What to Read, What to Watch, and Podcasts for You, in late September 2025
From a Gaza writer…
“Everyday in Gaza, death – ever persona non grata – waits a single step away, poised to snatch our souls.
“On 30 August, I was at Branch Hub – a spot in Gaza City’s al-Rimal neighborhood where I regularly go to find electricity and internet – when more than four explosions shook everything around me.
“The world went dark and at first I thought we had been hit. Then I realized the building next to us had been struck.
“The smoke was so thick I could hardly see.
“When I went outside, I saw a girl I had noticed minutes before, standing at the door. She had lost most of her leg; part of it was still attached to her body by a small piece of skin.
“She was screaming to me, ‘My foot! My foot!’
“I was frozen, unable to help her. Another girl lay wounded, unable to move after shrapnel struck her waist and foot.
“Human remains were scattered everywhere.
“In the street, I saw Abu Ahmad – the owner of a small biscuit stand where I often bought snacks – killed.
“His son stood nearby, covered in the remains of his father.
“The Israeli army later claimed it was the house of Abu Obeida, the spokesperson of Qassam Brigades.
“I will never forget that scene when I got out of the hub: furniture scattered across the ground.
“People told me that, moments before the strikes, a vehicle had passed by transporting a family and their furniture and belongings to the south.
“Seconds later, when the strike hit, the whole family had been killed, and their furniture lay scattered on the ground.
“I stood frozen and whispered to myself: “It’s better to stay here than to die on the road to the south. I felt that God had granted me a new life at that moment.
“I came to the realization – one shared by nearly everyone in Gaza in these trying days – that death awaits me both here in the north and there in the south.”
Night of Camp David by Fletcher Knebel, is a political bestseller published in 1965. Lately people in the US are resurrecting and reading this novel –why? Because it’s about a fictitious US President – a Democrat – who his aides and cabinet think is going “stark raving mad” – a quote I just heard bandied about in relation to Trump in today’s news flash. The fictitious but charismatic President Hollenbach pushes the US to take over Canada (!) and then insists every phone call and telegram in the US has to be monitored and recorded by the FBI. At one point Hollenbach tells a trusted senator about his grand schemes to “make America a great world power once again.” True his behaviour was a bit erratic – he stayed up all night to watch the dawn at Camp David for example. But this book is worth listening to on Audible – there are eery similarities with the goings on in Washington today. Or you can read it!
While I’m on a reading kick of books published 60 plus years ago, Howard Fast’s 1957 autobiography The Naked God: The Writer and the Communist Party, is worth reading. Fast was one of America’s best-selling authors of the 1940s, 50s, and beyond. You’ve seen the blockbuster movies made after his books such as Spartacus and Citizen Tom Paine; he wrote more than 100 celebrated books and major articles. In 1953 he was called before the US House of UnAmerican Activities. He refused to disclose the names of donors to a charity associated with American veterans from the Spanish Civil War. Jailed for three months, Fast found no one would publish his books when he was released. Fast was blacklisted for several years and had to write under a pseudonym. A leading member of the Communist Party USA, he quit publicly after 13 years when Moscow revealed Stalin’s record. This book pays homage to Fast’s socialist principles and explains a lot about the USSR 40 years after the Russian revolution.
“Unions Improve Social Well-Being Even For Non-Members” is a good article by Adam King, a labour relations specialist at University of Manitoba. Drawing on the new report by the CCPA, King writes that greater unionization rates improve the environment, income equality and public health. Read King’s article in The Maple here .
Greater unionization rates improve the environment, income equality and public health, according to a new CCPA report here.
Some of you know that Ken Dryden died early in September. He was a goalie for the Montréal Canadiens; he was a lawyer; he was a Liberal MP and cabinet minister and he was a writer. The book to read is his 1993 fiction work, The Moved and the Shaken – it’s only 32 years old. It’s about a family that lives in a Toronto suburb. To learn more, he decides to spend a week on the living room couch of a “middle class Canadian family.” The 43-year-old husband works as a customer service rep for Imperial Oil. His wife also works in an office. They manage to raise their three teens, despite limited resources — financial and emotional.
Dryden watches, listens and even follows the man to work in the day. We get a sense of the tensions between the teens and the parents in the family. As Dryden pointed out about his efforts to understand the man — the husband and father of the family, “Yet in the nearly five years I have come to know him [the dad of the family], I have learned more about myself and my own life than at any other time.”
Never Stop Talking About Gaza
The grim scene after yet another Israeli airstrike on Gaza City. (credit: Omar Ashtawy/APA images)
Several days after 7 Oct 2023, Dr Ghassan Abu-Sittah, a British-Palestinian plastic and reconstructive surgeon travelled to Gaza where he spent the next 43 days working around the clock at two hospitals. While he was operating at the Al-Alhi hospital it was bombed– with scores of casualties. In this fascinating half-hour documentary, Dr Abu-Sittah discusses what happened that day and British-based forensic architects show online models of how and where Israel bombed hospitals in the early days of Oct. 2023. This incredible film is called ‘When it stopped being a war…’ The Situated Testimony of Dr Ghassan Abu-Sittah.
“When it stopped being a war, and became a genocide.”
Dr G. Abu-Sittah, a British-Palestinian surgeon who served in Gaza just after 7.10.23. He said this recently in a film by forensic architects
Above (Left) Dr Abu-Sittah (right) with a forensic architect colleague. Right: Destruction of al-Ahli Hospital, Gaza, 17 Oct. 2023, read about it here. (Photo credit: Mohammad Saber/EPA)
The Best Book…
The best book I’ve read in ages is Atef Abu Saif’s book Don’t Look Left: A Diary of Genocide. Abu Saif is a Palestinian originally from the Jabaliya refugee camp near Gaza City. Armed with a PhD in political science and solid credentials in the arts as a novelist and writer, Abu Saif is the Minister of Culture in the government of the Palestinian Authority based in Ramallah, on the West Bank. In early October 2023, after attending a major arts conference, he travelled to Gaza City, with his 15-year-old son, to visit his father, brothers and sisters and other relatives. The book is beyond excellent. Every day he writes what he sees in Gaza for 90 days from the start of Israel’s bombings, until he managed to get himself and his son to Cairo and return home. We forget that in the first 60 days, there was still food in markets, groceries and water. Shops were open. But no one could leave and Israel was starting to destroy homes, apartments, workplaces, schools and fields.
Abu Saif by his tent, UN Stores refugee camp, Rafah. (Photograph: Comma Press/Ibrahim Abu Saif, Dec 2023)
And Israel was bombing hospitals! He writes his wife’s brother, his wife and son were killed by the IDF when their home was bombed.
“Thousands still lie under the rubble, denied a decent burial. Hatim and Huda, my brother-and sister-in-law and their son Mohammed have now been under the ruins of their house for 43 days. No one thinks of them. World leaders congratulate themselves, as my in-laws rot in the rubble. These are not figures for some statistical report, these are people.”
Their teenaged daughter, Wissam, survived the missile strike on the family’s home –barely. Rescued after being stuck under the rubble, doctors had to amputate both her legs as well as one of her hands. She was in horrifying pain, with few medicines, and when al-Shifa hospital was bombed. She survived and was sent to other Gaza hospitals. Her needs were so urgent, medical staff sent Wissam to a Cairo hospital. Wissam’s sister, Widdad, also survived. Knowing her family was dead and facing having to care for her suffering sister– Widdad had a breakdown.
Saif talks about the journalists he knows, street vendors, and others killed before his eyes. His desperately fled south to Khan Younis when the IDF tanks surrounded his father’s house. This book is a must. Here’s an article from The Guardian published one of his diary entries here. Strongly written, and haunting.
Gaza Doctors under attack
Zeteo presents ‘Gaza: Doctors Under Attack – The Full Film They Didn’t Want You To See.’ This one hour film is excellent and it’s here. You can watch for free or a small donation. Here’s a better description of it:
“Now, a new documentary, available in most countries across the globe exclusively here at Zeteo, takes you inside those hospitals to hear accounts from doctors there, on the ground, about the impossibility of saving lives in a Western-backed Israeli onslaught. It is a comprehensive investigation into the systematic targeting of Gaza’s healthcare system, including all 36 of its main hospitals, multiple times, and the killing of its doctors, nurses, and paramedics.”
A BBC journalist asked a young Israeli woman on the beach in Tel Aviv if she was bothered by the pictures of starvation and killings in Gaza. She said, “They are Gazawood, like Hollywood. 50% if not 80% are not real, they are staged.”
In mid-September, a BBC journalist walked down the beach in Tel Aviv to ask Jews about Gaza. Gaza is 60 km south of the beach. Interviewer Matthew Cassel asked two young women about the pictures of mass starvation and killings in Gaza. One woman answered (at 6.36 minutes in)
“They are Gazawood – like Hollywood. Fifty percent, if not 80%, are not real, they are staged. The people are suffering because of Hamas.”
Watch The Guardian’s On the Ground— 15 minutes here of ‘Our Genocide’: How do Israelis feel about the war in Gaza?
From July, here is 1.3 minutes that feature Gideon Levy, Israel’s foremost leftwing columnist who writes in Ha’aretz. The intro is by centre-right British journalist, Piers Morgan. Levy is Jewish, and said this at the end: “Only the Nazis were proud of mass killings and genocide.” Of course that begs the question — why is Israel so proud of its slaughter?
“Only the Nazis were proud of mass killing and genocides.” Israeli journalist Gideon Levy said Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich is “the face of Israel”, in response to comments Smotrich made during a conference at the Knesset, in which he said Israel “will occupy Gaza and make it an inseparable part of Israel”. “To be proud of slaughtering 20,000 children?” he said, likening Smotrich to Nazis. “This is not human.”
Union: A Film (2024) is a lively look at the successful union drive at the Amazon warehouse (that employs 8,000 workers!) on Staten Island New York. Watch this trailer. The first half of the film is a bit slow but the second half is great. Well worth seeing. We rented it on Youtube for $3.99.
Skandal – bringing down Wirecard is a good documentary about journalists digging up dirt on Wirecard, after it was used to launder money. Worth watching on Netflix. Here’s the trailer.
“In Gaza, the So-called ‘Evacuation of Civilians’ Is a Trail of Bombs and Death”
Watch the Québec dramatic series Empathie; it’s wonderful. A 40-year-old woman psychiatrist, Suzanne Bien Aime, works at a Montréal hospital for the criminally insane. She has to have a body guard who accompanies her to meet with the patients – and that’s interesting. Suzanne herself is adopted, and white; while her adoptive family are well-to-do professionals originally from Haiti. This is a fascinating series – well written (by the lead actor!) and refreshingly Canadian. It’s on Crave or Amazon Prime. You can watch the trailer, it’s in French but the series has English subtitles.
Below: stills from UNION, Scoop, Empathie, and My Life is Murder
The Critic is a 2023 film from Britain. It’s on Amazon Prime. In 1934, Jimmy Erskine is the over-bearing, and highly opinionated theatre critic for a London tabloid newspaper. His editors want him to pipe down and be less egotistical, but he won’t. He is arrested for homosexuality; the newspaper fires him. He takes revenge, and if you like that sort of thing, this film isn’t bad. Watch it on Amazon Prime. See the trailer here.
My Life is Murder is a 2019-22 Australian/New Zealand series of slapstick and murder. Pretty bland, but nice blue skies, pretty blonde women and enough dead bodies to suit. Watch four seasons (I’d rather not) on Acorn TV. The one good line I heard was the police detective boss castigating former cop, now a private investigator, Alexa Crowe. The boss said, “I hear you made a suspect cry.” Alexa answered, “Not at first.” Watch the trailer.
Scoop, this is a 2024 feature length British film. In 2010 a newspaper photographer takes a picture of Prince Andrew and Jeffery Epstein. Nine years later, the Prince has a lot to answer for – as the relationship is revealed. Not bad, quick moving – on Netflix. Here’ the trailer.
Black Bag is a 2025 thriller, about spies, killings, counter espionage and a couple both involved in spying. It’s not bad—though a bit confusing with super-stars such as Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender. You can watch it on Amazon Prime and here’s a trailer.
“God gave us Israel- all of it,” says a belligerent Jewish settler interviewed by The Guardian for a four-part series called AlongThe Green Line. Many Jews in Israel do not recognise that the Green Line exists – or existed – for decades. Each episode is 16 minutes – have a look at the first one: here. Watch it free on Youtube.
Islamophobia kills…
In June there was a monument dedicated to Wadee Alfayoumi, the six year old boy who was murdered by his family’s landlord in an anti-Muslim, and anti-Palestinian hate crime? In 2023, the boy was killed and his mother seriously injured at their home in a Chicago suburb. Public art now commemorates Wadee at a local playground renamed after him. Read about his death and life here.
(credit: Josh Hendricks/Plainfield Park District)
“You think these kids are so innocent?”
Recently, the far-right Trump confidante and “proud Islamophobe”, Laura Loomer, used her considerable influence to get the Trump administration to block medical visas for sick kids from Gaza. Now she’s justifying this by calling Palestinian kids terrorists. “You think these kids are so innocent?” Loomer said on her podcast. “[Y]ou think little kids are not capable of evil?” Of course the real terrorists are the people who have created the world’s largest cohort of child amputees and are systematically starving babies to death.
Art Gratia Artis…
“This seriously made my day” said someone on Facebook. Watch this; turn up your volume!!
UN brings in the Clown…
Watch the first 2 minutes of war criminal Netanyahu’s attempts to speak at the UN last week. When he stood to speak, about 2/3 of the UN delegates walked out –to applause for the delegates and boos for Israel’s prime minister. Unfortunately, Canada’s delegation, led by Canada’s Ambassador to the UN, Bob Rae, remained seated and listening to Netanyahu’s defiant speech— that Israel “must finish the job” against Hamas in Gaza. He continued,
“Western leaders may have buckled under the pressure. And I guarantee you one thing — Israel won’t.”
Canada has not been shy about joining a major walkout at the UN before. In March 2022, just days after Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, “Canada’s foreign minister was part of a 40-country walkout in Geneva as Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov addressed two UN sessions.”
You can watch Netanyahu’s whole speech, but I don’t recommend wasting your time. The first two minutes are a wonderful tonic: here.
“What Netanyahu said in his speech to all the indifferent, willfully blind, and happily collaborating [Israelis] is that it’s impossible to distinguish between him and them. They participated even if they only obeyed an order, either happily or with a heavy heart. He made sure that no one can distinguish between the half-mad Dr. Strangelove – speaking to empty seats – and the army, soldiers, and nation. And he’s right. Netanyahu alone could not have carried out genocide for two years.“
A journalist holds the blood-covered camera belonging to Palestinian AP freelance photojournalist Mariam Dagga, who was killed in an Israeli strike on Nasser hospital in Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip last Monday. (Credit: AFP)
Podcasts for you…
Max Haiven and Sarah Stein Lubrano’s Sense & Solidarity podcasts continue to fascinate– as they delve into the sociological, the political and the psychological. “Student Cheating = Working Class Refusal?”is a great listen here. An earlier podcast asks and answers “What Motivates Fascists? Opportunism, Paranoia and Psychedelic Power.” It is what the podcasters call a Thoughtsnack— and very good.
Shadow Kingdom, by Crooked Media, has an excellent podcast series called Coal Survivor which deals with union issues in the United Mineworkers Union from the 1940s on. The fight for leadership, the union’s reluctance to fight/compensate against Black Lung disease, and then the murder of former contender for union president, progressive Jock Yablonski (along with his wife and 25-year-old daughter). Shocking and worth listening to it here.
Canadian True Crime (with Kristi Lee) is a favourite podcast of mine. In her latest four-part series she deals with the Canadian hockey scandal in Analyzing the Hockey Canada Trial, the court case, and much more from a feminist and alternative lens in addition to the strictly “legal” issues. Fantastic. It’s here. I subscribe to Canadian True Crime on Patreon.
In the Dark (season 3) is produced by The New Yorker. In this season, investigative journalists examine the murder of a family of 24 by US Marines in Haditha, Iraq — almost 17 years ago. A shocking tale about THEN, but TODAY we hear of very similar targeted murders throughout Gaza. Here it is and you can listen to the trailer. And this is the companion piece, with shocking photos, published by The New Yorker a year ago.
Aftermath of US Marines’ slaughter of one family in Haditha. The Marines tried to keep their photos from the public.
Nota Bene…
A French study has found that men emit 26% more pollution because they eat more red meat and drive more. Of course we all need to be aware of our environmental impact, but it feels increasingly futile when billionaires take off for nuptials in their private jets and warmongers pollute the planet. Last year, The Guardian reported on a study that found that “[t]he planet-warming emissions generated during the first two months of the war in Gaza were greater than the annual carbon footprint of more than 20 of the world’s most climate-vulnerable nations”
Photo at the top:A Palestinian girl wounded by Israeli airstrikes in Gaza City, yesterday. Every person in Gaza is a survivor of previous wars and has known every kind of fear. (Credit: Khames Alrefi/Anadolu/ Reuters Connect)
Another ruined dinner party... 