Good morning. It is August 18th. It is a cloudy and cool morning in New York City, a blessed relief from the sweaty weekend. And this is your Indignity Morning Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. 

Calling this news may be stretching it, but people are waking up this morning to find a piece from Barry Weiss's Free Press making the case-by-case argument that children who have been featured in news coverage of starvation in Gaza are in many cases starving because they have medical conditions that are going untreated in a medical system left in a state of near collapse by Israel's unending ravaging of civilian infrastructure throughout Gaza. The ideological commitments of the Free Press have led it to believe that this is a point in favor of Israel's conduct of the war. At one point, the story argues that coverage of a starving 14-year-old boy didn't mention that last May he sustained a traumatic head injury amid what SHMS news agency, a Gaza-based outlet, called an Israeli shell explosion. “‘My son was injured in the head,’ his mother explained. Part of his skull was removed.”

“Sustained a traumatic head injury amid an Israeli shell explosion” is a fairly convoluted way of saying that Israeli forces shot a 14 year old boy with an artillery shell. And now the Free Press reports that he is completely paralyzed, so it only makes sense that he would be malnourished if you accept the premise that getting adequate nutrition to paralyzed children is an impossible challenge, rather than something doctors routinely do all over the place, or wherever there is an adequate ordinary supply of food and medical equipment and the hospitals aren't being bombed. 

Meanwhile, yesterday, hundreds of thousands of protesters filled the streets of Tel Aviv in a mass demonstration demanding the Israeli government seek a ceasefire and the return of remaining Hamas hostages in lieu of open-ended all-out war.

On the front of this morning's New York Times, most of the top of the page is taken up by a picture of children at the edge of a vast tent city in Gaza City. The caption is “Displaced children last week in Gaza City. One girl said she played with wet sand, shaping it into imaginary meals. She usually eats one meal a day, her parents said.” She usually eats one meal a day, her parents said. 

The headline below that is, “In Gaza, the Joys of Childhood Dissolve Into Indelible Trauma / No School, Scarce Toys and Constant Dread as the War Rages.” The story begins, “to numb the traumas of wartime Gaza, Rama Abu Abed, 12, plays a game with her friends. They ask one another, what did you eat before the war? What did your home look like before the war? What would you wear if you had new clothes? For Rama, who recounted these details in an interview alongside her mother, Heba, the answers are often less soothing than tragic. She hasn't eaten meat in months, her parents said. Her home in southern Gaza has been flattened, satellite imagery shows. Her clothes are mostly under the rubble. The beach, where her parents occasionally took her as a treat before the war, has become her full-time home.” The story goes on to say “after 22 months of war, childhood in Gaza hardly exists. There are about 1.1 million children in the territory, and nearly all require mental health or psychosocial support according to research by the United Nations. Most of them have been out of school for nearly two years. After Israel's 11-week blockade on food this year, all children younger than five are at risk of acute malnutrition, the UN said.” The story goes on to say that “18,000 Palestinians under the age of 18 have been killed, and about two-thirds of them did not reach their teenage years,” the Times writes. That distribution would mean that despite Israel's ongoing claims, that it's targeting dangerous militants and that some of those juveniles are dangerous Hamas fighters. The distribution of deaths is not skewed toward teenagers, since teenagers by definition make up about a third of the possible ages under 18. Although it's possible more teenagers are getting killed, and that's counterbalanced by disproportionate infant mortality at the other end of the age pool. 

The lead news column on the top left of the front page is “EUROPE’S LEADERS TO JOIN ZELENSKY IN VISITING TRUMP / A DISPLAY OF UNITY / Coordinating to Smooth Relations and Press for a Cease-Fire.” Leaders of Britain, Finland, Germany, Italy, NATO, and the executive arm of the EU all planned to attend to attempt to offset Friday's Trump-Putin summit in Alaska.

“The meeting,” the Times writes, “will come three days after talks in Alaska between Mr. Trump and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia ended inconclusively, but fueled concerns in Europe that Mr. Trump's thinking may have tilted toward Russia's position.” 

“Thinking” is a generous word, but, the Times continues, “after their summit, Mr. Trump sided with the Russian president in calling for a direct peace agreement that would quite likely see Ukraine cede unconquered territory to Russia rather than securing a ceasefire first. Negotiations instead of a ceasefire would give Russia time to exploit its battlefield advantage to seize territory before front lines are settled.” 

Adjacent to that are two other stories about the deteriorating diplomatic situation. “To Fleeing Ukrainians, Summit Felt Like a Slap /  Anger That Land Long
Theirs May Be Given to Russia for Peace.” 

And then below that, “For Europe, Deeper Concern Is Keeping the U.S. on NATO’s Side.”

“By most accounts,” the Times writes, “the European officials want to ensure that Mr. Trump has not pivoted too close to the Russian side and does not try to strongarm President Vladimir Zelensky into a deal that will ultimately sow the seeds of Ukraine's dissolution. And they want to safeguard against the risk of the United States, the linchpin of European security since NATO's creation in 1949, undermining that interest.” It's a little late to do anything about him undermining it, but they're really more trying to stop him from caving it in. 

And down at the bottom left of the page is a domestic NEWS ANALYSIS piece. “Scorn or Redeem Criminals? For Trump, That Depends.” 

“As President Trump made the case for militarizing the streets of Washington,” the Times writes, “he used pictures of homegrown terrorists to illustrate his point that crime in the nation's capital was out of control. ‘Look at these people here,’ Mr. Trump said at a news conference last week flipping through a handout from the White House containing five mugshots, all people of color. ‘They will never be an asset to society,’ he said. ‘I don't care. I know we all want to say, they're going to be rehabbed. They're not going to be rehabbed.’” The declaration, the story continues, “provided a window into the president's selective view of criminality and redemption. In his eyes, Capitol rioters, a triple murderer, two police officers involved in covering up the killing of a black man, and an Israeli settler accused of extremist violence, all deserve a second chance. But the people accused of crimes in Washington are irredeemable.” Accurate, and it treats the president's behavior as an expression of his beliefs. It continues, “Mr. Trump, himself a felon, has shown particular leniency to criminals he seems to identify with, people who are white or wealthy or who he believes have been unfairly persecuted or who rioted in his name on January 6th, 2021.” Not bad. Straightforward and factual.

There's a brief lapse into New York Times-ese a little bit later when the piece writes, “in his second term, Mr. Trump has seized on racial tensions to further his longstanding view that cities are hopelessly dirty, violent and menaced by criminals.” Where were these racial tensions lying around for him to seize on them? Seems more like straightforward racist animosity. And it seems like he seized it by just reaching right into his own heart. 

Facing the jump of that story, the Times dedicates almost an entire page to going to Southeast DC to document how the people there who do have to worry about crime easily and straightforwardly recognized that Donald Trump's deployment of federal agents and troops to Washington DC has absolutely nothing to do with protecting them or improving their neighborhood. It's a nice reported antidote to the pundit pieces that cropped up in response to Trump's attempted military takeover of the city, arguing that liberals and Democrats disparaged his crime-fighting ambitions at their own peril, because crime is, after all, a genuine problem. But when the solution to a problem is self-evidently fake, it doesn't help things to ask people to imagine what it wasn't. The facts are the facts. Stick to the facts. 

That's the news. Thank you for listening. The Indignity Morning Podcast is edited by Joe MacLeod. The theme song is composed and performed by Mack Scocca-Ho. You, the listeners, keep us going through your paid subscriptions to Indignity and your tips. Continue sending those along if you are able. And if nothing unexpected gets in the way, or if certain expected things don't get in the way as much as they potentially might, we will talk again tomorrow or else on Wednesday.