Filed with Key Arguments (MOC) · Related: Sources, Books & Media (MOC) · 60.10 Argumentation
Chapter 1: Critique of Bill Maher
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The world’s biggest douchebag is back in the news. And by that I mean, of course, the only man who could fit that title, Bill Maher. He was on his show on HBO on
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Friday. I want you to listen to this monologue because it’s this constant mopey, whiny, we’re treated so unfairly.
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And by that he means both Israel, the Jewish faith. And rightly, he points to some things like the growth in anti-semitic hate uh crimes against
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them. And that’s a real thing. That’s a real problem. Okay, fair enough. We can acknowledge some of those facts. But he is simply unwilling. It’s so funny,
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right? Because he and John Federman are constantly lecturing the left about how its problems are that they’re not right-wing enough and that if they were
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just more right-wing, we could solve all of the left’s problems, which of course is so insane, it barely deserves comment. But I want to say something before I play this. The audience doesn’t
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even get on board with this monologue for starters. And more to the point, how could they? Let me say this.
Chapter 2: Moral reasoning and Gaza
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If you can’t get the morality of Gaza right, I do not trust you. I do not trust you. I do not trust you. I you you
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are not showing the ability to morally reason. Now, it is also the case that there are people like the extreme right
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in certain cases that latch on to the Palestinian cause as a conduit for their own anti-semitism. That’s true. That’s a
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real thing. So it’s not that if you do get Gaza right then we can or you know such you can call their position right.
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But like that you recognize that the Palestinians have been genocided.
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Just because you can recognize that doesn’t mean you don’t necessarily use that for nefarious ends. But if you at least can’t get it right, if you can’t
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do basic moral reasoning and the avalanche of facts that facilitate the
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ability to engage in that moral reasoning, I do not trust you and the world does not trust you. Now, the truth is about
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Bill Maher’s views, he cannot be convinced. His smarmy, arrogant, condescending tone clearly indicates
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this is a person who a cannot even basically reason about the atrocities that have happened to ordinary Gazins and really the Palestinian condition
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more broadly and then on top of it is now arrogantly trying to defy those
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facts by just brazenly and easily dismissing them. Everyone else with a mamalian brain and a basic conscience
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can recognize that what has happened in Gaza is a genocide. There is massive amounts of evidence to corroborate those
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claims. Genocide scholars including Israeli ones have said as much in as well as human rights groups, Israeli
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human rights groups like Betelum. The evidence is simply overwhelming. And more to that point, the amount of dehumanization that has happened both in
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the American media as well as as well as Israeli media for not merely years, not since 2023, but for decades. There are entire academic disciplines around this.
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Edward says orientalism speaks to that and then some, even predating certainly the the the establishment of the American continent and the country. Like
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this goes on and on. I have this book. I was showing it to my live chat the other day. He wrote another book just on how Islam was unfairly covered in the west
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and the ways in which that dehumanization has played a pivotal role in how we have shaped relations with them and understand them as well. This has gone on for decades. Keep that in
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mind when you hear what Bill Maher is about to say.
Chapter 3: The Nakba and Israeli policy
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And finally, new role since yesterday was Israel’s birthday having become a nation on May 14th.
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Yeah. And May 15th is the official remembrance day of the Nagba. So always remember that their Independence Day is
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the same day that 750,000 Palestinians and families were displaced from their homes 78 years ago. Everyone must either wish
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her a happy birthday or admit they’re anti-Semitic.
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Yeah. H how about we just call balls and strikes about what kind of nation Israel has revealed itself to be?
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Now, it’s everyone’s right in a free country to be anti-semitic. But enough with hiding behind Israel or Zionism or
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Netanyahu. If you why I agree we shouldn’t hide just behind Netanyahu. His crimes are bad, but they are not the sum total of the problem.
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The problem is that the actions of the government essentially since its founding, but certainly since October 2023 have been to engage in an
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eradication campaign. Benjamin Netanyahu is behind that. In fact, he has exacerbated these conflicts to help himself stay out of prison.
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And Israeli society has revealed itself to not exclusively but predominantly be in favor of what they have done. And the attitudes that power this are Zionism.
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Why are these things not Why? Why is this beyond the pale of appropriate conversation?
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You think, as so many do now, that when it comes to human rights, Israel is the monster country of all time. You either
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don’t read or you don’t care about your own hypocrisy because there are so many worse places.
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There might be some people who make the claim that Israel is the worst about human rights. And again, this is my favorite argument. This is what they
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always say about gay folks. are like, you know, there’s there’s there’s pride parades in Tel Aviv, but if you went down to, you know, Conun, they would
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throw a gay person off of a roof. I’m like, there are no roofs left to throw gay people off of such that that this imagined scenario would ever happen to
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begin with. like the PE they they they they engage in these horrific crimes, the Israeli government, and then their
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supporters pretend that that it’s somehow distinct from the universe of actions you can consider to make a moral calculus about them. Right? You cannot
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count the fact that they’ve just wiped out families, killed tens of thousands of them. They’ve killed enough children
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that it is essentially since October of 2023, since the incident October 7th, that basically an entire Uvald day where 20 plus kids are killed in school.
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Imagine that. That’s happened every single day for for the entirety of the conflict mathematically.
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And then they they they we’re talking about tens of thousands of children murdered. Another enormous group maimed
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for life, lives destroyed, families displaced. But they they they want you to not be able to consider this as part
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of the moral calculus in how you understand them. No, no, no. It’s our tradition of food. It is our tradition of language and culture and dance. It is
Chapter 4: Media narratives and bias
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our tradition of, you know, whatever they want to say. It’s look how nice we are to the gays. That’s this is within
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the the framework of acceptable moral calculation, not the horrific crimes that would essentially shred any
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calculation once that factor is introduced.
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But that’s where we are these days. No Jews, no news. Ha.
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But China Zip Zippy laughs. Zippy,
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Russia, the Sudan, Iran, Myanmar, Haiti, the Congo, North Korea, all way worse.
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And that’s how you know it’s anti-semitism.
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H this guy is literally being like, “Yes, one of the great known prisons of the modern world in North Korea. Well, that’s worse than Israel.” This is not
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This is that exoneration to you, Bill, to say that it’s not as bad as a giant penal colony, which by the way, it is
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for Gazins and it’s actually worse and the West Bank still has obviously some level of autonomy. They’re trying to
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eradicate that too. This is not an argument. Once again, if you take inventory of the full freight of their
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actions, the military and the government of Israel, the the moral calculation is really not
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that difficult to make about their wrongdoing. But he cannot reckon with these facts. He cannot reckon with this reality. What’s happening to
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Palestinians is is a side concern independent of the the core identity of how they see themselves. No, the core
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identity of how they see themselves and the ideology powering that that this land belongs to them particularly on religious grounds ignoring that there
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was and there are people living there that do not share this background and that they must go or be killed. This has
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been the entire project from the word go. He starts this conversation by saying it’s the 78th birthday of the nation. I’m trying to tell you it’s the
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78th birthday of the Nagba. don’t want to they don’t want to make an account of this and they have developed this I like
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supporters like like like Bill Maher and by the way not exclusive to Jews by interest imagination Christians do it lots of folks do it this ideology that
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like this is not this is not a relevant factor in a broader consideration it’s the inconsistency
Chapter 5: Inconsistency in public discourse
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people talk about Jews these days like something out of Stormfront except it’s not Stormfront It’s an editor from the
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American Prospect, which is a venerable liberal publication that launched the careers of journalists like Ezra Klene. And yet, no one blinks.
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Who calls what’s happening in Gaza a genocide and who calls Israel an apartheid state when one of their editors says Israel is
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a brainwashed psychopathic death cult that might need to be nuked to save the human race. Uh, the nuking to save the
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human race seems quite excessive and I do not share that consideration. But brainwashed psychopathic de death cult.
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What what else would you call people who are broadly supportive of something approximating the mass extermination of their neighbors?
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Uh-huh.
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People say the left and the right can’t agree on anything these days. Well, there is this one thing they agree on.
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Right-winger Tucker Carlson has Nick Fuentes and Holocaust deniers.
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Why is Nick Fuentes’s name so hard to pronounce for people? If it’s fuent,
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it’s fuen n fuentes. Fuentes on his podcast and wonders along with
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them who really was the bad guy in World War II.
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And the New York Times has on their podcast super leftist Hassan [ __ ] who they call a progressive mind, and who
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says Zionists should be treated the same as Nazis, which I assume means hung at Nermberg.
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That’s what I’m not familiar with the full context of Hassan’s quote. Again, I’m never going to sign on to violence. I think that part is uh beyond the pale, but in
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recognizing the murderous ideology, calling that out is important.
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Progressive is now, I guess. So the kids are sure into it. They went nuts last year at Coachella for kneecap. That’s
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the name of an Irish rap group. As if Ireland hasn’t suffered enough. Knecap rules.
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It’s the only pop he’s gotten this whole thing.
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Their stage set is a sign that says, “Fuck Israel.” Good.
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And then they send a beach ball around the crowd. Zero laughs for this bozo.
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Zero laughs.
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No one No one finds this amusing. No one finds this clever. No one finds this interesting except Bill himself.
Chapter 6: Generational shifts in perspective
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Listen to this. Even his own audience can’t co-sign this [ __ ] Again, haha.
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Because again, Israel is the only country in the world doing anything bad.
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No, that is not the manosphere and the code pink people are on the same page because they both went to high school in America and they don’t know anything.
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This idea that Bill Maher is some like bright star of academic thought or otherwise interestingly an informed
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conversation. Once again, Bill, you can’t even basically morally reason and you’re lecturing young people who have
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been absolutely horrified by the wave of death that has been greeted a controlled
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and militarized by their oppressors population.
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You can’t even do basic moral reasoning which requires basic adherence to the
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world as it has been shown to us. And then you have the tmerity to act like what the difference is between what you have and what they have is wisdom.
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This is why no one is laughing at your [ __ ] ass jokes. You do not have wisdom.
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You have cognitive functioning problems.
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That is your issue. Your own audience can smell it on you. To say nothing of the rest of us.
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This condescending [ __ ] while they’re young. They don’t know anything.
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Sure, sometime that can be the case that the young can sometimes adopt positions aggressively at times without really
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understanding the full weight of what they are doing. It is not just the young.
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Yes, it skews more pro Palestinian the younger you get to an extent, but certainly support for folks who are in their 30s who have gone to school, who
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might have been to Israel. By the way, I’ve been to Israel. I’ve been to Gaza, they don’t like this either. People in their 40s and 50s, they don’t like it
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either. It’s the boomers like you who can’t let go of the mythology that you
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bought into a long time ago despite the vast and important need given the scale of human horror that has been shown to
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you. You are the one that has failed this moment. Not the young. It is you.
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So we
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[applause]
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so we really could someday soon have the tiki torch Jews will not replace his crowd and the queers for Palestine
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people working together to elect the next Hitler. There’s a North Carolina teenager who’s been charged with plotting to drive through a synagogue to
Chapter 7: Anti-semitism and political blowback
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fulfill her life goal of killing as many Jews as possible.
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This is terrible. There is simply no question. But I lived through the aftermath of 9/11 and the amount of
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anti-Muslim, anti-Arab, frankly even anti-seek violence that was distributed unfortunately to so many of
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them and which by the way we’ve been dehumanizing much longer than that.
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There’s been violence against them far predating that and certainly after that.
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So this is terrible. I make no I mean unequivocally horrible, but it’s quite strange that he doesn’t seem to notice
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that it’s been going on for much longer in the opposite direction. Cuz a kid’s got to have a dream. I’m just asking why
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in the world would this be the dream of some kid in North Carolina? Why is it the dream of Dan Bilzerian who’s running
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as a Republican to win a House seat in Florida? Who’s Dan Bilzerian?
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He sucks. Well, he’s a professional douchebag who’s attract brother. That’s you. I mean, I’m not a fan of Dan, but that’s you.
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Ed 30 million followers by doing this all day and posting it.
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[laughter]
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Yes, he’ll fit in fine with the current Congress.
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[applause]
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And Dan is fairly typical of the guys in the manosphere when he says, “The only real battle in the world today that I see worth fighting is [ __ ] you know,
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exterminating Israel. I mean, I would sign up tomorrow to go [ __ ] put boots on the ground and go [ __ ] kill Israelis.
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Why? Why is this asshole’s life about two things? Getting more Viagra and
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exterminating the Jews? Israel was Dan is actually anti-semitic. So this is not
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a necessarily an unfair charge that there’s this level of anti-semitism.
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But once again, it is not an unfair question to ask. Has the conduct of Israel itself since October 7th? Has
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this done anything worldwide to make Jews safer? I think that that I think
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that argument is quite poor. And to what extent have their efforts and this is the part we’ll talk about here certainly within even the United States to curb
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things like employment, free speech and other and other things beyond that. To what extent has that fmented some kind
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of blowback? Unfortunately I mean again I’m not saying unfortunately in the sense of that resistance to some of these efforts isn’t important. It is but that that the blowback leads to a
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direction of anti-semitism. That of course is unfortunate. Once again, he’s acting like where did hostility to the to the conduct of Israel come from? Yes,
Chapter 8: Questioning national interests
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Dan Blazerian Bilzerian has taken it in a gross and metastasized direction. That is true. But so there is so much
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awareness of the crimes of Israel and so little punishment that is being handed out and now our interests in this war in
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Iran which seems like hostilities might resume and how Trump has been explicit that he’s doing this for Israel and why
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our national interests are tied to them and how upset this makes people. This of course is not in any way whatsoever any kind of justification for violence. But
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it would be a part of something he would still not even like, which is questioning why are our interests tied to the government of Israel? Why are
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people speaking out against Israel? Why is kneecap putting a [ __ ] Israel sign back there? It is in part because of their atrocities. Although Nikcap is
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Irish, but here you’ll get it just the same. It is it is because of the it is because of how uniquely horrible what has happened to the Gazins is. And in
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certainly in the United States, it’s a question of to what extent are our national priorities and our interests being guided by entities where we don’t
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necessarily have overlapping interests in that way.
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Was founded on the idea that anti-semitism made a Jewish state unnecessary because Jews would never be safe without
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one. Can you honestly listen to this rhetoric and not see why that turned out to be true?
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Yes, I can. I can listen to this and say again what they want to say is that the
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actions of the Israeli government inherently make Jews safer because it provides a refuge. But the way in which they’re trying for this regional
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hegemony to get a greater Israel, taking territory in Lebanon, taking territory in Syria, taking territory in Gaza,
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taking to territory wherever they possibly can. They’re literally trying to take Lebanon up to the Latani River.
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What do you think that’s going to do for Israeli sentiment within Lebanon or any kind of people of conscience who are
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watching? That’s not even talking about Gaza. Add in what they’ve done in Gaza as well. Add in what they’re doing in this war to kind of exacerbate it on top of it to say nothing of how they might
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be directing some of the national priority from Net Netanyahu to Trump.
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Like they you mean to tell me Israel can go and just take part of a country’s territory and we’re supposed to believe
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that these people have those folks best interest at heart that this is an acceptable course of action that this is a reasonable exercise of statecraftraft.
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They are thieves.
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There are thieves who want to have an empire.
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That’s what all of this is. And saying as much is not anti-Semitic. Saying as much is actually critical.
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Israel as a force, whether it was Jewish, whether it was Muslim, whether it was anything, any any state undertaking what they’re taking. And
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then that combination of how it is affecting Western governments, most especially the United States who has
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hitched its wagon to it. It seems these are relevant questions.
Chapter 9: Academic and cultural rhetoric
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If you don’t have the right-wingers on your side and you don’t have the progressives, what do you have? What’s more progressive than college where
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professors now say things that would make Kanye wse?
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Osmani calls Zionists bloodthirsty animals.
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Who’s he? The leader of ISIS? No, he’s a professor right here in California at UC Irvine. And Candace Owens agrees with
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his assessment of Jews as animals because she says wherever they go, they bring their filth with them. Professor
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Hamid Dashi says of Israel’s they have a vulgarity of character that is bone deep and structural to the skeletal vertebrae of its culture.
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Dehumanization of Palestinian Palestinians has become part of the vertebrae of Israeli society. you know whether you want to call it bone deep
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and structural to skeletal vertebrae of the that that being vulgarity of character you know again I would need to see more about what he is saying this
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one I don’t know that I necessarily agree with as as is presented here but Palestinian life being subjugated
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eliminated and humiliated is absolutely a key feature of Israeli society now
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these are the kind of statements gerbles would have read and said, “No notes.”
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I mean, where are the Jewish space lasers when you need them?
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Now, there are absolutely horrible things said about Muslims, too. That should also be, of course, roundly condemned, like Republican Congressman
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Randy Fine, who’s running against dam.
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If they force us to choose, the choice between dogs and Muslims is not a difficult one. That’s awful. But it’s not the same as they need to be nuked
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and let’s exterminate them. This is why Jewish people here and in Europe now say they sometimes hide their identity,
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afraid that the Star of David will get them attacked, as has happened in almost too many places to mention lately. Leave
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your Star of David at home. But the Kafaya, you can wear that anywhere. You can wear it to fiddler on the roof.
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You can wear it and get harassed as well. Well, I mean it would be bad in both cases. Again, I’m not blind to the idea that there is a rising amount of anti-semitism in the world. You could
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see it on social media. You can see it in the world. And they need to be fought and combed in every way. That is simply no question about it. However, like the
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equivocation like, oh, you can just wear a kafia anywhere and nobody cares.
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Like the hate crimes have been committed. remember the Palestinian guy or the he may have been Jordanian or ArabAmerican who after October 11th was
Chapter 10: The disparity in hate crime reporting
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shot in the back and he had he was wearing one like I’ve seen so many videos on social media where people were wearing them and then some racist Karen came up to them. It’s not a get out of jail free card and you’ll get applause.
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Jew hatred isn’t just acceptable now.
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It’s cool. Celebrities love it and make it trendy. It’s the new Sha Vera t-shirt. the Islamophobia is just as bad argument is simply a false equivalency.
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Yeah. Because historically it’s been much worse. Certainly there’s been a spike in anti-semitic crimes, but the overall record in this country and
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certainly in Israel has been years, decades, lifetimes of Arab and Muslim dehumanization.
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Bush professor who talks about Muslims the way they get talked about.
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Yeah, I can actually look I’ll put some instances of it right here on the screen. And in fact, not only are the there are these instances, and by the
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way, you could look at pundits who have said things, academics who have said things, how about in the case of Raz Seagull who actually early into the
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genocide called it that as much and then actually suffered professional consequences. So you had a Jewish scholar who recognized that what was
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happening to the Palestinians was genocide and and he was made to suffer for it. So even when Jewish people of
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conscience, good people recognize the inhumanity and the murderous barbarity that has befallen the Palestinians, even they even they suffer consequences.
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No. Anti-Jewish crimes, hate crimes now outpace anti-Muslim hate crimes 9 to1.
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It’s not a contest, and I’m certainly not saying do more of the other. I’m just saying these are the numbers, the facts, the re
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This entire book just came out, How to Sell a Genocide from Adam Johnson. And it painstakingly shows on the news after October 7th.
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We’re talking about 5,000 hours of broadcast and more. Hundreds of pages of news articles. They calculate the
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language that media uses to describe crimes against Israelis versus crimes against Palestinians or military acts in
Chapter 11: The failure of legacy pundits
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either direction. And wouldn’t you know it, the evidence is overwhelming that the humanity of Israelis is taken into
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great consideration. The humanity of Palestinians at any kind of stage, baby, child, adult, is not is not we can
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verify it. And this has been happening for a long time. This is not in any way new or in any way novel. That it is
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lamentable that now anti-semitic crimes are on the rise is certainly true and that should be fought and combed every step of the way. But Israel is not helping that cause.
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Reality there is a frothing anxiousness for the literal extermination of this one group. And Democrats, where are you?
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If any other minority group was being talked about this way, you’d break out the kentacloth and have 10 benefit concerts.
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Once again, they want to talk about this like it’s some kind of like, oh, why don’t you talk about North Korea or the Democratic Republic of Congo or Haiti?
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It’s like, well, they’re not affecting the way in which our government functions and how we pay for things and how much we pay for things and how our
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interests are tied and how our civil liberties are being affected. You’re People aren’t being sent to ICE detention centers for writing op-eds
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about Haiti. People aren’t being sent to detention centers for writing op-eds about North Korea, but they are about Israel. College students aren’t having
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their lives upended because they protest Haiti. They’re not having their lives turned over because they have negative
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things to say about North Korea. It is only for Israel.
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And by the way, I didn’t mention this earlier in the video when I spoke out against Israel in 2018 when Scott Coker of the who used to run Bellator took the
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promotion there and I asked why it was an aparttheid state. That’s the only country I’ve ever criticized where I got a phone call about it. Criticized China,
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I’ve criticized Saudi Arabia, criticized I mean you name it. Never got a call. It was only Israel I got a call about. That
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was the only one from people who were really angry about it. But because you see that so many of your brainwashed by Tik Tok constituents now have an
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unfavorable view of Israel, you indulge them. Isra Is Israel is trying to squash Hamas. Hamas has any number of problems.
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And we don’t have to say we all think they’re great guys, but they are the actual inheritance of Palestinian national liberation. And it can be
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unfortunate that in the Middle East you can look around and you can say I don’t think that these are good guys and these are bad guys. It tends to cross both
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directions. But the idea that you can put on par the crimes of Hamas with the crimes of the government of Israel is
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itself its own kind of absolutely moronic but intellectual crime when you should be correcting them. You
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don’t tell your woke idiots Israel isn’t a colonizer. It is a colonized state. It isn’t a part committing genocide. It is committing
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genocide. If you brats had to spend a week anywhere in the Middle East other than Israel, you would understand what liberalism is not.
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Okay? I’ve been to Lebanon. I’ve been to Jordan. I’ve been to Egypt. I have been to occupied Palestine. I have been to Israel. I’ve been to a fair number of
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the parts of it. What you’re saying, Bill, is total [ __ ] [ __ ] And you can’t make that work on me. My mom is from Beirut. My sister was born in
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Beirut. I am intimately familiar with the Middle East, certainly relative to you.
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This doesn’t work on me. I’m not some woke kid in high school. I’m not some 20-year-old who’s learning, “Wow, things
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aren’t so as as interesting as I thought they were.
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I have I have spent a lot of time traveling the world, including those parts. I have seen some of these things
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with my own eyes. And what you’re saying is [ __ ] You’re now your own way of still
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undercutting the the tapestry of Arab and Muslim life throughout parts of this this region as well.
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Turning it into this is some kind of it would be the opposite of what you would expect. You would hate it. It’d be like MAGA rednecks times 10. And that’s simply not the reality. Yeah, of course.
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all of these parts of the world, they also have their, you know, backwards elements or anti-progressive forces in all kinds of ways. Sure, that’s true.
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But they also have all other kinds of force as well. And just by the way, here’s the problem, Bill. If there was another country reigning bombs on your
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house and the only people to defend you were MAGA rednecks with guns, you might not like it, but you still might seek shelter where they had some.
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All the people likely running for president now on the Democratic side want it known they don’t take money from
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Apac the Israeli lobby a stanch which gives permission to actual anti-semites
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to say see we’re right about Israel that’s [clears throat] a dirty money from a dirty country I mean dirty is one word but they’re
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right to resist Apac they are a force a a extremely influential lobbying force in the United states that has and it
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continue and it will continue unless we stop them from having a incredibly poisonous relationship with the United
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States. It’s not good for us for the country to follow what Israel wants and it is certainly not good for the country to follow what Apac is suggesting.
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Resistance to that is actually important not merely for American prosperity and security but autonomy as well. Yeah, listen. And I’m not saying he hasn’t brought up some odious characters here
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who have done some really awful stuff, but we’re putting Diddy on par with Ape. Get the [ __ ] out of here, Bill.
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A is too far. Let me just say this to all who ask me. Why are you harder on the Democrats than you used to be? Until
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you fix this whole issue, stop asking me.
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I’m all too happy to stop asking you. I wish you’d stop talking about it completely. In fact, I wish you’d go off the air. You cannot be trusted. You are
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racist as [ __ ] the amount of dehumanization in Israeli society that literally there
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were riots in favor of the ability for IDF security guards and prison guards to
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rape Palestinian detainees and then these people were celebrated on Israeli national television. And then you want us to say that there’s nothing really
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wrong at the heart of the culture that allows this kind of dehumanization to take place, this kind of abuse, this kind of torment, this kind of death.
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You are the one that is being left behind. You are the one who cannot do basic moral reasoning. You are the one
Chapter 12: Final assessment of current events
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who cannot be trusted. You are the one who cannot do basic moral reasoning. You are the one who has been Islamophobic
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from the word go. and anti- Arab racism has been a key feature of your editorial vision for as long as you’ve been on television.
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And now you look at the state of the world and you think it is teenagers who just need to read some more books. No,
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Bill, your brain is broken. This is why you are being left behind.
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Sure, anti-semitism is real. It’s a real problem and we should do everything we can to fight it. But doing that means
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fighting the forces in part anyway of the of the murderous acts of the government of Israel.
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People of conscience have to resist it.
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People who are worried about civil liberties here have to resist it. People who are worried about the future of American and frankly the present reality of American security have to resist it.
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And we will. and your views will simply go extinct because nobody agrees with you and and certainly people who know
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much more than you. But honestly, what really I think is so interesting to me and the part that you don’t see is that all of these high schoolers or genzers
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that you don’t respect for their views, yet they’re the ones whose brains are working just fine. They’re the ones who
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are able to take moral atrocity and process it and then assign requisite blame and then begin to ask questions about what we do to solve those
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problems. You look at those problems and you say, “What problems?” I don’t see
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anything. I bet you don’t, Bill. I bet you don’t. But the rest of us do. And we
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know about your long career trafficking and and grotesque ideas like this. We know about your career. You’re
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the one who had Van Jones doing dead Gaza baby jokes on your show and you have the balls to lecture us about our
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lack of moral urgency or factual clarity. You are an old man.
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You are an old man. And I don’t care how much hair dye you have or how much Botox you use or how many blood transfusions you might engage in. You are an old man
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with an understanding of the world that is equally becoming obsolete.
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Your time as being a leader on television of any kind of political idea, it is coming to a close. And it is
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not just coming to a close because you are old. It is coming to a close because your ideas are no longer tenable to
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people. particularly people of conscience. Go [ __ ] yourself. I can’t wait till you’re off television.
Sync to video time
Chapter 1: Seinfeld’s Gross Palestine Comment
0:00
Can we talk about how much a piece of [ __ ] Seinfeld is for saying Palestine doesn’t ex He sucks so much ass. Do these celebs intentionally stay silent
0:07
7 seconds
with their Zionism until they made until they made all the money they can? I don’t think they stayed silent necessarily. I’m not sure exactly what
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14 seconds
the full history of Jerry Seinfeld’s pal um Israel advocacy is. I don’t know if you guys saw this. He’s leaving the nickname and someone was like, “Can we get a free Palestine?” He’s like, “It doesn’t exist.” It’s like, “You ghoul.
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25 seconds
You ghoul. These people are evil.” Truly. truly sick. You know, there have
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you I hate to be so um graphic about it, but like the scene I mentioned I had seen Terminator 2 in in
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theaters and that’s that scene early on in the movie when the robot is like stepping on this wall of human skulls.
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Like that’s what people are doing when they say things like Palestine doesn’t exist. You’re just trying to erase a people. You’re trying to erase uh lives.
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You’re trying to erase identity. You’re trying to erase history. You’re just trying to make the world forget and
Chapter 2: US media Erasing Palestinian Identity
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doing it in the most, you know, um what’s the word exactly?
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You know, profoundly ghastly way. It’s the same with Van Jones. You guys remember Van Jones on Bill Maher show
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when he’s complaining like it can’t ever be the crimes of of of Israel’s military or the government. It can never be that, right? It can never be that. So what is
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it? Oh, it’s a disinformation campaign from Qar. That’s what it is. That’s why your Tik Tok algorithm is full of, you
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know, just one [ __ ] horror after another. It’s because of Qar, right?
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That’s what they say. And remember, he did that thing where he was like, “Dead Gaza baby, dead Gaza baby. Diddy.” You know, dead go. He was trying to make a point about Tik Tok. This is I mean,
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these people had names. Van Jones. These people had names, you know, they had lives. They had dreams and they just casually toss them aside.
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They want to tear them aunderder from their own land and then erase any trace of their footprints. Just dust in the wind is how they want to treat them.
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Think about how much contempt for human life you have to have to feel that way.
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Think about that. Like that to your [ __ ] bone marrow. You have to be antihuman.
Chapter 3: Sam Harris And Gaza
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Did you see Peter Binard’s rebuttal of Sam Harris on Israel? His refusal to debate any critics of Israel. Finally, Harris and Mah are taken to task. I
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watched about a minute of it. I have not finished. Sam Harris basically wrote an article filled with as many lies,
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falsehoods, obfuscations, bizarre tangents, and just ghoulish
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morality all through. This guy wants people to take his moral reasoning seriously. And it’s weird about Gaza because with these people like Sam, you
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can’t even have an ordinary conversation about the merits. You can only have they are unable to accept certain elements of
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fact. If you sit on a jury trial, there are things that are introduced to the court that the both the defense and the prosecution agree are facts of the case.
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And it makes the conversation a lot simpler because you have to consult those as the north star as the as the as the as the defining way in which to um
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have a conversation and to make a judgment about like but they just refuse to have that kind of a process. They they they there is every effort made to
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have some kind of explanation here. Oh people it’s just full of anti-semitism.
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Of course anti-semitism is real. But then you’ll hear things like the Qatar overtake of your Tik Tok feed and it’s like guys, maybe it’s the child killing.
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Maybe it’s the Oh, you know what?
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This book by Adam Johnson, we’re reading it together on my Substack. Um, he’s gonna
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be on my Substack and I’ll put I’ll put the interview on this YouTube channel afterward. He’s going to be on my Substack to do to talk about his book.
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This book is incredible. Now, it’s not just incredible for how good it is in the sense of how strong the argument is,
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but it’s more than that. He makes a very simple but very clear and important
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claim. He doesn’t claim that in his opinion
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major newspapers, television networks, and other forms of large-scale corporate media have an pro-Israel and anti-Palestinian bias because he feels
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it or because it’s reputationally there or because he saw isolated examples of it. No, no, no. His argument is the
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reason why we know it’s true is because you can empirically prove it.
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You can literally take the data that shows any number of different things that they want to measure and how much
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the disparity in that can be either positively or negatively in favor of Israel and against Palestine or vice versa vice virtue in terms of good or a
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bad like so for example if they look at um what was the one that I read the other day I thought was
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really good what’s a basic one that he starts out with oh god I can’t see [ __ ] Here.
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Hold on.
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Oh, Martin Fletcher. That was a good one. Uh, hold on.
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Let me get this one. Ah, here we go. Where is this one?
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Okay, we’ll do Okay.
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All right, let me just read the beginning of this to you, okay? Within hours of the October 7th attack, pro-Israel reporters, politicians, and commentators needed to exceptionalized
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Palestinian violence and create a tiered moral system that indexed October 7th as something morally distinct from both
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Israeli violence of the past and what would no doubt be an unprecedented military response by Israel in addition to the campaign to ISIS Hamas. So, one
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argument that he makes in this is he says that pro-Israeli forces or pro-Israeli sympathies through media exerted through different ways tried to
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turn Hamas into like nihilistic jihadist murderers, which yes, of course, they engaged in horrible acts on October 7th,
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but they’re not ISIS in that way. They are a political organization, too. They have political demands. Yes, they resorted to barbaric means. That is
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true. But, of course, their adversary has done that times a thousand. So whatever you can accuse them of, Israel would be just as guilty to the nth
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degree. And so now we’re back at a place where we’re having a political divide.
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And there was an attempt to like the the reason why they wanted to ISIS Hamas was so that they could make violence against them, wanting violence against them more
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acceptable. But he continues um the three mechanisms to achieve this exceptionalization were one, the almost
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entirely lopsided use of emotive words to describe the killing of Israelis versus the killing of Palestinians. So they would call it a tragedy or a massacre and then when Palestinians
Chapter 4: US media Israel Language Bias
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would be killed and they can measure the use of these words, right? And they show you side by side comparisons. But when it was when when it was Palestinians killed, there was never any of these
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other descriptors. It was merely like numeric totals, right? They would never call it a slaughter. They would never call it a massacre or they would never call it, you know, that kind of a thing.
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uh reflexively prefacing the majority of statements about Palestinian civilian deaths with claims of Palestinian war crimes while systematically ignoring welldocumented crimes by Israelis.
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That’s a very common one. And an overall rhetorical regime that humanized Israelis and dehumanized Palestinians.
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And then he goes through and then proves it to you by collecting data on like 10,000 news articles and like 5,000
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hours of television and showing you systematically how they often um they call when when if there’s someone 17 and
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under for who’s Israeli, they call them children. If it’s 17 and under, they call them minors. And you can’t find the reverse hardly at all. And he just documents this over and over and over.
Chapter 5: Selling A Genocide
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8 minutes, 17 seconds
It is empirically [ __ ] true. You can measure it. You can literally [ __ ]
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measure it. And so all of that is to say Sam Harris just can’t reconcile with this. He cannot
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reconcile with the crimes. He cannot reconcile with the reality. And so he has turned himself into a place where he’s like, I won’t even talk to critics
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because there’s nothing to say. There’s nothing to say because you are not even on planet reality. They can literally
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prove media bias. And this is just the beginning. the media bias. What is that for? Why is this important? Because this
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is the permission structure that was created. And by the way, not just a permission structure to start one, a
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9 minutes
permission structure to prolong one as some kind of ferocious inevitability.
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That that’s what this is for. That’s why it’s called How to Sell a Genocide. How to make you buy it, how to make you keep it. Yeah. Incredible [ __ ] book.
Sync to video time
The conflict in Israel and occupied Palestine has been generating international coverage and headlines for decades. That was true long before October 7th and has been true since. But here in the United States and perhaps more broadly in Western media, Palestinian voices have been ignored, marginalized, or otherwise undermined. Today, I don’t imagine that I can change that,
but here’s my contribution to perhaps solving some of that problem. A conversation with Omar Badar. Omar Badar is a Palestinian American. He is a policy analyst who has worked in a number of places, including the Arab American Institute, as well as the Institute for Middle East Understanding. In this interview,
Badar and I talk about that media coverage and why it has been so devoid of Palestinian input and why, in fact, more broadly, Palestinian life seems to matter so little in so many parts of the world, including the Western world. what it means for the future of the rules-based order,
and whether or not there will even be a Palestine to advocate for in 20 years. I do not imagine that one man can speak for all of Palestinian interests, but I also believe that it is important when possible to hear from various different parts of the diaspora or any other actors involved that have direct ties,
skin in the game, so to speak, and at bare minimum, voices that have been deeply marginalized in larger corporate media spaces. So stick around to the end of the interview if you would like to get access to a list of resources, both in terms of books you can read to better understand the conflict,
as well as news outlets and organizations you can currently access to understand what is happening in real time. Without further ado, here’s my conversation with Omar Badar. Omar Badar, thank you for joining me. Of course, glad to be here. Omar is a Palestinian-American and somebody who is… essentially an analyst of these matters.
I don’t know exactly where all of this is headed in terms of this war and what it means for the future of the Palestinian people. But if you could give me a sense of where we are now after October 7th, how would you contextualize the moment? And then ultimately, where are we headed with all of this?
It’s a big question. And I think from an American perspective, this is the moral issue of our time in the sense that if you think back of what people experienced during slavery, that’s the main debate. That’s the main issue of whether you’re for it or against it.
At the time, it seems murky and there are different opinions and whatever. But in retrospect, you look back at it and you think, That’s a morally obvious question. There isn’t any dispute on it once you’ve separated yourself from that political moment and can absorb the facts. The same with Jim Crow and segregation.
And I think right now we are at a moment in which Israel has expressed its intent to genocide Gaza completely and to ethnically cleanse the entire Palestinian population out of it. And this is happening with American support, American-provided weaponry, American-provided political cover. And right now it seems complicated because of how broken media coverage is of this question.
But I think that’s what we’re facing right now, is that this project of annihilation that Palestinians are under, and we’re essentially at the whim Donald Trump, whether he can be won over by the right party with the right amount of bribes or whatever, in the hopes that he might make policy choices that could prevent something so
horrible from happening. I think this is kind of the moment that we’re in right now. And it’s a break from… Biden in a very simple way. Biden’s policy was one essentially also of begrudgingly enabling everything Israel’s doing, kind of understanding where Israel was heading, saying, no, you’re overdoing it, it’s a little too much,
but never having the backbone to step in and say, okay, enough is enough. And Donald Trump is a very different character. He does have an unorthodox way of conducting foreign policy and seems to be willing to put his foot down and break certain norms in the way we conduct foreign policy.
So it’s no longer assured with him that we are going to continue backing this without any question. But it’s not about principle for Donald Trump. It’s about interests. And we’re, in a way, hoping that the interests would align in a way to stop this horror show from unfolding.
in the direction that Israel has made very clear that they’re moving in.
This is going to sound like a bit of a strange question, but I can only articulate it as somebody who has observed it, given my own background and obviously trying to understand yours. How is it possible that Palestinian life can mean so little to I could, I mean, I’m not, to be clear,
I am not trying to in any way whatsoever justify any kind of genocidal intent, that’s not what I mean, but I could at least understand how someone as a political and then wartime adversary might not have necessarily the greatest sense of someone else’s humanity, but even here in this country, all my life, all my life,
I’m 45 years old, I don’t know when Palestinian life mattered, and I don’t think it’s mattered less. How did it get to this point?
It’s a strange question, Omar, but how could this be? Look, it’s a stunning reality where we have a political culture that has evolved over a long period of time. This might seem like a rabbit hole for a moment. There is a process that I think is very similar to in a place like Saudi Arabia,
where they ginned up an extreme version of Sunni Islam because it served a narrow political purpose. And then there was blowback. It exploded back in their faces. And what you ended up with is groups like al-Qaeda that were trying to topple the Saudi government. You have a similar process in the Republican Party where they ginned up
anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim rhetoric and discourse because it might help them electorally in a narrow sense. But then Donald Trump comes along and builds on that and becomes the most extreme on all these fronts. You know, remember when he was running for office the first time,
he had suggested the complete banning of any Muslims from ever entering the U.S. And he ended up winning. He was out of the control of the Republican Party. But that’s an example of a political machine not appreciating the full extent to which something can blow back in your face if you’re not careful with what you’re playing with.
And I think there is something similar here, is that the United States felt that it’s an interest. It’s in the US interest. to have a strong relationship with Israel. So we embarked on a massive propaganda campaign, essentially portraying Israel as the underdog in the fight against Palestinians, complete reversal of the reality,
and creating a political dynamic within this country where nobody just questions Israel. You have both parties that line up to defend everything that Israel does and reflexively just say Israel has the right to defend itself. in answering any question that comes up about any violence that Israel is imposing in the region.
And that has blown up in our faces. We’ve gotten to the point to where the Israel lobby has been allowed to amass a certain level of power and influence that politicians are simply afraid to speak up against it. And media in this country follows political power in the United States.
If there are issues on which Republicans and Democrats disagree, then the media will allow for that debate to happen. And you get points of view about are you for abortion or against abortion, and there’s an intense debate on it. But on issues where Republicans and Democrats align, There is no debate in our discourse.
And so because our politics is broken on this issue, media discourse follows suit, and you end up in a situation in which Israeli life is very deeply valued. When Israeli hostages are captured by Hamas, we get to know their names, we interview their parents, we talk about their life story.
There’s a level of humanization that, from my perspective, is completely legitimate. We should humanize everyone. But that is never extended to Palestinians. Palestinians are simply numbers. They are the other, in a sense. And when you treat people like they’re the other, like their lives don’t matter, and you never provide context to explain what we’re actually seeing,
you very easily can end up in a situation in which Palestinian life is not on anybody’s mind. When you look at the justification of everything Israel has done since October 7th, the defense of it, it’s all, well, what do you expect? Look what happened on October 7th. Of course, they’re going to react with that overwhelming violence.
But they never go back far enough to ask the question in the opposite direction, which is, what about everything Israel has done in the lead up to October 7th? When you look at the numbers of Palestinians killed, infinitely more on the Palestinian side well before October 7. Gaza’s economy was under siege and destroyed before October 7.
Hundreds of Palestinian children had been killed by Israeli bombs in Gaza before October 7. All of that never comes up. It’s never part of the discussion. And then suddenly, when there’s Israeli victimhood as part of the story, and that ends up being the lens through which you paint the entire picture, we end up where we are today,
which is, frankly, at a level of horror that I had personally never imagined. I understood that there was always an anti-Palestinian bias to some extent. I never in my life imagined that it could get to the point to where you’re mass slaughtering tens of thousands of Palestinian children, where doctors would be returning from visiting Gaza, American doctors,
including an American Jewish doctor, reporting on how Israeli snipers are specifically targeting Palestinian toddlers with bullets to the head. And you still don’t have adequate coverage to convey how outrageous a situation we’re in. That’s a deeply demoralizing moment in which it’s a wake-up call, in a way,
about the moral reckoning we’re going to have to deal with when the reality of what’s unfolding sinks in after we get past this moment of media insanity and bias and the way that politicians engage on this issue.
Let’s talk a little bit about the media, particularly Western media in this one. I do wish to talk about the killing of journalists in Gaza. We will get to that in just a moment. Obviously, it’s a very important one. But to speak about the Western side of things, more recently,
you had the Financial Times and even The Economist come out and say publicly through op-eds, it is time, it is time to end the suffering, it is time to put this to bed and these are not institutions typically known for pro-Palestinian viewpoints.
So it does appear to me that there is some movement in the media and also this more recent situation where the 15 medics were killed and the Israeli army basically covered it up and the New York Times did this vast expose of it. It does seem like better late than never
But it took an enormous amount of suffering to get here. So what is wrong, to the best of your knowledge? I mean, you’re saying the media covers the politics, but there are folks in these media institutions, at least ostensibly, who could provide better coverage. Are they being sidelined?
Like, what are the nuts and bolts behind the media coverage such that it looks this way? Again, with typically what I would call morally unambiguous situations. Yeah.
Yeah, look, I think there are two factors. One, there is something just about workplace culture and the fact that a lot of people who run these institutions are older. There’s a significant divide in public opinion on this. People who primarily consume legacy corporate media have one view of this. And then people who are the newer generation,
40 and under mostly, who primarily consume social media as a way of finding out what’s happening. and getting the raw livestream genocide on their phones day in and day out. They have a very different view of this. And it’s just a reality that it’s the older generation that runs these institutions for the most part.
So there is that cultural bias internally of the kinds of voices that you pick to be platformed, the kind of story that’s already kind of in the back of your head. There’s always the sense that Israelis are like us, this is the us group, and this is the other group.
So whenever they talk about Israel doing things wrong, it’s always in the context of Did they overdo it? Their intentions are good, but is it too much? Are they being careful enough? Should they put more of an effort? The assumption is always good motivations and that any excesses are just that, they’re only excesses.
They never extend that benefit of the doubt to Palestinian violence. There’s nobody who ever says, well, we know that Hamas is well-intentioned, but did they overdo it? No, everybody just talks about it straight up. We know what your intention was. You killed civilians deliberately. That’s horrible and monstrous, and that’s wrong.
They never look at the lens where the Israeli government, even though their atrocities are infinitely more significant, they never look at it through that same prison. There is that internal bias. And the other thing is, there is also the reality of interest groups who primarily target the media whenever coverage is not favorable to Israel.
These are groups like Honest Reporting, like Camera, they’re out there and their mission is openly to defend Israel in Western media. And what they do is that if you write a story that is unfavorable to Israel, you pretty much are guaranteed to be receiving tens, if not hundreds of thousands,
of calls and emails telling you that your coverage is bad and wrong and insisting on it to be shifted in some way. And so that creates a level of self-censorship among journalists who, in order to avoid the headache of dealing with that kind of backlash and being
nickel and dimed on every word that comes out of your mouth, to say, all right, let’s not deal with this. And so you end up shortchanging Palestinian stories, Palestinian narratives, the reality of what’s really unfolding because people want to avoid the controversy around this and don’t want to deal with the possibility of being canceled or
targeted in that way.
I have an unbelievable stat here. I’m sure you’ve heard it. I don’t think this is new to you, but the Israel-Gaza war is the deadliest conflict for journalists in history. According to Brown University’s Watson Institute for Public Affairs, more than 232 journalists killed in Gaza since 7 October. And of course, journalists from outside of Gaza,
Western journalists in particular, would not be allowed in unless under Israeli escort or something to that effect. Why hasn’t there been more solidarity in the ranks among you’re talking about peer groups, in group, out group, surely people with the same profession, including many of these folks, I know they’re speaking an Arabic language,
but they are also fluent in English as well, not that that’s a deciding factor, I don’t understand, it’s just very hard for me to understand how you can watch people in your in-group suffer so, in a way that is historically unusual, and there is very little solidarity in the ranks, why?
Yeah, I mean, again, I’ll put it really bluntly, and I know that sometimes the charge of racism is a little bit overused in ways that are not particularly helpful, but in this case, it really is difficult to think of any other explanation. Israel has barred international journalists from going in. That’s the only conflict in which this happens.
In Ukraine, there are journalists on the ground covering what’s happening. Here, Israel says no international journalists are allowed in. They don’t want the truth of what’s happening to be documented. And the only people documenting what’s happening are Palestinian journalists. And then Israel can very easily do insinuations every time they murder a bunch of journalists. They say, well,
they had Hamas connections and come up with all kinds of stories that don’t pass muster. The evidence is laughable if it’s ever presented at all. And there’s a reflex among Western journalists to say, well, what if? Palestinians are inherently suspect, even though they’re journalists, they’re known as journalists, Hamas denies any connection with them.
All the evidence points to the fact that they’re real journalists doing meaningful coverage of what’s unfolding. Once Israel brings up the possibility, the charge that they might be affiliated with something negative, then Western journalists want to back off and don’t want to risk having that kind of association.
Again, this would not work if any other tyrant anywhere in the world, if When Russia killed journalists, if the excuse was, well, they’re this and then that, American media would be extremely skeptical. Nobody would take that at face value. And yet Israeli charges are constantly taken at face value.
And the only way to explain that from my perspective is anti-Palestinian racism that is sort of embedded in the culture of the way that we talk about these.
There’s a Jamal Khashoggi situation where he obviously had dual nationality and he wrote for a number of different publications inside the Arab world. And in fact, I think that ended up being his undoing from MBS. But there was lamenting of his death when he died. So what would be the difference?
Is that he worked for the Washington Post and that they could claim sort of ownership over him in that particular?
Yeah, he worked for the Washington Post, had colleagues at the Washington Post. People knew who he was. And so when it’s a personal connection, I mean, that’s the universal thing about racism, right? Once you have a personal connection and you see people as human, it’s very difficult to overlook their humanity in moments in which they are
subjected to tragedy. I don’t think that we have that kind of personal connection with Palestinian journalists in Gaza. They don’t have close connections with people who are working at prominent outlets within the United States. And if they had those relationships, then I think that there would be a much more significant backlash against the fact
that they’re being murdered.
What is your sense of the role that social media has played? The TikTok ban was supposed to go into effect. It did not. Everyone’s social media feed, including mine, is just sort of filled with an unending, an unyielding stream of horror. And you have even heard former Senator Norm Coleman of Minnesota say that this has
been a problem for Israeli, well, not Israeli public opinion, but public opinion about Israel, I should say. and he’s calling for censorship of it. They got very close and then it didn’t happen. I don’t know what will happen with TikTok. It’s very hard to predict under the Trump administration, but more broadly,
what is your perspective on how vital is the role of social media to determining people’s attitudes towards this conflict?
Yeah, it’s been absolutely indispensable, social media in a corporate environment in which Palestinian voices are almost never platformed and in which a story is being told from a very tilted perspective. It is absolutely indispensable that people have a direct stream of what is unfolding on the ground through social media. And it is precisely, to your point,
why remarkable that American politicians, again, are not speaking about this in a coy way. They are saying that as a result of what is unfolding on these platforms, public opinion is shifting against Israel, and therefore we’re going to intervene and suppress free speech, effectively,
and the ability for Americans to interact with the world as a way of trying to shift public opinion back in a more favorable direction. I mean, for all the free speech warriors who have been screaming about cancel culture and everything else, their silence on this issue is really deafening.
It’s as if there’s always this Palestinian exception to free speech. And you see it even beyond just social media. You see it in what’s happening on college campuses. You see it in the way that anti-Semitism is being defined in ways that are expansive. protests on college campuses where many of them, by the way,
progressive Jewish students who belong to incredible groups like Jewish Voice for Peace and If Not Now, who are linking arm to arm with other students objecting to this genocide. And yet these demonstrations are being described as anti-Semitic simply because they are critical of Israel, even though the people who are participating in them are, in fact, you know,
in many cases Jewish themselves who are leading this effort. The definition of anti-Semitism I think here is worth pausing with for a moment. Everybody intuitively understands what racism and bigotry are. Anti-Semitism is, you know, without quibbling about the technicalities of the term, is bigotry towards Jewish people. That’s what it’s supposed to mean.
And yet there’s an expansive definition known as the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of anti-Semitism. that includes certain forms of criticism of Israel. And if you accuse Israel of being a racist endeavor, if you judge Israel by double standards, whatever that means, these things are considered anti-Semitism. And the author of that definition said, hold on, everyone.
I made this definition deliberately broad. His name is Ken Stern. I made it very broad because I’m using it for data collection internationally. If you apply this as the definition domestically on college campuses for what amounts to anti-Semitism and not, then what you’re doing is you are suppressing free speech and open discussion about Israel politically.
That’s the view of the person who authored this definition, and that has not stopped politicians and special interest groups from aggressively pushing for that definition to be adopted domestically on college campuses as a means of suppressing dissent and criticism of Israel.
It’s an obvious example from my perspective of a side that is losing the debate on the merit. They can’t engage on it. And so what they want to do is shut the conversation down. They want to shut people up. And the easiest way to shut people up who are objecting to the monstrous policies
of the Israeli government and U.S. support for them is to suggest that it is anti-Semitic to be critical, and therefore everybody doesn’t want to be charged with something like that. And so they back off and are a lot more careful about what they say and how they engage with this.
It’s just such a cynical misuse of that charge because that charge means something. It is significant. There is real antisemitism in this country. There are people who are motivated by antisemitism. And when you water that charge down so much by employing it so carelessly and directing it at people who are defending human rights,
you are making that charge meaningless. And when you do that, you’re not only harming the people who are being smeared by it, but you’re also harming Jewish communities because their objections to actual antisemitism become watered down when that charge doesn’t mean anything anymore.
What is your sense about the state of antisemitism? It’s very hard to know. If you spend time on Twitter like you and I do, it is unambiguous. It is right in your face, and it is quite terrible. And of course, in some of these other male-dominated spaces like MMA communities, it is obviously undeniable there as well.
But in the broader world, I… I don’t know to what extent there is a growth. I mean, I’m certainly, I don’t know what the prevailing evidence suggests about it, but perhaps you do. What do we know about the state of anti-Semitism, not including in places where they don’t do any job of policing it, like online spaces? Yeah.
Look, I think there is a couple of things here. One of the problems is that the primary institution charged with defining anti-Semitism and tracking it is the Anti-Defamation League. And that is a group that, from my perspective, has completely abandoned.
I cannot take them seriously.
Yeah. They’ve abandoned their mission entirely, and they’ve prioritized essentially Israeli policy and protecting Israel from criticism. And so in their statistics, they count pro-Palestine rallies as anti-Semitic incidents. Those appear in their statistics. And so you can’t take those stats seriously. ordinary pro-Palestinian protest. They, you know, certain chance from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.
They consider that to be, like, those are part of their statistics. And so you lose all meaning and you lose the ability to track what’s actually unfolding when you look at the numbers that they present. On the other hand, just from an anecdotal perspective, I feel like there’s an undeniable uptick in anti-Semitism just from what I’m
exposed to on social media. And there is, I think, sort of an analogy here that might be useful. In the aftermath of 9-11, there was significant rise in anti-Arab and anti-Muslim bigotry. It would be insane to suggest that that’s a coincidence. There is obviously a causal relationship that you had this massive terrorist attack
on the Twin Towers in New York. and that sentiment exploded immediately after, causal connection is obvious in spite of the fact that every major Arab and Muslim organization in this country and around the world made clear that they have no association with this, they condemn it, they stand against it. That has not stopped the backlash.
And I think something similar is happening here, which is when Israel, acting in the name of the Jewish people, unfortunately not truthfully representing them, no more than Al-Qaeda represented the views of Muslims around the world, committing this horrendous, massive atrocity against children in Gaza. It is kind of unsurprising that there’s going to be a spike in antisemitism.
And the most disturbing part, from my perspective, is that groups like the ADL, rather than immediately distance themselves from that crime in order to fight for Jewish safety and Jewish protection, instead end up providing cover for the Israeli government, which, from my perspective, is just absolutely irresponsible in a climate in which we desperately need to push
back against antisemitism more forcefully.
I wanna talk about college campuses, and in particular, the connection to an assault on our civil liberties. But I think the first question for me is when you see, I’m sure I’m pronouncing her name wrong, Rumesa Ozturk, the Tufts Fulbright Scholar who gets arrested for an op-ed, which I read, it makes no mention of Hamas whatsoever.
It’s simply about, the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement, or as it related to, anyway, matching up with what they did with South Africa and whatnot. Or in the case of Mahmoud Khalil, where they’re putting him in detention, potentially for deportation, and by their own admission, the government’s own admission, he broke no laws.
is the reason they’re doing that, how much of it is an ideological commitment to a belief in protecting Israel’s interests as they see it, versus just a pretext for obtaining more power.
Yeah. My speculation on this is that this is Trump making good on a promise he made when he was running for office. That is, frankly, one of the only few points of contrast between him and the Biden administration around this issue in particular. Both Republicans and Democrats on this establishment, of course, excluding actual progressives,
Unfortunately, not enough of them in Congress. The policy was provide cover for Israel. Where there was a meaningful difference is domestically, is that Trump promised to up the ante by cracking down on Palestine solidarity domestically under the guise of combating Hamas sympathy within the United States. And he’s making good on it.
He’s going after people whose only crime is, I mean, ironically, right? They’re being charged with sympathy towards terrorism when the people who are being rounded up, from my perspective, are the conscience of this country. They are the ones who are objecting to terrorism. Terrorism, definitionally, is the use of violence against civilians to achieve political ends.
This is the dictionary definition of what Israel is precisely doing in Gaza right now. The people who are objecting to it, I mean, it’s just so Orwellian that they’re the ones who are being charged with sympathy towards terrorism. But I think it’s completely cynical. I don’t think anybody takes those charges seriously. Nobody believes them.
What they’re doing is they understand that significant donors have given Trump a lot of money, including Sheldon Adelson’s wife, Miriam Adelson, on the promise of that, waging that war domestically, and also in the West Bank in terms of promising that Israel gets to annex huge parts of the West Bank, which I suspect is coming.
And from Trump’s perspective, that’s a no-cost thing, you know. The courts may object. They might give him a hard time. There might be a back and forth. But the instinct, the impulse to just round them up and throw them in prison so that there’s something to show for, I think,
is a no-brainer from Trump’s perspective in exchange for significant amounts of donations that he collected from pro-Israel groups in the lead up to his presidency.
You know what really gets me on this whole thing is that, I mean, obviously we are dealing with people who are working and living inside the United States, not living in Palestinian territory. But one of the things that I’ve really noticed over the course of my life is that the Palestinians can’t win, right?
So if they respond militarily, it’s a no-go. If they boycott, it’s a no-go. If they peacefully protest, it’s a no-go. If they write, or she wasn’t the only one, Oz Tork, she had a series of authors with her. If they write an op-ed that literally has nothing to do with Hamas, they cannot win. To me,
like the line here, the through line through it is like Palestinian advocacy for itself is what is under assault. There’s no version of it that they will accept.
Yeah, they want the begging and groveling for Israel. Surrender.
It’s surrender or nothing. Yeah.
And the boycott part, I think, is particularly interesting, because boycotts are a fundamental part of American political culture. The boycott of British tea during the Revolution, the Montgomery bus boycott during the Civil Rights Movement, it’s a right that is protected by the US Constitution, affirmed by the Supreme Court, that Americans get to boycott,
and that is part of your First Amendment right. This is political expression. It’s part of free expression. And we’ve made it so that, in the United States, You can boycott American businesses. You can boycott American states. I don’t know if you remember, there’s plenty of debate about boycotting this state or that state because of
anti-LGBTQ laws or whatever. We talk just fine about boycotting American businesses and states, but boycotting that one foreign country is not OK. Suddenly, that’s where you draw the line. And it’s worse because it’s not just boycotting that country. It’s boycotting that country’s war crimes. Israel builds illegal settlements in the occupied territories.
drives Palestinians off of their land, builds an Israeli town on top of it. That’s a settlement. And international law is clear about the fact that this process is a war crime. And yet, if you boycott Israeli settlements, that’s considered not OK in many laws across the United States.
So many of the American states have passed laws that say you cannot boycott Israel or Israeli settlements and still receive a government job or a government grant. One egregious case from a few years ago, I think it was Hurricane Harvey in Texas. there was a hurricane, and if you wanted to apply to hurricane relief from the state,
one of the things that you have to do is sign a thing that says that you don’t boycott Israel. It’s just utter lunacy. The assault on free speech and free expression that we’re witnessing in this country in defense of a foreign government’s war crimes that were willing to shred the U.S.
Constitution and the First Amendment in the service of a foreign government’s genocidal enterprise, to me, is absolutely stunning and mind-boggling, and not enough people are talking about it. Now, thankfully, Courts have stepped in. There have been lawsuits by the ACLU in various states, and some of these laws have been struck down.
They’re popping up with tweaks that make them more difficult to challenge. This is a significant part of the battle for free speech and free expression. And again, all the people on the so-called intellectual dark web who endlessly scream about free speech are just completely silent and absent on this one,
even though this is the only example of the government, the state, stepping in to violate free speech. This is as core a First Amendment issue as you can possibly get, and it doesn’t get nearly the attention that it deserves to get.
Bari Weiss is a fraud. She’s a fraud. Yeah, she is. She has spent her entire life going after Palestinian advocacy, even as an undergraduate, and now with her free press putting out I’m sure you may have seen when this video comes out, I’ll put something on the screen for it. I don’t remember exactly what the headline was,
but basically that the claims that there’s famine in Gaza are either fabricated or vastly exaggerated, despite the fact that we know from virtually any entity who enters there, including those who have various relationships with the Israeli government, that it is in fact quite true. And that’s the sunny thing, right?
And she’s somehow invited into the inner circle of… whose opinion counts.
It is truly, truly bizarre. It’s stunning, yeah. And like, this is the contrast in the world. You know, there’s this whole debate around Douglas Murray as well, who’s a feature, you know, a common guest on Barry Wise’s platform, about who are the experts and who do you talk to? And you have somebody like Dave Smith,
who from my perspective, yes, a comedian, but a very well-informed one, who gets this issue much better than any of these clowns do. And yet- And cares. Yes, he does, and approaches it from a decent human perspective. You can tell that he’s genuinely interested in what’s the morally correct position
to take here in a way that none of these people care about. And there’s this whole debate about who the experts are. Well, the experts at every major humanitarian organization, the experts at every major human rights organization are all telling you there is starvation and famine and the deliberate killing of civilians. That’s what the experts are saying.
And we’re at a point to where either you believe that every international institution in the world is somehow biased against Israel, and these are the only group of people who are telling the truth or are the legitimate experts, or you have to start confronting the reality that the entire world acknowledges
that what Israel is doing is wrong because it is wrong, that we can’t continue behaving as if Israel is the one country that has to be put above the rules and above the law, and that if you try to hold them to account and treat them like any other country, that you’re somehow engaging in anti-Semitism or misinformation.
Those blinders, I mean, I think that that talking point used to work a lot more. And part of the reason why they’re spinning their wheels and freaking out is because they can’t control the narrative anymore. And so now they’re attacking the fundamental legitimacy of you having that opinion,
which in fact is in line with what all the experts who weigh in on this. Consider Arjen Ayer. He escaped the Holocaust with his family from Germany. He founded Human Rights Watch. He was the president of the ACLU at some point. And coming out of the Holocaust, your entire framework for creating Human Rights Watch,
it’s understanding what Jews suffered under Nazi rule and anti-Semitism in Europe. That’s the foundation for where he’s come from. And he, at first, when Israel first bombed Gaza after October 7th, said, I don’t think there’s genocide. I think Israel is committing war crimes, though.
And then after watching what Israel was systematically doing, came back and said, I was wrong. What Israel is doing is genocide. That is as much of an expert whose instinct is supposed to be pro-Israel as possible, coming to the obvious conclusion because he’s approaching it from an objective sense of trying to actually figure out what’s happening,
in sharp contrast with a lot of people whose open position is, I want to defend what Israel is doing. And then from there, they start bending over backwards to draw whatever conclusions they need to support that argument, as opposed to looking at the issue objectively.
One thing that’s kind of interesting to watch with this situation where they’re, it’s not just, by the way, I’m sure everyone knows this, it’s not just Mahmoud Khalil, it’s not just Oz Turk. They got a Georgetown scholar who is, I think, either married to somebody who had a relationship to a former leader of Hamas,
and they took him off his place in Roslyn, which was
Yeah, and heard that his young kid stopped speaking after he was snatched off the streets. I mean, just the human impact of this stuff is, again, an under-told story of people who are just going about their lives normally in this country, doing what they’re supposed to do, being, in a way, sort of exemplary citizens,
having the decency to speak up when something wrong is happening to someone else, and as a result, having your family suffer in that fashion. It’s just really unconscious.
What I was going to say was I… I’ve been trying to explain to Americans who have maybe no relationship to this cause, they’re certainly aware of it now, but I have a little bit of a different perspective, and certainly you do as a Palestinian American.
My mom is from Lebanon, and this completely has shaped the way I see this conflict in the world. But these people who don’t have a dog in the fight in that particular kind of way, And I try to explain to them, it’s like Gaza has come here. The way in which this government is policing around these issues,
they are doing the bidding of, if not the direct Israeli government, but certainly Israeli interests as they see them, or again, donor class interests. They are affecting civil liberties here because of a conflict there. Whether or not you find Khalil a sympathetic figure, that fact alone should cause alarm bells to go off, no?
Yeah, absolutely. And frankly, the Israeli government itself brags about its influence on passing laws to restrict boycotts and so on. So they’re not, again, coy about the fact that they are part of the push. So even though pro-Israel groups might not technically be related to the Israeli government in any way,
but the Israeli government itself is bragging about its role. You have the prime minister’s official Twitter account using the word we when talking about passing the laws that are being pushed in different states to restrict the conversation on what Israel is doing. And precisely to your point, there are two levels to this. From my perspective,
any decent human being should care that your government is facilitating the mass slaughter of civilians in a different part of the world. But even if you wanted to set that aside and look at it strictly from domestically, what’s in U.S. interest? The fact that, again, we say we don’t have money for health care for all Americans,
we say we don’t have all these things that every other advanced country in the world enjoys, all Western democracies in Europe, universal health care and child care, and all sorts of benefits that their people get, we say we can’t afford that. And yet we’re giving tens of billions of dollars to the Israeli government to
facilitate this genocidal project and undermining our constitution in the process. Seems like a no-brainer where Americans should stand on this. Stop wasting our money on something that is horrible and monstrous and start protecting our rights here in the United States to be able to say whatever the hell
we want to about whatever we want to and stop carving this exception to one foreign government that we’re somehow not allowed to criticize or boycott or…
It’s madness that people would give their civil liberties away for any foreign government, for France, for Canada, for Mexico, for Israel, for any foreign government. These are sacred things that are very, very difficult to protect, and they’re just going to punt for a foreign government’s interest. It has been…
My producer off screen, we talk about this all the time. I have a hard time understanding how there can be rhetoric around the values of freedom and then a willingness to look the other way because they’re green card holders, because their last name is not Thomas or Smith or some other kind of factor.
I’m more expressing to you dismay. It has been hard to watch.
It’s been truly hard to watch. And it’s, you know, you always start with vulnerable, marginalized groups that nobody cares about, and that’s how you begin to lose it for everyone. And that’s the part that people miss, is that if being subject to corporate media propaganda 24-7, you come to the conclusion that who cares about these people,
students who are protesting, you start believing all the smears against them. Still, there is the principle of freedom of expression that should apply to everyone. And if you give it up for people who you disagree with, You know, it’s very easy to say I’m for free speech for the views that I like. Where it really matters,
where you show what your principles are, is when you stand up for the rights of people that you don’t agree with and don’t like, frankly. Because if you start giving up those rights for them, it’s only a matter of time before somebody different is in power and it becomes your rights that are under threat.
One of the biggest lessons I’ve had to learn, and this was something we knew. If I can say in my adult life, and maybe before that it’s a little bit different, but certainly in my adult life, I watched 9-11 happen in my dorm room as a senior in college. That was a big event. But really,
that was a monumental event, but the radicalizing event was watching the invasion of Iraq. That had a profound effect on my politics. And then now this. These have been two deeply, deeply radicalizing events for me in a way that I just cannot see the world the same way as I did
And one of the things that has been absolutely destroyed in the process is any notion of the value of the rules-based order, the Western order. I wonder if you could speak to this in your sense as well. I think we’re roughly not too far apart in age.
We grew up in it at the time, post-World War II, kind of. The 90s were, you know, it’s kind of funny. We look back on the 90s. They were stable to a degree. Were they not? There was something to it. And the rules-based order,
I think we all knew that it was flawed and it was certainly limited and it had favorites. But it has been, Gaza has laid it bare as utterly fraudulent in my mind. I wonder if you share that opinion.
Absolutely. I mean, look… at least right the the conception was this is a flawed international order there are exceptions the powerful get away with certain things but there was the belief that we’re building towards something, and that it’s about tweaking and improving, and over time, we’re going to get to a better place.
And I guess a similar sense of, like, combating racism within the United States. Obviously, things remain deeply imperfect, but it’s certainly better than what it was in the 50s, and the 50s were certainly better than what it was in the 1800s, and so on, that there is some level of progress.
And I believed that about the international order until this happened. simply because we’ve decided to essentially throw away any semblance. I mean, consider the fact that the Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu is wanted by the International Criminal Court. And unlike the United States, which doesn’t recognize the court,
European countries do recognize that court and think international law is really important. And, you know, whenever you talk about international institutions, international law, European countries are usually in the forefront of talking about the importance of that international-based order. and rules-based order. And you have now a situation in which Benjamin Netanyahu is being encouraged by
European leaders to visit their countries promising that they’re not going to enforce that arrest warrant that’s out for him. That is, there is no bigger abandonment of any conception of international law and human rights and everything that we pay lip service to than the fact that you’re saying, oh, wait, wait, wait,
we were for these rules and for international court arrest warrants when we’re talking about random dictators in Africa or the Middle East or whatever. But if it’s Israel, then that’s an exception. Sorry, now the rules don’t apply anymore. The extent to which we are willing to say that rules do not apply to Israel means
that those rules are meaningless. It means that nobody has any incentive to follow them or pay any attention to them because we’re witnessing Nothing in international law. You know, when you talk about the layers of violations, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. Genocide is at the top of it.
And you have now Israel, frankly, quite obviously engaged in a genocidal campaign in Gaza. And everybody’s insisting that international rules don’t apply. Yeah, you can’t take it seriously anymore, and I don’t think we’re heading in the right direction anymore. We are looking, maybe there might be a different iteration of it in the future,
of a way of trying to put something different together that’s more robust and more meaningful. But in the meantime, I think we are looking at the complete disintegration of any pretense that we’re living in a rules-based order in which countries are supposed to behave certain ways or not.
Do you have any specific sense of the geopolitical impact?
I think this is a green light for everyone to behave however they want to, knowing that accountability is practically meaningless and that the U.S., the shining city on the hill, the ones who are preaching to the rest of the world about democracy and human rights, that this is entirely
I mean, the level of insincerity involved in this kind of rhetoric. And it’s funny, maybe that’s one of the things that’s kind of amusing about Trump is that he doesn’t pay lip service to any of this stuff. For him, it is pretty much. Might is right. Yeah. Might is right.
And if you pay me enough, I might do what you want me to do. And it’s just so transactional. Yeah, it’s a dark moment in which we’ve abandoned this pretense of building towards something meaningful. And I really don’t know what the full impact is going to be, but we’re certainly heading in a very dark direction.
And I worry about sort of where Trump is taking us on top of where Gaza has been taking us since before all of this. And about the fact that American policy, before Gaza was being genocided, was always an exception on this one issue. The fact that we intervened to kick Iraq out of Kuwait,
we’ve intervened in some ways saying we can’t believe that Russia would invade Ukraine, and yet Israel has been occupying Palestinian territories illegally for decades. And the U.S. has been paying lip service to the idea that Israel should end the occupation at some point. But actual policy has been to just indulge that occupation in
an endless supply of American weapons and diplomatic protection. The U.S. intervened at the U.N. more than 50 times to veto resolutions that are critical of Israel. So again, that’s, by the way, greater than the number of all vetoes cast by all other permanent members of the U.N. Security Council combined on all issues from the 1970s to today.
And so we’re very openly saying that there is this one exception. I don’t know how anybody in the world takes it seriously after this. I don’t know how anybody in the world takes our rhetoric seriously about it. And I don’t know whether Trump is the signal of the end of something,
whether he’s a blip that we might be able to survive and build back up from, or whether he’s really the disintegration of America’s moral standing, that being the obvious part. But really what’s left of America’s leadership after this, I think, is really in question.
I didn’t get to it. Before we move the conversation forward, I do have to ask you about Biden. I had someone suggest to me that I’m harsher on Biden than I am on Trump. And I think partly in the overall coverage of Trump that I’ve given him, even since 2015, 2016,
I don’t think that’s in any way accurate. But I will say I do have a particular degree of venom for Biden that I think they’re picking up on. Why do you think the left has a little bit more venom for Biden than they do Trump?
I mean, to the point you raised, they kind of expect this transactionalism from Trump. The other part is, again, as we were recording this, Trump has just entered the Middle East. He is claiming to do things. We will see what happens. But Biden never even seemed to care. Biden never seemed to try,
and he was supposed to be from a party that was ostensibly, if any party was going to care about protecting even a nominal sense of Palestinian sovereignty or humanity, it was going to be that party, and I think he destroyed that, and I think in doing so, he destroyed something, again, that caused that radicalization inside of me.
Is there something to this, you think?
I think you’re really identifying a problem that we have not talked about enough, which is, Biden was supposed to be the antidote to Trump, and he was the empathy president, right? This is the whole thing that we’ve heard about them, is that he really cares, and he might not understand every issue,
but at least he comes at it from a very human perspective and tries his best to understand. And then you’ve had an atrocity of epic proportions, and Biden didn’t just provide endless cover for it, right? pay lip service on occasion to, you know. But in other cases, he repeated the lies that Israel was engaged in.
Israeli propaganda in the immediate aftermath of October 7th. October 7th was enough of a crime. You can deal with the reality of it in a way that has gained sympathy. But because Israel’s intentions were to engage on this genocidal campaign, the reality wasn’t enough. They had to exaggerate. They had to make it more
graphic and barbaric than anything that anyone could imagine. So they started coming up with all these lies, including the beheading of 40 babies on October 7th. Complete and total lie. It simply never happened. And when Biden was asked about it, he said, yes, it happened and I saw the pictures.
He could not have possibly seen the pictures because that was proven a lie afterwards. And when asked about the numbers of Palestinians being killed, he said, well, you can’t really believe Palestinians about the numbers that they’re saying. So time and again, he’s intervened in very specific ways in order to amplify Israeli lies and
participate in Israeli propaganda against Palestinians and the dehumanization of Palestinians, while at the same time paying lip service to the idea of empathy and rules and restraint and all of that. That’s what was infuriating. There’s something about the fact that sometimes you see somebody who’s worse.
but is at least open and honest about what they think and what they’re putting on the table. And when you see someone pretending that they’re the kind of person who really cares and wants the killing to stop and just they don’t know what to do about it, that is more infuriating. That double dealing, that…
attempt to hoodwink the American people, that grift with people’s lives, is in a way more infuriating. And the fact that Kamala Harris kept saying what we’re working on day and night is to get that ceasefire approved or whatever, and since then the documents have come out and they’ve essentially proven, you know,
Israeli and American officials are confirming that Biden and Harris never made a significant or serious attempt at getting a ceasefire. The point was to provide political cover and let Israel do whatever Israel needs to do. That’s what was actually unfolding under the table. And, yeah, the hypocrisy element of it is infuriating.
The extent to which they were just bold-faced lying to the American people at the expense of thousands of children who were being killed in the process is deeply aggravating. And people lose faith. I mean, when you look at the outcome of the election, that’s the other untold story.
So many of the people who did not turn out for the Democrats, if you look at the numbers, Trump’s numbers are more or less constant from the last election. What happened is a massive dip on the Democratic side. And there’s no question that part of that is people who are completely fed up with this particular policy,
who simply could not bring themselves to go out to the polls and vote because they’re so infuriated by what was being put on offer. For a lot of people, I have always been a lesser of two evils voter. From my perspective, it was a no-brainer. Biden coming in after the first Trump administration. I voted for Biden.
It was, yes, both parties are bad, but we desperately need to save ourselves from Donald Trump. And so I cast a vote for Joe Biden without even thinking about it. It seemed like an obvious moral choice. But really, genocide hits different. There’s something about watching the mass slaughter of people day in and day out
and the utter dehumanization that were expected to participate in just pretending this isn’t happening, it was difficult for people to stomach. Even people who understood that Trump is worse could not bring themselves to come out. And that’s the untold story, is that so many people cited Gaza when we did public opinion polling,
groups like the Institute for Middle East Understanding did polling on this, and saw that a significant portion of people who stayed home were people who cited Gaza as the reason they could not go out and vote. And yet that story is practically absent from American mainstream media.
Gaza is hardly a blip when we talk about the outcome of the election. But I genuinely believe it played a very, very significant role. And had Biden and Harris taken the morally correct position in this case, it was also the strategically correct position for the United States and the politically obvious no-brainer.
We could have saved ourselves all this destructive damage that Trump has been displaying for the past several months. And who knows how much worse it gets.
It felt like betrayal, if that’s the right word. I don’t know if it is, but it felt different. It felt piercing in a particular way. Let’s talk about, if we can, the future of Gaza. But I have a different question to start that out. which is I read the book by Tariq Bocconi, Hamas Contained,
and it was certainly an eye-opener in terms of just understanding what Hamas wants out of this. But that book was written in 2017. Even some of his updated lectures don’t really get to it. And part of what they wanted to do, what Hamas wanted to do, was to shatter the illusion
that Israel could maintain apartheid and they would have come with no security cost. Okay, they managed to do that, but now Gaza is in ruins. And I have seen, and I don’t know to what extent it is meaningful, because obviously you cannot politically poll in Gaza in any kind of meaningful way,
but there have been protests that have emerged within Palestinians themselves in Gaza. What is the future of, what does Hamas want aside from a ceasefire? And what is their future in Palestinian politics? And again, for folks who may know, they have a totally distrustful relationship with Fatah and the people who run
Palestinian Authority and Mahmoud Abbas and the West Bank. I don’t know if they’re a dead letter, but I just don’t know what their, I don’t, what is their future?
Yeah, look, what, what, What they wanted to bring to the table is a different approach from the Palestinian Authority. The Palestinian Authority played the game precisely to your point about every method of Palestinian resistance was shot down. The only open path is negotiations, negotiations that Israel does not take seriously or engages in good faith,
the entire peace process. was premised on the idea that Israel, if Palestinians recognize Israel, then Israel is going to withdraw from the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, the areas that they’re illegally occupying and are obligated to withdraw from anyway, which constitutes something like 20% of historic Palestine.
Then they’ll pull out of these tiny areas and let a small Palestinian state exist. That’s the premise of it. And the Palestinian leadership bent over backwards to make this massive compromise of recognizing Israel, giving up any territorial claim to nearly 80 percent of historic Palestine, and saying, fine, we’ll take the small state.
And what Israel responded with is building more and more and more illegal settlements throughout the Palestinian territories, but never saying no to the negotiations, saying, we’re still talking, let’s keep talking. And meanwhile, the talking is completely… just disconnected from what israel’s doing on the ground the example that many
palestinians give it’s like two people sitting down to negotiate how to divide a pizza while one side is just eating away and saying let’s keep talking about how to divide the pizza well we’re going to be out of pizza pretty quickly while we’re pretending to be talking about it
The Palestinian Authority came under such intents, their entire existence depends on the U.S. and Israel, that they’re never able to say no in any meaningful way. They’re never able to change tactics. They’re not able to resist in any meaningful way. So their track is to negotiate.
And then when they’re upset at how bad faith Israeli negotiations are, they stop negotiating. But they’re not doing anything else. They’re just stuck in this game. And Hamas insisted that what we need to do is resist in a meaningful way. We can’t keep playing this game. And they wanted the more confrontational approach with Israel, which,
from their perspective, needed to have a military component. Now, there are people in Gaza who wanted a different kind of protest. There are the people who led the protest in 2018, marching to Gaza. the Israeli barrier between Gaza and Israel, insisting for the blockade to be broken, essentially marching, saying, we want out.
You can’t just keep us locked in here. And Israel responded by opening fire into the crowd and killing countless civilians at the time. And Hamas saw that this kind of civil uprising, unarmed uprising, was gaining momentum. And so they piggybacked on it. They attached themselves to it. They wanted to be a part of it.
It’s a recognition that Hamas is trying something. But once everything shut down completely, once every nonviolent effort was met with a dead end and no political prospect for anything different on the horizon and people just moving on from the conversation entirely as if Palestinians can be just locked in as prisoners under a shrinking
territory as an occupied people without any repercussions, Hamas decided to engage in something epic in a way, in a grotesque display of violence to say, this is not OK, this has to change. Probably, I think, at this point universally, when you do the stuff uncarefully, when you do the stuff, when you’re reckless with people’s lives,
because international law is very clear about what’s legitimate violence, that is, resistance to occupation and what’s not. And the distinction is quite obvious. You target Israeli occupation and military positions. That is legitimate resistance under international law. You attack civilians. That is… I mean, we call it, you know, casually terrorism under international law. It’s war crimes.
You can’t engage in war crimes. And once you mix the two, Hamas’s attack was a big mixture of the two. They attacked Israeli military positions, but also engaged in violence against civilians. And when you do that at such a large scale, you create an opening for Israel to exploit. Now, of course,
nothing that Israel has done is justified by any shred of imagination, except there was enough there there. to give Israeli propaganda something to play on and to play up what October 7 was, to inject a ton of inflammatory propaganda into it and make it the kind of thing in which whatever Israel doesn’t return,
a lot of people can just look away and say, well, you know, Hamas had it coming or something to that effect. And the worst point of propaganda is the claim that Palestinian civilians are only dying because Hamas is using them as human shields. That is the most commonly used rhetorical talking point that is complete and utter bullshit.
It really is. There is no basis to it in reality. This is not to deny that Hamas hides in civilian areas, but that is not the legal definition of human shields. Human shields is forcing civilians in front of you in order to discourage enemy fire. First of all,
Israel doesn’t not shoot at you if there are civilians there, so there is no such thing as a human shield in the sense that it would be pointless for civilians to put in harm’s way because that does not stop Israel from shooting at you. Second point, the Israeli military uses Palestinian civilians as human shields all the time.
This was not just a matter of practice, this was a matter of policy before 2005. after Israel used something like 1,000 Palestinian civilians as human shields during their raids in the West Bank, the Israeli Supreme Court finally weighed in on it and said, you have to stop using Palestinian civilians as human shields.
And the Israeli military establishment rejected, kind of pushed back. They said, no, they actually appealed the court decision saying, we have to keep using Palestinian civilians as human shields because it saves Israeli soldiers’ lives. So the relationship is backwards. The Israeli military knows that Palestinian militants value the lives of Palestinian civilians,
which is why they put Palestinian civilians in front of them to discourage Palestinian militants from shooting at them. So the entire thing is just debunked by that fact. And when you have an army that is using Palestinian civilians as human shields as a matter of policy, leveling the charge of human shields to justify their killing of civilians,
I mean, again, Orwellian is the only way to describe that, that the people who are using human shields consistently, ignoring that court order. You see interviews of Israeli soldiers in the Israeli press talking about how they routinely use Palestinian civilians as human shields. They use Palestinian children as human shields as well.
And human rights organizations weigh in on it. They say what the soldiers are punished with is something akin to a slap on the wrist. It’s not meaningful. Yeah, and yet the narrative is entirely backwards. If you mention the word human shield, you ask a guy like Sam Harris, that’s all he knows how to say.
He talks about the difference in values between both societies. Israelis are so careful to avoid civilian casualties, but Palestinians are so callous they use their children as human shields. It’s completely backwards, but the racist… stereotype is so deeply entrenched that people can just so casually say it without
even bothering to check whether there’s any factual basis to what they’re saying. And that’s the insidious way in which Palestinian, anti-Palestinian racism really plays into this debate more broadly.
Yeah, I want to be clear. I’m not in any way, I mean, I fully share your analysis that part of what, a big part of what Hamas did is engaging in war crimes. I don’t think there’s really any question about it whatsoever. I guess the question I’m asking was a slightly different one, which is,
Hamas has a political wing, they have a military wing, and for the political wing, it’s not an endorsement of their ideas, per se, for anyone watching. It’s just a question of what do they want. And from a political standpoint, what political objectives are they trying to achieve?
I guess what I’m asking is, in that particular regard, did they overplay their hand?
Yeah, I suppose I missed your question.
No, no, it’s a great answer, but I’m trying to think through. I don’t think that they thought it would get to this.
Certainly, and I imagine if they knew what the consequences would be, I think they would probably reconsider that plan from the get-go. What they were hoping for, and it’s funny because there was an interview with a Hamas official early on who said, we know there’s going to be sacrifices.
We know that they’re going to engage in significant violence against Gaza. But there was the assumption that this is going to be just another war on Gaza, which is something that lasts a few weeks. Israel does immense killing and destruction. And at the end of the day, you sit down and you negotiate some kind of political solution.
And Israel was not interested in that, and it got the green light from Biden and eventually Trump to basically go as far as they want to on the promise that they could achieve a political objective. If you take what they were saying from the beginning at face value, what Israel’s intentions were,
it was to allegedly destroy Hamas or drive them out of power and retrieve the hostages, now Benjamin Netanyahu is quite open about the fact that this is not what he’s interested in, because Hamas has already offered to release all the hostages and give up power in Gaza. in exchange for an end to this war.
And yet Netanyahu right now is insistent on a full ethnic cleansing of Gaza, that the project is, I think his quote from just a couple of days, was destroying as many homes as we can to make sure there’s nothing for these people to return to and to move to voluntary migration from here.
I think at this point Hamas’ ambition is simply to survive that prospect. I don’t think they’re interested in ruling Gaza. I think what they’re interested in is to sort of hold on to the reputation as the real resistance within Palestine, as the people who fought back, and being part of
the eventual liberation of Palestine as having played a significant role in that. I think that this is the idea that they’re holding onto, the idea of resistance towards the eventual liberation of Palestine. And frankly, they’re flexible on what that vision is too. There’s plenty of rhetoric about how
you know, Hamas wants the destruction of Israel and so on. And certainly if you read enough of their materials, there’s references to that sort of thing of sort of talking about the complete and total liberation. But Hamas officials also say things like, if the Palestinian people by referendum opt for a two-state solution,
we’re not going to be the ones to disrupt it. So they’ve signaled their openness to different political arrangements.
They accept partition.
Yeah. Objecting to it on principle, but saying they’re not going to interject to prevent it is a sign of accepting it. It’s just their way of saying, I don’t approve, but it’s fine. Jimmy Carter said that much, and Jimmy Carter was vilified as being anti-Semitic and anti-Israel and all that stuff for, again,
just conveying simple facts about the dynamics that are unfolding. Yeah, I think at this point they’re looking for an end to this war, and they’re looking for any semblance of a tiny victory. Anything that stops short of the complete and total elimination of Gaza, which is Israel’s project at this point,
is something that Hamas is going to try to spin into victory. But in a way, The only thing, to the extent that you can describe any success out of this, is that Israel can no longer pretend that the public opinion on this has shifted in such a drastic way.
There isn’t the pretense that Israel is a peace-loving country trying to work out a political settlement with the Palestinians. At this point, anybody with IQ of above room temperature can understand that Israel is engaged in a war on the Palestinian people, and that’s the kind of thing that can never be undone.
For folks who’ve seen it, No Other Land was an incredible documentary, but of course that’s the West Bank, that’s not Gaza, but I bring it up to say I don’t know what will happen to Gaza. And to this point, I don’t know what’s going to happen to the West Bank. And there is no uniform Palestinian,
not Palestinian authority, but in a general sense, there is no unifying political movement between the people or the diaspora. There’s no one who really speaks for Palestinian identity. And I guess that’s sort of one part of what I’m about to ask, which is… When the war first started, and it was bad at first, I thought to myself,
you know what, this actually might reinvigorate a two-state solution only for the reason that these are not people that I think could live together anymore. I realize that there are people of Palestinian ancestry who live in Israel proper, what they call Israel proper, But in general, the people who are being military occupied, they cannot.
These are not people that can live side by side. And there was a lot of people who I think shared that opinion. And now I’m at the place where it just looks to me like they’re trying to erase the very notion of what it means to be Palestinian completely.
They want to turn it into Kurdistan, which simply does not exist, right? Do you share that assessment? What is your sense of… what happens to Palestinian sovereignty and the cause behind it.
Yeah, this is the $64,000 question, especially with the Trump administration. Trump has surprisingly indicated that he’s willing to stand up to Netanyahu in a way that Biden never did. It’s kind of really shocking.
It could be a ruse. It could be a ruse for Iran saber rattling. I don’t know.
Yeah, but that’s the thing, is what I imagine is happening. You know, there was a pretty high-profile firing of Mike Waltz from the administration on the grounds that he was working with Netanyahu too closely to try to drag the U.S. into direct military confrontation with Iran.
It’s clear that Trump is not fully down with Israel’s vision for how the U.S. should interact with the region. The U.S. took on the burden of bombing Yemen, a completely pointless bombing campaign because Yemen had been bombed by Saudi Arabia for nearly a decade without that producing any result, with U.S. support and Israeli support and everything else.
Finally, Trump put his foot down, and I’m watching Israeli commentators kind of meltdown about saying, we’re going to cut a deal with the Houthis in Yemen so that they don’t attack American ships, we don’t attack Yemen, but the Houthis are still free to fire rockets at Israel.
That confrontation between the Houthis and Israel is completely separate from the American agreement. So the U.S. saying, we’re taking a step back, you guys do your thing, you figure it out between the two of you. That really pissed Israel off. And this whole conversation about coming to an agreement with Iran,
there was an agreement with Iran that restricted them from ever having a nuke. It was the Obama deal, the Obama nuclear deal. Trump came along and tore it up under pressure from what Israel wanted and the Israel lobby in the U.S. because it was not enough for them that Iran does not develop a nuclear weapon.
What they want is a complete and total Iranian submission to Israeli regional dominance. That’s what they wanted. And Iran was not playing ball. They were giving money and weapons to groups like Hamas and Hezbollah and others. Trump now is indicating that he’s effectively going to go back to something that is similar to the Obama deal.
He’s no longer looking for this complete submission from Iran that Israel wanted. Israel is trying to push Trump towards bombing Iranian nuclear sites and engaging fully in this war. And Trump is saying, no, we’re going to look for a diplomatic solution. We’re going to talk.
And there’s indications that these talks are productive and moving in a certain direction. I would never rule out the possibility that these talks break down and we do head towards a catastrophic regional war. But these are two elements of Trump showing that he can disregard what Netanyahu wants in order to favor American interests.
The problem is that what happens to Palestinians is not of significant concern for Trump. That’s the really deeply disturbing part, is that when Miriam Adelson gives $100 million to the Trump campaign and says what she’s interested in is allowing Israel to annex the West Bank,
I worry that the bone that Trump throws to Israel is do whatever you want with the West Bank and Gaza. That’s for you to figure out. What we care about is not being dragged into a war and cutting this deal with Iran and so on.
In that sense, I don’t know what the future of Palestine would be from here. It is unquestionably a dark moment because Israel sees the shifting public opinion. They know that they don’t have a green light to do whatever they want forever, they can feel the shifting winds,
and they feel an urgency to act now while they have Trump in office who’s going to probably sign off on whatever they want to do in Palestine to do their worst. And I worry that their worst is eliminating Palestinians entirely so that the prospect of Palestinian, I mean,
it just becomes museums effectively when you talk about what Palestine was as opposed to a nation that can really survive and rebuild itself and reestablish itself. Palestinians deserve to be a free people in their land, and Israel does not see them as equal human beings, which has always been the fundamental problem,
and Israel’s feeling the urgency to act on that dehumanization. We’re watching the most monstrous levels of it currently unfolding in Gaza, but they’re already doing it in the West Bank too. It’s a slow bleed. Yeah, and there’s no, the Hamas excuse in the West Bank does not exist.
But that has not stopped Israel from killing hundreds of Palestinians in the West Bank, from killing Palestinian Americans. There’s a 14-year-old boy, Rabia, something I don’t remember what his first name was. Just before Netanyahu visited Washington, not even a month ago, this American kid was killed by the Israeli military, allegedly for throwing rocks.
I don’t know if he was throwing rocks or not. If he was, it certainly does not justify spraying him with bullets. This is happening in Palestinian territory that Israel has no right to be in in the first place. Israeli occupation there is illegal. This American kid gets killed, and nobody talks about it.
It doesn’t come up with a press conference. No journalist says, what about the American kid that was killed? And you can imagine if any other government had killed an American child, that would be the only topic of conversation. And yet, because Israel did it, we don’t have a conversation about it, and that’s
That is what’s worrying about this political moment is, you know, where we started the conversation. Palestinian life doesn’t matter. And with Israel worrying about whether that’s going to continue to be the case in the future, what are they going to do in the meantime and what is Trump going to allow them to do?
The stakes could not possibly be higher about what we’re talking about here.
You mentioned something domestically. I’m gonna read you another stat here. 53, this comes from I think Pew Research. 53% of Americans have an unfavorable view of Israel. That’s more broadly, that was 42% in 2022. The Pew survey findings show that young Americans are even less well disposed of the Jewish state.
Most respondents also don’t want the US to take over Gaza. Obviously we are dealing with a situation where we have a gerontocracy here. So we have people who, again, have a different sense of what Israel meant to them in their life versus now. That’s a big issue. The other one is, as you mentioned,
the Israeli lobby has effective outreach to both and influence over both of the parties. However, there has been something of a sea change with younger voters. I wonder what you think, those seeds that have been planted in terms of what you can see with public opinion, especially with the young,
what electoral fruit one way or the other that bears?
Yeah, I think the future is bright. And in the meantime, we’re in a horror show. And it feels like a race against time. American policy towards Israel is unsustainable. I have almost no doubt that in 20 years, we’re looking at a fundamentally different relationship and policy. The question is, does Palestine survive for 20 years? That’s the question.
At this point, it’s difficult to imagine what a two-state solution would even look like, given the extent of Israel’s takeover of Palestinian areas, whether we’re looking potentially at the complete fall of the Zionist project, which is to say the end of Israeli apartheid between the river and the sea, and the possibility of one person, one vote.
That is certainly the vision that we have in the United States. It’s a non-starter for Israel, but are we beginning to see a shift that would change that for the rest of the world? Because it may be a non-starter for Israel, but if the rest of the world is not willing to tolerate this apartheid regime
continuing to exist, what does that future look like without this unrelenting U.S. military and diplomatic backing? All these are just very wide open questions. We’re at a… A friend of mine used the term recently, which I thought was very interesting, sort of accentuated equilibrium, disequilibrium. It’s a moment in which the world takes a particular shape,
and it’s the status quo, and then something really traumatic and big happens, and it’s in a moment of disequilibrium, and it’s slowly reshaping to hold back together. But until it does, Everybody’s all in on trying to shape what that freezing is going to look like, because once it freezes,
it’s probably going to be stuck that way for a while. And we’re in that moment of disequilibrium in which it seems like anything is possible, and we don’t know how things are going to reshape. We just know that the Israeli government holding the immense power that it does is
just unleashing unspeakable violence in this moment to try to shape. the refreeze in a way that would be favorable to Israel. Even if the political winds shift against them, they want to have imposed the reality on the ground that they want, which is maximum Israeli control over land and minimum number of Palestinians existing on it.
That’s what they’re going for.
One thing that’s kind of interesting is I read a book recently about the nationalization of our politics. And one of the things that the book authors argue is, take someone like Bernie Sanders, right? So Bernie Sanders is very progressive, social democrat, but pretty pro-gun, relatively speaking, to the democrats. And that kind of thing is missing, right?
Where you have these sort of cross-cutting ways in which your identity matches up with a different party or ideological part of the spectrum. It may be geographical in nature, but everything is not top-down defined for you from sort of a national agenda. And I’ve kind of been seeing a little bit of this.
You had Matt Gaetz who is, you know, He’s a guy, but he made a comment on a podcast recently talking about that it’s very difficult to get elected if you’re not very supportive of the Israeli government here in the United States. And another person who I don’t have necessarily a fond attachment to, Marjorie Taylor Greene.
But she is speaking out in a way that I did not ever imagine that she would. And here we have, not currently in Congress, but maybe the next generation of politicians, perhaps, Am I positing a scenario that is insane when I say, is it possible that it won’t be necessarily one party or the other that takes a
less positive stance towards maintaining a relationship with the Israeli government and essentially greenlighting all of their acts, but that it could be cross-cutting in that way where you do see it just as a new generation comes up and supplants the existing one?
Yeah, this phenomenon on the right is very, very new. I always believed that it is through progressives that we’re going to achieve that change, that it started earlier. You’ve got the Squad. You’ve got Bernie Sanders. You’ve got even Elizabeth Warren and Betty McCollum. People are not necessarily progressive like Betty McCollum. She’s not the far-left progressive wing.
She’s kind of more of an established Democrat, but perfectly willing to speak out against AIPAC’s influence and calling for a different policy. That was growing within the Democratic Party, and it seemed like that was the route from which the political change is going to come. But this shift on the right has been surprising to me,
the extent to which there is now pushback on that, on people like Marjorie Taylor Greene saying that we should not be fighting wars for Israel and describing ourselves as not owned by AIPAC. You’ve got, you know, we talked about Dave Smith, from my perspective, kind of a, you know, he’s a libertarian, I’m not.
We don’t align values-wise on that. But I can see that he’s a fundamentally decent human being drawing the correct moral conclusions about this entire relationship. And then you have people that I don’t necessarily have a favorable view of at all, like Candace Owen, also coming around. That is very surprising to me.
Yeah.
So there is something happening on the right that is beginning to challenge the status quo on this in a way that I did not expect. But it seems… from my perspective, that Israel’s actions are so extreme that in spite of all the pandering by our politicians and all the propaganda by our mainstream corporate media,
you can’t cover up something as ugly as what they’re doing in Gaza. It is just an unspeakable horror. And the extent to which we have now this whole debate about trying to silence criticism and stifle free speech in America, that is naturally going to produce a reaction of sorts.
And we’re beginning to see that percolate in all kinds of places. It’s in a way Israel dooming itself by behaving in a way that is incredibly extreme, by having its lobby really, really. If you’re trying to undermine the First Amendment in the United States to shield a foreign government,
that’s not going to play well once people catch on to it. The problem is not a lot of people are catching on to it. But to the extent that people are catching on in the places that they’re catching on, I think that that’s really exploding in ways that I had certainly not seen coming.
So I do agree that we are witnessing that shift across the board. That’s a completely different…
We do have to be careful, though, because MTG was the Jewish space laser lady.
That’s right. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So, like, half of it, it’s like, oh, this is an interesting development. The other half is like, right, you might be anti-Semitic a little bit. I don’t really want to touch that. But I just… It’s just they’re, at least on some level, occupying a space that 20 years ago was unfathomable.
Yeah, yeah. No, I’m 100% with you. And even people like Candace Owen, you know, defending Kanye West and whatever. Like, there’s… A lot of suspicious surrounding- Yeah, I’ll pass on that, yeah. And just what’s surprising is that they now find themselves in a political moment
where it’s advantageous for them to speak out in the way that they are. They don’t take that leap on their own. You know, Candace Owen was with Ben Shapiro, who was just about as despicable a pro-Israel propagandist as you’re going to get. And seeing a niche for herself to separate from that and to talk the way she’s
talking means that there’s a change in the base on the right as well. It’ll be interesting to see how all that politically plays out.
Before we let you go, I’m going to borrow this from a different person. Do you have anything that the viewer can take from this conversation in terms of things they should be reading, any kind of book, any kind of source material, anything to help them better understand this conflict, where it might be headed,
how you have come to understand it, something, some kind of scholarly work of some kind of way.
Look, in terms of scholarship, Edward Said is hard to beat.
We didn’t even get to Colombia and how painful it is for me to watch the home that Edward Said and Rashid Khalidi built turn into this, but please go ahead, I’m sorry.
No, no, it’s, I mean, look, those are intellectual giants, both of them who have contributed so much to a basic understanding of this issue that I think has been missing. So those are two Palestinian scholars who have written a ton. Obviously, Edward Said is no longer with us, but Rashid Khalidi is. Their books,
if you get anything by them that is Palestine-related, is going to be incredibly incisive. Noam Chomsky also is still alive, but not active and not doing well health-wise. His scholarship for me was indispensable on this entire question. People like Norman Finkelstein also have put out a lot of incredible material.
The primary book on Gaza was a book by Norman Finkelstein that came out in the lead-up to October 7th, and it was kind of like the only scholarly book out there. that had fundamentally described the dynamic of Gaza, what it means for it to have been under siege,
breaking down and analyzing the endless Israeli assault and human rights violations that Israel has imposed on them. And if you want to look at the history as well, there is a book by Ilan Pape. He’s an Israeli historian. The ethnic cleansing of Palestine takes you to the origin of this.
I mean, it’s one thing to kind of look at the obvious at this point, from my perspective, destruction of Palestinian rights and Palestinian humanity that Israel is engaging in. And it’s worth noting that this has been the plot from the beginning. And books like The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine really gets into what
Israel intended to do from its founding, that this is a project of replacing one people off of a land and establishing themselves. On top, the creation of Israel necessitated the destruction of another people, the destruction of hundreds of Palestinian towns and villages, the ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians.
And contrary to the mythology that this is all an accident of war, it in fact was a plan, a plan to replace one people with another, and the hopes that you could just be done with it, that it’s just a historical event in the same way that we at this point, right?
This is not a Native American country anymore. That’s just the thing that we accept. We look back and reflect on the atrocities against Native Americans as a historical event in a way. I think that’s what Israel was hoping to have accomplished. They have not been able to accomplish it,
and they’re making one hell of an effort at this point to make that a reality. And understanding the magnitude and the stakes, I think, is really important. And in terms of just your daily news consumption, Progressive outlets like Democracy Now does a better job than any mainstream American corporate media.
Shows like Breaking Points with Crystal Ball and Kyle Kalinske do a good job. Love those guys. Yeah, they’re terrific. There is, you know, just… a litany of Palestinian analysts and journalists who are all over Twitter. Diana Butu is an incredible person to follow. Yusuf Muneer is another.
I can make a full list available if it’s worth sharing whenever this episode comes out. Also, I’m happy to do that. But yeah, alternative sources of media and whatever you do, avoid corporate mainstream framing as much as you possibly can, because that framing is the problem. You’ll get information that is completely lacking in context.
You’ll watch an event. You’ll hear about a Palestinian throwing a rock and an Israeli soldier shooting them, and you think almost think of it as a policing event or something, like there’s a conflict and somebody got shot. Without understanding that this is occupied territory where the Israeli military is
there for the explicit purpose of driving Palestinians off their land and taking over that land, and that the Palestinians who are there are fighting back to defend themselves and defend their land, if you take that context away, you can’t process what is unfolding.
So it really is taking with a grain of salt the framing that you are exposed to and making sure that you are seeking deeper, better information for people who actually understand what is unfolding.
Omar Bowder, thank you for your time.
Thank you very much.