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Amanpour
Interview with American Immigration Council Senior Fellow Aaron Reichlin-Melnick; Interview with "The Cauldron: The Making of the Modern Middle East" Author Simon Sebag Montefiore; Interview with "The American Way of Killing" Author Malcolm Gladwell. Aired 1-2p ET
Aired September 29, 2026 - 13:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
[13:00:00]
BIANNA GOLODRYGA, CNN ANCHOR: Hello, everyone, and welcome to "Amanpour." Here's what's coming up.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
MARKWAYNE MULLIN, DHS SECRETARY: Operation Rotten Apple has taken over 2,100 Criminals off our streets.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
GOLODRYGA: Out of sight, out of mind, ICE arrests surge across America. Immigration expert Aaron Reichlin-Melnick on the hidden crackdown.
Then --
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
MASOUD PEZESHKIAN, IRANIAN PRESIDENT (through translator): We live in a region in which warfare knows no borders. Crisis in one land will spill
into the surrounding nations.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
GOLODRYGA: -- A region forged in the cauldron of conflict. As the war with Iran grinds on, Historian Simon Sebag Montefiore looks back at the forces
that made the modern Middle East and still shape it today.
Also, ahead --
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
MALCOLM GLADWELL, AUTHOR, "THE AMERICAN WAY OF KILLING": The same bullet that would kill me in upstate New York will -- I will survive in Midtown
Manhattan.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
GOLODRYGA: -- "The American Way of Killing." Malcolm Gladwell's new book challenges what we think we know about gun violence. He tells Hari
Sreenivasan why rethinking the problem could help America solve it.
Welcome to the program, everyone. I'm Bianna Golodryga in New York sitting in for Christiane Amanpour.
This summer has seen a massive surge in arrests by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Reaching near record highs in almost every state. In
August alone, ICE made nearly 51,000 arrests. But unlike previous crackdowns, this one is far more widespread, attracting less attention and
fewer protests. Most of those arrested have never been charged with or convicted of a crime.
Meanwhile, President Trump says his immigration policies are working, particularly at the southern border.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
DONALD TRUMP, U.S. PRESIDENT: I got elected because of the border. And now, because it's so good, one of my people is fantastic, said, sir, the
people don't care about the border anymore.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
GOLODRYGA: And now, ICE is preparing to expand its detention capacity to 100,000 beds. So, what does this new phase of Trump's immigration crackdown
look like? Aaron Reichlin-Melnick is a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council. And he joins me from Washington. Aaron, good to see
you again.
So, as we noted there in the introduction, ICE arrested over 50,000 people in the month of August alone. Yet we're seeing fewer headlines about it,
fewer national protests. So, what has changed in how these operations have been conducted? And does that make them even more difficult to scrutinize
and analyze?
AARON REICHLIN-MELNICK, SENIOR FELLOW, AMERICAN IMMIGRATION COUNCIL: I think one major shift is that the administration has abandoned the strategy
that it carried out last year under Secretary Noem of targeting large cities for massive scale operations where thousands of federal agents
deployed in a city with the intent of carrying out operations over the course of a month.
Instead, what they are doing is taking the resources that they now have, thousands of new officers hired and expanding out across the country, going
to suburbs, rural areas and places without the same level of scrutiny to round up people who are more likely to have no criminal record and are
therefore less visible.
In many ways, they're going after the lowest hanging fruit, people that they already know the location and address of. And they can go in and get
in and get out quickly without getting the kind of attention and pushback that they did last year.
GOLODRYGA: So, what's driving their priorities in the policy itself here? Because the president, during his campaign in 2024 and in the early months
of his administration, as well as his aides, have consistently said that they are going after the deadliest, the most dangerous of dangerous people
and immigrants. As we noted, most of these people who they've detained don't have criminal records. And yet the numbers continue to grow. So, is
it about sending away the most dangerous of these people, or is it just a numbers-based policy?
REICHLIN-MELNICK: It is just a numbers-based policy. And we can look at the data itself to see what's happened. Before President Trump took office,
more than 80 percent of all of the people arrested by ICE had some form of interaction with the criminal justice system, either a prior conviction or
some form of pending charges.
[13:05:00]
But starting in July, really as this new surge began, we are now seeing a majority of the people being arrested have no criminal record whatsoever.
And this is probably a first for the agency since it came into existence in 2003. Because in the past, the agency has always had a criminal record. It
has always prioritized people who have some interaction with the criminal justice system. Now, the number one goal appears to just be increasing
arrest numbers month after month.
GOLODRYGA: I'd like to play sound that the vice president recently said in response to this claim, still defending that the goal here is to go after
the most dangerous of these migrants.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JD VANCE, U.S. VICE PRESIDENT: If you, let's say, have a DHS agent, and that guy can deport one person that day, he can go and deport a violent
criminal or person who hasn't committed a violent crime, of course we're going to prioritize the violent criminals. We've already, I think, gotten
north of 3 million people out in just 18 months. Again, we have prioritized violent criminals, but nobody who has come into the United States illegally
should remain in the United States. That remains our policy.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
GOLODRYGA: So, do the numbers and tactics back that up, what we just heard from the vice president?
REICHLIN-MELNICK: They do not. And ironically, what he was describing was effectively the prioritization policy of President Biden and President
Obama before him. An enforcement priority system that said ICE is going to use its limited resources to go after people with serious violent offenses
first, and then other sort of threats to national security, recent border crossers second, and really only last go after people who are just
undocumented and living here who have never had any interaction with the criminal justice system.
But ICE is not prioritizing people with violent offenses. In total, since Trump took office, the data shows us that only 6 percent of people arrested
had a violent criminal conviction. And that number is dropping. In July, that fell to 4 percent, because the agency is expanding its grasp towards
other populations.
GOLODRYGA: How long do we expect this surge to continue? Is it something the president or you think the administration is hoping to do up until the
midterms, or given the amount of money allocated to both DHS and ICE in the most recent supplemental, is there reason to believe that this is more of a
permanent agenda?
REICHLIN-MELNICK: This is likely to be the new norm. Last year, Congress gave ICE $75 billion to carry out immigration enforcement in the interior.
$45 billion of that went to detention. $30 billion went to hiring and increasing resources for internal operations.
Already, according to The New York Times, 8,000 new officers have been hired by ICE, and they are now planning to hire an additional 5,000, which
means that we should expect to see this operation continue to increase in scale as the next year or two goes on.
GOLODRYGA: We know that there had been an increased amount of scrutiny. Obviously from Democrats, but even from some Republicans, given the scenes
that we saw play out in major cities, Minneapolis and in Maine, over the course of the last year and a half. And what the country, what Congress was
told, what some Republicans were told in exchange for their support was the added money would go to training, to body cam videos. Are we seeing that
translate to those specific items?
REICHLIN-MELNICK: Well, the agency says that it's going to have body cams fully deployed soon, but they have been saying that for months. And the
recent shooting of Wilber Garces in Texas involved an officer who didn't have his body camera on.
So, we can expect, hopefully, that that goes on. But I think beyond that, the question of training remains a very serious one. In its speed, ICE
hired thousands of officers and put them on the streets, giving them a badge and a gun before they had completed formal background checks. And
that resulted in many people being hired who should not have been.
And in the last few months, ICE has actually fired hundreds of the people that they put into the field because it turns out that those people should
have never been hired in the first place. And as ICE continues to expand its hiring over the next year, we can expect similar problems to emerge.
GOLODRYGA: So, can you just explain to our viewers the difference, perhaps, in training and requirements from a police officer in one of these
cities versus an ICE agent and why we continue to see even some alarm from local law enforcement as to the tactics that some of these ICE officials
have displayed?
REICHLIN-MELNICK: I think one key change has been the length. Once Trump took office, ICE actually slashed the time that officers got for training.
[13:15:00]
And immigration law, as well, is an area where, in the past, officers would get multiple days' worth of training in immigration law to make sure they
understand it. That training has been cut significantly. And we've had whistleblower reports from ICE officers who worked at the Federal Law
Enforcement Training Center who said, what is going, what is happening in this facility, the training that officers are getting is inadequate. I
think that has been a significant cause of some of these viral videos that we're seeing where ICE officers appear to be blatantly disregarding the
law.
And you've seen a lot of pushback from congressional Democrats who are demanding that ICE return the trainings to what had existed prior to
President Trump taking office.
GOLODRYGA: Another question that comes up is, what exact legal protections do these defendants have? CNN witnessed children facing deportation
proceedings without attorneys, including a 13-year-old boy who broke down when asked whether he wanted to leave voluntarily or receive a removal
order. I don't even know that a 13-year-old would understand that kind of question. The administration says that it remains committed to legal
representation for children.
How do you reconcile that promise with what's actually being reported and happening?
REICHLIN-MELNICK: That's another example of the Trump administration effectively saying one thing to the public and then doing a different thing
in practice. Legal representation for children has been a challenge for years. And during the Biden administration, Congress for the very first
time actually funded legal representation for children, allowing more attorneys to come forward and help represent small little children facing
removal in immigration court.
But when President Trump took office, the Trump administration actually slashed those contracts, ending them, and forcing children to be abandoned
by their lawyers, forcing lawyers to give up representation. And in recent months, they've handed that contract to a politically connected ally to the
president, and it's unclear whether and when they're going to resume the kind of legal representation that children were getting up to the time that
Trump took office.
GOLODRYGA: The administration, the president in particular, spends a lot of time and energy focused on what they say is a huge number of illegal,
undocumented people in this country who will then go to the voting polls come the midterms. And that has been something the president has been using
to justify some of the new laws that he's trying to pass through Congress that the Republicans can't even back at this point. You can't get enough
support for that.
But gearing up for the midterms, the Department of Homeland Security had posted this on X. Sanctuary politicians can try to claim that voter fraud
isn't happening, but it's very real. It is a serious threat to our country. The Trump administration will always protect the integrity of our election
systems so that only American citizens are electing American leaders. Do the numbers back up those claims?
REICHLIN-MELNICK: They do not. And I want to give two examples to show why. Secretary Mullin claimed at one point when President Trump gave a
press conference about non-citizen voting that they had flagged 16,000 potential non-citizen voters in the State of Nevada. And when Nevada went
to them and said, can you give us these names and information? They said, well, we admit it's not actually 16,000 people. It's actually 185 people
that we think for certain are non-citizens who voted illegally.
And so, Nevada said, give us the names. And the DHS gave Nevada the names and Nevada went and checked. Every single one of those people was a U.S.
citizen. DHS got every single one of them wrong. And it turns out, therefore, we went from 16,000 potential non-citizen voters to 185 certain
to zero. Similarly, we just saw out of Maricopa County, Arizona, an audit that began with a claim of 187 non-citizens on the voting roll, 60 of whom
had voted down to, as it turns out, eight total out of an election. And only two of those voted in the 2024 election out of two million people. So,
literally, one in a million voters were non-citizens.
And that shows you the scale of what this actual issue is. It's not that non-citizens never vote. It's just they vote about one in a million.
GOLODRYGA: And that impacts the outcome, how, if at all?
REICHLIN-MELNICK: It doesn't. In fact, audit after audit after audit carried out by both Democratic and Republican election officials has never
produced a single election which has been decided by an illegal non-citizen vote. And when I say that, it's also important to understand, in most
circumstances, non-citizen voters are green card holders who are affirmatively misled by the government, who are allowed to vote despite
having told the government that they were non-citizens or who were falsely told that they were eligible to vote by a government official.
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GOLODRYGA: The president argued yesterday that people have stopped caring about border security because he's done so well, that it's not a top
priority. So, perhaps this is an outcome that he's created given everything that he's done to close the border. And, to be fair, that is one of the top
priorities that voters had going into the 2024 presidential election.
But a recent Reuters-Ipsos poll found that 36 percent approve of a non- citizen vote. 35 percent approve of his immigration handling and 55 percent disapprove. So, do you think he's conflating support for securing the
border with support for some of the tactics now that the administration is using? Because it's hard to defend the need to use them if the border is,
indeed, more secure.
REICHLIN-MELNICK: I think the president is right. Because the border is much quieter than it was in the past, people are no longer thinking about
it as much. And that means what they're thinking about when they think about immigration enforcement is what's happening in the interior. And what
polls have shown consistently since Trump began his mass deportation efforts is that what Americans don't like is chaos. They don't like chaos
at the border.
They didn't like chaos at the border. And they don't like chaos in the interior. And they don't like seeing American citizens being arrested by
mistake, undocumented immigrants, family, you know, people who are just raising families, working hard, being arrested and thrown to the ground and
beaten by officers. And all of this is reflecting negatively on the president, because it's not what they were selling when he was campaigning.
GOLODRYGA: Yes. And reporting suggested that it even reached the point that the president was turned off by some of the images that he was seeing
on American streets. All right. Aaron Reichlin-Melnick from the American Immigration Council, thank you so much for your time and analysis. Really
appreciate it.
REICHLIN-MELNICK: Thank you for having me.
GOLODRYGA: And do stay with CNN, we'll have more right after the break.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
GOLODRYGA: Well, seven months into the war with Iran, there are few signs of a swift end. But diplomacy is continuing. Iran's foreign minister, Abbas
Araghchi, says Qatar is shuttling ideas between Tehran and Washington.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
ABBAS ARAGHCHI, IRANIAN FOREIGN MINISTER (through translator): Today, one of the Qatari mediators held another meeting with us. We discussed ideas on
how to find a way to fulfill Iran's conditions and how these conditions could be met. They had some ideas, and we agreed that they would raise the
matter again with the American side, after which the U.S. side's final response would be conveyed to us. I hope this process will be completed by
tomorrow.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
GOLODRYGA: Whatever happens next, the roots of this conflict stretch back far beyond just the last seven months. In his new book, "The Cauldron,"
historian Simon Sebag Montefiore traces more than a century of war, revolution, and great power rivalry that shaped the modern Middle East. And
he joins me now live from New York.
Simon, there has been so much anticipation gearing up to this book release, and today it is officially out here in the United States. Quite an
ambitious journey you decided to take on. And given all of the reviews, I'm almost done with the book, you succeeded masterfully. So, congratulations.
Thank you so much for joining us to talk a bit about it.
SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE, AUTHOR, "THE CAULDRON: THE MAKING OF THE MODERN MIDDLE EAST": Thank you. Thank you so much.
GOLODRYGA: You've written many history books, and I think what makes this one stand out a bit from the others, even on similar topics, is your
approach to it.
[13:20:00]
You begin in 1902 with Ibn Saud's capture of Riyadh, not Jerusalem or with the European powers drawing and redrawing borders. Why does this story of a
modern Middle East need to start there?
MONTEFIORE: I think so many of the traditional histories begin with Europeans drawing maps in the Middle East. And I think that after 80 years
of independence, it's very important that we realize that the Middle East, of course, there's outside interventions, there's great power politics.
But really, history is also made there by the Middle Easterners themselves. And that's why I started in the beginning of the 20th century with the
Ottoman Empire and with Abdulaziz Ibn Saud, as he's often known in Western histories, with 40 friends seizing a small town in the middle of Arabia,
and that small town is Riyadh. And that is the foundation of the modern kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which is actually the third Saudi state to rule
Arabia.
And it's a story that it has great excitement, it's cinematic, but it also tells you something because now in our period, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf is
really the center of the Middle East and in some ways the center of the world.
GOLODRYGA: And, Simon, you come from one of Europe's most storied families. If people think that, hey, his name sounds familiar, it is
because your story, your family story is rooted in so much history, stretching from Morocco to Italy to Britain, Jerusalem, where Moses
Montefiore helped build a Jewish community. Outside of the old city's walls, you walk the streets of Israel, you see many streets named after
your family carrying the Montefiore name.
What did you believe growing up about this region that perhaps researching either taught you more about or made you reconsider?
MONTEFIORE: I always have been fascinated by the Middle East. That's the Montefiore windmill that you're showing there. But the Seabag family,
another part of my family, lived in Morocco. They were also Jewish, but they lived in Morocco for 500 years before they came to Britain.
And I think that the point of both these stories, Montefiore and Seabag, is that the Middle East is a much more complicated, nuanced and diverse
region, interconnected region, filled with different ethnicities and sects that is much more complex than the usual story as it appears in the media
or particularly on social media. And what I wanted to do with this book was really show the history as it really took place, rather than just depending
on slogans and memes that you see on Twitter or TikTok.
But I looked for a history like this. I wanted a history that showed not just the Levant, not just Israel and Palestine, not just Iran, but the
whole Middle East. And what I've done here is tell the history of how the Middle East of 1900 became the Middle East of 2026. It goes from 1900 to
2026. It covers 19 countries, from Iran to Morocco, from Turkey to Yemen and Sudan.
And it really answers the question, how on earth did we get to where we are today? And the answer is, you have to start with the period of the empires
and go all the way through to the period of independence. And we're now 80 years into that period. And I must say, we are in a period where history is
moving so fast at the moment. And the book goes right up to the beginning of the present third Gulf War in February this year.
GOLODRYGA: And as we noted in the introduction, history continues to write itself, as it always does, but specifically in that region, as the United
States is now engaging in war with Iran. It may seem counterintuitive, Simon, but one of the book's strengths is that you don't play favorites.
And as a historian, even today, that does seem to be something we don't see often. How important is it to tell the story without feeling the pressure
of fitting into a certain narrative that may be in vogue at the moment?
MONTEFIORE: That's the whole point of the book. I mean, I'm a historian. I studied history at Cambridge in Britain. And the books I write aren't
ideological. They aren't nationalistic.
[13:25:00]
They show everyone on all sides good and bad. And this book contains the narratives of many peoples. It contains some of the great powers that
you'll have heard of, Turkey, Iran, Egypt, the Saudis, for example, but also many smaller peoples. Who are the Druze? Who are the Kurds? Why didn't
they get a state? Who are the Assyrians? It follows all these peoples as well. And that's extremely important.
It isn't pro-imperialist. It isn't pro-capitalist. It isn't Marxist. It isn't pan-Arab. It doesn't follow pan-Arab nationalism. The point is just
to say exactly what happened. And the reader can judge. If they want to make moral judgments, they can do that, or else, they can simply enjoy the
story. Because it's also told through the great characters that made the modern Middle East.
There are Americans in there, President Wilson, President Trump. There are Russians. There's Stalin. There's Nicholas II. There's Putin. And then
there are the great Middle Eastern leaders, Ataturk, who founded Turkey, Erdogan, who rules Turkey now, Ben-Gurion, who founded Israel, Ibn Saud,
the founder of Saudi Arabia, Reza Shah and his son, the Shah of our time, Khamenei and Ali Khamenei of Iran. All these characters are in the book.
And so, are all the great movements, Islamism, Zionism, capitalism, fascism. They're all in there.
GOLODRYGA: You trace much of today's instability to the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and then the borders that subsequently followed. Why was
this such a pivotal moment in the region's history?
MONTEFIORE: To go -- to understand the Middle East today, you've got to go back to the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman Empire was a sultanate that ruled
from the Balkans to Iraq, and it ruled for 400 years. And during that time, it existed in many different manifestations, but it dominated the region
and it set up itself as a religious and political authority. And since the fall of the Ottoman Empire in 1918, no single power has had the same
authority that the Ottomans had. And that is one of the reasons why there is a constant tournament of power going on in the Middle East in the search
for a single dominant power.
Now, I mean, at various times after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the British and the French ruled much of the Middle East, as we know. During
the Cold War, the Americans and the Soviets. After the end of the Cold War, there was an American paramountcy there. And now, since the Trump era,
since 2016, we are seeing a multiplayer game in which many powers, some large, some small, are exerting new power, sometimes neo-imperial interests
and aspirations across the Middle East.
And one of the interesting things is we see the Middle East as the Arab world, but the major military powers in the Middle East, Iran, Turkey, and
Israel, none of those three are, in fact, Arab-speaking countries.
GOLODRYGA: Let's talk about Turkey first there, because it is central to your story here, and especially given Erdogan's role now in pursuing what
could be described as a sort of nostalgia for the Ottoman Empire. Given his closer ties with the United States, the fact that many of the developments
we've seen over the course of the last few years in the region have benefited him and Turkey, and as a member of NATO, how far can he pursue,
and at what point does it become increasingly dangerous to continue to pursue some of that Ottoman nostalgia?
MONTEFIORE: Well, I think that's a very good point. I mean, Erdogan is the other, you know, along with Ataturk, who created the Turkish Republic in
1922-23, Erdogan is the most important Turkish leader of the last century.
And, you know, what he's doing is he's combining a sort of Muslim Brotherhood variety of Islamism with Neo-Ottomanism, Neo-Ottoman imperial
aspirations, and that's why he's continually talking about how he wants to exert special influence in former Ottoman cities, Aleppo, Damascus, and why
he's constantly talking about Jerusalem, and his ministers are talking about retaking Jerusalem, and that means Aleppo, Damascus, and why he's
constantly talking about Jerusalem, and his ministers are talking about retaking Jerusalem, and that means he's constantly combining those two
ideas in his attacks on Israel.
[13:30:00]
But obviously, as you imply, that's dangerous. He's a NATO member, he has special relations with the E.U., his economy is extremely fragile and
dependent in part on those relations. So, he's playing a dangerous game, and there are cases in the history of the Middle East where very powerful
leaders, like Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, for example, constantly talked up war with Israel and tried to create larger states and exert power, and
that led to actual war, which actually destroyed his power.
So, I think Erdogan is playing a dangerous game, and of course, he is behind or he takes the credit for the new regime, the al-Sharia regime in
Syria, and that's an area where he's coming up against Israeli power.
GOLODRYGA: And we continue to see tensions ratchet up between Israel and Turkey, two countries which just over a decade ago or so had much closer
ties. You've challenged the portrayal of Israel as simply a European colonial project. What essential history does that label erase? And talk
about how you were able to navigate and sort of dispel some of these more modern-day assumptions while also fully acknowledging Palestinian
dispossession.
MONTEFIORE: Well, this history, you're absolutely right, is very carefully written as a history of both the Israeli and the Palestinian nations, which
in their modern manifestations are pretty recent. But as for the creation of Israel, I see it in part as one of the nations that were created out of
the fall of the Ottoman Empire. It's a post-Ottoman imperial state that emerged along with all the other states in the Middle East. So, that's the
first thing to understand, is that nation states like Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, they're not ancient states.
They didn't exist before they were invented in the middle of the 20th century. They were drawn by imperial powers, France, mainly France and
Britain, and they all became independent around the same time as Israel, as did other modern powers like Pakistan and India. As for the idea that
Israel is a settler colonial creation, that's an ideological term that I don't use.
Of course, many Jews did settle in the Holy Land and to help create Israel. The difference is that unlike in colonialism, there was no metropole, there
was no imperial power, and the Jews were, in fact, had always been present in the Holy Land and indeed were indigenous to Judea, which is where the
name Jewish comes from. And of course, many of the Jews that make up the modern Israeli nation are from Eastern Europe, but many of them, and now a
great majority, over 60 percent, are from the Middle East and are therefore indigenous to the Middle East. So, that's why I kind of avoid, in my book,
all ideological jargon, which I generally find to obscure the story and obscure the facts.
And in the book, I just let the story of Zionism and the Palestinian catastrophe of 1948, the Nakba, I tell both exactly as it happened and the
reader can judge.
GOLODRYGA: Simon, another phrase you avoid, you don't use, in fact, you strongly reject is that of genocide and the charge after October 7th and
the horrific attacks and then the subsequent brutal war, the longest in Israel's history, in Gaza. You do that while at the same time condemning
the devastation in Gaza and some of the rhetoric of extremist Israeli ministers. What evidence is decisive for you that this, in fact, is not a
genocide?
MONTEFIORE: I think the key thing about the word genocide is that it's historically an incredibly important and sensitive word for the most
supreme and total of crimes in world history.
[13:35:00]
And in this book, I chronicle the genocides that were suffered by the Armenian people, by the Pontic Greeks, and to some extent by the Maronite
Christians during the Ottoman period, the Yazidis under ISIS, the Kurds under Saddam Hussein, and so on. And of course, the ultimate genocide, the
Holocaust against the Jewish people in World War II.
And therefore, I think it's very dangerous to use the word genocide as a hyperbolic, ideological insult on a banner, which is how it's often being
used now. And it's not correct to use the word genocide as another word for a ferocious war. And that's what we've seen in Gaza. But the book,
obviously, it recounts very carefully the ferocity of the war, the brutality.
But I think that ultimately, historians can debate this. Some historians are now using that expression. Many are not. And ultimately, most Western
governments believe that it has not yet reached anything like the level of a genocide. And ultimately, it's up to the international law courts. But I
think it's very dangerous to misuse it as a hyperbole.
GOLODRYGA: Yes. You describe Israel as brilliant tactically, but impoverished strategically and one of the danger from within of Jewish
supremacism. So, many are saying that this election next week is the country's most consequential. And yet there's hope. You're an eternal
optimist, Simon. You end with Palestinian and Israeli poets and the idea that peace requires people to hear each other's history.
Last few seconds of the show. Why is it so important for you to make that point?
MONTEFIORE: I think the key thing is that one of the reasons why these histories are important is peace can only be made if people really respect
the narrative, the history of the other. And that is one of the missions of this book. But ultimately, I think there are new models of a new model, a
new model Middle East that in which Israel has a role. We're seeing that right now with the meetings that are happening in the Middle East. And it
is absolutely essential that both the Israelis and ultimately the Palestinians have the right of self-determination and that there are two
nations and two republics. And it may not happen tomorrow, but I think it has to happen. And I think it will happen.
GOLODRYGA: And that the people that are living in those two lands are going nowhere. They have to resolve their own peace as neighbors.
MONTEFIORE: That's the point.
GOLODRYGA: Simon Sebag Montefiore, great to have you on. Author of "The Cauldron," it is out now. Thank you for joining us. Really appreciate it.
MONTEFIORE: Thank you.
GOLODRYGA: And do stay with CNN, we'll be right back after the break.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
GOLODRYGA: Now, to gun violence in America. According to the CDC, roughly 130 people are killed by guns every day and twice as many are shot and
wounded.
[13:40:00]
Meanwhile, firearms remain the leading cause of death for young children and teens in the U.S. This is a disturbing reality, yet little progress has
been made in preventing more tragedies. In his new book, author Malcolm Gladwell argues that the false narrative surrounding the gun debate may
have stalled decisive safeguarding measures. And he joins Hari Sreenivasan to discuss why it's important to challenge them.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
HARI SREENIVASAN, CNN INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Bianna, thanks. Malcolm Gladwell, welcome back to the program.
Your latest book is called "The American Way of Killing: The Invention of an Epidemic." And you really take a look at the sort of gun debate that
we've had for so many years now. What did you conclude about how we discuss this topic?
MALCOLM GLADWELL, AUTHOR, "THE AMERICAN WAY OF KILLING": Yes, the kind of theme of the book is that there's something fundamentally dishonest in the
way that Americans talk about gun violence. And by dishonest, I don't mean deliberately deceptive. I mean, that there are so many kind of false
assumptions, so many misunderstandings, so much kind of deliberate avoidance of difficult truths that it's just impossible to have a kind of
straightforward conversation about how to end this public health disaster.
SREENIVASAN: You write that, a conversation that starts with the best of intentions can become dishonest for any number of reasons. When either side
pretends that something is consequential when it is not, when either side avoids the right conclusion because it is difficult, or when either side
blinds itself to the truth through laziness or indifference. The American conversation about guns is rife with this kind of dishonesties.
Let's get into a couple of these dishonesties that, you know, I think a lot of times we almost use them as shorthands. And you're saying a lot of these
are wrong.
GLADWELL: Yes. A good example would be that Americans have this notion of themselves as over-policed, and conservatives like that, and liberals think
it's a problem. In fact, America is not over-policed. We are dramatically under-policed relative to our peers around the world.
The example I give in the book is that the City of Los Angeles has, on a good day, 8,500 police officers. Berlin in Germany, which is the same size
as L.A., has 18,000 police officers. And that's typical. You go down the list of American cities, you will see that, on average, we have half as
many police per capita as other Western countries.
What we do is, the difference is, European countries and American countries spend the same amount of money on public safety, but we spend all our money
on prisons and a little bit on police, and they do the opposite in Europe, a lot on police, a little on prisons. I don't think anyone, if the question
was posed to them that way, would prefer the American model to the European model. It makes far more sense to put your resources in the prevention of
crime and public disorder than it is in just dealing with the after- effects.
So, we've -- because we haven't understood a very basic fact about our policing, we've had a kind of phony conversation about what's wrong and how
to fix it. That's just one of numerous examples of, I think, how we lead ourselves astray.
SREENIVASAN: You also write about Flint, Michigan, and you're saying this, a consequence of what you're calling under-policing is a different type of
behavior.
GLADWELL: Many people have accurately, particularly those on the left, have accurately developed on the fact that American police are far more
violent than their counterparts around the world. And the assumption has been, oh, our police are violent because there's too many of them. In fact,
the opposite is true.
There's a wonderful study done by two people at Harvard where they simply take a look at all of the police forces, all the countries, a good sample
of countries in the world, and rank them by how many police they have per capita. Then they look at the levels of police violence in all those
countries, how many people are killed by the police, how much excess force is used.
And what they find is that you see police violence and excess force in the countries with the lowest numbers of police. And you see the fewest, you
see the best-behaved police in the countries with the most police, which, if you think about it, makes sense. That the use of force by police, of
aggression by police, is a response to being overwhelmed and undermanned.
That if you have enough police on the ground that they can get to know the community, that they can do more than simply drive in their cars from one
emergency to the other, then you have a chance to have a real relationship develop between the community and law enforcement.
So, we have done a case where we've misdiagnosed our problem. We looked at police violence and said, defund the police. We should have said the
opposite. Looked at police violence and said, we need more of them.
[13:45:00]
SREENIVASAN: So, what was happening in Flint? I mean, because a lot of people build this idea that the police are violent and that they're
aggressive when they don't need to be, based on the actions that they may have seen in their own neighborhoods. What you're saying is an under-police
department, right? So, what's happening --
GLADWELL: You militarize. Flint is a classic example of a police department that is so -- I mean, if you look at the per capita police in
Flint, it's so low, it's to be astonishing. And if you have so few police governing so many people, you really, I mean, no alternative, but the
inevitable result is that the police become militarized. They behave like an occupying army. That's what armies do when they invade a country.
They're massively overmanned. And so, they respond by projecting their power in the most kind of aggressive way imaginable.
SREENIVASAN: You also write that, look, the number of people being killed by guns is going down. And you use Memphis, Tennessee to really point to
something most people don't recognize. What's happening in Memphis or what has happened in Memphis and why?
GLADWELL: Yes. So, Memphis is a good example of something that's happened all over across the country. This is another common misunderstanding we
have. The homicide rate is a function of two factors. One is the level of lethal violence, right? How many people are getting shot? And also, is
access to quality medical care, right?
If I'm up in the Hudson Valley, if you shoot me right now, it's going to take me at least an hour to get to a level one trauma center. And probably
the ambulance is going to take 20 minutes to get to me or half an hour. That's 90 minutes. If you shoot me on York and 68th in Manhattan, steps
from a level one trauma center, I'm going to survive, right? The same bullet that would kill me in upstate New York will -- I will survive in
midtown Manhattan. In upstate New York, that's a homicide. In Manhattan, that's aggravated assault, right?
The difference is not the level of violence. The difference is the quality and access to healthcare. And what has happened in America over the last
couple of generations is that our ability to quickly offer high quality medical care to gunshot victims has gone up dramatically. Memphis being a
good example is a famous study a couple of years back from a Memphis -- a big research hospital in Memphis, which talked about how even though the
number and severity of gunshot wounds they are seeing is going up, the number, the death rate from people being shot is going down. And that's
because of how good they've become at treating potentially lethal injuries.
SREENIVASAN: You point out multiple ways in the book that the majority of people who are killed by guns are themselves, that suicide is an incredibly
large number of the horrible statistics that we have at the end of every year. But you also point out that there's kind of two different kinds of
violence that we should be thinking about. Explain the difference between instrumental violence and expressive violence.
GLADWELL: You can broadly group homicides into two categories. One is instrumental, and that is a homicide committed in or violence committed in
the course of some other rational end. I'm trying to rob a bank. The guard gets in the way. I shoot him. I have a drug territory. Someone's trying to
steal my drug turf from me. I defend it by shooting the person, right? That's instrumental violence.
Expressive violence is you and I are having an argument. You harm my sister. I'm outraged. I pull out a gun and I shoot you. I'm not thinking
that through. The violence is the point. It's not a kind of strategy used in pursuit of some other end. It's a violence that happens in the moment.
I'm angry. My levels of cortisol and adrenaline have shot up. I'm not thinking straight. I probably regret doing it like 10 seconds after I shoot
you.
And the question is, when we talk about a homicide problem in America, what kind of homicide are we talking about? If you watch "Law and Order," all
you see are instrumental homicides. There's always a motive and a point behind. In real life, that's not what homicide is. Homicide in America and
around the world, and not just now, but going back for as long as we've talked about homicides, is overwhelmingly expressive. It is people in the
heat of the moment trying to settle some dispute or grievance with the use of lethal force.
[13:50:00]
And once you understand that that's what it is, you realize that the potential avenues available for addressing gun violence are very different
from the kinds of things that we typically discuss amongst ourselves when it comes to reducing violence.
SREENIVASAN: So, if this is that impulsive behavior, is there something that's happening in the brain that's different, that doesn't respond to
this idea that, listen, if I do this right now in this parking lot over this scuffle about whether or not I should get the spot versus you, that
there's this 40-year sentence that my entire social world is going to collapse. I'm going to have to spend years in a little box.
Those are all consequences that our society has set up that says, don't do this thing. Those are the disincentives. What is happening when our
impulsive reaction is taking over and we're not even considering all that?
GLADWELL: This is a classic case of the kind of cure we have imagined for gun violence has absolutely no connection to the disease. You know, the
person who is in that moment and, you know, shooting somebody in an argument over some sort of simmering emotional dispute is not calculating
the costs and benefits of their behavior. They're not responding to a recent change in sentencing guidelines for federal judges. They're not
thinking about what it would be like to spend 30 years behind bars. They're thinking about resolving the social circumstance in front of them.
And once you understand that, you realize that we've been, all of these things that we group under getting tough on crime aren't relevant to the
crime that we're trying to reduce, right? Once you understand that something like homicide is largely expressive, you have to have a
completely different approach and language for dealing with this kind of disorder.
SREENIVASAN: You point out some programs that are actually working.
GLADWELL: Baltimore is the American city that has reduced its homicide rate extraordinarily over the last three years. Their whole strategy is
they examine closely a shooting. They look at the social connections among the people involved in that shooting. And they literally go and, you know,
my best friend got shot.
So, they come and visit me the next day and they say, Malcolm, I know you're thinking of retaliating. I know that you posted on social media that
you're out to get, you know, whoever shot my best friend. Don't, you know, work with us. You know, tell us about your life. Tell us how we can help
you. Here's a pastor from your neighborhood who you've known your whole life. He's going to come and have a cup of coffee with you and sort of work
you through this moment. Those kind of interventions allowed Baltimore to lower its homicide rate from 350 people a year. And this year, they could
be under 100. It's an astonishing turnaround. And it's all about those kinds of personal interventions.
The thing you're talking about in Chicago is a similar program that's sort of upstream of that, that just takes young high school men and over the
course of a year, gives them an extended kind of course in controlling their emotions, understanding their emotions, learning how to deal with
them effectively, learning how to manage conflict, learning how to teach them the kind of skills they will need when they're in those highly
emotionally volatile situations. That program has been empirically tested and has shown to have dramatic reductions in levels of criminal violence.
SREENIVASAN: So, much of our conversation in the United States about gun violence ends up focusing on the type of weapons used. But that's not what
we should be doing, especially because we're focusing on the long guns. Why?
GLADWELL: Yes, at the beginning of "American Way of Killing" with a chapter, I go to a shooting range in North Carolina. With a gun expert and
who shows me how to shoot an assault rifle. And he then sort of introduces me to assault rifles and walks me through what they do, what they're like.
And the point of that chapter is that we have spent an enormous amount of time and energy in this country on assault rifle bans. And if you look
closely at those bans, you realize they don't actually ban assault rifles.
What they do is they ban certain kind of cosmetic attachments that you can put on an assault rifle that makes it look uglier or scarier or cooler,
depending on your perspective. They don't -- if you -- at the end of every assault rifle ban, there's an appendix which lists all of the rifles that
are unaffected by the ban. In some cases, the appendix runs for 20 pages. It's like the whole thing is crazy.
And more than that, we greatly overestimate the significance of assault rifles in this country's homicide problem. They are rarely used. They're
not even the dominant weapon in mass shootings. Handguns are the dominant weapon. More people are killed by handguns in mass shootings than are
killed by assault rifles.
[13:55:00]
I mean, it's an example of how we're well-meaning attempts to deal with this country's violence problem miss the mark because we're not paying
attention to the nature of the problem. We're not looking closely at what these bills say and also, we're not looking closely at what actually
happens in something like a mass shooting.
SREENIVASAN: The book is called "The American Way of Killing," author Malcolm Gladwell, thanks so much.
GLADWELL: Thank you.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
GOLODRYGA: -- miss our show, you can find the latest episode shortly after it airs on our podcast. And remember, you can always catch us online, on
our website, and all-over social media. Thanks so much for watching, and goodbye from New York.
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