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Coming up, I'll evaluate the situation in Israel, including the odious Hamas lobby that has been emerging in the United States.
Zev Ornstein, International Affairs Director at the City of David Foundation in Jerusalem, joins me for Hey, if you're listening on Apple, Google, or Spotify, or watching on Rumble, please subscribe to my channel.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Show.
The times are crazy, and a time of confusion, division, and lies.
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Two things really stand out in terms of the U.S., Relationship to the Hamas attacks in Israel.
The first is that the Biden administration helped to subsidize these attacks, and it did it quite simply by releasing $6 billion of funds to Iran.
Now, there's a great effort on the part of the left to run away from this, to hide from this.
By saying, in effect, that yes, we released the money, but the money was put into a separate bank account and not one cent, I'm not quoting them, not one cent of this money has been spent yet.
Now, this defense makes not really a lot of sense because money doesn't have to be spent in order to be used.
And if that seems like an odd thing to say, let's say I win the lottery and I'm going to get $6 That's basically what the Biden administration did.
They said, Iran, you've won the lottery.
Here's $6 billion.
But the money's coming.
It's in an account. You just don't have it yet.
The question is, do I still have $6 billion?
Answer, yes. Because all I need to know is that the money has been allocated for me.
It's not going to be taken back.
It is promised and the Biden regime is going to keep its pledge.
The money has in fact left the United States.
It's sitting in a bank account.
And so I can go to another bank and say, hey, listen, I've got $6 billion sitting over there.
Can I get a loan for $5 billion?
And the bank would go, of course.
If you have the money and you can pay the interest, you can certainly have that kind of loan.
So the simple fact of it is, whether or not those particular dollar bills have been spent, Iran's net worth went up $6 billion and they can easily use that money.
The Iranian president couldn't have been more clear.
We'll use the money for whatever we want.
And if they haven't spent it yet, well, they could spend it in the future.
So Hamas is going to have to defend against the incoming Israeli assault.
Maybe Hamas thinks, well, the way to defuse the assault is to launch new attacks and get the Israelis to have to defend their own territories.
So Guess what?
We have 6 billion in unspent money that the Iranians can help us with, so we haven't used it yet, so let's use it now!
Now... Interestingly, there are Republicans who are saying, and a lot of people saying, that the Biden administration should take back that money.
And think about it. If it hasn't been spent, you can totally take it back.
But the Biden people are reluctant to do that.
The Democrats are reluctant to do that, with the exception of one or two.
None of them has come out and said, yes, we think that this $6 billion should be returned.
So all the rhetoric that's coming out from the Democrats Oh, we condemn terrorism.
Our hearts are with the Israelis.
There is an element of insincerity when you're not willing to acknowledge that A, your funds may have played a role in helping this to happen.
This is a little bit like what we saw with COVID, except only worse.
And that is when you do gain-of-function research, you do it in collaboration with the Wuhan lab, the virus may well have come out, leaked out of that lab, and then you go, well, we're not really responsible because our gain-of-function research wasn't connected to.
It's just an attempt to sort of avoid responsibility.
But even if you try to avoid responsibility, you should at least try to undo the effects of what you have set in motion.
And so here's the $6 billion.
And if you're right that the money still is around, let's freeze it again.
Let's seize it.
Let's take it back. The money is supposedly under the supervision of Qatar.
Well, let's go to the Qataris and say, hand it over.
This should not be hard to do.
The U.S. would easily be in a position to do this.
Now, I was thinking a little bit about the connection between the stuff going on in Israel and the police state, and I think there is a connection.
The connection is simply this.
The US government and the intelligence agencies and the police agencies of our government are so obsessed with With going after January 6 grandmas, going after peaceful protesters, following around people who went to the Trump rally, targeting what they call domestic extremism, that they were not doing their real job.
Think about it. What was the...
What did...
When the US government was given all these police powers in the aftermath of 9-11, in the aftermath of the Patriot Act, wasn't it to monitor the activity of foreign terrorists and, in specific, Islamic terrorists, the same guys who did 9-11, who continue to wish harm on us and our allies?
And that's the key job of the U.S. intelligence agencies, and they clearly weren't doing it.
They have turned their lens inward, and they're targeting unbelievably us.
So, look, I am concerned about Israel, but I am also very alarmed by the police state emerging in the United States.
Why? Because if the lights go out here, if the noose tightens here on our basic rights and liberties— The noose is going to tighten all over the world.
The lights are going to go out in Israel.
They'll go out in other free societies around the world.
So if we want to protect American lives, American freedoms, and the free world, we should begin by doing it at home and then extend those protections to the degree we can to our allies abroad.
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Guys, I'd like to welcome back to the podcast a really good friend of ours, Zev Ornstein.
He's Director of International Affairs at the City of David Foundation in Jerusalem, Israel.
He has been up close with all these tragic events of the last several days, and I thought it'd be really great to have Zev come on and talk a little bit about it.
Zev, welcome. Thanks for joining us from Israel.
And let me begin by asking you to describe some of the work that the City of David Foundation is doing, because I want to draw a strange connection between your work And some of these tragic events.
On the surface, it may not seem to be connected, but I believe, and I think you believe, it is.
So let's begin by talking about what the city of David is doing in Israel.
Very simply, the city of David is the historic site of biblical Jerusalem.
When you think of the place where the kings of the Bible ruled, where the prophets of the Bible preached, they were not hanging out in what's known as the old city of Jerusalem.
But just outside the walls of the old city, just south of the Temple Mount in the Western Wall is the city of David.
That's where people like King David, King Solomon, prophets like Isaiah and Jeremiah, that's where they were hanging out.
And there's no place in the world more so than City of David where you can take the Bible in one hand and see what's being unearthed in the other and see that Jerusalem's biblical heritage, what in America might be known as the Judeo-Christian heritage, is not simply a matter of faith but a matter of fact where every single day antiquities are being unearthed that show that our shared Whether you're Jewish or Christian,
whether you're in Israel or in America, our shared heritage that both our nations are established upon, the archaeological affirmation of that heritage is being unearthed every single day in the city of David.
So let's think about what these excavations in the city of David are really showing.
I mean, not only are they validating, you may say historicizing, giving firm historical grounding, that some of the Hebrew prophets, some of the ancient kings of Israel, these were not mythical figures.
These were historical figures.
They lived, they had They had territory.
They had wives. They ruled.
They were subject to human flaws and temptations.
And the other thing, if I'm right, is they're showing that this is the ancestral home of the Jews.
The Jews might have been scattered in diaspora, but before that, this is where they lived.
This was their home.
Isn't that right? 100%.
And not only for the Jewish people that we've been living in this land for thousands and thousands of years, that archaeology affirms that, but of course for your Christian listeners, Jesus himself was Jewish.
And he would have been walking through the city of David.
He would have been in Jerusalem as a Jew.
And so, whether you're Jewish or Christian, this is a place that has deep, deep significance for the affirmation of our shared heritage, which is a biblical heritage with its roots in Jerusalem, in the city of David.
Zev, you have a project going on right now, which is excavation of the Pool of Siloam.
And this is the pool in which religious Jews would bathe and sort of cleanse themselves before walking down the pilgrim road to the temple.
And when Jesus of Nazareth, being a Jew, and having gone to the temple, would have been in that pool, would have walked that road.
So isn't this what you're talking about when you're saying that this is a Jewish history, but also obviously for Christians, it has a Christian dimension as well?
100%. Now, we have this massive, unprovoked, unexpected attack that has come from Hamas, seemingly, or actually quite obviously, with Iranian planning, Iranian orchestration.
Comment a little bit about whether you see any connection, however remote, between the work that you're doing, the historical validation that you're doing, and what Hamas is trying to strike out at.
What's clear, and Hamas makes this very clear, if anyone wants to see the people that we are talking about right now, just go online, Google Hamas Charter, and you'll see it is the modern-day Nazi party calling for the genocidal eradication of Israel and the Jewish people.
And from their perspective, Israel is an occupying, colonizing power that has no legitimate historic ties to the land of Israel or to Jerusalem, certainly.
And in a certain sense, it is a...
Spiritual conflict, not just a military or geographic one, which is from their perspective, the idea that anyone other than Islam, having domain in the Middle East and certainly in the land of Israel and Jerusalem, from their perspective, it is...
It's a holy war that you have to drive out the infidels, whether they be Jews, whether they be Christians, that they have no place in the region and certainly no place as sovereign in the region, which is why Hamas is so committed to driving Israel out.
The idea that from their perspective that you could have a Jewish state in the Middle East is unacceptable.
And the idea that in a place like the city of David where we're unearthing direct affirmation Of the fact that we've been here for thousands of years, that Jerusalem's biblical heritage was significant not to millions, but to billions, whether to Jews or Christians, is not simply a matter of faith, but a matter of fact.
These are all things that, from Hamas's perspective, are a non-starter.
And so what they are fighting against is not, you know, the so-called quote-unquote occupation or anything, a political policy or they don't like Netanyahu or they don't like this policy or that government.
They want to eliminate the state of Israel.
They want to eliminate the Jewish people from this land.
And believe me, it's not just the Jewish people or the Jewish state that they would want to eliminate.
They would do the same to America if they could.
Because why they hate us is the same reason, in large part, why they would hate the United States of America as well.
For the same foundations of our shared heritage, which they are committed to wiping out.
We'll be right back with Zev Ornstein, Director of International Affairs at the City of David Foundation based in Jerusalem.
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I'm back with our friend Zev Ornstein, Director of International Affairs at the City of David Foundation based in Jerusalem.
Zev, you know, you mentioned this idea that is articulated by Hamas, by a lot of the other radical Islamic groups, that Israel is a colonial occupier of the land that we call Israel.
Israel sort of doesn't belong there.
It sees that land by force.
And its presence there is illegitimate.
Now, let's think about this for a moment historically, because the lands of the Middle East were originally Jewish.
Then they became Roman.
Then a lot of them were Christian, places like Jordan.
Islam comes along in the 7th century and conquers those regions.
So, what I find kind of amusing is that...
That you have Islam, which was itself a colonial power, an invader, a conqueror, an occupier, and really proud of it.
I mean, the conquests of Islam are celebrated in the annals of Islamic writings through the centuries.
Isn't it interesting that you've now got this rhetoric, which almost seems to me a modern Western rhetoric, the rhetoric of treating colonialism as bad and treating the victims as good.
It's interesting that the radical Muslims have learned this language, which was invented in the West.
I think one of the reasons why they use that language, and you see it in particular on university campuses in the media today, is they use the language that will resonate with the people that they are trying to convince.
It's not that they believe in Western liberalism or any of these values, but if that happens to resonate with getting political support, be it at the United Nations or on university campuses, they will use that rhetoric to And it's ironic also because there is virtually not a single grain of sand in the Middle East that Islam has had control over that did not come via the sword.
So the idea that somehow they're a pacifist, that Hamas is really just a bunch of nice people that are misunderstood, obviously that is not the case.
and if anyone needed any proof of that just look at what's happened over the last few days here in Israel which has been really almost no words to describe the barbarism, the inhumanity that has been displayed.
Are you seeing Zev that in Israel now?
There is a coming together of the Israeli people.
I say this because something of the sort happened at 9-11 in the United States, as you know.
And yet Israel, like America, has been quite a politically divided society.
Netanyahu, undoubtedly a controversial figure.
But what is the sentiment in Israel now as you look kind of across the political spectrum?
How are people... Are those rivalries now somewhat muted in a common project to defeat Amos?
One of the, I would say without a doubt, one of the reasons that led to this attack was the sense of disunity within Israel, the political strife and divisions that were tearing apart Israeli society over the last number of months.
And I imagine that Hamas and Iran, which sponsored everything that's happened over the last couple of days, they believe that Israel is at a weak point.
And their big mistake, which they'll realize in the days, weeks, and months to come, is that they have actually helped to reunify our society.
And when the Jewish people, when Israel is united, nothing will break us.
It doesn't mean that we have not suffered a very difficult blow that will take many, many years and generations to recover from.
But once we're a united society, the acts of kindness, the wall-to-wall support, and just keep in mind, it's different from America.
Israel just called up 360,000 reserve soldiers, which means that virtually all able-bodied males beneath the age of 40 or so, they're all serving on the front lines right now.
Meaning all teenage and young adult sons are on the front lines, fathers, husbands on the front lines.
This is not where you have a small percentage of society that serves in the military.
This is the entire country now is on the front lines.
And those who aren't on the front lines, I can speak about my family, but my family is just one example of pretty much every family in this country.
Finding ways to do acts of kindness.
How can you be doing something to help, whether it's the soldiers, whether it's the families who are in need right now from the South, who have faced such terrible loss?
What can you be doing? No one is sitting home watching Netflix right now.
Everyone is finding a way to contribute to strengthening the home front, strengthening unity amongst people here in Israel, finding ways to just...
be a part of the effort here.
There are the fighters and then there are those who support the fighters and everyone in this nation right now is in some way in one of those two categories.
There is no one who is just sitting on the sidelines and it's a beautiful thing to see.
It's tragic whether it takes a 9-11 or something that just happened here in Israel to bring that about, but when it does express itself, it's a beautiful thing and it's truly an unstoppable force.
And in many ways now, I think that the nation is going to hopefully be leading our leaders and showing that the nation is strong, the nation wants to fight, we're united, we're ready to dig in for whatever is necessary, as long as our leaders do what needs to be done, both our military leaders and our political leaders.
But the nation is unified and strong and ready for whatever sacrifices need to be made in order to end this threat one We'll be right back with Zev Warnstein, Director of International Affairs at the City of David Foundation, based in Jerusalem.
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Feel the difference. I'm back with Zev Ornstein, Director of International Affairs at the City of David Foundation.
Zev, you know, there's...
There's a lot of passionate condemnations of the Hamas attacks now coming from the United States from all quarters.
And yet, it remains a sort of stunning fact that the Biden administration released $6 billion in funds to Iran.
Now, shouldn't there be some soul-searching right here in the United States and perhaps some accountability in the Biden administration for what would seem to be subsidizing a horrific attack?
So you can't condemn the attack without looking at, well, what helped to pay for this attack?
I think if anyone had any blinders as to what Iran represents, what Hamas represents, not that there should have ever been any, but in case anyone did, I think those blinders have been thrown off.
And Hamas could not have done this without the direct Iranian support, not just financial support, but intelligence and training.
The Washington Post and other media outlets have already verified that this was in fact the case.
Hamas is not capable on their own to pull off what just happened.
So, Iran was directly behind this.
And Iran is the sea-largest backer of both Hamas and Hezbollah, which are the two fronts that Israel is primarily dealing with, Hamas in the south and Hezbollah in the north.
And the thought that, you know, $6 billion, it's a lot of money, is going to Iran...
Even if, you know what, it was given under the best of intentions, let's give benefit of the doubt, it's not too late to say, you know what, we can no longer give you that money.
I'm sorry, but the United States of America, which stands for the values that the country was built upon, standing with their allies who were just...
Attacked by an Iranian proxy that the United States of America can't in good conscience allow the $6 billion to go to Iran.
And believe me, there are a lot of better causes to give that money to.
I mean, Israel right now is going to have to rebuild the country from this attack just in terms of humanitarian need.
Better to give it to something like that than to Iran.
And so I would imagine this should be an apolitical thing.
This should not be a Republican issue or a Democrat issue.
But there are good guys and there are bad guys here.
And I think everyone, whether you're Republican or Democrat, should be able to agree that Iran is on the evil side.
Hamas is on the evil side.
And giving any money, especially now, billions of dollars, which everyone knows, will be used for more of the same as what we just saw in Israel over the last couple of days.
I couldn't imagine any member of Congress or Senate from either party supporting that money still going to Iran.
And so hopefully this is something, a bipartisan effort that can stop that money, freeze that money, and at least begin to make Iran pay a small price for what they're responsible for.
Well, I mean, the kind of statements that we've seen coming out of the Biden administration, various organs of the government, is sort of an effort to say that the money has not been spent yet.
The money is sitting in an account, as if to say that the actual dollar bills we provided were not used for this terrorist attack— Well, I think that what you're saying is, number one, if it hasn't been spent yet, take it back.
And number two, Iran has made it very clear.
I saw a statement by the president of Iran basically saying, listen, once we get the money, it's our money.
We're going to use it for whatever we decide, not what you think.
So this is a case where it seems less important to make an explanation to avoid responsibility and more to say there may be an opportunity to undo this grievous error that has been made.
Don't you agree? 100%.
I think, you know, for your listeners, just to imagine what we're talking about that happened.
We're talking about in one day, the bodies are literally still being counted, but it's up to over 1,300 Israelis were murdered this past Saturday on the Sabbath, on one of the Jewish festival days.
1,300 people.
So just to, you know, it's a number.
So what does that mean?
So if you're listening and you live in an apartment building, So imagine your entire apartment building is just gone, destroyed.
And then the one next to that one and the one next to that and the whole block of apartment buildings and you come out to about 1300 people.
And if you live in a private home, so imagine everyone in your home murdered and the home next to you and your entire block and the block next to that one and probably your whole neighborhood, 1300 people.
And just yesterday, It came out in one of the villages near the Gaza border.
They found 40 babies.
Babies. Mutilated.
Beheaded. Beheaded. We're talking about elderly people, women raped.
I mean, you know, the Bible talks about that every person is created in the image of God.
And you know what? It does not apply to Hamas.
Hamas is shown in their actions here.
They are not created in the image of God.
This is, if you want to see evil in the world, this is evil.
When you go into a nursery and you behead You kill the men and then you take the women and the elderly hostage into Gaza.
This was not a military attack.
This was not a political dispute.
And the thing that makes it even worse...
This has been the greatest day in terms of number of Jews killed in one single day since the Holocaust.
And the difference between Hamas and the Nazis is the Nazis tried to cover up their crimes.
Hamas is so proud that they released videos.
Anyone can go on YouTube and just Hamas is releasing the footage of the brutalities of the atrocities that they carried out that they're proud of it.
And that's something that really every American should be aware of.
And just know that Israel today is fighting a fight, not just for the Jewish people, not just for the state of Israel.
But if we are not successful in eradicating Hamas here, then it will embolden all the similar groups like Hamas who want to do the same to America.
That either we will show the world that evil can be defeated.
And strike fear into the hearts of all these organizations.
Or if Israel is not allowed to finish the job, then it will give encouragement to all these organizations to show that even when you kill 1,300 men, women, children, elderly, babies in one day, you can get away with it.
And if they got away with it by Israel, it'll come to the United States also.
So this is a fight for both of our nations, a fight that we must win.
We'll be right back with Zev Ornstein, Director of International Affairs at the City of David Foundation in Jerusalem.
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I'm back with Zev Ornstein, Director of International Affairs at the City of David Foundation in Zev, you said something that on the face of it was really shocking, but when I think about it, quite accurate.
And that is, you said that sometimes people liken...
Hamas and these terrorist groups to the Nazis.
And of course, then people go, well, were they really of the same, you know, were they really that evil?
Were they really that bad? And I think what you implied is, in some respects, they're worse.
Because the Nazis realized that if we have these death camps...
First of all, we can't keep them in Germany.
We can't let the German people find out that we're putting people in gas ovens.
So what we have to do is put these death camps in Poland.
We've got to put them in the occupied territories.
And in fact, the death camps were located in those occupied territories.
So the Nazis tried to hide their crimes completely.
Hamas, on the other hand, is boasting about its crimes, putting it out on social.
So this is a level of depravity that in some ways even the Nazis didn't go for.
Yeah, it's just, and the reason they're putting it out in many ways is psychological warfare to scare the people in Israel and perhaps in America and elsewhere of, well, this is what you're up against.
And the videos are frightening and it's literally getting a look into evil.
In 2023, it's hard to imagine that this is still possible in the world today, but here it is.
And we all have a choice.
And the choice is, what are you going to do?
Are you going to try to appease evil?
Are you going to just look away and hope it doesn't come to your doorstep?
Or are you going to eradicate evil?
And hopefully Israel as a society, we've made our choice because the choice is we've already paid with $1,300.
Dead men, women, and children in one day.
We, God willing, will have the courage to destroy Hamas once and for all.
But again, America and the rest of the Western world, you could pretend that, you know what, this just happened to Israel.
They only hate Jews. We're not Jewish.
We don't have to worry about it. It's not really our problem.
Maybe you're right for today, maybe for tomorrow, for a month, a year, maybe a decade.
But it will come to you.
If you don't fight the fight, if you do not commit yourselves to standing up against this kind of evil in the world, and it is evil, it will come.
And that's what's at stake here.
Are you concerned, Zev, that one of the kind of ideologies that has gained a lot of footing in Europe and America over the past generation, it's sort of the rhetoric of moral equivalence.
And it's the rhetoric that essentially takes, there's an evil act, and then when you retaliate against that evil act, And the rhetoric of moral equivalence says, well, gee, these are two people doing the same thing.
Hamas struck out at Israel.
Israel is striking out at Hamas.
And so, how do you think about Hamas?
The, not just the political backlash that could come against Israel once Israel really gets into the fight with Hamas.
But second, how do you think about, you know, as an observant Jew, as somebody who takes your faith seriously, who takes morality seriously, how do you think about this issue of moral equivalence?
Moral equivalence, I think people talk a lot today about privilege.
Moral equivalence is a privilege because only a society that has not gone through the types of things that Israel's faced over the last few days can talk about moral equivalency.
When it's your family, when it's your nation, when it's your people that has just had 1,300 of its men, women, and children brutally murdered, raped, beheaded, mutilated, I think?
There is the obligation, even in the Bible, to eliminate evil.
I'm not here to get into how do you define what's evil.
But I can say that anyone who cannot acknowledge that beheading, mutilating 40 babies in a nursery, if you can't acknowledge that's evil, Then you need to do some soul searching.
So this is not politics. Well, if you're right winger, if you're left winger, if you're religious or secular, there should be certain baseline truths of this is evil and it should be eradicated.
You don't have to be an observant Jew or Christian to understand these things.
Although sadly today, it seems that...
Common sense is becoming less and less common, and one doesn't have to go very far.
If you look in New York City today, if you look at Harvard University today, the types of propaganda, there are demonstrations the last few days in New York City calling for the destruction of Israel, a number of student groups at Harvard University being Harvard.
Talking about how Israel bears sole responsibility for apparently having 1,300 of its own citizens murdered, raped, mutilated.
I guess that's Israel's fault somehow, according to Harvard, which apparently is supposed to produce the smartest people in the world.
I guess we're not so smart that we don't understand it that way.
But when you look at a society that cannot tell right from wrong, good from evil, that is a society that does not have much of a future because if you can't identify evil, if you can't identify what is good and what is wrong, what is right and what is wrong, then you can't defend it and you can't fight against it.
And so that's really, Israel has had a wake-up call if we needed one.
And the question is, will America and the rest of the world heed that call as well, or if they will wait for similar circumstances to strike at their home countries?
We'll be right back for a final segment with Zev Ornstein.
Guys, I'd like to invite you, and there's no better time, to check out my Locals channel.
I post a lot of exclusive content there, including content that's censored on other social media platforms.
On Locals, you get Dinesh Unchained, Dinesh Uncensored.
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Every week, I do a live weekly Q&A. It's typically on Tuesday, 8 p.m.
Eastern. No topic is off-limits.
I've also uploaded some cool films to Locals, 2,000 Meals included, documentaries and feature films, my films and films by other I'm back with Zev Ornstein, Director of International Affairs at the City of David Foundation in Jerusalem.
Zav, when BLM came to prominence in the wake of the George Floyd business, everybody was gaga.
People were, progressives particularly in this country, very enthusiastic, corporations piling money into BLM. And yet, interestingly, when this erupted, BLM Very clearly came out on the Palestinian side.
I was a little shocked that they even showed the image of Hamas fighters kind of parachuting into Israel and embraced that kind of imagery.
I mean, it seems to me, I don't know if this is happening in Israel, but there needs to be a...
It's progressive re-evaluation here because I think when a lot of people supported BLM, they, you know, think about the innocence of the term, Black Lives Matter.
Well, sure. But you don't know that when you're signing up for that, you're getting a whole bunch of other stuff as well.
You gotta read the fine print.
From the very, very beginning, when BLM put out its charter, you know, support for Palestine referring to Israel as an apartheid state, an illegitimate, you know, occupying power, well, that's what they were calling for.
And the... You know, refer to Israel in humanized terms, whether it's apartheid or colonizers or whatever, well, then you got to fight against them.
And, you know, here we are.
And not to mention that the idea of referring to Israel as colonial anything, there's probably no people anywhere in the world that has more of a connection to their land, to their homeland, Then the Jewish people have to the land of Israel with documented scientific archaeological evidence of their living continuously in this land for nearly 4,000 years.
So there's no occupation.
There's no colonization.
There's no apartheid. This is not a political issue.
This is a right and wrong issue.
And again, go read Hamas's charter.
It's there online. They don't hide it.
And see what they are calling for and see if that is something that You, listening to this, whether it's in the United States or anywhere else, that you can feel in good conscience that this is a legitimate perspective.
You know, I got to not that there's anything to chuckle about here, but one thing that did make me chuckle today was a bunch of the Harvard South Asian organizations, the Asian Indian group, the Nepali group had all signed on to this support for Palestine.
And then a venture capitalist came out in America and said, OK, give me the names of the members of all these organizations.
So we'll make sure never to hire them.
And I noticed that one by one, these Asian societies are now disavowing their statement.
So clearly, progressive morality doesn't go very far.
The moment you realize, oh, my job may be affected.
It's like I'm going to cancel my involvement with this kind of kind of organization.
Well, let me say on the other side or ask you, there are going to be Americans who say, are there things that we can do to help ordinary Israelis in this situation?
What would your answer be?
Absolutely. There are many, many causes that people in America can reach out to in Israel to help.
I'll just mention two or three.
You have an organization called the Friends of IDF, Friends of the Israel Defense Forces, which helps get supplies to people on the front, which is certainly in need right now.
You have another organization called Magen David Adom, M-A-G-E-N-D-A-V-I-D-A-D-O-M, which is essentially Israel's equivalent to the Red Cross.
Which they're involved every moment of the day right now in life-saving efforts, which they could use their support.
In terms of the City of David specifically, we are trying to bolster security in and around the historic site of biblical Jerusalem, ensuring not just that the antiquities are protected, but you have hundreds of families living in the area that right now are in need of protection.
And so we're trying to ensure that that happens as well.
And so... You can find in the show notes, there'll be a link to that project as well where you could go to that or go to the City of David website, cityofdavid.org.il and in the about section, find donate and you can make a donation there to support that project.
Guys, Debbie and I think that there is just about no cause as important as the work that the City of David Foundation is doing.
We're supporters. We want you to be as well.
And Zev Ornstein, thank you so much for joining me from Jerusalem and giving us your point of view.
Thank you. Thank you so much.
I'm in a section of the Gulag Archipelago where Solzhenitsyn is describing a group of Soviet soldiers who found themselves in World War II in Sweden, and they experienced life in the West.
It was wartime, but nevertheless, there was the abundance of Sweden, the technological sophistication of Sweden, the presence of people sitting in cafes and eating food.
And the Soviet soldiers saw, wow, these people are living the kind of life that we don't have in our communist paradise.
And so the Russian leadership, the Soviet leadership, knew this.
So when these guys came back to Russia after the war, guess what?
They are imprisoned.
And you can infer that they were imprisoned both to teach themselves a lesson.
They were probably praising the virtues of Western society.
But second, so that they don't go around telling other people, hey, listen, guess what?
All this stuff we're told about how horrible life is in the bourgeois societies, it's not even true.
Those guys live far better than we do.
Now, Solzhenitsyn now goes into what happened after that.
And what happened after that is that, obviously, in Sweden and in the West, people find out that these Russian soldiers are now in prison.
And so there are articles in the Western press about, wait a minute, you've got these Russian soldiers, they're fighting for the motherland, they're fighting against the Nazis, they're helping to defeat the Nazis, and what?
Stalin has ordered them to be locked up?
So, there's outrage in the Western press.
And so, says Solzhenitsyn, and now I'm reading, Suddenly, these soldiers were fed for two months as though for slaughter and allowed to let their hair grow.
So, instead of getting the kind of crew cut of a prisoner, you're allowed to have a normal haircut.
They feed you as if you're a lamb fattened for the slaughter.
Why? Because they're about to parade these same prisoners before the Western press.
Then they were dressed with modest elegance, rehearsed on what to say and to whom, and warned that any bastard who dared to squeak out of turn would get a bullet in his skull.
And then they were led off to a press conference for selected foreign journalists and some others who had known the entire crew in Sweden.
The former internees...
Meaning, prisoners.
Bore themselves cheerfully, described where they were living, studying, and working, and expressed their indignation at the bourgeois slander that they had read about not long before in the Western press.
After all, Western papers are sold in the Soviet Union at every corner newsstand.
And so they had written to one another and decided to gather in Leningrad.
Their travel expenses didn't bother them in the least.
to the newspaper Canard, the discredited journalist went off to write their apologies.
It was wholly inconceivable to the Western imagination that there could have been any other explanation.
So the Western press are suckers.
They see all these guys. Whoa, wait a minute.
They're not in prison. Wait, their hair's grown.
They look like they're living normal life.
They are very outraged that we have been slandering them like this in the Western press.
And so they've gathered at their own expense to object to this.
We better retract our stories.
And then, of course, Solzhenitsyn continues, So this is how police states operate.
They operate by intimidation and threats.
Hey, listen, you guys...
You're angry at being confined in a prison camp, but we need you right now.
And so we're going to fatten you up.
We're going to dress you up.
We're going to give you a script.
And your script is to go out there and dispute the reports in the Western press.
In other words, dispute the accuracies in the Western press and replace them with the lies that we're going to give you.
The lie that you're not in prison, you're not in danger, you're You're a student, you're an intellectual, you're living a normal life, and here you just came across this article in the Western press, and you have to correct these inaccuracies.
And guess what? After this task is performed, and of course it is performed by these prisoners with a gun to their head...
Then it's like, all right, back to the prison camp to serve out the rest of your term.
Now, you're lucky that we're not adding to your term and that is a reward.
So the reward that you get for playing your appropriate role is not that we shorten your term, it's not that we let you out, it's not that we give you your freedom, it's that we agree not to give you 10 more years.
We're not going to be adding to your sentence.
So the lesson here is that socialist societies, I think the phrase is the Potemkin village phenomenon.
The Potemkin village is an artificial village.
It's a scene that's not real.
It's a facade. You see the front of a building, but if you went and peeked at the back, there's no building there.
And so this is propaganda in the true sense of the term.
The state has an objective and The police state has an objective.
And even though you are at the receiving end of the police state, they still have enough control over you.
After all, they can always make your life worse.
So they can get you to dress up and comb your hair and behave yourself and even praise the very regime that is going to take you right back to prison once you've finished your press conference.
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