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Nov. 27, 2023 - The Ben Shapiro Show
47:22
Why Conor McGregor Is Now Under Investigation
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Over the weekend, MMA legend Conor McGregor got himself into serious legal trouble with the Irish authorities.
So what precisely did McGregor, a national hero, do?
He tweeted.
And he didn't just tweet.
He tweeted something unsayable.
Now, there are certain things that have been deemed unsayable by every society.
Usually those things cut at the very root of that society.
Incitement of murder, for example, undermines the rule of law.
Expressing support for enemies during time of war, for example, undermines the ability of the government to win victories.
So we can tell a lot about a society by the kinds of speech it actually seeks to ban.
In Ireland, that speech amounts to criticism of open immigration.
On Thursday, three kids and a woman were stabbed in a knife attack outside a school in Ireland, allegedly by an Algerian immigrant in his 50s with mental illness.
Bystanders tackled the man.
But many Irish citizens were fighting mad about the incident, which they saw as indicative of the government's looseness about migrants entering the country.
From April 2022 to April 2023, Ireland saw a 16-year high of 141,600 immigrants, including
40,000 Ukrainians. Increasing economic insecurity combined with that high level of immigration
put Ireland on the path to conflagration.
Rioters clashed with the police.
They set vehicles on fire.
They looted.
It was the largest riot in Ireland in decades.
34 people were arrested.
One police officer was seriously injured.
The Prime Minister, Leo Varadkar, condemned the riots and quote, waves of ignorance and criminality and said, quote, those involved have brought shame on Dublin, brought shame on Ireland and brought shame on their families and themselves.
This is not who we are.
This is not who we want to be.
And this is not who we will ever be.
So what exactly did Conor McGregor do?
Well, he spent the past few days tweeting about the Irish government's absurdly lax immigration policies.
When the Prime Minister urged migrants to register to vote in Ireland, McGregor tweeted, quote, Imagine the United States.
This is the most preposterous, ridiculous, scheming attempt at gaining votes this government has attempted yet.
A real showing of the lack of care they have for the common Irish citizen.
As it stands, they do not have my vote.
Shame on them.
Before the stabbing attacks, McGregor tweeted, quote, Ireland, we are at war.
After the attacks, in response to the Irish Garda Commissioner claiming that a, quote, hooligan faction driven by far-right ideology is behind the riots, McGregor tweeted, quote, innocent children ruthlessly stabbed by a mentally deranged non-national in Dublin, Ireland today.
Our chief of police had this to say on the riots in the aftermath.
Drew, not good enough.
There is grave danger among us in Ireland that should never be here in the first place, and there has been zero action done to support the public in any way, shape, or form with this frightening fact.
Not.
Good.
Enough.
Make change or make way.
Ireland for the victory.
God bless those attacked today, we pray.
He then added, you reap what you sow.
McGregor also tweeted that stabbers should be punished with torture and death.
He said, quote, any update on the well-being of those stabbed today?
Absolutely horrific scenes all day.
My stomach is churning with no action being taken at all during these ever more frequent events, like literally zero action taken whatsoever.
How do we expect an end to this?
We need reform.
We need action.
McGregor did add a compliment for the Brazilian immigrant who had stopped the knife attacks, stating, quote, the working man is the real hero.
Bravo to our Brazilian brother in Ireland, working hard, earning a living, contributing to Irish society.
This is it.
We love, appreciate and respect you greatly.
Thank you so much.
Kaio Benicio, you're forever free to eat at my establishment.
Then he said, quote, We are not losing any more of our women and children to sick and twisted people who should not even be in Ireland in the first place.
Call it what you want.
We do not care.
He stated that violence, by the way, had achieved nothing toward fixing the issues we face.
He continued.
I do understand frustrations, however, and I do understand a move must be made to ensure the change we need is ushered in and fast.
And he added, I'm in the process of arranging.
Believe me, I'm way more tactical and I have backing.
There will be change in Ireland.
Mark my words.
The change needed.
Now, all of this is passionate, but it is standard anti-mass migration rhetoric.
Yet it drew rebuke from Ireland's Deputy Prime Minister, Michael Martin, who called McGregor's statements, quote, absolutely disgraceful and explained, quote, isolated voices like that and voices that are essentially inciting hate and to a degree, to some extent, incitement are unacceptable.
So what's happening now?
Well, the Irish police are now investigating Conor McGregor for supposed dissemination of online hate speech.
So what does that mean?
Well, it means that for the left in the West, the unsayable thing also happens to be obviously true.
Mass migration often presents a real threat to the cultural cohesion of a nation and combined with generous welfare payments can endanger the socioeconomic status of an entire country.
This is the unsayable thing.
It's unsayable in Canada and some of Europe.
And in these places, it can be prosecutable because it is dangerous.
But why should those comments be unsayable?
Why should they be dangerous?
Because, according to the left, the world is made up of oppressors and oppressed.
There are no cultural differences.
They don't exist.
They're not important.
Only class differences exist.
And class differences are reflections of economic exploitation that can only be cured by Marxist redistributionist materialism.
Diversity is our strength, says the old saw.
Never mind that according to Harvard left-wing sociologist Robert Putnam, quote, the only two things that go up as the diversity of your census tract goes up are protest marches and television watching.
No, no, no, no.
Diversity is our strength because the more migrants who arrive in your country, a rich welfare state, the more pressure there will be for class-based change.
This is why we see the left-wing nostrum that when a culture war takes place, That culture war is actually fake.
It's created by the elite.
The real solidarity should be class-based solidarity.
Any other perspective must be outlawed.
The pressures.
Diversity is our strength.
Must be protected.
It should be no surprise, therefore, that Prime Minister Varadkar spent the weekend calling for more hate speech laws, and at the same time also saying that the Israeli hostages taken by Hamas had been, quote, lost.
Not kidnapped.
Lost.
He literally tweeted, this is a day of enormous joy and relief for Emily Han, that's one of the released hostages.
An innocent child who was lost has now been found and returned.
We breathe a massive sigh of relief.
Our prayers have been answered.
Lost, you know, like you'd lose a puppy.
Because, for Varadkar, to label Hamas what it is would be to acknowledge precisely the sorts of cultural difference the left cannot be allowed to acknowledge.
But here's the thing.
Everybody knows those cultural differences exist, and they are a problem.
Westerners are beginning to openly acknowledge precisely those cultural differences, and they should.
As Ayaan Hirsi Ali has pointed out, from 2009 to 2021, some 3 million immigrants have come to Europe, mostly from the Middle East and Africa.
Two-thirds were male.
80% were under the age of 35.
Unsurprisingly, sexual coercion has become far more commonplace across Europe.
In 2017 in Germany, for example, sexual coercion and rape jumped 41%.
Between 1997 and 2013, some 1,400 children were sexually abused and rather him in the UK.
The media refused to even report the story because they believe that doing so might cause a quote spike in racism.
According to Professor Alexis Jay's report on the story, quote, several counselors interviewed believe that by
opening up these issues, they could be giving oxygen to racist perspectives that
might in turn attract extremist political groups and threaten community
cohesion.
Remember, noticing is what threatens community cohesion.
In the Netherlands, which Ayaan Hirsi Ali had to leave thanks to threats
from radical Muslims of exactly the same ilk who murdered her filmmaking
partner, Theo Van Gogh in 2004, Muslims represent at least 5% of the population.
According to Leon Zwinter of De Telegraaf, as of 2017, non-Western immigrants in the Netherlands and their children are, quote, half of welfare recipients, but only 11% of the total population.
Among recent Somali refugees granted asylum, 80% are on welfare.
No wonder, then, that over the weekend, Gert Wilders of the Party for Freedom finished first in last week's parliamentary elections in the Netherlands.
Wilders has been a longtime icon of the right in the Netherlands.
He spent decades warning about the Islamicization of the Netherlands.
Wilders was caught on tape this weekend.
Here is what he had to say.
As a speaker, to wrap up, I have a message for all the Muslims in the Netherlands who do not respect our freedom, our democracy, and our core values, who find the rules of the Koran more important than our secular laws.
There are many more of these.
Research by Professor Koeman shows there are 700,000.
And my message to them is, get out.
And my message to them is, get out.
Leave for an Islamic country.
Wael Derz as an anti-mass migration advocate also wants an exit.
A Netherlands exit from the heavy hand of the pro-mass migration European Union.
He wants a reduction in the overseas aid budget, slashing to EU funding, curbing of entry to foreign students.
He wants more police officers and zero tolerance of crime.
It's not just Gerd Wilders.
In the Netherlands.
From Giorgio Moloni in Italy, to Viktor Orban in Hungary, to the Finns party in Finland, to the Sweden Democrats, Europe is bucking against multiculturalism.
And Europe should.
Multiculturalism without assimilation to Western values is a dramatic failure.
Oddly, though, the media seem to continue to press the idea that opposing mass migration from cultures that actually kind of hate the West, well, that just means generalized xenophobia.
It's all about racism or Islamophobia or whatever.
That isn't true.
Many of the same parties pushing against mass Muslim migration are incredibly pro-Jewish, for example, and back Israel in its current conflict with Hamas.
That's certainly true of Wilders, who's an Israel supporter.
So is George Maloney.
So is Viktor Orban.
As it turns out, radical Muslims don't like Jews.
They are anti-Semitic.
And it turns out, being pro-multiculturalism, while promoting mass migration of radical Muslims, very often links up with anti-Semitism.
While opposing mass migration, very often amounts to fighting anti-Semitism when the mass migration is coming from countries where people generally hate Jews.
But again, reporting the truth on these issues means undercutting the left-wing lie that culture isn't the problem, class is.
And that is the unsayable, forbidden thing.
But silencing is not going to work for long, as McGregor is showing.
The Europeans are not going quietly into the multicultural light, and attempts to ram Europeans who want to protect their culture back into the diversity is our strength box are doomed to fail.
Okay, meanwhile, over in Britain, there were more pro-Hamas protests over the weekend.
As always, there was a giant pro-Israel protest over the weekend.
It was mainly ignored by the media.
About 100,000 people showed up.
It was perfectly calm.
It was perfectly quiet.
No media coverage.
There was, however, a lot of vile harassment taking place at the pro-Hamas protests.
Here's some of the footage from the pro-Hamas protests, at which, again, monuments were defaced.
People were climbing up on them.
People were slapping.
Cameras out of the hands of cameramen.
Here's some of the actual footage, and then we'll get to even the reporters recognizing how bad this is.
It's coming down now.
There we go.
Of course, masked face dressed like terrorists.
So we have, there we go, we got, it's a peaceful protest, yeah?
The police are asking, and here come some of the, here comes some of the pro-Khamasniks are slapping cameras out of their hands.
Meanwhile, releasing smoke bombs in the center of London.
This is like every weekend in London now.
One British reporter explained what it was like to actually cover the pro-Hamas rallies.
It turns out that the people at these rallies are not particularly nice.
In the last hour or so, we, the cameramen, our backwatcher, who's here to keep us safe, had really quite an unpleasant experience.
A guy on a tannoy shouting at us, wanted to know who we were broadcasting from.
He wouldn't go away.
He was very persistent.
Eventually, I said, GB News.
At that point, he just I can't tell you what he said, but it was vile, fascist, scum, etc.
A group of people came round us, all shouting at us.
I have to say, it was very intimidating.
I was shaking by the end of it.
Now, one of the things that is amazing about this is that Britain right now is caving to these protesters.
As we saw just over the last couple of weeks, Rishi Sunak laid off Svela Braverman, who's the Home Secretary, for mentioning the same sort of stuff that many other members of the populist right are mentioning from France, to Germany, to Sweden, to Finland, to Italy, to Hungary.
He laid her off.
Because, of course, the populace cannot be allowed to say the unsayable thing.
Gerard Baker points this out over at the Wall Street Journal.
He says, the culture war in the UK between the people and the establishment, in which the people for a heady moment seized control over matters like immigration, national sovereignty, criminal justice, and the right not to be ashamed of their race or cultural heritage, has ended.
The establishment appears to have won.
Last week, the formal surrender papers were signed.
First, Rishi Sunak, who became prime minister a year ago after a pantomime performance by his ruling conservative party had ousted two predecessors in quick succession, brought back into government David Cameron, the man who inadvertently fired the first shot in the populist revolt by calling the referendum on Brexit seven years ago.
If you wanted a caricature of the English establishment, there is none better than Mr. Cameron.
Mr. Cameron isn't just the man who insisted the British people endorse membership in the EU on the pain of economic punishment.
He also boasted of having inaugurated a golden age of relations between the UK and the People's Republic of China.
Now he's Foreign Secretary, charged with leading Britain's international relations.
This, of course, coincided with Sunak getting rid of Braverman.
Braverman is a much less polished figure than is Mr. Cameron.
After the political chaos of last year, she emerged as the most outspoken advocate of a tougher approach to immigration, crime, and the woke mind virus in the public sector.
Staunchly pro-Israel, she's also been extremely critical of the British police force's tolerance of the often violent pro-Hamas demonstrators on the street.
In Britain, you can be arrested for silently saying a prayer within a few hundred yards of an abortion clinic, but you can call for the destruction of Israel and praise Adolf Hitler, and the boys in blue will ensure that you're allowed to scream your bile unimpeded.
Well, she was fired, and instead, Cameron was elevated.
Is that going to last?
Is that going to be a thing that the right is going to withstand in Britain?
I really, really doubt it.
Because as it turns out, polling data tends to show that the rise of populism that is happening all over the world actually has less to do with the rhetoric and much more to do with the actual policies.
That's particularly true when it comes to immigration.
The vast majority of people in Western countries are not particularly interested in importing vast numbers of people who do not like their country.
It is one thing to say, as many people say, that if people want to come to the United States, for example, for the economic opportunity, assimilate to American values, love the flag, love the Constitution, great, we're glad to have you.
In fact, I'd trade you for a bunch of people on the other side of the political aisle in a heartbeat, but When it comes to people who are coming here and despise the country, who openly hate the country, or who are just here for the welfare benefits, why exactly should those people be allowed in?
If the West ignores that, they're going to get more of what they are seeing electorally.
The Conservative Party in Britain is going to face the same fate.
That many of the right-wing parties, or center-right parties, in the rest of Europe have faced, which is co-option by elements that are more right-wing than they are, particularly on the immigration issue.
Because here's the thing.
You can pretend the cultural differences don't exist.
But they do.
There's an entire European mindset that suggests, of course, that cultural differences, as we have suggested, are a figment of the imagination.
That underneath, everybody is exactly the same.
They think the same way.
They all think like Westerners.
They all think like Western liberals, to be more exact.
And that really, If they evince signs of anti-semitism, or hatred of women, or hatred of rights, really that's because of their economic disposition.
In the infamous words of Barack Obama at one point, talking about terrorism, what people really need is jobs.
If we were just able to get them some sort of economic growth, this would magically cure the cultural differentiation.
Better welfare benefits would make everything all better.
Except that isn't true.
And everybody knows that isn't true.
Not only isn't it true, it happens to be a recipe for both economic downturns as well as cultural decay.
People increasingly across Europe are recognizing this.
And people had better recognize this because otherwise the bad guys are going to win.
Now, the media are fully dedicated to this narrative, of course.
The media are going to continue to press that narrative over and over and over.
That you point out that cultures are not immediately cognizable as the same.
is to be racist or horrifying.
But that simply can't stand.
It simply can't stand.
It can't withstand the light of day.
And what's actually happening is as the media continue to promote that line, as they continue to claim a moral equivalence between everybody on earth in order to degrade the West, more and more people are seeing directly through it.
More and more people recognize exactly what is the game that they are playing.
They're becoming more and more discredited.
And then they whine about how they're being discredited.
So, to take the latest example, over the weekend, there's been this series of massive hostage exchanges between Hamas and Israel.
So this weekend, saw Hamas release some of the 240 hostages that the terror group took during its mass killing spree on October 7th.
They released 13 Israeli hostages the first day.
That was Friday.
13 more hostages on Saturday.
17 hostages on Sunday, bringing the current total to 43 hostages.
Under the current break-in operations, Hamas was set to release 50 total hostages.
The deal could be extended by one day for every 10 more hostages released.
So why did the deal happen in the first place?
Well, on Israel's side, the reason is pretty obvious.
Israel values the life of its citizens in a way that Hamas simply does not.
In fact, Israel is willing to put its own soldiers at additional risk in order to achieve the return of civilians.
And by the way, even in order to protect Palestinian civilians, many of whom participated in the October 7th attacks, Because again, reminder, Israel has complete air superiority over Gaza that could bomb the place into total submission if Israel wanted to do so.
So for Israel, the deal was painful but clear.
Try to get out as many hostages as possible, even if Hamas would be temporarily strengthened.
Meanwhile, what is Hamas looking for?
Well, they're looking for a breather.
Hamas has been absolutely pummeled.
Its leadership class has been largely eliminated.
Its operations in northern Gaza have been devastated.
Hamas wants a few benefits from the temporary ceasefire.
First, a break to regroup, possibly plan new operations.
Second, more fuel to enhance the possibility of their survival.
And this is the most important one.
They want time to try to convince the world that Israel ought to leave them intact.
That Israel's campaign against Hamas ought to stop.
Again, that last point is the most crucial.
Hamas wants the rest of the world to buy the narrative.
That Hamas is, in fact, a reasonable actor.
Or, as we have said, the left-wing notion.
That Hamas, Israel, they're no different.
Underneath, all the same.
It's just exploitation.
It's just colonization and all the rest.
Now, that is a pretty hard sell after you hang glide into Israel and murder nearly 300 people at a music festival.
Go house to house to burn babies in their cribs and rape their moms and slaughter civilians at will.
Because here's the thing, Hamas didn't even just engage in murder of civilians, they engaged in some of the worst atrocities in modern history.
According to one Israeli reserve combat paramedic that's reported by the Washington Post, he found the corpses of two teenage girls in their bedrooms.
Quote, one was on a bed.
Her arm was dangling from the bed frame.
Her legs were bare with bruises.
She had a bullet hole in the chest neck area.
The other was lying on the floor on her stomach.
Her legs spread, her pants pulled down toward her knees.
There was a liquid on her back that looked like semen.
She was shot in the back of the head.
According to a volunteer at the Shura military morgue, which was analyzing the bodies of the slain, quote, we saw many women with bloody underwear, broken bones, broken legs, broken pelvises.
Another witness described a gang rape at the Nova Rave, followed by the murder of the victim, quote, he didn't pick up his pants.
He shot her while inside her.
So yeah, it's tough to turn Hamas into Israel's moral equivalent, but the good news for Hamas, they never have to do their own selling.
As always, their fellow travelers in the coalition of the oppressed, including their cheerleaders in the legacy media, do it for them.
The legacy media have no regrets in their pro-Hamas coverage over the course of the last few weeks.
In fact, they admit as much.
Here, for example, was the BBC's international editor, claiming that the BBC has been doing a stellar job despite provoking international riots on behalf of Hamas, thanks to lies and false reporting about supposed Israeli human rights violations.
Here's the BBC's international editor saying we've done an amazing job.
I've got to ask you about the hospital on the 17th of October.
Oh yeah, luckily.
Yeah, OK.
The BBC was criticised heavily for its reporting of that event.
Tell us what happened that night, and, you know, bluntly, where were you getting your information, and do you regret anything that you said that night?
So it broke in, I suppose, mid-evening.
And to answer your question, no, I don't regret one thing in my reporting, because I think I was measured throughout.
I didn't race to judgement.
But you said that building had been flattened.
Oh yeah, well I got that wrong because I was looking at the pictures.
And what I could see was a square that appeared to be flaming on all sides.
And there was a, you know, sort of a void in the middle.
And it was, I think it was a picture taken from a drone.
And so, you know, we have to piece together what we see.
The media aren't backing down from their pro-Hamas propaganda, not one iota.
So even as this hostage deal went through, for example, one LBC reporter, again, British reporter, asked an Israeli spokesperson whether the unevenness of the exchange, remember, here is the exchange.
Israel is supposed to get back 50 of its own hostages, and they're releasing 150 terrorists.
So that's a three to one ratio of Israel releasing three terrorists for every innocent Israeli.
This reporter literally asked the Israeli spokesperson Whether that exchange rate represented Israel's disregard for Palestinian life because it was a three-for-one rate.
I was speaking to a hostage negotiator this morning.
He made the comparison between the 50 hostages that Hamas has promised to release as opposed to the 150 prisoners that are Palestinians that Israel has said that it will release.
And he made the comparison between the numbers and the fact that does Israel not think that Palestinian lives are valued as highly as Israeli lives?
That is an astonishing accusation.
If we could release one prisoner for every one hostage, we would obviously do that.
We are operating in horrific circumstances.
We're not choosing to release these prisoners who have blood on their hands.
We are talking about people who have been convicted of stabbing and shooting attacks.
Notice the question of proportionality doesn't interest Palestinian supporters when they are able to get more of their prisoners out.
But really, it is outrageous to suggest that the fact that we are willing to release prisoners who are convicted of terrorism offences, more of them than we are getting our own innocent children back, somehow suggests that we don't care about Palestinian lives.
Really, that's a disgusting accusation.
It is a particularly stupid question.
But the most common idiotic message of the weekend was actually parroted all over the legacy media.
That somehow there is moral equivalence between Israel releasing terrorists and Hamas releasing children.
This is something the legacy media are actively promoting.
So let's start with the actual fact.
Every single person Hamas is releasing is an innocent person.
Every single person Israel is releasing is a criminal.
Here is a chart of the Palestinian released prisoners, grouped by their actions.
15% threw stones at Israeli soldiers.
8% were involved in stabbing attacks.
10% were involved in shooting attacks.
6.4% in other violences.
Terrorist contact, 11%.
Terrorist attempt, 14.4%.
12.4% Molotov cocktails.
10.7% explosives.
Only 11% others, but even those people were associated with terrorism.
12.4% Molotov cocktails, 10.7% explosives, only 11% others, but even those people were associated with terrorism.
I mean, it's amazing.
Okay, so who exactly are these convicts again?
I don't have to just tell you from the chart.
Here's the video of some of these terrorists who were released.
What they actually did.
Here's one woman.
Okay, she was released.
She's an innocent woman, right?
An innocent woman being held hostage by Israel.
Except for she actively stabs this police officer.
Watch the tape.
She goes after him with a knife.
Here's another.
Here's another woman.
She's carrying a knife above her head, trying to stab a police officer.
Here are two Terrorists chasing a police officer with knives.
Here is a Palestinian just stabbing a random person.
There is one of the terrorists literally taking his van, crashing into a police officer and then trying to stab him.
A car attack.
Jumps out with a knife.
A knife attack.
These are the people that the media are portraying as equivalent to the Israeli hostages being released.
Again, these are people who are literally attempting to stab and murder people.
That's who was in Israeli prisons.
Now, those terrorists who are being released are immediately being greeted with raucous cheering by Hamas supporters, not in the Gaza Strip, in Judea and Samaria, the West Bank.
This was taped from Ramallah this weekend.
They're literally firing fireworks in celebration at terrorists being released back into their community.
Because these are heroes in the Palestinian community.
People who attempt to murder Jews.
Not just police officers, like random Jews.
In fact, how innocent were the people who were released?
Well, the released prisoners themselves immediately donned Hamas headgear and they pledged to renew their terrorist efforts.
Again, they're literally they literally put on the Hamas headbands and and then swore
that they would rejoin the fight.
These are terrorists.
the world.
Where is Hamas here?
Mass celebration of the release of terrorists.
Thanks.
I'll be there.
Bye.
OK, and here are here's one of the persons who was released calling for more Jewish blood.
OK, this lady who is a terrorist, she's saying we are the sort of Mohammed.
He is the military leader of Hamas.
So that's on the one side.
Meanwhile, here is some tape of Israeli children being released to their parents.
If those parents survived, some of these kids have no parents because Hamas actively murdered them.
You can see these are kids being delivered back into the arms of their family after being held hostage for 50 days.
Exactly the same.
Moral equivalence, according to the media.
Exactly the same.
This is, you know, a cycle of violence and all of that.
It's ridiculous.
And sick, to make any sort of equation here, but of course that's the entire game that the media are playing.
By the way, some of these hostages, for example, one of these hostages, she was told upon her release that her father is still being held by Hamas.
Karen Munder.
There's a four-year-old child, an American, who was released.
Both her parents are dead.
They were both murdered by Hamas.
She had to be told that upon release, I'm sure, that her parents are dead.
Now, can you see the difference between the two sides?
By the way, even when Hamas released the hostages, they still played games.
Families were separated, they're still being separated.
The International Red Cross was originally denied agreed-upon access to the remaining hostages.
Hostage release has been delayed until the very last minute.
Hostages were told to pose for the cameras by Hamas terrorists.
Here is some of that footage.
So you can see, in this video, they literally say, keep waving.
Keep waving.
They're telling them to keep waving and smiling for the cameras.
Okay, so believe it or not, Hamas propagandists spent the weekend trying to argue that this footage right here of the little girl being released was actually evidence that Hamas had treated these prisoners so decently that they were really, really happy with their captors.
Well, I mean, Except for them being held at gunpoint for 50 days and essentially quasi-starved and essentially... I mean, one of them is basically dead.
Here's one of the hostages.
She's an 84-year-old woman in such poor shape she had to be medevaced immediately.
She's currently in the ICU.
She looks like she's in great condition.
Hamas, they're very nice people.
So, how did the media play the obvious moral imbalance?
Again, this is part of the broader attempt to morally equivocate between the West and its enemies.
How did they do this?
Well, they attempted to claim that Israel was also holding innocent people rather than terrorists.
Now, as we've shown, that's not true.
But here was a Sky News reporter making just that claim.
And you would agree that today was, given the circumstances, a success.
We saw the ceasefire kick in at seven o'clock, and then we saw the hostages released later in the afternoon, and of course you have now released 39 Palestinian women and children, so... Oh, can I argue, please?
Can I argue?
Sorry, I can't let that stand, because it's like they release children and we release children.
I'm sorry, don't accept that.
Here we have a two-year-old, A four-year-old, a five-year-old, and a nine-year-old.
How can you compare that with a minor who is 16 or 17 years old, who is involved in a stabbing attack, or throwing a petrol bomb, or the other acts of violence?
You can say women and minors, but to compare that to the Israeli two-year-old, I think is a bridge too far.
It's not just a bridge too far, it's sick.
But unfortunately, this is what the media do.
A New York Times headline, for example, obscured that a woman in this particular picture is actually a terrorist.
Okay, so, the headline is, a disfigured woman whose case has become well-known is among the Palestinians released.
Wow, disfigured?
Wow, that's so terrible.
Disfigured woman being held by the Israelis.
So terrible.
Well, there's only one problem.
The reason that she is disfigured is because she attempted to blow up a car bomb.
And the battery acid hit her.
That is the reason she disfigured herself.
She disfigured herself.
She was arrested after her car exploded at a checkpoint.
Did it?
Did it just randomly explode?
Did it randomly explode?
Or was it a car bomb?
Here's a CNN journalist similarly claiming moral parity between small children released by Hamas thanks to Israel's military pressure and Palestinians released by Israel in order to free those children.
Israeli authorities blocked off roads, corralled the media into one location, brought the Palestinians in through the back door when they received them, and then only allowed family members to come in very limited single file in individual cars.
And there's a reason for that.
Because unlike the images of celebration, which you might have seen from Ramallah and the West Bank, here in East Jerusalem, Israeli authorities were better able to enforce the diktat of their far-right national security minister, who has deemed the prisoners released today as terrorists.
But not just that.
He said any Palestinian who celebrates will themselves be charged as terrorists.
I mean, just to break that down a little bit, there is no grounds to call them terrorists, because by Israel's own reckoning, those 39 prisoners were 15 minors, 10 of whom were only charged, and 24 women, 23 were detained, not charged, and 10 of the minors were detained, not charged.
For terrorism!
That's why they were detained!
For stabbing attacks!
And throwing molotov cocktails!
Of course, the Asenai and Gigi Hadid did the same thing, using as her model of victimhood when Ahmed al-Mansara, accusing Israel of taking children as POWs, engaging in abduction, rape, humiliation, torture, murder of Palestinians.
She tweeted out, Israel is the only country in the world that keeps children as prisoners of war.
Right, that children as prisoners of war.
Abduction, rape, humiliation, torture, murder of Palestinians.
Years and years before October 7th.
Ahmed El Mansour, abducted by the Israeli occupation at the age of 12, has endured solitary confinement.
Hundreds of Palestinian children remain detained, suffering in Israeli jails.
Here is some actual video of what Ahmed did.
So that would be Ahmed chasing Jews toward a gas station, running into the gas station with the knife, looking for somebody to stab, And then settling eventually on, they eventually settled, he and the other person he's with, settled on the murder of a 13-year-old boy.
That's the game.
It's always the same game.
You pretend moral parity between Israel and its enemies.
You ignore all evidence in order to accomplish this.
This allows for the continuation of that egregiously false narrative that Israel's elimination is a legitimate goal or that Israel ought to be forced to make concessions to terrorist groups, which are, by the way, the only governing powers in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
Fatah, for example, is the military wing of the Palestinian Authority.
It is run by Mahmoud Abbas.
That's supposed to be Israel's peace partner.
That's the person Joe Biden wants to see running at Gaza after Hamas.
Well, over the weekend, the Secretary General of Fatah's Central Committee, Jibril Rajoub, stated that October 7th was, quote, an act in the context of the defensive war our people are waging, and that, quote, Hamas is part of our political and social fabric and of our struggle.
Their involvement is important.
Rajoub also said that Hamas's onslaught, quote, thwarted the goal of the Israeli right to integrate Israel into the region without resolving the Palestinian issue based on the principle of peace in exchange for peace.
Those are the moderates.
The non-moderates spent the weekend murdering and mutilating the bodies of two supposed collaborators with Israel.
Here are some of the images of that atrocity.
It's literally Palestinians.
They executed two men and mutilated their bodies in front of giant crowds.
They mutilated them and they hanged them up.
People shouting, cheering.
We're going to go ahead and get started.
Notice the cell phones and notice the cheering, and here and again lies the problem.
If there is no moral parity, there can be no two-state solution under these circumstances.
Not remotely, not with Hamas, not at the PA, not with Palestinian-Islamic Jihad, not with any of the parties on the table.
And that is not likely to change anytime soon.
So, what are the legacy media to do?
Well, they have a few options left.
When the narrative that Hamas is kind to the old women and kids they've kidnapped doesn't fly.
Well, first, they can argue that Hamas has no agency.
After all, they're really the victims of circumstance.
In fact, as it turns out, Israel is to blame for Hamas.
After all, only the Jews have agency.
Thus, according to Steve Hendricks and Hazem Belusha of the Washington Post, By the way, that's an outlet that has disgraced itself beyond measure as a Hamas propaganda outlet during this conflict.
They say the real fault here is, wait for it, Benjamin Netanyahu's, the Israeli prime minister.
According to the Washington Post, Netanyahu and Hamas, quote, found each other useful for their own purposes.
Netanyahu pursued a strategy that didn't disrupt the status quo of a divided Palestinian population, leaving Hamas to ruling Gaza and the rival Palestinian authority in the West Bank.
Leave aside the fact that had Israel moved to depose Hamas over the past 20 years, the world would have condemned them for it.
In fact, every time Israel went in to clean out Hamas actors, the world condemned them.
Leave aside the fact that the Palestinian Authority currently allies with Hamas and is also a terrorist group.
The insane bigotry of suggesting that the Jews are responsible for radical Muslim atrocities because they didn't defend those radical Muslims, while you are currently arguing, by the way, that Israel ought not defend Hamas, is totally mind-boggling.
So just to get this logic straight, Bibi is bad because he didn't depose Hamas.
Bibi, therefore, must not depose Hamas.
Right now.
Okay, then.
Well, if that argument doesn't work, you can argue, as the press has been doing for weeks, that Israel's retaliation against Hamas is just as evil as Hamas' original attacks.
Thus, we've seen story after story condemning Israel for not having magic weapons that only hit terrorists, even when those terrorists hide among civilians.
Pushing this idiotic argument is Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut.
Here he was over the weekend on State of the Union.
Well, I stand by what I said.
I do believe that the level of civilian harm inside Gaza has been unacceptable and is unsustainable.
I think there's both a moral cost to this many civilians, innocent civilians, children often losing their life, but I think there's a strategic cost.
Ultimately, Hamas will get stronger, not weaker, in the long run if all of this civilian death allows them to recruit more effectively and ably inside Gaza.
Well, I mean, obviously, obviously he is an expert on this sort of stuff.
And if Israel doesn't use its magic weapon, well, then Israel's really, really bad.
Naturally, Murphy then connects this idiotic argument with the argument that Israel ought to make concessions to the Palestinians after all, which is what they did in Gaza and are now being blamed by The Washington Post for doing.
Here is Murphy saying, oh, the only way out of this is for Israel to, you know, give more after they had all their citizens slaughtered.
The only future that guarantees the survival of a Jewish state in the Middle East and that is a Palestinian state.
Benjamin Netanyahu believed that you could ignore the Palestinians, that you could try to squash their desires for a state.
And ultimately, that would bring peace to the region and to Israel.
That's just not the case.
Ultimately, the next government is going to have to put us back on a path to have a Palestinian state.
That's not easy, but it is the only way forward for Israel.
It is the only way forward for long-term peace.
So, I have a question.
When he says it's not easy, the reason it's not easy is because no Palestinian governmental body has ever accepted a peace deal.
Ever in history.
Oslo was a framework for the development of a peace deal and it was then rejected.
By the Palestinians multiple times.
None of this passes the smell test, but it doesn't have to.
Again, it's all merely the predicate to a more subtle argument that Israel should be pressured to stop.
Now, if Israel does stop, let's be perfectly clear about this.
The hostage deal becomes awful in retrospect.
Israel cannot stop.
Israel has to wipe out Hamas.
If Hamas emerges intact, Israel will be seen as weak, indecisive, absolutely incapable of defending their own citizens.
Israel has routinely destroyed a lot of the military power of terrorist groups in surrounding areas.
But so long as those groups survive, they immediately claim victory and then they regrow.
Israel cannot allow that.
What's more, Israel is at the beginning, not the end of this battle.
Netanyahu said over the weekend, quote, we have three goals for this war, eliminating Hamas, returning our hostages, ensuring Gaza does not become a threat to the state of Israel again.
The conflict in Gaza is not over, but it's not just in Gaza.
Israel is going to have to, over the coming years, take on and destroy Hezbollah on its northern border.
There are currently 30,000 Israelis who have left their homes in northern Israel because they're under the umbrella of a terrorist threat created by Hezbollah, that is the Iranian Bacteria Group, that has, right now, 200,000 rockets, minimum, pointed at Israel, perhaps 50,000 of which have actual sophisticated targeting systems.
Hezbollah cannot be left to stew for that long, especially given the Iranian development of a nuclear weapon.
If Iran develops a nuclear weapon, they simply hand it over to Hezbollah, and then Hezbollah has the ability to do pretty much what they want.
And then there's the so-called West Bank, where the Palestinian Authority, remember Israel's supposed peace partner?
The PA is pathetically weak.
Israel is going to have to engage in continuing counterinsurgency tactics in both Gaza and the West Bank indefinitely in order to ensure safety and security.
Will the West allow Israel to do what it has to do to protect its own security?
That is the big question moving forward.
And that question is, again, connected to the broader question that many people are asking now in the West.
Will the West do what it has to do to protect itself and its own security from the threat of radical Islam, particularly in the form of mass migration?
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Meanwhile, the question as to whether West is going to stand up for itself, again, that remains an open one, not just internally, but with regard to foreign policy.
So, for example, When it comes to foreign policy, the assumption of weakness by the West is what drives America's enemies to become stronger and more militant.
This is why, presumably, over the weekend, China's military said it had driven a U.S.
warship from waters it claims in the South China Sea and accused the United States of being the biggest destroyer of peace and stability in the region.
So that means that that meeting between Xi Jinping and Joe Biden went absolutely swimmingly in San Francisco.
It wasn't seen as weakness by the Chinese, like at all, to put out a somnambulant President of the United States, a barely sentient person, a tablecloth, to actually talk to the Chinese dictator.
China's state-run People's Daily quoted senior colonel Tian Junli, the spokesperson for the People's Liberation Army Southern Theater Command, as saying the guided missile destroyer USS Hopper had entered China's territorial waters illegally on Saturday.
It said the incident occurred near the Paracel Islands, which China calls the Xisha Islands.
Tian sharply criticized the United States, claiming the U.S.
had violated Chinese sovereignty.
So tensions ramping up with China.
That, of course, is no surprise.
Meanwhile, American sailors did do something amazing over the weekend.
So the tanker that was seized by Yemeni rebels last week, it's not an Israeli tanker, but it does have investment from an Israeli billionaire.
That tanker was seized by the Houthis last week.
Well, now apparently it was freed by U.S.
warship and now it is safe.
That is good because if the international waterways are impinged upon by pirates and terrorists, All of your costs are going to go up pretty dramatically at home.
Again, an unstable world is a dramatically worse world for American citizens, and America being the global hegemon is the only party that is capable of providing safety and stability all over the world for economic trade lanes, for example.
But the thing that undercuts that is continuing Shilly-shallying over things like should Hamas survive.
So Democrats continue, radical Democrats continue to push Joe Biden into pressuring Israel on Hamas.
According to the Washington Post, earlier this month, a group of about 20 distressed White House staffers requested a meeting with President Biden's top advisors as Israel's war in Gaza entered its sixth week.
The diverse group of staffers, diverse, hmm, had its three main issues they wanted to discuss with the White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zients, former advisor Anita Dunn, and Deputy National Security Advisor John Finer.
They wanted to know the administration's strategy for curbing civilian deaths, the message it plans to send on the conflict, and its post-war vision for the region.
Zients, Dunn, and Finer listened respectfully, but some participants felt they fell back on familiar talking points.
Had a White House official familiar with the meeting?
So again, what this is, is an attempt to drive Biden into the arms of Hamas.
That is the goal.
And Biden is susceptible to the sort of stuff he is.
Apparently, there was a private meeting that he held with prominent Muslim Americans.
And he apologized to members of the Muslim community.
Why?
Well, because at one point he had been asked about the numbers coming out of Gaza with regard to civilian death.
And he said, I don't believe the numbers coming from Hamas, which is the proper answer, given that Hamas routinely lies about said numbers.
And apparently, Biden apologized for those comments.
Quote, I'm sorry.
I'm disappointed in myself.
I will do better.
This is pathetic.
It is pathetic.
It remains pathetic.
But again, this is a way for the radical left inside the Biden administration to push Joe Biden.
That's going to have significant ramifications for the American people.
Because a weak America on the world stage is a real problem for American security.
This, by the way, would be just another reason why Joe Biden's polls keep getting worse and worse.
According to Politico, President Biden's poll numbers keep getting worse.
Among the latest surveys this month from 13 separate pollsters, Biden's position is worse than their previous polls in all but two of those polls.
And while polls suggest most of the movement comes from voters abandoning Biden, Donald Trump has also started to gain steam.
Trump's vote share in the national polling average is higher now than at any point in the last year.
The state-level data are just as striking.
In addition to New York Times' Siena polls within the last week and a half, other surveys have shown Trump ahead by 8 in Arizona and 5 in Michigan.
Again, he is losing some young voters.
Right now, Trump, according to the NBC News poll, is actually leading Biden among voters younger than 35, 46 to 42.
That is within the margin of error for that group.
But bottom line is that Joe Biden is losing approval.
Why?
Because it feels like the world is on fire.
It feels like the world's on fire because Joe Biden is weak.
And when weakness is evidenced by the world, it turns out that people do really bad things.
Meanwhile, you can see the writing on the wall a little bit here.
Apparently there are a huge number, like 39 members of Congress who have already said they are planning to leave their seats.
25 of those members of Congress are Democrats.
So a lot of Democrats are seeing the writing on the wall in the next House election, especially if Joe Biden has reverse coattails, meaning if he's the guy at the top of the ballot and he underperforms, that is a massive, massive problem for Democrats.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump went to South Carolina in an attempt to blunt the momentum that Nikki Haley has been attempting to build and he went to this college football game in South Carolina and he was widely cheered.
It was funny to watch as people on Twitter tried to treat this as Donald Trump being booed.
I'm not sure you're watching the same tape the rest of us are.
I'm not hearing a lot of boos there.
And in South Carolina, Donald Trump is a pretty popular guy.
If Donald Trump just runs this campaign, he literally just walks out and stands there, he will win.
Really.
Like, that's all he has to do.
Just be quiet, walk out, stand there, leave.
If he does that, he will win.
Because the truth is, the electorate is treating Trump, believe it or not, they're treating Trump like generic Republican.
Seriously, that is the real answer here.
Yes, Trump has high negatives with Democrats.
So does every generic Republican.
So, pretty much everybody is treating Trump because they've seen him before, and they know what he is, and they know he says wild stuff, and they also know he's kind of a generic Republican politician in terms of his actual policy.
Despite all the wild statements.
And the public is treating him like that.
Generic Republican against Joe Biden wins the next election cycle.
And everybody is starting to realize that pretty quickly here.
Okay, in just one second, we'll be getting to this insane story.
Derek Chauvin, who is the person convicted for the killing of George Floyd, was stabbed in prison nearly to death.
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