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Nov. 3, 2023 - The Ben Shapiro Show
55:09
The Islamophobia Lie
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Less than a month ago, we saw the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust.
Since then, we've also seen the worst global spike in anti-Semitism since the Holocaust.
According to Reuters, quote, in countries where figures are available from police or civil society groups, including the United States, Britain, France, Germany, and South Africa, the pattern is clear.
The number of anti-Semitic incidents has gone up since October 7th by several hundred percent compared with the same period last year.
Such incidents range from verbal abuse to threats to property attacks to actual assaults.
Some are happening on our nation's campuses.
This one happened at Harvard, where the editor of the Harvard Law Review, Ibrahim Baramal, joined in.
You can see the crowd mobilizing around a Jewish student, pushing the Jewish student around.
Again, one of these people is the editor of the Harvard Law Review.
Anti-Semitism also extends into the administrative halls of our universities.
Georgetown just hired the radical anti-Semite Anissa Johnson as new assistant director of academic affairs.
Here are some of her posts.
This is July 7th.
Quote, ever since going to NU, I have a deep-seated hatred for ziobleeps.
They bring out the worst in me.
You know why I call them ziobleeps?
Because they're dogs.
This is the kind of person who apparently gets hired at Georgetown.
Meanwhile, Ilya Shapiro, a law professor, was thrown out of his job for the crime of suggesting that Joe Biden was picking judicial nominees based on race, which he said himself.
Meanwhile, some Jewish businesses are being boycotted for the crime of being Jewish businesses.
According to the Washington Post, more than 30 Jewish eateries and markets in Philadelphia are now being hit with a boycott organized by a pro-Hamas group because they are, quote, owned by Zionists.
Even some shops that aren't even owned by Jews are being boycotted because they serve Israeli food, because according to the Philly-Palestine coalition, such a food is, quote, a means of erasing Palestinian existence, unquote.
But there's something peculiar about all the media reports about the extravagant spike in anti-Semitism.
Every single story also carries notes about a supposedly concomitant rise in Islamophobia.
This is odd, to say the least.
What the hell does Islamophobia have to do with antisemitism?
The answer is, precisely nothing.
Precisely nothing, that is, unless you wish to suggest that response to antisemitism is linked with Islamophobia.
That if you wish to oppose radical Muslim antisemitism, that, in fact, is an aspect of Islamophobia.
Which, of course, is precisely what antisemites are suggesting these days.
Take, for example, Corey Saylor of the Council on American Islamic Relations.
CARE is the most frequently cited group in America on, quote, rising Islamophobia.
CARE is also a group that, by the way, was an unindicted co-conspirator in the trial of Hamas front charity, the Holy Land Foundation.
Saylor himself refuses to condemn boycotts on Jewish businesses.
He told the Washington Post, quote, it is 100% on the table to criticize supporters of Israeli apartheid.
Care itself accuses Israel of, quote, textbook ethnic cleansing and war crime for defending itself, trots out anti-Semite extraordinaire Linda Sarsour, and promotes the Hamas lie that Israel bombed a hospital.
Of course, it was Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
On October 7th, the date of the Hamas massacre, Care National tweeted, quote, we join the American Muslim community in reaffirming our support for the Palestinian people's right to freedom and calling for an end to the Israeli occupation, which sparks the deadly violence that we see again and again, including today.
On October 7th, before any Israeli response at all, CAIR also called for an end to American aid to Israel and the Abraham Accords.
The group has not offered a single word condemning Hamas.
In other words, CAIR is anti-Semitic.
Good thing the Biden administration infamously invited CAIR to participate in its national anti-Semitism strategy back in May.
CAIR is, by any stretch of the imagination, a giant fomenter of anti-Semitism.
But that, of course, is the point of focusing on supposed Islamophobia.
The goal is to treat response to antisemitism as a form of Islamophobia.
So, for example, Saylor claims it is Islamophobia to publicize the names of students who signed petitions siding with Hamas, while simultaneously claiming it's not antisemitism to boycott Jewish businesses because they're Jewish.
Fascinating.
Columbia University is playing the same game.
The president of Columbia University sent out a letter yesterday praising the quote persistence and perseverance of students who have signed letters supporting Hamas after their names and faces have been shown publicly.
Opposing Hamas means Islamophobia apparently.
The legacy media feel the same way too.
That's precisely why since October 7th the media have rushed to link anti-semitism and Islamophobia as though the two phenomena are part of a cycle of hatred.
That's a disgusting wrong take that excuses antisemitism through false charges of Islamophobia.
But it's an extraordinarily common take on the left these days.
One variation on the theme comes from Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, who has now emerged as one of the nation's leading antisemites.
She now accuses the American Israel Public Affairs Committee of being an extremist group attempting to undermine American democracy and targeting members of color.
Yes, those wily Jews and their dirty shekels are clearly the problem as antisemitism around the nation spikes.
They must be stopped, according to AOC.
The Biden administration itself is falling into the trap of linking anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, a link that has the purposeful goal of demonizing opposition to Hamas.
Fearful of their own base, the Biden administration announced yesterday a White House national strategy to combat Islamophobia, again, in the middle of the worst spike in anti-Semitism of my lifetime or my parents' lifetime.
Karine Jean-Pierre explained, quote, But Islamophobia is the real issue.
in America and those perceived to be Muslim, such as Arabs and Sikhs, have endured a disproportionate
number of hate-fueled attacks and other discriminatory incidents. In actuality, Sikhs are targeted far
more often than Muslims, according to the FBI, despite representing just a few hundred thousand
people in the United States. Jews represent around 60 percent of all victims of federally
monitored hate crime, despite representing about two percent of the American population.
But Islamophobia is the real issue. Here was Vice President Kamala Harris announcing the
new initiative yesterday. As a result of the Hamas terrorist attack in Israel and the humanitarian
crisis in Gaza, we have seen an uptick in anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab, anti-Semitic
and Islamophobic incidents across America, including the brutal attack of a Palestinian
American woman who was Muslim and the killing of her six-year-old son.
A senseless act of violence that the Department of Justice is investigating as a hate crime.
For so many people in our nation, the past few days and weeks have brought about all too familiar fears.
Fears that they will be targeted, profiled, or attacked simply because of who they are, how they worship, or how they look.
Again, linking these two things is ridiculous.
The case that she cites, by the way, which is a horrifying crime against a Palestinian-American mom and her child.
Horrifying, horrifying crime.
Condemned by literally everyone.
You can't find a Jew in America who won't condemn it.
However, you can find Care National that will not condemn Hamas.
So why is the White House playing this game?
Because they're attempting to buy back the support of radical Muslims across the United States who are enraged that the White House has sided with Israel instead of Hamas.
The latest polls show that nearly 6 in 10 American Muslims agree that Hamas was justified in attacking Israel as part of their struggle for a Palestinian state.
The White House is trying to buy off the Hamas fans by jabbering about the supposed victimhood to which those Hamas fans are subjected.
It's perverse.
It continues to drive a false narrative that opposition to Hamas and opposition to Hamas fans is opposition to Muslims more broadly, a proposition that Muslims themselves should reject.
Although we're still waiting for a lot of people to do so.
The moderate Muslims have been conspicuously silent.
If the Biden administration feels the necessity to keep radical Muslims in their electoral coalition by pandering, that says something pretty nasty about their moral stature in fighting anti-Semitism, as they claim they actually want to do.
In just one second, we'll get to the situation in Britain.
Which is going to become a lot worse over the course of the next few weeks.
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Over in Britain, a lot of this is going to come to a head because apparently there is a planned pro-Hamas rally, a million strong march in favor of Hamas and of course against those horrible Jews who are defending themselves in Israel.
They're going to do it on Remembrance Day.
According to the UK Express, an MP has now called for the military to be drafted in to keep the peace in London after it emerged that these protesters are organizing their march on Remembrance Day.
The planned day of the protest, November 11th, will clash directly with this year's Remembrance Day.
It comes a day before the annual Cenotaph Memorial for Remembrance Sunday.
Despite the head of the Met, Sir Mark Rowley, telling the London Assembly the protesters, quote, will not be allowed near the official events or to disrupt them, there are serious concerns about how such a large protest can take place while maintaining law and order.
A Tory MP has told the Express that the Metropolitan Police and Sadiq Khan, who is the mayor of London, must ask for military assistance.
Crowley MP Henry Smith said, quote, And that, of course, is exactly right.
of demonstrations where the cenotaph and other national monuments have been grossly disrespected.
It's completely inappropriate for further protests to be held over Remembrance Weekend.
He said, I don't have confidence in the mayor of London or the police under him to properly handle the situation
given their past poor record.
And that of course is exactly right.
I mean, the fact is that the West imported a huge number of radical Muslims who hate Jews and hate the West
and who have been taking advantage of the great material beneficence of the West to live there.
That's not every Muslim.
There are many Muslims who are happy to live in a place like Britain or like the United States and who are happy to engage with Western countries and imbibe from the well of Western values.
There are many of those people.
They're just not the people who are marching in favor of Hamas.
And those people, there are a lot of those people.
And trying to pretend that that's not happening in the face of images that are extraordinary from places like London or from America's college campuses, that is absolutely foolhardy.
Now, what's amazing about all of this is that because the media have basically taken the side of Hamas in this conflict, which was the most predictable thing, they swiveled directly from, we can't believe this atrocity that Hamas created to, Israel is committing atrocities every single day.
It's absolutely terrible.
It's the Occupation II state solution.
Like, just parroting every Hamas talking point.
Because of that, you're starting to see wavering inside the Biden administration.
And it's only coming from a radical few, by the way.
It does show the power of the legacy media.
Now, for all the talk about how the legacy media has been challenged or overthrown, and it's true, they haven't been completely overthrown.
They still have an enormous amount of weight with members, for example, of the Biden administration.
All it takes is a radical few people to apparently move the Democratic coalition toward placating Hamas in some way.
So yesterday, Mr. President, if you care about Jewish people as a rabbi, I need you to call for a ceasefire right now.
a female rabbi.
This person, again, has about as much to do with Judaism as a buttered lobster.
Here is, quote-unquote, Rabbi Jessica Rosenberg calling for a ceasefire.
Mr. President, if you care about Jewish people as a rabbi, I need you to call for a ceasefire right now.
Get out! Get out!
A pause means give time to get the prisoners out.
I'm the guy that convinced Bibi to call for a ceasefire to let the prisoners out.
I'm the guy that talked to Sisi to convince him to open the door.
The heckler was escorted out by security while singing ceasefire now.
So, this, by the way, is a picture of quote-unquote Rabbi Jessica Rosenberg.
So yeah, just like a normal rabbi.
You can see, this person probably has a rabbinic degree from Yeshiva University, from Ritz.
This person obviously is knowledgeable in all aspects of halakha.
I mean, except for every single aspect of halakha.
But sure, a posake, a gadol hador over here.
I know it's a lot of Hebrew for people who are not inside the Orthodox community, but everybody who's in Orthodox town right now is laughing because that's an absurdity piled on top of an absurdity.
What's amazing though...
is that the Democratic Party seems increasingly interested in ignoring its own voters.
I mean, the reality is that young voters in America, Democratic young voters, are against Israel.
But everybody else in the United States is very much in favor of Israel wiping away Hamas.
In fact, pulling data from Echelon Insights, quote, who do you think is mostly responsible
for civilian casualties in the Gaza Strip? Total number.
64% Hamas.
This is in the battleground states.
64% Hamas.
14% Israel.
22% unsure.
I mean, that is strong support.
That is very, very strong support for Israel in the battleground states.
This is a popular position.
In fact, even among demographic groups that the Biden administration is gonna disproportionately rely upon.
Say, for example, black voters.
Black voters support Israel over Hamas in who's responsible for the civilian casualties.
They say Hamas, 44% to 20%.
In fact, even among young voters who are supposedly Biden's core demographic.
30% of people aged 18 to 29 say Hamas, 24% say Israel, 46% say unsure.
Now, as per our usual arrangement, the older you get in the United States, apparently age does confer wisdom.
If you get to the 65 plus crowd, 83% say Hamas is responsible for civilian casualties, only 4% say Israel.
Again, demonstrating that young people in the United States are unbelievably ignorant and stupid.
But we knew that anyway, by the way.
There's a hilarious video going around that I'll play for you in a moment, demonstrating just how little people know about anything when they say that they support Hamas or support, quote unquote, free Palestine from the river to the sea and all this nonsense.
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And when young people say that they are in favor of Hamas, it's because they literally don't know what they're talking about.
If you go to any of these rallies, and you find a person who is not a radical Muslim, you just find a left-wing fellow traveler, and you ask them, which river and which sea are you talking about?
When you say, from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free?
They can't name them.
If you ask them on a map of Israel, where exactly do you want Palestine to be?
If you give them a map of the world, they won't even know where exactly, quote-unquote, Palestine is supposed to be on the map.
This was exposed by a pretty funny video yesterday.
This is a person going up to young people and asking them to sign a petition to help Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
And then he reads them the details.
Doing a quick petition to help Hamas-free Palestine.
You're all in?
Alright.
Oh yeah, you're in?
I just have to read terms and conditions just so you know what you're signing.
By supporting Hamas-free Palestine, you agree to the following.
You agree that every Jew, Christian, and non-Muslim in the world must be slaughtered.
I don't know about that one.
You endorse making homosexuality punishable by jail or death?
What?
What?
Oh no, I don't agree.
You don't agree with that?
You believe Iran should use Palestinians as puppets to spread radical jihad and destroy the West?
No?
No?
No.
I'm glad I read the Terms and Agreements.
I'm sorry.
Not interested?
Sharia law which bans women from showing their knees, hair, playing sports in public, not
being able to travel without a man's permission.
I'm sorry, I'm not interested.
Not interested?
Oh, okay.
You want a terrorist group that beheads babies and rapes girls to replace only democracy
in the Middle East?
I'm not sure that's something to support.
I'm not sure that's something to support.
something to support.
So if I sign, I agree with this?
Yes.
Maybe no.
No?
Okay.
Oh no, thank you.
I don't support any of these two things that you described to me, so I won't be able to sign this now.
That's fair.
Thanks for not signing.
Okay, so that is Mikey Greenblatt, and he's just going up to people.
People express support for the quote-unquote oppressed without thinking about whether the oppressed are actually oppressed or actually good.
And that's one of the reasons why you see young people constantly resonating to the wrong side of conflicts.
They constantly do this.
They look at any conflict, and because they've been taught to think in a deconstructionist way, because they think of all relationships as relationships of power, and this is what they've been taught in their schools, what they've been taught in their universities, because when they do...
The first thing they do is they say who's powerful and who has less power.
And whoever is powerful must be bad, and whoever is powerless must be exploited, oppressed, and therefore good.
And of course, that's a lie.
But they don't think about any of that stuff, and so they sign on to these movements until it's too late, obviously.
Now, the thing about this is that the Democrats should know better, but apparently they don't.
So now you're hearing rumblings that the Biden administration is going to try to put pressure on Israel for some sort of humanitarian ceasefire or to ship fuel in to the Gaza Strip.
Let me explain something about this fuel situation.
Hamas has hundreds of thousands of gallons of fuel.
They're using it to maintain their presence in these tunnels, because when the fuel goes out, all of their generators go out.
When the generators go out, you can't live underground.
They would have to come up and actually fight the Israelis, like men, instead of like rats.
But instead, what they are doing is they're staying down in the tunnels, and they are hiding their civilians on top, so that if Israel has to strike the tunnels, civilians get killed, and then they can go to the compliant press, the complacent press, the pro-Hamas press, and then get those people to mimic their line, that Israel is attempting to kill civilians.
When Israel is the only party in this conflict attempting to minimize the killing of civilians.
I should point out at this point...
That Hamas is the governing power in the Gaza Strip.
Any governing power's first responsibility is to protect its citizens.
That's the first responsibility.
You know how I know this?
Because Israel, for example, right now, Hezbollah is threatening on the northern border.
Israel took 30,000 of its own citizens and moved them inland from the northern border.
No one talks about that, of course, because that's a population movement of Jews.
No one cares about that.
By the way, speaking of other population movements, Pakistan is now expelling 1.7 million Afghans from Pakistan back into Afghanistan.
No one cares because it's Muslim on Muslim.
Doesn't matter.
Because when Muslims do horrible things to Muslims, no one cares at all.
In fact, as it turns out, when Muslims do horrible things to Jews, a lot of people don't seem to care very much.
It's only when Jews defend themselves that people really seem to start caring a lot.
In any case, Gaza is filled with fuel.
It's just all controlled by Hamas.
When you ship in more fuel, it is not going to power the hospitals.
It is going to power Hamas.
In fact, there is a reason why Hamas apparently has stationed virtually all of its fuel sources under al-Shifa Hospital.
It's not to power the hospital.
They've been claiming that al-Shifa Hospital is running out of fuel.
And literally, like, a few yards underground is the fuel.
Why?
Because that fuel is not going to the hospital.
That's the whole point.
So when you have people like Joe Biden telling Israel to ship fuel in that is immediately going to be stolen by Hamas to power their tunnels, all you are doing is prolonging this conflict.
All you are doing is making the situation worse.
Meanwhile, You have Tony Blinken trying to tell Israel that maybe, maybe, maybe there should be some ceasefires.
They don't like the strategy.
Let me make this clear.
Israel, on a timeline, has been engaged in the ground conflict part of this war for less than a week.
For less than a week.
And already the West is starting to lose its nerve.
Again, no shock from some of the usual suspects and, of course, prompted by the pro-Hamas media.
So already, you're starting to see the wavering members of the Democratic coalition.
You knew who they were going to be.
It's all the most left-wing members of the Democratic coalition.
It's Senator Dick Durbin from Illinois.
Senator Dick Durbin is the same guy who once compared American soldiers in Iraq to Pol Pot.
And now this moral genius, he's suggesting that he wants a ceasefire.
By the way, a ceasefire helps only one party in this conflict, Hamas.
The reason that they are begging, screaming, pleading for a ceasefire right now is because Israel, tactically speaking, is now surrounding Gaza City.
A huge percentage of Hamas' leadership is in Gaza City.
The reason they want a ceasefire right now is to restock, to resupply, to maybe smuggle people out.
That's the whole reason for the ceasefire.
By the way, there was a ceasefire in place between Israel and Hamas until October 6th.
Then on October 7th, that ceasefire was violated by the worst anti-Semitic killings since the Holocaust.
All these moral dementia patients, like Dick Durbin, calling for a ceasefire on behalf of Hamas.
Truly, truly vile.
Here we go.
Is a ceasefire needed now?
I think it is.
At least in the context of both sides agreeing.
For example, the release of those who have been kidnapped should be part of this.
Immediate release.
That should be the beginning of it.
An effort should be made to engage in conversation between The Israelis and the Palestinians.
Let's face it, this has gone on for decades.
Whenever the rationale from the beginning has now reached an intolerable level, we need to have a resolution in the Middle East that gives some promise for the future.
It's reached an intolerable level?
Which part was the intolerable part?
The part where they slaughtered 1,500 Jews and took another 200 prisoners?
Killed a bunch of foreign people as well?
Is it like what, our holding American citizens killed a bunch of American citizens?
Which part of that, which is, how, what was the level at which it reached intolerable for Dick Durbin?
Was it when there were some ugly pictures on TV because war is ugly and horrific, especially when your enemy is propping up women and children in front of bombs to try to protect their terrorists?
Again, the insane logic of people who are now suggesting that it is up to Israel to stop killing terrorists because those terrorists have chosen to hide themselves among civilians.
That's so insane.
That is literally saying to terrorists, the best thing you can do to protect yourself is hide with civilians.
That's what you are saying.
You're saying the smartest thing you can do is murder civilians on the other side and then run and hide behind civilians on your own side.
In other words, the more laws of war you violate, the more we can call on the other side to not kill you, which is totally the reverse of the incentive structure you want to set up.
If the whole point of the rules of war is to get people into uniform on a battlefield away from civilians, then you can't reward them for hiding behind civilians, which is exactly what Dick Durbin wants to do.
Same thing with Chris Murphy.
Chris Murphy, of course, is the ridiculous senator from Connecticut.
He's always been really soft when it comes to Israel.
He says, as I've said consistently, Israel has a right and an obligation to defend its people from terror attacks like the horrific events of October 7th.
The Hamas terrorists who planned and executed those attacks must be held accountable, and the ability of Hamas to carry out similar attacks in the future must be eliminated.
It's time for Israel's friends to recognize the current operational approach is causing an unacceptable level of civilian harm and does not appear likely to achieve the goal of permanently ending the threat from Hamas.
From Chris Murphy?
Okay, like, military advice from Chris Murphy?
I'm just wondering, who knows more about military battle in the Middle East?
Chris Murphy, or the entire IDF?
I mean, let's be fair, he did get his JD from University of Connecticut Law School.
I mean, that's pretty impressive in terms of his military credentials to talk about what is going to be successful militarily and what is not.
When he says this is not dedicated toward eliminating Hamas or is unlikely to eliminate, then why is Hamas standing for the ceasefire?
Why does Hamas want the ceasefire?
Why is Hamas on Chris Murphy's side?
Presumably, if it were in the best interest of Israel to Pursue a ceasefire, it would be Hamas not wanting a ceasefire and Israel wanting a ceasefire.
Trying to pretend that he's a friend of Israel while undercutting Israel's military policy is ridiculously stupid.
Or corrupt, or both.
He says, as we have learned from America's own counterterrorism campaigns, disproportionately large number of civilian casualties come with a moral cost, but also a strategic cost, as terrorist groups feed off of grievances caused by civilian harm.
Israel is doing its best to distinguish between civilian and terrorist in the Gaza Strip.
Hamas is attempting to obscure that, and he is now declaring that Hamas should effectively have him immunity.
He says, I share Israel's desire to destroy the threat from Hamas.
No, you don't.
He says, I know Israel cares about the impact of this war on innocent Palestinians, even as they track Hamas' hideouts inside and below mosques, apartment buildings, and schools.
But the way in which the current campaign is being waged suggests they've not struck the right balance between military necessity and proportionality.
He says he urges Israel to shift to a more deliberate and proportionate counter-terrorism campaign, surgically targeting Hamas and Islamic Jihad leaders and terrorist infrastructure, while more highly prioritizing the safety of civilians.
So, I'm just wondering, what exactly does that look like?
I assume what he means is he wants more Jewish soldiers to die in Gaza, going house to house.
I presume that's what he means.
He should just say that out loud.
That he thinks that the Jewish army has an obligation to get many, many, many of its soldiers murdered on the streets of Gaza by terrorists and some quasi-civilian supporters.
I mean, by the way, the distinction between civilian and non-civilian is very real, but it's very difficult when people blur the line.
There are many civilians, people who are not formal members of Hamas, who took part in the actual attacks of October 7th.
There's film of them doing so.
But of course, Chris Murphy, it's not about principle here.
Trying to argue with people like Chris Murphy, it's very difficult because, frankly, Chris Murphy doesn't care about the truth and he doesn't care about the reality.
He cares about the outcome.
And the outcome for him is that he wants pressure on Israel.
The media want that too.
Which presumably is why they're constantly blasting out, like truly blasting out, Hamas propagandists.
So just a couple days ago, I played on this show a video report from the Washington Post that featured some social media influencers from Gaza.
One of them was a woman named Plestia Alakad.
Well, it turns out that a lot of these quote unquote social media influencers from Gaza It turns out a huge number of those people are, you know, actual propaganda fronts for Hamas.
Shocker.
According to the Jerusalem Post, Plestia Al-Akkad has more than a million followers and calls herself an independent journalist, but spread the lie on Instagram and in an interview with British TV that Israel bombed the Al-Akhli hospital and killed more than a thousand people.
She told Britain's GB News, quote, it's a genocide, literally a genocide and not a massacre.
In her post, she has not provided any explanation for the commencement of the airstrikes on Gaza, namely the October 7th massacre.
Another influential figure is Bisan Ouda, who presents herself as a filmmaker hailing from Gaza, Palestine, with a substantial following numbering in the hundreds of thousands.
Her posts have received endorsements from well-known figures associated with anti-Semitism and conspiracy theories.
Following the October 7th massacre, she posted a note in Arabic on social media.
For every action, there's a reaction.
This means, what was expected after 75 years of occupation and 17 years of siege?
What was expected of us?
She has been quoted as a quote, ambassador of goodwill on ABC News and legitimized on the BBC.
And this is very common in the media.
Again, they're still using the Council on American Islamic Relations, which was once labeled an unindicted co-conspirator in a conspiracy to funnel money from a false charity called the Holy Land Foundation to Hamas.
And they're being quoted by the media as a source on Islamophobia.
I searched the entire Karen National feed yesterday.
They have not once condemned Hamas.
Not once.
Ever.
Literally ever.
And yet they are seen as some sort of moderate force?
The media are perfectly willing to overlook the actual extreme anti-Semitic radicalism of many of the sources they are using in order to rip Israel.
That is their favorite thing to do.
And again, this is the game.
The media ignore context.
They ignore realities of war.
They ignore who exactly is hiding civilians in front of their bombs.
Caitlin Collins on CNN is doing a horrific job on this.
Here she was yesterday asking an advisor to Benjamin Netanyahu how many Palestinians were killed in a strike on a refugee camp.
And he says, well, we don't know the answer to that.
By the way, Hamas doesn't know either.
They're just lying to the American media.
But here is Caitlin Collins asking like six times.
Why did Israel strike again here?
And do you know how many civilians have been killed in this area as a result of these strikes yesterday and today?
So we know we've taken out a senior Hamas commander who was directly involved in the massacre of October 7th.
As you will recall, there were rapes, there were beheadings, there were people burnt alive.
Birds so badly, until today we've got 130 bodies that we can't recognize who they are.
They're just ashes.
And anyone who was involved, especially a commander of the operation, we have a duty to find them and to bring them to justice.
Okay, but you're not acknowledging how many... I assume Israel does have an estimate of how many civilians were killed.
I assume you have an estimate of how many civilians are there when you make a calculus on when to strike.
Tell me if that's wrong.
But when you decide on striking targets that you say are military targets but are also where civilians are, I mean, how many civilian deaths does Israel believe are acceptable in an airstrike if it is a military target?
So obviously we try to keep any collateral damage to a minimum, as minimum as possible.
And the advantage of this particular location is that it has been largely, not totally, but largely evacuated because we were telling people there two weeks ago longer that they should evacuate.
Okay, so again, CNN putting the pressure on, and this is the goal of the media, put the pressure on Israel.
Why isn't Israel taking care of the civilians better?
Why isn't Israel doing a better job with civilians?
There are reports that during that Jabalia strike, that there were women and children who literally marched out by Hamas, literally marched out by Hamas in order to get them killed.
This is not a surprise.
They say this crap openly.
Again, it would be one thing if I were alleging it.
It's another thing for Hamas to just say it.
And they constantly say it.
And then everybody just ignores it.
It's unreal.
It's unreal.
This is why you can hear it.
There's frustration in my voice.
There's been frustration in my voice for a month.
Why?
Because usually I'm in the business of trying to provide what I think are reasonable arguments to generally people I think are reasonable and are able to hear reasonable arguments.
And if I'm wrong, I'm wrong.
But we can make reasonable arguments and we can disagree on these things.
When Hamas says a thing, and then I repeat that they have said the thing, and then people say, I don't care whether Hamas said the thing, doesn't matter, it's Israel's fault.
Or, sure, Hamas said the thing, but they don't really mean it deep down.
Or, sure, Hamas said it, and they really mean it, but the real reason is that it's the Jews, after all.
You're no longer engaged in anything remotely resembling a rational conversation, you're engaged in a propagandistic effort to prop up a genocidal Jew-hating group that openly declares its desire to exterminate Jews.
And then you expect people to have arguments with that.
There's no way to have an argument with that position because that's not a rational position.
And it's not a position that's capable of being breached by rational thought.
That's the part that's extremely hard.
But you're seeing it all over the media from supposedly rational people.
You've got Ezra Klein who's declaring what's going on in Gaza.
It's like 400 9-11s.
Well, I'm sure that statistically that's true.
You know who could stop that?
Hamas.
Tomorrow.
Why don't any of you people just call for Hamas to surrender?
It's amazing.
You can't get a single one of the people who are decrying the horrors happening in Gaza to say that Hamas should just surrender.
It will end literally tomorrow if Hamas surrenders.
They're holding 242 hostages right now, including dozens of small children, babies, nine-month-olds, and they murdered 1,500 people in their beds.
In peaceful civilian villages.
And your idea is it's Israel's fault?
And so all we're supposed to look at are the casualty numbers that are created by Hamas specifically so you will do this.
It's just Hamas agitprop out of the mouth of mainstream media reporters.
Palestinian health officials say that more than 8,000 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed since October 7th.
And I want to note here that there is a fog of war.
It is possible these numbers are wrong.
It is also, of course, possible that practically by the end of this, these numbers will be much higher.
But if you take something like the 8,000 numbers right, well, then one way the horror of October 7th was driven home, one way its scale was driven home to Americans, was to put it in terms of 9-11s.
Adjusting for population, Joe Biden said it was like 15 9-11s.
If you take that same math, then Gaza's experienced so far around 400 9-11s.
Again, just strip it of context and just give casualty numbers without noting who's responsible for the thing.
Again, as I've said, I said this at Oxford.
I said this at Cambridge.
You know, if all you look at is disproportion in casualty numbers...
Then every American war, every Western war of pretty much all time, the West was wrong.
Because it turns out that during World War II, you know who died the most?
Germans.
If you look at the British and the Americans versus the Germans, lots more Germans died than British and Americans.
Because that's sort of the point of the war is to win the war.
You don't tend to win the war by losing more people.
Like literally the only nation on earth that tends to lose more people and win wars is Russia because they just throw endless masses of bodies at every single war, historically speaking.
But generally speaking, when you win a war, that does involve a lot of death on the other side.
And that's even when the other side is not hiding in civilian areas.
How much worse is it when the other side is deliberately hiding in civilian areas?
And yet the media strip it all of context.
Meanwhile, I got the UN, the disgusting Mos Eisley of the UN, saying that all this might be a war crime.
Then when confronted with the actual realities of war, then they say, oh, well, no, no, no, actually, you know what?
I don't want to talk about that.
What's amazing about this, as I'll show you in a second, is that the legacy media just mirror, like the perspectives are indistinguishable from the perspectives of people who stand for Hamas.
From the perspective of people who create a moral equivalence between Hamas and Israel, and who lie for a living.
I'll get some more on this in just one second.
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One of the truly amazing things about our disgusting legacy media is that these supposed objective arbiters of truth and reality, they just mirror the perspectives of the most radical members of the decolonized coalition.
So I've talked on the show over the past couple of weeks about the philosophy that links, for example, Black Lives Matter with the From the River to the Sea people.
Like, what do those people have in common?
Why are there queers for Palestine?
Why are all these people marching in the same coalition?
And the answer is because they hate the West.
And they think the West is truly, truly a horrifyingly bad place.
The leader of that coalition in the United States for a long time was Ta-Nehisi Coates.
And he was treated with this sort of bizarre reverence and respect despite the fact that he's a garbage writer.
I'm sorry.
I'm just going to put it out there.
He's not a good writer.
He's incredibly purple.
He's been wildly overrated.
I wouldn't even say that he's a poor man's James Baldwin.
He's like a dead man's James Baldwin.
He doesn't have any of the skill.
He's not a good debater.
He is not a good thinker.
He's not a good writer.
There's literally nothing appealing about him other than he uses purple language.
Also, dude really, really stands for Hamas.
Why?
Because again, oppressor versus oppressed, colonizer versus colonized, and all the rest of this.
So yesterday, and as I've said before, the broader philosophy that is worth noting here, the broader philosophy is hatred of the West.
You'll notice that replete throughout what this Ta-Nehisi Coates person says.
Not a shock, again, he wrote in his own book, a book celebrated by our legacy media, who are on the same side.
He wrote in his own book that on 9-11 he sat at the top of his apartment building and watched the towers burn and smoked blunt and felt nothing.
He literally writes that in his own book because that's how much he hates the country.
And yet this person is seen as some sort of bizarre moral exemplar.
Because he writes garbage like between the world and me.
Oh, between the world and me.
Oh, you're a real intellectual.
In any case, here's pseudo-intellectual Ta-Nehisi Coates.
And again, the stuff that he spouts is almost indistinguishable from our quote-unquote objective media.
We have to stand on principle.
And if I'm a latecomer to the Palestinian cause, I'm also a latecomer to the cause of nonviolence.
But I'm here now, you know, and knowing what that is meant to our history.
Sorry, can you pause it there for a second?
He's a latecomer to the cause of nonviolence?
He's literally standing for the most violent terror group on the planet in Hamas right now.
I mean, literally every governing body of the Palestinians is a violent terror group.
The Palestinian Authority, Islamic Jihad, Fatah, which is the military wing of the PA.
These are all violent. But don't worry, he's an advocate of nonviolence. It's beyond parody.
It would be beyond parody, except that people are so stupid.
People are so f***ing moronic that they have no clue that what he's saying is garbage.
You actually have to know a few things to know how dumb he is, but it doesn't matter. People don't
know things, so he gets away with it.
There is no way in the world that we can leverage the memory of Dr. Martin Luther King.
There's no way in the world we can leverage the weight, the ancestry of our movement in defense of a war, in defense of indiscriminate bombings or refugee camps.
Indiscriminate?
We can't do that.
We can't do that.
We would be a disgrace to our ancestors.
And I would look out and I would see roads that Palestinians could use.
And roads that only Israeli Jews could use.
I said, I know what this is.
Okay, pause it for a second.
Pause it for a second.
Okay, so he says that he went to, he went to Israel, which he calls Palestine.
He said, I saw only roads that Israelis could use and only roads that Palestinians could use.
Actually, that's not true.
There are roads that both Palestinians and Israelis can use.
Those are the ones owned by Israel.
You have to get through a checkpoint so Israel can make sure that you are not a terrorist.
And then you are free to use it as a Palestinian or an Israeli.
And then there are only roads that Palestinians can use.
So in fact, there is no road that only Israelis can use.
There are roads that Israelis and Palestinians can use if you're not a terrorist.
And then there are roads that only Palestinians can use.
Why?
Because there are no Jews living inside the Palestinian Authority.
None.
They will be murdered.
There are none living under Hamas because they would be murdered.
So he's lying right off the bat.
Because I saw different colored license plates for different classes of people.
I said, I know what this is.
Yes, but stop it there.
Different colored license plates because Palestinian Authority people, people living under the auspices of the Palestinian Authority, live under a different government.
Of course!
That's like saying you saw Canadian license plates and United States license plates.
Duh!
Yes, that is correct!
Why would they have Israeli license plates?
They're not Israeli citizens!
As I saw communities that I can only describe as segregated, and what I felt was a tremendous weight.
I felt the obvious thing that I think all of us feel that our tax dollars are effectively subsidizing apartheid, subsidizing a segregationist order, a Jim Crow regime.
He went on to say that Israel is a democracy like America is the world's oldest democracy.
And that was the key point.
Because again, he hates America.
He hates the West.
He thinks that they are bad.
He benefits from them.
He plays on suckers in the West to pay him oodles of money to write his absolute dumpster fire books.
And they pay him tons of money to give stupid speeches?
And then he rips on the West.
Because the West has a suicide wish.
That is the only reason why the West has ever tolerated people who spend all day just ripping on them.
And when I say tolerate, I mean people who they've imported.
Because obviously citizens in the United States have free speech.
I will say, however, that making those people rich is an insane thing.
Ta-Nehisi Coates is a respect- You know that DC Comics had a deal with Ta-Nehisi Coates?
That human was writing the super- He was actually, until like a year ago, writing a Superman movie for J.J.
Abrams.
That guy!
That's how deeply embedded in our culture this garbage is.
If you don't think it's a threat to America, you got it totally wrong.
The threat doesn't have to come directly from Hamas.
It can come from the entire decolonized coalition, which is perfectly fine with violence.
Don't be fooled by his garbage about nonviolence.
He's literally supporting people who do terrorist violence.
That's what he does.
And the media?
Their view is almost indistinguishable.
Okay, meanwhile, Israel's defense minister, Yoav Galant, he says that Hamas has one choice here.
You can either surrender or you can die.
Which, by the way, is the proper answer to when people slaughter in Mos, civilian citizens, because they're evil.
So here's Yoav Galant, he's the defense minister of Israel, saying this yesterday.
We're not going to stop until we eliminate all of them, all levels of command and lower.
The enemy has two options only, either to die or to give up, surrender without any conditions.
Okay, that is right.
Meanwhile, Hassan Nasrallah, who is the head of Hezbollah, he was supposed to make his first sort of live in-person appearance in Lebanon in years because he's been hiding in a bunker somewhere while he watches people get killed on the northern border of Israel for a very long time.
He didn't.
He gave his speech.
It was a recorded speech from a sewer somewhere.
And in his speech, He, of course, called the attacks on Israel heroic.
So just a reminder, Hezbollah is an Iranian-backed terror group armed with 150,000 rockets minimum pointed into the north of Israel, which is why there are currently 30,000 Israelis who are not living in their homes in northern Israel.
The big question of the day was going to be whether Hassan Nasrallah led off a new Hezbollah-led war.
My prediction had always been that that would not happen, because Hezbollah understands that especially with two American aircraft carriers stationed off the coast, if they start a war in Israel's north, they just will not exist.
It'll be bloody and horrible for Israel, and also Lebanon will be destroyed.
Because Israel will be stretched, and Israel will have to do whatever it has to do to maintain the safety of its own citizens.
So Nasrallah is basically mouthing off from what I can tell at this point.
He's going to continue to try to draw forces north away from the Gaza Strip, but it seems unlikely that he is going to push too hard to go directly into war.
So that is the situation in terms of Israel and the Palestinians and Hezbollah and all the rest.
We'll see how it develops over the weekend.
Meanwhile, In the House of the United States government, there has been a vast disagreement about how to fund Israel.
So, you have the Biden administration, which is trying to lump together a bunch of things.
They're trying to lump together Ukraine aid.
They want $60 billion more dollars in Ukraine aid, some $14 billion in aid to Israel, a few billion dollars for border security, and like $7 billion for Taiwan.
And they're trying to lump all that together in a $105 billion package.
Well, Mike Johnson, the new Speaker of the House, he pushed forward and then passed an Israel-only bill.
And the Israel only aid bill is just aid to Israel.
And he does it by taking money away from the IRS.
Now the Democrats are claiming, of course, that this is a poison pill.
This house proposal is going nowhere.
Basically what we have now is a game of chicken.
The game of chicken is that the Democrats are hoping to wrong foot the Republicans
by getting them not to fund Israel in favor of not funding Ukraine.
And the Republicans are trying to wrong foot Democrats by saying, guys,
why can't you just give aid directly to Israel?
Obviously, I'm on the right-wing side of that argument.
I don't understand why these issues are the same.
They are not.
The battle in Ukraine, I'm fully in favor, by the way, of continuing to provide Ukraine the aid to maintain its own security inside of the post-2014 borders.
I say post-2014 because right now Ukraine is trying to push into the Donbass and Crimea.
I'd be fully in favor of them doing that if there's an actual possibility of them winning.
They've shown over the course of the last year that that probably is not a possibility.
In fact, that's extraordinarily unlikely.
In fact, Ukrainian ministers are now saying that's extraordinarily unlikely, so the question becomes what the end of that war looks like.
That doesn't mean that you're in favor of undermining Ukrainian security.
Ukraine should be funded to the point where it can certainly prevent Russia from doing this again.
Plus, I'm very much in favor of degrading the Russian military capacity, since they're aggressive on every front they can find, including in the Middle East.
So drawing Russian resources into battle in Donbass or Crimea is fine with me.
I don't have a generalized problem with that, but $60 billion is a lot of money.
So that is a different issue, and it's a slightly more complex issue, than the issue of funding Israel and attempting to exterminate an actual terror group, Hamas.
Which it can do, and is achievable.
Very achievable.
Okay, so separating off the two causes makes a lot of sense, but both sides are now accusing each other of putting poison pills in their bills to wrong-foot the other.
The poison pill for the Republicans is apparently that they're trying to defund the IRS in order to do this.
The Democrats are mad about that.
Here was Chuck Schumer saying that.
The Democratic majority leader has already declared his verdict on the proposal.
The House GOP proposal is not going anywhere.
It's dead before it even is voted on.
Okay, so he says that's going nowhere, but the question is going to be whether the reverse is true.
Whether the Senate proposal, which is the giant $105 billion proposal, whether that gets rejected by the House.
And so basically we now have a game of chicken.
As I say, I think the next step for Mike Johnson is probably to disconnect the Israel aid from the IRS defunding.
I think that again would wrong for Democrats.
And it's like, okay, fine.
You don't want us to, you love your IRS so much?
Fine, we'll just take that out.
And here's the Israel aid, just pass it.
No poison pills, nothing, like a clean Israel aid bill.
That'd be very hard for Democrats to reject.
I assume that's the next step that Johnson is going to take if in fact the Senate and President Biden decide to veto.
Biden has threatened to veto this particular proposal.
It'll be interesting to see whether he does veto that particular proposal in favor of, we need to cram down aid for Ukraine in the middle of all this.
Okay, in other non-Middle East related news, apparently Sam Bankman Freed, you remember him, he was the FTX founder who basically bilked people of billions and billions of dollars, like robbed Peter to pay Paul's essentially giant pyramid scheme.
Well, a jury has now found Sam Bankman Freed guilty on all seven criminal counts against him.
The FTX founder faces a maximum sentence of 115 years in prison.
Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement, Sam Bankman Freed thought he was above the law.
Today's verdict proves that he was wrong.
So he was a person who believed that his political connections were going to allow him to get off scot-free.
He was the biggest single Democrat donor in the last election cycle.
Other members of FTX gave some money to Republicans as well.
The government flipped a bunch of people against him, including his ex-girlfriend, Caroline Ellison, and the former head of Alameda and FTX co-founder, Gary Wang, whose Bankman Freed's childhood friend from math camp both pled guilty in December and then cooperated as witnesses for the prosecution to get off easier.
As CNBC says, the central question for jurors to consider was whether Bankman Freed acted with criminal intent in taking customer funds from FTX and using that money to pay for real estate venture investments, corporate sponsorships, political donations, and to cover losses at Alameda after crypto prices plunged last year.
There was $10 billion in customer money that went missing.
So Bankman Freed now awaits sentencing.
We'll see how long he ends up going to jail.
Now, one of the things that's so funny about the whole Sam Bankman Freed situation, as we talked about when the story first broke, is that Sam Bankman Freed had built his entire persona around, quote-unquote, effective altruism.
And the idea was, if you give me a lot of money, if you give me tons of money, and I'll spend a lot of that money on politics, I'll spend a lot of that money on the causes that you love most, I'll be really rich and then I'll spend... Now, The basic idea, which is that one of the great aspects of capitalism is that when people become rich, they give a lot more charity.
That's true.
I give a lot more charity now when I make a lot more money than I did 15 years ago when I made a lot less money.
However, the basic hiding behind altruism in order to justify his own business malpractice and his political payoffs and all the rest was one of Benkman Freed's favorite things.
And he was made a hero for this.
He was put on the cover of magazines and Jim Cramer praising him to the skies.
Again, he briefly held the title of the world's richest 30-year-old.
He had an estimated net worth of $20 billion.
And one of the ways he distinguished himself from his competitors was how altruistic and magical he was going to be.
He was going to just spend money on the things that mattered most.
And he took a bunch of people in.
According to a columnist at Coindesk, Despite the wreckage he caused and the accompanying failure to do good, there remain numerous voices sympathetic to SBF.
Chief among them is well-known author Michael Lewis.
Throughout his new book on SBF and FTX, Going Infinite, he paints a portrait of SBF as a misunderstood genius whose intentions were pure.
On his book tour, Lewis continues to say things like, quote, I think of him as a creature of modern finance.
At almost any period in history, he's like a high school physics teacher.
Well, if Lewis is right, says this columnist, he should be indicting modern finance wholesale.
After all, SBF, by skipping the effort of honestly earning the money he gave away, never actually performed a genuinely altruistic deed.
See, this is one of the things that people should also notice about altruism.
When it comes to the business world, we tend to think of business and altruism as in opposition to one another, or as though business is not a form of altruism.
If business is done right, it is in fact the best form of altruism.
So Maimonides, one of the great Jewish thinkers of all time, Maimonides suggested the highest form of charity was giving somebody a job.
That's the highest form of charity.
Not giving them money, giving them a job.
Why?
Because it turns out that the most good that you do for the world is a sustainable method for generating things that are good for other people.
You know what we usually call those markets?
Markets are usually where you generate a sustainable, repeatable method of doing a good thing for another person.
If I give charity, eventually, if I don't earn more money, the charity runs out.
If I give you a job, and that means that you can earn a living, and meanwhile, you're providing me with good or service that I can use to generate more goods and services, and then I can pay other people, and I can buy other things.
I've helped many, many more people that way than I would have if I just gave away the money.
Just giving away the money in some cases is obviously justified.
There are people who can't work.
There are people, children, orphans.
This is why the Bible focuses when it talks about the sort of class of people who require charity on widows and orphans.
Why?
Because the idea is that widows are going to have a hard time earning a living and orphans don't have anybody to take care of them.
What it doesn't focus on are people who are capable of working and somehow you should give them charity because they won't work.
Or the idea that charity is supposed to be specifically designed At causes that could be better done in a sustainable way.
You want to talk about sustainability?
Markets create sustainability.
Charity is generally non-sustainable.
This is interesting, for example, socialism and capitalism.
Socialism is how do I redistribute everybody else's money.
Capitalism is how do I create entirely new lines of business thus to support money earning by millions more people, which is why when capitalism is tried, it succeeds.
In socialism, the best you can talk about with socialism is redistributing the gains.
That's all you can talk about.
That's why the, quote-unquote, social democratic nations in Northern Europe are very capitalistic in the way they pursue business.
And then they just have very, very strong welfare structures on top of that.
But if the entire system, obviously, were nationalized systems, the entire thing would collapse.
It would look like the USSR.
Which is why it's always been a lie to suggest that countries in Northern Europe are predominantly characterized by their socialism.
They're not.
They're predominantly characterized by their capitalist business structures.
The heads of the government of Denmark have said as much.
When you call them socialists, they get annoyed.
They're like, what are you talking about?
There's no nationalization of resources here.
There's redistribution of some resources at the top level in the same way that they have a mixed economy.
In other words, the same as the United States.
It's just that their mixed economy happens to be significantly smaller.
Their population tends to be significantly more homogenous.
And their redistributive weight tends to be greater.
But the sort of point of Sam Beckman Freed is that when you place altruism in differentiation from business, you end up being a bad business person.
You end up treating business as though business is the dirty part and altruism is the good part when that's wrong.
I've said this before and I'll say it again.
Bill Gates did more for the world by creating Microsoft than he has in giving away his billions of dollars to charity.
Why?
Because he has led to the employment of probably hundreds of thousands of people, not just directly at Microsoft, but indirectly through his software.
That is a massive good to the world.
And we tend to think of the only time we judge people based on their intent and the intent.
If your intent is pure, that means that your action is more beneficent, and that's wrong.
That's just not true.
If I intend with this $1 donation to do something good, it's just out of my pocket, no benefit to me.
Here's $1.
I've done significantly less good than we do at this company, which is employed 300 people.
Alrighty folks, the rest of the show continues right now.
You're not going to want to miss it.
We'll get into the 2024 race.
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