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May 21, 2024 - The Ben Shapiro Show
51:17
Why The West Mourns the ‘Butcher of Tehran’
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So yesterday, something peculiar happened.
On Sunday, the president of Iran, an evil human being, the butcher of Tehran, named Ebrahim Raisi, died in a helicopter accident.
And as I said yesterday, I feel bad for the helicopter.
It's a waste of a good helicopter.
Ebrahim Raisi, one of the worst people on earth, presided over the deaths as a member of the Iranian pseudo-judiciary.
The deaths of thousands of innocent people, dissidents.
He has presided over the crushing of all dissent from women, from people who do not believe in Sharia law in Iran.
He's presided over the deaths of thousands of American troops, attacks on American allies.
His proxy groups around the region have been involved in the deaths of thousands of human beings, including, of course, the 1,200 Jews who were murdered on October 7th with the tacit permission and support of Iran via Hamas.
So he dies in this helicopter accident, and the immediate reception of the West, the response of the West, is to lament his death.
This is a weird thing.
It's a weird thing.
It's something that is somewhat unprecedented in modern history.
For example, when Pol Pot died, the dictator of Cambodia, when he died, Bill Clinton issued a statement, and that statement from Bill Clinton Ripped into Pol Pot.
It said, quote, The death of Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot has again brought to international attention one of the most tragic chapters of inhumanity in the 20th century.
Between 1975 and 1979, Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge followers transformed Cambodia into the killing fields, causing the death of an estimated two million of their countrymen in a brutal attempt to transform Cambodian society.
Okay, so the entire statement, that was from Bill Clinton, was a Democrat, a moderate member of the left, using the opportunity of Pol Pot's death to point out his evils and the human rights atrocities that he had committed.
And of course, historically, this has been the way that we treat evil dictators and people associated with evil dictatorships when they die.
The world becomes a better place when they are no longer breathing.
That was certainly true of Ibrahim Raisi.
I mean, for example, I mean, there's no question what Ibrahim Raisi was, Here he was speaking at the United Nations circa 2023.
And again, the United Nations is an abomination, as we'll discuss in just a moment.
But here he was fully explaining his intentions for the world, which was the domination of a radical form of Islam, which is why his country is dominated by the Ayatollahs, a religious fundamentalist leadership that took over what had formerly been a secularist country in 1979.
Here he was explaining to the whole world that the era of the West was over, The equation attributed to the hegemony of the West no longer resonates with the diverse realities of today's world.
Old powers will keep their current downward trajectory.
They are the past and we are the future.
I repeat once again, they represent the past and we represent the future.
We are the future.
We do believe that according to divine will, just as divine prophets have promised, justice and fairness will overtake the world.
And the rule of the sincere people, those who truly follow the path of the omnipotent, will reverberate throughout the world.
A world that rejects ignorance.
The world awaits the day in which the old past will come to an end.
And let's be clear what he's talking about here.
He is talking about the messianic beliefs of Shia Islam.
That is what he is talking about right there.
He's not making any bones about that.
He's saying that in front of the entire world.
And of course, on the anniversary of the 1979 revolution that brought the Ayatollahs to power in Iran, he gave a speech, this is in February of 2024, in which he ripped into the United States, which in Iran has typically been termed the Great Satan, According to state TV in Iran, millions of people turned out at rallies and it showed large crowds chanting, death to Israel, death to America, which of course is very common in Ibrahim Raisi's world, right?
In his worldview.
So what explains the reaction of the West?
Because here is how the West reacted.
Here's how the international community reacted to the death of an evil Islamist dictator-in-waiting, because he was widely perceived to be a possible heir to Ayatollah Khomeini, who is now 85 years old, and when he passes on, God willing soon, when he dies as a barbaric dictator of an evil regime that spreads terrorism all over the region against fellow Muslims, against Jews, against Christians.
When he dies, Raisi was supposed to take over.
Instead, Raisi is dead.
And here is how the world reacted.
The UN Security Council held a moment of silence for Ibrahim Raisi.
Here it was.
The entire UN Security Council stands up for Ibrahim Raisi.
Thank you.
Which is vile and disgusting.
Why in the world should Western powers pay homage to a butcher?
What is the purpose of that?
How is that possible?
The Senate chaplain in the United States held a moment of prayer after the death of Ibrahim Raisi.
This is Rear Admiral Barry Black, who held a moment of prayer for the Iranian dictator-in-waiting responsible for the death of thousands, tens of thousands of human beings.
And Lord, we pray for the Iranian people who mourn the death of their president.
We pray in your loving name.
Amen.
Honestly, hard to think of something more blasphemous.
Again, I'm not a Christian.
Hard to think of something more blasphemous for Christians, I would imagine, than praising an Islamic dictator who wanted to forcibly convert the world, which is what Ibrahim Raisi is.
And by the way, something more sick than saying that the Iranian people are mourning that dictator, which is obviously not true.
The Iranian people are by and large the most moderate population in the Middle East, and they are dominated by an Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps that is wildly radical, We'll get to more on this in just a moment.
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Meanwhile, the State Department put out a statement.
It's beyond parody.
Here's what Matthew Miller put out.
Quote, The United States expresses its official condolences for the death of Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, Foreign Minister Amir Abdullahian, and other members of their delegation in a helicopter crash in northwest Iran.
As Iran selects a new president, we reaffirm our support for the Iranian people and their struggle for human rights and fundamental freedoms.
Do you see how far we've moved?
Pol Pot dies and Bill Clinton, a moderate Democrat, gives a statement talking about his human rights abuses and why it should remind us to fight human rights abuses in places like Cambodia.
Ibrahim Raisi dies in a regime that presides over terrorism across the world.
The number one terror sponsor on planet Earth is the regime Ibrahim Raisi spends his life serving and in which he was a decision maker.
And the State Department of the United States government put out a statement with condolences for his death.
That is a sickness.
It wasn't just the United States.
The EU did the same.
Charles Michel, who is the President of the European Council put out a statement, quote, How about the families of the people who have been slain in protests against the Iranian dictatorship?
How about thoughts for the families of the people who are living in repression and poverty thanks to those dictators?
NATO put out a statement.
our thoughts go to the families.
How about the families of the people who have been slain in protests against the Iranian dictatorship?
How about thoughts for the families of the people who are living in repression and poverty,
thanks to those dictators?
NATO put out a statement.
NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which is oriented against aggression by foreign powers,
The NATO press secretary, Farah Dakhlala, put out a statement, quote, our condolences to the people of Iran for the death of President Raisi, Foreign Minister Amir Abdullahian, and others who perished in the helicopter crash.
So the people of Iran, the people of Iran don't need your condolences.
The people of Iran deserve your condolences for having to live under the terroristic auspices of this evil regime.
This is insanity.
So the question is, where is this coming from?
Because it's not necessary.
The entire West could have just stayed silent.
They could have said nothing.
Instead, they all came to the fore.
Moments of silence.
By the way, in the UN, there was, I checked, there was no moment of silence, so far as I'm aware, in the UN Security Council for the victims of October 7th.
None.
They did not stand up and pay homage to the 1,200 people who were slaughtered and 250 who were taken hostage by a terrorist group.
But they did stand to pay homage to a terrorist dictator who supported October 7th and proxy terror groups from Yemen to Lebanon to Syria to Iraq to Hamas.
It's an amazing thing.
So what is going on in the West that Western leaders feel the necessity to give condolences on the death of an evil enemy?
Because Raisi was an evil enemy.
That's who he was.
So there is an error in thinking that has become extraordinarily common in the West that I think leads to so many bad results.
This error in thinking was made clear yesterday actually by Pope Francis.
So there's a lot of controversy over something that Pope Francis said in his 60 Minutes interview.
He said a lot of controversial things.
One of the things that he said, Pope Francis, is being translated here.
And what he says about human beings, is controversial, to say the least.
And you can interpret it in a way that is friendlier to Catholic theology, as far as I'm aware.
And you can interpret it in a way that is less friendly to Catholic theology.
Here is the Pope.
When you look at the world, what gives you hope?
Everything.
You see tragedies, but you also see so many beautiful things.
You see heroic mothers, heroic men, men who have hopes and dreams, women who look to the future.
That gives me a lot of hope.
People want to live, people forge ahead, and people are fundamentally good.
We are all fundamentally good.
Yes, there are some rogues and sinners, but the heart itself is good.
Okay, so there are a couple of ways to read that statement.
I want to explain three ways of reading human nature.
We'll get to more on this in just one second.
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Okay, so the traditional Judaic way of reading human nature, and again, I'm a Jew, so I know more about this than I do about the alternatives.
The traditional Judaic way of reading human nature is that human beings are not inherently good.
Human beings Have an internal battle.
That battle is between what we call the Yetzir HaTov, the good desire, and Yetzir HaRa, which is the bad desire.
And these two things are fighting with each other all the time.
And it is up to us to try to cultivate the good desire at the expense of the bad desire.
If you do it well, presumably, you can even turn the bad desires toward the good.
And that's the Judaic perspective.
Then there is the Catholic perspective.
The Catholic perspective is interesting.
Traditionally, and I'm quoting Thomas Aquinas here, the Catholic perspective is that human beings are inherently good in the sense that they were made in God's image.
But through original sin, human beings were then cursed with the capacity for sin.
That capacity for sin is dominant and powerful.
And original sin was only expunged with the death of Jesus.
And I have Catholics in my office who will correct me if I'm wrong about this.
But that is not quite the same thing as the secularist idea.
The secularist idea is that human beings are inherently good.
And not only are they inherently good, most human beings are not even sinful.
Most human beings are not even sinful.
And that is at odds with both the Judaic and the traditionally Christian view of human nature.
And again, the traditionally Christian worldview on human nature is that while the human heart might be the inmate in the image of God, meaning that on a fundamental soul level, the soul of human beings are good, the Bible is replete with statements about how sinful human beings are.
Whether you're talking about the book of Mark, where Jesus said no one is good except God alone, or Romans, where he said none are good, no not one, or Jeremiah, where the prophet says the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked, Or the Psalms, 51.5, where it says, And the traditionally religious view, at the very least, is that the human capacity for sin is extraordinarily strong.
And that means that most people, in fact all people, are inherently sinners.
Now the solution to that differs between Judaism and Christianity.
The solution to that for Judaism is perform the mitzvot, act in virtuous ways, and you will become more virtuous and you will dominate over sin, as God says to Cain at the beginning of the book of Genesis.
Sin crouches at your door, but if you're strong, if you will it, you can dominate sin.
You can rule over it.
That's the sort of Judaic perspective.
The Christian perspective, it is only through the grace of Christ that you can expunge that original sin, giving you the capacity for a free will so that you can conquer sinful, sinful nature.
And then there's the secularist point of view, which is different from both of these and is a misread of Judeo-Christian tradition.
And that basic idea is that human beings are not only inherently good, not only is the heart inherently good, sin is not something internal to human beings.
It's not even a force that human beings fight on an individual level, that sin only exists in systems and not in individual human beings.
There's no such thing as sin.
Human beings have a nature and that nature is inherently good.
And if you consider something sinful, it's probably because you are the problem.
You see this in secularist society all the time.
If two people love each other, how can it be a sin?
If you do something bad to another person, well, you know, that's just relativistic.
It's relativistic in morality.
Who are you to judge?
All of that is a misread of traditional Judeo-Christian doctrine.
All of it.
But that widespread secular perception that human beings are inherently good, and that the only problem with human beings is that the systems above them are a problem, leads to two incredibly false conclusions.
One, human beings generally agree on right and wrong.
This is a lie.
It is not true.
It is fundamentally false.
Human beings do not agree on right and wrong.
There are very few things that most human beings agree on, like murder is wrong.
And even that traditionally has to be bounded by the tribe.
Because it turns out that people in tribes are pretty open about being fine with murdering people who are in other tribes.
Human beings do not, at a fundamental level, agree on wide aspects of right and wrong.
At least not once it comes to outside the tribe.
The second fundamental assumption that arises from this idea that human beings are good is that all it requires is better human institutions and an organizing effort to effectuate right over wrong.
Progress is the effectuation of this attempt.
That is the basic left-wing theology when it comes to curing the sin of the world.
Again, the Jewish theology in curing the sin of the world is act better, perform mitzvot.
The Catholic and Christian theology is find Christ and that will cause you to be, it will heal your soul and you will be a better person for that.
And then there is the secularist version of what to do about human sin, which is that sin does not abide at the level of the individual.
Sin only abides at the level of the society.
This is the Marxist materialist idea.
That the only reason that people are bad is because the systems under which they live are inherently bad and corrupt.
And therefore, if we can cure those systems, then magically humanity will be absolutely transformed.
This is written in the Communist Manifesto.
What people mistake about Marxism, it's not an economic philosophy so much as it is a religious philosophy.
About how you cure the sin of the world by curing the systems at the top level.
When put into the language of international politics, this leads to a bizarre belief in international order that is just a lie.
It leads to, for example, to the rise of the League of Nations.
And if only we can organize all the nations that we all think alike, and if only we can organize along the right lines, we can all be friends.
This is why the West is paying homage to Ibrahim Raisi, because they feel In the West, that if they are nice enough to Ibrahim Raisi, if they change the systems enough that people like Ibrahim Raisi and his followers and the mullahs in Iran, they will become inherently good.
Magically, they'll become inherently good if we change the international order because human beings are naturally good.
And if we change the order in which we live to expunge all of the various contra- It's really just a miscommunication is all that it is.
So Woodrow Wilson, when he was speaking for the League of Nations said, quote,
there's only one power to put behind the liberation of mankind.
And that is the power of mankind as a whole, as a whole.
That's stupid.
There is no such thing as quote unquote, the power of mankind as a whole
in pursuit of the broader interests of mankind.
It turns out there are lots of human beings.
They have lots of different interests.
You can see this all the way down to present day.
Barack Obama, and what I pointed this out in 2008 when he was running for president,
that this was a sick version of how you see the world.
It is a wrong worldview with dramatically evil connotations.
But this was Barack Obama in dreams for my father.
And everybody saw this as sort of nice and loose.
It was sort of pacifistic and it was sort of hippie-ish.
But what he says in this quote from Dreams from My Father, I think is his whole philosophy in a nutshell.
And it is a desperately wrong philosophy.
Quote, I have seen the desperation and disorder of the powerless, how it twists the lives of children on the streets of Jakarta or Nairobi in much the same way as it does in the lives of children on Chicago's South Side.
How narrow the path is for them between humiliation and untrammeled fury, how easily they slip into violence and despair.
I know that the response of the powerful to this disorder Alternating, as it does, between a dull complacency and, when the disorder spills out of its prescribed confines, a steady, unthinking application of force, of longer prison sentences and more sophisticated military hardware, is inadequate to the task.
I know that the hardening of lines, the embrace of fundamentalism and tribe, dooms us all.
So, in other words, what he is saying there?
In fancy, possibly written by Bill Ayers words, in dreams for my father?
What he is saying there, which is that all human violence, terrorism, is a result of the systems of the elites.
And those elites are the ones who are creating all of this.
And thus, if we create better international organizations run by people like Barack Obama, all violence and terrorism will fall away.
We will all have a new community organized day.
Now here's the problem.
This is absolute trash.
It is nonsense, it is garbage, and it is absolutely going to create more violence in the world.
It turns out that these Western delusions of everybody thinking like a Westerner, these Western delusions that everybody has the same value system down deep.
By the way, not unique to the left.
George W. Bush said many of the same things in 2005 after his re-election.
He gave a speech in which he said that the fundamental desire of all human hearts was to be free, which is a lie.
It is untrue.
The vast majority of people on planet Earth may not wish to live like people in the United States.
Recognizing that truth means you have to protect your own interests.
But if you believe that all you have to do is massage your enemies and suddenly they will be your friends, you will be used by your enemies.
And that is what we are seeing right now.
We'll get to more on this in a moment.
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It turns out that in Islam, There's a doctrine which is called dhimmitude.
Okay.
Dhimmi.
To be a dhimmi.
Okay.
Historically speaking, if you go back to the Quran, when Muslims took over a particular area, there were three statuses that were applied.
Muslim, which is top level.
Unbelievers, who are people who were pagans, who could be destroyed and murdered.
And members of the dhimmi.
The dhimmi were so-called people of the book, Christians and Jews, who accepted their secondary servile status, paid a head tax called the jizya, And we're forced into a series of laws.
This was true, by the way.
It remains true today in many Muslim countries.
My wife's family is from Morocco.
And in Morocco, until fairly recently, Jews did have secondary status, meaning they weren't allowed to perform certain activities.
This is true for Christians in particular areas of the Muslim world.
Historically, it meant that, for example, non-Muslims could not ride horses.
They were forced to keep their heads lower on the streets than Muslims during the Ottoman Empire.
Hey, that was demitude, was being a second-class citizen.
So people like Ibrahim Raisi, who see everyone who is a person of the book or a non-believer as a person of secondary status, those people will turn the naivete and the openness and the hope of the secular West in their own favor.
They will use open systems of immigration against you.
They will engage in deceit.
They will seek hudnas, ceasefires, for example, so they can rearm and fight again later.
They will use the generosity of the West, free immigration, free movement, free speech regulations against you.
They will use legal implements against you, the very institutions that you're trying to reorganize for the benefit of global society.
They will use against you, which is why the UN, which was founded in the aftermath of World War II, By the great powers in an attempt to organize the international community for a better day.
Well, the UN is now a tool of some of the worst powers on the planet.
It has been a complete waste of space and resources.
It has done more bad in the world than good, the United Nations.
Because, as it turns out, the international order is a lie.
There is no international order because human beings are not, in general, good.
You can say they have a fundamentally good human nature, but that it's sinful also, the Christian perspective, which means the outcome, most people, all people are sinners, but that is not the case being made.
If all human beings are good, this means that the only failure is a failure of organization.
That's a lie.
It is why every institution directed toward quote-unquote international order ends up being perverted by people who are evil.
It's why, for example, the UN General Assembly in 2023 issued seven general resolutions against the entire world, but 15 against Israel.
Is that because Israel is uniquely evil, or is it because, it turns out, there are a lot of countries that hate Israel?
Where was the unanimity in moral right and wrong?
Where did it go?
It is also why the world is perfectly willing to ignore the predations of Hamas in favor of slamming Israel at this point in time.
For example, right now, the International Criminal Court is attempting to issue arrest warrants for the Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the Minister of Defense, Yoav Galant.
At the same time, they're issuing arrest warrants for Yehia Sinwar and Mohammad Daif, who are the heads of Hamas, as though these are two equivalents.
The accusation made by the International Criminal Court, which does not have any legal jurisdiction in the state of Israel, or in the United States, by the way, or in China, or in Russia, or in India, What is their accusation?
According to the people who wrote the brief, including Amal Clooney, the wife of George Clooney, who happens to be Lebanese, what they say is that the reason for this indictment reached unanimously is, quote, the war crime of intentionally using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare and the murder and persecution of Palestinians as crimes against humanity.
Now, Israel has shipped in Thousands of tons of aid into a war area that is controlled by its enemy.
Unprecedented in the history of warfare.
In the middle of World War II, we were not shipping aid into Germany.
In the middle of the Korean War, we were not shipping aid into North Korea.
That is not how war works.
In the middle of the Gulf War, the United States was not shipping aid into Iraq.
Either time.
That is not how war works.
It has never worked that way.
Israel is doing it and they're being charged with it.
We'll get to more on this in just a moment.
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Meanwhile, what is Hamas doing?
According to Reuters, most of the aid coming into Gaza from the U.S.
military pier.
We have now spent, by the way, hundreds of millions of American dollars to build a stupid pier off the coast of the Mediterranean, off the coast of Gaza, in order to ship aid in.
That aid is immediately being stolen by Hamas.
11 out of 16 trucks were cleaned out on Saturday, according to Phil Stewart, a military and intelligence correspondent for Reuters.
There were no deliveries on Sunday or Monday because of this.
So we're wasting taxpayer dollars, your taxpayer dollars and mine, in order to ship aid to Hamas in the middle of all this.
Does anyone seem to care?
No.
Because the International Criminal Court is yet another attempt to create an international institution.
By common agreement about morality and right and wrong.
That does not reflect natural law.
It does not reflect decency.
It merely reflects the hollowing out of the West's presuppositions about unanimity in favor of a secondary status for the West.
Again, the West's own openness is being turned against it.
You can see this in major cities all around Europe, where there are, in fact, real no-go zones, meaning that the police basically leave them alone because they understand that those areas are violent and dangerous.
And those areas happen to be in places like France or in places like Sweden.
They happen, generally, to be places where there is a very high population of Northern African Muslim immigrants.
That is not a coincidence.
The West has let its own openness and foolhardiness be used against it, while others are attempting to achieve secondary status for Westerners.
That is what this is.
And the West doesn't know what to do about it.
The answer, of course, is to reject the fundamental supposition.
That is the actual answer to all of this.
Reject the fundamental supposition.
Not everybody thinks the same way you do.
Not everyone has the same moral value system that you do.
The problem, in fact, is not one of general lack of systems.
The problem is that there are some systems that are bad and some systems that are good, just like there are some ideas that are bad and some ideas that are good.
There are some cultures that are significantly worse than other cultures.
The left refuses to acknowledge this, and thus they are led to the Barack Obama solution, which is, let a few elites restructure all of society and everybody will magically turn into a good person.
That is not true.
It is fundamentally untrue.
And so you end up with, in democratic circles, for example, is a bizarre willingness to criticize the ICC, the International Criminal Court, for going after Netanyahu.
At the same time, it goes after Gertrude Sinwar.
But no willingness to just dismantle the ICC.
They have to keep the lie alive.
To admit that the UN is a garbage heap and a bad idea would be to defeat the idea that all of humanity thinks similarly and that there is a community of nations where all human beings believe in right and wrong in similar ways.
To get rid of the ICC would be to let slip the fundamental truth That human beings are not, are not good all the way across the board.
At the very least, we are all sinful.
And that means that people orient toward tribe.
It means that they are perfectly willing to engage in all sorts of atrocities and human rights violations against one another without regard to a higher morality and to use the institutions that you have supposedly created for international comedy against you.
So you have the Biden administration coming out and condemning the ICC, which of course, not super shocking.
Joe Biden said that it was outrageous.
He said that there is no equivalence, none between Israel and Hamas.
And he said later at American Heritage Month, some event that he was celebrating, Jewish American Heritage Month, that what's happening in Gaza is not genocide, we reject that.
But he's been spending the entire time, the last several months of the war, declaring a moral equivalence between what Israel is doing and what Hamas did, which is why he's been calling for an immediate and permanent ceasefire in Gaza, leaving Hamas in place while shipping aid in, and criticizing Israel's prosecution of the cleanest urban war in history, in literally all of history.
Can't admit the truth.
You can't.
Because the minute that you admit, maybe Hamas is evil and believes evil things and pursues evil ends.
Maybe Ibrahim Raisi is evil and does evil things and pursued evil ends and it's a good thing he's dead.
If you admit that, then it fundamentally explodes your vision of the world.
And it might mean that there's a lot of responsibility that adheres and inheres in human beings.
Individually.
That failure is not in fact a reflection of the system all the time.
That very often it's a reflection of you.
But that is something that the left cannot abide.
And so they will end up with this bizarre status where they're simultaneously standing for moments of silence for Ibrahim Raisi and also condemning the ICC, but not getting rid of the ICC.
So the State Department spokesperson yesterday said that the United States fundamentally rejects the ICC's attempt to go after Prime Minister Netanyahu.
This is the same exact human who paid homage in a statement to the dictator of Iran.
As the Secretary said in a statement a short time ago, the United States fundamentally rejects the announcement today from the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court that he is applying for arrest warrants for senior Israeli officials together with warrants for Hamas terrorists.
There should be no equivalence between Israel and Hamas.
None.
Okay, so then why have you guys maintained a quasi-equivalence?
Meanwhile, other members of the European Community.
By the way, a continent responsible for two world wars and some of the worst genocides in human history.
They have decided that it's important to effectuate the desires of the ICC.
The high representative of the EU for foreign affairs and security policy, a person named Joseph Burrell-Fontales, put out a statement saying, I take note of the decision of the ICC prosecutor to apply for warrants of arrest before pretrial chamber one of the ICC.
The mandate of the ICC as an independent international institution is to prosecute the most serious crimes under international law.
All states that have ratified the ICC statutes are bound to execute the court's decisions.
And this is what you get.
You have courts that have now been taken over on behalf of some of the worst human beings on the planet, promulgating the worst values on the planet, and everybody in Europe, apparently, nodding at all of this.
In the United States, the Democratic Party is torn.
On the one hand, they realize what the ICC is doing here is quite evil and terrible.
On the other hand, they don't want to explode the ICC because that would do too much damage to their fundamental belief system.
You're seeing this right now, by the way, with a lot of Jewish liberal Americans who marched with Black Lives Matter, believing that there was a coalition of the oppressed, and then suddenly realize that members of the coalition of the oppressed hate them and think they're the bad guys.
And so they have two choices, to dissociate from their former ideology, or to continue to pretend alone because it's too damaging to their way of thought to acknowledge the reality.
Here's Chuck Schumer yesterday condemning the ICC.
This is the same guy who's calling for Benjamin Netanyahu's ouster five seconds ago.
As disappointing as the ICC's decision is, it comes as no surprise, because for decades and decades, the ICC has shown it harbors deep biases against Israel.
This decision, suggesting an equivalency between Israel and Hamas, is another glaring example of that bias against Israel.
As I have said many times, there has never been And there can never be any equivalence between Israel's right to defend itself against terror and Hamas's barbarity.
Then why exactly have you gone along with your president's attempts to deprive Israel of arms in a time of war?
The Republican Party, thankfully, actually does have a level of moral clarity about the situation because Republicans, because Republicans are disproportionately Christian, do not abide by the stupidity that human beings are good as a general rule.
Speaker Mike Johnson put out a statement, quote, The ICC has no authority over Israel or the United States.
Today's baseless and illegitimate decision should face global condemnation.
International bureaucrats cannot be allowed to use lawfare to usurp the authority of democratic nations that maintain the rule of law.
Congress is reviewing all options, including sanctions, to punish the ICC and ensure its leadership faces consequences if they proceed.
If the ICC is allowed to threaten Israeli leaders, ours could be next, which of course is true.
The ICC has been investigating American soldiers in Afghanistan for years at this point.
Meanwhile, when it comes to the death of Ibrahim Raisi, best statement award goes to former Speaker Mitch McConnell, Senate Minority Leader.
Here he was giving a morally clear statement about the death of Ibrahim Raisi.
I too would like to extend my condolences to the people of Iran for their long suffering under the brutal theocratic rule of the Islamic Republic.
I suspect a great many Iranians would rather Western admirers stop lionizing a man known as the Butcher of Tehran for executing political prisoners.
They might prefer that foreign leaders not further legitimize the regime that actively represses all of them.
You might think so, wouldn't you?
But again, it's the international comedy of nations that is at stake.
And that is why the West continues to play directly into the hands of people who think that they are the DME.
Okay, in just one moment, we'll get to an epic flub by Joe Biden yesterday.
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Meanwhile, Joe Biden's unbroken series of epic screwups continues.
Yesterday, he was speaking at Jewish American Heritage Month.
I didn't even know that was a thing.
Okay, but I guess it's a thing now.
And this is, again, Joe Biden trying to play both sides of the table.
On the one hand, Israel is committing possible human rights violations, according to the State Department, and they have to be barred from using certain weaponry, and they certainly can't go into Rafia, where the last four brigades of Hamas are.
That would be really bad, and uncover all the terror tunnels with Egypt, that, by the way, are large enough to drive trucks through.
That would be really, really... On the other hand, he does like matzo ball soup.
So here was Joe Biden speaking.
What he says here, He name-checks a person named Hirsch Goldberg-Polen.
Hirsch Goldberg-Polen is an American hostage to Hamas being held in the Gaza Strip, who Joe Biden has effectively abandoned because he says that Israel should not exert more military pressure in Gaza, and he has no plan for actually getting those people out of the Gaza Strip, short of allowing Hamas to continue to rule the Gaza Strip.
He announced that Hirsch Goldberg-Polen was present at this event before realizing, oh wait, he's a hostage.
My administration is working around the clock to free the remaining hostages, just as we have freed hostages already.
And here with us today is Hersh Goldberg-Poland, and still, he is not here with us, but he's still being held by Hamas.
Oh.
Well, that's, that's awkward.
I wonder, I wonder maybe you should do something about that, sir.
But don't worry.
Joe Biden says that the United States is going to try to get the hostages help, which is weird because he has not.
The trauma of October 7th and its aftermath of the deadliest day the Jewish people have undergone since the Holocaust is still fresh and ongoing with many of you.
We have parents of someone being held hostage right now, and we're going to get them home.
We're going to get them home from hell or high water.
Honestly, if you're attending this event with Joe Biden because you believe that Joe Biden is going to get the hostages home, You're delusional.
I don't know what you're thinking.
And meanwhile, the Democratic Party also had a big day yesterday because it was the anniversary of the death of Michael Brown.
You'll remember that Michael Brown was the young man from Ferguson, Missouri, who robbed a convenience store using force, then was walking down the street, accosted by a police officer, proceeded to reach inside the police officer's car, punch the police officer, grab at his gun, fire a shot inside the car, try to run around, and then, when caught, turned around and charged the officer before being shot.
This led to the Ferguson riots of 2014, spurred on by the President of the United States at the time, Barack Obama, who suggested that people would not make up a story like, hands up, don't shoot.
Remember, the entire media parroted a lie from a friend of Michael Brown who said that Michael Brown had surrendered and then was shot in the back After putting up his hands and saying don't shoot.
And the entire left went around and became a new symbol of the BLM movement.
BLM did not start with George Floyd.
BLM started with Michael Brown.
And you'll recall that there was a lie.
The lie was, hands up, don't shoot.
There were t-shirts.
There were marches.
All sorts of stuff.
You remember this?
Well, it turns out, according to Eric Holder's own DOJ, under Barack Obama, that, in fact, Michael Brown had attacked a police officer, was not shot in the back, was shot in the front, was charging a police officer, and, hands up, don't shoot, was a total and complete fabrication and lie.
It doesn't matter, because the myth is more important than the reality.
So the Democratic Party The woke members of the Democratic Party decided that it was time to stand up for Michael Brown once again.
It is truly amazing how a criminal who attempted to shoot a police officer has become the face of the Black Lives Matter movement.
But again, you got to pick the worst examples to demonstrate fealty to the cause.
So here is Cori Bush, Ferguson Congresswoman, trying to make a big deal out of it because of course she wouldn't be famous or in Congress if it were not for the death of Michael Brown.
Michael Brown should have turned 28 years old.
The last birthday he celebrated and will ever get to celebrate was his 18th.
Just 81 days after his 18th birthday, a Ferguson police officer killed him.
In a just world, Mike Brown would be with his loved ones right now, celebrating another year, dreaming of his future as he blows out the candles on his birthday cake.
But instead, we are only left with the memories of who he was.
Yeah, who he was, a guy who robbed a convenience store and tried to shoot a cop.
That'd be who he was.
The attempt to rewrite incidents.
What's truly amazing is there are in fact incidents of tremendous police misconduct.
This is not one of them.
But they have to keep pushing out the lie.
Because again, this goes back to the original supposition that I brought up at the beginning of the show.
The left believes that everyone is good.
Not just they have a good heart and then original sin entered the world.
That everyone is good, like throughout.
And it's only the systems that are bad.
It is our evil systemic racism that led to the death of Michael Brown.
Today, he'd be walking on the moon with NASA, if it were not for his murder at the hands of a police officer, which is not true.
It is not true.
Jamal Bowman did the same routine.
He put out a tweet suggesting something similar.
He said Mike Brown should be celebrating his 28th birthday today.
Mike was just 18 years old when he was killed by a police officer.
Black people continue to be targeted by police who view us as a threat.
Well, it turns out that you're viewed as a threat when you punch a police officer and reach through the window of his car and fire his gun.
We need justice and accountability so black boys can grow into black men in peace.
Actually, what you need is fathers in the home and law and order in major American cities.
That's what you need.
But that would, again, go to personal responsibility as opposed to the sort of broad, systemic changes that Jamal Bowman is pursuing.
This is an unbelievable star- Guys, what the heck is going on in there?
Nothing.
Keep going.
Are you grilling the steaks again?
Yeah, yeah, you got me.
Why are you doing that in the middle of the show?
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Let's do it.
Okay, meanwhile, the Donald Trump trial continues.
It is amazing how much faith the media have put into the Donald Trump trial, the idea that he's going to be jailed.
Basically, he's going to be jailed or he's going to win the election.
If Donald Trump just goes into a basement and throws his phone somewhere, puts it in a lockbox for the next several months, he will be president of the United States again.
Latest Harvard-Harris National Poll, Trump 49, Biden 43.
Remember that time in 2020?
When Trump's ceiling was like 44, 45%, then he ended up with like 46% in the national election.
He's now at 49, 43.
With leaners, he is now at 53, 47.
With RFK Jr.
in the race, he is at 45, 40.
So in other words, these are very good numbers for Donald Trump right now.
And the Democrats are freaking out as well they should be because it turns out that even the New York hush money trial It's such an obvious farce at this point that even members of the CNN coterie are like, what the F?
So yesterday, Michael Cohen, who is Donald Trump's former garbage lawyer and fixer, it turns out that he admitted on the stand to having stolen some $60,000 from the Trump Organization, which is a more serious crime than anything even alleged against Donald Trump.
Here's CNN's Eli Honig pointing this out.
Michael Cohen explained this whole thing, quote, that's what was owed and I didn't feel Mr. Trump deserved the difference.
That's a lot different than I stole $60,000 from my boss on the transaction at the heart of this case.
And by the way, the fact that he was never charged with larceny is important because stealing $60,000 through fraud, which would be larceny in New York state, is more serious of a crime than falsifying business records.
Oopsie.
That's a problem.
The CNN anchor spent the rest of yesterday just reeling.
It was reminiscent of the time when Donald Trump was president.
Every single day there'd be a breaking news alert from Wolf Blitzer about this was the moment when they were going to discover the secret documents linking Vladimir Putin with Donald Trump and it never materialized.
Yesterday, CNN's anchor was like, oh no.
Oh no, he escaped again.
It's like Lucy and the football.
Yeah, no, it's fascinating stuff and I have to say I'm still kind of reeling from the revelation that Michael Cohen stole money from the Trump organization and that wasn't, at least to my knowledge, that the prosecution didn't get that out earlier because it's not as though the prosecution's going to be helped by further evidence that Michael Cohen is a shady character.
I'm shocked that we are hearing it for the first time on day three of cross-examination of Michael Cohen, that the prosecution did not take the sting out, did not front it, because it goes to the heart of the actual case.
It's not just about establishing him as a liar.
They've done that.
The prosecution fronted that.
We knew that.
He has convictions.
But going to the heart of what you were telling your employer about what money you were owed and the extent of it, we're talking about $420,000.
We've already seen the payment structure here.
Right, this isn't like 15 bucks.
It's not $15.
The heart of the matter is that Donald Trump was complicit, caused to have this happen, and knew about the money that was going and why.
If they can establish Michael Cohen as somebody who is not to be trusted about the amount of money as well, then they might be able to suggest that Donald Trump had no idea what he was truly paying.
Well, I mean, oops.
It just turns out that this whole case is gonna- they'll convict him anyway.
It's New York, so I'm sure they'll find a way to convict him.
He's not gonna get jail time.
He is not a prior criminal, in any sense not a criminal under this case.
He would probably get some form of probation.
If that happens, this is just gonna look like they missed him again.
And every time they miss Trump, every time they fire Trump and they miss, it actually benefits Trump.
So now, The left is basically relegated to just shouting at the wind about how Donald Trump is a mean bad man.
The latest form of this comes courtesy of a film festival in Cannes.
So the film festival over there, obviously, is where all the she-she people get together to watch films that no one will ever watch in real life.
There is a movie called The Apprentice about Donald Trump's rise to power.
In America, it is apparently incredibly controversial because Sebastian Stan plays Donald Trump, Jeremy Strong plays his political fixer Roy Cohn, and apparently in the film, Donald Trump, his wife Ivana.
The screenplay is from a Vanity Fair journalist, Gabriel Sherman.
Gabriel Sherman is most famous for during the Fox News sort of heyday, maybe 10 years ago, writing stories about Fox that were just patently not true over and over.
But now he's written a screenplay and it's about the evils of Donald Trump.
According to the Washington Post, when the lights rose, the applause was instant and robust, with Cate Blanchett and Cynthia Erivo somehow leading the charge down the orchestra seats near Abbasi and Stan.
There'd been spots of laughter, especially during moments of physical comedy, like when Trump slips on ice while courting Ivana and boastfully telling her he knows how to ski.
But by and large, it is a very dark and chilling origin story.
Stan's Trump is not a clown, but a vicious killer, as the character categorizes his ambition.
In details that seem to be based on a 1990 divorce deposition from Ivana Trump, we see him go under the knife in gory detail to get liposuction and a scalp reduction surgery as a solution to his growing love handles and bald spot.
And we watch when, as Ivana also alleged in that deposition, Trump pushes her to the floor of their home during an argument and rips her.
He's also depicted receiving oral sex from a topless blonde in Atlantic City while married.
Apparently, uh, the Trump campaign Says that they're going to file a lawsuit to attack the film.
But again, if the idea here is that this star-studded affair is going to somehow damage Donald Trump, Wrong approach, guys.
That ain't gonna do bleep-all.
The reality is that if Donald Trump loses this election, then that's largely on Trump because he has every systemic advantage right now.
Joe Biden is a terrible candidate.
A huge number of people who were lukewarm on Trump are now hot on Trump because Trump is not Joe Biden.
And Joe Biden has proved himself to be an awful, awful leader of the free world.
The left can attack Trump with all the slings and arrows they can muster with regard to personal attacks and dumb lawsuits.
It ain't gonna make a difference.
The only person in this election who can defeat Donald Trump is Donald Trump.
And he seems to be running, believe it or not, a much more disciplined campaign this time around.
All right, coming up, we'll be joined by Trent Horn at Catholic Answers to discuss the Pope's appearance on 60 Minutes.
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