Hi y'all, it's Riannon. You're about to hear another amazing, gorgeous, five-four episode,

but I felt like I needed to come on and quickly talk about a couple things,

because for me and millions of people, it's not business as usual right now.

Everyone who listens to this podcast knows, I hope, that I'm Palestinian.

So what's happening in Palestine right now is overwhelming. It is in many ways indescribable,

like I generally think I'm a decently articulate person, and over the past several days,

I have felt absolutely incapable of finding the vocabulary to describe what is happening and what

it feels like. Maybe the most simple way to put it is that we are collectively either witnessing

or collectively actually experiencing, if you are in Palestine, a massive escalation of violence

in a apartheid state that is predicated upon ethnic cleansing of indigenous inhabitants of that land.

Israel has dropped more bombs on Gaza in a week than the U.S. dropped on Afghanistan in a year

during the war on terror. Thousands of civilians are dead. People are digging through the concrete

rubble of their homes with their bare hands, looking for bodies of their loved ones. I don't need to

tell you all this. I know I don't. I know I don't need to tell you the details of the siege on Gaza,

I know that people who listen to fight for are people of good conscience who are informed and

concerned with justice and liberation from oppression. I just wanted to come on and say that no

matter what corporate media and western governments and the most powerful and high tech and wealthy

militaries in the world are saying and doing, Palestine lives, and the Palestinian people struggle

for liberation continues alongside all oppressed people all over the world. I hope that the overwhelming

grief we're all experiencing can be channeled into action and solidarity. And I want to say because

so many of you who are listening are law students, I want to say that over the past week it has been

law students. It has been law students who have shown up when I have felt deeply alone at work

...