The So, I'm very glad to be joined today on bad faith

podcast by Dr. Asselrod. She is a historian of the modern Middle

East and someone who's been a really vocal advocate, it seems almost diminishing to say it in this way, but online. I mean, I have been so heartened and informed and educated by your tweets and your messaging over the last almost a year now and I just have really appreciated your voice and I'm really excited to be able to talk to you face to face.

Thank you. I appreciate that and thank you for having me.

And I agree with you.

It's one of these things where I appreciate the sentiment, but obviously given the gravity of what we're

all trying to cover, it's just been very difficult to try and use these platforms to get these stories across as much as possible.

I'd wonder about that. I mean prior to October 7th, did you find yourself as engaged on Twitter, online as you've become, as you've been trying to push back against the prevailing media narratives?

You know, I was not originally like a big social media person and even now, you know, I get people who say, why don't you go on Tik-talk, why don't you go on Instagram, and I sort of just stick to this particular platform. I think I didn't grow up with social media and so that's part of the reason why but I can see why it's vital especially in this particular situation where you have the Israeli government preventing foreign journalists from coming in where even when we have information coming in the

way it's filtered through Western media it's so important it's so crucial to get these

videos on the ground from journalists, Palestinian journalists in Gaza,

so many of whom have been killed by Israel in this period of time, and just citizen journalists

who are trying to get the videos out as much as possible for people to see.

I actually spent a period of time not being very active online and then this genocide

that we've been watching unfold is really what got me back to engaging online and I think it's been important in shifting, not me personally, but the way that the overall social media approach has been in people seeing what's going on and also shifting the narrative and the

conversations that are happening in the West.

It is interesting to me because I mean you are a historian and you're an author.

I have had conversations with some friends of mine who are in

academia who sometimes even express some frustration that they'll have done all

this research and they are genuine experts in their field and outside of being a guest on a show or

having generated their own social media platform, there is this weird asymmetry that I feel sometimes

uncomfortable with where those of us who have sometimes the platform to talk about X, Y, and Z aren't the most informed.

...