Dinesh D'Souza - THE YOUNG AND THE RESTLESS Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1189

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Oct. 14, 2025 - Dinesh D'Souza

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THE YOUNG AND THE RESTLESS Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1189

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	Is the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians?
	The revival of an ancient conflict recorded in the Bible.
	The nation of Israel is a resurrected nation.
	What if there was gonna be a resurrection of another people, an enemy people of Israel?
	The Dragon's Prophecy.
	Watch it now or buy the DVD at the Dragons Prophecyfilm.com.
	Coming up after a glorious phase one, the Trump peace plan is now in phase two, and I'll consider the prospects.
	I want to explore why young people today are especially vulnerable to the anti-Israel and anti-Jewish sentiment from the right.
	And a filmmaker and activist Yuval David is going to join me.
	We're going to talk about the strange alliance between the cultural left on the one hand and the global jihadis on the other.
	Hey, if you're watching on YouTube, X or Rumble, listening on Apple or Spotify, please subscribe to my channel.
	Hit the subscribe, the follow, the notifications button.
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	This is the Dinesh D'Souza podcast.
	America needs this voice.
	The times are crazy in a time of confusion, division, and lies.
	We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
	This is the Dinesh de Souza podcast.
	We have just uh witnessed a tearful joyful day in which the hostages came home.
	I've mentioned before that for Debbie and me there's a little bit of a personal element to this because one of those hostage families, the Miran family is profiled in our film, the Dragon's Prophecy.
	By the way, I just got my DVDs for the film.
	This is what they look like.
	Just downright awesome.
	A great way to watch at home, a great way to watch on your big screen uh TV, a great way to share uh as well.
	So uh check out the DVDs.
	By the way, they're available both from Salem now, but they're also available from Amazon.
	And so if you are a member of Amazon, uh the link to buy them on Amazon is on the website.
	So go to the Dragon's Prophecy Film.com and you'll see that you can get the DVDs from Salem, you can get them from Amazon.
	The movie's also, by the way, in streaming on multiple platforms, and as I mentioned yesterday, we also have a tab for church screenings.
	If your church wants to screen the movie, we've um made uh a deal with a company called Catalyst, which will organize those church screenings.
	This is what they do so they they know how to do it.
	So that's the way to pursue that.
	Go to the website as a kind of starting point for watching this film however you want to do it.
	Now as I mentioned, the um the hostages are home, and um, you know, our friend Marina Medvin sent us not just photos but videos of the Miran family reunion.
	So touching to see.
	Uh and Debbie and I are quite moved at uh at um at seeing this after two years.
	I mean, imagine being a four-year-old or a two-year-old and not seeing your dad for two whole years.
	They've they've missed two years of your life.
	You've missed them for two years of uh of growing up.
	Israel paid a steep price for this, uh, for getting the hostages back, um, and that is to release a large number of really bad guys.
	Terrorists in most cases, but in other cases, suspect characters who are rounded up uh during the war.
	All of those guys are back, and well, you can be sure many of them will be up to up to no good.
	So this is phase one.
	Uh, and phase one, I think can be declared a success, an unequivocal success.
	I've been really struck by the fact that both on the left and on the right, from people who were complaining about, oh, the war is extracting so many civilian casualties and there's genocide going on.
	Now, there wasn't really genocide going on, but uh nevertheless, for the people who said that there was genocide going on, they seem awfully quiet now that the genocide has stopped.
	I've been looking for people on the left celebrating this peace plan.
	Very little of that.
	Just kind of like a grumpy, sullen silence.
	I've been looking on the right at uh people who had warned this was going to lead into World War III, the US is going to be pulled into a quagmire, just wait.
	Many people saying that.
	And again, those people have gone dead silent.
	This seems to be kind of, by the way, a mark of our social media age.
	You never admit error, you never apologize, you never reconsider, you just basically go quiet.
	I suppose this media tactic was um in some ways uh officially established by mainstream media outlets themselves, where when they make statements that turn out to be flatly wrong, instead of apologizing or doing a public correction, they go back and stealth edit their articles to pretend like they never said it in the first place.
	So a very low, deceitful age we live in, I'm sorry to say.
	Uh and certainly I uh I'm going to try to live by standards a little better than that.
	If I get it wrong, I'm gonna tell you, hey, I told you this was going to happen.
	It actually didn't happen, something else happened.
	Uh, here's why I think I got it wrong.
	Uh and uh however, in this case, so far at least, I don't have such apologies to make because I haven't gotten it wrong.
	I've backed the Trump effort and I've proven to be right.
	I backed the Trump effort in the strike against Iran, and by the way, Debbie and I were talking about this.
	That laid the groundwork for what's happened here.
	And not just the Iran strike, by the way, because think about it.
	If Iran was still calling the shots, if Iran was still uh, you know, if its nuclear reactors were churning, Iran would extract far more onerous terms from the United States for any kind of deal if there was one to be made at all.
	It's the fact that Iran is flat on its back.
	It's the fact that their nuclear reactors are now in embers or essentially debris.
	Uh, Iran is out of the picture.
	We don't even have to talk to them.
	We don't care what they think.
	Um, and even their surrogates like Hezbollah have been um severely weakened.
	This weakening, by the way, has been done primarily by Israel, not by the United States.
	It has been Israeli efforts, Israeli strategic ingenuity, uh, Israeli soldiers putting their lives on the line.
	Uh, and this has been a massive effort.
	By the way, in about seven different countries.
	The um Israel went to Lebanon and crushed Hezbollah over there.
	Hezbollah, of course, an arm of the Iranian regime, Hezbollah, which had a quite massive arsenal of rockets, all aimed at civilian centers in Israel.
	Then Israel goes to Iran and neutralizes Iran, basically obliterating their military forces, uh blowing up a bunch of their generals and their top scientists, and also then cooperating with the United States in the strike against the ballistic missile or the nuclear program.
	In Syria, the Iran-backed Assad regime collapses.
	Israel is a part of that, and so suddenly Tehran's land bridge to the Mediterranean is cut off.
	In Yemen, The Israelis hit the Houthis really hard.
	The United States also did a couple of bombing missions against the Houthis, but the long-range capacity of the Houthis is destroyed.
	In Iraq, the pro-Iran militias have gone largely silent.
	They realize that if they, if they sort of try to get it going, they're going to be the next on the list for airstrikes.
	And then Israel, of course, has prosecuted the war very effectively in Gaza and also neutralized the pro-Hamas factions in the middle of the country.
	This is to say, in the so-called West Bank, in Judea and Samaria.
	What I'm getting at here is this is a deal that goes down because of power.
	It doesn't go down because of goodwill.
	It goes down because Israel and America has the strength and because Hamas and its allies all over the region, people in Qatar, people in Turkey, they are not as strong.
	So they're making a deal, not because they want to, but because they have to.
	Now, as we go into phase two, I expect that there are going to be more problems.
	Trump sounded a very optimistic note.
	Peace has come to the Middle East.
	He says we can look forward to an era of peace and prosperity.
	I think for Trump, uh, he looks at this in terms of sort of practical assessment.
	Trump basically goes, why would people choose death over life?
	Why would they choose rubble over tall buildings?
	Why would they choose aimlessness and joblessness and nihilism over a productive life for themselves?
	Why would they choose indoctrination over a decent education?
	So in Trump's mind, offering them this alternative is tantamount to them taking it.
	Why wouldn't they take it?
	Why wouldn't anyone take it?
	It is better than what they have now and by a long shot.
	I think the problem here is that there has been in Gaza and throughout the Middle East, massive projects of ideological indoctrination that have convinced not only young people, but also their parents, that this lifestyle of the jihadi is in fact the noblest way to go.
	It may not be the most peaceful way to go, but it is the religiously mandated way to go.
	It may not be the most prosperous way to go, but prosperity doesn't count for anything when you are being asked to sort of follow the will of Allah.
	So what you have here is a society that is not a normal society.
	That is a society that has been programmed in a way over several decades, certainly since 2005, when Hamas took power in Gaza, that jihad is their duty and wiping Israel out.
	That is their objective.
	That's how they measure success.
	How many, how many Jews have I killed?
	How much have we pushed Israel back?
	Hamas also, I think has been greatly heartened by its worldwide support.
	Heartened by the fact that you've got other Western leaders calling for a two-party, a two-state solution, people like Keir Starmer, people like Albanese, the prime minister of Australia, Makron, also in Canada, Mark Carney.
	So Hamas has realized we've got some pretty powerful allies, not just in the Muslim world, but in the world, in the world more generally.
	And not only that, I mentioned this before, but I circulated a video on my social media of a British jihadi talking about how nice it is from the Islamic point of view, from the Islamists' point of view, that they've got all these allies on the American right.
	And the guy goes on to mention, you can see how familiar he is with social media.
	He doesn't just mention Tucker, he mentions Candace, Marjorie Taylor Green, Matt Wallace, uh, and he goes on and on.
	This guy is, as I say, obviously quite familiar at the level of granular detail about who these right wingers are on the MAGA side who are attacking Israel, attacking the Jews, and de facto supporting Hamas, supporting the jihadis globally.
	In fact, the example that this guy gives on social media has nothing to do with Palestine, nothing to do with a two-state solution, even.
	It has to do with the fact that the Trump administration, having crippled Iran's nuclear facilities, did not go further and wipe out the mullahs themselves, didn't topple the regime.
	And he goes, who deserves the credit?
	Who exercised an influence to stop U.S. foreign policy from going the next step?
	And his answer was, it's the right.
	It is, as this jihadi sees it, our allies on the right who spoke up and in a sense deterred the Trump administration from taking the logical next step and toppling the Iranian regime.
	And so he goes, basically, we've got to be grateful to these MAGA allies because they are now basically on our side.
	So, you know, for me, it's very interesting to envision a Candace or envision a Marjorie Taylor Green.
	Are these the friends you actually want?
	Bearded jihadis who want to establish a caliphate across the West and across America.
	This is basically the Ilhan Omar camp.
	This is the AOC camp.
	This is the Mamdani camp, and how odd it is to find people, longtime advocates of MAGA who were and are on our side of the aisle backing this terrible cause and these terrible people.
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	I mentioned in the last segment Trump's enthusiasm about longtime peace in the Middle East.
	Now, I will say that if the Bible is to be believed, and obviously it is believed by me, We will not get permanent lasting peace in the region.
	The Bible seems to suggest, and I say this a little cautiously because we, when you're reading biblical forecasts or biblical prophecy, you've got to be, you've got to be careful and tentative in the way you do it.
	But the Bible does seem to say this stuff will not be finally worked out until the last days.
	In other words, it will continue to be a festering sore.
	And I think that this is not just something that we get from biblical texts.
	I think a kind of rational look at the situation convinces us that the Bible is right, that you can make progress, you can leverage your power to get agreements.
	The agreements could even be willingly signed.
	But the underlying mindset, the underlying ideology, the root causes, as some people like to say, of these problems, do not go away.
	To the degree that the Palestinians, the Arabs basically living in Israel, believe our land is being occupied by a hostile power, they're going to continue to connive ways to push Israel out and get their land as they see it back.
	That's not going to change.
	To the degree that you've got global jihadis who see the cause of Gaza and the cause of the Palestinians as part of their worldwide project to win over public opinion, to undermine Israel and the United States, to create, if you will, Islamist outposts in the West.
	They're not going to stop doing that.
	There's nothing that's happened that changes that agenda.
	They're going to try to figure out ways for that agenda to march ahead.
	And in some ways, if they're set back over here, it's like a business, right?
	You're selling a bunch of products and you find that your tractors aren't selling that well, you go, that's all right.
	We also sell motorcycles and cars.
	Let's up the ante and try to improve our markets in those areas.
	And I think similarly here, it's quite possible that the jihadis go, well, if we're set back in Gaza, we're going to up the ante in our infiltration, let's say, of Texas or of red states in the United States and trying to trying to establish a stronghold in cities like New York.
	This would be Mamdani, but also in suburbs where you might not think that the Muslims have a great deal of power, but increasingly they do.
	Now, I want to talk about uh young people in this country and their peculiar susceptibility to these sort of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish themes.
	Once again, let's be really clear.
	What I'm not talking about is critiques of Netanyahu, critiques of Israel's strategy, questions about how Israel dropped the ball in allowing October 7th to occur in the first place, uh, arguments about how the war is being carried out.
	You let's say, for example, it's reasonable to believe, well, why didn't Israel strike on October 8th?
	Strike immediately following the original atrocity, uh, and then be done with it.
	Um, in other words, strike back immediately rather than dragging it out, that's not the best strategy.
	All of this is grounds for a legitimate debate.
	Uh, nowhere do I say that questioning Israel or questioning Netanyahu, attacking Netanyahu.
	Um, by the way, the Israeli left does this every day, and they're pushing ahead with attempts to uh lawfare type of event, uh, attempts to impeach Netanyahu, to um um to hold them criminally liable.
	All of this has not been forgotten.
	It has not been dropped.
	Uh, it's still going on.
	What I am talking about is the agenda where Israel can do no right, and the agenda by which the Jews, this kind of collective category, the Jews are to blame.
	They're to blame in Israel, but they're to blame in the United States.
	Um, they control our institutions, they control our banks.
	Um, this is a little bit of a problematic way to think.
	Um, why?
	Uh, first of all, because in many cases it's flat out false.
	Um and even in areas where it's not false, uh, the question then becomes well, if let's just say, for example, the Jews control the banks.
	Uh, is that because Jews have somehow um uh how did Jews get control of the banks?
	Well, the answer to that's complicated.
	It goes back to the Middle Ages, where a lot of Christians, for example, did stayed out of the banking industry.
	Uh, usury was forbidden in many Christian kingdoms.
	And so basically the Christians told the Jews, you do that.
	You go into these so-called low professions, which involve lending at interest.
	And so the Jews went into those professions because they were forbidden from other professions.
	They were pushed into these areas.
	All right, they developed a proficiency in them.
	So this is how the Jews got where they are.
	So even if it's true, it hardly suggests anything other than that a combination of historical and cultural factors, not to mention Jewish success at making these companies run uh profitably and successfully.
	So the broader point I'm getting at is you've got a lot of young people, I think, in this country now, and they are deeply alienated.
	They're alienated from, well, pretty much everything.
	Uh they're alienated from their own families, in part because they've grown up in dysfunctional family structures.
	They're alienated from their community because there is no community.
	They live in towns where the old civic structures have broken down.
	There's nothing really resembling the old bowling leagues and little leagues and town meetings and get togethers and potlucks and all of that is kind of gone.
	So the they're living in a sense in a certain type of desert, if you know what I mean.
	They are very often disconnected from the church.
	They have problems with religion, as they might say, organized religion.
	They don't really trust the church or their pastor, and maybe their pastor is disconnected from the world also and doesn't actually preach about anything that has to do with their lives.
	And so they feel like they're in a Sunday bubble and then they step out of it and it's unconnected with their ordinary life.
	And then they feel economically debilitated.
	They feel like I don't have the same American dream as my parents.
	I don't have the same prospects.
	I've been saddled with these student loans that somebody kind of talked me into and I didn't really pay attention, just signed on the dotted line.
	Now I owe like 184,000, and how am I expected to pay it back and I can't find a job?
	So these are real concerns, and these are real issues.
	I will add to this the fact that a lot of these young people believe that institutions have been lying to them.
	The CDC lied to them during COVID.
	So did the NIH, people like Dr. Fauci, so did the FBI, so did the border patrol.
	So many of our institutions have discredited themselves, the medical establishment, the food industry.
	And so these young people feel like I can't believe anything.
	So many things that were dubbed to be conspiratorial have come to be true.
	Therefore, conspiracy theories in general are more likely to be true than not true.
	And therefore, when somebody comes along and tells me the Mossad killed Charlie Kirk, well, could be true.
	I might as well give that the same credibility as the FBI telling me that this guy Tyler Robinson did it.
	How do I know that the FBI isn't lying to me again?
	So what we have is a breakdown of institutional trust.
	I also think we have seen a breakdown of critical faculties.
	By critical faculties, I mean the simple ability to be able to tell when an argument is valid, when something really makes sense, and when something is like downright um absurd, when something is so unlikely as to be safely dismissible as a reasonable prospect.
	Now, um I don't blame these young people, to be honest.
	A lot of them are actually, and some of them are on my social media.
	Dinesh, we used to watch your movies, you've you've now proven to be like a shill for Israel.
	Um I'm like, I I I would like to engage these people, but the moment I try to do, they will post something like $7,000.
	Like, as if to say, I'm doing this, I've made this entire film costing millions of dollars to get like a check for $7,000 from like Israel.
	Absolutely ludicrous.
	Uh so how do you argue with these people?
	Well, at the end, I don't.
	Um I I want to engage them, I want to educate them uh in any way that I can.
	Um, and uh, but the real blame here, I think, doesn't fall with the young people.
	It falls with the people who know better.
	It kind of falls with the Pied Pipers on the right.
	And these are people, by and large, who know better.
	These are people who actually know that no, you know, a Mossad guy didn't crawl out of a pipe and shoot Charlie Kirk.
	These are people who actually recognize that there's a lot of Muslim money in this country that is funding not only the left, but now also institutions that you would consider right of center.
	And all you have to do is, you know, all the these nonprofits, their annual statements are public, and their annual statements list who's endowing their chairs, who's hiring their professors, who's making large donations.
	Israel may be trying to do its small-scale social media campaign, but it's one thing to try to pay some Instagram influencer or TikTok influencer.
	It's another thing to own the political science department of like Tufts University or Tulane or Yale.
	So the Muslim strategy is to go after captivity of these institutions.
	And again, this is this is known by the Pied Pipers on the right.
	So you have to blame the leaders.
	Just like in the universities, I don't blame the kids primarily.
	Who indoctrinated them?
	Their professors, the deans, the administrators who created this engine of indoctrin indoctrination that we call the university.
	And the same is true on the MAGA right.
	It's not the recipients of the propaganda, it's the Pied Pipers of the propaganda themselves.
	I think they bear the lion's share of the responsibility.
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	Guys, I'm uh delighted to welcome to the podcast a new guest.
	His name is Yuval David, and he is a versatile fellow.
	He is an actor, he is a media host, a documentary journalist, he's a news commentator, he's a filmmaker, he's also a sociopolitical activist.
	Debbie actually met him informally or online on Instagram.
	And I thought it'd be fun to get him on the show with his, well, very unique perspective on what's going on with the peace plan, what's going on with the uh critiques of Israel from the left and from the right.
	Uh you can follow him on X at Uval David.
	He's also on Instagram.
	He's also got an IMDB that you can check out, a kind of a movie, uh, a movie bio.
	Yuval, welcome.
	Thank you for thank you for joining me.
	And um let me begin by just asking you, you know, you've my audience doesn't know who you are, so I want you to start by talking a little bit about who you are and how you are um viewing all these quite monumental events that are happening uh in the Middle East right now.
	Well, firstly, Dinesh, it's an honor to be on your show and join you in conversation.
	And I'm surprised, you you bring a guest on your show to talk about themselves?
	No, who would do such a thing?
	I'm kidding, of course.
	Um, so sure, to tell you a bit about myself.
	I mean, I I think that sometimes people see everything I do and say, wow, you do a lot.
	But I think what it is is we are all well-rounded individuals.
	I just share a lot of it very publicly.
	My work has always been in entertainment and media, going back and forth and sometimes at the same time between being a journalist and news commentator publishing articles every week and going on air on different news outlets as a news commentator, and working in the entertainment industry as a filmmaker director and actor.
	But what always started happening is I kept being pulled more and more in the direction of the media side of things.
	Because I'm born and raised in the United States.
	I'm a dual citizen of the US and Israel, because most of my family is in Israel.
	And in both countries, I understood that it's my civic duty to do as much as possible to make sure that my country and countries in this case are the best they can be, that I must do my part for not just myself, my family, and my friends, but my community and my nation at large.
	And the more I would do that, the more I would be invited to talk about that on air.
	And now I advise dozens of governmental and non-governmental organizations from a communication strategy perspective, also making sure that they properly represent the American Jewish community, uh, Judeo-Christian values in the United States, and of course, global affairs as they pertain to the Middle East.
	So, for example, I'm a fellow at the Middle East Forum.
	I'm one of the advisory group as part of Voice of the People, working along with President Herzog of Israel, uh, and all of these other things.
	You can find me on news and news uh Fox News and Newsmax and News Nation regularly.
	But the thing is, is I'm a storyteller.
	I understand how to under to recognize the audience, to understand the information that I'm able to impart and to package or in many cases unpackage it in a way that is digestible.
	Because when we look at global affairs, many times people think, oh, these are very complex.
	Let me just step back from it all.
	But you know what?
	I lean into it because that's how I was taught to be an American, to lean into the complexities, to have the conversations, and hopefully do something better with it.
	So that's the long and short of who I am and and and what I do.
	Sure, find me all over social media, especially if you if your audience wishes to share positive messages, because as you probably surely experience, I get so many hate messages and death threats from people who are purely challenged by my sharing facts and opinions that might not agree with them.
	Um I'll add one more thing to it because this is something you'll resonate.
	Is I used to be a Democrat.
	I used to be democrat uh part of the progressive movement.
	I used to be very much involved in the woke movement.
	But then I started to see things that were anti-progressive that weren't progressive, that progressives were doing.
	I started to see hypocrisies within the woke movement and even hypocrisies within the Democratic Party.
	And I feel that my values never changed, but my party affiliation sure has.
	Would you say, just to pursue that, would you say, Yuval, that the primary contradiction that you saw in the woke movement was the very peculiar alliance between the cultural left in the West and these kind of global jihadis.
	In other words, this would appear to be two radically dissimilar groups with completely different end goals.
	And this would appear to be two groups that cannot live very easily in each other's world, and yet they appear to be politically allied.
	Can you speak to how that alliance do you think even came to be?
	And second of all, why is it a kind of a very bad bargain, let's say, for people on the left to do this?
	The people on the left who have aligned themselves with Islamist movements, and let's be clear, it's not these people who are parading themselves as pro-Palestinian, aren't pro-Palestinian.
	They are Palestinianist.
	The Palestinianist movement is the Trojan horse of the Islamist movement.
	The far left factions within the Democratic Party and within the left movement in general are useful idiots who've been manipulated by Islamist movements, thinking that they're rising up for a good cause.
	But so many of these people are following a hashtag and don't actually understand Middle Eastern affairs.
	Many of them haven't even been to the Middle East, many of them aren't Muslim, aren't Arab, aren't Jewish, aren't Israeli, and don't really know what they're talking about.
	So they're very easy to manipulate, especially in this information era where people go onto their phones, onto their devices and think that if they're posting about it, then they're an activist.
	Well, you know what?
	If you're really pro-Palestinian, if you're really pro one of these movements, then help build infrastructure.
	If all you're doing by being pro is by attacking those that you're against, well, you're not really making this world a better place.
	So the Islamist movements, just like they did in Iran, just like they did in countries around the world, started to target and try to court the student movements, the communist Marxist and socialist movements starting to inspire and involve the youth who are very passionate and want to do something big that's greater than themselves,
	and they give them an opportunity to do so, and then they end up using them, abusing them, and just as we saw in many countries around, especially the MENA region, the Middle East and North Africa regions, they then kill those progressives, Marxist communists, and non-Muslim people.
	Uh people from India have seen it when they deal with uh Islamic terror as well, especially what comes out of Pakistan.
	So what I wish is that these far-left people here in the United States and in the Western world, how about they just listen to the people who actually have fought against Islamism, who actually have fought for indigenous rights, but we're just seeing placard strategy and virtue signaling amongst these people, and it's pathetic.
	Yuval, when you say that the Islamists are kind of using the cause of Palestinianism, as you put it, Um let me spell that out a little bit more clearly because I think people may wonder, well, what does that really mean?
	And I think here's what you mean, and you tell me if I'm on the right track.
	What you mean is that you have students in the West who are very much into identity politics.
	Uh, and identity politics here has to do with self-determination uh for me as an individual, but also self-determination for groups.
	Um, these are people who see themselves they're fighting for Native American rights, they're fighting for Latinos to be able to uphold their culture, for example, uh in the United States, and they think of themselves as fighting to preserve a certain measure of autonomy and self-government uh for Palestinians.
	But I think what you're saying is that you have these kind of global jihadis who wake up in Egypt and Saudi Arabia and Turkey and Iran, and they actually don't care about Gaza.
	And they don't really care about Palestinians either.
	What they care about is a global Islamic caliphate.
	That is their sort of stated and explicit goal, and everything else is kind of a means to that goal.
	So they're willing to use Hamas and play along with this whole Palestinian thing.
	They don't really want to solve the problem.
	They certainly don't want to take the Palestinians into their own countries, but it is a it is a cudgel and it is also an entree for them to get acceptance among the cultural left.
	So I think what you're saying is that the Islamists have a different agenda and they are smuggling that agenda under the banner or under the name of Palestinian rights.
	Is that a good summary?
	I'm smiling and nodding my head in complete agreement.
	That is a great summary.
	Because if they really, if the Islamist groups and Muslim groups and Arab groups around the Middle East and the Arab world really wanted to help the Palestinians, then they would have accepted Palestinian refugees.
	If they really wanted to help the Palestinians, then the Palestinians in Lebanon wouldn't be treated as third-class citizens.
	For example, in Lebanon, Palestinians are not allowed to enter the medical field.
	They're not allowed to own property the way other Lebanese citizens are able to do.
	Same thing in Syria.
	Syria has slaughtered many Palestinian refugees and Palestinians who've lived there.
	The border with Egypt and Gaza is one of the most severe blockades you can see around the world.
	Egypt has not let Palestinians or Gazans specifically in.
	Nobody has helped the Gazans more than Israel.
	So one thing that people were talking about throughout this war is saying that Israel needs to send more aid into Gaza.
	Well, a fact is Israel has been sending aid into Gaza throughout this war, paid by Israeli taxpayers, by the way.
	That aid would cross the border and then oftentimes sit there because the UN organizations weren't distributing the aid properly, as the aid was just baking in the hot sun, and Hamas would then steal the aid, only using it for themselves and oftentimes selling it back to Gazans.
	So that was this weird thing that everybody was talking about.
	Israel needs to send more aid into there.
	If we really wanted to see the Arab groups helping the Palestinians, then they would have actually helped them.
	What you just unpackaged so uh brilliantly is that they're just using this Palestinian narrative to touch the hearts and the minds of people around the West and around the world.
	And we see media outlets being manipulated, we see student groups being manipulated.
	That's why we saw these campus riots and protests.
	And it's uh it's a very upside-down world, especially when you look at the values.
	For example, why would women's rights activists be supporting an Islamist cause that doesn't believe in women's rights?
	For example, in Palestinian territories and in most of the Arab world, women are required permission from a male relative to travel around the country, many times not even being able to travel alone in Palestinian territories.
	Women aren't even able to have a full education the way men are.
	So I can go on about women's rights issues.
	That's the question of why women's rights organizations have accepted this Palestinianist and Islamist cause.
	Same thing with the LGBTQIA 2S plus movement, a movement that is supposed to represent me as a gay man, but really doesn't represent me at all.
	Why do we see queers for Palestine where queer people get thrown off of buildings or get raped as punishment for being queer?
	Again, that doesn't make sense.
	All that does make sense is understanding the money that poured into civil rights, social justice, and human rights movements for decades to slowly manipulate people who are often called useful idiots because their idiocy Is being manipulated by nefarious movements.
	Yuval, here we are, and it's been an exhilarating moment because of the return of the hostages.
	I mean, a high price for it because Israel has been forced to release a whole bunch of really bad guys who I guess are going to pour right back into Gaza.
	My question is how hopeful or how optimistic are you about like phase two of this plan?
	Because this involves demilitarization, it involves removing Hamas from power.
	We can assume that Hamas isn't going to be too eager for this to happen.
	They're probably going to think of all kinds of ruses.
	Let's rename ourselves.
	Let's call ourselves the Social Justice Committee of Gaza, and the same people reappear now in kind of a new guise.
	Trump seemed to struck a very hopeful note.
	And I think he's sort of right to kind of parade the achievement that is already, we've already seen, but there's some hard work to be done in the next phase.
	What do you think is the promise, but also the perils of what phase two portends?
	The promise and the perils are massive.
	Firstly, peace doesn't come from weakness, it comes from strength.
	The strong arm of the Trump administration and Israel's government finally created the leverage needed to move towards a real resolution.
	Not one that's only uh dictated and manipulated by terrorists, but by reality.
	And that's something that that President Trump has been very proud of.
	Now, Hamas also sees their worldwide support as a massive win.
	While Hamas has been decimated in many ways, what they have won is the war of PR, which Israel has lost, the war of PR.
	As much as Israel tries to share facts and share information, Hamas has something called Paliwood.
	These fake videos that they put out and share on social media and look really extreme, but when you look closely, you'll find things that prove that it's a fake photo or a fake video, but that's touched the hearts and minds of people around the world.
	That proves to Hamas that they're actually strong, that they hold a lot of cards, and that these different uh Islamist groups and movements, such as the Muslim Brotherhood now know that Hamas is their way to share more information that ultimately will take down the countries that represent Judeo-Christian values.
	Because the Muslim Brotherhood aims to create a global caliphate.
	Hamas has become some great uh players in this because what they've done is they've created these global movements that are supporting Islamist causes.
	Again, it's so confusing to understand.
	But here's something that's very important to say: the peace dealings.
	Israel has tried to have peace dealings and negotiations time and time and time again with Hamas, especially since 2005 and since the attack on October 7th, 2023.
	Israel has negotiated and negotiated and negotiated.
	But here's something people need to think about.
	How can a democratic country negotiate with a terror group?
	Hamas never represented peace, only power through terror.
	They subjugated Israelis, Gazans, and the entire Middle East peace process under the grip of fear.
	You cannot negotiate with those who glorify death and destruction.
	Hostages have been released in Israel.
	Israelis are parading in the streets, are crying, are weeping, are embracing the families and loved ones of hostages and the hostages themselves, are weeping for the hostages who were murdered in captivity and the other people who were murdered by Hamas terror.
	And in Gaza, we're seeing Gazans and Hamas people celebrating in the streets, chanting out Khybar Kaibar Yahyahood, which is an old Arabic saying that the Khybar region, which in the Arab world used to be a city that had many Jews, and what the Islamists did hundreds of years ago is they murdered every Jew, raped every Jewish woman, and stole the wealth and any property of the Jews there.
	And now they're chanting that they're going to do it again.
	So what are the next steps?
	The next steps are how can we change Hamas as an ideology and educate people to want to better themselves and their neighbors?
	That's a massive challenge.
	That is a massive, massive challenge indeed.
	Yeah, very sobering and I think appropriately uh cautious account about what comes next.
	Guys, I've been talking to Yuval David, actor, filmmaker, advocate, news commentator, docujurnalist.
	Follow him on ex at Uval David, also on Instagram.
	Check out his IMDB.
	Yuval, a great pleasure.
	Thank you very much for joining me.
	I really appreciate it.
	I appreciate everything you do and say, especially because I resonate with the way that you, Dinesh, you lean into the challenging conversations.
	You accept that things aren't easy, that global affairs and news is very challenging, but you have a conversation about it.
	You unpackage it and you focus on your values.
	I wish that more of us, especially here in the United States could do that as well.
	So no matter if people agree or disagree with you, they should emulate the way you have a conversation, and I applaud you for that.
	Well, that means a lot.
	Thank you so much, uh, guys, you'll all David, uh, youval will have you back sometime, and uh really appreciate you coming on.
	Pleasure's mine.
	Thank you.
	One of the things that we will learn in this exploration of life after death is different ways of arguing or making a case.
	And part of what we want to do is to evaluate whether that's a sound way of deciding whether something is true or false.
	Now, a few years ago, I was in a debate with a philosopher named Daniel Dennett on the question of God and Christianity.
	In fact, one of the things that stands out to me from that debate is before the debate.
	Now, Dennett is this kind of old Santa Claus type of guy and has published um many, many books on consciousness, on neuroscience.
	He's a well-recognized philosopher.
	And I remember reading him when I was quite young.
	So as a result, debating him was somewhat intimidating.
	It's kind of like I remembered, well, I was reading his books when I was in my 20s.
	And so, how am I gonna kind of go up against this guy?
	He's got a seems to have a much wider range of knowledge than I do.
	And I was talking to a pastor, a friend of mine, and I said, Well, I'm a little uneasy about this debate.
	And the pastor goes, no worries, Dinesh.
	And I go, no worries.
	And he goes, just remember, his conscience is on your side, which I thought was actually a brilliant line, and actually got me to laugh.
	And what I found it to be kind of consoling as I went into the debate.
	But during the debate, uh, a well, the students, of course, a lot of them were Dennett's own students, philosophy students, and so they're going to argue in a philosophical mode.
	And so one of them stood up very confidently, very brashly, to expose me or to sort of refute me in the following way.
	Here's what he said.
	He goes, look, he goes, let me acquaint you, Dinesh, with the principle of parsimony, my principle of parsimony.
	So parsimony, of course, means um means um frugality, the principle of thinking in a very clear and lean and frugal way.
	And so the student goes on to say there are two ways for something to be to be true.
	One is for something to be true, like by definition.
	So if I say, for example, all bachelors are single, we know that that's true.
	Why?
	Because it's part of the definition of being a bachelor that you be single.
	Bachelors can't by definition be married.
	So things can be true by just being definitionally true.
	But there's a second way for things to be true, uh, so says the student, and that is by empirical verification.
	So empirical verification means checking by experience.
	So if I were to tell you that, you know, John Smith is a bachelor, well, that's a factual claim.
	And you can check it out by going and finding out is the guy ever been married, is the guy single, and if he's single, uh, then uh if you don't find his name in the marriage records, then yeah, I guess it's true.
	John Smith is in fact A bachelor.
	So the student was saying to me that things can only be true if they fit one of these two classifications.
	Either they have to be true by definition or they have to be true by empirical or factual checking, by a fact check, you can call it.
	And the student was saying if anything doesn't meet these two criteria, it's not even false.
	It's like meaningless.
	It doesn't make any sense.
	And the student goes, all right, so let's now apply this test, this two-part test, to God and immortality, to God and life after death.
	Number one, is the existence of God obvious by definition?
	No.
	Can God be verified by some kind of empirical checking?
	Is there a way experientially to be positive in a manner that all of us can go and verify for ourselves that God exists?
	No.
	And so his argument is, therefore, the question of God isn't just false, it's it's meaningless.
	And the same would apply to life after death, pretty much by the same criteria.
	Is life after death obvious?
	Is it true by definition?
	No.
	And is it possible to empirically verify that we have life after death?
	No.
	And so the student again goes, ha, I've shown you Dinesh that these concepts of God and immortality are not merely wrong, they are they are meaningless.
	Now the student obviously was thinking thought he was being extremely clever and original.
	He probably got this two-part from his professor, Daniel Dennett.
	But in fact, this two-part test goes back centuries, it goes back to the 18th century to the philosopher named David Hume.
	So we're actually going to be arguing not with Dennett or with the student.
	These are sort of derivative sources.
	We're actually going to be examining something that was written by Hume.
	and Hume, one of the greatest, by the way, of all the philosophers, certainly to write in the English language, Hume advanced what has come to be known as Hume's verification principle.
	And Hume was actually using it to claim that metaphysical or moral claims are kind of empty.
	They're kind of meaningless.
	Here's Hume.
	Quote, if we take in our hand any volume of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance, let us ask.
	Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quality or number?
	No.
	Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence?
	No.
	Commit it then to the flames, for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.
	Notice that this is really just a somewhat different restatement of the student's question.
	Hume is saying that certain things, like numbers, are true by definition.
	Two plus two equals four.
	I don't even have to put two apples on the table and two more apples and count them.
	I know that two plus two is four in my head.
	But Hume goes, that's the that's the self-evident, or that's the definitionally true.
	And then Hume goes, the only other way for things to be true is by experience or by verification.
	And everything else is like bogus.
	It's completely meaningless.
	I wanna point out that this Humean reasoning was picked up in the 20th century by a philosophical group called the logical positivists, We don't have to go down that road very much.
	But the point of the logical positivists is that they were great defenders of science.
	They claim that scientific knowledge is like true knowledge.
	But metaphysical claims, claims about right and wrong and good and evil, they said are complete nonsense.
	Scientific claims can be verified, metaphysical claims cannot.
	And uh, so metaphysical claims are really just matters of feeling or preference.
	You want to do this because you like it or you don't like it, it gives you pain, it gives you pleasure, but there is no sort of moral basis for holding certain things to be true or or false.
	And I only mention these logical positivists because there are many educated people in the West who have believed something like this.
	Scientific claims can somehow be proven, metaphysical claims cannot, therefore, facts, scientific claims are facts, whereas metaphysical metaphysical claims are quote, values, and therefore they are suspect for that reason.
	They're subjective.
	they cannot be held objectively.
	Now I'm going to kind of go into a fairly thorough refutation of this idea, by which I mean Hume's verification principle.
	But today I won't be able to complete the refutation.
	I'm only going to begin it.
	So I'm going to begin by pointing out a couple of massive kind of contradictions.
	First of all, if you are going to apply this principle of parsimony, or if you're going to apply this Humean verification principle, think about it.
	And if in fact we go along with the student and say, all right, by your reasoning, you wipe out God and immortality.
	I would go on to say, by your exact same reasoning, you wipe out all of atheism.
	Why?
	Because let's consider a couple of statements.
	One, God does not exist.
	And two, there is no afterlife.
	Now I'm going to apply the principle of parsimony or the verification principle to these two claims.
	God does not exist.
	Can you establish that by definition?
	Can you prove by definition that God does not exist?
	Obviously not.
	Can you prove that God does not exist by some kind of empirical checking?
	You have some sort of fact check by which you can definitively show through experience that God does not exist.
	No.
	Therefore, the claim God does not exist is not merely false, it is meaningless.
	And let's go to the other one.
	There is no life after death.
	Is that self-evidently true?
	Is it true by definition?
	No.
	Can it be established by verification or fact checking of any kind?
	No.
	Therefore, it too is not only false, but it is meaningless.
	And we can go even further.
	Let's take the principle of parsimony itself.
	Let's take Hume's verification principle itself and ask this question.
	Is this principle of parsimony, this kind of two-part test for determining whether something is true or false?
	Is it the principle of parsimony?
	Is it true by definition?
	No.
	Can it be proven by some sort of checking?
	Can you use some kind of experiential fact check to show that these are the only two ways to establish if something is valid or not?
	And no, you can't do that either.
	So what I'm getting at is that the principle of parsimony is itself wiped out, refuted, using the using its own test.
	It cannot survive its own standard.
	And so what I've really begun to do here, and only begun, um, I'll be picking this up again tomorrow, is I'm showing the inadequacy of reasoning in this way.
	You have clever people who cite, well, there are two ways to know if something is true.
	And if you don't know, and you've heard this for the first time, you're like, wow, that seems really very convincing.
	That seems a lot of our young people are succored in this way by their professors.
	They are they are presented with an argument, they don't know how to think about or refute the argument, therefore they succumb to it, and in fact, they think this is an intelligent way to think.
	In fact, it's not.
	It can be demonstrated not to be.
	But it takes a little bit of, in other words, it takes uh a philosopher to be able to explode this philosophical argument.
	It takes uh an academic mind to know what is wrong with this kind of academic sophistry.
	We're gonna pick up this argument next time, but for now, let's just say that we've shown a couple of major problems with this principle of parsimony.
	Number one, it wipes out atheism itself, and number two, it can't survive, it can't, it cannot be applied to itself.
	It doesn't even work in its own singular case.

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