. Because he’s got a diverse coalition of constituencies that will be far more energized than what we saw in Michigan in 2024, when these same constituencies felt lukewarm about the corporate Democratic Presidential candidate's commitment to Israel, ICE, a paltry minimum wage and privatized health insurance.
A lot of folks want to know if Michigan’s many liberal Zionists – especially Jewish folks – will vote for Abdul in November. On the day after the election, our dear friend and comrade Rabbi Alana Alpert published an op-ed appealing to this constituency.
Alana is the rabbi at T’chiyah in the Detroit suburbs just north of 8 Mile. It is a liberal synagogue with Zionist and anti-Zionist members. In her piece, Alana quoted the prophet Zechariah and the wisdom of Pirkei Avot to compel liberal Zionists that Abdul El-Sayed shares their same core values: justice, truth and peace.
Rabbi Alana summarized the implications of taking cues from the Hebrew Prophets:
By this measure, the idea that Jews who want unconditional aid for Israel should therefore vote for a candidate who would strip away abortion rights, gut health care, and undermine the basic machinery of democracy is, to use a technical term, cuckoo banana-cakes.
Rabbi Alana confronted the fear and uncertainty stoked by corporate media outlets and dark money PACs by bringing her people back to the roots of their tradition.
No matter what happens in November, Something Else will be possible, if more and more of us commit to justice, truth and peace - no matter how often we are called "extremist."