Blindeye To Genocide - September 29, 2026

Cenk Uygur (0:00)

Well, hello.

Well, hello, The Young Turks, Cenk Uygur, Ana Kasparian with you guys. Lots of news today, of course, as usual. So Trump's in a lot of trouble, Republicans are in trouble. We're all in trouble, AI's in trouble, the markets are in trouble. You might be in trouble, that suit is too big on you, you might be in trouble. You might be in trouble, you might be in trouble.

Ana Kasparian (0:27)

You might be in trouble, you might be in trouble, that suit is too big on you, Uygur.

Cenk Uygur (0:31)

God, who doesn't love to hear that?

Ana Kasparian (0:32)

You're swimming in it, it's ridiculous, come on.

Cenk Uygur (0:35)

My God, thank you for making my day. Okay. All right, but we got an important interview for you guys to start with.

Ana Kasparian (0:40)

We sure do.

Well, much has been made about the Trump administration's handling of Gaza, which has been atrocious at best. However, Biden created or allowed for a situation to fester. And with the Democrats losing the last presidential election, as you can imagine, that paved the way for Trump to handle Gaza as he pleases, which has been even more genocidal and disgusting. But I think it's important to go back and remember what the Biden administration did. And luckily, joining us today is Akbar Shahid Ahmed, who is a diplomatic correspondent over at The Washington Sun. And also, the author of a book that I'm sure you guys have heard a lot about lately. It's titled Crossing The Red Line, Biden, His Advisors, and Israel's War in Gaza. Akbar, thank you so much for joining us.

Akbar Shahid Ahmed (1:30)

Thank you both for having me.

Ana Kasparian (1:32)

Well, let me just start off by telling you that this is a book that I started reading today. I'm almost done with it because I can't put it down. It is infuriating to say the least and getting this inside look into the internal discussions taking place with the Biden administration as it pertains to genocide in Gaza is eye opening. That's for sure.

And I'm pretty furious about this. So I want to start off by asking you to discuss with our audience the pure disdain Joe Biden had for the Palestinian people and how he reacted to reports of civilian casualties. Including by the way, on October 31st, 2023, a single Israeli strike killed 126 civilians in the Jabalia refugee camp. And by the way, 23 of those victims happened to be children. They used a 2,000 pound bomb supplied by the United States to do this. How did Biden react to these stories, these cases of mass civilian casualties?

Akbar Shahid Ahmed (2:37)

I used almost 175 infuse with people in the administration, people close to the administration, intelligence, diplomatic, humanitarian, to try to answer these questions of what did President Biden know? How did he react? And it's important to remember that while he was, as we now know, in quite serious cognitive decline by that point, on Gaza, he was deeply, deeply involved in the policy. What we know about Biden's approach can be summed up by the fact that he claimed to have seen repeatedly 40 beheaded babies on October 7th after the Hamas-led attacks. That was never proven, US intelligence in fact said that was not the case. I asked President Biden's spokesperson as recently as the summer before we went to press if he wanted to take back that claim, he never did.

In my reporting, I found, for instance, that someone quite high up in the administration, not someone working on Gaza policy, but someone just shocked by it, as so many of us were, went to the president and said, look, I can't stop thinking about these children that are being massacred by American weapons that we are enabling on a daily basis by our taxpayer dollars, to which Biden's immediate response was, yes, all I think about are the Israelis killed on October 7th. So President Biden was consistently pretty dismissive of Palestinian pain, the experience.

And I think that's where we really need, still, there's a lot in my book that reveals kind of the dynamic between Biden and his top advisors. But given how insular the policy making was and how much it was controlled by Biden and those four or five men, we still need answers from those men of how did they take to him these reports of civilian casualties. Jake Sullivan, his national security advisor-

Ana Kasparian (4:19)

A disgrace.

Akbar Shahid Ahmed (4:21)

Said to me that he did take to Biden the argument that American weapons should be halted. But did he take it to Biden saying, hey, this is an important option. And by the way, as our own experts are saying, violations of American and international law are happening all the time.