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Nov. 24, 2015 - The Ben Shapiro Show
30:42
Ep. 30 - Donald Trump Must Be Silenced Or Americans Will Die

The left steps on a rake with regard to 9/11; they also say that Trump must be shut up or American Muslims will die. Plus, the latest on Turkey and Russia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Howdy howdy!
Here we are on a Tuesday and lots to talk about.
Apparently the Russians are now in basically a war with Turkey.
We'll talk about that.
We will also be talking about Bernie Sanders getting a big, huge, enormous endorsement.
Plus, of course, Donald Trump on the ropes again thanks to the media.
Or is he?
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
You tend to demonize people because you don't care about your feelings.
All righty, folks, let's start with Donald Trump today.
Donald Trump made a comment that has gotten him in all sorts of hot water with the media.
And Trump does this routine.
I like to call it the Trump brand rake.
He sets up a rake on the ground for people, and then the media just steps on the rake.
And when they step on the rake, you know, the handle of the rake comes up and smacks them between the eyes.
That's basically what Trump does.
The way that Trump does this is he says something that is factually untrue, but the underlying narrative of which is true.
And the media, because they don't like Trump's narrative, they immediately say that not only is Trump's fact not true, his narrative is untrue.
And that's when they step on the rake, because the truth is that when Trump, his story, his generalized story, his general view of the world in many of these cases is true, but he uses the wrong facts, the media can't help themselves.
They're like Charlie Brown trying to go for the football.
They just keep on attempting to smack Trump over his narrative when the narrative is the only part of what Trump says that's true.
Everything else that Trump says is not true, but the narrative part of what Trump says actually is true.
So to take a brief example, the controversy of the day for Donald Trump is that Donald Trump said at one of his rallies that he watched thousands of Muslims, American Muslims, celebrate 9-11.
Here is the audio of Donald Trump doing it from a rally over the weekend.
I watched When the World Trade Center came tumbling down.
And I watched in Jersey City, New Jersey, where thousands and thousands of people were cheering as that building was coming down.
And the entire media said this isn't true.
There weren't thousands and thousands and thousands of people cheering as the buildings came down.
Well, first of all, first of all, that it isn't true.
There's no evidence that thousands of American Muslims were cheering in the streets.
There is evidence that thousands of Palestinians were cheering in the streets as the towers came down.
In fact, we have tape of that.
And it's always a nice reminder just to remember, these are the folks that President Obama wants to sign $400 million a year, too.
If you remember all the way back to 9-11, this is what it looked like in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip on 9-11, thanks to our good friends, the Palestinians.
The v-sign for victory being displayed in East Jerusalem today among jubilant Palestinians that the United States had been subject to this attack.
What are we to make of that, Jennifer?
Yasser Arafat may issue this condemnation.
Look at this.
We're seeing people applauding, clapping, smiling, happy to know that thousands of Americans have died in this sneak attack.
And there you see a v-for-victory sign held up to the camera.
Well, look at that.
There were widows and there were children, there were orphans.
All the people President Obama says could never possibly be sympathizers with the bad folks, there they are celebrating.
And it's always a nice reminder to remind you that these are the people with whom we are warring.
And yes, all of those people are currently receiving money from your tax dollars, from the American federal government.
But what Trump was specifically referring to was Muslims in the United States.
And what was amazing is the media didn't just say that Trump got it wrong with the thousands.
They didn't say that some Muslims in the United States celebrated, but there weren't thousands.
What they said was no Muslims in the United States celebrated.
This is what Glenn Kessler said.
Here in his original report, Glenn Kessler from the Washington Post, he said, There were some reports of celebrations overseas in Muslim countries, but nothing that we can find involving the Arab populations of New Jersey.
There is only one problem.
The Washington Post at the time reported this, quote, So Glenn Kessler works for the Washington Post.
He says there are no reports of any American Muslims doing any of this.
to the World Trade Center, law enforcement authorities detained and questioned a number of people who were allegedly seen celebrating the attacks and holding tailgate-style parties on rooftops while they watched the devastation on the other side of the river.
So Glenn Kessler works for the Washington Post.
He says there are no reports of any American Muslims doing any of this.
It turns out his own newspaper reported it.
It was also reported in the New York Times.
It was also reported in the San Francisco Chronicle.
In fact, there were some people who were actually detained by the authorities because they were suspicious that they might have terror ties because they were celebrating 9-11 in the United States.
So this is where the media stepped on the Trump rake, right?
He says something that is not factually true.
Thousands of people in the streets celebrating in Jersey City.
But they go so far as to say no people were celebrating.
None.
Zero.
Because American Muslims would never celebrate such a thing.
Because remember, there are two competing narratives.
There's Trump's narrative, which is that radical Islam over the entire span of the globe is a problem.
And yes, there are radical Muslims here in the United States.
And some of them were celebrating on 9-11.
Right?
That's Trump's narrative.
And then there's the media's narrative.
Radical Islam doesn't really exist.
It's a figment of everybody's imagination.
Who are you going to believe?
Me or your own lying eyes?
And there are no radical Muslims here in the United States, which means we need to import thousands and thousands of Syrian Muslim refugees without reference to what exactly they believe, right?
There's their narrative.
The problem is their narrative is false.
So when they go so far as to try to discredit Trump's entire narrative by discrediting one of the things that he says, instead they end up stepping on the rake and looking like fools, and it hits them right between the eyes.
And that's what we saw today with regard to the media.
And it really was quite ridiculous.
By the way, I do think that it is worth noting, when we talk about people who celebrated 9-11, it is incredible.
We have the left media saying, nobody celebrated 9-11.
American Muslims didn't celebrate 9-11.
No one celebrates 9-11, right?
Well, I can name a few people.
Who celebrated 9-11?
I can.
Ta-Nehisi Coates, who is the black, now he's a black spokesperson, he's considered this great black thinker, and he's been celebrated by the Atlantic and by the White House and by various other people who consider themselves real thinkers, real lefty thinkers, Ta-Nehisi Coates, he said that on 9-11 he sat on top of an apartment building and got high and watched as the towers fell and he felt nothing.
I mean, he wasn't celebrating, but he felt nothing.
I can think of somebody else who actually celebrated when the towers fell.
Barack Obama's pastor.
I mean, Jeremiah Wright, as we all remember, said this right after 9-11.
What Malcolm X said when he got silenced by Elijah Muhammad was in fact true.
America's chickens are coming home to roost.
We took this country by terror away from the Sioux, the Apache, the Arawak, the Comanche, the Arapaho, the Navajo.
Terrorism!
We took Africans from their country to build our way of ease and kept them enslaved and living in fear.
Terrorism!
We bombed Grenada and killed innocent civilians, babies, non-military We remember all this.
We can stop it.
And we remember Jeremiah Wright doing this whole routine.
And Barack Obama, of course, never heard any of this.
He was there for 20 years.
Never heard one word of this.
It was amazing.
All the days that Barack Obama was there, Jeremiah Wright was just doing, well, Lindsay is just informing our devotionals.
But on the days that Barack Obama wasn't there, it sounded exactly like this.
So the question for the American people, and this is why Trump is becoming more popular, the question for the American people is not, Was Donald Trump right about thousands of American Muslims celebrating?
It's, who do you trust to keep you safe?
The same people who said that Jeremiah Wright saying this kind of stuff didn't matter, and say that there's no such thing as a radical Muslim, or the guy who says, I'm deeply worried about radical Islam, and I believe that there are radical Muslims inside the United States.
Which person is going to do a better job of keeping you safe?
And we now have it on record because the fact is that Barack Obama, the guy who went to this guy's church, his State Department, after years of the President telling us that we'd won the War on Terror, we weren't even going to call it the War on Terror anymore, it was an overseas contingency operation, we weren't going to use the word terror, we weren't going to use the word Islam, yesterday the State Department issued a worldwide travel advisory to any American citizen.
So if we go anywhere outside the United States now, we are targets because we're American citizens.
Right?
We're the targets now.
And we're targets because of radical Muslims.
But don't worry, if you're really upset about not being able to travel outside the United States to meet radical Muslims, President Obama has suggested that he will bring tens of thousands of them to the United States so you can meet them here.
So it's really great.
If you don't want to go to France and get killed, then you can stay here and get killed.
I mean, it's really a wonderful thing.
And then people wonder why Donald Trump is gaining in terms of the polls.
And he is polling not only high and continuing to lead in most of the swing states, although Ted Cruz is now in the margin of error in Iowa, Donald Trump, he does well against Hillary Clinton.
And there's a reason for that.
And so what this means that there has to be another level of stopping Donald Trump.
What can the left do beyond trying to—beyond their patented rake step?
I mean, this is such a bad stepping on rake routine.
It really is.
I mean, it's almost as bad as Hillary Clinton saying yesterday, tweeting out yesterday that she thinks that all victims of sexual assault ought to be heard and believed and supported.
And her name is Hillary Clinton.
Again, her last name is Clinton, and her husband's name is Bill.
You may remember him from such shows as Paula Jones, the miniseries, and Monica Lewinsky, good times in the Oval Office.
The worst rake step of the day was the media, which climbed up onto a high board and then proceeded to jump off the high board, like at the pool, and land both feet on this rake and just hits them right between the eyes.
So what do they do now?
What do they do now to stop Trump?
Because they've already tried to say that he's making things up, that his narrative isn't true.
So what do they do next?
Well, the next step is to suggest that Donald Trump is actually dangerous.
That Donald Trump is a dangerous fellow.
Right?
Donald Trump is the kind of guy where if he were to get into office, random people would be killed.
And remember, this has been the narrative for a couple of weeks now, ever since Paris.
The narrative has been that the real danger to Western civilization is not radical Islam.
The real danger to Western civilization is Westerners going crazy and randomly killing Muslims because at heart, we're all evil Islamophobes.
Right, that's been the narrative for a long time here.
Now they're just extending it to Donald Trump.
And the idea here is that in a country where we actually believe, or some of us do, in principles of freedom of speech, in a country where we think that you should be able to say what you think on politics, there's only one sort of speech that has traditionally been held not to be within the realm of freedom of speech.
And this would be the, quote-unquote, shouting fire in a crowded theater exception, right?
The shouting fire in a crowded theater exception comes from a case from, like, 1919, and it was adjudicated by Oliver Wendell Holmes.
It's been dramatically narrowed.
But the idea was that you weren't supposed to be able to—it's not free speech if you go somewhere and you create a public panic based on false information.
So what the left is trying to do now is they're trying to say that that's what Trump is doing.
Trump, with all of his verbiage, he is threatening the safety of the American citizen, particularly the American Muslim.
Van Jones, who actually is a communist, Van Jones is on CNN, and Van Jones was the former Obama green czar.
By the way, the same guy who once told me in the green room at CNN that black folks think of cops the same way that Jews think of Nazis.
Van Jones, that's not incendiary, but he says that Donald Trump must be shut up because if he's not shut up, then he's going to get American Muslims hurt.
Here's Van Jones from CNN last night.
Celebrating the Twin Towers fall.
Numbers of people is what the Washington Post said.
This is so terrible.
This is just terrible.
Go ahead, Van.
I just want to say, this is just terrible.
You have a presidential candidate Who is deliberately stoking fear and smearing a whole population of people.
You have nuts, Jeffrey.
We're not talking about Hillary Clinton here, Van.
Jeffrey, hang on.
Jeffrey, hang on.
Hold on a second.
You have a political candidate, your candidate, you come on night after night and defend no matter what despicable, horrible, un-American, racist, inflammatory thing he says, you defend him.
At some point, Do you have no shame?
He said that there were thousands of Arabs out there and there's not one picture in a world of where you got cell phone cameras, you got video cameras from coast to coast.
Not one picture, not one image.
This is demagoguery.
It is dangerous and somebody's gonna go hurt some Muslim as a result of this kind of hatred.
It's wrong.
Somebody's gonna go hurt some Muslim as a result of this kind of hatred, and it's totally wrong.
There's not one camera.
First of all, nobody had camera phones back in 2001.
If you remember, camera phones are a relatively recent invention.
I think I had a cell phone in 2000 and in 2001, but you really didn't have cameras on there.
If you did, it was really crappy quality.
If you had, if you had like a really updated flip phone in 2001, maybe you could take one picture, and the memory held like one picture.
But that's, it's just not true.
It's also not true that there's no, that people didn't discuss this at the time.
In fact, CNN itself reported just a couple of years ago, Anderson Cooper, on this network, was saying that there were American Muslims who celebrated 9-11.
Here's Anderson Cooper saying just that in a special investigative report a couple of years ago.
These men are radicals, but they are also Americans, believe it or not, who praise Osama bin Laden and celebrate the 9-11 attacks.
So what's so extraordinary is that we found them out in broad daylight, out on the streets of New York, trying to spread their message just a few feet from a peaceful American mosque.
Drew Griffin of CNN's Special Investigations Unit has this.
I mean, so it's on CNN, but no, it never existed.
And the idea here is that Trump is such a crazy, he's a Hitlerian character, and now we're seeing this bubble up to the surface in lots of media reports, right?
Trump is Hitler.
When the left has gone beyond all else, they turn to the Hitler reference.
Right?
Trump is Hitler.
He wants Muslims to wear crescents.
He wants a database of American Muslims, which, again, was suggested openly by a member of the media to Trump.
It was not Trump who suggested that idea of registering all American Muslims, and Trump doesn't back that idea of registering all American Muslims.
There's no evidence that he does, but he has to be painted as a Hitlerian character, and he has to be painted as Hitlerian so that we can shut him up.
And it's not just Van Jones.
There's a Democratic congressman yesterday who said exactly the same thing.
Trump's rhetoric is going to lead to murder.
He's whipping up hatred to scapegoat a minority religious group, which has some very dangerous historic precedents, as you might agree.
I mean, it's the kind of behavior that is classic demagoguery.
And, you know, he's going to get somebody hurt.
I don't suppose he cares much, but it should be the kind of behavior that is roundly denounced.
And the thing that scares me is that the more he says outrageous, inflammatory things, it seems like it doesn't seem to cost him in terms of support, which makes me a little bit worried about the people who support him.
You just said he's going to get somebody hurt.
What do you mean by that?
What I mean is that when leaders who have a national platform whip up hate and hysteria against a particular group, particularly a religious group,
a minority religious group that is not popular, invariably, a minority religious group that is not popular, invariably, you know, the people who are mentally unstable or motivated by hate come out of the woodwork and you see secretions of buildings that are associated with that group.
You see assaults.
You see murders.
You see things happen.
There's actually a fairly significant track record of this kind of thing.
And I think that it really demonstrates how much of an anti-leader he really is.
Okay, so that leads to violence.
It doesn't lead to violence when the President of the United States routinely labels police officers racist who are killing black people for no reason.
And then there's a spate of shootings of members of the police.
It's not labeling a minority religious group or even a majority religious group in the United States when you say that they are a bunch of bigots because they won't bake same-sex wedding cakes and then shine the homosexual flag on the White House.
None of that is bigotry that incentivizes violence in any way, even though there have been cases, including Floyd Lee Corkins over at the Family Research Council, of people who are anti-Christian activists going in and trying to shoot Christian activists, family-oriented activists.
None of that matters.
So there's this double standard that applies.
When it comes to Trump.
That, by the way, is Keith Ellison.
Keith Ellison is a Democrat congressman from Minnesota who happens to be Muslim as well and has been connected with a couple of radical groups including CARE, the Council on American Islamic Relations.
So the idea here is that Trump is so bad, he's so evil, he's so terrible, that he just has to be shut up.
And there's long historical precedent for this among folks on the left.
This is an argument that we've heard, we remember hearing.
You remember hearing this with Jared Lee Loeffner?
You remember when Gabby Giffords, the congresswoman from Arizona, was shot?
And we heard that it was Sarah Palin's fault because Sarah Palin had a map of targeted districts On her, on her website that showed which districts she wanted to oust the Congress people in and Gabby Giffords was on that.
There was no evidence that Jared Lee Loeffler even knew who Sarah Palin was, but it was Sarah Palin's fault.
The left did the same thing when they were talking about JFK's assassination.
They tried, LBJ said it was the climate of hate created by right-wing groups that led to JFK's assassination because as, as JFK's wife, as Jackie said, she was just very upset that it had to be some silly little communist.
Those were her words.
She said she was very upset it was a silly little communist who killed JFK, and he couldn't die for some grand, glorious goal like civil rights.
Instead, he died for some nonsensical, silly thing like capitalism and defense against the Soviet Union.
Right?
So the idea was that the right wing had always created this.
We have to shut down the right wing.
You'll notice that there's always... It's so funny.
I remember... I'm old enough to remember the Bush administration, where I kept hearing from folks on the left that Bush wanted to shut down his opposition.
Remember this?
Bush wants to— dissent is the highest form of patriotism, and Bush is a fascist, and Bush just wants to shut us up, and that's the only thing that's important to Bush.
I don't remember any of these people being shut up.
I don't remember any of them being shut up.
But I'm seeing on a pretty frequent basis the President of the United States trying to shut people up.
If you're a YouTube filmmaker, you go to jail and they blame you for Benghazi.
If you're Dinesh D'Souza and you write anti-Obama books and do anti-Obama documentaries, somehow you'll find your way into a federal court on a charge that nobody gets charged with in the United States.
If you're somebody who wants to bake cakes for the people you see fit, and you're Christian, you don't wanna bake for a homosexual wedding, then you might find yourself in front of an administrative law judge.
The fact is that there's only one side of this debate that truly wants to shut down the political debate, and you're seeing that on campuses too.
That's why I was at University of Missouri last week, because now you're seeing, as we talked about yesterday, 40%, 40% of young people, 18 to 34, say that they would curb the First Amendment so as not to be offensive to ethnic minority groups.
Okay, what that means is Donald Trump, shut up, because we find what you're saying offensive.
That gives all the power to the offended in our society.
And that's, of course, what the left wants.
Now, none of this is to say that Trump is some sort of angel when it comes to his rhetoric, because he isn't.
Trump says certain things that just make you cringe.
So, for example, there is a situation, this is typical media coverage, there's a situation at this, I think it was at this particular rally, where a Black Lives Matter protester showed up and started trying to disrupt and yelling and screaming.
The Black Lives Matter protester, there's only, the only thing the tape shows is him on the floor and then the police picking him up and rushing him out.
The Black Lives Matter protester claimed that he'd been assaulted by six men Six white men who were calling him the N-word and shouting at him.
There's no evidence of this whatsoever.
He didn't file a police report against the guys, so we still haven't had any arrests in that particular case.
And Trump was on TV, and he was asked about this, and here's what Donald Trump had to say about this particular Black Lives Matter protester.
Man that was, I don't know, you say roughed up.
He was so obnoxious and so loud.
He was screaming.
I had 10,000 people in the room yesterday.
10,000 people.
And this guy started screaming by himself.
And they did, I don't know, rough up?
He should have been, maybe he should have been roughed up.
Because it was absolutely disgusting what he was doing.
This was not handled the way Bernie Sandals handled his problem, I will tell you.
But I have a lot of fans and they were not happy about it.
And this was a very obnoxious guy who was a troublemaker who was looking to make trouble.
So Trump's comment there, they actually don't ask him about it, which is kind of egregious.
They should obviously ask him about he should have been roughed up.
I mean, that's why you have security at these events.
I mean, you're the leading presidential candidate on the right side of the aisle.
Presumably you have security.
But here's where the hypocrisy comes in, right?
So Donald Trump says that maybe he should have been roughed up because he was making trouble.
So, naturally, a friend of this protester comes out and says, Donald Trump, he's not just a guy who gets overexcited.
He's not just a guy who uses ridiculous language.
He's a modern-day Bull Connor.
This is what he says.
He says he's a modern-day Bull Connor.
And for those who don't know, Bull Connor was the sheriff down in Birmingham, Alabama, when they were turning hoses and sicking dogs on black people, using the force of the law to do so.
Here is this friend of the protester who was taken out of the Trump rally.
If you ask me, I'd say it like this.
I believe that Donald Trump is really the modern-day Bull Connor.
He'd go around our country spewing hatred and racism and is not accepted here in the city of Birmingham.
We're on the verge of raising our minimum wage to $10.10 an hour, so Trump doesn't support raising our minimum wage.
We welcome immigrants to our city, and Trump does not.
So what do any of those things have to do with Bull Connor?
They don't.
I mean, what does the 10-10 minimum wage have to do with Bull Connor?
What does immigration have to do with Bull Connor?
Nothing.
But that's the point, right?
It's all wrapped up in one ball.
If you want to criticize Trump for not allowing security time enough to get the guy, Or for saying that, I mean, because honestly, it really isn't his responsibility what his followers do in the audience when they're irritated by somebody.
If you've ever been at a rally, this sort of thing is not actually particularly that uncommon.
It does happen on a fairly regular basis.
If you've ever been at a mass event, ranging from a concert where fights break out, to a baseball game where I've seen fights break out, to a political rally like this where fights break out.
You cannot like Trump's language, but that's the point.
For the left, it's not about Trump's language.
It's about Trump's actual policies.
They don't like Trump's policies, and therefore they don't like Trump's language.
And that's why the hypocrisy of the White House here is so egregious.
Josh Earnest, who's the White House spokesperson, he says, yeah, no, of course Trump condones violence.
That's just the kind of guy that Donald Trump is.
Well, this is not a departure from Mr. Trump's habits.
You know, he's previously Uh, had reporters who were asking him tough questions removed from the room.
So the fact that he might condone violence against a protester is not particularly surprising to me.
It's certainly not an approach that I would agree with, but he's running his own campaign and that's what he should do.
No, it's not an approach that they would agree with.
President Obama is the guy who has actually banned campaign reporters from his jet.
If you remember, in 2012 he did that.
The President of the United States is the guy who said at a rally of his constituents that if you are in a political fight, you should bring a gun to a knife fight.
Right?
President Obama is the guy who said that he's going to put his boot on the throat of BP.
I mean, he's used this sort of language routinely.
I mean, this is the party that says Republicans are the enemy.
President Obama has said Republicans are the enemy.
But no, it's Donald Trump who's the real problem.
And that, of course, is the double standard.
Now, meanwhile, one more point on Trump.
You want to know why Trump is popular?
The reason Trump is popular is because he's saying a lot of things that people are thinking.
So Donald Trump was asked about waterboarding and Donald Trump was at a rally and he spoke about waterboarding and here's what he had to say.
This morning they asked me a question.
Would you approve waterboarding?
Would I approve Water Board?
Oh, dear!
Would I approve Water Board?
And I say, well, let me ask you a question.
On the other side, they chop off our young people's heads, and they put them on a stick.
On the other side, they build these iron cages, and they'll put 20 people in them, and they drop them in the ocean for 15 minutes and pull them up 15 minutes later.
Would I approve waterboarding?
You bet your ass I'd approve it.
You bet your ass.
In a heartbeat.
In a heartbeat.
And I would approve more than that.
And don't kid yourself, folks.
It works, okay?
It worked.
Only a stupid person would say it doesn't work.
It works.
They're all saying, oh, it has no effect.
I know people that are very, very important people, and they want to be politically correct.
And I see some people talking on television about, well, I don't know if it works.
And they tell me later on, it works.
It works.
Believe me, it works.
And you know what?
If it doesn't work, they deserve it anyway for what they're doing now.
But it works.
Okay, that's why Trump is popular, folks.
I mean, in a nutshell, that's why Trump is popular because, let's face it, who hasn't thought that?
When you're watching a Jordanian pilot burn alive, who hasn't thought, okay, the people who did this, if we waterboard them and we don't get any information, are you gonna lose sleep over that?
Is that something that you're deeply going to care about?
Trump is...
Right on this.
I mean, he is, as a general rule, he is right on the narrative and he is wrong on the facts, right?
That's just what Trump is.
And that's why Trump is so popular.
Now, meanwhile, I do have to mention what's going on over in the Middle East with regard to Syria.
So the Russians flew a plane over a one-mile area of Turkish territory and the Turks shot it down.
Now, the reason this is important is because Turkey is a member of NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
And the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was originally created in order to be a counterweight to the Soviet Union.
The idea was that any attack on a NATO member would count as an attack on all the NATO members, right?
So if Russia were to attack Latvia, then all of the various members of NATO would join up and they would go fight the Soviet Union, they'd go fight Russia.
If they attacked Poland, everybody would join together and they would go and they would attack the Soviet Union.
And Russia, it was obviously created as this.
One of the things that Russia has wanted to do for a long time is to break NATO.
They want to destroy the North Atlantic Treaty Organization because they feel if they are able to destroy NATO, then they can take these countries one at a time, right?
If they can attack Poland and not have to worry about what the United States is going to do or France, if they can just peel countries off one by one, then they can eat them up the same way they did before.
And this is what they've done with Ukraine, because Ukraine isn't a NATO member.
Well, the same thing that today, Because of this attack on the Russian plane by the Turks, this smells like a setup to me.
It smells like Vladimir Putin is attempting to use this as a point of breach with NATO.
So the United States came out after this and they said, Turkey has a right to defend itself.
We're not gonna get involved.
Well, what happens when Vladimir Putin says, okay, well, I have the right to defend myself too.
It was my plane that got shot down.
I'm bombing positions in Turkey now.
I'm gonna bomb those border positions in Turkey.
Is anybody going to stand with Turkey?
Is Turkey going to go open war with Russia?
Or is it just going to set the precedent, which is really what Putin wants?
Is it going to set the precedent that NATO is no longer a functional treaty organization?
This is what happens when there is a lack of American leadership in the world.
You want to know what's going on in Syria and Turkey and the Middle East?
All you have to do is look at the various interests of the people who are involved.
If you look at the various interests, it all becomes clear.
Obama has made such a muddle of this.
That there is no way.
He keeps thinking somebody's going to come and fill the gap.
The only people filling the gap are the Russians who have their own interests here, and their interests do not align with our interests.
You want to know why ISIS has survived this far?
The answer is because none of the regional neighbors actually have a total interest in getting rid of ISIS.
None of them.
Right?
Because the fact is this.
Syria doesn't want to get rid of ISIS because ISIS is taking out the Free Syrian Army.
They want to keep ISIS there so that Bashar Assad looks good.
The Iranians want to keep ISIS out of Iraq but in Syria because, again, it allows Bashar Assad to look good and it allows Iran to look good because they're fighting the worst people on planet Earth over in ISIS.
Jordan and Egypt and Saudi Arabia, none of them like ISIS, but they're afraid because ISIS is making gains in all of their territories.
And they also know that if they were to fight ISIS, it looks like they're now fighting on behalf of Shia Right?
They're Sunni.
The Iranians are Shia.
Bashar Assad is Alawite, which is basically a form of Shia Islam.
And so if they fight ISIS, which is Sunni, then they're now siding with the enemy.
So nobody has the wherewithal or the compunction to go after ISIS full bore.
Except for Putin, who's happy to go after ISIS full bore because he's doing the dirty work that the Iranians don't really want to do.
He'll say, okay, I'm going to get rid of ISIS, and then I'm also going to get rid of the Free Syrian Army, and I just cleared the path for Iran.
I just cleared the path for Iran.
And meanwhile, if I can, into the bargain, also break NATO, then I've won a big victory.
And President Obama is sitting by doing nothing as all of this happens, when the truth is that this is actually very much, it's actually very reminiscent of when Saddam Hussein went into Kuwait in 1991.
Saddam Hussein was Sunni, right, and his quasi-allies, supposedly, his Sunni allies, against Iran anyway, were places like Saudi Arabia.
By him invading Kuwait, he ended up confounding the entire situation.
But the Saudis, nobody in the region actually wanted to oust Saddam Hussein, because they were afraid if they oust Saddam Hussein, the Shia take over.
So that's why the American military didn't go in and completely oust Saddam Hussein back in 1991, because they figured if to do that, they would have had to occupy the country.
Well, this is the same dilemma now.
We could theoretically go in and nail ISIS and then occupy ISIS areas, but President Obama doesn't want to do that.
And he also doesn't have—and the problem is that there is no area in which we are safe from ISIS.
So he could make a hard decision, which is we'll do whatever we have to do to destroy ISIS, and if that includes going in and occupying the area so that it doesn't become another Iranian pond, then we'll do it.
But President Obama won't do that because he's a coward.
And so what's destined to happen here is that ISIS will become a solid part of the Middle East.
It will become a consolidated state.
It's not going anywhere, folks.
Okay?
Anybody who tells you that ISIS is going to be completely destroyed is lying to you.
Because there are too many players in the region I'm Ben Shapiro.
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