Gabor Mate on Trauma and Palestinian Suffering
In this episode of Centre Stage, our guest is Dr Gabor Mate, a retired physician, author and Holocaust survivor who has written extensively on trauma and child development, as well as Israel and Palestine.
Mate talks about the colonial foundations of Zionism, how living under it has traumatised Palestinians and the ways mainstream media distorts the realities on the ground in Gaza.
Phil Lavelle is a TV news correspondent at Al Jazeera.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Al Jazeera
39 minutes ago
- Al Jazeera
Google's AI video tool amplifies fears of an increase in misinformation
In both Tehran and Tel Aviv, residents have faced heightened anxiety in recent days as the threat of missile strikes looms over their communities. Alongside the very real concerns for physical safety, there is growing alarm over the role of misinformation, particularly content generated by artificial intelligence, in shaping public perception. GeoConfirmed, an online verification platform, has reported an increase in AI-generated misinformation, including fabricated videos of air strikes that never occurred, both in Iran and Israel. This follows a similar wave of manipulated footage that circulated during recent protests in Los Angeles, which were sparked by a rise in immigration raids in the second-most populous city in the United States. The developments are part of a broader trend of politically charged events being exploited to spread false or misleading narratives. The launch of a new AI product by one of the largest tech companies in the world has added to those concerns of detecting fact from fiction. Late last month, Google's AI research division, DeepMind, released Veo 3, a tool capable of generating eight-second videos from text prompts. The system, one of the most comprehensive ones currently available for free, produces highly realistic visuals and sound that can be difficult for the average viewer to distinguish from real footage. To see exactly what it can do, Al Jazeera created a fake video in minutes using a prompt depicting a protester in New York claiming to be paid to attend, a common talking point Republicans historically have used to delegitimise protests, accompanied by footage that appeared to show violent unrest. The final product was nearly indistinguishable from authentic footage. Al Jazeera also created videos showing fake missile strikes in both Tehran and Tel Aviv using the prompts 'show me a bombing in Tel Aviv' and then a similar prompt for Tehran. Veo 3 says on its website that it blocks 'harmful requests and results', but Al Jazeera had no problems making these fake videos. 'I recently created a completely synthetic video of myself speaking at Web Summit using nothing but a single photograph and a few dollars. It fooled my own team, trusted colleagues, and security experts,' said Ben Colman, CEO of deepfake detection firm Reality Defender, in an interview with Al Jazeera. 'If I can do this in minutes, imagine what motivated bad actors are already doing with unlimited time and resources.' He added, 'We're not preparing for a future threat. We're already behind in a race that started the moment Veo 3 launched. Robust solutions do exist and work — just not the ones the model makers are offering as the be-all, end-all.' Google says it is taking the issue seriously. 'We're committed to developing AI responsibly, and we have clear policies to protect users from harm and govern the use of our AI tools. Any content generated with Google AI includes a SynthID watermark, and we add a visible watermark to Veo videos as well,' a company spokesperson told Al Jazeera. 'They don't care about customers' However, experts say the tool was released before those features were fully implemented, a move some believe was reckless. Joshua McKenty, CEO of deepfake detection company Polyguard, said that Google rushed the product to market because it had been lagging behind competitors like OpenAI and Microsoft, which have released more user-friendly and publicised tools. Google did not respond to these claims. 'Google's trying to win an argument that their AI matters when they've been losing dramatically,' McKenty said. 'They're like the third horse in a two-horse race. They don't care about customers. They care about their own shiny tech.' That sentiment was echoed by Sukrit Venkatagiri, an assistant professor of computer science at Swarthmore College. 'Companies are in a weird bind. If you don't develop generative AI, you're seen as falling behind and your stock takes a hit,' he said. 'But they also have a responsibility to make these products safe when deployed in the real world. I don't think anyone cares about that right now. All of these companies are putting profit — or the promise of profit — over safety.' Google's own research, published last year, acknowledged the threat generative AI poses. 'The explosion of generative AI-based methods has inflamed these concerns [about misinformation], as they can synthesise highly realistic audio and visual content as well as natural, fluent text at a scale previously impossible without an enormous amount of manual labour,' the study read. Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, has long warned his colleagues in the AI industry against prioritising speed over safety. 'I would advocate not moving fast and breaking things,' he told Time in 2023. He declined Al Jazeera's request for an interview. Yet despite such warnings, Google released Veo 3 before fully implementing safeguards, leading to incidents like the one the National Guard had to debunk in Los Angeles after a TikTok account made a fake 'day in the life' video of a soldier that said he was preparing for 'today's gassing' — referring to releasing tear gas on protesters. Mimicking real events The implications of Veo 3 extend far beyond protest footage. In the days following its release, several fabricated videos mimicking real news broadcasts circulated on social media, including one of a false report about a home break-in that included CNN graphics. Another clip falsely claimed that JK Rowling's yacht sank off the coast of Turkiye after an orca attack, attributing the report to Alejandra Caraballo of Harvard Law's Cyberlaw Clinic, who built the video to test out the tool. In a post, Caraballo warned that such tech could mislead older news consumers in particular. 'What's worrying is how easy it is to repeat. Within ten minutes, I had multiple versions. This makes it harder to detect and easier to spread,' she wrote. 'The lack of a chyron [banner on a news broadcast] makes it trivial to add one after the fact to make it look like any particular news channel.' In our own experiment, we used a prompt to create fake news videos bearing the logos of ABC and NBC, with voices mimicking those of CNN anchors Jake Tapper, Erin Burnett, John Berman, and Anderson Cooper. 'Now, it's just getting harder and harder to tell fact from fiction,' Caraballo told Al Jazeera. 'As someone who's been researching AI systems for years, even I'm starting to struggle.' This challenge extends to the public, as well. A study by Penn State University found that 48 percent of consumers were fooled by fake videos circulated via messaging apps or social media. Contrary to popular belief, younger adults are more susceptible to misinformation than older adults, largely because younger generations rely on social media for news, which lacks the editorial standards and legal oversight of traditional news organisations. A UNESCO survey from December showed that 62 percent of news influencers do not fact-check information before sharing it. Google is not alone in developing tools that facilitate the spread of synthetic media. Companies like Deepbrain offer users the ability to create AI-generated avatar videos, though with limitations, as it cannot produce full-scene renders like Veo 3. Deepbrain did not respond to Al Jazeera's request for comment. Other tools like Synthesia and Dubverse allow video dubbing, primarily for translation. This growing toolkit offers more opportunities for malicious actors. A recent incident involved a fabricated news segment in which a CBS reporter in Dallas was made to appear to say racist remarks. The software used remains unidentified. CBS News Texas did not respond to a request for comment. As synthetic media becomes more prevalent, it poses unique risks that will allow bad actors to push manipulated content that spreads faster than it can be corrected, according to Colman. 'By the time fake content spreads across platforms that don't check these markers [which is most of them], through channels that strip them out, or via bad actors who've learned to falsify them, the damage is done,' Colman said.
Al Jazeera
an hour ago
- Al Jazeera
Trump vs US intelligence: Iran is only the latest chapter
United States President Donald Trump has insisted that the military strikes he ordered on Iran's nuclear facilities on Sunday morning 'completely obliterated' Iran's uranium enrichment capabilities. And after an initial classified US intelligence report contradicted that assertion, Trump and his administration have lashed out at those who leaked the document and the media that has covered it – throwing out its assessment. The standoff between Trump and the evaluation of sections of his own intelligence community continued through Wednesday at The Hague, where the US president was attending the NATO summit and was asked several questions about the leaked document. Yet it was only the latest instance of Trump publicly disagreeing with US intelligence conclusions during his past decade in politics – whether on Russia or North Korea, Venezuela or Iran. Here's what the latest spat is about, and Trump's long history of disputing intelligence assessments: What is Trump's latest disagreement with US intelligence about? On June 21, the US joined Israel in its strikes against Iran. US forces hit Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan, three Iranian nuclear sites, with a range of missiles and bunker-buster bombs. Trump applauded the success of the US attacks on Iran multiple times. 'Iran's key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated,' he said in a televised address from the White House after the attack. However, a confidential preliminary report by the intelligence arm of the Pentagon, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), suggested otherwise. The DIA report said the US attacks had only set Iran's nuclear programme back by less than six months. The report added that in the DIA's assessment, Iran had moved its stockpile of enriched uranium before the strikes, something Tehran has also claimed. As a result, little of the material that Iran could in theory enrich to weapons-grade uranium had been destroyed. On Tuesday, the White House rejected the findings of the intelligence report. 'This alleged assessment is flat-out wrong and was classified as 'top secret',' White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement, describing the person who leaked the document as a 'low-level loser in the intelligence community'. 'The leaking of this alleged assessment is a clear attempt to demean President Trump and discredit the brave fighter pilots who conducted a perfectly executed mission to obliterate Iran's nuclear program. Everyone knows what happens when you drop fourteen 30,000-pound bombs perfectly on their targets: total obliteration,' Leavitt added. Trump also dismissed the report on Wednesday during the NATO summit in the Netherlands, continuing to claim that the US decimated Iran's nuclear capabilities and denying claims that Tehran moved its enriched uranium. 'I believe they didn't have a chance to get anything out because we acted fast,' Trump said, adding 'it would have taken two weeks, maybe, but it's very hard to remove that kind of material… and very dangerous. 'Plus, they knew we were coming,' Trump added. 'And if they know we're coming, they're not going to be down there [in the underground sections of the nuclear facilities].' On Wednesday, the White House website published an article titled Iran's Nuclear Facilities Have Been Obliterated – and Suggestions Otherwise are Fake News. Besides Trump, the article also quotes Israel's Atomic Energy Commission, which has said that 'the devastating US strike on Fordow destroyed the site's critical infrastructure and rendered the enrichment facility inoperable.' Of Iran's three major nuclear sites, Fordow is the hardest to reach for Israel's missiles, as it is buried deep under a mountain – which is why Israel successfully convinced the US to hit the facility with bunker-buster bombs. Additionally, the White House article quotes the Trump-appointed US director of national intelligence (DNI), Tulsi Gabbard, as saying: 'The operation was a resounding success. Our missiles were delivered precisely and accurately, obliterating key Iranian capabilities needed to quickly assemble a nuclear weapon.' John Ratcliffe, director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), also diverged from the DIA report, saying the US had 'severely damaged' Iran's nuclear facilities. In a statement published on the CIA website on Wednesday, Ratcliffe said: 'CIA can confirm that a body of credible intelligence indicates Iran's Nuclear Program has been severely damaged by the recent, targeted strikes. This includes new intelligence from a historically reliable and accurate source/method that several key Iranian nuclear facilities were destroyed and would have to be rebuilt over the course of years.' Yet Trump's track record of disputing intelligence assessments and distrusting the intelligence community runs much deeper than Iran. Did Trump disagree with US intelligence during his first term? Yes, multiple times, including: The US intelligence community, in July 2016, accused Putin of meddling in the US presidential election with the aim of helping Trump defeat Democratic challenger Hillary Clinton. In November of that year, Trump won the election. His transition team rebuked intelligence reports that concluded that Russian hackers had covertly interfered in the election. In a statement, the Trump transition team said: 'These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.' In an interview in December 2016, Trump himself said: 'I think it's just another excuse. I don't believe it.' He added that: 'Nobody really knows. And hacking is very interesting. Once they hack, if you don't catch them in the act, you're not going to catch them. They have no idea if it's Russia or China or somebody. It could be somebody sitting in a bed someplace. They have no idea.' In July 2018, the US indicted 12 Russian military intelligence officers, accusing them of being involved in 'active cyber operations to interfere in the 2016 presidential elections', according to then-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. This indictment was part of a probe into allegations of collusion between the Trump team and Russia before the 2016 election, being led by former FBI Director Robert Mueller. That same month, Trump met his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin in Helsinki for a joint summit. During a joint news conference after the two leaders had a one-on-one private discussion, Trump backed Putin on the Russian leader's insistence that the Kremlin did not meddle in the 2016 election. 'I have great confidence in my intelligence people, but I will tell you that President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today,' Trump said. 'He just said it's not Russia. I will say this: I don't see any reason why it would be.' Trump also said the Mueller investigation was a 'disaster for our country' and drove a wedge between Washington and Moscow, the 'two largest nuclear powers in the world'. Former CIA Director John Brennan called Trump's statements during the news conference 'nothing short of treasonous'. Trump later pulled Brennan's security clearances. Those clearances give select former officials access to classified information and briefings. In 2019, Trump again rebuked the intelligence community, disagreeing with them over multiple issues. The US intelligence community, on January 29, 2019, told a Senate committee that the nuclear threat from North Korea remained and Iran was not taking steps towards making a nuclear bomb. Intelligence agencies said they did not believe that Iran violating the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, a nuclear deal signed between Iran and a group of countries led by the US in 2015. This, even though Trump had pulled out of the deal in 2018. 'The Intelligence people seem to be extremely passive and naive when it comes to the dangers of Iran. They are wrong!' Trump wrote on X, then called Twitter. 'Be careful of Iran. Perhaps Intelligence should go back to school!' Trump wrote in another X post. On the other hand, US intelligence said North Korea was unlikely to give up its nuclear program. On January 30, Trump contradicted this in an X post: 'North Korea relationship is best it has ever been with US No testing, getting remains, hostages returned. Decent chance of Denuclearization.' During his first term, Trump engaged directly with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, and in June 2019, met him at the fortified Demilitarized Zone between the two Koreas – the first US president to travel there. Meanwhile, US spy chiefs warned that the ISIL (ISIS) armed group would continue to launch attacks from Syria and Iraq against regional and Western adversaries, including the US. That assessment was at variance with Trump's views. In December 2018, he withdraw 2,000 US troops from Syria on grounds that ISIL (ISIS) did not pose a threat any more. 'We have won against ISIS,' he said in a video. What did Trump and US intelligence clash over recently? During his second term, too, Trump has differed with the intelligence community's conclusions on multiple occasions, including: Trump's current term has been marked by an aggressive immigration crackdown. In March, he signed a proclamation invoking the 1798 Alien Enemies Act. Trump's proclamation claimed that the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua is 'perpetrating, attempting, and threatening an invasion or predatory incursion' against US territory. The proclamation says all Venezuelan citizens aged 14 or older 'who are members of' the gang and are not naturalised or lawful permanent US citizens are liable to be restrained and removed as 'Alien Enemies'. In his proclamation, Trump said the Tren de Aragua 'is closely aligned with, and indeed has infiltrated, the [Venezuelan President Nicolas] Maduro regime, including its military and law enforcement apparatus'. However, in April, a classified assessment from the National Intelligence Council (NIC), an arm of the DNI, found there was no coordination between Tren de Aragua and the Venezuelan government. The assessment found that the gang was not supported by Venezuela's government officials, including Maduro. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) was the only one, among the 18 organisations that make up the US intelligence community, to disagree with the assessment. On March 25, Trump's DNI Gabbard unambiguously told US Congress members that Iran was not moving towards building nuclear weapons. 'The IC [intelligence community] continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader [Ali] Khamenei has not authorised the nuclear weapons programme he suspended in 2003,' Gabbard said. On June 17, however, Trump told reporters he believed Iran was 'very close' to building nuclear weapons, after he made an early exit from the Group of Seven summit in Canada. Why does Trump distrust the intelligence community? Trump's distrust for his own intelligence community is widely viewed as stemming from what he has described as a 'witch-hunt' against him – the allegations that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to help him win. During the 2018 news conference in Helsinki, Trump said: 'It was a clean campaign. I beat Hillary Clinton easily.'
Al Jazeera
2 hours ago
- Al Jazeera
Defiant Khamenei says Iran will ‘never surrender' to the US
Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has said Iran will 'never surrender' to the United States, striking a defiant tone in his first remarks since a ceasefire with Israel took hold. 'The American president indicated in one of his statements that Iran must surrender. Surrender! It is no longer a question of enrichment, nor of the nuclear industry, but of the surrender of Iran,' said Khamenei in a statement and televised speech carried by state media on Thursday. 'Such an event (surrender) will never happen. It will never happen.' Khamenei's remarks come two days after a ceasefire halted a 12-day war between Iran and Israel – the foes' deadliest and most destructive confrontation – and mark his first public appearance since June 19. The speech also comes amid conflicting accounts in the US over the extent of the damage inflicted by US strikes on key Iranian nuclear sites at Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan during the conflict. US President Donald Trump said the strikes 'obliterated' the nuclear facilities. But Khamenei said Trump had 'exaggerated' the impact of the attacks and said the US 'gained nothing from this war,' claiming the US strikes 'did nothing significant' to Iran's nuclear facilities. 'The Islamic republic won, and in retaliation dealt a severe slap to the face of America,' he said, a reference to Iran's missile launch targeting a US base in Qatar, the largest in the Middle East, which caused no casualties. Al Jazeera's Resul Serdar, reporting from Tehran, said Khamenei also focused on the country's armed forces, to offer them congratulations and counter the claims around the world and in Iran that the army 'has received huge blows from the Israeli attacks'. While Iranians who fled Tehran during the war have been gradually returning to the city, 'there is a common anxiety among the Iranian people here as well because they believe this was only the first wave of the war,' said Serdar. 'Many are questioning the efficiency of Iran's air defence systems' and feel that Iran could be more vulnerable to a potential future attack from the US and Israel, added Serdar. In fact, Khamenei said that the Iranian army successfully targeted military and non-military positions, and caused extensive damage in Israel and added that 'if Israel attacks us again, they will see a further destruction', added Serdar. Khamenei did not threaten the Israelis or Americans with military action in his speech, but did say that the country's nuclear programme remains largely in place – contrary to US statements, said Serdar. 'He said that most of the sites are still in place and that Iran is going to continue its nuclear programme.' Both Iran and Israel have claimed victory in the 12-day war, with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hailing on Tuesday a 'historic victory' for Israel. Meanwhile, Iran has said it is willing to return to nuclear negotiations with Washington. The Israeli strikes on Iran killed at least 627 civilians, Tehran's health ministry said, while official figures indicate Iran's attacks on Israel killed 28 people. A state funeral will be held on Saturday in Tehran for top commanders and nuclear scientists killed in the war.
