There’s been a marked rise over the last decade of nationalist and authoritarian politics. Global freedom declined for a 17th consecutive year in 2022, according to a Freedom House annual report. The rise of MAGAism in the U.S., neo-fascism in Italy and hard-right politics in Israel are just a few examples of why democracy around globe continues to hang on a knife’s edge. Our guest this week has experienced first-hand the deleterious effects of attacks, perpetrated by opponents of democracy, on civil, political and press freedom. Rula Jebreal is an award-winning journalist, bestselling author, foreign policy expert and visiting professor at the University of Miami. She joins WITHpod to discuss the interconnectedness of the global authoritarian movement, the personal attacks she has witnessed, what is at stake, how authoritarian gains could be rolled back and more.
Note: This is a rough transcript — please excuse any typos.
Rula Jebreal: I came in 2009 into the U.S. when this amazing country elected Barack Obama. We all thought the moment of hope and we can, that we thought America was teaching the rest of the world how to be respectful and inclusive of their minorities, and how multiracial, multicultural democracy cannot only exist, can thrive and can send a signal to the rest of the world. Fascism is dead and it’s dead for good. We were wrong.
Chris Hayes: Hello and welcome to Why Is This Happening? with me your host, Chris Hayes.
You know, one of the most disturbing global trends of the last, I don’t know, 8 to 10 years is the rise of a specific kind of 21st century right-wing, populist, nationalist, authoritarian politics. I mean, obviously, these kinds of politics have existed for a long time. I think particularly let’s talk about Europe for a moment and I think in the U.S. as well, I think in Europe and the U.S., obviously, populist, authoritarian, anti-immigrant movements were the core of the rise of fascism, right-wing fascism. It happened in Spain, Italy, obviously, Nazi Germany.
But there were fascist movements in all other kinds of places. My colleague, Rachel Maddow, with a great podcast, Rachel Maddow Presents: Ultra, which is about fascist sympathizers in the U.S. and their relationship to Nazi Germany. There were fascist movements in Greece. There were far-right fascist movements in Eastern Europe. Some of them, you know, teaming up with the Nazis against the Soviets during that period of time.
But this kind of politics, I think, much of it was wrung out or purged or discredited in the wake of World War II. If you read Tony Judt’s amazing, masterful book, Postwar, one of the things you learn is that what happens post World War II, particularly in what we now call the West, the parts of Europe that are not under Soviet control, is that, you know, all of the right-wing parties had been associated with fascism.
And so when the fascists lose, like a whole portion of the political spectrum is basically just lopped off, and people are discredited. And some, you know, not all of them, some find their way back into government. But as a movement, this vision of sort of authoritarian, post liberal, right-wing politics didn’t have a lot of currency, even if it was still there as an impulse.
What I think has happened, and this is my sort of quick and dirty account of this, is that as we’ve aged out of the cohort of people that remember living through fascism, a lot of those ideas have come back and with real virulence. And we see it across the world in all sorts of different places, among different traditions.
I mean, Vladimir Putin runs a populist sort of authoritarian nationalist state. You know, it’s extremely hostile to racial diversity, extremely invested in traditional gender roles, incredibly nationalistic and jingoistic. We’ve also seen it in MAGAism in Donald Trump in the United States. We’ve seen it in Israel, where a specific kind of right-wing nationalism has gotten more and more powerful, including parties and associated movements that were once sort of considered beyond the pale, or in some cases outright illegal, that have their descendants now very close to power.
And that’s a very similar story in Italy, where a party that was sort of created from the ashes of Mussolini’s fascist party, you know, rebranded, but not totally. They appropriated the kind of central symbol and kind of made it over. And the Prime Minister of Italy’s government, Giorgia Meloni, won their elections last year, and this is the first far-right government really of this kind that Italy has had since Mussolini.
They’ve had right-wing governments, Silvio Berlusconi, who kept getting elected and then investigated, elected and investigated back and forth. In fact, his party is part of this coalition. But there was something new that happened in Italy with Meloni’s rise. We’ve also seen this obviously in Hungary with Viktor Orban, who is, you know, such a hero of the American right, the post liberal American right, that CPAC did a satellite conference there.
So this is one of the most sort of important global trends right now is this kind of politics. And it’s hard because it’s different in different places. Obviously, all the different places I mentioned have very different specific context, histories, institutions, forms of government, all these different things that inform what this right-wing authoritarian nationalist government looks like in those places. And I say authoritarian in its impulses, not in its reality in some places, right? So there’s a tension there as well. These places are still, many of them, liberal democracies.
But it’s very hard to find a person who has like comparative expertise in these different places because they’re so different, right? So, like, if you talk to someone who is an expert in Hungary, they’re probably not going to be in expert in Narendra Modi in India. Hungary may be a very different place with different contexts and different histories.
But if there’s one person who has a really, really remarkable degree of expertise and embeddedness in three different countries that have had seen their own different rise of right-wing politics is my guest today. Her name is Rula Jebreal. She’s an incredibly accomplished award-winning journalist, speaker, author, activist, critic, novelist. You may know her book, Miral, which was incredibly claimed. It was turned into a fantastic movie. That’s her first novel. She wrote another novel as well.
She’s got a new book out in Italy. And as we’ll get to, Rula was born in Haifa. She grew up much of her life in Italy, and has been living in the States. She’s reported about all three of those places. She speaks fluent Arabic, Hebrew, Italian, and English. So she has one of the most remarkable sort of comparativist perspectives on this moment, in the rise of right-wing politics. I thought it would be like a real pleasure to get to pick her brain today. So Rula, welcome to the program.
Rula Jebreal: Thank you, Chris. Thank you for having me.
Chris Hayes: There are not a lot of people with your particular background, linguistic skill set, experience of the world. So do you mind if we just go through your bio a little bit?
Rula Jebreal: Please.
Chris Hayes: It’s a remarkable, fascinating bio. You were born in Haifa?
Rula Jebreal: I was born in Haifa in Israel. I’m an Israeli citizen, was ethnically Palestinian. My family is Christian and Muslim. And I was raised in East Jerusalem until the age of 18, almost 19. Then I moved to Italy, where I studied at the University of Bologna. And then I became the first TV host to read the news on main Italian news in our news channel, TV channel.
And then I had my own political TV show on Italian television until I interviewed Prime Minister Berlusconi at that time. He was not happy with the interview. His ministers called me the N-word on national television. Roberto Calderoli, later on, he was indicted for racism. And now, he is a sitting minister in Meloni’s government.
Chris Hayes: You also came to U.S. at some point, right?
Rula Jebreal: I came in 2009 into the U.S. when this amazing country elected Barack Obama. We all thought the moment of hope and we can, that we thought America was teaching the rest of the world how to be respectful and inclusive of their minorities, and how multiracial, multicultural democracy cannot only exist, can thrive and can send a signal to the rest of the world. Fascism is dead and it’s dead for good. We were wrong.
Chris Hayes: It’s good that you highlighted that because I spent the whole intro talking about these forces of reaction, right? But what they’re opposed to, I think, what you’ve talked about is this very difficult thing, it turns out, is thriving multiracial, multicultural, multiethnic, pluralistic democracies that aren’t uniformly associated with a nation state that has a certain ethnic and linguistic tradition, right? So really making that real is proving to be the big challenge of the 21st century.
And talk a little bit about your experience in Italy because Italy is a country I know better than most because I studied there, and because I have a connection to it and I speak some Italian. And I was always struck by how even when I was in Bologna, where I studied for six months as well, like even my lefty friends in Bologna would say wildly racially questionable stuff and wildly reactionary stuff about immigrants. And I would be like, whoa, hold up —
Rula Jebreal: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — hold up. What did you just say? Like, all Nigerians are ex? That was strong, and I’m curious what your experience of being an Arab woman in Italy was like.
Rula Jebreal: So it’s a great question, Chris, because I was always a minority in both countries. Basically, in Israel, I was a Palestinian citizen, second class citizen, where the overwhelming majority of Palestinians either are second class students. Our inferiority is enshrined in laws, or under a military occupation. And then I moved to Italy, where even though I became a prominent Italian journalist who was on air, who has her own TV show, and I became an Italian citizen as well.
Yet in the eyes of both countries that I have citizenship of, I am a demographic threat. I am described, or people who look like me, who pray like me, who love like me, or who look like me, who don’t look like natives in the case of Italy or are non-Jewish in the case of Israel, are considered and described as fifth columnist, demographic threat. Then you have the most racist, xenophobic language used and normalized. I mean, Roberto Calderoli, that minister, when he, you know, said I’m not going to answer the question of this N-word, basically.
I mean, we have a prime minister who promoted the racist, anti-Semitic great replacement theory, and a lot of Italian truly believed that. We had a governor of the most important region, Lombardy, his name is Fontana, he said, we need to protect the white race. Our mandate is to protect the white race. And he was just reelected in a region that is the most diverse region, the cosmopolitan region, they elected that xenophobic racist governor.
When it comes to me, I mean, I always followed, you know, American journalists or British journalists, they have a very tough style of interviewing politicians.
Chris Hayes: Yes. Yes, they do. Yes.
Rula Jebreal: So when I interviewed Berlusconi, I grilled him on his racist statement and also Islamophobic statement when he said Islam as an inferior civilization. And I said, why would you say such a thing and then deny it? I mean, one of the two things, either you believe that, or you’re lying to your followers, or you’re lying to yourself, so why deny it? He said, I never said it. I said, well, I’ll have a video of that, actually. Would you like to see the video? And he said, I never believed that Muslims and Islam is an inferior civilization, and I have a proof of it. The proof that, he said it live, he said that he dated Muslim woman.
Chris Hayes: I knew where that was going to go. Yes.
Rula Jebreal: And for him, that was the proof that he was not a bigot. So again, when you grill politicians with these kinds of questions in Italy, when I grilled Meloni also, and we had a debate in 2016 when Trump won the elections, and she said, well, if there’s a white supremacist phenomenon, that belongs in America. We don’t have those things here in Italy.
So I reminded her of her beloved Mussolini and the racist laws that he approved and his association with Hitler, how Mussolini himself who she said, the great thing for Italy, how he actually was the first to pass racist laws that paved the way for deportations of Italians, and the murder of Italian citizens who Italians never viewed as citizens because they were Jews.
So when she talks about herself, Meloni, when she says that she is Giorgia, she is Christian, and she’s a mother, this is a coded language. And basically, her whole ideology is around fatherland, Christianity, God and family. She’s trying to say, who are her people —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Rula Jebreal: — and who are the others. So I always felt that I was part of those others who are criminalized and demonized.
Chris Hayes: So you know, Italy is an interesting case and it’s similar to many other European nations for the following reasons. One is that it has declining birth rates.
Rula Jebreal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: You talk about replacement theories, below replacement, right? The population is declining because Italian families don’t have enough children to replace the people that are dying.
Rula Jebreal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: The population is aging. And I remember this was 20 years ago now, when I was there in 2000. When you walk through the streets, Bologna was not at that point, a particularly diverse place. It was pretty homogenous.
Rula Jebreal: It still is not.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, pretty homogenous. And particularly for me —
Rula Jebreal: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — I grew up in the Bronx in New York City —
Rula Jebreal: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — it’s crazy to me to be in a place where everyone looks the same. But the one difference is when the little kindergarteners —
Rula Jebreal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — would walk through the streets, you would be like, oh, well, that’s a much more diverse group of people. And so, clearly, you know, the country was getting more diverse as immigrants were coming and as the older Native population was dying, right? And this dynamic is the same in basically —
Rula Jebreal: Everywhere.
Chris Hayes: — everywhere, across the continent. It’s the same in the U.S. throughout, quote-unquote, “the West.” Talk about the politics of that and what Meloni was able to harness to get elected this last time, after the party had had sort of fits and starts of electoral success, but nothing like this.
Rula Jebreal: So, Chris, Meloni was a militant at age 15 in basically a neo-fascist group that was birthed from the ashes of fascism, right. She chose to walk into that party, and she basically campaigned with Mussolini nieces. And you know, her symbol, it’s not only the symbolism of that, but she wanted to send a clear message.
Meloni was the first very young minister in Berlusconi’s government. Berlusconi bragged that he brought into the fold, he legitimized the neo-fascist movement, but it all happened not because you had these migrants. Italy has less migrants than a lot of European nations.
Chris Hayes: Yes, it’s lower levels than other places. Yeah.
Rula Jebreal: But they are the most vicious in their attacks against minorities. I mean, Germany had millions of Turks. France has millions of Moroccans, Algerians. And yes, they have their own issues. But the kind of xenophobic, racist, homophobic, Islamophobic rhetoric and policies that come out of the Italian government, I’ve never seen anything like this.
And it started happening when Obama was elected. You know, when we had the birther movement in America, that was a backlash on the reaction —
Chris Hayes: Yup.
Rula Jebreal: — to the election of Obama where a lot of native white people thought, oh, my God, yeah, these people are not hiding anymore. They’re actually exercising their right to share power and have power. And they freaked out and they formed the Tory Party.
So in Italy, you had moments and it happened exactly around 2008 and ‘09, where for the first time in Italy, you had this minister who became a minister of government, a black woman. Then you have people like myself who appear regularly on Italian television not as foreigners, as Italians to speak on Italian affairs. So I think there was a backlash against, they decided that they could not offer a vision of, you know, economic improvement or more tax cuts, and because they bankrupt the country with Berlusconi after 20 years.
Chris Hayes: Yes. The context here is —
Rula Jebreal: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — incredible stagnation.
Rula Jebreal: Exactly.
Chris Hayes: Italy, relative to other countries, used to be one of the wealthiest countries, it’s gotten poor and poor over time such that there are Eastern countries, I believe, places like Slovenia and others that are per capita GDP right in the same place as Italy.
Rula Jebreal: More or less. Exactly. So they could not offer any more any economic relief or hope and prosperity for the future. So they decided to hide themselves behind identity politics, who we hate. So what they’re selling today is we will tell you who the enemy is that’s trying to steal your jobs, that instead of saying we failed to create new jobs. Basically, the economic crash hit us worse than any other country because we have a very corrupt system after 20 years of Berlusconi, who never cared about governing, he cared about something else. He cared about power, and using the judiciary to stay out of prison —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Rula Jebreal: — exactly like Bibi Netanyahu.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Rula Jebreal: And he succeeded for a long time. Fast forward, they could not offer anything, that they decided that, okay, how can we create and revive against the narratives of who we hate, who are the enemy. And the enemy today, for them, according to their media and exactly like Fox News, you have Berlusconi’s media, newspaper, propaganda papers, who described the opposition as enemy of the people, terrorist, anarchist, as people basically who want open border.
I mean, last week in Italy, 80 migrants drowned because of Meloni’s cruel policy let them die. You had a ship, they received a call from basically NGO vessel saying the ship is in distress.
Chris Hayes: This is in the Mediterranean?
Rula Jebreal: The Mediterranean. There are refugees from Afghanistan, women and children, please, go save them. They did nothing. And then when 80 people died and drowned, and the body start, you know, coming to shore and basically to the beaches of Sicily. The reaction of the interior minister was, well, if they didn’t want to die, they shouldn’t have left. It’s their fault that they die.
And Meloni validated the same sentiment where she said, we want to send a message that it is inconvenient to come to Italy illegally. And she continues with these policies of, okay, who are the enemies? Minorities, migrants and the media. I mean, on the day I was tweeting about this tragedy in the Mediterranean, two policemen showed up at my relative’s home in Bologna to ask my whereabouts. Five policemen showed up at a newspaper in Italy called Domani to basically confiscate an article about the migration policy. The article is already on the website. She’s using law enforcement to intimidate journalists. This is what she’s doing.
Chris Hayes: Wait. No, I want to talk about this incident because this is very important —
Rula Jebreal: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — and very chilling. So let’s put a pin in that for a second. But just to go back for a second, the incident with the Afghan refugees who drowned in the Mediterranean. This is not just Italy, we should say. The Greek government has had a back and forth about criminalizing help for —
Rula Jebreal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — refugees, in fact, a very high profile criminal trial for NGO members who attempted to save boats. In the U.K., the big new initiative of the Tory party is cutting off anyone that comes to the country through the asylum, means not through sort of regular order, like the folks that are coming on the boats. They’re sending out these messages, saying, we’re cracking down on this.
In the U.S., the huge Fox News obsession is the border and chaos at the border —
Rula Jebreal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — and people coming and applying for asylum. It has been effective, actually, I think, in moving Biden towards their position, where he has now a series of announcements that have essentially restricted asylum in all kinds of different ways that are similar, if not exactly the same as Trump, right?
This is a global phenomenon. And I just want to stop here because I want to make a point on the other side, which is not to play like devil’s advocate for the insane cruelty and inhumanity that we see on display. But what I would say is you talk about sort of scapegoating. Clearly, that’s a big part of it.
But there is also something profound here to me, which is the post-World War II order which is basically a democracy with a coherent ethnostate, right? Like, there’s one ethnicity and one language that makes people Dutch or makes people French or makes people Italian, right? That’s breaking down. I mean, it’s breaking down under the fact that people can get around the world much more easily.
Rula Jebreal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: The fact that the global south is much poor than the global north, largely due to things the global north did.
Rula Jebreal: True.
Chris Hayes: And people want to leave those places and go to places that —
Rula Jebreal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — have more opportunity. And so the appeal here isn’t just the simple cynicism, which it 100 percent is. It’s that there is actually a profound reimagining of what it means to be Italian, what it means to be a Brit, what it means to be French, what it means to be Norwegian. Up and down, that is put on the table by the phenomenon of global migration, that countries are wrestling to answer. Do you think that’s fair?
Rula Jebreal: That is absolutely fair. To question your migration policy and put a cap of how much you need, however, is not an illegitimate conversation to have.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Rula Jebreal: What Meloni government is doing and rhetoric that preceded, Meloni started basically promoting the great conspiracy theory that people like Soros, the globalist —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Rula Jebreal: — and the European Union are trying to replace white Native Christian Italians with people who look like me.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Rula Jebreal: That second generation and third generation citizens of Italy are basically a threat somehow —
Chris Hayes: Right. Yes.
Rula Jebreal: — or suggesting. I mean, during that election campaign, she posted a video of a woman who was being raped without the consent of the victim, just to underscore the fact that the rapist was an asylum-seeker. This is how ruthless the woman is. Not only that, she campaigned, saying that she wanted the border wall, which is Trump’s idea. They don’t have the wall. They don’t need the wall, and they will blockade.
Chris Hayes: And it’s a lot.
Rula Jebreal: And they will blockade.
Chris Hayes: Yes, exactly. Yeah.
Rula Jebreal: And she went as far in saying we need to sync these rescue ships and criminalize anybody that help these asylum-seekers. So that kind of mindset reminds me actually very often to the mindset that paved the way to the Mussolini era, racist law that criminalized minorities.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Rula Jebreal: It never ends with migrants, never ends with migrant. It starts with migrants today, sooner or later. I mean, I’d say this example because the oldest woman in the Italian Senate, her name is Liliana Segre. She’s a Holocaust survivor. When she was a child, she was deported by Mussolini’s regime to Auschwitz, together with her father, Alberto. She survived and came back.
Today, she’s under police protection because she gets death threats, because she tries to tell her story simply because her tool is education, writing books, going to schools to inform people about their own history. And in order to implement the idea that never again, we need to inform people what took place, and for that, she gets death threats.
What we are seeing is violence, political violence that is becoming a norm, where schools and the streets are the battleground. Two weeks ago, in a school in Florence, neo-fascist attacked the students. And when the teacher and the principal of that school wrote a letter against fascism. Guess what? She was threatened by the Minister of Education, saying how dare she write that letter.
What we’re seeing, this is not a drill, Chris, the threat to democracy in Italy is real. And the attack on democratic norms on the opposition, criminalization of critical voices is the first step. And I say this because I was a witness in 2018, when one of Meloni coalition partner, Salvini, who is very pro-Putin —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Rula Jebreal: — and who actually defended Putin together with Meloni, saying, what they’re doing in Syria is okay. Killing Syrians is okay because they are defending Christians.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Rula Jebreal: Okay, that was their justification, while they were criminalizing Christian refugees. In that moment, they had a candidate in the north, his name is Luca Traini. That conspiracy theory, the great replacement conspiracy theory radicalized that man, and he went on a shooting spree and he shot six people of color, black men, and he shot also against the headquarter of the Democratic Party. So their words, their rhetoric, their policy is already paving the way for political violence, already was the cause for political violence in Italy.
Chris Hayes: More of our conversation after this quick break.
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Chris Hayes: What’s chilling, what’s upsetting and scary to me about Italy, too, is that Meloni comes after Berlusconi, and Berlusconi to me is the closest international comp you have to Trump —
Rula Jebreal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — because he’s this weird combination of like grifter, self-dealer, lawless attention magnet, charismatic in his own strange way —
Rula Jebreal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — but undeniably so. But also, I mean, an ideologue kind of, but all his ideology is sort of subsumed by his ego which is truly what his ideology is.
Rula Jebreal: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Whereas Meloni seems like the real deal, like she is a true believer.
Rula Jebreal: Oh, yeah.
Chris Hayes: — hard right, like, I joined the neo-fascist —
Rula Jebreal: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — youth group when I was 15. That’s not Donald Trump —
Rula Jebreal: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — and that’s not Silvio Berlusconi. And so you’ve got this sort of transition from kind of like decadent, corrupt, vain, sort of cynical authoritarian populism and self-dealing to like true believer, authoritarian, right-wing, zealotry in the forum Meloni. I want to talk about you and her have a history. I mean, you’re a prominent —
Rula Jebreal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — Italian commentator. She has been around in Italian politics. Like you said, you’re on stage together, you’ve debated, you’ve talked. Talk about what just happened to the incident with the police and I want you to sort of walk through it slowly because I think when you hear that here, it’s like, whoa. So I want you to tell me how this happened and what happened.
Rula Jebreal: So again, my story with Meloni starts in 2016, during this big debate. You know, in Europe, they were shocked that Donald Trump was elected in America after Barack Obama. And because I actually predicted his victory, compared him to Berlusconi, because —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Rula Jebreal: — Donald Trump rhetoric was for people, for minorities who are alerted to threats, especially to populous demagogues who are authoritarian, you know, figures, we immediately understand what they’re talking about and who they’re appealing to.
I was in London when Brexit happened. So people were shocked, I was not. I understood the appeal of racism, you know. When the Brexit here starts saying, we will have migrants from Turkey. They will take over. They will take your health care. They will take your buses, their schools. I understood people will actually get scared. They weaponize fear. Trump did the same with Mexicans, with others.
So when I debated Meloni, she worked with her own team. During the debate, she kept looking at them. Every time I would talk, she wouldn’t look at my face. She kept looking at her team and telling them, she’s crazy. She’s crazy, right? She’s crazy. She wanted her team to applaud her, and she wanted her people behind her. It was clear to me she lived in ecosystem where she had yes women and men around her, validating her views. She never had to confront a critic and it was the first time, and she honestly thought probably that, you know, I could not debate her. I would be intimidated. I was not and I kept challenging her views and her ideas calmly and rationally.
And by the end of the debate, it was clear she didn’t know how to convey any other idea except identity politics. Like, yeah, racism, we don’t have racism. You know, fascism is dead. I said, well, is fascism is dead, why you’re campaigning with these people on those ideas? These are fascist ideas. And I kept pushing back and pushing back, and then she was clearly frustrated, and she took it personal.
So since then, every time when Italy invites me to a big show, for example, they invited me to present the equivalent of the Grammys, and that year they wanted a bunch of women and I was the only woman of color and Italian. So they invited me to introduce the Grammys and I gave a monologue about violence against women. Meloni went on national television and said I should be censored. I should never be invited because I’m a leftist and that I have a leftist views and that kind of, you know, popular stage should not be political stage.
Chris Hayes: I have to say you’re underselling this because what you’re talking about is Sanremo —
Rula Jebreal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — which is far bigger in Italian culture than the Grammys in the U.S.
Rula Jebreal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: It’s like if you combine American Idol and the Super Bowl —
Rula Jebreal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — together. It is a national song competition that takes place every year, and it’s probably one of the most watched things outside of soccer that happens in Italy.
Rula Jebreal: Usually hundreds of millions —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Rula Jebreal: — between Italians in Italy and outside of Italy watch that.
Chris Hayes: Yes. It’s a continent-wide thing. So the Grammys doesn’t do it justice.
Rula Jebreal: Okay.
Chris Hayes: This is probably the central focal point of Italian pop culture while it’s happening.
Rula Jebreal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: The way the Super Bowl is here —
Rula Jebreal: Exactly.
Chris Hayes: — and everybody watches it, and people talk about it. And because it’s a competition, people also have their favorites that they get invested in, right? So it’s got that reality show sort of feel to it. So you were a presenter on this and you gave this impassioned monologue that went very viral across the world about women and the threat to women, particularly violence against women.
Rula Jebreal: Exactly. The pandemic within a pandemic and, basically, the pandemic of violence against women. In that week I was giving that monologue, six women in Italy were murdered by their husbands, six women. And the statistic about how many women are killed by their husbands and partners in Italy, it’s horrifying.
Anyway, when I accepted to be a participant in Sanremo, to present at Sanremo, my condition was clear, I don’t need to appear on Sanremo except if I can do it to convey a message about something that I am interested in socially —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Rula Jebreal: — and it is violence and rape, especially sexual harassment. And Meloni went on television and campaigned, actually she —
Chris Hayes: She went nuts about it.
Rula Jebreal: She went crazy. She went crazy.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. Now, wait, I just want to also say this because, again, I haven’t watched the monologue in a while and I watched it in Italian and my Italian is, you know, maybe a 4 out of 10. It was a feminist monologue about women.
Rula Jebreal: It is a feminist monologue.
Chris Hayes: But it was not a partisan monologue.
Rula Jebreal: It was not.
Chris Hayes: You were not calling it like this party, these politicians.
Rula Jebreal: No.
Chris Hayes: It was clearly political. It was about women’s dignity, equality and the pandemic, as you put it, of sexual abuse and sexual predation against women. But you didn’t name politicians. It wasn’t not partisan. Meloni made it this huge deal and then your monologue was like the central culture war fight in Italian politics for weeks.
Rula Jebreal: Exactly. It is ironic because they always say that conservative voices are canceled. And yet, that was a canceled culture where if you are not part of their group —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Rula Jebreal: And this is where the we versus them.
Chris Hayes: Yes. Who is this Arab woman lecturing us?
Rula Jebreal: Exactly. How dare she is Palestinian.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Rula Jebreal: I mean, like, I’ve been an Italian citizen for almost 20 years.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Rula Jebreal: And they’re, like, oh, we need to pay a foreigner? So the whole idea of the far-right, basically, newspapers went with that, and they start describing me as a Taliban, as an extremist, as an Islamist, but glamorous. She doesn’t wear a veil, but her head is covered with bad ideas. I mean, like, all kinds of garbage, excuse my language.
Chris Hayes: I’m sorry, I’m laughing because it’s preposterous.
Rula Jebreal: And then double standard, you know how they play with words, I’m obsessed with sexism, but also I’m obsessed with sex.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Rula Jebreal: The whole thing is like trying to trash me in all kinds of ways. And Meloni, when she went on television, basically, she asked a TV host on Channel 7 to put her on television because she wanted to take this campaign to the next level, and to single out to her followers. This is when I started getting the first death threats, when she went on this 2020, you know, before Sanremo, before the pandemic, one month before the pandemic, and said that I should never be invited to that TV show to Sanremo to be a presenter because somehow my political views cloud my cloud my judgment.
And if they have to invite me, she can concede to that, but the only condition is that they need to invite a counterpart. The problem with that, who’s the counterpart? A guy who is violent, some rapists, or somebody who beats his wife? I mean, it didn’t make sense. She was so blinded by her ideology. She didn’t know what she was talking about.
Chris Hayes: Well, she also, I think, saw it was opportunistic. Did she start criticizing you before the monologue or afterwards?
Rula Jebreal: Every time I would tweet.
Chris Hayes: Right. So you already announced that you were going to host and you’re tweeting, and she starts going after you in the run up to it?
Rula Jebreal: Even before —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Rula Jebreal: — I tweeted something, you know, there was a sexist attack on one of the senators in the Senate about her looks. And I tweeted saying, you know, it’s gross that in the 21st century, a woman in her 50s should be attacked for her looks and her weight, on whatever. This is really gross. Where are we heading with this?
And Meloni tweeted, saying, you never defended me. How dare you not to defend me? I’m the most insulted woman in Italy. And I was like, wait one second. I mean, why she’s obsessed following my tweets? And I actually tweeted back at her, actually, I defended you when they attacked you, you know, with sexist remarks, and maybe you should defend other women because we’re in this together. None of us are safe or free until we are all free. Obviously, she never answered.
And then she went after Sanremo. And then after Sanremo, she was she was quiet for a while. But then she went and start, you know, whenever I tweet, she would tweet me back or attack or insult and et cetera. Then during the campaign of last year, when she released that rape video, this is when I truly hit close to home.
Chris Hayes: So just to be clear, she posts it, it was an actual video of an actual —
Rula Jebreal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — sexual assault of an actual person?
Rula Jebreal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: Without consent that she posts it on social media?
Rula Jebreal: Yes. It was a Ukrainian refugee. And the person who was the rapist, the perpetrator was an asylum-seeker. So she wanted to underscore that —
Chris Hayes: Right. Of course.
Rula Jebreal: — they are rapists and et cetera.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Rula Jebreal: Twitter took it down immediately. And obviously, I reminded Meloni how, first, she didn’t ask the consent of the victim. She’s entitled to criticize what happened and she has a right. And the victim actually said that she was recognized, and it’s created a trauma for her, even a further trauma.
And then her campaign became the most aggressive campaign against migrants and refugees, and she would peddle all these things. And then we discovered that her own father was a drug trafficker, a convicted drug trafficker in Spain. Meloni’s own father —
Chris Hayes: Wait. Really?
Rula Jebreal: — a convicted drug trafficker in Spain. He abandoned her. He left her mother and left. And then this is where it all started, where I tweeted the article from El Pais, Spanish newspaper —
Chris Hayes: Oh, God. Okay.
Rula Jebreal: — where I tweeted saying the facts. El Pais reveals that Meloni’s his own father was in jail for drug trafficking. Well, very often Meloni uses rhetoric about migrants, where she criminalized collectively everybody.
Chris Hayes: Right. Yes. Right.
Rula Jebreal: In a democracy, there’s personal responsibility and not collective punishments.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Rula Jebreal: As she suggests that we need to collectively punish everybody because they’re rapists and criminals and drug traffickers. And on something else, I wrote, you know, when she talks about the great replacements theory, very often she uses the two things together. They’re trying to replace us, and they’re bringing these criminals.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Rula Jebreal: So she immediately said that she’s going to sue me. She actually is suing me currently. She did a police report, and in Italy, they call it defamation.
Chris Hayes: Right,
Rula Jebreal: You know, (inaudible) defamation.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Rula Jebreal: So she basically launched the legal action the day she won. The day of her victory, she launched the legal action.
Chris Hayes: She launched a civil legal action against you as a plaintiff. She’s suing you in civil court, not as the head of state.
Rula Jebreal: She’s suing me in civil court —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Rula Jebreal: — not as a head of state, but she did it the day she won the elections.
Chris Hayes: Right. So then what happened with the police?
Rula Jebreal: So because I’ve been out of the country, they couldn’t serve me the papers, right? They have to serve you.
Chris Hayes: I see.
Rula Jebreal: So they couldn’t serve me, I’m out of the country. And then I start tweeting about this tragedy of the 80 refugees who died. As soon I start tweeting, and as soon as I saw the government is panicking, and all her ministers and her senators insulting me on Twitter, obviously, I ignored them, this is when the police showed up at my relative’s home in Bologna, asking my whereabouts. Well, where is she?
Chris Hayes: And this was ostensibly about service of the civil lawsuit?
Rula Jebreal: I believe it was about that.
Chris Hayes: I mean, that’s what they’re saying it was for?
Rula Jebreal: That’s what they were saying.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Rula Jebreal: Two police officers showed up at my relative’s home and my relative who was an elderly woman said, well, she’s not here, she’s out of the country. And you, of all people, should know this because when anybody come in the country or leave the country, you can see it, right?
Chris Hayes: Right.
Rula Jebreal: But clearly, there was pressure.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Rula Jebreal: The timing was suspicious.
Chris Hayes: I see. I see what you’re saying.
Rula Jebreal: There was pressure on, you know, the local police. And it was a coincidence because it was two days after the police stormed the headquarters of a main newspaper in Italy called Domani because of their articles about migration and migrants, and the shipwreck that happened in Sicily.
Chris Hayes: Well, I guess one question is there’s different ways that these governments can go in terms of their popularity. So one of the things that I think really saved, that was really crucial for the U.S., and I think there was a bunch of reasons this was the case —
Rula Jebreal: The media.
Chris Hayes: The media, and I think this is a chicken or egg question about the media and Trump and his popularity, but Trump was never popular. I mean, when you look at India and you look at Modi, and there’s moves —
Rula Jebreal: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — in India against the independent press. There’s incredibly problematic relationships between the ruling party and really dangerous, violent, ugly sort of street groups of bigotry and anti-Muslim —
Rula Jebreal: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — bigotry particularly.
Rula Jebreal: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: But in India, Modi is very popular. You know, he won reelection. His poll is at 60, 65 percent. Now, again, it’s hard to disentangle that from the media. These two things are connected. You know, Trump is at 40 to 43 percent the whole time. Orban is quite popular. Where is Meloni? Like, Italians always hate their leaders and they throw them out every nine months. So it’s very hard to be popular Italian leader, at least, in my adult life. But I guess my question is like how politically successful has this project been so far for Meloni?
Rula Jebreal: Well, she’s still in a honeymoon period. But the difference between the United States and whether India or Italy, it’s a major issue, freedom of speech, freedom, criticism, freedom of the press. When Steve Bannon said that the real opposition is the media, he was right. I agree with him. And this is the main difference.
I think one of the main authors of authoritarianism, Hannah Arendt, she said, you know, the perfect subject of a authoritarian state or a police state are people who can no longer distinguish between facts and fiction, truth and lies.
In Italy, as we speak, Chris, by the way, you have seven channels in total. You have three that are controlled by the government. So the government decide who speaks, who doesn’t speak, Rai 1, 2, 3.
Chris Hayes: Right. Uno, Due, Tre.
Rula Jebreal: Uno, Due, Tre.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, those are the three.
Rula Jebreal: The other three are Berlusconi channels.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Rula Jebreal: Five, four, six. So you have the government in control of six channels, and the coalition government. And then you have Channel 7, the only independent network.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Rula Jebreal: The owner is a guy that used to work with Berlusconi, but that’s an independent channel. You see in that small channel, independent voices. But that’s it. They don’t have our MSNBC. They don’t have CNN. Like, they don’t have that. And Meloni is very clear about censorship. I mean, the head of Rai 2, the news, is now a cultural minister. All of the people who —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Rula Jebreal: — used to be on television, defending her or her trolls, are now working with her and for her. So she sent a clear message, if you dare to criticize me, I will sue you, and I will put you out of work. If you speak well of me, I will reward you. And this is, you know, quintessential fascist politics.
Chris Hayes: Correct.
Rula Jebreal: So when Steve Bannon went to Italy, he identified Meloni better than anybody else in 2017, where he said, you put a presentable face on populist, you know, ideas, conservative, whatever, and then said, this is how we win.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Rula Jebreal: You basically have a woman who is defending patriarchy, defending the whole idea that Italians are under attack, assault by these migrants who are taking from them everything, that Europe is complicit in this project. You know, that conspiracy theories are thriving in Italy. People on Italian television defend Putin until now, defend what Putin is doing in Ukraine saying, well, NATO started all of this.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Rula Jebreal: Americans are behind this war. I mean, like, all kinds of conspiracy theories that the last time I heard such conspiracy theories I was in Egypt when 9/11 took place, and Egyptians were saying, oh, it’s an inside job, right? Those are the conspiracy theories that you hear only under authoritarian regimes.
Chris Hayes: We’ll be right back after we take this quick break.
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Chris Hayes: One of the things that is striking to me and I don’t have quite the experience to sort of reliably make this case, but I’m just sketching out a thesis in hearing your feedback. When I, you know, looked at Brexit, when you look at some of the contours of Italian politics, even the fact that like birtherism —
Rula Jebreal: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — was very widespread in Israel during the —
Rula Jebreal: Oh, yeah.
Chris Hayes: — Obama years, because, you know, the Israeli government really sort of went after Obama as this threat to state of Israel and Iran deal.
Rula Jebreal: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: The degree, you know, America still retains somewhat remarkably to me, incomparable cultural hegemony in the world.
Rula Jebreal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: I mean, in some ways, even stronger than I would have guessed. If you’d asked me 20 years ago, projecting forward, America has more cultural hegemony that it’s retained than I would have guessed 20 years ago. And I think that’s sort of fascinating and I don’t know why it is. This is a thesis and I’m curious to hear your feedback on it.
Basically, America has a shocking degree of cultural hegemony in the world still. Even as the world has grown, other countries have grown richer, even if there have been, you know, all sorts of changes in the international landscape, American culture still has this sort of profound effect on the rest of the world. And one byproduct of that, I think, is that American conservative messaging, conservative rhetoric and tropes. I am always surprised how far-reaching they are.
Like, there was QAnon folks in Germany —
Rula Jebreal: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — and I was like, wait a second —
Rula Jebreal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — how are there QAnon folks in Germany? The whole idea of QAnon is like this sort of Byzantine recondite conspiracy theory about deep staters in the American government. Like, how does it get to Germany? But it’s like, well, there’s American pop music in Germany, too. So American conservatism and American culture war conservatism seems to be exported. And I’m curious as someone who consumes media in different places —
Rula Jebreal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — in Israel, sees what the Israeli media is like, how much you think that’s true, and how much that’s part of what happens?
Rula Jebreal: It is so true. So I remember two things. Recently, I was reading a couple of comments on Twitter from Salvini’s own party members, and they were all glorifying and celebrating Ron DeSantis. For them, he’s the hero.
Chris Hayes: It’s so weird. It’s just so weird. Like, the reverse doesn’t happen, right? Yeah.
Rula Jebreal: And then we’re saying we need to start implementing what Florida is implementing. I mean, Meloni’s members of her party, who are elected to the European Parliament, the head of her delegation of the European Parliament was at CPAC and he was peddling conspiracy theories about stolen elections and basically saying, you know, the left is trying to impose their ideology, gender ideology, and you know, open borders. I mean, they are absolutely importing those ideas because they have no other ideas to basically run on.
The only thing they are fascinated with, for example, Meloni wrote a tweet, and she put my face on that tweet, a year before the election because I said, you know, clearly, Meloni and Mussolini are fascinated with American pop culture, especially fascination with weapons and arms, especially Salvini. So she put my thing and she said, this is embarrassing. We never, you know, were fascinated with a culture of arms and arms sales and weapons. And you know, the First Amendment is not our thing. And it’s embarrassing that Jebreal claims such lies. Fine.
Fast forward, now, her own member of her parties are holding clashing calls on All right-15, and all kinds of things, exactly like Lauren Boebert and —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Rula Jebreal: — Marjorie Taylor Greene, and posting pictures, basically glorifying gun culture, gay rights. Again, now they’re trying to say to the European Union, we’re not going to accept your regulation about gay couple adopting children because they’re a threat to traditional family. We see and hear this rhetoric in America all the time.
And the worst part of it, it’s not only against migrants and others, against their own citizens. For example, the whole idea of what they need to study and what to read, and what books to ban or whatever, this is now becoming a debate in a lot of countries, especially Italy. But one of the things that was striking to me, do you remember some of these right-wing activists, Ben Shapiro and others? They would put these videos of themselves debating with some people like, he destroyed them.
Chris Hayes: Yes, yes.
Rula Jebreal: He, you know, drowned them.
Chris Hayes: Yes, yes.
Rula Jebreal: You know, he killed them.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, yeah.
Rula Jebreal: So every time Berlusconi on newspaper or another far-right newspaper, Il Giornale, Il Libro, they put my face, and they often do that, my picture. It’s like, yeah, Meloni destroyed her.
Chris Hayes: Interesting.
Rula Jebreal: This other parliamentarian, he really knocked her down. I mean, the day they found 80 people drowned, they used the same word. It’s called annegata, affogato. It’s like that we really crushed her. Like, the day we found all of these dead people, for you, the most important thing is to put my face in a newspaper to say, you know, that you crushed me with your talking points. I mean, it’s just preposterous.
But then they go from that to basically now claiming that the opposition, the Democratic Party that is led by a woman, who happen to be Jewish and lesbian, Elly Schlein, start calling them terrorists, the enemy. They start calling them all kinds of names that I honestly think that, you know, I’ve never seen in America such an extremism, I don’t remember seeing in America calling, I don’t know, Kamala Harris, except, you know, we had Nancy Pelosi’s husband being attacked.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Rula Jebreal: And then, you know, Nancy Pelosi was called, you know, enemy of the people.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. I mean, to me, the closest and one of the moments that I think it’s been a little lost is when Trump said about Rashida Tlaib —
Rula Jebreal: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — Ilhan Omar and AOC —
Rula Jebreal: They need to go back home.
Chris Hayes: — send them back, send them back. And there’s a moment where he goes and does a rally, where he brings them up after this, and the crowd starts chanting, send them back, send them back. I did a monologue on it. I was, like, this is fascist.
Rula Jebreal: This is fascist.
Chris Hayes: I’m sorry. Like, a big crowd chanting about the members of the other party, all of whom were of color, like, send them back.
Rula Jebreal: And you can see the link between when they start saying these words and violence. When Trump was talking about after Charlottesville, and he said, you know, they’re fine people, whatever.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Rula Jebreal: And then you see how the rhetoric and especially the great replacement conspiracy theory, whether Jews opening the door for refugees, and then you see the terrorist attack in the synagogue, Tree of Life synagogue —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Rula Jebreal: — and other places.
Rula Jebreal: And then you can see how this rhetoric is deployed by these serial killers and these terrorists, while the far-right is calling terrorists the opposition. I mean, all bets are off. She’s been in office, Meloni, for three months. I am surprised and I think political violence is coming. It’s a question of when.
And when the leader of the Democratic Party was elected two weeks ago, immediately after, in a small town, on the walls of that main square, her name was written there. There was a swastika, and basically said, de facto, it was a death threat. So these are not words. In Italy, people are very angry because of the political situation but also the economic situation, and they want to blame somebody for, you know, whatever, what’s happening in their life.
And Meloni is giving them, feeding them, and that government is feeding them rhetoric. And what kind of rhetoric is that she’s feeding them? You know, not only identity politics, but also pointing out to who are the enemies are, and who are the people to target.
Chris Hayes: You know, to sort of loop back to where we started this, and you talked about great replacement theory. I mean, great replacement theory, which is, for those who don’t know, the idea that there is essentially an international conspiracy led by Soros, and you know, in some corners, Jewish refugee services groups —
Rula Jebreal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — and NGOs, whose goal is to replace the Native born, particularly white, ethnically —
Rula Jebreal: Right.
Chris Hayes: — pure populations of the U.S. or Italy, whatever state it is, with people from either in the U.S. context, Mexico, Central America and South America; in the European context, the Middle East and Asia —
Rula Jebreal: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — and Africa, right?
Rula Jebreal: And Africa.
Chris Hayes: I mean, it’s insidious, and disgusting, and racist is also not true. The truth is much more banal, which is that people around the world want to go to these countries because they’re wealthier. And many people are in places in the U.S., for instance, huge asylum uptick in Cuba, right? Cubans, Cubans are in very dire straits right now.
And what’s bizarre to me is, like, for years, everyone in American politics, a bipartisan policy consensus understood like, boy, why would Cubans want to leave the island? Well, everyone knew why Cubans want to leave the island.
Rula Jebreal: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: This is a central, you know, part of American Cold War mythos. Of course, they want to come here for the freedom and escape the boot heel of Castro. And now, you have this, like, the great replacement theory doing all this work. When the truth is just the banal truth that there’s lots of places in the world that are violent, dangerous and poor, and people are desperate to get to places that are safe and have an opportunity for life. That’s it.
The thing that I think is hard for people to deal with, and I think the thing that right preys on, and the thing I think the left has a hard time articulating —
Rula Jebreal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — is that when it comes down to it, if you’re like me and you’re born in the U.S., you won the natural lottery. You just got lucky at birth that you weren’t born in —
Rula Jebreal: Afghanistan.
Chris Hayes: — Afghanistan. That’s it. Like, literally, the cosmic dice rolled and they came up, and one child came out in Afghanistan in the midst of the 20-year war and one of them came out in the Bronx, New York in 1979. And what we can’t quite look in the face, and I think this is where the power of the right derives some of its forces, what is the moral justification for me being here and they being there, right? Because what I want to say as a liberal is we have a moral duty to these folks that are on the boat and at the border to do what we can, right?
Rula Jebreal: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: But the logical extension of that moral duty is open borders. It’s basically, like, it’s not fair that other people are born there and I was born here. They should all come. But of course, that’s very impracticable.
Rula Jebreal: Yeah,
Chris Hayes: And it’s also, like, very hard to sort of run a society that way. But what is between those two is a difficult thing to articulate.
Rula Jebreal: Much more. I don’t know, Chris, if it’s difficult. I traveled to these areas.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Rula Jebreal: I’ve been in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq. So when I hear the boat or even, you know, in Libya where they have torture camps, and the Italian government would rather pay the people who torture the refugees and lock them, and sell them and rape them than basically do anything about the situation in Libya. Again, there’s a huge sea of things to be doing.
But if you are part of the coalition that bombed Afghanistan, and was part of that war, on terror, that bombed basically seven or eight Muslim majority country, you cannot really say, well —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Rula Jebreal: — you know, we tried, whatever.
Chris Hayes: Great point.
Rula Jebreal: I don’t want —
Chris Hayes: Yeah, someone else’s business.
Rula Jebreal: Okay?
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Rula Jebreal: No, it’s your own business.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Rula Jebreal: I’m so sorry.
Chris Hayes: Good point.
Rula Jebreal: Okay? One of the things, how much budget do we have in the Pentagon in the United States compared to basically U.S. aid? The far-right in Italy said, we need to help them back home. But guess what? Italian budget when it comes to those missions and helping them back home is, you know —
Chris Hayes: Paltry. Yeah.
Rula Jebreal: — nothing, nothing, not even 1 percent. Okay. And if you’re criminalizing also the rescue ships or the NGOs —
Chris Hayes: Yup.
Rula Jebreal: — or trying to help them home, that means, you know, you have no intention. It’s only propaganda. But again, another thing that I think is lost, what Russia did and why there’s a Russian narrative that is very popular against migration in Europe. They use refugees as a political tool —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Rula Jebreal: — a weapon to —
Chris Hayes: In Syria you’re saying?
Rula Jebreal: In Syria.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Rula Jebreal: So when the first wave of refugees starts coming to Europe, and you know, Bashar al-Assad, together with Putin were bombing these countries. The far-right was inciting about those refugees who are being killed —
Chris Hayes: Yup.
Rula Jebreal: — in Syria. And they said, we don’t want these people because they’re Islamist. They’re ISIS. We don’t want them. Actually, Putin is doing our job. And this narrative —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Rula Jebreal: — resonated. On the other side, nobody said that Putin actually was not bombing really ISIS and the Islamists. They were bombing the pro-democracy activists —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Rula Jebreal: — who are challenging Bashar al-Assad and wanted more freedom, more democracy and dignity. And nobody wants to leave home until home is a mouth of a shark, Chris. Nobody wants to leave Aleppo, gorgeous Aleppo, to come live in the slums of the U.K. or Milan or Berlin. Nobody wants to do that.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Rula Jebreal: Even if they’re poor in their own country, they’re willing to stay.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Rula Jebreal: But once you start, you know, gassing them with chemical weapons, and you start brutalizing and oppressing them, or you start —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Rula Jebreal: — you know, decapitating them like the Taliban’s are doing, nobody wants to stay there.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, yeah.
Rula Jebreal: So the whole narrative that they are about to invade us have to be dismantle at its root, at its core. It’s not an invasion. Actually, we are the one that invaded those countries and made it, for many people, unlivable. So more diplomacy, and I’m not saying this as a rhetoric. After I visited Syria and I saw what they were doing in Syria, as a humble citizen of the world, I came back and I opened up scholarship program for Syrians and Ukrainians that is still running for the last eight years.
And we have Syrian students and Ukrainian students, especially women and especially women who were abused and tortured and persecuted. You know, we just brought to Italy these amazing Ukrainian refugees. She’s from the Tartar community, she’s Muslim. And you know, she called me the other day and she said, you know, it’s so strange that the rhetoric in Italy against Muslims is worse than I ever seen in my country, in Ukraine. We never had that. We have taken a thousand of Muslims. We lived and we have a Jewish president. And yes, we’re at war with another nation who wants to erase. But that’s kind of rhetoric I never heard anywhere else.
So again, if I humbly can do this, the U.S. that has a huge responsibility, a huge budget, and culturally, still have this hegemony over the world, they can do much more in terms of diplomacy. They can do much more. Somebody has to explain to me why Ashraf Ghani within seconds left the country, taking billions of dollars from his own people, from the Afghans. And then, you know, 20 years where we spent trillions of dollars, collapsed in seconds, in weeks. I mean, somebody has to explain to me that that, you know, military rule didn’t work, maybe we need to change approach —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Rula Jebreal: — and do something different that create less refugees and less crisis.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, it’s a really, really important point. I mean, it’s not just something. You know, when I say the natural lottery, that strips away so much accountability, right, about what actually happened and the causes of history that have produced people going to Europe or in the case of the Western Hemisphere to the U.S.
Rula Jebreal: Yes. You know, the most popular woman for all of these refugees, you know who that is? Samantha Power, USAID, she has so much power. I don’t know if she knows that or she doesn’t. But she could do so much good with that power. And the Russians were very effective at exploiting prejudice against refugees —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Rula Jebreal: — and weaponizing refugees and giving a weapon to the far-right movement who won across Europe on that argument. We did not give our liberal friends another tool —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Rula Jebreal: — to counter that narrative. We need to kneecap that narrative from the start.
Chris Hayes: Rula Jebreal is an award-winning journalist, best-selling author, novelist, foreign policy expert, visiting professor at the University of Miami, fluent in many languages, has been all over the world, and has a truly unique perspective. Rula, it’s such a great pleasure to have you on. Thank you so much.
Rula Jebreal: Thank you, Chris. Thank you for everything you’re doing and for speaking for the voiceless very often.
Chris Hayes: Once again, great thanks to Rula Jebreal, really a remarkable person with an incredible amount of experience across the world. We’d love to hear your thoughts. Tweet us with the hashtag #WITHpod, email withpod@gmail.com. Be sure to follow us on TikTok by searching WITHpod.
Why Is This Happening? is presented by MSNBC and NBC News, produced by Doni Holloway and Brendan O’Melia. This episode was engineered by Cedric Wilson, and features music by Eddie Cooper. You can see more of our work, including links to things we mentioned here, by going to nbcnews.com/whyisthishappening.
Tweet us with the hashtag #WITHpod, email WITHpod@gmail.com. Follow us on TikTok by searching for WITHpod. “Why Is This Happening?” is presented by MSNBC and NBC News, produced by Doni Holloway and Brendan O’Melia, engineered by Bob Mallory and features music by Eddie Cooper. You can see more of our work, including links to things we mentioned here, by going to nbcnews.com/whyisthishappening.