Sheer Intelligence: Dennis Kucinich on Gaza, Genocide and the Boomerang of War

An interview with my dear friend, famed journalist Robert Sheer, regarding my article 'War Dust and Collateral Inhalation', the Palestinian genocide and war consciousness.

After detailing the devastating toll of the U.S.-backed genocide in Palestine, I joined my long time friend, famed journalist, host Robert Scheer on this episode of Scheer Intelligence to discuss my Kucinich Report articles, specifically honing on War Dust and Collateral Inhalation: Israel Breathes in Gaza’s Dust: A Forensic Study of the Self-Inflicted Consequences of modern warfare, which details the ecological effects of Israel’s relentless bombing campaigns on its close neighbor.

“If someone is close to the dropping of [a 2,000 pound bomb], the human body is vaporized. And in addition to that, the buildings, building materials, concrete, rebar, steel, can also be turned into dust. That dust migrates. The environment, the atmosphere doesn’t really have any boundaries, no geographical boundaries. The wind just takes that right into Israel,” I told Scheer.

“This is strictly Orwellian, the way that right becomes wrong and worse becomes the better reason. And when it comes to standing by and watching a full-blown genocide where you can’t even have an honest body count because people are being vaporized, one must ask, what is the United States about? What is Israel about? What is our moral responsibility to put an end to this violence and to bring those who are responsible for it to justice?”

I emphasized that this war is a self-inflicting wound on Israel and war in general is a lose-lose situation. “When you wage war against someone, you’re actually waging war against yourself… That’s the deeper proposition here. It’s not just philosophical. It’s not just metaphysical. It is a physical fact that when people wage war against a country that is proximate, it is incontrovertible that the treatise of that war is going to be visited to people, not only in the air, but in the water, in the land, on the food.”

I explained how the genocide is a harbinger of darker times that could visit the United States and the world. “If we don’t challenge… the consciousness that created this war and continues it and approves it and sanctions those who oppose it, if we don’t challenge it, we are opening the door for a new epoch as America in which we celebrate the destruction of other people.”

The interview is transcribed below and the video posted above:

Robert Scheer

Hi, this is Robert Scheer with another edition of Scheer Intelligence where the intelligence comes to my guest. In this case, somebody I have known for a very long time, think, although we’ll trace it, but at least a half century, Dennis Kucinich, well known to anybody listening to this, a guy who was a member of Congress for 16 years, he ran for president. He’s been a public intellectual as well as a political person, politician.

But when I first met him, he was described throughout the mass media on TV and what have you as the boy mayor of Cleveland. And I went and interviewed him for the Los Angeles Times. I interviewed him for a Playboy interview, which I think destroyed his chances of reelection for the more conservative community there in Cleveland. I don’t know, being in Playboy, maybe I’m wrong. But he’s no stranger to controversy.

One of the few that has voted against war in the US Congress and even wanted a Department of Peace. But he just published an article on his Substack that I reprinted on ScheerPost that really shows, to my mind, a certain political courage that ought not to require courage to make such a statement. It’s a very strong criticism of Israel’s conduct of this war in Gaza.

I’ll let him summarize the charge of this column. But reading it, I felt like, you know, kryptonite in my hand or something. I feel like, wait a minute, you know, what is the consequence? We live in a time when the U.S. Congress that Dennis used to be a member of has decided that any criticism of Israel is by definition antisemitic.

And even if you’re a traditional Orthodox Jewish person who thinks it was not a secular decision that should bring back Israel. It should be a larger power, an almighty that brings it back. But the fact of the matter is we’re in a very strange, off-with-their-heads attitude to anybody on any college campus, even Harvard, let us say, who dares object to the policies of a government, the state of Israel.

And Dennis’s objection, and this column is very strong, I’ll let him describe it, and then let’s talk about the fear that exists, the legal consequence of daring to challenge, and what this has done to our First Amendment, freedom of the press, freedom of speech. Take it away, Dennis.

Dennis Kucinich

Thanks very much, Bob, for this chance to discuss the article that I’ve posted on Substack and on ScheerPost concerning war dust, concerning the ecological and health effects of war. To begin with, war is ecocide. It always has been. It’s just even more devastating now because of the types of munitions that are being used and the circumstances in which they’re being used.

In the case of Gaza, Israel has dropped a hundred thousand tons of bombs on Gaza on not just buildings but on tents that were supposed to represent safe areas. Now what I did in the article was to go very deeply into the destructive power of each bomb and by the way the bombs in the plane generally come from the United States, so the US doesn’t have by any means any clean hands so were instrumental, in my view, in a genocide.

But what I did, I focused very tightly on the destructive power of these various munitions that come from the US that are being dropped on the people of Gaza. And what happens is, 2,000 pound bombs, for example, if someone is close to the dropping of one, the human body is vaporized. And in addition to that, the buildings, building materials, concrete, rebar, steel, can also be turned into dust. That dust migrates. The environment, the atmosphere doesn’t really have any boundaries, no geographical boundaries. The wind just takes that right into Israel.

It takes the human remains, the DNA, the torn DNA particles, the dust, the metals, the cadmium, nickel, lead, all kinds of chemical metallic substances that are in the bombs themselves. All that drifts. And the point that I made is that Israelis are inhaling this and the health consequences to people in Israel, you know, we know about the consequence to people in Gaza. They’re getting killed and if they survive their health will be physical and mental will be severely damaged forever.

Robert Scheer

They’ve been turned into lethal dust. We’re now not talking about the destruction of human beings, be they two years old or 80 years old, be they men, women, or be they combatants, or they, as with the vast majority, not. We’re talking about, they’re dead for seriously maimed or what have you.

What we’re talking about, what happens, they’ve been turned into lethal dust. And your article pointed out that that then comes to, it’s not just the victim of the bombing, it’s the bomber’s culture, people that are now at risk.

Dennis Kucinich

Right and it cannot be antisemitic to raise concerns about the health effects of war on the people of Israel itself. I mean, I’ve in a previous column that was posted on Substack called “The Cross and the Pieta,” also posted on ScheerPost. I pointed out the effects on the people of Gaza of the war. In this one, I point out the effects of war on the people of Israel, but it goes beyond that because the wind will carry this across the Middle East can, you know, depending on which way the wind blows, hundreds, even thousands of miles.

This raises a bigger question, and that is who, you know, isn’t it time that we started to discuss that ultimately there’s very little separation between the oppressed and the oppressors, between the victims and the aggressors, that they all are part of a residence of a common human sphere, of a common environment.

And when you wage war against someone, you’re actually waging war against yourself. That’s the deeper proposition here. It’s not just philosophical. It’s not just metaphysical. It is a physical fact that when people wage war against a country that is proximate, it is incontrovertible that the treatise of that war is going to be visited to people, not only in the air, but in the water, in the land, on the food.

And so the deeper question I posed in this article, Bob, is why do we even have war? I mean, how, this whole idea challenges the war consciousness. And really what I’m trying to do is open up the discussion about the broader consequences of war on all the participants. On the combatants and non-combatants on people who are thousands of miles away. And this is a discussion certainly that we need to have that was started by somebody like Jonathan Schell years ago when he spoke about nuclear winter and the danger of nuclear war.

So I’m introducing this discussion now. And these are all verifiable facts. I had 23 different citations of scientific studies that I plumbed and in comparisons with 9-11 and Manhattan and with soldiers in the first Gulf War and how they suffered effects from that. We don’t pay enough attention to this. We wage war with such certainty, but then mindlessly avoid any consideration of consequences. And so I’m talking about consequences.

Robert Scheer

Yeah, let me introduce more of your background. You, actually, in Congress during your 16 years, try to get a Department of Peace. We euphemistically call our War Department a Department of Defense. It’s not. It’s a Department generally of aggressive war. Wars on other people and wars basically on civilians. Some, you know, McNamara or Secretary of Defense admitted to US war in Vietnam at an early stage, having killed over three, three and a half million people.

The number probably rose to five million for Indochina. But you try to get a Department of Peace. The mass media never took that seriously. And people even argue whether it should be called a Department of Defense. Why not call it a Department of Offense or so forth? But it’s really at the heart of it a way, it’s propaganda to make it seem like it’s not war on humans, and it is war on humans.

A 2,000 pound bomb, that’s what else is it? It means you can’t have a specific target. You’re gonna kill lots of other people who were ever there in that area.

Dennis Kucinich

They’re being specifically dropped on tents and you know there’s nothing left. People just get…

Robert Scheer

I want to really get to a question, frankly, of courage. How do we stop? How do we discuss this? You are in Congress for six years. It’s not your fault, of course, you’re a rare voice for peace. But the fact of the matter is the U.S. Congress, you can blame the Republican leadership, but the fact of the matter is plenty of Democrats support this. And they actually have taken the position that there is something special about Israel.

And yes, and there’s something special about its claim to be a Jewish state that means that anything they do is by definition antisemitic and defined as a crime. Anything you criticize. And this is such an extreme attack on two points of the Constitution, the freedom of speech, of the press, yes, but also the freedom of religion.

Because after all, you know, and I am a Jewish person. I lost half of my family in Lithuania. That was Jewish. The other half, yes, I’m from a German Protestant family. I have to ask myself, how in the world can Germany now, and Donald Trump, who has all a German background, in the name of stopping the antisemitism that came to our consciousness because of the barbarism of Germany, now destroy the people of Gaza who have no army, no air force, no big mechanization, basically destroying a civilian population.

And if you dare question the value of it, the morality of it, the purpose of it, somehow it gets linked with historic antisemitism of this sophisticated military machine of Nazi Germany against Jews and others. You know, there are after all tens of millions of Slavic people killed and so forth.

I want to ask you about this decision of Congress. And now here’s this president. You know, he doesn’t look back and blame his own ethnic ancestors in Germany. Somehow it’s all visited upon Palestinians and on Palestinian civilians. So I want to ask two prongs to this: a denial of the humanity of anybody who’s a Palestinian, but also a denial of the US responsibility and Israel responsibility.

We’re obviously arming them to not engage in genocide. And you use that word. And if you actually use that word, the president has an off-with-their-heads by definition, you’re an enemy of America, of humanity. You’re antisemitic. There’s something grotesque about this, and I want you to put yourself back in Congress. Why are so few of the people in Congress willing to address this obvious hypocrisy?

Dennis Kucinich

Well, you know, first of all, having served 16 years in Congress, I saw even from the beginning of my career, the great sensitivity for and support of Israel by members of Congress. And, you know, I’d say initially it came from the same historic concern that people worldwide had had about the plight of Jews in World War II who were subject to the Holocaust and who Hitler and his henchmen tried to wipe off the face of the earth.

That is such a graphic and burn into memory cultural awareness that I think everyone who’s alive and particularly those who are older today have that you don’t need much more than the awareness of that to cause you to want to be sympathetic to Israel. So then let’s submit that.

Now let’s go to the next level. We have to understand that every country has its own politics, but the US and Israel have had a rather unique relationship, especially when you go back to the formation of Israel and then you go to how Palestinians were at the very beginning subject to Nakba and getting ejected from the land in order to create space. One must be aware of that history.

As sympathetic as we must be for what Israel experienced at the hands of Hitler in World War II, that sympathy does not in any way create impunity for the government of Israel to impose on the people of Gaza and the West Bank an ethnic cleansing, genocide itself, clearing land, stealing homes, a litany of usurpations and oppression.

Antisemitism itself has been redefined as we know. And then it’s been weaponized to once the effort was made to say that Palestinians are no longer Semitic, I mean how that happens, you know, does violence to epistemology, to history, but it was a political move. Okay, so, Palestinians are no longer Semitic.

Then you start to justify going after the Palestinians because they’re not Semitic anymore. And anything that is done to resist the attack on the Palestinians and on Gazans, antisemitic, ipso facto. Well, not really. I mean, this whole thing is about an inversion of meaning. And if people don’t see it, well, they’ll see it sooner or later.

This is strictly Orwellian, the way that right becomes wrong and worse becomes the better reason. And when it comes to standing by and watching a full-blown genocide where you can’t even have an honest body count because people are being vaporized, one must ask, what is the United States about? What is Israel about? What is our moral responsibility to put an end to this violence and to bring those who are responsible for it to justice?

Robert Scheer

Let me push a little harder on this because first of all, a significant group of people that are losing their jobs, threatened with all sorts of things, are Jewish. There is a considerable amount of criticism among the Jewish community of the world, including, unfortunately, not as many as one had expected from previous experience in Israel itself.

But the fact of the matter is this charge that criticism of the government of Israel by definition is antisemitic deprives Jewish people. This is a point I make that doesn’t seem to register with anybody. It deprives Jewish people of their right to interpret their religion, pursue their religion according to their view and not Donald Trump’s view, the irony here is we actually have to turn to some Christian groups that weren’t very understanding of Jewish rights.

After all, the attack, the pogroms, the killing of six million Jews was largely defended. Yes, there were Christians who opposed it, but in Germany, the Catholic establishment, the Protestant establishment certainly went along with this. And so this irony here of Jews at Columbia University who happen to be students protest what Israel is doing in their name. They can be kicked out of school. They can be arrested. They could lose their status.

And so I don’t understand why freedom of religion does not apply to Jewish people who say, wait a minute, Israel is misinterpreting our view, my view of what it means to be Jewish.

Dennis Kucinich

Well, you know, as I’ve reviewed this, you know, I just want to go back to a fundamental statement here about why I’m involved in this. I’m opposed to war. I see war as a racket. I don’t see war in this modern age as having any instrumentality other than the profits of the people that are selling the weapons and maybe the secondary benefit to those who have a political agenda. You know, I oppose the violence that Hamas visited upon Israel.

I opposed anyone visiting violence on Israel. But I also opposed the violence that had been done to the Palestinians. So let’s go back to, and to people globally. Again, I reject the idea of the necessity of war. Now let’s get into people who are Jews who do oppose what’s happening. They’ll do it on religious reasons. They separate Judaism from Zionism, which if anybody’s aware of the history of Judaism and history of Zionism, it’s not that difficult to do.

But the government of Netanyahu, for political purposes, is of course trying to combine the two for the purposes of shielding some of his own dark interests in ethnic cleansing and in genocide. There is a miasma and a confluence of thinking here that is so destructive and my concern, Bob, is that if we don’t challenge this, not just the war dust, but the consciousness that created this war and continues it and approves it and sanctions those who oppose it, if we don’t challenge it, we are opening the door for a new epoch as America in which we celebrate destruction of other people.

And it’s a very dangerous moment for America. And the suffering of the Palestinians and the Gazans, the people in the West Bank, is a warning to us. And we cannot stand by. We’re participating even as observers. You know, if you think of the Heisenberg principle, everybody’s participating who watches it. But the question is, do you do anything? Do you say anything? Do you challenge this type of thinking, which I see as destructive of all humanity.

We cannot be detached from this. And so the Jews that are coming forward and saying, look, don’t put this on us. We disagree with this approach. I can also understand those in Israel who support the approach because fear has been so driven into a population that people are in a survival mode.

They feel, well, this is what they have to do survive. When that happens, oh my God, we’re, you know, we then are at the advent of the licensing of a slaughter that can only multiply and spread across the world. So I opened up the discussion with talking about breathing in the death and the physical, the health effects, the psychological effects, the spiritual effects of all this and to bring this discussion forward and I appreciate this chance to do it with you, Bob.

Robert Scheer

And I should correct myself in presenting this. You did write two articles and the first article, which you had on Substack and was reprinted in ScheerPost, I hope everybody reprints it, called out the severity of what’s happening in Gaza. You were not, the second piece, which took it to a different level, was not ignoring the first piece and you labeled it as genocide, which again, I keep bringing, the current atmosphere, they can arrest you for that.

I mean, they’ve really, well, you shrug. People are being deported. How did you deport a student at Columbia who was involved in trying to have a peaceful demonstration? He’s not accused of any crime. He’s now locked up. He can’t even be there for the birth of his child. All his freedom has been taken away and his own university, which gave him his master’s degree, was a good student, hasn’t said a word in his defense. It’s outrageous.

And so we’re talking about, look, the great irony, I am older than you, Dennis, so I was alive during the war. And as I said, I come from a mixed family where my father’s family was the agency. Those people, the German people, good Christians, were the agency of killing a large number of Jews, obviously, grotesque genocide, but also tens of millions of other people.

And the question out of the Second World War was, can it happen here? The big slogan was never again. And then could it happen here? Because after all, Germany and the United States were very similar. German Americans were the largest immigrant group here in the United States.

We admire Germany. It had the highest level of science. It was a society of considerable diversity, we thought, and a sense of law and order. And the irony that we are now considering an American fascism, and a lot of people are using that word not to just make noise, but calling serious attention, people who have studied the Holocaust, studied of the rise of the fascism, and they’re doing it in Israel as well.

The horrible blood libel, somehow this is connected with Jewish survival. Jewish, justice for Jewish people, security for Jewish people. We would destroy freedom in the United States in the name of justifying what the Israeli government does. And if you dare question, I want to take it back to Congress, I want to keep, you know, we want to keep this and not take too much of your time.

But at the heart of this is not McCarthyism. McCarthy was a lone senator without all that much support who was challenging the president of United States, Dwight Eisenhower. He was challenging people who were running congressional committees who called him to task. We have a situation here with the United States Congress has basically denied that American citizens have the right to question the policy of another government, Israel.

Dennis Kucinich

Yeah, yeah, and I will say that, you know, I’m not sure there isn’t some parallel here. Are you now or have you ever been antisemitic? I mean, you know, there is some kind of a ring to McCarthy’s questions.

Robert Scheer

…because it’s on the highest level. The U.S. Congress took this position that if you criticize a government, whether you’re Jewish or not Jewish or on what basis, you could have been Hannah Arendt or Albert Einstein. I mean, there were a very large number of Jewish intellectuals in the world who have all along criticized policies of Israel and in fact, the man who tried, did the most courageously to try to bring peace, Rabin, was killed by a Jewish fanatic who, people who supported him, but some of them are in the Netanyahu government, so forth.

So I want you, you have a good sense of history. How alarmed are you? How alarmed?

Dennis Kucinich

It’s a constitutional issue here. And I would submit to you that any and every law and policy which contravenes the First Amendment of the United States will eventually be turned down or overturned by the Supreme Court. It’ll happen. The problem is the interim period. In addition to the First Amendment, which as you point out is freedom of religion and of course freedom of speech, you also have the vitiation of Fifth Amendment rights, of Fourteenth Amendment rights, due process is out the window.

The administration has moved so quickly that people were without a chance to defend themselves. And even the habeas corpus goes out the window. You don’t even have a chance to state your claim as a person. Now, I think that what we need to do is to understand there is symmetry here between that kind of conduct which is occurring in the United States and the violence that is being done to the people in Gaza and the West Bank.

Israel does not have a First Amendment. They don’t have a constitution per se. They have basic laws. The United States, the First Amendment is the cornerstone on which all of other rights depend. And yet Congress, in its willingness to be sympathetic to Mr. Netanyahu’s claims about what’s happening in Israel, has gone in fully without asking the more basic questions. And it may be that Congress is not the place to be able to save the rights of the American people here. We’re going to have to rely on the courts.

Robert Scheer

Including the People’s House of Representatives.

Dennis Kucinich

Yeah, absolutely. You know, the executive branch and the Congress, both elected, are not living up to their constitutional obligation here. Now this has a broader implications, which I want to put on the table right now. When we realize when you start to add up the sum, the total of all of the of all of the justifications, the false justifications, of all the rationalizations and of the policies themselves, this is absolutely the moment that we need to have a broader inspection of the United States’ role in the world and of the trillion dollar Pentagon budget and of how that money is spent and of the influence that think tanks and others have in apportioning that money as opposed to housing, education, healthcare and all those other things that are relating to the practical aspirations of people.

So I think that while we’re in this discussion, we’re riveted to this discussion of what about Israel? What about Gaza? What about Palestine? The bigger discussion is what about the United States? What do we stand for? Who are we as a country? And why do we continue to wage war around the world? Why do we have 800 military bases? Why are we getting ready to why are we even having a discussion in preparation for a war using nuclear weapons or attack on nuclear installations in Iran.

What is going on in this country? We’ve lost the thread of democratic thought of a republic. We are drifting here and we’re whistling through the graveyards of history, the 100 million people who perished in wars in the 20th century, most of them innocent civilian noncombatants. We think it can happen here. It’s happening here.

And we better stop this impulse, this maniacal pathological impulse towards destruction or we will be consumed by it.

Robert Scheer

And the rest of the world as well. I’m gonna end on this Dennis, first of all, people wanna get you right off the bat, it’s your Substack, right? How do they sign on or?

Dennis Kucinich

You don’t get a free subscription at kucinichreport.substack.com. Just type it in, you’ll get there.

Robert Scheer

And for those interested in having many different points of view, we have to have a ScheerPost where they can read you. But I want to announce, I think I have your approval, and we’re going to do this on a regular basis, right? Maybe there’s a lot happening.

Dennis Kucinich

I’d be honored to do that, Bob.

Robert Scheer

Yeah, so like maybe every, no, maybe every week if the times require it, we’ll have the Bob and Dennis show here. Otherwise, as part of ScheerPost, I want to thank you for taking that time. I want to thank Joshua Scheer, who once worked in your office, who is our executive producer and has followed your career ever since he was quite young. I want to thank Diego Ramos, who is our managing editor and writes these intros, Max Jones who does the video. The JKW Foundation, memory of Jean Stein, a fiercely independent Jewish writer from an old Jewish family. Yes, and she dared very early on to say Palestinians, as with Jewish people, certainly it was with Israelis, Jewish people have the right to survive and live and be free. And I want to thank Integrity Media Len Goodman, and also from an old Jewish family for also giving us some funding to do this and the name of a free press. So we’ll see you next week with or whenever we require us, we’ll get Dennis back. By the way, I realized there’s a picture behind me. That’s when I interviewed Jimmy Carter, when he was running for president. That was ‘76. When did I interview you?

Dennis Kucinich

‘78.

Robert Scheer

So two years later, I interviewed you when you were the mayor of Cleveland.

Dennis Kucinich

Just so your viewers won’t think that I had a warm and fuzzy place in my heart for you, after I read the Carter interview, I said I am not going to be interviewed by this guy. But I changed my mind when I saw the integrity of your work. So I appreciate it, Bob.

Robert Scheer

And there was great integrity in the, you know, it’s ironic. The Carter interview got so much attention because he talked about lust in his heart and that, you know, he wasn’t going to be the subtype born again, you know, telling everybody how to live. But actually in that interview, what was really going to be the news, I asked him, what kind of Democrat are you going to be? Are you going to be like what Lyndon Johnson did and get us into another Vietnam War? And he said, this was a quote, he said, I would never lie to the American people the way Lyndon Johnson did about Vietnam.

And that, I thought, well, that was pretty explosive. Lyndon Johnson was dead by that point. Lady Bird Johnson left the airport in Dallas, wouldn’t meet him. That’s where he was flying in. And I thought, wow, Jimmy Carter was a complex man, because he did get us into some wars. Leaving that aside,

We’ll get back next week and see you then. Take care.

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