Description
We hear from Dr. Thaer Ahmad, a Palestinian American doctor who spent time in Gaza trying to administer to a civilian population under relentless siege. Plus, Constitutional scholar, Bruce Fein, takes apart the Supreme Court’s decision to grant the president of the United States the powers of a king.
Dr. Thaer Ahmad is a Palestinian-American emergency physician who has made numerous relief trips to Gaza. Dr. Ahmad is Assistant Program Director for the Emergency Medicine Residency Program at Chicago’s Advocate Christ Medical Center. He also serves as the Global Health Director and Medical Ethics Director for the Emergency Department at Advocate Christ. Dr. Ahmad is a Clinical Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a board member for MedGlobal, a medical humanitarian NGO that works at building healthcare capacity and reducing health inequities globally.
I don't think [Palestinian healthcare workers] get enough credit for what they've had to deal with over these last several months… These doctors are also displaced. Their families are displaced. They are living out of tents and they are showing up every day at the hospital to treat the community that's there. They've not been paid—the health ministry collapsed—they have no money. They're totally dependent on the scarce aid that gets in. These doctors are showing up to work when they should be in line at the bakeries that are producing some of the bread—where they should be in line collecting some of the aid that's being distributed. But they're showing up.
Dr. Thaer Ahmad
I work with MedGlobal. They're doing fantastic work on the ground. They're in Gaza—more than 110 physicians and nurses who are Gazans are running medical points throughout the Gaza Strip. They have a malnutrition center that they're also using to help with the starvation that we were talking about. So I think that that's an excellent organization to contribute to—medglobal.org .
Dr. Thaer Ahmad
Bruce Fein is a Constitutional scholar and an expert on international law. Mr. Fein was Associate Deputy Attorney General under Ronald Reagan and he is the author of Constitutional Peril: The Life and Death Struggle for Our Constitution and Democracy, and American Empire: Before the Fall.
[On Trump v. United States]: The court gave nothing more than the equivalent of, “We know when it's not immune when we see it, but otherwise you try to guess what that's going to be.”
Bruce Fein
It's a judicial counter-revolution. It's a violation because it basically turns the Constitution into a scrap of paper—it means whatever the Justices want it to mean. It doesn't have to find even a single word in the Constitution to justify the opinion.
Bruce Fein
It's really a judicial coup d'etat that occurred on July 1, 2024. It's hard to fathom the belief that these six judges think they're going to get away with it. There is going to be all kinds of damage to all kinds of people—regardless of their political labels—and there's going to be a big pushback. Do they think they're going to get away with it? These unelected, lifetime-position judges?
Ralph Nader
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In Case You Haven’t Heard with Francesco DeSantis
1. Haaretz reports that in the immediate wake of the October 7th attack, the Israeli Defense Forces implemented the ominously named “Hannibal directive” which “directs the use of force to prevent soldiers being taken into captivity.” In other words, the explicit order of the Israeli military was for Israelis to kill Israeli soldiers to prevent them from being taken hostage by Hamas, in order to deny the group leverage in negotiations. As Haaretz reports, this directive also put civilian lives at risk. The Hannibal Directive had been a secretive but official Israeli policy since the 1986 capture of three soldiers by Hezbollah in Lebanon, but was formally revoked in 2016.
2. Lancet, the prestigious British medical journal, has published a study estimating
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