Hello, and happy Friday!
Longtime readers of this correspondence might recall this essay I wrote nearly three years ago for The Atlantic, in which I urged the U.S. government to launch its own investigation into the killing of Palestinian American journalist and longtime Al Jazeera Arabic correspondent Shireen Abu Akleh. She was fatally shot on May 11 while reporting on an Israeli military raid in the city of Jenin, in the occupied West Bank.
No such investigation materialized. While Israeli authorities eventually acknowledged that Shireen was most likely shot by an Israeli soldier (after first suggesting, without evidence, that Palestinian militants were to blame), they declined to identify the culprit. As the Palestinian journalist Dalia Hatuqa, a close friend of Shireen, told me at the time, all her loved ones want is “a little bit of justice, a little bit of accountability.”
For three years, both have remained elusive — until now. A new documentary from Zeteo News, the media organization started by former MSNBC broadcaster Mehdi Hasan, claims to have independently identified Abu Akleh’s killer. While the Israeli military told The New York Times that it made “no definitive determination regarding the identity of the individual responsible for the shooting,” two Israeli military officials confirmed the documentary’s conclusions to the paper, which also published his name. That soldier was killed last June in Jenin after his convoy was hit by a roadside explosive.
No one has ever been formally held accountable for Shireen’s death, and it now seems that no one ever will. When I wrote that piece in 2022, I’d hoped (perhaps naively) that in the absence of justice, the U.S. might at least be willing to turn Shireen’s case into a deterrent—a warning to those who might otherwise feel little compunction about murdering members of the press. But after watching the U.S. and Israeli governments effectively declare the case closed, and having since seen at least 168 Palestinian journalists killed in the latest war in Gaza, I no longer harbor such hopes.
What I’ve read
This deeply-reported piece on Sen. John Fetterman and the urgent concerns his current and former staffers have about his health:
Fetterman was, according to Jentleson, avoiding the regular checkups advised by his doctors. He was preoccupied with the social-media platform X, which he’d previously admitted had been a major “accelerant” of his depression. He drove his car so “recklessly,” Jentleson said, that staff refused to ride with him. He had also bought a gun. “He says he has a biometric safe and takes all the necessary precautions, and living where he does I understand the desire for personal protection,” Jentleson wrote, referring to Fetterman’s rough-and-tumble town of Braddock, Pennsylvania. “But this is one of the things you said to flag, so I am flagging.”
This profile of Anthony Weiner, the man who refuses to be forgotten:
Our subject is Anthony Weiner, whose surname was a burden long before it became a curse—so fused with his disgrace that you can’t say it without triggering an avalanche of cringe. Weiner, who was caught texting pictures of his penis, first denied it, then admitted it, then resigned from Congress, then ran for mayor of New York City, at which point he sexted again under the alias Carlos Danger, was caught again, lost the election, sexted a photo with his young son in the background, sexted a minor, and forfeited a laptop with emails from his estranged wife that caused the FBI to reopen its Hillary Clinton email investigation, greasing the way for Donald Trump’s 2016 victory and hastening the possible end of the republic and democracy as we know it.
This essay by Jia Tolentino:
My psychological reaction to Trump, and my civic sense of what ought to be done under the thumb of this Administration, has also been radically altered by the war in Gaza, the horrors of which seem impossible every morning and then become seamlessly, nauseatingly incorporated into the irreversible past. For a year and a half, we have been looking at videos on our phones of infants left to die in hospitals bombed by Israel, of parents crying over the bodies of their children, of starving orphans covering their siblings with rags to keep them warm. Our government continues to give Israel billions in military aid with which to carry out these atrocities. According to a public count by an activist group, out of the five hundred and thirty-five members of Congress, only ninety have ever plainly called for this to stop.
This long read on why Americans are revisiting religion (they’re not the only one):
America’s secularization was an immense social transformation. Has it left us better off? People are unhappier than they’ve ever been and the country is in an epidemic of loneliness. It’s not just secularism that’s to blame, but those without religious affiliation in particular rank lower on key metrics of well-being. They feel less connected to others, less spiritually at peace and they experience less awe and gratitude regularly.
Now, the country seems to be revisiting the role of religion.
What I’m thinking about
Although I’m no fan of horror films, I recently watched Sinners (before you ask: no, I did not know vampires would be involved). The film — and its fantastic playlist — has been living rent free in my head ever since.
Until next time,
Yasmeen