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Oct. 25, 2023 - The Ben Shapiro Show

52:28

F*** The United Nations

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	Yesterday, the Secretary General of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres, took the floor of the United Nations to blame Israel for the murder of 1,500 of its own citizens and the kidnapping of another 200 plus.
	Here is what he had to say.
	Nothing can justify the deliberate killing, injuring and kidnapping of civilians or the launching of rockets against civilian targets.
	All hostages must be treated humanely and released immediately and without conditions.
	And I respectfully note the presence among us of members of their families.
	Excellencies, It is important to also recognize the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum.
	The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation.
	This is, simply put, Jew hatred.
	Full stop, Jew hatred.
	It is apology for terrorism.
	It ignores reality.
	The vast majority of Palestinians live under the direct Palestinian rule, whether Hamas in the Gaza Strip or the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank.
	But worse than that, it reverses reality.
	It lays the blame for a genocidal mass slaughter of Jews on Jews.
	Contextualizing mass murder, of course, is par for the course for the evil organization that is the United Nations.
	And the United Nations is, in fact, an evil organization, as we'll discuss in a moment.
	Gutierrez didn't stop there.
	He blamed Hamas's perversities on settlements, meaning Jews building homes in the heartland of biblical Israel, Judea, and Samaria.
	Clearly, this somehow contextualizes mass rape and burning of babies.
	He then drew equivalence between Hamas's Holocaust-level atrocities and Israel's military retaliation directed against Hamas.
	Excellencies, even war has rules.
	The relentless bombardment of Gaza by Israeli forces, the level of civilian casualties and the wholesale destruction of neighbourhoods continue to mount and are deeply alarming.
	Protecting civilians can never mean using them as human shields.
	Protecting civilians does not mean ordering more than one million people to evacuate to the South, where there is no shelter, no food, no water, no medicine and no fuel, and then continuing to bomb the South itself.
	I am deeply concerned about the clear violations of international humanitarian law that we are witnessing in Gaza.
	Yes, this is the supposed head of the international community likening military operations to kill terrorists to terrorist operations attempting to kill civilians.
	All in the name of international law and human rights.
	These are lies, and they are disgusting lies.
	And that's the point.
	If Gutierrez and the international community can somehow equate Israel with its terrorist enemies, they can achieve their actual goal, which is the survival of the terrorist group Hamas.
	Once again, that is precisely what Gutierrez called for.
	To ease epic suffering, make the delivery of aid easier and safer, and facilitate the release of hostages, I reiterate my appeal for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire.
	Excellencies, Even in this moment of grave and immediate danger, we cannot lose sight of the only realistic foundation for a true peace and stability.
	A two-state solution.
	The humanitarian ceasefire would of course benefit Hamas and leave Hamas in place.
	And a two-state solution with whom?
	Pray tell.
	With Hamas?
	With the terror-supporting Palestinian Authority who signed checks to the people who murdered 1,500 Jews?
	To Islamic Jihad?
	Doesn't matter.
	The end goal is obvious.
	Stop Israel from defending itself.
	Perpetuate the so-called cycle of violence.
	Make it harder for Israel to survive.
	Continue the UN's mission to destroy the Jewish state.
	The United Nations is a garbage heap of epic proportions.
	It's not merely a useless organization that costs the United States over $12 billion every year.
	It's an epic failure of an organization that provides cover for the world's worst human rights abusers and actively foments Jew hatred and Jew murder in the Middle East.
	The United Nations General Assembly is dominated by nations who hate Israel and care little for human rights, which is why from 2015 to 2022, the UN General Assembly adopted 140 resolutions against Israel.
	It adopted one against North Korea, one against Afghanistan, zero against Venezuela, zero against Hamas, zero against China.
	In fact, the entire rest of the world combined merited a grand total of 68 resolutions of condemnation.
	Israel supposedly merited 140.
	The U.N.' 's particular hatred for Israel has been a long-running theme.
	Which, of course, makes sense.
	Some 56 member nations are also members of the so-called Organization of Islamic Cooperation, the vast majority of which are directed overtly against Israel.
	But it means that the U.N.
	has served as the propaganda arm for Jew haters all over the globe for decades.
	In 1975, at the behest of the Soviet Union, for example, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution declaring Zionism, the political movement for a Jewish homeland, racism, prompting the U.S.
	ambassador to the U.N., Daniel Patrick Moynihan, to declare that the U.N.
	had made anti-Semitism international law.
	Moynihan added, a great evil has been loosed upon the world.
	Nothing in the nature of the UN has changed since.
	The United Nations has an entire department dedicated to forwarding
	anti-Israel propaganda and terrorism.
	The United Nations Relief and Works Agency was founded in December 1949
	with the purpose of dealing with refugees from the 1948 Israeli War of Independence.
	Arab refugees, that is.
	The 800,000 Jews expelled from Arab and Muslim lands in the same time period, those people were simply taken in by Israel.
	The Arab nations, of course, took in none of the Palestinian refugees.
	The UNRWA is, in fact, the only agency at the UN dedicated to one specific population, and it has helped keep that population in refugee camps for 70 years.
	The UNRWA is almost entirely staffed by members of the Palestinian-Arab community.
	It is, in fact, a globally-sponsored welfare organization with 23,000 Palestinian-Arab employees and just 100 UN professionals from elsewhere.
	It is not a UN organization.
	It is a make-work organization that works very, very closely with Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the Palestinian Authority.
	The UNRWA has never condemned Hamas' agenda.
	It routinely hires members of Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
	One of the UNRWA's chief tasks is running dozens of Palestinian schools.
	The UNRWA, as you might predict, then helps indoctrinate Palestinian Arab schoolchildren in Jew hatred.
	According to a March report from United Nations Watch, the UNRWA has overseen the broad indoctrination of Palestinian youths into toxic and vile anti-Semitism.
	That report names 47 cases of incitement to violence by UNRWA staff.
	133 UNRWA educators and staff who promote hate and violence on social media, and another 82 educators and staff involved in 30 UNRWA schools who create and distribute Jew-hating content to students.
	For example, one reading comprehension exercise for 9th graders at Alt-Magazi Middle School for Boys in the Gaza Strip celebrates the burning of a Jewish bus as quote, a barbecue party.
	5th graders at that same UN school were taught that martyrdom and jihad are quote, the most important meanings of life.
	This sort of stuff is not uncommon by any stretch of the imagination in Palestinian schools run by the UNRWA, which is why Hamas's political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, is a UNRWA graduate.
	So is Abd al-Raziz al-Rantisi, the former Hamas chief.
	So is Ibrahim Makadama, the mastermind behind Hamas's military structure.
	UNRWA resources are also dedicated to helping terrorist groups more directly.
	UNRWA vehicles have been used to transport terrorists and weapons.
	That includes ambulances.
	UNRWA schools have been used by Hamas to store weapons.
	The UNRWA also helps promote Hamas front groups, including the Palestinian Return Center.
	The UNRWA has been used by Hamas to cover its tunnels.
	Last November, the UNRWA, in a rare admission, protested the, quote, man-made cavity on the grounds of a UNRWA school.
	That's the euphemism that they use.
	Man-made cavity, not terror tunnel.
	They called it a serious violation of the agency's neutrality.
	The statement, of course, made no mention of Hamas.
	In 2021, Hamas actually prevented entry to an investigative team from the UN to a shaft built under a UNRWA school.
	The whole purpose of this is so that if Israel tries to strike a terror tunnel, it has to hit a school.
	For all these reasons, the Trump administration cut off contributions from the United States to the UNRWA.
	Then President Biden, in all of his vast wisdom, restored hundreds of millions of dollars in funding.
	Much of which undoubtedly went directly to Hamas.
	Over the course of the last couple of years, the administration gave the UNRWA some 700 million dollars of your taxpayer money.
	This is why back in February, Representative Chip Roy of Texas called for the defunding of the UNRWA, noting, quote, UNRWA's lengthy and detailed history of promoting antisemitism, violence, and terrorism through educational materials and its continued ties to Hamas should completely disqualify this corrupt entity from receiving any U.S.
	taxpayer funding.
	It didn't happen.
	And so it shouldn't be surprising that after the October 7th massacre, many employees of the UNRWA went online to celebrate the mass Jew murder.
	So, for example, Principal Iman Hassan, who glorified Hamas' murder of babies as, quote, repaying injustices and liked her friends burn, burn, burn.
	The burn, burn, burn, of course, was directed at civilians.
	Or UNRWA teacher Mohammed Adwan, who defended the Hamas massacre, quote, what we do is resistance, regaining our rights, and then eulogized terrorists.
	Or, for example, UNRWA school counselor Niveen Afana.
	On the same day of the massacre, she prayed for the murderers on Facebook, quote,
	Oh Allah, have mercy on the martyrs. Steadfast are Mujahideen.
	Grant them victory over the unbelievers and a good ending. How about UNRWA teacher Osama
	Ahmad on Sunday morning as Hamas terrorists invaded Israeli towns going to Hillel Nour?
	He celebrated, Allah is the greatest above imagination.
	How about UNRWA pediatrician Bashir Khamis Ghanam?
	Right after the massacre, he shared a post praising the murderers as quote, martyrs of the Islamic and Arab nation who were martyred in defending their homeland and nation.
	And none of this is a surprise.
	This is what the UN is all about.
	It is not an exception.
	It is not a few bad apples.
	The UN has been run as an anti-Semitic organization from basically a few years after its inception until right now.
	The United Nations is a disgrace.
	It has never fulfilled its core mandate.
	The purpose of the UN was originally expressed in its charter, quote,
	to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought
	untold sorrow to mankind, and to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and
	worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women of nations large and small,
	and to establish conditions under which justice and respect for obligations arising from treaties
	and other sources of international law can be maintained, and to promote social progress and
	better standards of life in larger freedom. The UN has achieved almost none of these goals.
	The United Nations was established primarily by the United States in the aftermath of World War II in an attempt at creating a so-called family of nations.
	It has been a full-scale disaster area ever since, serving more as a propaganda tool on behalf of third-world autocracies than on behalf of the Institution for Defense of Democracy that served as its initial mission.
	The United Nations should be disbanded.
	The U.S.
	should defund it.
	The U.N.
	building should be fumigated and rededicated to something more useful like manufacturing manure.
	Never again should anyone pretend that the United Nations has the power of the moral high ground.
	In fact, it really never did.
	In just one second, we'll get to the latest on the ground in Israel, and we'll see the rest of the Middle Eastern autocracies again siding with Hamas.
	That is one of the things that is happening right now, which is prompting a call for ceasefires.
	Again, moral clarity disappeared like that.
	It was like magic.
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	Okay, so, meanwhile, the state of Israel is still figuring out what to do.
	For their part, obviously, they are fighting mad at the Secretary General of the United Nations, making excuses for Hamas and suggesting that basically burning babies alive in their beds, that's just the predictable response to land disputes.
	That's effectively what the UN is now claiming.
	Gilad Erdan, who is the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, here's what he had to say.
	The UN is failing and you, Mr. Secretary General, have lost all morality and impartiality.
	Because when you say those terrible words that these heinous attacks did not happen in a vacuum, you are tolerating terrorism.
	Of course, that's absolutely true.
	That's absolutely true.
	But of course, what's happening at the U.N.
	isn't happening in a vacuum either.
	Meaning the constituent nations of the U.N., the people who actually vote in the U.N.
	General Assembly, the people who disproportionately comprise the U.N.
	General Assembly, are in fact nations that are either autocracies or sympathetic to terrorists.
	And that's just the reality of the world.
	I know it's an ugly reality for us in the West to contemplate, is the fact that not everybody thinks like us, that people don't agree with us, that we can't all talk it out over a cup of tea across a table.
	But the reality is that many of the same people who you see, folks, suggesting are rational actors in this region, are in fact dedicated to the destruction of the West.
	They do not like the West.
	They think the West is bad.
	One of those people is the president of Turkey, The dictator of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
	So Erdogan, who shifted Turkey away from being a secular quasi-democracy in the early 2000s and toward being an Islamic fundamentalist dictatorship.
	Erdogan is a sponsor.
	He's a state sponsor of terrorism.
	He sponsors Hamas.
	You'll recall that, just recently, there were some commentators who were suggesting that he ought to play honest broker between Israel and Hamas, which is a joke.
	It's ridiculous.
	Well, yesterday, he just came out squarely in favor of Hamas.
	He said that Hamas was not a terrorist organization.
	Instead, they were a, quote, liberation group, fighting a battle to protect their land, which is weird, because I didn't realize their land included Kfar Azza.
	I didn't realize that their land included Kibbutz Berri.
	But apparently, according to Erdogan, it does, because, of course, all of that is Islamic land.
	Erdogan then claimed that Israel had taken advantage of Turkey's good intentions, and then he cancelled a visit to Israel because he said that Israel is fighting an inhumane war against Hamas that is rich, coming from the same country that routinely violates human rights, whether it is against Armenians or whether it is against others in the region.
	He said Hamas is not a terrorist organization.
	Of course, this is the stuff that he says to his own parliament.
	One of the big things to understand in the Middle East is that what many of these dictators say to Western media is not the same stuff they say in their own language to their own people.
	What they actually mean is the stuff they say in their own language to their own people.
	He then blamed the United States, suggesting that people outside the region were quote unquote, adding fuel to the fire in the name of supporting Israel.
	Turkey is supposed to be a moderate state.
	Turkey, you'll recall, is a member of NATO, which is ridiculous.
	The idea that if there were ever an attack on Turkey, that NATO members would be obligated to come to Turkey's defense is insane.
	That's totally crazy.
	It's not, of course, just Erdogan.
	CNN, last night, had on Queen Rania of Jordan.
	So, let's be clear about the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.
	The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan exists because the West put in- You want to talk about a colonial outpost?
	The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan is a colonial outpost.
	It's literally a tribal family that was elevated to royalty in a made-up country called Jordan.
	If you think that Jordan has, like, a historic basis with Hashemite kingdoms, it does not.
	It does not.
	It was created from exactly the same cloth.
	It was British Mandate Palestine, and then Jordan was carved off, and the Hashemites were given control of the kingdom because there were land disputes over control of Syria, for example.
	And so in order to placate the Hashemites, they were given control of Jordan.
	But the land of Jordan is populated almost entirely by quote-unquote Palestinian Arabs, meaning people who were descended from people who were living in British Mandate Palestine.
	At the time of the creation of Jordan.
	Queen Rania is one of them, by the way.
	Queen Rania is a Palestinian Arab.
	But she's also a member of the Hashemite royal family.
	If that Hashemite royal family were to cross the population, the population would kill her and her head would be on a pole.
	That's effectively how it goes in Jordan.
	So, she was interviewed on Tuesday night by CNN.
	She's supposed to be a quasi-Western moderate.
	Here she was, pretending that Hamas didn't commit atrocities.
	Now, do I really think that Queen Rania thinks that Hamas didn't commit atrocities?
	Of course not.
	Of course not.
	But truth does not have quite the same value in this part of the world as it does in, say, the West.
	And she also knows that, again, if she were to come out against Hamas, if she were to condemn Hamas, there's a good shot that she and the rest of her family would be dead.
	Again, you want to talk about colonial outposts.
	Colonial outposts would be the Kingdom of Jordan.
	That is a colonial outpost.
	That is a leftover from the British Mandate.
	In any case, here is Queen Rania denying that Hamas committed atrocities.
	I'm not arguing accuracy, Christian.
	I'm arguing equivalence and double standards here.
	When the President of the United States is told that, you know, he has evidence, he has seen evidence of children beheaded only to retract because the IDF said that there's no proof of that.
	That is confirmation bias.
	Even at your network, Christian, you know, the CNN website at the beginning of the conflict reported a headline of Israeli children found Queen Rania, I just need to stop you right there because there have been pictures shown by the Israelis and our journalists have been down there.
	Now, my question to you, would you publish such a damning yet unverified claim made by
	a Palestinian?
	Queen Rania, I just need to stop you right there because there have been pictures shown
	by the Israelis and our journalists have been down there.
	I'm not talking about beheadings.
	I'm talking about babies' bodies riddled with with bullets and things.
	Of course, she's standing for Hamas.
	Of course she is.
	Like, just a full-on Holocaust-level denial right there from the Queen of Jordan.
	That's what this region is.
	And if anybody pretends otherwise, they're blinding themselves to the reality.
	We'll get to more from Queen Rania.
	And just again, she's a Western moderate and we're all supposed to pretend that this is a moderate kingdom here.
	Moderation is not quite the same thing in the Middle East.
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	Okay, so again, back to Queen Renia.
	This notion that the world is a collection of like-minded nations, you just have to talk it out, is ridiculous.
	It's why the United Nations, as a premise, was always idiotic.
	It was always idiotic.
	Pretending that the United States and China are going to get together in a room and side on world policy is stupid.
	It's stupid.
	It's always been stupid.
	That's the Security Council.
	What's even stupider is imagining that the General Assembly is anything but a collection of some of the worst nations on planet earth.
	You got like Sudan making world policy.
	You got England giving the same vote as like Libya.
	It's wild and insane and stupid and the fact that anybody treats this this way is just once again evidence of a cultural ethnocentrism that comes with the West.
	One of the great ironies of the anti-ethnocentrism movement from people like Edward Said, who wrote the book Orientalism, suggesting that the West had a dim view of, quote-unquote, the Oriental cultures, and that that had led them to colonialism and apartheid and all the rest of it.
	And really, really, that was ignorant, and we should study those cultures from the inside.
	Ironically, that has led to a new sort of ethnocentrism in which the West assumes that everybody thinks like members of the West.
	And thus, everyone can be trusted and treated as moderate.
	Queen Rania, again, is welcomed in capitals around the world as some sort of moderate while she stands for Hamas.
	I mean, here she was yesterday talking about it's a glaring double standard for the world to, you know, defend Israel, defending itself from terrorists.
	In the last couple of weeks, we have seen a glaring double standard in the world.
	When October 7th happened, the world immediately and unequivocally stood by Israel and its right to defend itself and condemned the attack that happened.
	But what we're seeing in the last couple of weeks, we're seeing silence in the world.
	Countries have stopped just expressing concern or acknowledging the casualties, but always with a preface of declaration of support for Israel.
	Are we being told that it is wrong to kill a family, an entire family at gunpoint, but it's okay to shell them to death?
	I mean, there is a glaring double standard here.
	This is such trash.
	I'm sorry, this is such trash.
	And it's obviously morally equivalent trash.
	By the way, this is the same kingdom that massacred, that massacred 3,000 Palestinians in 1970 and expelled 20,000 Palestinians just to get rid of its radicals.
	I don't see them bring that up ever, ever, ever.
	By the way, the Jordanian security services are not known for being particularly nice to Palestinian radicals.
	You know why?
	Because if they were, they'd be overthrown.
	But again, it's all fun and games when the West pretends moral equivalence.
	And that moral equivalence allows them to pressure Israel into, quote-unquote, two-state solutions and all the rest.
	Pressuring Israel to bring fuel into the Gaza Strip so that Hamas can use it.
	By the way, aerial photos show that Hamas currently has half a million gallons of fuel available to it.
	It's using all of it, presumably, to support its terrorist operations.
	Meanwhile, the so-called peace process partners that Israel's supposed to be relying upon, the Palestinian Authority, Wall Street Journal, today, Long before Hamas militants burst out of their Gaza stronghold to massacre scores of civilians with handguns and assault rifles, Iran and its allies had accelerated efforts to smuggle weapons into a different part of the Palestinian territories, the West Bank.
	Using drones, secret airline flights, and a land bridge that traverses hundreds of miles and at least four national borders, the smuggling operation is raising the specter of a new conflagration in the war between Israel and Palestinians.
	It poses a growing threat to Jordan, a staunch U.S.
	ally which borders Israel and the West Bank and has been struggling to contain a growing flow of drugs and arms.
	Iran wants to turn Jordan into a transit area for weapons going into Israel, said Amir al-Sabaila.
	You wonder why Jordan is standing for Hamas?
	Because they are also held hostage by Hamas's allies.
	That would be the reason.
	And yet at the same time, it's the West promoting the idea that Israel has to make concessions to these same exact people.
	To the Palestinian Authority, which has allowed all of this to happen, and which pays, by the way, again, they sign checks to the families of the terrorists.
	With your taxpayer dollars, by the way, since you're the ones who are sending money, I'm sending money to the Palestinian Authority right now.
	It's absurd.
	Meanwhile, Israel continues to fight an existential war for itself, and that existential war is not going to end with the destruction of Hamas.
	Because that war is going to continue.
	Hezbollah on Israel's northern border, as I've said before, is a much higher threat to the existence of the State of Israel than Hamas is.
	Hamas is dangerous to Jews.
	Hezbollah is dangerous to the entire existence of the state of Israel.
	Because if Israel is stretched so thin that it has to fight a war with Hamas in the Gaza Strip, and it has to simultaneously fight a war with Palestinian Authority and Islamic Jihad terrorists in the so-called West Bank, and it has to fight a war with Hezbollah in the north, maybe with Syria, that's an existential threat for Israel.
	So Israel is facing a long-term battle for its survival here.
	Benjamin Netanyahu's spokesperson talking about Hamas said, listen, we at least have to take Hamas off the table.
	We're not going to live next to a genocidal threat.
	Here was Bibi's spokesperson, Tal Heinrich.
	Well, right now we have more than 7,700 rockets that have been fired at Israeli territory since the outbreak of this war that we didn't start, a war that we didn't want, we didn't even expect.
	We were dragged into it by the Hamas terror organization and we, Sandra, as a nation, we have taken this very important decision that we can no longer live next to an existential, genocidal threat This is the only reason why we are operating in Gaza right now.
	And we will bring an end to the Hamas regime in Gaza.
	Once we are done, they will not have any kind of governance bodies or a military wing.
	Hamas can simply be no longer.
	Now, the only question is whether the West is going to actually allow Israel to do that or whether they're going to try to tie their hands.
	So far, the Biden administration has been sending a few mixed signals.
	So yesterday, in good signaling, John Kirby, the NSA spokesperson, he said that the idea of an immediate ceasefire is ridiculous and helps Hamas, which of course is true.
	Just now, as you know, the UN Security Council had a meeting.
	The Arab groups condemned killing civilians, but also said that we should support a peace process instead of sending weapons to Israel, if we want to support Israel.
	Do you envisage a scenario I couldn't begin to speculate on that.
	Those are potential steps that haven't happened yet and may not happen.
	international conference will take place soon?
	I couldn't begin to speculate on that.
	You know, that's, those are potential steps that haven't happened yet and may not happen.
	All I can tell you is we're going to continue to make sure Israel has the tools and the
	capabilities that they need to defend themselves.
	We're going to continue to try to get that humanitarian assistance in.
	We're going to continue to try to get hostages and people out of Gaza appropriately.
	And as I think you've heard us say, a ceasefire right now really only benefits Hamas.
	U.S.
	Secretary of State Antony Blinken also added, but if Iran attacks American forces, obviously we'll respond how we have to respond.
	And let me say what we've consistently said to Iranian officials through other channels.
	The United States does not seek conflict with Iran.
	We do not want this war to widen.
	But if Iran or its proxies attack U.S.
	personnel anywhere, make no mistake, we will defend our people, we will defend our security, swiftly and decisively.
	The question is whether that is going to be true in action.
	So far, the Iranians have been launching attacks on Americans and American allies throughout the region.
	According to the Wall Street Journal, for more than six months, Iranian-backed militia groups refrained from launching drones or rockets against American troops in Iraq and Syria.
	That came to an abrupt end when U.S.
	officials said Iran-backed groups launched 10 drone and rocket attacks against U.S.
	bases U.S.
	troops used in Iraq and another three on a U.S.
	base in southeast Syria.
	The attacks were carried out between October 17th and October 24th.
	In one of the attacks at al-Assad Air Base in Iraq last week, U.S.
	troops shot a militia group's drone out of the sky and then fell on top of an American drone and destroyed it.
	In Yemen, Iranian-backed Houthis fired five Iranian-provided cruise missiles and launched about 30 drones toward Israel, an attack that was larger than initially described by the Pentagon.
	Last week, the USS Kearny guided-missile destroyer, which was operating in the northern Red Sea, shot down four of the cruise missiles, while a fifth cruise missile was intercepted by Saudi Arabia, protecting its own airspace.
	The Pentagon has deployed nearly a dozen air defense systems to countries across the Middle East ahead of Israel's expected land invasion of Gaza.
	They've moved missile launchers to Iraq, Syria, and the Gulf.
	According to U.S.
	officials, the Pentagon is also sending a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, or THAAD, to Saudi Arabia and Patriot surface-to-air missiles to Kuwait, Jordan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates, in the expectation that Iran goes ballistic if Israel decides that it's going to go in and wipe out Hamas.
	Hamas, obviously, is an Iranian proxy, and Iran doesn't want to see them taken off the board.
	So the question is going to be whether Iran tries to call the U.S.' 's bluff.
	It'd be the worst mistake they ever made, by the way.
	I truly believe that even as much as I am afraid of the weakness of the Biden administration, as much as they send mixed signals, if American bases are fully attacked, if U.S.
	ships are attacked, It'll be the worst thing Iran ever did for itself.
	That'd be a huge mistake, which is why, in the end, I think that Iran is signaling a lot, but I don't think they're actually going to do anything overwhelming.
	Right now, what they are doing is pursuing low-level conflict sufficient to let everybody know that they're upset.
	They're pursuing low-level conflict sufficient to tie up Israeli forces in the north, for example, and to signal to Hamas that they want them to continue what they're doing.
	But, Again, I don't think that Iran is irrational enough to step over the line with the United States in the region.
	Meanwhile, the Biden administration, again, those mixed signals are wild.
	Yesterday, I played a clip of Karine Jean-Pierre, the press secretary for the White House, absolutely incompetent, terrible at her job, being asked about rising anti-Semitism in the United States, pretending it doesn't exist, and then immediately launching into a speech about Islamophobia.
	Well, yesterday, she had to walk that back because, again, she's terrible at her job.
	I want to make something clear at the top because I understand how important moral clarity is, especially at this time.
	So, when Jews are targeted because of their beliefs or their identity, when Israel is singled out because of anti-Jewish hatred, that is anti-Semitism.
	And that is unacceptable.
	There is no place for anti-Semitism.
	Full stop.
	Period.
	This is important to the President, it's important to me personally, and to everyone in the administration.
	Following the Hamas terror attacks in Israel, which were the deadliest for Jews since the Holocaust, the President has been consistent and clear.
	We must all do our part and forcefully, forcefully speak out against anti-Semitism.
	And we must ensure that there is no place for hate in America.
	Yeah, you know, it'd be a great start would be expelling Rashida Tlaib from Congress.
	I still have yet to see any members of Congress actually asked about Rashida Tlaib, who continues to maintain, by the way, falsely, that Israel bombed a hospital in Gaza.
	She continues to maintain that, despite all evidence to the contrary.
	It does not matter to her because, of course, she is a pathological liar and a terror supporter.
	So that, of course, is no shock at all.
	One of the reasons that the world feels capable of slipping back into this ridiculous moral equivalent, the soft, Lukewarm bathwater of moral relativism is because the media do it for them.
	The media make it super easy.
	So last night, for example, CNN's Aaron Burnett was talking about the conditions under which hostages are being held.
	There's still 200 plus hostages who are being held in bondage by Hamas.
	And again, the world community seems to have far less words for Hamas holding hostages than they do for Israel trying to kill members of Hamas.
	In any case, here is Aaron Burnett Weirdly praising the conditions under which hostages are being held?
	I've never heard this before.
	Honestly, I've never heard a situation in which a hostage is taken, babies, the elderly, and the media are like, yes, but they do have sinks.
	What the?
	What the?
	What?
	Some things stand out in there.
	The mundane necessity, right?
	You're talking about tunnels.
	We know these tunnels have ventilation.
	We know that they've been known to have air conditioning.
	This has all been reporting that we've heard from the Israelis over the years.
	But the fact that she's saying she was held underground for more than two weeks, that
	there was shampoo, there was antibiotics, there was a guard per hostage in the experience
	she had, that there were medics and paramedics, and obviously she is elderly, the other woman
	who was released also elderly and had medical needs, and that they had the medicine needed
	and if not, something similar to replace it.
	It is pretty stunning because you've got to contrast that with what's happening above
	the ground, right?
	Where there isn't water, never mind shampoo, okay?
	They don't have water.
	They're using toilet water.
	There is no morphine for any kind of amputations.
	Antibiotics, no, right?
	But Hamas had stockpiled all of that and has all of that underground and that's what we're learning from her.
	That's weird.
	Why are we describing the magic of the tunnel networks?
	I mean, what she should be saying, Erin Burnett, the logical conclusion of what she should be saying there is because Hamas cares about keeping terrorists and doesn't give a crap about its own civilians.
	But, of course, CNN is never going to go quite that far.
	Again, moral equivalence to hell of a drug.
	By the way, in a good move from the other side of the aisle.
	Florida's university system, working with Governor Ron DeSantis, ordered colleges on Tuesday to shut down a pro-Palestinian student organization, this would be a pro-Hamas organization, the Students for Justice in Palestine, which is leading a lot of these pro-Hamas protests all over the place.
	Administrators have said that National SJP identified itself as part of Hamas' attack, and it was a felony under Florida law to provide material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization.
	So that, of course, is a positive move.
	I've seen some people claiming that DeSantis is somehow not pro-Israel enough.
	That is a bizarre statement, considering he's the most pro-Israel politician In America and the most effective on that score by an extraordinarily long shot.
	And meanwhile, you're starting to see fallout at the university level.
	So elite universities have always relied on these major donors who've been giving to their alma maters in order to prop them up.
	Well now, finally, some of the liberal Jews have been giving a lot of money to these organizations are realizing that actually they've been contributing money to people who don't care about the murder of their co-religionists.
	Like, at all.
	And they're starting to pull their cash.
	We'll get to that momentarily.
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	Okay, meanwhile, The interpolation of terrorist supporters in the West continues apace.
	The reality, which is that there are a lot of people who support terrorism and anti-Semitism all over the globe, That is not relegated to foreign countries.
	That is very true here in the United States as well, which is why you are starting to see some donors at major American universities look at the universities and realize exactly what it is that they've done.
	The universities have full-scale embraced the decolonization narrative.
	That narrative started with people like Frantz Fanon back in the 1950s and 1960s, claiming that the way that the third world was going to decolonize would have to involve violence against Western institutions.
	Those Western institutions were evil and they had to be done away with.
	There's going to be a violent movement.
	There's a lot of sympathy for that in left-wing circles, Marxist circles particularly.
	That united with the sort of intersectional critical theory movement to produce the idea that decolonization was not just a project for the third world, it was something that had to happen here at home, which is why you see Black Lives Matter united with the Friends for Non-Revolutionaries.
	This is why you see Queers for Palestine, for example, that's what that is.
	And so that is the leading, bleeding edge of the ideological revolution at these major universities.
	It's why you see mass protests at universities in favor of Hamas, In which you see, again, the local trans group marching.
	It doesn't seem to make sense from the outside, except that you have to understand this is the quote-unquote coalition of the wretched, the coalition of the oppressed, and they are rising up against the institutions of the West.
	It's not an attack on Israel, it's an attack on Western institutions, as Western institutions, a lot of people who are sort of liberal hollow men fellow travelers.
	We're fine with this for a long time because they thought, okay, well, we also, you know, we don't love the institutions and it buys us some street cred with the left wing if we pretend along.
	The Hollow Men fellow travelers, the people that Tom Wolfe described in a very famous essay written in the Late 1960s, called Radical Chic, that party at Lenny's which was all about Leonard Bernstein, the left winger, who hosted the Black Panthers at his apartment.
	And the Black Panthers were telling all the white people that they wanted to kill them and all the white people were patting them on the head and posing for pictures with them.
	Because that's what they do, because it meant that they were cool.
	That sort of attitude has lasted until now, except for at a certain point it actually sets in that these people actually do want to kill you, and they're not joking, and that they're not actually your friends, and that in fact they are perfectly fine with watching your compatriots get murdered.
	And so you're starting to see liberal Jewish donors in major universities and other liberals who are not happy with this start to pull their money.
	According to the Wall Street Journal, David Megerman was in Israel celebrating a holiday by dancing with a Torah in synagogue when Hamas attacked the country earlier this month.
	When his alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania, put out a statement a few days later that called the assault horrific but didn't explicitly condemn Hamas, he was then sentenced.
	So he simply pulled his money.
	Top universities, such as Harvard and Penn, are facing backlash from alumni angry about the school's reactions to the attacks and their aftermath.
	Some say it was the final straw after years of growing disenchantment with the schools over what they see as a leftward political shift.
	That includes people like President Larry Summers.
	He used to be the president of Harvard University.
	Retail billionaire Leslie Wexler's foundation said that it would cut financial ties with Harvard and a program it funded at the school for Israelis.
	Wexner and his wife donated more than $42 million to Harvard University.
	On Monday, a group of prominent alumni, including Mitt Romney and investors Seth Klarman and Bill Hellman, published an open letter to Harvard criticizing the school's leadership.
	Penn is facing a giant donor revolt from people like Ronald Lauder and Apollo Global Management Chief Executive Mark Rowan.
	They're pulling their money as well, as well they should.
	It's beyond time.
	All the masks are coming up.
	The only thing that I can say about what has happened in the last three weeks is that all the masks are currently off.
	Like, all of them.
	There are no more masks, and that's why the world looks so ugly today.
	And so you see the West struggling to please put the mask back on.
	Please put it back on.
	Let's pretend that everybody's moderate.
	Let's pretend that the two-state solution is really the answer.
	Let's pretend that what's happening on college campuses is just another fun aspect of free speech.
	Let's just pretend.
	Let's just pretend.
	But everybody can tell that it's bullcrap.
	Everyone can tell.
	All the masks are off, and people are being forced to take sides.
	And people don't like taking sides, and so again, they're rushing for the moral equivalence, they're looking, they're grasping at straws, begging for any excuse to go back to status quo ante.
	But guess what?
	The world was never status quo ante.
	You guys all got it wrong.
	And at a certain point, you're gonna have to recognize you got it wrong if you wish to live in the real world and make the real world a better place.
	It turns out that the world of fantasy and illusion you built up in your own mind, where everybody is your potential friend, and the intersectional coalition, they're all your buddies, and all these people, who have been openly calling for revolution against Western institutions, with Israel as the tip of the spear, that all those people were not lying.
	They were saying it directly to your face, and you, in your great sophistication and wisdom, decided that they didn't understand their own little hearts.
	You were more broad-minded than they were.
	You understood what they really, really wanted.
	And that was a lie.
	You were pretending.
	Some of them were lying to you.
	Some of them were pretending that what they wanted was a two-state solution in Israel.
	What they really wanted was a little bit more leeway when it came to criminal justice reform.
	But it turns out that a lot of those people, they were lying to you.
	And that's not what they wanted at all.
	And what they said to their own friends is something very different than what they said to you.
	And people are starting to realize that.
	And you know what?
	Maybe that's the only silver lining to horrifying situations like this, is that reality tends to generate its own solutions.
	Okay, meanwhile, The Republicans continue to battle over who will be the next Speaker of the House.
	This battle continued yesterday when Tom Emmer went down to flaming defeat.
	Tom Emmer, of course, was a Minnesota congressperson who was running for Speaker of the House.
	He was considered by some people to moderate because he was pro same-sex marriage.
	Donald Trump tried to torpedo him, but the reality is that he was going down to flaming defeat anyway.
	It wasn't really Trump that did it.
	Trump is taking credit for it, but Trump backed Jim Jordan.
	That didn't put him over the top.
	But this makes Trump happy.
	So, according to Politico, just hours after Tom Emmer won the Republican Conference's nomination to be House Speaker on Tuesday, former President Donald Trump took to Truth Social to deride him as, quote, a totally out of touch with Republican voters' globalist rhino.
	He then got on the phone with members to express his aversion for Emmer and his bid for Speaker.
	By Tuesday afternoon, he said, he's done, it's over, I killed him.
	And just minutes later, Emmer officially dropped out of the race.
	Now, again, the chances that Emmer was going to move forward anyway were pretty low.
	Not just because Trump didn't support him, but because he just didn't have the kind of under-the-table friendships that enough people needed in order to get to 217.
	So the latest nominee is apparently Mike Johnson.
	Is Mike Johnson going to get to 217?
	Who the hell knows?
	So first, the Republicans had to hold another celebration about torpedoing another nominee.
	So Marjorie Taylor Greene said it's good that Tom Emmer is out.
	Here she was yesterday.
	Had you communicated to him that you couldn't change your opinion, you sort of were locked in on opposing him?
	I opposed him openly in the conference, in our roll call vote, and that was simple enough for me.
	There was more conversations that went on in the conference, but he's dropped out now, and I think this is good.
	Here's what's going on.
	The GOP conference is changing.
	And it's changing to reflect America first.
	And Republican voters overwhelmingly support President Trump.
	And the GOP conference and the Speaker of the House should do the same.
	Okay, I mean, that's all well and good, except that McCarthy also supported Trump, and Trump supported McCarthy, and you guys ousted him anyway, so that was weird.
	Not Marjorie Taylor Greene, who voted against ousting McCarthy, for what it's worth, but there's no question that herding the Republicans at this point, as Republican Representative Mike Flood of Nebraska said, it's like herding meth-ridden cats.
	Not an inaccurate comparison.
	Are you interested?
	I was speaker of the Nebraska unicameral legislature, which, by the way, is officially nonpartisan.
	It's like herding cats on methamphetamine.
	And when I got to Washington, I thought, the unicameral followed me to Washington, D.C.
	No party discipline, no party leadership.
	It reminds me a little bit of 49 individual state senators running around, but no, I think I need a little bit more than 15 months to do that job.
	So, yeah, I mean, nobody really wants to j— In any case, Mike Johnson is the guy who's up for the job today.
	We'll get to his chances of actually being the next speaker, which are better than Tom Emmer's, and apparently Jim Jordan's, and Steve Scalise's, and Kevin McCarthy's.
	By the way, we're only about, like, 216 members away from getting back to Kevin McCarthy's.
	We go around the endless wheel of speakers.
	We'll get to that momentarily first.
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	Politico seems to think maybe the answer is yes.
	Maybe this long national nightmare for Republicans is coming to an end.
	Representative Mike Johnson became the latest GOP conference nominee.
	This time, there was no backbiting, no ultimatums, no snarky comments to reporters, just cheers and an overwhelming sense of relief.
	It's not over yet.
	Three lawmakers voted present during a roll call poll of the conference.
	22 GOP lawmakers were absent.
	So it's possible there might be a decisive handful of never-Mikes hiding out there, but the lack of vocal opposition and surfeit of genuine enthusiasm that was aired last night on opposing sides of the House GOP Marked a significant shift after three weeks of chaos.
	Mike is a straightforward leader who can unite us, as Republicans wrote.
	Representative Carlos Jimenez of Florida, who's one of the centrists, who has been not voting for some of the nominees.
	Johnson is the right guy at the right time, says Representative Chip Roy, who is, of course, on the right of the caucus.
	Representative Ken Buck of Colorado.
	He said, I think he gets it tomorrow.
	Johnson was not anyone's first choice.
	Far from it.
	On the first ballot on Tuesday morning, he garnered only 34 votes, but he doesn't have a lot of enemies because he's a lot lower profile than a lot of the other Republicans who are in the House.
	All these other people have made enemies.
	Johnson, not so much.
	He's a 51-year-old Shreveport native.
	He came into elective politics in 2016.
	So he hasn't been in the House all that long, but he is the chairman of the Republican Study Committee.
	As the former RSC chairman and current chair of the Judiciary Subcommittee, he's sort of a wonky guy.
	He doesn't have a lot of outward ambition, and so he's sort of the guy who they came to in the end.
	He'd be the least experienced speaker in the history of the House.
	He is in his fourth full term, and he's never served in senior leadership at all.
	So, he's not like a big fundraiser.
	Some of the things that are going to come up, obviously, is that he was an organizer of an amicus brief in favor of overturning the certification of electoral votes.
	But it does seem like the Republicans are finally tired of this and Johnson is the least offensive guy on the block.
	I'm sure he'll be fine at the job.
	I'm sure he will because everyone has the same incentive structure.
	You know who would have been fine?
	Any of these people.
	The one thing that has to change is if he takes the job, he has to get rid of this idiotic rule whereby he needs Republican unanimity in order to go forward.
	He cannot continue to be Speaker of the House with the rule in place that any member at any time can call effectively for a no-confidence vote against him.
	That needs to stop right the hell now.
	Here's Representative Johnson last night announcing his Speakership bid.
	We want to thank all the press for waiting.
	It's been quite a process.
	Democracy is messy sometimes, but it is our system.
	This conference that you see, this House Republican majority is united.
	Hey, well, that would be nice.
	Because it seems like there are some things to do.
	So, perhaps the Republicans this time will get their act together.
	And if not, then the endless wheel of speaker candidates will continue.
	Okay, meanwhile...
	The economy continues to cool down.
	Again, Republicans have been provided a target rich environment by the Biden administration.
	You have the world on fire nearly everywhere.
	You have the economy continuing to overheat despite radically increased interest rates.
	Right now, according to the Wall Street Journal, we have the highest bond yields in 16 years.
	Quote, the yield on the U.S.
	Treasury, 10-year Treasury, touched 5% on Monday for the first time in 16 years after climbing rapidly in recent weeks.
	That is among many borrowing costs, including for other long-term government debt, mortgages, credit cards, auto purchases, business loans that could slow the surprisingly resilient economy.
	Rising rates come on top of other potential impediments for the economy.
	Those include the conflict in the Middle East, prolonged labor strikes.
	Meanwhile, higher yields lift borrowing costs for the U.S.
	government amid ballooning national debt.
	The economy has remained strong over the past year.
	If higher long-term rates persist, they could increase the risks of a broader and deeper downturn rather than the so-called soft landing.
	Those higher rates are going to crimp consumer spending.
	But more than ever, what this means is that it's just very hard to take out new debt.
	As the bond yields continue to increase, what you're going to see, effectively speaking, is very difficult monetization of the debt.
	That's weird.
	Also, you're going to see money that is now being shifted away from the stock market and toward the bond market.
	When yields are this high and you can secure a 5% yield on bonds, that's a pretty solid yield on bonds.
	Are you going to bet in the stock market on the other side?
	The only reason not to is because you think that the federal government is going to raise the interest rates and the old bonds are going to be worth less than they are even now.
	Which could happen.
	All this uncertainty is creating enormous friction in the economy.
	Meanwhile, Joe Biden's plan is to spend more money.
	Not just on foreign policy.
	He is now calling for $50 billion more on urgent domestic needs.
	This guy just, he has one solution, and it's more cowbell.
	He just needs a fire hose with money, and he's just gonna fire it everywhere.
	The proposed legislation will call for more funding for child care, high-speed internet access, natural disaster relief, and firefighters battling wildfires, among other domestic policy priorities, according to the White House Office of Management and Budget Director, Shalonda Young.
	This is the Washington Post reporting.
	It's not clear how much funding the president will propose for each program.
	So, again, the White House just recently unveiled that $106 billion aid package, primarily focusing on funding for Ukraine and Israel.
	It includes Taiwan aid, it includes some border security stuff, and now he's adding on top of that another $50 billion, because why the hell not?
	It's not as though if we just keep spending into an inflationary economy, the inflation will continue.
	That would be crazy.
	That's exactly what he's doing, by the way.
	And it is going to continue.
	Meanwhile, the UAW continues its strike that has now been going on for weeks and weeks and weeks.
	Unions all over the country are looking at the Biden administration as a patsy and somebody they can play in force into a position of taking an anti-management position.
	And so more and more unions are looking at the possibility of striking and creating friction in the American economy.
	Joe Biden's gonna have a rough re-elect road if Republicans don't do what they are so fond of doing, which is jump on a rake repeatedly.
	Joe Biden has been awful on every available front.
	It is possible to be awful.
	So if Republicans could, you know, start to make some moves towards sanity, that would definitely be a welcome change.
	Alrighty guys, the rest of the show continues right now.
	You don't want to miss it.
	We'll be joined by Shadi Khalil.
	Shadi is the president and founder of ICAA, the Israeli Christian Aramaic Association.
	He is, of course, an Israeli Christian and he's going to give us an update from the ground.
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