The Honest Take

Garbage In, Gospel Out: Wikipedia, Reddit, and the Battle for Reality | with Ashley Rindsberg

Episode Description When you ask ChatGPT, Google, or Gemini a question, where does the answer come from? Increasingly, it traces back to Wikipedia — and Wikipedia, investigative journalist Ashley Rindsberg argues, has been captured. In this episode, Rindsberg walks through how a small, coordinated network of editors — a "gang of 40" — has reshaped the way Wikipedia presents Israel, Zionism, and the war in Gaza, and how those edits flow downstream into the AI systems the world now treats as neutral arbiters of fact. He breaks down the tactics: swarming, the 500-edit barrier, severing Jewish historical ties to the land, weaponizing arbitration, and laundering terror-linked content through Reddit and into the models. It's a tour of the machinery behind the "narrative engines" — Wikipedia, Reddit, Google, and AI — and a sober look at what media literacy actually requires when the encyclopedia itself has a point of view. The Honest Take * Podcast (all platforms): https://thehonesttake.transistor.fm [https://thehonesttake.transistor.fm/] * YouTube playlist: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLuF-lEHTGTw_RrfN9EP6pdWhgjMX7Fg5 [https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLuF-lEHTGTw_RrfN9EP6pdWhgjMX7Fg5] * Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-honest-take/id1896315802 [https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-honest-take/id1896315802] * Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1pCnClcM4jiggKP46YZGjG [https://open.spotify.com/show/1pCnClcM4jiggKP46YZGjG] HonestReporting * Web: https://honestreporting.com [https://honestreporting.com/] * X / Instagram: @HonestReporting [https://x.com/HonestReporting]

The Most Hated Man at the UN: How the United Nations Turned Against Israel | With Hillel Neuer

What does it feel like to walk into a room run by dictators and state sponsors of terror — and tell them the truth to their faces? Hillel Neuer has done it for twenty years. As executive director of UN Watch in Geneva, he's become, by his own account and several media outlets', "the most hated man at the UN." In this conversation with Benjamin Chertoff, he explains the machinery behind the headlines: who actually writes the resolutions, how the "automatic majority" of 56 Muslim-majority states plus the dictatorships works, why Western democracies go along to get along, and how the Human Rights Council went from its founding chair Eleanor Roosevelt to a representative of Gaddafi's Libya. They get into the Iran moment — the UN's near-silence on the massacre of Iranian protesters, followed by its sudden fury once the US and Israel struck the regime — and the case of Francesca Albanese, the Special Rapporteur condemned by France, Germany, Canada, the US and others for "Holocaust inversion" and antisemitism, who remains effectively unaccountable. Neuer breaks down the disinformation feedback loop (NGO → UN statement → "the UN says" → global press), the meaning of the Council's Israel-only "Agenda Item 7," and whether the institution can ever be fixed. Guest: Hillel Neuer — Executive Director, UN Watch. Host: Benjamin Chertoff. From HonestReporting.

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

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 * Antisemitism vs. anti-Israel * The Abraham Accords and Morocco's reckoning * Recognition, justice, and reparations; the case taken to the UN in Geneva, September 2025 Notable quotes * "Libya in 1948 had 38,000 Jews. Today there are zero." * "I'm a Babylonian Jew." / "How can I deny that I'm Iraqi? I've been there for 3,000 years." * "I have no Jews. I only have Moroccans." — the King of Morocco * "Why would a million people leave in 30 years? That is ethnic cleansing." * "You can't talk about one refugee story without the other."

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

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. Eve Barlow's links * 📰 Blacklisted (Substack): https://evebarlow.substack.com [https://evebarlow.substack.com/] * ✍️ "Queers for Zion" (SAPIR Journal): https://sapirjournal.org/aspiration-ii/2026/queers-for-zion/ [https://sapirjournal.org/aspiration-ii/2026/queers-for-zion/] * 𝕏 https://x.com/Eve_Barlow [https://x.com/Eve_Barlow] * 📸 Instagram: https://instagram.com/evebarlow [https://instagram.com/evebarlow] Chapters * (00:00) Cold open * (00:18) Welcome — who is Eve Barlow * (02:08) The Barcelona sauna incident * (06:52) An outlier, or an epidemic? * (11:34) From NME and GQ to fighting Jew-hatred * (20:35) The writing on the wall: BDS, London, and leaving the UK * (28:09) Where "Queers for Palestine" comes from: queer theory & post-colonialism * (35:36) Marginalization as political pathology * (42:26) Moral superiority and the activist "cult" * (48:22) Building a new closet: "take off your Magen David" * (52:42) The "as-a-Jew" anti-Zionists: Matt Bernstein & Zach Polanski * (57:19) Pinkwashing — and Israel's real LGBTQ+ record * (1:02:17) Most rights in the region — and still room to grow * (1:04:13) "Queers for Zion" and Emily Damari in captivity * (1:08:52) To the queer Jewish kid told to choose * (1:12:04) Where to find Eve's work * (1:12:41) Ben's final reflection The Honest Take goes past the headlines to find out what's actually true about Israel and the people covering it. Hosted by Ben Chertoff for HonestReporting. ▶️ Watch on YouTube: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLuF-lEHTGTw_RrfN9EP6pdWhgjMX7Fg5 [https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLuF-lEHTGTw_RrfN9EP6pdWhgjMX7Fg5] 🎧 Listen everywhere: https://thehonesttake.transistor.fm [https://thehonesttake.transistor.fm/] If this conversation made you think, do us one favor: leave a rating and a reviewwherever you're listening — it's the single biggest thing that helps new people find the show. And follow HonestReporting on Instagram, X, TikTok, and Facebook.

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

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 [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 [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. [https://share.transistor.fm/s/a2cab599/transcript]