Welcome to a Citations Needed News Brief.

I'm Neema Shirazi.

I'm Adam Johnson.

You can follow the show on Twitter and Blue Sky at CitationsPod.

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We do these news briefs in between our regularly scheduled episodes of Cetaceans needed now in its ninth season.

And today, Adam, we want to touch on something that obviously you have written about in your upcoming book,

which is called How to Sell a Genocide, the Media's Complicity in the Destruction of Gaza, which will be published by Pluto Press in April.

So very soon, everyone should check that out and pre-order if you can, get it wherever the

finest books are sold.

But something that you write about in your book, Adam, is the weaponization of the human shield argument.

We hear this all the time when it has to do with Palestine and Israel's destruction of Gaza,

that Hamas is hiding within the civilian population, that they are using regular civilians as

human shields, which really allows Israel to murder

men, women, children, babies, senior citizens, bombing hospitals and mosques and schools and

apartment buildings with impunity because they are saying, well, Hamas has now militarized

civilian sites and, hey, there's nothing we can do because

we just have to kill everyone. So this human shield argument is used as an absolution for war crimes

in the case of Israel. But what we also see Adam and what we've also been seeing since the

beginning of the U.S.

...