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Inside Geneva: books to make you think

This week, Inside Geneva presents the newest instalment of our “Books to make you think” series.

We talk to an author who had a ringside seat as the US development agency USAID was being destroyed.

“The people who so recklessly tore down the agency […] are still sitting in high government positions and have not been held accountable for their actions, so I intentionally named names in the book and explained exactly who was responsible and why,” says Nicholas Enrich, author of Into the Wood Chipper.

“USAID was destroyed by people who really had no idea what they were doing, and because of the vindictive ego of Elon Musk,” continues Enrich.

And we hear about a forensic analysis of the language used by US media to report the war in Gaza.

The New York Times referred to the killing of Israelis on October 7 as a ‘massacre’ 124 times, and a ‘slaughter’ 53 times. In the same time frame, they used similar language zero times to describe the killing of Palestinians, despite the fact that, in the first 100 days, the death toll was seven or eight times higher than on October 7. Zero, not once, did they describe anything Israel did to the Palestinians in that period as a massacre or a slaughter,” says Adam H. Johnson, author of How to Sell a Genocide.

Did the mainstream media sanitise war crimes?

“Do you think that it is possible Israel killed 20,000 children at least – that’s the official number that no one disputes – over two years and never once committed a massacre or a slaughter? Does that feel statistically likely to you? I think the answer is, on its face, ‘no’,” says Johnson.

Join host Imogen Foulkes on Inside Geneva.

Find out more about the ‘Inside Geneva’ podcast and our other Swiss podcasts in English here.

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