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The Honest Take

HonestReporting

News

Frequency: 1 episode/5d. Total Eps: 19

The Honest Take is HonestReporting's long-form interview series bringing together leading voices to examine how Israel and the Middle East are covered — and what goes into creating and feeding the narratives that target Israel. Each episode features leading experts, analysts, researchers, and journalists who work on media bias, terrorism, NGO accountability, foreign influence, antisemitism, and international institutions. These are professionals directly involved in investigating how narratives are shaped, amplified, and protected across global newsrooms. The conversations go beyond breaking news to unpack: • Media bias and misinformation about Israel • How terrorist organizations exploit humanitarian and civil society frameworks • The role of NGOs and international bodies in shaping public perception • Foreign state influence on Western media and education • Why context disappears in reporting on Israel and the Palestinians This series is for listeners seeking in-depth analysis, evidence-based discussion, and accountability in journalism on Israel and the Middle East.

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Follow the Money: How the Muslim Brotherhood Bought a Seat in America's Schools | With Dr. Charles Asher Small

Episode 7

Tuesday, June 2, 2026 • Duration 01:05:58

In 2012, Dr. Charles Asher Small pulled an all-nighter at Stanford, started googling a Yale administrator, and stumbled onto a money trail that became one of the most consequential antisemitism research projects in the West. The founder of ISGAP — which he launched in 2003 alongside Elie Wiesel — joins Ben Chertoff to lay out what he found: an estimated $100 billion in undisclosed Qatari money flowing into American universities, $10 billion to Cornell, $1.3 billion to Texas A&M, a K-12 curriculum in 8,000 American classrooms that erased Israel from the map, and a campus-to-City-Hall pipeline that runs all the way to the mayor of New York. We also press him on the hardest question: where the documented paper trail ends and connect-the-dots begins.

ISGAP: https://isgap.org — publications free to the public.
"Follow the Money" project — Qatar / Muslim Brotherhood university funding research.
DETERRENT Act — federal bill (passed the House, before the Senate) lowering the foreign-gift disclosure threshold from $250K to $50K.
New (May 2026) ISGAP report — "Institutional Capture: Qatar Foundation International": https://isgap.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/QFI-US-Report.pdf — published the day after this taping; documents $65.3M across 220 K-12/education programs (2009–2025).

(00:00) - — Cold open:** "$10 billion to Cornell" — the white-sheets vs. keffiyehs analogy.
(00:47) - — Who is Charles Small & what is ISGAP:** 23 years tracing Qatar's money into American universities.
(01:16) - — The 2012 discovery:** A Yale administrator, a Stanford all-nighter, and the thread that became "Follow the Money."
(03:26) - — 2003 & Elie Wiesel:** Co-founding ISGAP at the UN — "a time of a great emergency."
(05:14) - — Mamdani, SJP & what the Muslim Brotherhood actually is:** From a Bowdoin chapter to City Hall; the Protocols at the core of the ideology.
(08:25) - — Why the West keeps missing it:** The "failure of imagination" and the 50-year strategic goal.
(11:17) - — Inside "Follow the Money":** $3 billion → $18 billion → $100 billion; the Qatar–Muslim Brotherhood oath.
(16:59) - — How the research works:** Texas A&M's $1.3B contract, Georgetown, and $10B to Cornell — all open-source.
(19:29) - — Columbia reported $0:** The disclosure laws on the books since WWII that no one enforces.
(22:26) - — The 300% statistic:** Soft power, correlation vs. causation, and a university's "sacred responsibility."
(26:23) - — The DETERRENT Act:** Where the federal investigations stand now.
(28:15) - — K-12 capture:** Brown's "Choices" curriculum in 8,000+ American classrooms.
(31:19) - — How campus ideas filter into society:** Edward Said, and the chilling parallel to the 19th-century academy.
(33:59) - — The Columbia teach-in, 10 days after October 7:** When gender-studies professors called the massacre "justified."
(38:18) - — The Red-Green coalition & Judith Butler:** Why the radical left and Islamists converge.
(43:35) - — Soft power, silence & the Iran test:** The pogrom that the campus left wouldn't condemn.
(47:41) - — Where else the money lands:** Al Jazeera, the Qatar–CNN deal, Northwestern, social media.
(49:13) - — JVP, SJP & Neville Singham's network:** Following the money behind "Jewish Voice for Peace."
(51:41) - — Mamdani:** "Of course he knows what he's doing."
(55:40) - — Allies in the Arab world & the three centers of the Brotherhood:** Qatar (money), Turkey (command), London (laundering).
(57:13) - — How do you fight an idea?:** Lessons from defeating communism and fascism.
(01:00:43) - — What's next for ISGAP:** New reports on Canada, the UK, South Africa — and the Muslim Brotherhood terror designation.
(01:03:37) - — Where to find ISGAP's work.**
(01:04:10) - — Ben's close:** "The emergency didn't arrive by accident."

Click here to view the episode transcript.

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Weaponizing Identity Politics to Demonize Israel and Jews | With David Christopher Kaufman

Episode 3

Tuesday, May 26, 2026 • Duration 01:04:14

What happens when the very system built to protect minorities leaves Jews out entirely - and then gets turned against them?

David Christopher Kaufman is a journalist, a Black man, and a Jew. That combination gives him a lens on American identity politics that almost no one else has. In this conversation, he argues that October 7th didn't just expose antisemitism - it exposed the structural failure of the DEI framework to account for Jews at all. The result: Jews now have the highest hate crime rate of any group in America, and yet they're the only minority expected to argue for their own victimhood before anyone will believe them.

We talk about Zohran Mamdani's rise and what it tells us about where the DSA and the progressive left are actually headed. We talk about the word "Zio" - which Kaufman says hit him the same way the N-word does. And we talk about why he believes Jewish safety is the defining civil rights issue of this moment - and why American Jewish leadership is failing to say so out loud.

David Christopher Kaufman is opinion editor at the Daily Mail, former editor at the New York Post, and author of the Substack Counterintuitive.

Follow David: davidkaufman.substack.com

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HonestReporting is a media watchdog holding the press accountable on Israel coverage.

Website: honestreporting.com

YouTube: youtube.com/@honestreportingvideo

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The Lawfare War Against Israel: Why the West Is Next | With Natasha Hausdorff

Episode 6

Tuesday, May 19, 2026 • Duration 01:04:29

British-Israeli barrister Natasha Hausdorff has spent years inside the world's most powerful international courtrooms — the ICJ, ICC, and UN — watching the legal case against Israel get built in real time. She joins Ben Chertoff to take the genocide accusation apart, piece by piece.

The ICJ never said Israel committed genocide — so why does every headline say it did? The ICC issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant on a legal standard that inverted the burden of proof. And right now, three countries are quietly trying to rewrite the Genocide Convention itself — to eliminate the intent requirement that separates genocide from ordinary warfare. If they succeed, no Western democracy will ever again be able to fight a non-state actor without facing genocide charges.

Israel is the test case. Hausdorff explains who's running the play — and what comes next.

Natasha Hausdorff is a British-Israeli barrister and Pro Bono Legal Director of UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI). She holds a BA/MA from Oxford and an LL.M. from Tel Aviv University in international law and the law of armed conflict. She was a Fellow at Columbia Law School's National Security Law Programme and clerked for Chief Justice Miriam Naor, President of the Israeli Supreme Court. Her family has lived in Israel for eight consecutive generations since 1847.

Hausdorff is the founding director of the Centre for International Rule of Law and appears regularly on BBC, Sky News, Fox News, CNN, and Times Radio. She has briefed parliaments across Europe and addressed the UN Security Council.

Kristof's Unbelievable Tale | With Rachel O'Donoghue *Live Broadcast May 12, 2026*

Episode 5

Wednesday, May 13, 2026 • Duration 33:46

On May 11, Nicholas Kristof published a column in the New York Times titled "The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians" - a 1,500-word piece alleging systematic sexual violence by Israeli security forces, grounded in anonymous testimonies and sources with documented histories of fabrication. Ben went live the next evening with HonestReporting's Rachel O'Donoghue, who had spent 48 hours pulling the piece apart from the ground up.

In this episode:

• The dog rape claim: where it originated (Euromed Human Rights Monitor, Geneva), why it's scientifically impossible, and why it passed through a Times editor anyway

• Euromed Monitor's track record: organ harvesting libel, denial of Hamas infrastructure at Al-Shifa, a single-witness foundation for its most grotesque claims

• Sami Al-Sai - Kristof's primary named source: arrested by Israel for incitement (celebrating Oct 7, coordination with terrorist groups), with a documented history of claims made, recanted, and then re-recanted

• Issa Amro - second named source: "threatened with rape" in his Washington Post account; "raped" in Kristof's account. A significant discrepancy Kristof did not address

• Kristof's defense on Twitter: cited medical journals to prove dogs can rape humans - journals that were actually about bestiality in the other direction. As Rachel put it: "He read it backwards."

• The Israeli Civil Commission report, released the same day: two years in the making, 300+ pages, 10,000+ photographs, 1,800 hours of visual material, 430 testimonies across 52 nationalities - documenting systematic sexual violence by Hamas on October 7th. The Times reportedly declined to publish it in advance.

• What the NYT's muted headline for the Civil Commission report (*"Israeli report examines sexual violence during and after Hamas-led attack"*) says about editorial priorities

• The pattern: when the Times gets Israel wrong, it always cuts the same way

The Other Side of the Nakba: The Forgotten History of 1948 | With Yossi Klein Halevi

Episode 4

Monday, May 11, 2026 • Duration 01:01:44

Yossi Klein Halevi grew up the son of Holocaust survivors in Brooklyn. As a teenager, he joined Meir Kahane's Jewish Defense League. Then he moved to Israel, broke with extremism, and wrote a book called Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor - released free in Arabic - asking Palestinians to see Jews as an indigenous people returning home, not colonizers.

Today, on college campuses across America, the answer is: you're colonizers. The Nakba proves it.

With Nakba Day approaching, Ben sits down with Halevi for an honest, unflinching conversation about what actually happened in 1948 - the partition vote, the Arab invasion, Deir Yassin, the Hadassah convoy massacre, the 850,000 Jews expelled from Arab countries that nobody talks about. And then: how a legitimate historical grievance became a weapon of delegitimization.

Halevi is not a denialist. He openly names the Nakba as a real catastrophe. He has criticized Israeli education for refusing to teach it. But he also argues that collapsing 1948 into a "narrative of total innocence" - and using it to erase Jewish indigeneity - is something categorically different from honest historical reckoning.

This is the conversation about 1948 that most people never get to have.

In this episode:

00:00 — Cold Open (Deir Yassin / Hadassah convoy quote)

00:22 — Intro: Ben introduces Yossi Klein Halevi and the episode

00:53 — The Real Story of 1948 — episode framing

02:43 — Growing up in Brooklyn, joining the JDL

04:12 — Breaking with Kahana and moving to Israel

05:25 — Living with the partition wall in Jerusalem

07:42 — Two overlapping geographies: Land of Israel vs. Land of Palestine

08:02 — The UN Partition vote (1947) — Arab rejection and the pattern of refusals

12:07 — The Palestinian maximalist frame vs. the Israeli counter-narrative

The Honest Take: TRAILER

Episode 9

Monday, May 11, 2026 • Duration 01:30

Welcome to The Honest Take, the new long-form interview podcast from HonestReporting.

For 25 years, HonestReporting has been the global watchdog on media bias against Israel — monitoring newsrooms, calling out distortion, and forcing corrections from some of the world's most powerful outlets. The Honest Take is where we go beyond the rapid response and sit down with the people who understand what's really happening: journalists, scholars, lawyers, diplomats, and activists.

Hosted by Ben Chertoff, every episode is a sustained conversation about the stories the mainstream keeps getting wrong — antisemitism, the war in Gaza, the UN, campus politics, the future of Jewish life, and the fight for truth in an information war.

Subscribe now. New episodes weekly.

Featuring voices including Hillel Neuer (UN Watch), Shai Davidai, Yardena Schwartz, Yossi Klein Halevi, and many, many more.

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Elite, Educated, Antisemitic: How Academia Fosters Jew Hate | With Shai Davidai

Episode 2

Tuesday, May 5, 2026 • Duration 45:57

What happened on American campuses after October 7 did not come out of nowhere.

In this episode of The Honest Take, Shai Davidai joins HonestReporting to trace the intellectual roots of the antisemitism now shaping elite universities. From Edward Said’s Orientalism and the rise of the activist professor, to moral relativism, postcolonial theory, and the normalization of anti-Zionism as virtue, Davidai explains how decades of academic ideas helped create a culture where Jew hatred is repackaged as justice.

The conversation also explores Columbia’s long history with antisemitism, the role of groups like Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace, and why so many students and faculty cannot even recognize their own bigotry. Davidai argues that this is not just campus radicalism. It is a broader moral and intellectual failure with real consequences for Jews, for higher education, and for American society.

Shai Davidai is a social psychologist, former Columbia Business School professor, and host of Here I Am with Shai Davidai. His forthcoming book, American Intellectual Antisemitism, is scheduled for release on October 6, 2026.

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The Lie That Lit the Match: Hebron, Nazis, and the West's Vanishing Memory | With Yardena Schwartz

Episode 1

Tuesday, May 5, 2026 • Duration 47:37

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often thought of as a protracted political dispute based on two peoples fighting over one land. Often, they place the start date at 1948. Sometimes 1967.

But for a real understanding, it is necessary to reach back to the pre-State era, and realize the religious nature of the conflict, and one man who played a pivotal role in shaping it: The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem.

We speak to Yardena Schwartz, author of "Ghosts of a Holy War," about Hajj Amin al Husseini, his surprisingly close relationship with Adolf Hitler, the 1929 Hebron massacre, and how reporting on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has changed over the course of the century that followed.

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The Second Exodus: How 850,000 Jews Were Erased From the Arab World | With Dr. Henry Green

Episode 9

Tuesday, June 16, 2026 • Duration 01:13:36

In 1948 there were 38,000 Jews in Libya. Today there are none. Across the Arab world, some 850,000 Jews — communities that predated Islam by a thousand years — were driven out, dispossessed, and denationalized in barely three decades. Most of the world has never heard the story.

Dr. Henry Green, founder of Sephardi Voices and emeritus professor at the University of Miami, has spent more than fifteen years recording the testimonies of those who lived it. In this conversation with Ben Chertoff, he traces how the Jews of Baghdad, Benghazi, Cairo, Casablanca, Aleppo and beyond went from flourishing — at one point Jews were 35–40% of Baghdad — to gone: the Farhud, the rise of the Mufti, Nazi propaganda in Arabic, the great rescue operations, the ma'abarot transit camps, and the long erasure of an entire refugee history.

Henry explains why this exodus was left out of the textbooks, what justice might look like, and why his new work puts a forensic dollar figure on what was taken — work he carried to the UN in Geneva in September 2025. And he closes with the story of a young Hillel president who found her own grandparents in the Sephardi Voices archive and wept.

Guest: Dr. Henry Green — founder, Sephardi Voices; emeritus professor of Religious & Judaic Studies, University of Miami. Co-author of Sephardi Voices: The Untold Expulsion of Jews from the Arab Lands (2021, with Richard Sternberg) and author of new work, The Forgotten Exodus of Arab Jews, presenting a forensic valuation of seized Jewish assets.

The scale of the exodus: From 150,000 to 3 Jews in Iraq, 38,000 to 0 Jews in Libya
Indigeneity and antiquity — the Talmud written in Babylon; "I'm a Babylonian Jew"
Life as dhimmi under Islam vs. persecution in Christian Europe
The Farhud (1941 Baghdad pogrom) and Nazi reach into the Arab world
Baghdad's golden age — Jews 35–40% of the city; the Zilkha banking family
The rescue operations: Magic Carpet (Yemen) and Ezra and Nehemiah (Iraq)
The ma'avarot transit camps and the dominant Ashkenazi diaspora narrative

Pride and Prejudice: How Antisemitism Captured LGBTQ+ Spaces | With Eve Barlow

Episode 8

Tuesday, June 9, 2026 • Duration 01:13:57

It's Pride Month, and at a queer women's sauna night in Barcelona, two married Jewish women — wearing Stars of David — were surrounded, interrogated, and thrown out to chants of "Free Palestine." Not in Tehran. Not in Gaza. In a room built on the promise that no one gets turned away for who they are.

Journalist Eve Barlow knows these spaces from the inside. She was deputy editor of NME — the biggest weekly music magazine in the world — broke bands, wrote the cover stories, and built LGBTQ+ coverage from scratch at GQ. She was at the beating heart of progressive culture. Then, around 2019, she said one thing out loud: that the anti-Zionism rising around her was antisemitism wearing a new coat. The world that let her in turned on her. She named her newsletter after what they did to her — Blacklisted.

In this conversation, Eve and host Ben Chertoff go past the headlines on:

The Barcelona sauna incident — and why the perpetrators were elites (a university sociologist, a lawyer, a teacher), not the ignorant
Where "Queers for Palestine" actually comes from — the queer-theory and post-colonial lineage that turned a civil-rights movement into an oppressor/oppressed morality play
Why marginalization became a political identity the movement can't put down — and the eerie parallel to how Jews went from "oppressed" to "oppressor"
The "as-a-Jew" anti-Zionists — Matt Bernstein, Zach Polanski — and the market that rewards them
The pinkwashing smear, flipped on its head: Israel's real LGBTQ+ record vs. the rest of the region
Released hostage Emily Damari, and the particular vulnerability of being openly gay in captivity
And a closing message to the queer Jewish kid who's been told to choose between their people and their pride

Eve's argument: Pride began as a celebration of how far people had come in a single generation. Somewhere along the way it inverted — from celebrating victory into a contest over who is most oppressed. The moment a people succeeds, it gets recast as the oppressor. Her answer isn't to shrink. It's to refuse the trade.

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The Honest Take – Details, episodes & analysis

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