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| By The Free Press |
It’s Wednesday, May 7. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Does Bernie Sanders have the answers to the Democrats’ problems? Who is the real Mohsen Mahdawi? And what did Donald Trump say when Mark Carney told him Canada is not for sale in the Oval Office yesterday? All that and more coming up.
But first: How a falsehood about Gaza became accepted as fact.
Samantha Power, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, announced in April 2024 that a famine had begun in Gaza. As evidence, Power cited a report by “an independent, United Nations–affiliated monitoring system, called the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification Global Initiative (IPC),” writes Michael Ames in The Free Press.
As Ames reveals in his story for us today, there was a serious problem with Power’s statement: Neither the IPC nor the specific report she cites ever actually declared a famine in Gaza.
Ames is a careful reporter, with extensive published work in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, and other outlets. He did the digging into how this myth—which originated with Hamas—became accepted as fact across large parts of the American media. Ames writes that in the past 20 years, the IPC has confirmed only four famines: one in Somalia, one in Sudan, and two in South Sudan.
“The famine storyline in Gaza is like the proverbial bell that cannot be unrung,” writes Ames. “So many unthinkable tragedies have occurred since Hamas’s massacre on October 7, 2023, but a famine in Gaza isn’t one of them.”
I urge you to read Ames’ whole report.
—Adam Rubenstein
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Why Economic Sanctions Always Backfire | |||
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The manufacture of cutting-edge semiconductor chips is arguably the most important industry in the global economy. Which is why the U.S. has sanctioned Chinese tech firms in the field—and everyone seems to agree these sanctions have been a success. But an ominous new development suggests that conventional wisdom has it all wrong.
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Who Is the Real Mohsen Mahdawi? | |||
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Mohsen Mahdawi, the pro-Palestinian international student at Columbia detained by the Trump administration, has presented himself as a blameless advocate for peace since his release from custody last week. And much of the media coverage about him has struck a sympathetic tone. But court filings, a police report, and posts on social media tell a very different—and more troubling—story.
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