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Opinion
Doctors Are Trained to Save Lives, Not Count the Dead
We are in absolutely no doubt, both from a medical and societal perspective, that a genocide is exactly what is being perpetrated by Israel in Gaza.
Aug 16, 2025
As medical doctors, we are bound by an oath to do no harm. That oath compels us to speak out and act against the ongoing genocide in Gaza, now in its 22nd month, a genocide marked by deliberate starvation, medical extermination, and mass civilian casualties. And we are equally compelled to expose the failure of institutions and governments who could stop it but have chosen silence and complicity.
We called the organization we founded in November 2023 Doctors Against Genocide (DAG) because despite the debate around the word’s precise legal definition, we are in absolutely no doubt, both from a medical and societal perspective, that a genocide is exactly what is being perpetrated by Israel in Gaza.
We are in touch daily with our medical colleagues in Gaza, like their patients now suffering from starvation themselves and working in almost impossible conditions. Israel routinely cuts or limits access to electricity, putting ICU and other patients at dire risk and forcing surgeons to operate using the flashlights on their phones. Some have fainted during 48-hours shifts. Their patients are lying in corridors or being turned away due to overcrowding. Doctors in Gaza have been deliberately targeted by Israeli forces, abducted, tortured, imprisoned, and even murdered.
Because of the high prevalence of extreme malnutrition, patients who might otherwise recover from wounds and injuries inflicted by Israeli gunfire and bombings fail to survive. Put simply, a starving body cannot heal and a starving mother cannot nurse her child. Yet, Israel has blocked infant formula from entering Gaza, even confiscating it from our international colleagues when they volunteer for medical missions there.
After more than 600 days of atrocities, the prevention of a genocide is no longer possible. But it can still be stopped.
The fuel shortages also drive the water shortages, as pumps that draw up clean water from the depths of the water table are unable to function. This has left the population dependent on lower quality water sources, leading to enterovirus outbreaks.
Now we are seeing outbreaks of meningitis, measles, hepatitis, and polio. These are diseases either eradicated or extremely rare, resurging now due to the intentional denial of food, water, and medicine. Meanwhile, Israel has blocked lifesaving aid, bombed hospitals, and abducted doctors. Our colleague, pediatrician Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, was abducted in December 2024. He has reportedly lost nearly 90 pounds and remains in Israeli custody, tortured, starved, and held without charge.
We have done everything we can. Members of our organization have made countless trips to Capitol Hill, held press conferences, called their senators and representatives and even the White House, all to no avail. We educated our colleagues and our elected officials. We have even faced arrest for demanding “bread not bombs.”
But with each passing day, the bombs continue, and the medical annihilation worsens. Only 27 U.S. senators voted last month to stop a shipment of 20,000 assault rifles to Israel. Just 24 voted against sending more bombs. Few have even acknowledged this as genocide.
Disgracefully, our major US medical institutions, most notably, the American Medical Association, remain silent, abandoning their ethical obligations and forfeiting moral leadership. We no longer seek change from these bodies.
Because we built strong relationships with trusted local actors, we were able to quickly pivot. In late July, DAG began sending funds directly to aid groups across Gaza to deliver hot meals, fresh produce, clean water, and bread to those in immediate need. Prices are astronomical, but the time for perfect solutions is long gone. People are starving now. We chose to act.
The funds we are sending will help offset the financial strain for local aid groups on the ground who must get food to people now, saving them from having to enter the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation’s brutal distribution points, which have become killing zones.
Among those we’re helping are more than 1,200 people who became newly blind from direct eye injuries during Israeli attacks, and another 4,000 who have lost partial vision. We are also supporting a broader disabled community that cannot reach distant or militarized aid sites.
Our organization is also raising funds to build an urgently needed field hospital on the grounds of the partially ruined Al-Shifa Hospital in northern Gaza, once the largest hospital serving the Palestinian population there. Plans have been drawn up for a 140-bed hospital housed outdoors in sturdy tents, along with two operating theaters, two recovery rooms, and communal space for employees. We know it may be targeted, like all of Gaza’s hospitals. But doing nothing is not an option.
After more than 600 days of atrocities, the prevention of a genocide is no longer possible. But it can still be stopped. One phone call from US President Donald Trump could end it. We urge him to make that call, and we urge our colleagues around the world to act with the urgency this moment demands.
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Dumbing Down America’s Best Idea: National Parks in Free Fall
Each week of the Trump administration, there is another action stripping the National Park System of its intellectual, institutional, and moral core.
Aug 16, 2025
Often been referred to as America’s Best Idea, our National Park System has played a key role over the years in inspiring a global conservation movement.
But consider the plight of the National Park Service (NPS) today, nearly 10 years into its second century since its 1916 founding. Even as it sets new all-time visitation records, no one could claim our national parks are basking in a golden age.
Much has been made of the NPS hemorrhaging staff under Trump 2.0, with an estimated 25% overall workforce reduction just since January. At the same time, daily decisions governing national parks are made by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, a former software executive and South Dakota governor with no park management experience. Despite plummeting staff levels, Burgum has issued orders directing that
- All park units remain open;
- Parks should take steps to maximize visitation and recreational opportunities; and
- Accommodate desires of gateway communities in park operations.
At the same time, Secretary Burgum has “consolidated” most all NPS administrative, human resource, and IT staff to work for all Interior agencies, a move costing NPS another 5,700 employees, approximately one-quarter of its remaining workforce. The disruptive impact of this internal move is now just starting to be felt, and its impact is magnified by new restrictions on park purchasing and contracts.
All of this is taking place without an NPS director, or even a nominee to serve as director. Even its chief deputy director is a career Army officer, with no prior national park experience. In addition, the entire chain-of-command through the secretary is almost completely devoid of any official with any background in national parks.
Meanwhile, most of the NPS regional director slots are vacant, and there are an unknown but large number of empty park superintendent positions. Compounding matters is the decision to shutter the two national park academies, which provide training to current and future NPS leaders in the laws, policies, and practices guiding park management. These shutdowns are major blows to the professionalism of this institution.
Even more profoundly, President Donald Trump’s budget plan proposes to divest as many as 350 of the 433 national park units to state or local governments. Meanwhile, the Trump mega-bill leaves NPS on even shakier fiscal status, while the few park investment proposals are highly questionable at best, and do little to help the park system, such as creating a new “Garden of Heroes,” filled with statuary depicting Americans the Trump administration deem as great.
Meanwhile, edicts issued under Trump and Burgum have gone further, such as demanding that all park interpretative displays be stripped of anything that could be interpreted as “negative” or “disparaging.” These orders have the effect of casting aside such essential notions as historical accuracy and cultural context. They also inject a corrosive politicization into park interpretive displays, lectures, and tours which had been designed to educate rather than merely placate.
The first and indispensable step for renewal will be recruiting a new generation of leaders who truly understand and appreciate the unique role of our national parks.
Compounding all of the above is the eviscerating of park planning, with National Environmental Policy Act requirements for considering long-term impacts and alternatives undergoing radical truncation. Consequently, road building and other development projects within national parks will be harder to stop or moderate regardless of damage to park resources. Moreover, since the scientific specialists within NPS are fast disappearing, there will be little capacity to even assess those impacts.
One example of this scientific retreat is the cessation of air quality monitoring at national parks. Maintaining the air quality of our most pristine places is apparently no longer of value, but it is far from the only scientific research work in our parks grinding to a halt.
In short, the combination of these developments means that our park system is being hollowed out. Each week there is another action stripping the National Park System of its intellectual, institutional, and moral core. The damage done in the past few months is both dramatic and cumulative, in many cases building on a slow degradation over the past 30 years. It will not be easily or quickly reversed.
Nor has the system touched bottom yet, as the impact of several of these moves has yet to be full felt. This descent will be long and painful with a turnaround not yet on the horizon.
The first and indispensable step for renewal will be recruiting a new generation of leaders who truly understand and appreciate the unique role of our national parks. They will have to rededicate our park system to an ethic of public enjoyment that also safeguards conservation of these resources for the balance of national parks’ second century. It cannot happen soon enough.
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Standing Up to Trump’s Un-American Nightmare
MAGA has given us a government that turns its back on democracy, and an economy that proactively prevents millions of people from meeting their basic needs.
Aug 16, 2025
The first weekend in August, the neo-Nazi group Blood Tribe showed up in Concord, New Hampshire to intimidate us in front of our capitol. They chased families out of the park, barked hate into a megaphone, and conducted an organized and choreographed march, complete with Nazi flags and repugnant chants.
I am Jewish, for the record. I have a family portrait on my wall, and two of the people in it died in the camps. I’m also disabled. I was once an able-bodied EMT, and even a state legislator. But I got sick. And like far too many in chronic pain, I now spend my days fighting for the healthcare I need, while greedy insurance company CEOs and the corrupt politicians they’ve bought and paid for live high on the hog.
I’m not afraid of Nazis. You can punch a Nazi in the mouth. But I am afraid of Nazi policies. The idea of a “master race” is antithetical to American values. Yet, eugenics are increasingly popular. The same tech bro billionaires who bankrolled Donald Trump’s presidency and the MAGA majorities in the House and Senate are paying to gene-edit babies to make them “smarter,” and “athletically better.” American Eagle’s advertising campaign with Sydney Sweeney, and Dunkin’s advertising campaign with Gavin Casalegno reference genetics to put neurotypical, white, Christian actors on pedestal. This, in a time when Trump’s border czar admits that Immigration and Customs Enforcement detains people based on “physical appearance,” and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has called for data registries of autistic Americans, doing away with vaccines he claims cause neurodiversity, and firing anyone who isn’t willing to toe the line. This is the same RFK Jr. who made antisemitic claims about Covid-19 immunity, and stated vaccine mandates were worse than Anne Frank’s persecution.
These ideas are dangerous, not because they feed outrage algorithms on social media, but because they seek to remove millions of people from our democracy and replace economic mobility with a caste system void of economic opportunity. The Constitution’s preamble reads, “We the People” because our Founders knew that G-d given rights preceded citizenship in any nation. These words were written before our own Constitution’s ratification. America is America because Americans sought to make a living as workers and entrepreneurs before we had a federal government. We were promised life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness before the American Revolution was won. And that has remained the promise of the American Dream ever since. There have never been any asterisks applied. And every past effort to deny someone the rewards of their work because of race, gender, ability, nationality, or religion has been met with resistance, because ours is a country that believes effort, not pedigree, should be rewarded.
Or at least we did until Trump.
The right to petition our government for grievances has been replaced with a version of democratic governance that mirrors the frustrations of automated touch-tone customer service and the unhelpfulness of scripted chatbots.
After passing his “Big Bill” to gut Medicaid, Medicare, and more to give tax cuts to billionaires and corporations, Trump called for a 2025 census that only counts the people he wishes to be counted, days after signing an executive order to lock up anyone experiencing homelessness. And in so doing he is overtly telling us that noncitizens and those experiencing hardship have no claim to the American Dream. Imagine saying that to people who fled their countries of birth like Albert Einstein, Desi Arnaz, Gloria Estefan, and Madeline Albright. Imagine saying that to Suze Orman, Halle Berry, James Cameron, or Jim Carrey, who once lived in their cars. Again, as you begin to add in the layers of genetic modification, and the further expansion of economic inequality through a trillion dollar AI arms race that is hyperfocused on eliminating middle class and working class jobs, and you are left with an unmistakable picture of an unrecognizable America. One in which class mobility exists only in fables. And the right to petition our government for grievances has been replaced with a version of democratic governance that mirrors the frustrations of automated touch-tone customer service and the unhelpfulness of scripted chatbots designed to increase your frustration level, so you just give up.
Everyone deserves to earn a living wage working one job instead of three. We deserve affordable childcare and education for our kids without mountains of debt. We deserve comprehensive healthcare from the day we’re born to the day we die. We deserve a planet that is living and breathing for generations to come. And we deserve a retirement with security and dignity. Anyone who says that we cannot afford this vision of America is lying. Our country is not suffering from scarcity. We are suffering from greed. There’s plenty to go around to make sure that every American can thrive, not just survive if the billionaires and corporations don’t steal it.
The call to Make America Great Again has been fundamentally un-American. It has given us a government that turns its back on democracy. And an economy that proactively prevents millions of people from meeting their basic needs. It’s time to reject every un-American thing Trump and MAGA are doing. No more eugenics. No more denying anyone the promise of the American Dream because of where they were born or the circumstances they live in. No more billionaires and corporations that don’t pay taxes. No more politicians who don’t understand that they work for us, regardless of whether we can or did vote for them. Because in this country, we stand up to bullies, we punch Nazis, and we don’t care where you’re from or what you have, as long as you’re willing to roll up your sleeves.
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Trump—With Media's Help—Is Creating American Conditions for 'Good Germans'
In both 1940s Germany and today’s America, the effect is similar: the public is shielded from the human scale of state-led actions against targeted groups, making it easier for those policies to continue without mass pushback.
Aug 16, 2025
We’re all familiar with Trump’s famous deportation flights of Venezuelans and Kilmar Abrego Garcia to a concentration camp in El Salvador in violation of a court’s order.
But did you know there have been over 1,000 such flights in the past few months, some to absolute hellhole countries?
On top of that, the Washington Post reports this morning that ICE is planning to open or expand 125 new “detention facilities” across the country, including ones to hold families, giving America the largest prison system in the world. The paper notes:
“The documents outline the strategy behind ICE’s breakneck expansion, a chaotic effort that has already triggered lawsuits and accusations of cruelty.”
Are Americans being conditioned by our media to become “Good Germans”?
For several decades I did international relief work for a nonprofit based in Germany; my family and I even lived at the organization’s headquarters in Stadtsteinach for much of 1986/1987. One of my closest co-workers and mentors was a man 25 years my senior, Horst Von Heyer, who’d been a teenage member of the Hitler Youth when WWII ended.
I started working with Horst in the late 1970s after his assistant was eaten by a crocodile in southern Africa; for example, we went into Uganda together to deal with the post-Idi Amin 1980 famine and set up a program for orphaned kids that continues to this day. When we lived in Germany, Horst and I used to have lunch together nearly every day when we were both in town; he became one of my closest friends (he’s now passed away).
So, of course, I asked him how Germans (and him, as a teenager) could possibly have been okay with the Nazis rounding up millions of Jews and other “undesirables” to ship via boxcars to the death camps.
His answer was frankly shocking in its simplicity:
“We didn’t know.”
The concentration camps within Germany were, he explained, for “the worst of the worst” criminals and “traitors” who’d tried to overthrow the country. The Republican Great Depression and the chaos that followed World War I, he told me, had created a massive problem of street crime and homeless people, so most middle-class Germans, feeling unsafe, enthusiastically supported Hitler’s “law and order” agenda.
Those “innocent” Jews, Gypsies, and others removed from local areas were being moved, Horst said he was told, because their residences were slated to be part of what we’d call “urban renewal” efforts. They were simply being resettled, and it would end up better for them and the communities they were leaving.
“I remember how shocked we all were when the pictures came out from the Polish death camps like Auschwitz at the end of the war,” he told me. “You Americans and the rest of the world were shocked, too. Hitler’s men and the German media had done a really good job of keeping it all under wraps.”
In that, I discovered by reading Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and other research, Horst was right.
By the end of 1933, Hitler had largely neutered Germany’s free press; not by market competition, but by bankrupting writers and outlets with libel lawsuits, unleashing police raids for “slander” claims, vigilante “Brownshirt” militia violence against reporters, arrests of publishers for “publishing anti-German propaganda,” the outright seizure of progressive newspapers, and a sweeping Schriftleitergesetz “Editor’s Law” which criminalized journalism that exposed government excesses.
Nazi loyalists and party-friendly oligarchs took over the press outlets that remained in a massive media consolidation project, ensuring that every headline and every radio news report served the regime much like Fox “News” and rightwing hate-radio/podcasts do today for Trump.
When stories were published about Jews and others being transported, they were couched in euphemisms such as Umsiedlung (“resettlement”) or Evakuierung (“evacuation”) and Arbeitseinsatz (“labor deployment”) in official communications, press coverage, and public speeches.
These terms fit neatly into propaganda narratives about “urban renewal,” war-effort labor needs, or “population transfers” from “overcrowded” and “crime-ridden” cities. There were literally no public reports in Germany about mass killings or illegal detentions between 1934 and the end of the war in 1945.
Today in the U.S., the lack of coverage of Trump’s brutal treatment of immigrants, lack of due process, and hundreds of monthly deportation flights to hellhole countries or foreign concentration camps isn’t due to a Schriftleitergesetz legal ban but rather to billionaire owners sucking up to Trump, partisan political framing, and the media’s tendency to underplay ongoing, systemic human rights abuses once they’ve been normalized.
We saw something like this in the early days of the Iraq war when the Bush administration tried to normalize and justify the black sites, torture, and murders that were later exposed to the horror of Americans and the world.
In both 1940s Germany and today’s America, the effect is similar: the public is shielded from the human scale of state-led actions against targeted groups, making it easier for those policies to continue without mass pushback.
In the first week of Trump’s second term, 7,300 people were put on military flights and deported from the US. The numbers have only grown since then, with virtually no oversight and little by way of due process. Since he took power, over 100 immigration judges (about 15%) have been fired nationwide; as Chicago’s former Assistant Chief Immigration Judge Jennifer Peyton noted. She added:
“Since January 2025, the immigration courts under EOIR are no longer honoring or offering due process like they did when I was appointed. The court system has been systematically and intentionally destroyed, defunded, and politicized by this administration. I don't know why this has happened, but I fear for our country and for justice.”
Meanwhile, American media has engaged in a 1940s-German-like scheme to downplay the horrors of these disappearances.
When I heard a guest on CNN Wednesday night mention in passing that there’d been over 1,000 deportation flights in recent months, I was shocked. Why didn’t I know?
Every day I read at least a dozen different news outlets and am a voracious consumer of cable news. Yet, like most Americans, I thought deportation flights to foreign horror chambers were the exception — like with Abrego Garcia — rather than the rule. After all, the Biden administration was also running deportation flights; the difference is that they only happened after due process had been granted the deportees, and they were never sent to foreign concentration camps or dumped in hellholes like South Sudan.
In 1944, as questions were being raised by stories leaking into the foreign press about the boxcars of people traversing the countryside, the Hitler administration produced a slick PR effort around a concentration camp in Theresienstadt, Czechoslovakia. It served as a way-stop on the routes to the death camps, but Goebbels had the barracks painted, gardens planted, and the grounds beautified.
He then organized “social and cultural events for the visiting dignitaries” and the press, and made a documentary film of their one-day visit with the simple title Theresienstadt that played in theaters across Germany.
The international press bought it hook, line, and sinker, reporting to the world that the Nazi detention camps weren’t all that bad and were just part of rebuilding and cleaning up Germany after WWI and the Great Depression.
Which raises the question: How long will it be before we start seeing films and made-for-TV events with Noem or Bondi telling us how “humane” the new private, for-profit “detention centers” are that are being built by Trump’s donors and cronies?
I give them about a month to get their propaganda routine together. In the meantime, they seem to be doing everything they can to make sure we don’t really know the full scope and brutality of their efforts to push Brown and Black people out of the United States.
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