Is Israel’s War a US War? “Free Speech Advocates” Demand Silencing of Israel’s Critics. Is War w/ Iran Inevitable? & Israeli Media Calls for Restraint | SYSTEM UPDATE #160
Watch full episodes on Rumble, streamed LIVE 7pm ET: https://rumble.com/c/GGreenwald
Become part of our Locals community: https://greenwald.locals.com/
- - -
Follow Glenn:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ggreenwald
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/glenn.11.greenwald/
Follow System Update:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/SystemUpdate_
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/systemupdate__/
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@systemupdate__
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/systemupdate.tv/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/systemupdate/
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight...
The war between Israel and Gaza is now in its fifth full day, and each day brings new escalation, new forms of violence, and extreme levels of civilian deaths on both sides of the border.
It should not be surprising that virtually the entire political class in Washington sides with Israel.
As we documented on Monday night's show, support for Israel has been a centerpiece of bipartisan U.S.
foreign policy for decades.
And numerous politically influential groups in the U.S.
feel a strong affinity for Israel for all sorts of political, geostrategic, cultural, and religious reasons.
While this pro-Israel sentiment is not surprising, it is most definitely necessary to discuss this question.
To what extent are Israel's wars in general, as well as its new war in particular, also America's wars?
Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley said on Sunday, one day after this war began, quote, this is not just an attack on Israel, this was an attack on America.
Today, her fellow South Carolinian, Senator Lindsey Graham, who treats every actual and proposed American war exactly the same way, he vocally cheerleads each and every last one of them, went even further than Governor Haley in a Fox interview today when he said of the United States, quote, we are in a religious war.
Is this true?
When Israel is involved in a war, does it automatically mean that the U.S.
is also involved in this new war as a participant?
Is it possible as an American citizen to oppose U.S.
government involvement in an Israeli war without being guilty of being, quote, pro-Hamas, similar to the way that Americans who oppose their government's role in the war in Ukraine are called pro-Putin?
Or how Americans who opposed their government's role in Syria were called pro-Assad, or how those who dissented from any parts of the Bush-Cheney War on Terror were accused of being, quote, on the side of the terrorists, or pro-Al Qaeda.
Given the emergence of these kinds of statements from people like Lindsey Graham and Nikki Haley, it is more vital than ever to ask what the proper U.S.
role in this war is.
Then, many media careers have been built over the last several years, very thriving and lucrative media careers, based on a professed belief in free speech and opposition to what is called cancel culture, which we have long heard has been typically practiced by the left, an attempt to suppress or punish the expression of views the left dislikes and regards as dangerous, hateful, and likely to incite violence.
We're now hearing it, it seems, from the other side.
Yesterday, the quite conservative British Home Secretary, when speaking about pro-Palestinian protest in London, declared the following, quote, "Waving a Palestinian flag or singing a chant advocating freedom for Arabs in the region may be a criminal "Waving a Palestinian flag or singing a chant advocating freedom for Waving the Palestinian flag or chanting about freedom for Arabs in the region is If you do that in the UK, you may be committing a criminal offense.
In Canada, the mayor of Toronto accused pro-Palestinian protesters of having broken the law by failing to obtain necessary protest permits.
The same argument Canadian officials invoked last year to argue that those trucker protests against COVID mandates were also illegal.
Oh, they didn't get the right permits.
Meanwhile, in the United States, many prominent figures, including ones who have long denounced the evils of censorship and what they call cancel culture,
Meaning punishing private citizens for expressing widely unpopular views, especially when those views are declared to be hateful or inciting of violence, have spent this week compiling the names of students, lists of students at universities, American universities, who signed pro-Palestinian statements and have devoted themselves publicly to pressuring companies, private companies, sometimes successfully, to fire those people for having signed those statements or announcing and committing to the fact that they will refuse ever to hire such people.
Is this a violation of their previously stated opposition to censorship and cancel culture or is there something special and unique about this particular debate about when it comes to Israel that renders such threats of criminalization from government officials or campaigns to have people fired for their views uniquely justified?
And then the Wall Street Journal on Monday purported to have confirmed that top Iranian officials directly planned and helped organize Saturday's attack on Israel, a claim that has been repeated by numerous presidential candidates and officials, including both Nikki Haley and Lindsey Graham and others as well.
This is obviously a quite inflammatory claim.
Recall that similar claims about Saddam Hussein's participation in planning the 9-11 attack is what led many Americans to support the regime change war against Iraq because they thought Iraq had helped attack the United States.
Now, even U.S.
and some Israeli officials have quickly denied knowledge of any such linkage between Iran and this attack.
But some vocal anti-Iran voices, while some are also calling into question the veracity of this report, others have started to beat the drums of war against Iran.
And it illustrates how there are a lot of influential sectors in American political media circles who crave conflict with Tehran.
Raising the question, I think, How many wars with how many different countries is the U.S.
supposed to now be fighting?
The U.S.
government is already heavily involved in one dangerous proxy war by using Ukraine to fight against and weaken the world's largest nuclear power, which is Russia.
The U.S.
is already heavily involved in this new Middle East war in similar ways by feeding Israel the money and weapons that we used to wage this war, and has even deployed major aircraft carriers to the region.
At the same time, a non-trivial number of influential people in the United States see China as the gravest American enemy.
And there is open talk in many key circles about how the likelihood of ending up in a hot war with Beijing is very real, especially if they harass or invade Taiwan.
Most Americans in positions of influence, including the President of the United States, say they would go to war against China if that happened.
These are a lot of wars already.
Serious, dangerous wars against countries with serious militaries.
Should Iran, a country three times the size of Iraq, with a much more sophisticated military, be added to the list of the countries the U.S.
is supposed to be considering not just an enemy, but one that we should be preparing for a possible war against?
The Wall Street Journal article made that possibility much more likely by announcing, seemingly with very little, proof that Iran was the key organizer of this attack on Israel.
Finally, it is a notable paradox that the Israeli media contains many voices urging restraint in how Israel uses military force in Gaza in order to avenge Saturday's attacks by Hamas.
They argue, and we'll show you a couple of representative voices, that there is a crucial distinction between Hamas on the one hand and Palestinian civilians on the other.
And they argue the lives of Gazans, ordinary Palestinians, have value, especially given that half of its 2.2 million population is composed of children, people under the age of 18. - Yeah.
And they further argue that Israel must observe basic humanitarianism and long-standing laws of war in order to avoid indiscriminately extinguishing massive amounts of innocent Palestinian lives.
Now, this is a view heard paradoxically, I think, more in the Israeli media than in the U.S.
media, so I think it's worth asking, especially as we examine the latest wreckage and death and destruction in Gaza, whether That argument that some Israelis are making is actually correct.
In some, while there are a few people who have done so, there is nobody of any prominence in the United States who is cheering or defending or justifying the horrific atrocities committed by Hamas against Israeli civilians, including children, on Saturday.
Any decent person, by definition, values innocent civilian life of all kinds, including obviously Israelis, and reacts with horror and disgust when seeing those videos from Israel on Saturday, and believes it's always morally reprehensible to deliberately target civilian life.
The question, sadly prompted by our current discourse in the United States, including calls for the complete eradication of Gaza, is whether this basic humanitarian principle that innocent lives have value, whether that applies to Palestinian as well as to Israeli lives.
As a few programming notes, we are encouraging our audience to download the Rumble app, which functions both on your phone and your smart TV.
And if you do so, you'll be able to follow the programs you like watching on the Rumble platform, which hopefully includes system update.
And if you turn on notifications, which we hope you will, that means that as soon as our program or any other program that you like and follow starts to broadcast live on air, you will be immediately notified however you want through email, through your phone.
So you can just click on the link.
As soon as those shows that you like go live, you don't have to wait around or try to remember when they start.
It also really helps our audience and Rumble's audience to be able to have this function turned on.
It also helps more and more people watch these shows live, including ours.
As another reminder, System Update is also available in podcast form.
You can listen to each episode in podcast version on Spotify, Apple, and all other major podcasting platforms.
And if you rate and review the show and every episode posts there 12 hours after the first broadcast live here on Rumble, it really helps spread the visibility of our program.
Finally, as a reminder, every Tuesday and Thursday night after this show we move to Locals, which is part of the Rumble platform, for our live interactive aftershow where we take your questions, respond to your feedback.
That show is available only for subscribers to our Locals community, and if you want to become a subscriber, which gives you access not only to those aftershows twice a week, but also the daily transcripts we produce of this show, Each day we publish them there as well as original journalism and it really helps support the independent journalism that we do here.
You just click the join button right below the video player on the Rumble page and it will take you to our locals community.
For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
On Monday night, On Monday night, we devoted a two-hour episode to covering as many aspects as we could of this new war between Israel and Gaza.
And we began with a 10-minute explanation of why we regarded the attack by Hamas, particularly the parts that deliberately targeted and massacred innocent civilian lives, as a moral atrocity. particularly the parts that deliberately targeted and massacred innocent civilian And we provided a clear, long explanation of why that was so.
And I think the important thing to note is that pretty much every single person of any prominence, whether on the left or the right or in between, whether a supporter of Israel or a longtime critic of Israel, Prominent people with mainstream platforms did exactly the same.
Namely, all over the world, and certainly in the West and in the United States, any decent person who's psychologically healthy, by definition, was horrified and disgusted when they looked at the videos of what Hamas had done to young people at a musical festival or old people and children in their homes.
All of that.
Now, I think it's so important to note that because there is currently an attempt underway to suggest that there's some significant segment of the American population which has cheered and applauded and praised what Hamas did, celebrated it, justified it, including the grotesque attacks, deliberate attacks on civilians.
And the reason that's being done is because, and we talked about how 9-11 is the key framework on Monday for understanding what's happened.
I think clearly this attack on Israel is being treated in Israel like 9-11 was treated in the United States.
But a lot of the rhetoric and the sentiments that have emerged from that attack are very similar as well.
And of course, the key lesson from 9-11 that we reviewed on Monday is that even though I do think the rage that most Americans felt at the 9-11 attack was completely valid and the desire for vengeance was as well,
by giving into those impulses and not balancing them with by giving into those impulses and not balancing them with reason and by believing what we were told that anything and everything the government wanted to do in the name of avenging that attack and fighting the terrorists was justified, we ended up endorsing a lot of things that most Americans poll show have come to regret.
All right.
From the invasion of Iraq to the institution of torture regimes and rendition and kidnapping programs in Europe and due process free prisons all over the world and the transformation of our government with the Patriot Act and warrantless eavesdropping.
The lesson we learned is that you can be as horrified and disgusted and filled with rage, valid righteous rage, as you want about an attack.
It doesn't mean everything done in the name of stopping that attack or avenging it or preventing further attacks is justified.
And it's our obligation as citizens to use our process of reason to balance our emotions in order to make the best decisions about what should and shouldn't be done.
Now, the way that that was suppressed, that process of reason, Was that very early on, we were told by our own government, by George Bush, reading a speech in front of the Joint Session of Congress on September 20th, 2001, 10 days after the 9-11 attack, a speech written by the neocon David Frum, who is now at the Atlantic.
We were told that there are only two sides to this war on terror.
You're either with the U.S.
government or you're with the terrorists.
There's no third option.
And in the days and the weeks and the months after the 9-11 attack, as a result of this righteous anger and rage that a lot of people felt, including myself, as I recounted on Monday, when I lived in Manhattan on the day of that attack, and witnessed the same things everyone in Manhattan did, that we were told that if you stood up and questioned anything the Bush administration was doing, the war in Afghanistan, the invasion of Iraq, the enactment of the Patriot Act, the warrantless spying,
You are pro-terrorists.
You were on the side of Al Qaeda.
You were on the side of Osama Bin Laden.
It was a scummy and manipulative and shameful tactic that now is deployed in every war since then.
It was deployed in the war in Iraq.
People against the war in Iraq were told they were pro-Salam Hussein.
They were indifferent to the repression of Saddam Hussein.
Same with Syria.
They were told they were Assad lovers.
People opposed to the regime change war in Libya were told they loved Muammar Gaddafi.
People opposed to the ongoing occupation of Afghanistan were told that they were apologists for the Taliban.
They didn't care about the rights of Afghan women.
And of course, the war in Ukraine, anyone who questions it at all, let alone opposes it, is instantly branded pro-Putin.
This is the framework that people are now trying to create so that if you at all question anything that's done, either by the Israeli government or the American government, in the name of avenging these attacks, even questioning whether the U.S.
should be involved, whether the U.S.
should consider it its own war, that that means you are pro-Hamas.
There are only two choices.
You're with the Israeli and American government, Or you're on the side of Hamas.
That's the same framework that's attempting to be constructed.
And there has emerged this spate of articles, including by Liberals who have an affinity for Israel in the Democratic Party who are trying to claim that there's a significant portion of the American left that is celebrating Hamas and justifying and cheerleading the attacks on civilians.
Even though the only people who are doing this are marginalized people who are often denounced by their own allies and even forced to apologize.
You can't name a prominent person who has done this.
There's a couple of chapters of BLM, there's a few chapters of DSA, and even there it's more individuals whose names aren't known who are celebrating Hamas.
We showed you an individual who mocked the people who were kidnapped.
They mocked them as hipsters and laughed about them, but there was revulsion even among those groups.
But these groups are totally marginalized.
In fact, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez came out and didn't just condemn the attacks from Hamas, but she harshly denounced DSA, the Democratic Socialists of America, of which she's a member.
For allowing any kind of celebration or defense of Hamas.
This is a marginalized view and yet there's an attempt to suggest that it's significant because there's an attempt to suggest that either you accept every aspect of what the U.S.
and Israeli government does or it means you're pro-Hamas.
Here, for example, was an article by the ostensible leftist Naomi Klein, who's really just a Democratic Party hack.
She's nothing more than that.
And ever since Donald Trump's election, that's all she's been, like most American leftists.
And she has an article in the Guardian.
They changed the headline because of how much anger this provoked, but the original headline, you can see it there in the Guardian's tweet, quote, why are some on the left celebrating the killings of Israeli Jews?
And the most notable thing about this article is that there was not a single example That she identified of anyone who's supposedly celebrating Hamas's targeting of Israeli Jews.
Because in order to offer names, you end up essentially acknowledging that this is a marginalized view that every decent person is disgusted by.
This is not a serious view that people with influence wield.
Even longtime critics of Israel, almost everyone that I know, expressed revulsion and disgust at what was done on Saturday to Israeli civilians and Israeli families because it was the deliberate constant targeting of civilian life and the extinguishing of it which is always unjustified and morally reprehensible and that's the overwhelming view and yet they are trying to invent a faction of people in the United States who are cheering Hamas and not admitting that it's trivial again to suggest to link
You, if you question anything to being on the side of Hamas, that's what this is about.
Here is an article in New York Magazine, and it's by a very similar person to Naomi Klein, Eric Levitz, who also criticizes Israel but has an affinity for it, and here you see his title.
He's trying to do the same thing as Naomi Klein.
Quote, a left that refuses to condemn mass murder is doomed.
Now, unlike Naomi Klein, he actually did include a few examples of people that he claims are guilty of refusing to condemn mass murder by Hamas.
And the reason it's valuable that he did is because this is when you see how marginalized these people are.
Here's what he wrote, quote, it is not hyperbole to say It is not hyperbole to say that many left-wing supporters of Palestine celebrated Hamas's atrocities.
It's absolutely hyperbole to say that.
Here are his examples.
The National Leadership of Students for Justice in Palestine, which I have to say, as somebody who has covered the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for more than a decade, is a group I've never heard of.
That's his first example.
The National Leadership of Students for Justice in Palestine declared that this weekend's events are, quote, a historic win for the Palestinian resistance, touting Hamas' success in, quote, catching the enemy completely by surprise.
The Connecticut chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America applauded the Palestinians' resistance, quote, unprecedented anti-colonial struggle, pledged solidarity for that struggle, and vowed, quote, no peace on stolen land.
And at a rally co-sponsored by socialist organizations in New York City, one speaker, one speaker who nobody knows, nobody knows his name, This is the one we showed you spoke approvingly of the mass murder of Israeli teenagers saying quote there was some sort of rave or desert party where they were having a great time until the resistance came and electrified hang gliders and took at least several dozen hipsters.
So those are his three examples.
Some Connecticut chapter of DSA, a single individual at a DSA rally who a lot of people at that own rally were horrified by, who mocked the victims, the Israeli victims, and then some group that's pretty obscure.
He then adds, quote, Some left-wing intellectuals, meanwhile, chose to gussy up their ardor for war crimes in layers of impenetrable jargon.
Speaking plainly would have required such thinkers to acknowledge that they were endorsing the mass murder of children, and thus to assume the extraordinary burden of justifying this stance, which is to say, the burden of explaining why we should believe that Palestinian liberation can be achieved through the killing of Jewish children, and only through the killing of Jewish children.
It's understandable then that instead of forthrightly making the case, many chose to convey the sentiment, quote, oppressed people have a right to commit mass murder with as much opacity and pseudo profundity as the hard one vocabularies would allow.
And then here was his example, having built this whole thing up about these people who are so terrible.
These remarks from an editor of The Drift, a socialist magazine, are exemplary.
Now, again, I've never heard of The Drift.
So the fact that you have to, I'm not saying nobody expressed these repulsive views.
They did.
We covered them on Monday Night Show, but we did it to demonstrate that it is a tiny marginalized view.
And again, I'm somebody who has criticized Israel for a long time, but the minute I saw those videos, there was no ambivalence about what I felt about the targeting of innocent people in Israel.
It's repulsive.
And enraging.
But this is what anybody in a position of authority or influence or prominence is saying, even those who are simultaneously expressing support for the Palestinian cause.
Here, for example, is Ilyan Omar, who is probably one of the top two or three Israel critics in the U.S.
Congress, by which I mean one of the two or three people along with Rashida Tlaib and Couple members of the squad willing to criticize Israel most harshly.
And here's the statement she issued on October 7th, which was the first day Of the conflict, quote, I condemn the horrific acts we are seeing unfold today in Israel against children, women, the elderly, and the unarmed people who are being slaughtered and taken hostage by Hamas.
Such senseless violence will only repeat the back and forth cycle we've seen, which we cannot allow to continue.
We need to call for de-escalation and a ceasefire.
I will keep advocating for peace and justice throughout the Middle East.
Now, some people were angry that she called for de-escalation.
But she did not celebrate at all the civilian massacres of Hamas.
Quite the contrary, she quite emphatically and unambiguously denounced it, as did almost everybody of any significance.
Here is AOC herself on the same day, quote, I condemn Hamas's attacks in the strongest possible terms.
Does it get clearer than that?
Not only did AOC Say I condemn Hamas's attacks in the strongest possible terms but today, or rather yesterday, She came out and harshly denounced that DSA protest in New York for allowing some of the speakers to express some of those views that we covered.
There you see the political headline.
AOC knocks quote bigotry and callousness of Times Square rally for Palestinians.
Quote, it should not be hard to shut down hatred and anti-Semitism where we see it.
This is a core tenet of solidarity.
Now, I say all that not to defend those people or their views, but simply to point out that we are not going to fall, I'm not going to fall at least this time, or allow to be perpetrated this lie.
That either you uncritically and mindlessly endorse and cheerlead for every last thing the Israeli and American governments do or you stand accused of being pro-Hamas.
That is a lie.
It is a manipulative propaganda tactic just like it is in all those other wars I reviewed where it's used.
There's an attempt underway, however, to try and imply that by essentially saying there are only two camps, people who support everything Israel and the United States does and those who celebrate Hamas.
And there's huge numbers of people in the middle, in a wide range of the middle, who are saying, I think what Hamas did is reprehensible, but I still don't want my own government, the United States government, to treat it as it's war and get involved in that war.
That's Israel's war to fight.
They have all the military hardware.
I'm even in favor of providing them with arms, some people are saying, but I still don't want the United States to get to be involved.
And then there are other people who are saying that They're critical of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the blockade of Gaza, but nonetheless find what Hamas is doing reprehensible as well.
Unless people are praising Hamas and what they did, which is a tiny number of people, nobody should be called pro-Hamas or on the side of Hamas for questioning what their own government is doing.
That is an absolute, not only right, but a duty that you have when your government is involved in war.
And that's especially true given how many American politicians are essentially calling for Israel to wipe out all of Gaza.
We're even arguing that this should be America's word.
We should treat it as America's word.
I quoted earlier the statement of Nikki Haley, who the day after that attack happened, she went on Fox News and she said to Prime Minister Netanyahu, finish them.
Finish them.
She suggested that Iran was also involved and she explicitly said, this is not only an attack on Israel, but an attack on the United States.
It is not an attack on the United States.
That is just the reality.
It was an attack on Israel.
Those are two separate countries.
Here is Marco Rubio, who like Lindsey Graham and like Nikki Haley.
And I'm sorry, this is just a fact.
Cheerlead and support and advocate for every single American war fought over the last 25 years and ones that haven't been fought but that are proposed.
If there's a war, two things you know for certain about Marco Rubio.
One is he's nowhere near the fighting, nor is his family.
And number two, he's an ardent advocate of that war and of U.S.
participation in it.
Here's what he said on October 10th about this new war.
So why would you be issuing war threats to Iran?
be if the U.S. is attacked or this thing has escalated that implicates whether it's U.S. servicemen in the region, servicewomen in the region, or facilities in the region, whether it's Iran directly or through their proxies, we're going to hold Iran responsible.
We're going to consider it an attack by the Iranian state, and we will respond in kind.
So why would you be issuing war threats to Iran?
Again, that's my question.
I thought the Republican Party voted for Donald Trump in 2016 and then made him as nominee in 2020 and went to vote for him for president because he convinced Republicans, and a lot of Republicans already thought this, which is why they were attracted to the message, that and a lot of Republicans already thought this, which is why they were attracted to the message, that we have to stop being involved in so many wars, that the only wars we should be fighting are wars when our And...
And if you listen to Marco Rubio, who is a huge supporter of the U.S.
role and participation in the war in Ukraine, that's one war we should be fighting, the proxy war against Russia.
Another war we should be fighting is the war with Israel, that this is an attack on the United States as well.
He obviously has said many times that we should go to war with China in the event they get more aggressive or attack Taiwan, which is a foreign country.
And Here he is threatening war with Iran.
How many wars are we going to fight?
Against how many big powerful countries are we going to conduct wars?
Apparently, according to Nikki Haley and Marco Rubio, the answer is a lot.
A lot.
Pretty much against every major country, apparently, that does anything other than do the United States' bidding.
Here is Lindsey Graham, who unsurprisingly came forward with a statement that, when it comes to unhinged and deranged warmongering, outdid even Nikki Haley and Marco Rubio, which is not easy to do.
Listen to what he said.
We're in a religious war here.
I am with Israel.
Do whatever the hell you have to do to defend yourself.
Level the place.
Okay.
We're going to get in just a minute to how many Israelis in the media are disgusted by what Lindsey Graham said.
It's really easy to be in a safe distance, sitting in the United States, and calling for Israel to just obliterate Gaza, just carpet bomb it and turn it into a parking lot, even though it has 2.2 million people concentrated in an extremely dense area, half of whom are children.
I don't understand.
I genuinely don't understand how you can simultaneously express revulsion for what Hamas did in targeting innocent people and children and not be repulsed by this call to wipe out Gaza.
I mean, that would be genocide.
The Gazans cannot leave Gaza.
They're blockaded for most of their border by Israel and part of their border by Egypt.
And the reason Egypt blockades them is because Egypt is a huge recipient of U.S.
aid.
When Egypt one time had an election and voted for Mohammed Morsi, who was more pro-Palestinian than any other leader, he was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, that's who Egyptians chose.
The Egyptian military overthrew him and installed General Sisi, and John Kerry applauded that because we wanted the Egyptians to do the bidding, including making sure that those Gazans are trapped inside Gaza.
So Egypt is involved for that reason, but nonetheless, the Gazans cannot leave.
There was even talk about allowing them to leave through Egypt, but then the crossing got bombed, and the Egyptians don't seem eager to allow Hundreds of thousands or millions of Gazans to enter their countries.
You're talking about, if you're talking about leveling Gaza or wiping out Gaza like Lindsey Graham did, you're talking about knowingly and purposely killing hundreds of thousands, if not more than a million children.
Children.
Palestinian children who live in Gaza on top of the Number of innocent adults, civilians, who have never participated in violence.
Now, I will not accept any suggestion that if you think that the lives of Palestinian children have value and that it is psychotic to call for their mass extermination, that that makes you pro-Hamas.
In fact, I see a lot more similarities Between people like Lindsey Graham and Hamas than I do between people who think that all human life has value for innocent civilians, including children.
The idea that human life has no value if you're angry enough or disgusted enough at the population is exactly what Hamas adopted when they just did what they did.
It's the same ideology.
It's an ideology that believes in genocide, that just wants to murder people for their nationality.
And I don't care what the names are called, I don't care how many people are angry, that's never going to be a campaign or a cause that I'm supporting or on board with.
But what Lindsey Graham is doing here, beyond advocating what the Israelis should do, and again, it's so easy if you don't have to deal with the fallout in that region.
What do you think Hezbollah and Turkey and Iran and Qatar, with its control over huge amounts of gas that the world relies on, is going to do what they watch Gaza be turned into a parking lot.
Do you think they're just going to sit around and be okay with that?
Do you think there will be no consequences for Israel?
It's very easy sitting in the United States not to care about that.
And I think that's why there are a lot more calls in the Israeli media for humanitarianism and restraint.
Not because they're less angry or disgusted at what Hamas did, but because they don't want to have to deal with that fallout, whereas Lindsey Graham doesn't have to, as always. - Thank you.
But what the most important part of what Lindsey Graham is saying here is that he's saying it's America's war, and not just America's war, it's a religious war.
We, the United States, are now involved in a war, this is now our war, he says, and it's a religious war.
Which, historically, are the worst kind.
Because if you Make a war about religion and you're fighting for your religion and to wipe out another religion, typically that leads to huge amounts of fanaticism.
What Lindsey Graham is saying is incredibly dangerous and morally reprehensible.
Now, that is, I think, Something that we have to be willing to discuss.
The extent to which the United States should be involved in this war, the extent to which the United States should consider this war our war, and whether or not the United States should be seeking or expecting or wanting a direct military conflict with Iran.
These are very consequential questions.
These questions cannot be extinguished.
By claiming that everybody who asks questions or even expresses resistance is pro-terrorist or pro-Hamas.
That's what got us into the war on terror of 20 years and all the abuses that it generated and we shouldn't let that happen again.
There is another aspect to the discourse surrounding the war on Gaza that I will admit surprises me.
Because what is happening in the West is that the rage and the anger that people feel from feeding on these videos about what Hamas did to Israeli civilians, which again is rage and anger that I can not only understand but share, is not only being channeled into what I think are sociopathic calls for the eradication of innocent life in massive numbers,
But also the dismantling of core free speech rights in the West as well as, as a way of fighting dissent, as well as the explicit invocation of what until about six seconds ago was universally reviled by the American right as the excesses of cancel culture.
Meaning that people participating in public debates and expressing views that those with power dislike should be, since you can't jail them with the First Amendment, should be scorned and fired and rendered unhirable.
That has happened to a huge number of people who have expressed opposition to Black Lives Matter or who have called for policing, more policing, or who are opposed to affirmative action.
Or who have expressed concerns about the exorcism of the Me Too movement, or who have argued against some of the more novel and radical expressions of the new gender ideology and the trans agenda.
And the argument typically made against such people when they're fired because of those views Is that the firing is justified because those aren't real views.
Those are expressions of hatred against a marginalized group of people.
That it's attacking vulnerable people and marginalizing them and inciting violence against them.
That it's basically hate speech and therefore not permitted.
Which is exactly the same argument being invoked by the people who have spent years criticizing that tactic.
To justify the firing or the barring from hiring of people who are in some ways expressing criticism of the Israeli government or solidarity with the Palestinian cause.
And if someone wants to say, you know what?
I do believe in cancel culture.
My problem with the left's use of cancel culture has simply been that they've directed it at the wrong ideas.
The views they want to punish are views that I don't think should be punished, but these views I do think should be punished, then at least I can respect the intellectual consistency involved.
But obviously that's not what's happening.
People are simultaneously campaigning to have people fired or barred from being hired, and at the same time pretending that they're not engaged in these very tactics they've spent so many years denouncing.
So first of all, let's look at the actual censorship emanating from state officials.
Here is from the UK, The Guardian, on Monday.
Waving a Palestinian flag may be a criminal offense, Braverman tells police.
That's the Home Secretary of the UK, which is like the Attorney General.
Home Secretary also suggests a clampdown on pro-Arab chants in a letter that will concern free speech advocates.
Oh, do you think?
Now if you're somebody who hates the Palestinian flag or who despises chants like free Palestine or free Arabs, you should hate that all you want, but then the question becomes do you think the state should make it criminal to express these views because you hate them?
Which is what we've covered on this show all the time.
That's happening and usually people are Appalled by that kind of censorship, here's from the Guardian, quote, in a letter to chief constables in England and Wales, the Home Secretary urged them to clamp down on any attempts to use flags, songs, or swastikas to harass or intimidate members of the Jewish community.
Now you might be saying, oh, well, it's not just the flags, it's the harassing of members of the Jewish community, but what they mean by that is walking on the streets, saying you're pro-Israel, Protest and then doing a counter chant or waving a Palestinian flag.
And that's the argument always for censorship.
Oh, if you go around denouncing the trans agenda, you're making trans people feel unsafe.
You're harassing them and intimidating them.
And every other minority group to whom that applies.
Quote, the Home Secretary's words, which followed deadly attacks by Hamas on Israelis in a military response, will deeply concern freedom of speech advocates and members of the Muslim community.
In the letter, the Home Secretary, Braverman, said police should not restrict themselves to potential offenses related to the promotion of Hamas, a prescribed organization.
So what she's saying is, obviously it's a crime to defend Hamas.
Do you think it should be a crime to defend Hamas, no matter how much you hate Hamas?
Do you want that to be a crime?
Do you want people to go to prison if they say, oh, I think what Hamas did is justified?
We just went over the fact that there are a few people saying that.
Should those people be turned into criminals?
Should they be prosecuted?
She's saying not only do I think they should be prosecuted, people defending Hamas, But many other people, quote, it is not just explicit pro-Hamas symbols and chants that are cause for concern, she said.
I would encourage police to consider whether chants such as, from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free, whether that should be understood as an expression of a violent desire to see Israelis erased from the world, and whether its use in certain contexts may amount to racially aggravated Section 5 public order offenses.
Quote, I would encourage police to give similar consideration to the presence of symbols such as swastikas at anti-Israel demonstrations.
Context is crucial.
Behaviors that are legitimate in some circumstances, for example, the waving of a Palestinian flag, may not be legitimate such as when intended to glorify acts of terrorism.
I guess it's okay to call for the complete and total eradication of Gaza as Lindsey Graham did.
That's legal.
What's not legal is to wave a Palestinian flag if the state believes that you're doing so in order to glorify terrorism.
Do you want the state in the business of doing this?
Usually the answer is unequivocally no.
But the reason the Home Secretary of the UK is threatening to criminalize this is because she believes, probably accurately, that a large portion of the British population want that to be criminal.
That's how the government exploits emotions surrounding war.
This is exactly what they did in the War on Terror.
They said, look, we know that ordinarily the Patriot Act would be unthinkable.
Remember 9-11?
Aren't you enraged by that?
Don't you want us to be able to stop that?
Well, you better give us these powers then.
And people said, oh, okay, and they voted overwhelmingly, in fact, almost unanimously for the Patriot Act.
That's how this always works.
They leap in at the very first days when emotions are at their highest and they exploit them to gain authoritarian power.
There was a similar protest in Canada, in Toronto, where people were waving Palestinian flags and chanting pro-Palestinian slogans.
And the mayor of Toronto, Olivia Chow, tweeted the following, quote, I'm aware of the unsanctioned rally at Nathan Phillips Square today.
My statement is below, quote, the government of Canada has rightly listed Hamas as a terrorist organization and we simply must not tolerate any support for terror.
Full stop.
The rally to support Hamas at Nathan Phillips Square today is unsanctioned, without a permit, and I unequivocally denounce it.
Glorifying this weekend's indiscriminate violence, including murder and kidnapping of women and children by Hamas against Israeli civilians, is deplorable.
I don't have a problem with her expressing those views, that it's deplorable.
She then goes on, quote, I am receiving updates from the chief of police, who assures me they will investigate and address any suspected incidents of hate So she's not just threatening to use the police to investigate people expressing support for Palestine, which you may find deplorable and disgusting and enraging, but nonetheless, I hope you don't think that should be illegal in a free country, in a democracy.
This is exactly what the Canadian government did when they tried to criminalize the protest of truckers who were protesting against vaccine mandates during COVID.
Here you see a tweet from a Canadian journalist who during those protests tweeted, quote, Ottawa police say the protesters do not have a demonstration permit.
So that's what they were exactly what they were trying to do to make those protests illegal, too, and most people found that enraging, repressive.
I hope that view doesn't change simply because now it's a protest that you dislike.
Hear from Reuters on the same issue of the Canadian reaction and attempt by the Trudeau government to criminalize the protest.
There you see the headline, Canada police threaten protesters with arrest.
Government links blockade to extremists.
So essentially the same argument.
This is being done by people who are dangerous, who believe in extremism, who are glorifying violence, and therefore we can make this protest illegal.
In the United States, thankfully, because we do have the First Amendment, not that many people want to criminalize the expression of opposition to the Israeli government action or support for Palestinians, but there are people who want to destroy the lives of those who are doing it, which I always thought was called cancel culture.
That's what I always understood cancel culture to be.
Somebody is at a and they make a white supremacist sign using the OK sign.
And then they have to be fired.
There's pressure from media companies and journalists to get them fired to make sure they're never hired.
People post things on Facebook or Twitter about Black Lives Matter or the Me Too movement or the trans movement.
And there's a campaign to have them fired based on the view that those are hateful statements against vulnerable minorities that are likely to incite violence.
That's cancel culture, at least as I have always understood it.
And now, a lot of the people who have spent the last several years building a career, a public profile, based on opposition to cancel culture and the virtues of absolutist free speech are now involved in a very public campaign, often successful, To have people fired or barred from being hired who are expressing views on the war between Gaza and Israel that they dislike.
Here is Meghan McCain, who is a very stalwart defender of Israel, like her father John McCain was, promoting and cheering and pointing to a tweet by Bill Ackman, who is a very wealthy Silicon Valley investor.
Who has, I think he's the CEO of a certain company, he's an investor in a lot of companies, a very rich Silicon Valley guy, and this is what he's saying, quote, I have been asked by a number of CEOs if Harvard would release a list of the members of each of the Harvard organizations that have signed a letter, issued the letter assigning sole responsibility for Hamas's heinous attacks to Israel, so as to ensure that none of us inadvertently hire any of their members.
If in fact their members support the letter they have released, the names of the signatories should be made public so their views are publicly known.
One should not be able to hide behind a corporate shield when issuing a statement supporting the actions of terrorists, who we now learn have beheaded babies among other inconceivably despicable acts.
Now again, he's not actually talking here about people who have praised Hamas's massacre of Civilians, he's talking here about student groups and students who have said that they think the broader context for the Israel-Gaza situation, namely Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the blockade of Gaza, is the cause or the blame for this conflict.
That's a view shared by a lot of people around the world.
Again, you may hate that view.
You may despise it.
You may be sickened by it.
But I just want you to know that that is exactly how the left feels about the views that they want punished.
As much as you might hate the views that Bill Ackman is saying should be used to bar people from employment, he's demanding a list be assembled
of people who aren't on Israel's side so that all of he and his CEO friends can collude together and agree not to hire them as they graduate Harvard or whatever other university where they're expressing this view because he considers this support for terrorism just like the left regards the views they dislike as celebrating white supremacy or neo-nazism or fascism
Or violence against trans people or gay people.
That's what the left genuinely believes about the views they want suppressed and punished.
And I always thought the idea was that's wrong to do.
That the solution to bad ideas is to engage people with better ideas.
Wasn't that the whole point of what we've been told for a long time?
Is there now an exception?
Explicitly and officially?
And we've asked this question before, whether there's a free speech exception on the right when it comes to Israel and Palestine, because I think there's evidence that there often is.
This seems pretty explicit to me.
Here is a article in Forbes about this campaign that has been launched.
Billionaire Ackman, others pledge they won't hire Harvard students who signed a letter blaming Israel for Hamas attack.
Quote, billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman on Tuesday roundly objected to a controversial statement from a group of Harvard student organizations solely blaming Israel's occupation of Gaza for Hamas's weekend attack on Israel, calling for the names of the students to be released in his effort not to hire them.
The statement was penned on Saturday by the Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee, with signatures from 33 university student organizations.
Arguing Hamas' military assault on Israel, quote, did not occur in a vacuum, comparing the Gaza Strip to an open-air prison, which is common in Israeli discourse to say that Gaza is an open-air prison where two million people are trapped and can't leave, while claiming that Israel's, quote, apartheid regime is the only one to blame, Harvard student newspaper the Harvard Crimson reported.
The statement says Israel is, quote, entirely responsible for the violence that began Saturday when Hamas militants crossed from Gaza into southern Israel.
Ackman, the CEO of Pershing Square Capital Management, tweeted he has been approached by, quote, a number of CEOs asking for the names of the student organizations to ensure none of them, none of us inadvertently hire any of their members.
Jonathan Niemann, the CEO and co-founder of healthy, fast, casual chain Sweetgreen, responded to Ackman's post on X saying he, quote, would like to know so I never hire, so I never, so I know never to hire these people.
To which healthcare services company Easy Health CEO David Duhl responded, quote, same.
Dovehill Capital Management CEO Jake Wyrzak also supported Ackman's plea to release the names of the students, though Ackman's request did not receive universal support, with Meds.com CEO Stephen Sullivan writing people should, quote, be angry at the administrators and teachers, but cautioning against putting college students' names on a list.
The statement also gained national attention from business leaders and some lawmakers, including Congresswoman Alisa Stepanak, Republican from New York, and Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, who asked on Monday, quote, what the hell is wrong with Harvard?
Now again, if you support that, that's fine.
Please don't come to me and tell me that you hate cancel culture.
Please just don't pretend that.
Just say what is true.
Just be honest about your perspective and your argument.
I don't actually have a problem with cancel culture in principle.
In fact, I support cancel culture in principle.
I believe that people who express repellent views should have their careers put in jeopardy and be fired from their jobs.
My problem with the left isn't that they use cancel culture, but instead use cancel culture against people whose views I like.
And instead it should be used against views I hate.
The left just hates the wrong views.
The left wants to punish the wrong views.
The left wants to get fired the wrong people.
Just say that.
Here's Aaron Sibarium, who's a friend of the show and somebody who's reporting we've approvingly cited many times.
We had him on our show before.
He is an outspoken opponent of cancel culture on campuses.
That's one of the things he most prominently covers.
And in response to people objecting to this campaign on the grounds that it sounds a lot like the left-wing cancel culture you typically denounce, He replied, quote, I think there's a pretty big difference between firing someone for a poorly worded tweet or an opinion shared by half the country, especially when that opinion is not relevant to their job, and firing someone for endorsing terrorism.
Now, first of all, We read you the relevant parts of the statement that the students signed.
They did not celebrate or justify Hamas's massacring of civilians.
They did not endorse terrorism.
They said that the context is crucial for understanding this war, and they think Israel bears the blame for this war.
That's not the same as endorsing the targeting of innocent civilians.
But let's assume that it is.
Let's assume that that's a fair and accurate characterization.
And by the way, we asked Aaron to come on our show tonight.
He told me he would come on to talk about this, but wasn't able to in the next few days, so hopefully we'll have him on our show soon to talk about it, obviously in a civil In a constructive way, that's what I promised him I would do while making clear I did not agree with what I consider this use of cancel culture, but let's assume that characterization is right.
The Wall Street Journal on October 8th, so this is on Sunday, published a article alleging, stating outright in a news article, quote, Iran helped plot the attack on Israel over several weeks.
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps gave the final go-ahead last Monday in Beirut.
Quote, Iranian security officials helped plan Hamas' Saturday surprise attack on Israel and gave the green light for the assault at a meeting in Beirut last Monday, according to senior members of Hamas and Hezbollah, another Iran-backed militant group.
Oh, so it's according to senior members of Hamas and Hezbollah.
Officers of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had worked with Hamas in August to devise the air, land, and sea incursions, the most significant breach of Israel's borders since the 1973 Yom Kippur War, these people said.
Now, a lot of people in journalism, including who are in mainstream journalism and who are typically eager to report stories incriminating of Iran, immediately question the credibility, not just of the story, but of the specific reporter.
Here is the editor, Andrew McGregor Marshall, who used to be the editor of the reporter, Summer Saeed, who reported that story.
And this is what he said, quote, The main reporter on this story, Summer Saeed, has a history of dishonesty and inventing stories.
I fired her from Reuters in 2008 for this reason.
I'm surprised that the Wall Street Journal has hired her and is publishing her stories that are clearly bogus.
I mean, that is not something you hear from people in mainstream media very often, saying something so direct and blunt about the lack of integrity of another reporter, the willingness to make up stories.
This is one of her editors.
The Israeli military came out, and obviously the Israeli military has no love for Iran.
And said no evidence yet of Iran linked to Hamas attacks says Israeli military quote Iran has issued denials and US also the US government has said it has no direct knowledge of Iran being behind the attack CNN-CNBC, the day after the Wall Street Journal article was released, quoted Secretary of State Antony Blinken as saying the U.S.
has, quote, not yet seen evidence of Iran involvement in Hamas attack on Israel.
CNN, the next day, said initial U.S.
intelligence suggests Iran was surprised by the Hamas attacks on Israel.
A direct refutation of the Wall Street Journal story where they stood alone and made this claim.
Quote, the United States has collected specific intelligence that suggests senior Iranian government officials were caught by surprise by Saturday's bloody attack on Israel by Hamas, according to multiple sources familiar with the intelligence.
The existence of the intelligence has cast doubt on the idea that Iran was directly involved in the planning, resourcing, or approving of the operation, sources said.
Now, I'm not going to tell you that because the U.S.
government or even the Israeli government deny it or have claimed that they have no intelligence suggesting it that you should blindly believe that either.
There may be reasons why the U.S.
government in particular and the Israeli government don't want people believing that Iran helped plan the attack because that would immediately put pressure on them, obviously, to go to war with Iran.
But certainly the Israelis, if they believed Iran was involved, would come out and say so.
They wouldn't deny that.
They'd want to know who was responsible for this horrific attack on their country that killed over a thousand of their citizens.
And yet, the Wall Street Journal came and stood alone and reported this while every other media outlet called into question.
And it's clearly an attempt to stir up war fever with Iran, which a lot of people are already doing.
And I want to ask you again, if you're somebody who believes that Iran is a grave enemy of the United States, that we should go to war with them, we should bomb them, that Israel should bomb them, I just want to ask how many wars we should be fighting.
Again, we have the war in Ukraine, the war against Russia that we're spending hundreds of billions of dollars on, depleting our own weapons supply.
That was the highest priority until about five days ago of the CIA and the Western security apparatus.
That war is not going anywhere.
We have that war with Russia using Ukraine as a proxy.
We're now heavily involved in the Israeli war.
Funding it, supplying the weapons, deploying our aircraft carriers to the region to deter attacks by Hezbollah or Iran or any other one who might be thinking of involving themselves in this conflict.
So we're already quite heavily involved in this very dangerous war that can easily escalate to regional conflict in the Middle East.
And we all know, because we lived through it, how dangerous Middle East wars can be, how difficult they are to end.
Obviously, there's a significant portion of the American population on both the right and the Democratic Party mainstream that believe that China is a grave enemy of the United States as well, and we should be on war footing with China.
We have China militarily encircled.
You have U.S.
bases all around China, in Japan, in South Korea, in Guam, in the Philippines.
And I've heard many, many people of influence and prominence say we should go to war with China immediately if they attack Taiwan.
That's the official position of Joe Biden, the first president in decades, who has abandoned strategic ambiguity to threaten war with China.
And now you have U.S.
officials threatening war with Iran as well.
How many wars are we supposed to be in?
How many countries are we supposed to be fighting against?
Now, one of the things that I think is so interesting Is that while in the United States you have all kinds of calls for like that from Lindsey Graham saying we're in a religious war and we need to wipe Gaza off the map and Nikki Haley's shrieking finish them, finish them!
These kind of psychotic calls just obliterate Gaza with no consideration for innocent human life.
In the Israeli media you can read so many more articles as they do every day Urging the Israeli government to avoid becoming like Hamas, meaning avoid devaluing all human life, including innocent life and the life of children, and observe basic humanitarianism and the law of war, not collectively punish the entire Palestinian population for what Hamas did.
So let me just show you one example.
It's in Haaretz, which is a more liberal paper, but it's very much part of the mainstream.
It obviously has condemned Hamas with great fervor and supports Israeli military action against Hamas, like every mainstream newspaper in Israel does.
And yet they have this op-ed, and I'm telling you there are so many, from the Israeli professor Michael Sfard, the headline of which is, Israelis must maintain their humanity even when their blood boils.
And again, I do believe that most people came to realize that after 9-11, that was what we should have done and didn't.
So just because the rage is raw and fresh doesn't mean we should forget that lesson.
And this is what he's urging.
Quote, the truth is that this is a crime against humanity, a crime against everything human, meaning the Hamas attack.
Each of us knows someone who was murdered or abducted or whose relatives were wounded.
Tens of thousands of Israelis will walk around in the coming years with severe psychological wounds, some from shell shock and some from post-traumatic stress.
And yet, The laws of war weren't designed only for situations in which our blood is cool, in which there is no justified anger or understandable desire for revenge.
The laws of war constitute humanity's renunciation of the idea of a complete prohibition on the use of force.
It's renunciation of the pacifist worldview, meaning the laws of war permit war and recognizes there are justified wars, but it does so, quote, in exchange for an approach that set rules of basic humanity and boundaries on the harms to civilians.
Remember that a lot of the laws of war were promulgated at the Nuremberg Tribunals, the trial of Nazi officials and soldiers who participated not only in the Holocaust but the aggressive war that spawned World War II.
And the judges and the prosecutors at the Nuremberg Trials stressed over and over, I've written about the Nuremberg Trials before, and if you haven't read about them or watched them, I urge you to do so.
What they emphasized more than anything else is that the primary purpose of the Nuremberg Trials was not to punish the Nazis for crimes they committed.
That was part of what they were doing.
But they said this will matter and be more than just victor's justice if and only if we come out of here with principles that also limit every other country, including the ones participating in and conducting the Nuremberg Trials, meaning the United States and its allies.
That's where the laws of war come from, from the atrocities of World War II.
They were designed to ensure that no matter how angry people were, no matter how much rage they felt, as this Israeli activist is saying, that you still observe basic humanity because if you don't Then you lose your claim to moral high ground.
He writes quote, but in the days since the massacre in southern Israel, statements have piled up from the country's leaders indicating that Israel has officially adopted a combat policy whose essence is extensive violations of the laws of war regarding millions of Gazans.
Defense Secretary Minister Yoav Galant said, and we reported on this on Monday, quote, we've imposed a full blockade on Gaza City.
No water, no food, no gas.
Everything is closed.
That statement and its tone suggests that Galant has ordered the Israeli defense forces to adopt a method of warfare that includes starving Gazans and letting them go thirsty.
And no context could such a move be legal or moral.
Even a siege, a military strategy that can be legal under certain conditions, cannot include depriving civilians in the besieged area the necessities of survival.
They must also be allowed to leave it.
I'm not even sure you could get an op-ed published like that in a major American newspaper.
But again, Israelis are the ones who live in that region.
It's their countries in whose name, it's their names in whose, who their government is acting on behalf of.
And I think it's a lot less abstract to them.
They live next to Palestinians.
They understand their humanity.
At least some of them do.
And I've been actually relieved to see a lot of longtime vocal supporters of Israel in the United States expressing similar sentiments.
Here is David Sachs, who I can't really describe his politics well, but I think he's generally associated with the Republican Party.
He's been a very eloquent and outspoken opponent of US role in Ukraine.
And he's also very much A supporter of Israel, I know he's traveled there, he has a connection to it, and yet this is what he wrote on Twitter today, quote, or this was yesterday rather, after he wrote a paragraph about how repulsed he is, like any decent person is, by the Hamas attacks on civilians, he wrote, quote, that said, one of the purposes of a terrorist outrage is to provoke an escalatory response that ultimately backfires.
After 9-11, the U.S.
plunged into two decades of wars in the Middle East that caused untold blood and treasure, unleashed staggering murder and mayhem, changed the geopolitical map in unfavorable ways for the U.S., and squandered the sympathy of the world.
Bin Laden must be smiling in hell.
Now, many of the same U.S.
figures who miscalculated so badly after 9-11 are screeching for Israel to, quote, finish them.
We're praying for a larger war with Iran.
This is exactly the wrong advice.
Our leaders should be encouraging a cool-headed response that finds the right balance between achieving a just and legitimate military objective and minimizing civilian casualties and avoiding the risk of a wider war.
Let us hope and pray that the Israeli government finds that balance.
So you're talking here about, obviously, people who can never be accused of being sympathetic to Hamas.
It would be repulsive to suggest that about any of those people who I just cited, who are essentially saying, I don't want to replicate the behavior of Hamas.
I don't want to be like Hamas.
I don't support the deliberate extinguishing of human life and especially children.
So I'm not in favor of indiscriminately bombing and ending the lives of 2.2 million people, half of whom are children.
Because doing so achieves no end and can never be morally justified.
That's why what Hamas did is so reprehensible.
Again, it's like with the cancel culture and the censorship.
You have to have principles that are universally applicable.
Otherwise, you don't really have a moral stance.
Just to give you a small sense of what's going on in Gaza, and obviously the suffering among Israelis is still very raw and still very pervasive.
But innocent life in Gaza is just as valuable as innocent life in Israel.
And I think it takes a sociopath to think otherwise.
About either side being of less worth or no worth.
Here's ABC News, October 8th, which was Sunday.
Quote, an Israeli airstrike kills 19 members of the same family in a southern Gaza refugee camp.
Nasser Aboukouda lost 19 members of his family in an instant when an Israeli airstrike blew up his home in a crowded refugee camp in the southern Gaza Strip.
Here from Channel 4 News is a report on what Gaza looks like.
It's from October 11th.
You can't hear yourself think.
It's not just the noise of the sirens and the strikes.
The sound of the chaos in between is just relentless.
Pure panic everywhere you look. - - This little boy was pulled out alive, his face blackened.
His rescuer rushes to his mother.
But before she can embrace her boy, she passes out in shock.
Annika becomes an ambulance.
This woman is ripping off before the boot can be shot.
We've been told to get out.
But where do we go?
And how do we get there?
There are more than two million people living here.
Almost half are children.
Families are rushing, trying to make plans.
Every second matters.
Gaza is under a complete siege.
- Gaza is under a complete siege.
No water, no food, no electricity, and no escape.
It's too hard.
Some almost give up.
But you can't stand still for long.
Please, my family, they're just kids.
We are not strangers to war, but how it feels this time.
It's hard to find the words.
It feels like the world is collapsing.
So I think there's two different ways to look at this war.
You can start and treat Saturday like it's the first day of history.
Ignore everything that came before it.
Watch those videos of Israeli suffering and react with disgust and horror and rage which is the only normal healthy reaction in my view to seeing what Hamas has done and then as a result just close your heart and decide that you no longer care about human life and you want the same exact suffering to be brought to the people of Gaza including people who are children and innocent civilians simply as a way of getting vengeance or
Thinking that you're achieving some sort of increased security for Israel, which I don't think is going to happen.
But one of the reasons why I think this war is almost impossible to pay attention to for too long is that it seems like lots of people on both sides are deciding that humanity has no value.
And there's all kinds of claims in the West that the people of Gaza are animals, are subhuman, doesn't matter what happens to them.
And obviously there are a lot of people who think that about Israelis as well, including the people from Hamas who went into Israel and murdered as many people as they could for no reason other than the fact that they were Israelis.
Once you go down that road though, once you allow yourself to connect to that mentality, Then all you have to do is look at history.
Lots of different examples, not just one, to see where that leads.
Not only for the world, but for yourself.
Here is just one more video.
There you see the credit of the people who produced the video, which is Adenology.
And just a little bit more about what's happening in Gaza.
I'm here today to show you the massive destruction that happened to the most beautiful areas in the Strip, in Gaza City.
As you can see, I'm speechless.
I don't know what to say.
I don't know what should I say.
day that believe me it's the most sadness that Gaza ever had.
Oh my God.
Oh my God.
It's like a whole square.
More than 15, 15 to 20 houses got demolished.
not destroyed, demolished. - No, I don't think you should only look at that side.
I think, obviously, you should be aware of the extreme amounts of suffering and loss and insecurity that was brought to Israel as well.
We've seen those videos.
We covered them on Monday.
I've talked about them a lot, including tonight.
The point isn't that, oh, there's just one side which is suffering and the other isn't.
They both are.
with extraordinary amounts of cruelty and the loss of human life.
And I can't imagine celebrating that for whatever you think your political ideology or causes.
I want to conclude with the president of the EU, Ursula von der Leyen, who actually strongly condemned the tactic of, in war, shutting off a population from water and gas and electricity and food.
She called it a war crime.
Obviously, she didn't do that in the context of what Israel is doing to Gaza.
She already came out and said the EU has full and unequivocal and unlimited support for what Israel does.
She did that when claiming that that's what Russia did, that Russia was cutting off gas and electricity and food and water to the Ukrainian population.
Which is exactly what the Israeli government, by its own boasting, by its own admission, is doing now to the people in Gaza, the Palestinians in Gaza.
And here's what she said about this when she claimed Russia was doing it.
Or crimes.
Targeted attacks on civilian infrastructure with a clear aim to cut off men, women, children of water, electricity and heating with the winter coming.
These are acts of pure terror and we have to call it as such.
This is a moment to stay the course and we will back Ukraine for as long as it takes.
If it's those things when Russia is doing it to Ukraine, it has to be those things when Israel is doing it to the Gazans.
Again, if you are somebody who is at least on enough to say, look, I don't have any standards.
I have no moral convictions that apply to everybody.
I just believe in power.
And when I object to censorship when done by my opponents, it's not because I care about censorship.
It's because I only want them silenced.
I don't want my side silenced.
And I'm angry about civilian deaths when it's from a country that I hate, but when it's a country that I like doing it to a country that I hate, I'm going to applaud it.
That's fine.
At least you're being honest.
I wish more people were that candid about what they think when they see these things.
But if you actually have real standards and real principles, like people like to believe they do, like a lot of people claim they do, then you cannot pick and choose when you apply them.
And one of the things we're definitely going to keep doing here as we report on this war, and there's no choice but to pay attention to it because the United States is directly involved in it, is to keep giving voice not to the people in Palestine, but the people in Israel who are increasingly critical of their own governments' indiscriminate use of force.
Because it's an incredibly dangerous thing to do for so many reasons that— The government of Qatar has already threatened to cut off gas for the entire world if the bombings don't stop in Gaza.
Obviously there's the possibility of escalation with Hezbollah, which has already fought bloody and protracted wars with Israel and has a real sophisticated military operation.
And then there's the threat already being issued.
by Marco Rubio and Lindsey Graham and those kind of people that the US might have to go to war with Iran or that Israel should.
So you're talking about a very dangerous situation, the second dangerous war on top of the one the US is already feeling in Ukraine.
And there may be people who watch this show who don't agree with this perspective, who want to see the Israelis unleashed and just destroy everybody in Gaza, but that is not a view we're going to support or get on board with at all.
And I just don't, I hope that if there are any of you who are on board with that, that you stop and think about if not on moral and ethical grounds, what you're cheering, at least on pragmatic grounds, that this was the kind of mindset that led to all the things about 9/11 and the war on terror, all those words that Americans came to regret.
And it's hard to understand why anybody would want to repeat those mistakes, if not because you care about the morality of it, because you care about the consequences of those policies.
So that concludes our show for this evening.
As a reminder, System Update is also available in podcast form, or you can follow us on Spotify, Apple, and all other major podcasting platforms.
Each episode is posted in podcast form on those platforms 12 hours after their first broadcast.
Live here on Rumble, and if you follow or rate and review the program, it really helps spread the visibility of the show.
As another reminder, every Tuesday and Thursday night when we're done with our Rumble show, we move to Locals, which is part of the Rumble platform, where we have our live interactive after show where we speak to our audience.
If you want to have access to that, which is exclusively for subscribers to our Locals community, just click the Join button right below the video player on the Rumble page.
It will take you to the Locals community.
Subscribing there not only gives you access to those twice-a-week shows, those live shows, after shows, but also the daily transcripts of every show that we do here.
We publish a professionalized transcript of so you can read it and see it in that form as well.
And it also really helps support the independent journalism that we do here.
For those of you who've been watching this show, we are, as always, very appreciative and we hope to see you back tomorrow night and every night at 7 p.m.
