Using bin Laden's 9/11 Defense: Erasing the “Civilian” Category. PLUS: Reckless Abuse of the “pro-Hamas” Label to Justify Censorship & Stigmatize Criticism of Israel | SYSTEM UPDATE #163
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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, in the aftermath of 9-11, the leader of Al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, adamantly denied having planned the attack or played any role in it.
He did, however, offer theories as to why it was morally and legally justified to target American civilians with violence.
Because American citizens choose their leaders, he argued, and then choose them again when deciding to re-elect them, Americans are directly responsible for those leaders' actions, including when they bomb civilians, impose sanctions regimes that starve and otherwise kill hundreds of thousands of innocent people, including children, when they destabilize other countries or work to engineer coups in other countries, and when they invade and attack other countries, as they did with Iraq.
Indeed, after George W. Bush and Dick Cheney invaded Iraq and then bombed multiple other countries and tortured detainees and implemented a program of kidnapping called renditions, Americans re-elected them in 2004 knowing that, and thus ratified all of that violence, including violence that ended up killing innocent people.
And under Bin Laden's theory, American civilians are not really civilians.
By ratifying the violence carried out by their government, they became actively complicit in it, and thus became legitimate military targets for those seeking to bring reprisals for violence by the United States against innocent people.
Now, Bin Laden's theory at the time provoked worldwide indignation and revulsion.
After all, the category of civilian that he sought to erase was central to the entire post-World War II framework that was implemented by numerous international bodies to prevent the Holocaust or to prevent other civilian-targeting atrocities that came to define that war.
One reason that the 9-11 attack provoked so much anger and unity around the world was due to the consensus that civilians are civilians in all cases and can never be justifiably targeted by violence.
That's called terrorism.
Civilian lives are sacrosanct and they can never be deliberately targeted.
This has been the consensus of the legal framework and Western morality since at least the end of World War II.
Now, while Bin Laden's theory was widely and vehemently denounced, it has become popularized over the years.
And all with the same goal that he had, to find a way to justify killing civilians in large numbers, either by deliberately targeting them, or dropping bombs and using violence in reckless disregard for their lives.
In all wars, especially with the way they're now fought, civilian deaths are inevitable in large numbers, and we all learn the name in order to justify and dismiss that, quote, collateral damage.
But what Bin Laden did, as well as many others who have since followed in his footsteps, is something entirely different.
It's a way of justifying either the failure to safeguard those innocent lives, or to justify their targeting.
If a theory can be offered why civilians are actually part of the military, or a legitimate military target that one can legitimately destroy, then the responsibility to avoid killing civilians disappears.
When Hamas launched its horrific attack on Israeli civilians last Saturday, it did so based on the premise that there's no such thing as an innocent Israeli civilian.
Because they elect their governments, which then occupy or blockade Palestinian land, or because they support the killing of innocent people in Gaza, or because they serve in the Israeli Defense Forces, The category of civilian is blurred or even erased when it comes to Israel under the worldview of Hamas.
That's what drove what they did in Israel on Saturday.
But it's not only Hamas that has embraced this view to justify their targeting of civilians and other atrocities.
Over the last week, there have been explicit statements from Israeli officials and their American supporters that promulgate a quite similar theory, namely, that because the people in Gaza elected Hamas, They did so the last time an election was permitted, 16 years ago, back in 2007, when most of the population either hadn't been born yet or were far too young to vote.
Then it means that those so-called Palestinian civilians are not quite civilians, since they either implicitly or even explicitly endorse the violence of their Hamas leaders.
The growing invocation of this theory to erode and erase the concept of civilian is quite dangerous and alarming, and we think it merits a good deal of thought and analysis.
Then, we have heard many accusations over the last week of people who are said to be, quote, pro-Hamas.
Namely, people who are said to have justified the civilian massacres carried out against Israeli civilians, or who, even worse in general, are people who are calling for and cheering and advocating the murder of Jews.
This rather pernicious label, pro-Hamas, is often used to vilify anyone questioning, let alone opposing, the actions of the Israeli and American governments.
Close your ears to all of that, we're told, because those people are pro-Hamas.
But it's not just used to smear people's character.
It's also used to justify all sorts of cancel culture campaigns and even the kinds of censorship we have been reporting is now pervading the West in the wake of this new war.
Echoing the left liberal theory to justify censorship, we are told by those supporting such measures of oppression now about this war, we're not talking here about free speech.
This is different.
This is hate speech.
This is incitement to violence.
These people are calling for the murder of Jews.
That's what makes it different.
That's why it's not legitimate speech.
Are there some people who have justified the attack by Hamas and generally endorsed the killing of all Israelis?
Yes, of course there are.
You can find people advocating literally any idea if you look hard enough.
But as we documented last week at length, the reason it was necessary to highlight people whose names nobody knew until last week, a stray speaker at a DSA rally, or some local chapter of a Black Lives Matter group, or a non-tenured assistant professor no one had ever heard of, It's precisely because this pro-Hamas view was actually quite marginalized, really reserved only to the outermost fringes.
Very few people, and almost none with any position of power or influence, did anything other than act with disgust at what Hamas did in Israel on Saturday.
The reason this phrase pro-Hamas is being used so indiscriminately Applied to everyone who expresses any criticism about or opposition to the acts of the Israeli and U.S.
governments in response, or who insists that the lives of Palestinian civilians have the same value and worth as anybody else's, is the same reason that the people who questioned the Bush-Cheney war on terror were called pro-terrorist.
And those who oppose the invasion of Iraq were maligned as pro-Saddam.
And those who oppose the regime change wars of the CIA in Syria and Libya stood accused of being pro-Assad and pro-Gaddafi.
And those who now oppose the U.S.
war in Ukraine are vilified as pro-Putin or pro-Kremlin.
It's all designed to create a simple-minded dichotomy where, in the words of George W. Bush, you are either with us or you're with the terrorists.
And exactly as was done back in 2001 and 2002, this rancid propaganda framework is used to justify the imposition of authoritarian powers.
As long as you can successfully pin the label pro-Hamas to the foreheads of those who dissent from the current war policies, who cares if they're censored or put on blacklist or fired or made unemployable or worse?
After all, they're pro-Hamas.
Who would possibly care what happens to such people?
The Biden administration announced just a few hours ago, as the Wall Street Journal reported, that, quote, the U.S.
military has selected roughly 2,000 troops to prepare for a potential deployment to support Israel, U.S.
defense officials said.
Though, don't worry, they, quote, aren't intended to serve in a combat role, the officials said.
This war is already more dangerous than the war in Ukraine.
And that's a very dangerous war.
It's between the U.S.
and Russia, the two largest nuclear powers on the planet.
In this new war, regional escalation is highly possible, if not likely.
The U.S.
is already heavily involved, deploying aircraft carriers, providing bombs and money, deploying more aircraft carriers now, designating troops that might be deployed.
Any tactics that are designed to vilify good faith dissent, or worse, ones that are designed to justify official state censorship, such as France's banning of all pro-Palestinian protests while still allowing all pro-Israel protests because those are aligned with the government policy, any such tactics like that deserve our scorn.
And our attention.
So that's what we're going to give it tonight as we explore the latest developments in this war between Israel and Gaza and how it is being discussed and exploited in the United States and the West more broadly.
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System Update Americans woke up on Saturday to news that Hamas had invaded Israel, and it was through that day, and then the next day when the magnitude of the atrocities that Hamas had committed against Israeli civilians became manifest.
And And we came back on Monday night.
Monday night is, of course, the first night of each week when we do our program.
We don't have our program on the weekend.
And we knew that we had to talk about this war.
So before getting into the substance of what I want to talk about tonight, what I just laid out, I just want to talk a little bit about how we decided to cover this war all through last week.
We devoted every episode to this war with a couple of exceptions where segments were about other things, but obviously the war That is raging between Israel and Gaza with the United States increasingly involved with the West increasingly involved Dominated our coverage and our discussion of all last weekend.
I think it's likely to continue Certainly to be heavily featured into the near future and our coverage and the way we talked about the war actually produced a lot of feedback from audience So I want to kind of discuss some of that feedback that we got because I thought it was interesting.
It raised some interesting points about how to kind of report on a topic like this.
So one of the things that we heard a lot of was that we had talked about this war in a very restrained and nuanced way, and some people considered that positive.
And as the week went by, I think some people were expressing that almost as a criticism, that we seemed too restrained and condemning things that we ordinarily would have condemned a bit more full-throatedly or emphatically.
And I just want to give you a little bit access and insight into the thought process that we had as we discussed how to cover this, which is one of the things I've seen over the many years now that I've been reporting on foreign policy and civil liberties and war is that when something first erupts, emotions are extremely high.
Oftentimes they're high just because human beings naturally react to events like what Hamas did in Israel with a huge amount of intense emotion.
We certainly confess, I certainly confess to having reacted to those videos that everybody consumed that I consumed all day about the terror that was brought to Israeli civilians that Hamas purposely wanted us to see with a lot of emotion.
How could you not?
There was a kind of empathy that you naturally had with the people who were suffering these huge traumas of being murdered and tortured on video and being abducted and having families split and killed in front of each other and kidnapped.
And when we came on Monday night, we knew that emotions were extremely high.
And so the space that existed to be able to have a conversation was quite limited.
And you have two basic choices when that happens, when you're confronted with emotions that high.
One is you can just decide to ignore it, to insist that everybody puts aside their emotions, be strictly rational, and hear whatever views they should hear, regardless of whether they're ready to hear them or not.
Or you can respect the fact, acknowledge the fact that there's a certain kind of emotional state that most people are in that limits their ability to hear a huge amount of dissent and try and figure out how best to bring people along, including people who may not agree with you and not alienate them, given how much emotions there are.
And we decided to do the latter.
And I think that is the right choice.
On Monday night, When we first started talking about this, I went back and I looked at the first several shows that we did in the immediate aftermath of Russia's invasion of the Ukraine.
And it didn't just start off within 12 hours or 24 hours of that invasion.
Warning about how Ukraine is not a vital interest to the United States and the United States has no business there and the United States and NATO provoked the war and it did a coup in 2014 and surrounded the Russians and how Ukraine is filled with all kinds of Nazi battalions who it would be very dangerous to arm because I knew that everybody was feeding on the same videos I was seeing of old Ukrainian women weeping over the death of their
Son who had gone to combat right away and all the propaganda around the feisty Ukrainians who were defending their country against a vicious and unprovoked assault by the Russians.
This is the narrative of the time that a lot of people connected to.
And as a result, I focused much more on those first few days on urging a kind of sober discourse, on urging people to avoid falling prey to those emotions because those emotions are often deliberately manipulated by governments and media that are extremely adept, over decades they've learned how to do this, of manipulating your emotions so that you immediately acquiesce to whatever the government wants to do.
And if you don't respect the fact that those emotions are not just arising and emerging and very intense but are being deliberately cultivated externally, then you're going to be just talking into the wind.
You're going to be able to rally people who fully agree with you already and everybody else is going to just tune out and be alienated by what it is that you're saying.
There are some interesting comments in the chat that we have been monitoring about exactly what kind of way is best to approach this, but I do think that as the Israeli response has become
Much more aggressive as we hear now from how many people in Gaza are being killed by indiscriminate Israeli bombing and by all sorts of other horrors that are beset upon them, while the Israeli Defense Ministry talks about cutting off water and food and fuel and electricity, which they've done, how they ordered half the country and gave them 24 hours to evacuate to the south, which would be virtually impossible to do.
There's a lot more space now opened up not only to the question of whether the Israeli response is justified or Legally or morally, but also what role the United States should play in this war, if any.
Like, why is this our war?
Why is the war in Ukraine the United States war?
Why is the war in Israel now the United States war?
Why is the United States deploying again its troops and its aircraft carrier and saying this also is our war and we're gonna fuel and fund and arm the Israelis for as long as they need in order to defend this war?
There's at least now more open debate.
And part of what we tried to do, especially all last week and into this week, is to ensure that that space for debate can actually take place.
Because nothing is more dangerous, and I think to me this was the lesson I personally learned after 9-11 more than any other, is that nothing is more dangerous when tactics are permitted to take root that are designed at their core to bar all debate, to bar all dissent by Adopting laws as France and Germany and the UK and Canada have done, legally prohibiting any protest against government war policy or by having billionaires as is happening in the United States.
Create public lists of anybody signing pro-Palestinian petitions or criticizing Israel in a way that they deem over-the-line to make them unhirable.
And at the very least, a job of a journalist has to be to demand that that space be permitted to be open, that dissent be permitted to forest.
When you're talking about something like having your government, the United States government, the most powerful military in the world, involve itself in yet another war in some way or other.
And the war itself is just incredibly dangerous.
With or without US involvement, you're talking about a high risk of regional escalation.
We have a responsibility, not just a right, but a responsibility to Pay attention to that word to allow people to be heard without having their jobs ruined or having them worse arrested or prosecuted for expressing dissent that governments have decided can't be expressed.
And so a big part of what we tried to do last week and what we're going to continue to do is ensure that that space can remain open.
I think it's important to have to respect the fact that people feel very strongly about this issue on both sides.
It's amazing if you think about it.
How much emotion anything involving Israel generates in the United States.
I think you can really see that there are a lot of people and influence, pundits and journalists and people in government who so quickly react much more intensely and emotionally and passionately To things that are happening in Israel than even to things that are happening in the United States.
We went over that argument that Ben Shapiro had with Tucker Carlson last week, where Ben Shapiro was yelling about the fact that it's so much worse what happened in Israel, where they were targeted, civilians were, by terrorists, than what's happening in the United States, where say 100,000 people each year are dying of fentanyl overdoses.
Without realizing the key distinction, which is that when, from the perspective of the U.S.
government, the major difference is that the war is happening in Israel, which is a foreign country, whereas things like fentanyl overdoses and other suffering of the American people is happening in the United States and the role of the United States government is supposed to be not to protect Ukraine, not to protect Israelis in a foreign country, that's the job of the Ukrainian government or the Israeli government, but instead to protect the United States.
That distinction gets lost and emotions are very high when it comes to this topic.
So let's take a look at some of the things that we wanted to cover.
And I want to start with the fact that the Biden administration today announced What could just be a political ploy to demonstrate that they are doing everything possible to stand by the Israelis.
But it seems to be a clear announcement that has at the very least the potential to drag the U.S.
even further into this conflict.
Every war involving Israel automatically involves the United States.
The United States is the biggest patron of Israel.
They're the biggest recipient of foreign aid over the last decade.
When bombs drop from Israeli jets, people in that region know they're supplied by the U.S.
government.
Generals like David Petraeus and others have previously warned that one of the things that puts American troops at the greatest risk is the perception that We are the ones that enable Israel to engage in violence against Arabs and Muslims in that region, whether rightfully or wrongfully.
The reality is we are connected to Israel.
We are responsible for Israel because of the bipartisan support that we've given to them.
And so when the Biden administration makes an announcement like it did today, it's urgent that we take it seriously.
Not just dismiss it as a political ploy.
So here's the headline.
U.S.
picks troops to prepare for potential deployment to the Middle East.
And there you see the article, quote, the U.S.
military has selected roughly 2,000 troops to prepare for a potential deployment to support Israel, U.S.
defense official said.
They aren't intended to serve in a combat role, the official said.
So they're trying to assuage public concern that we're not yet deploying combat troops.
And as we all know, that's often the prelude to combat troops.
We first deployed troops to Vietnam, for example, in an advisory role by the thousands and then the tens of thousands.
And then eventually in 1964, when the military invented the lie that the American military was attacked by the North Vietnamese in the Gulf of Tonkin and Congress or Senate almost unanimously authorized military force, it turned very quickly into a deployment of combat troops.
Amen.
So, So that intensifies everything that we think we need to think about.
The fact that the Biden administration is at least intending to signal, if not in fact,
Doing and implementing a serious escalation of the US role, which as I said is already very high anytime Israel is involved in a war Now we started off our show talking about this theory That was most associated with Osama bin Laden not saying he pioneered it But he was the most famous exponent of it at least during the past couple of decades, which is the idea that Either
American civilians are legitimate targets for violence when other groups or other countries are attempting to strike back against the United States for wars the United States engaged in or regime change operations it engineered.
That it's not just military facilities or people in combat uniform, but all Americans are either legitimate targets for reprisals or there's no such thing as an American civilian by virtue of the fact that the United States being a democracy means that the leaders are elected by the people.
And they have to be reelected in order to stay in office.
And that means whatever policies of violence or aggression in their eyes that the United States government engages in, you have a theory that says Americans are directly responsible for it.
Therefore, either they're legitimate targets or there's no such thing as an American civilian.
And we have heard that theory in the past week.
Obviously, that was the theory that propelled Hamas To go into Israel and not just indiscriminately kill people, including civilians, but deliberately target civilians, because their view is that there's no such thing as an Israeli civilian.
They all serve in the military.
They're all part of an occupation force.
They elect Benjamin Netanyahu, who then bombs Gaza or occupies the West Bank, and they've eroded the idea that there is such a thing as an Israeli civilian, that they have the right to be safeguarded and protected And that's what made what they did so reprehensible.
Had Hamas invaded Israel and gone into military bases and engaged troops, there would have been a lot of condemnation of it, but nowhere near the level of moral revulsion.
The idea is that the reason why it was indefensible was because they deliberately targeted civilians.
But their theory is that there's no such thing as an Israeli civilian.
What's alarming is that we have heard very similar theories emanating from Israeli officials and their defenders in the West, About Palestinian civilians.
Obviously, Palestinian civilians in Gaza are dying in enormous numbers.
They're going to continue to die in enormous numbers, not just because Gaza, an extremely densely populated strip of land, is being massively bombed.
In the last week alone, the Israelis have dropped more tonnage of bombs than the United States average dropping in Afghanistan in an entire year.
In an entire year, more bombs have been dropped in Gaza by the Israelis over the last week.
And obviously, given how densely packed it is, it's inevitable that huge numbers of Israeli civilians are going to die, and when you add on to that the fact that the Israeli Defense Minister has vowed, and now they're doing, to block food and water.
There's no clean water in Gaza.
And there's an increasingly shortage of food supplies.
There's no electricity.
Hospitals are having trouble keeping basic machines running.
Obviously enormous numbers of Palestinians are dying in unthinkable numbers.
And so the question is how is that justified?
And one of the reasons or one of the ways that we're hearing from Israeli officials that it's justified Is that there's not really a such thing as a Palestinian civilian?
Let's listen to the Israeli President Isaac Herzog on October 14th.
So that was late last week.
Describe his view of that question.
We are working, operating militarily according to rules of international law, period.
Unequivocally.
It's an entire nation out there that is responsible.
It's not true.
This rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved, it's absolutely not true.
Okay, let's just stop there because I think what he said is crucial.
He's saying it's not just Hamas.
That is responsible for what was done on Saturday.
It's an entire nation.
And he mocked the idea that there's such a thing as Palestinian civilians who somehow are not responsible for that violence.
He's essentially saying it's the entire country that is our target, that our legitimate target for violence.
The same exact theory that Osama Bin Laden used to justify 9-11, the same theory that Hamas, knowingly or otherwise, used when gunning down and terrorizing Israeli civilians on Saturday.
Let's listen to that part again.
Nation out there, national law, period, unequivocally.
It's an entire nation out there that is responsible.
It's not true.
This rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved, it's absolutely not true.
They could have risen up.
They could have fought against that evil regime, which took over Gaza in a coup d'etat.
But we're at war.
There is that other part of that theory.
Bin Laden said Americans could have removed the government.
They could have voted them out and they didn't.
They elected these governments that...
Implemented all these policies that Al Qaeda said justified a fatwa, justified violence against the American population.
Things like imposing a sanctions regime on Iraq that Madeleine Albright, Clinton's Secretary of State, notoriously said was worth it despite being confronted with evidence that it killed 500,000 children of starvation.
Or the placement of American military bases on Saudi territory, which Muslims consider sacred as the birthplace of Islam.
Or the support for Israel as it occupies Palestinian territory and denies Palestinian statehood.
This is the theory that Bin Laden used exactly what the Israeli president said, namely that Americans could have changed their leadership.
Because they didn't, they are now responsible.
I heard this same theory, by the way, when it came time to do things like ban Russian athletes from competing internationally, and the argument was, at first, well, we don't hold athletes or citizens responsible for the acts of their government.
American athletes weren't banned, nor were British athletes banned in 2002 and 2003 when the British and the Americans invaded Iraq and used what was called shock and awe to explode huge bombs all throughout Baghdad.
Because we don't hold individuals responsible for the acts of their government.
And yet, that theory was promulgated then as well.
No, the Russians are responsible for Putin.
They could have removed him from power.
The irony is that, in my view, this is a theory that should never be entertained.
That the civilian distinction is not valid.
But if you're going to invoke this theory, That civilians are no longer civilians, that they become responsible for their government's violence and therefore are legitimate targets.
It really applies far more to a democracy like the United States, where we really do elect our leaders and can remove our leaders, at least in theory, than it does to, say, a country like Russia or like Gaza.
There hasn't been an election in Gaza since 2007.
That's 16 years, which means the majority of the population Either was not alive the last time they voted or was way too young to participate in the vote.
The vast majority of citizens, that's true for.
So if you're going to adopt that theory, it makes way more sense for the United States and for the UK and for Western Europe than it does for places you call tyranny like China or Russia or Gaza.
But as I said, this theory has no place in civilized discourse, and yet it's coming right from the Israeli president.
You just heard it.
Let's hear the rest.
No, it is true.
We are at war with our, we are defending our homes.
We are protecting our homes.
That's the truth.
And then when a nation protects its home, it fights.
And we will fight until we break their backbone.
No, it is true what he's saying is that they're involved in a war.
Probably the Israeli population would not have tolerated anything other than that kind of a response, just like the American population wouldn't after 9-11.
Amen.
Thank you.
Thank you.
But in wars, there are rules, there are laws.
At least there have been since Nuremberg.
We have war crimes tribunals.
In fact, the West has maneuvered so that Vladimir Putin currently stands accused of being a war criminal because of actions that he undertook in Ukraine.
In fact, we showed you last week the head of the EU accused Putin of being a war criminal specifically for cutting off food and water and gas to the Ukrainian population, which is exactly what Israeli officials have threatened to do and now have done.
And while the Israeli president is right that Israel is at war, it doesn't mean that anything and everything they do is justified, especially erasing The notion of a civilian is an incredibly dangerous theory to embrace, and the last people who should want that theory embraced are the citizens of the country that fights more wars in more countries than any other, which is the United States.
If this theory prevails, think how many, as an American citizen, how many countries, how many groups of people can now view you as a legitimate military target, wherever you might be found, to just kill you and say that you are responsible for the violence undertaken by your government because you voted for them under this theory.
This theory is becoming popularized in this war.
Here is Marc Lamont Hill on Al Jazeera interviewing an Israeli official who essentially admits, more or less explicitly, that the policy of the Israelis right now is collective punishment.
Namely, they say justified in going to war because of what Hamas did.
But they are holding all Palestinians responsible for those acts and punishing them collectively, which is illegal under every precept of international law and was particularly emphasized as something urgently prohibited after World War II.
Let's listen to this.
He said that the humanitarian situation, quote, will only deteriorate exponentially, and that crucial life-saving supplies, including fuel, food, and water, must be allowed into Gaza.
So, the U.N.
is saying you must do this.
You are saying you're not going to do this.
No, we're not saying that.
He's saying doing it immediately.
What I'm saying is what you're doing.
No, no.
He's saying doing it immediately.
I got you.
I get exactly what you're saying.
We will do everything for the Gazan people.
Once and now, we demand immediate surrender.
Unconditional surrender of Hamas.
If Hamas people come out with their hands up and clear their weapons, believe me, everything will be restored to Gaza.
It is Hamas in Hamas' hands.
Okay, now I understand.
Thank you for clarifying that, sir.
I think we're actually on the same page here.
You're saying that once Hamas leaves, you'll grant the Gazan people food, shelter, fuel, electricity, hospitals, schooling.
And if they don't, and if Hamas doesn't leave, then they'll continue to starve and die in hospitals.
You are defining for the international community right now, collective punishment.
You're saying until Hamas acts differently, So, he went on to say that all this is Hamas' fault, that it's Hamas that is responsible, that's the line.
differently, these two million people in Gaza will be treated better.
That is exactly what collective punishment is.
You're holding them accountable for the actions of others.
That is the definition, the textbook definition of collective punishment, sir.
Now you may accept that.
So he went on to say that all this is Hamas's fault, that it's Hamas that is responsible.
That's the line.
What I want to be clear here is I'm not trying to suggest that the Israeli government is to blame.
What I'm suggesting is that if you're an American citizen and your government is linked to this war and to many other wars, the theories that get embraced and that get fortified and that get implemented about how wars can be fought, about who are legitimate targets, about what are and are not valid targets for war about who are legitimate targets, about what are and are not valid targets for war have a great They can implicate all sorts of things.
Now, if you're somebody who just says, look, you know what?
The Israelis are at war.
In war, everything is justified.
There are no laws of war.
There are no rules of war.
Then I can at least respect that as a candid argument.
Obviously, that would be an argument that would then have to be applied universally.
It would mean that everything is fair game for people who perceive a grievance with the United States to do, including targeting civilians or civilian infrastructure.
But what the Israelis are doing is something that we are supposed to have considered immoral, illegal, under the post-World War II framework.
And it's vital to at least lay that out as a fact and obviously you can make the decision about whether you think that is justified just to give you a sense for how this Theory has proliferated into the West.
Here is a tweet from Eugene Kondorovich.
We'll get his exact credentials.
I believe he's a professor somewhere.
And in response to President Biden's tweet, which said, we must not lose sight of the fact that the overwhelming majority of Palestinians have nothing to do with Hamas's appalling attacks and are suffering as a result of them.
This is what he put on top of that, quote, fact check.
The majority of Palestinian people in Gaza elected Hamas, which ran on a kill-all-the-Jews platform, and it remains widely popular in Gaza.
And there you see some community note fact checks, including the fact that the last election in Palestine was held in 2006, and nearly half of Palestinians are under the age of 18 and were either not alive in 2006 or could not vote.
But this is the sort of moralizing, the sort of moral theory that is becoming Very acceptable to just openly state.
He's a professor at George Mason University, which is where a lot of defenders of the Euro security state are because it's located in Northern Virginia.
Now, when the Israeli officials speak, especially when they began speaking after the Hamas attack on Saturday, They say some things that give a very clear idea of what their view of Palestinian civilians are, whether or not they even recognize such a concept.
Here is the Defense Minister, Yoav Galant, who the U.S.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has met with twice in the last week.
And here is what he has ordered as his policy. - Okay, there you see that rhetoric. there you see that rhetoric.
We are fighting human animals.
And you can argue that he was talking there about Hamas, not all Palestinians, except that it was in the context of his announcing and defending a policy to cut off all food, water, electricity and gas, not to Hamas, but to the entire Palestinian population.
What can justify that?
Cutting off food and water.
And it's not that the Israelis are failing to supply it.
As we know, they control the airspace, the sea lanes, and the border of Gaza.
They've controlled everything that comes in and out of Gaza while the Egyptians keep one part of that border closed.
Obviously, the Egyptians are very closely tied to the United States government.
We provide them with a lot of aid.
We helped install that government.
The Egyptians had an election where they elected Mohammed Morsi, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood.
It was very pro-Palestinian.
And within less than a year, he was out in a coup, a military coup, that John Kerry at the time applauded as an advance for democracy.
So General Sisi is there and keeps that border closed.
Is that justified in any way?
Cutting off food and water to an entire population?
And is it a positive asset for American national security that the United States is closely associated with this policy of suffocating the Palestinians?
Is that something that is positive for American national security in the region?
Here is an interview that was conducted on Sky News that was extremely contentious, to put that mildly.
Between a Sky News anchor who was asking Naftali Bennett, the former Israeli Prime Minister, he was the Prime Minister last year before giving that seat up back to Benjamin Netanyahu, he's known as being to Netanyahu's right on questions like the rights of the Palestinians, and watch what happens when this Sky News anchor was trying to get him to talk about Palestinian
Casualties and the deaths of civilians and the Israeli responsibility for Palestinian civilians just gives you the real sense for the mindset that has emerged inside the Israeli government and their Western supporters when it comes to whether there even is such a thing as Palestinian civilians and if there is whether they are worthy of any, they're assigned any value.
And what about those Palestinians in hospital who are on life support and babies and incubators whose life support and incubator will have to be turned off because the Israelis have cut the power to Gaza?
Are you seriously keep on asking me about Palestinian civilians?
What's wrong with you?
Have you not seen what happened?
We're fighting Nazis.
We don't target them.
Now, the world can come and bring them anything they want.
If you want to bring them electricity, I'm not going to feed electricity or water to my enemies.
If anyone else wants, that's fine.
We're not responsible for them.
Now, again, that is incredibly disingenuous.
No one is suggesting the Israelis have a charitable duty To go and buy food and water and deliver it to the Gazans.
The Israelis control the Gazan border and have decided to blockade that border and not allow in any food or water.
That was the announcement we just showed you from the Israeli Defense Minister.
But Napoleon Bennett is morally enraged.
That anybody would even care about Palestinian civilians, anybody would even ask about them, even though they're dying an enormous number.
And there's a massive humanitarian crisis, really a catastrophe, inside the Gaza Strip.
Now, if you are somebody, again, who doesn't think Palestinian life has any value, that this is a savage race, that they are people who are primitive, Or who get what's coming to them.
Again, if you just want to say that and admit that, then I think there's clarity in the discourse.
But as I said last week, that is something I will never be on board with.
And I find it shocking.
I guess I find it as shocking to hear Naftali Bennett saying this as he found it shocking that the Sky News anchor would care at all enough to ask about civilians in Gaza.
Let's listen to the rest.
I want to tell you, listen, you listen to me right now.
I've heard you enough.
I've heard a lot of you.
No, you're not.
You're not going to get out of here.
But it's my country.
This is my show and I am asking the questions.
You're raising your voice and I've asked you and we've already, we've already, stop please, and let me finish.
We've already distinguished between Hamas. - I wanna tell you, you shame on you, Mr.
You're trying to speak over me?
No, no.
We are not shame on you.
It's nothing about shame.
We're trying to have a conversation about a very serious situation here and you are refusing to address it.
Because when you just jump over immediately and again and again you... Absolutely not.
You are incorrect.
They are responsible because I can tell you that when the UK, when Great Britain was fighting the Nazis during World War II, no one asked what's going on in Dresden.
It was the Nazis targeting London and you targeted Dresden.
So shame on you if you go on with that false narrative.
We're not talking about that.
And in hindsight, many people have readdressed that kind of carpet bombing.
Oh, I see.
Now you're Mr. Clean.
Shame on you.
So I have to say that Tali Bennett is not wrong when he points out As so often happens that these British journalists who love to put on their self-righteous hat have very little more credibility to do that given what their countries have done.
But nonetheless, the disgust and rage and indifference that Naftali Bennett expressed The fact that the world is Expressing concern over what is happening to this population filled with mostly children and that is just the truth I know it sounds cliche when you talk about the children and you try and get people to care about that But it is true.
It is a population of 2.2 million people half of whom are under the age of 18 in part because They have a very high birth rate, but it also because they have a very low life expectancy and If you just look at what's happening in Gaza, the reality is there's immense civilian suffering, and the answer seems to be that either those civilians don't have any real value in their lives, or there's no such thing as that concept.
Now, the first time after Osama bin Laden offered this theory in that series of interviews he did following 9-11, again, he denied responsibility or involvement in those attacks, but he nonetheless offered these justifications for them.
The first time that I heard that theory repeated was in 2006 when the Israelis were bombing I mean bombing Southern Lebanon as part of their conflict with Hezbollah.
And the same concerns were raised that there were a lot of Lebanese civilians dying in this conflict, that the bombs that the Israelis were dropping on Hezbollah targets were killing a huge number of Lebanese civilians.
And the same arguments were invoked that Hezbollah was using Lebanese civilians as human shields But the reality is just like the Taliban couldn't be erased because they were integrated into the Afghan population and just like the Iraqi insurgency couldn't be exterminated without killing huge numbers of Iraqis because the Iraqi insurgency were Iraqis.
It is also the case that Hezbollah is integrated into the Lebanese population.
That's why Alan Dershowitz, as you see in this headline from the LA Times, in an op-ed that he wrote, tried to eliminate the idea of a civilian.
Or at least try to suggest that now we don't just have two categories any longer of innocent civilian and legitimate military target.
Now we have this kind of sliding scale of whether maybe someone's a civilian but not really.
Because that was necessary at the time for Alan Dershowitz to do what he always does, which is automatically justify everything and anything the Israeli government does when it comes to engaging in war against its neighbors.
And here's a little sample of what Alan Dershowitz wrote, which again, was very right of Osama Bin Laden's theory to deny civilians.
Quote, the news is filled these days with reports of civilian casualties, comparative civilian body counts, and criticism of Israel, along with Hezbollah, for causing the deaths, injuries, and quote, collective punishment of civilians.
But just who is a civilian in the age of terrorism?
When militants don't wear uniforms, don't belong to regular armies, and easily blend into the civilian population?
There is a vast difference, both moral and legal, between a two-year-old who was killed by an enemy rocket and a 30-year-old civilian who has allowed his house to be used to store rockets.
Both are technically civilians, but the former is far more innocent than the latter.
There also is a difference between a civilian who merely favors or even votes for a terrorist group.
Let's focus on this part because, again, this is the Bin Laden theory.
There is also a difference Between a civilian who merely favors or even votes for a terrorist group and one who provides financial or other material support for terrorism.
So this is what you see is this constant theorizing.
Not just from Hamas and Hezbollah and Al Qaeda, although them too.
But from a lot of the most fanatical Western supporters of Israel to break down this concept of civilian.
And to say that maybe civilians aren't really civilians.
He goes on, quote, finally, there is a difference between civilians who are held hostage against their will by terrorists who use them as involuntary human shields and civilians who voluntarily place themselves in harm's way in order to protect terrorists from enemy fires.
These differences and others are conflated within the increasingly meaningless word civilian.
So in case you think I'm engaged in hyperbole or inventing some sort of melodramatic narrative when I say that there is a explicit attempt underway to do away with or at least erode the concepts of civilian, the centerpiece, the linchpin Oppose Nuremberg morality in the Western world.
Here you see Alan Dershowitz from 2006 calling it the increasingly meaningless word civilian.
Increasingly meaningless word.
Civilian.
Now there's a lot of talk about who is a terrorist and what that term means.
When the word terrorism was first enacted, and we're going to do a show on this shortly, as a formal part of the international law and legal vernacular, the definition included a provision that basically said that only non-state actors are capable of engaging terrorism.
So no states by definition can be guilty of terrorism even if what they do is exactly the same as what terrorist groups do, they're automatically excluded the minute there are states.
So the United States, Russia, China, Iran, Israel cannot by definition engage in terrorism.
But the defining mentality of terrorism is an indifference to civilian life and the attempt by Alan Dershowitz and others like him to promulgate theories to destroy that concept is something that is driving so much of this violence.
He added, quote, about this word, civilian, a word that carried great significance when uniformed armies fought ununiformed, I'm sorry, when it had great significance, this word civilian, when uniformed armies fought other uniformed armies on battlefields far from civilian population centers.
Today, the same word equates the truly innocent with guilty accessories to terrorism.
Now, have a debate all you want about who is a terrorist and who you isn't, but the person who's trying to do away with the term civilian is someone who, to me, has a lot of proximity to that term.
Here, from The Guardian in 2002, one of the things that I've been doing is, you know, a lot of people who are not doing this, but I'm not doing this.
Was Osama Bin Laden's letter to America, and this is just one of the many places where he offered this theory that civilians aren't really civilians if they are responsible for their government.
Quote, is it in any way rational, said Osama Bin Laden, to expect that after America has attacked us for more than half a century, that we will leave her to live in security and peace?
You may dispute that all the above does not justify aggression against civilians for crimes they did not commit and offenses in which they did not partake.
This argument contradicts your continuous repetition that America is the land of freedom and its leaders in this world.
Therefore, the American people are the ones who choose their government by way of their own free will.
This was Osama Bin Laden's justification for targeting civilians.
Therefore, the American people are the ones who choose their government by their own free will, a choice which stems from their agreement to its policies.
That's exactly what Alan Dershowitz said, what neocons have long said, what the Israeli president just got done saying in that video we showed you.
That the Palestinians are Hamas, they're responsible for Hamas because they could have changed their government how they wanted to and chose not to, and therefore become responsible for their violence.
Osama Bin Laden was actually saying it only applies in a democracy, but we've now decided it applies even to those places where we say that people have no political rights, that they're subjected to tyranny and despotism, and yet we still To them, apply the theory that they're responsible and therefore legitimate targets for their leader's violence because they could have removed them, even though on the other hand, we constantly say that they can't, but we don't apply it to ourselves.
We insist we are innocent civilians, even though we elect our governments.
Here's Bin Laden, he goes on, quote, thus the American people have chosen, consented to, and affirmed their support for the Israeli oppression of the Palestinians, the occupation and usurpation of their land, and its continuous killing, torture, punishment, and expulsion of the Palestinians.
The American people have the ability and choice to refuse the policies of their government and even to change it if they want.
Now, I referenced earlier the Nuremberg Trials.
Which are widely credited as serving as the foundation for concept of the wars of law, what it means to be a war criminal, of international law.
And a lot of times when people think about the Nuremberg Trials, which was the place that Nazi criminals were put on trial and found guilty and then executed for their crimes against humanity as part of World War II, People generally think of it as being the place where punishments were doled out to Nazis.
But according to the people who participated in the Nuremberg Trials, the judges and the prosecutors, that was a secondary purpose.
The primary purpose, they said, was to promulgate universally applied principles that applied to all countries, not just The ones that existed at the time, but all the ones in the future, including the countries that held the tribunals, meaning the United States, Russia, the UK, and its allies.
Here was the closing statement of the chief prosecutor from the Nuremberg trials in which he emphasized that very point.
Quote, what makes this inquest significant?
Is that these prisoners represent sinister influences that will lurk in the world long after their bodies have returned to dust.
This was the Nuremberg Trials saying what their real purpose was.
That their sinister influences, the things they were punishing, will lurk in the world long after they have returned to dust.
We will show them to be living symbols of racial hatreds, of terrorism and violence, and the arrogance and cruelty of power.
And let me make clear that while this law is first applied against German aggressors, the law includes, and if it is to serve a useful purpose, it must condemn aggression by any other nations, including those who sit here now in judgment.
In other words, these are meaningless, these tribunals.
If all we do is use them to condemn our enemies, to condemn Nazis, they're only meaningful If we all agree that these are now binding principles on all of us, including the people, the countries that have convened the tribunal.
And one of the core principles of this tribunal was that civilians in a war zone, civilians during war have a right to be protected and not targeted.
And that's the principle that is now being not implicitly eroded or violated, but explicitly renounced.
Now, as far as whether or not civilians in Gaza are really civilians, I really would encourage you to follow Gazans, people who live in Gaza, on social media.
I've been doing this for years.
Obviously, we hear from Israelis a lot.
They participated in our discourse.
We all have heard a million times from President Netanyahu and other English-speaking Israeli officials.
There are a lot of ties between the United States and Israel.
We all heard those videos coming out of Israel and we empathize with those Israeli citizens who are suffering and continue to suffer as a result of the murder and abduction of their loved ones.
And that's a reason why we reacted so vibrantly to the horrors that Hamas brought to Israel because we connected to it as human beings.
We heard from these individuals.
They weren't abstractions.
And I have often looked at the Instagram accounts of young people in Gaza or Gazan activists and journalists who are on Facebook.
And a lot of them have pages where they talk about the countries they dream one day of visiting but cannot leave Gaza because they're contained within it by Egypt and Israel.
They're locked in that strip of land, that tiny strip of land, their entire lives.
The only airport they had was bombed by Israel.
They can't fly out, they can't leave by sea because they'll be killed because Israel doesn't permit ships to leave and their land is blockaded by Egypt and Israel, so if you have doubt about their humanity or about their, the value of their lives, just go follow them on Twitter or Instagram or Facebook.
Just get a sense for who they are and what they're saying.
It, I mean, I can barely follow it.
It's so harrowing.
In the same way I had to stop watching the videos of the Israelis who are continuing to suffer by, as a result of what was brought upon them.
Here is just a couple of examples.
This is a young man named Assad Abu Toa.
On October 14th, 2023, he tweeted the following.
One, I'm alive but not safe.
30 members of my family were killed yesterday at night in Gaza City.
I just got the news from my brother that they bombed my neighborhood.
Whole families, my neighbors were killed.
We left our house on Thursday.
Two, two hours ago, I just went back home to get some food and clothes, and just a few minutes ago, they bombed my neighbors.
They are dead, we are dead.
These are not accounts, by the way, that just appeared overnight if you want to be jaded or cynical, and are propaganda accounts or trolls accounts.
These are people who I've been following for a long time, and so have many other people.
Here is Mohammed Samiri, who is an English-speaking Gazan.
I had to stop looking at his account, mostly, because it's just so bleak and grim.
Imagine being in Gaza.
October 16, heavy airstrikes.
Pray for us.
Hashtag Gaza.
What's that?
Oh, so there you see, heavy airstrikes, pray for us Gaza.
And then there's another tweet, just so you know, the killing in Gaza hasn't stopped for a minute.
Everyone here has lost someone from his relatives or friends.
We are here just waiting our turn watching while the world is watching.
Which must be what it feels like to be in Gaza, this notion that There's just an endless stream of bombs dropping everywhere and at any moment there's a good chance it's going to drop on you and kill you.
You can't flee because you're probably going to be bombed.
You can't stay in your home because you're probably bombed.
You have no access to medicine or water or increasingly food.
The hospitals aren't working.
There's death and destruction all around you.
While most of the world says we stand with Israel.
So it's obviously really something that is really harrowing if you want to get a sense for what the humanity actually is that's being denied in Gaza.
We have a second segment planned for you that I think is crucial.
And we spent a lot of time in this part because I think this is crucial.
So I just want to briefly go over this point and then we'll kind of lay it out in more ample detail for you tomorrow when I know this is going to be continued to be relevant.
But I do want to mention it tonight.
So let's just take a little second break.
So we talked about at the start of the show what has become this very disturbing tactic, this idea that if you in any way do what we just did, this idea that if you in any way do what we just did, namely raise questions about
namely raise questions about what the Israeli government is doing or suggest that there is excessive force being used or inadequate consideration for the lives of Palestinians.
Any kind of attempt to raise questions about what the Israelis are doing or what the Americans are doing immediately causes people to claim that you are pro-Hamas, which is a tactic, as I recounted at the start, is used for every single word.
It's been used for the war in Russia where you're pro-Kremlin or pro-Putin if you raise questions about that war.
It was the key tactic at the start of the war on terror where everybody was pro-terrorist in the days after the 9-11 attack.
And here's the Israeli government.
Which is purposely revitalizing the framework that was used by George W. Bush that either you're with us or you're with the terrorists.
And here you see the Israeli government saying you either stand with Israel or you stand with terrorism.
It's a binary choice.
So many times I've heard that people who participate in pro-Palestinian protests or
Criticism of Israel are people who are pro Hamas who are calling for the murder of Jews and this is just a slander and what it's intended to do is create this dichotomy where you have two choices you either applaud and cheer everything the Israeli government does or You stand accused of being on the side of terrorists of being pro Hamas And again, there are people who express support for Hamas, but they were marginalized and fringe and barely
And anywhere near the mainstream.
Just like you can hear people saying, I want to end the lives of every Palestinian.
You can see them at pro-Israel protests.
We showed them last week, but it doesn't mean that in any way people who participate in support for Israel are guilty of those most extreme views of wanting to eradicate all Palestinian life.
And yet this is increasingly a view that I'm hearing not just in Israel but from some sectors of the American right when it comes to supporting the idea that pro-Palestinian protests should be banned the way they have been in France or Germany or the UK or even that people should have their careers destroyed or be banned from hiring because we are told these people are pro-Hamas when in fact
Some of them are, but most of them are not.
I think you should watch out for that.
I think you should watch out for this tactic that in so many other cases we on this show have opposed all the time.
This idea that if you oppose a war it means you're on the other side, and yet this really has become the primary tactic used in this framework that anybody who is engaged in any kind of dissent from the policy of Western governments is anti-semitic, is calling for the death of Jews.
It's a very similar Mindset, ironically, to the kind of left-liberal identity politics that conservatives usually denounce.
We've been documenting this, that conservatives, some, in the name of inspiring, unquestioning support for Israel and the United States, have been resorting to a lot of the standard tactics on the left that have been used to justify censorship.
The argument that this isn't real speech, this is hate speech, it's designed to incite violence, that it's bigoted, it's anti-Semitic.
And this is all part and parcel of that.
And I just want to show you one tweet because what this really is is it's a it's a neocon That is really where it was invented.
We've shown you many times before where David Frum said in 2002 that people who opposed the war in Iraq were unpatriotic, conservatives in particular.
And here is a tweet from David Frum, and this is from earlier this year, just a few months ago.
This was not about The war in Israel, it was about the war in Ukraine, and he wrote the following.
There was Mike Lee, the senator from Utah, who said, I don't support this war, meaning the one in Ukraine.
And David Frum, in reply to Senator Lee, said, quote, if the United States Senator refuses to support a US administration and NATO allies defending a European Union candidate state against invasion and atrocity, he's not, quote, anti-war.
He's doing everything in his very considerable power to assist one side of that war, the wrong side.
This is classic neocon propaganda, that you are not anti-war.
If you question your government's war policies, your government's desire to involve itself in a war, you instead are assisting the enemy.
You're on the wrong side of the war.
David Frum has been using this argument, neocons have been using this argument for every single war since the war on terror began and even before that.
It was David Frum who wrote George Bush's speech, You're either with us or you're with the terrorists.
That's the mindset that they try and impose.
And in response to David Frum, Mac Doss, who...
He's actually a supporter of the war in Ukraine.
He was Bernie Sanders' senior foreign policy aide when Bernie Sanders was running for president, and also when he was a senator as well.
In response to David Frum, Matt Dust wrote the following, this is a straight cut and paste from 2002 to 2003.
Anyone who opposes the Bush administration's Iraq war is objectively pro-Saddam.
It was dishonest then, and it's dishonest now.
And that's true, and it's also dishonest to claim that people who question the Israeli and U.S.
response are pro-Hamas.
Use that phrase for people who are defending Hamas only, which is a tiny number of people.
Most people who are questioning the Israeli attack on Gaza are doing so for the same reason they found Hamas's attack on Israel is so despicable because it eliminates consideration for civilian life.
And to have that view be called pro-Hamas is dishonest at best and extremely dangerous at worst.
This is what is being invoked, not just to vilify dissent to the war, but increasingly to suppress it and even make it illegal.
So that concludes our show for this evening.
We will present to you a lot of other information as this war evolves, including a lot of what's going on in terms of people losing their jobs.
There was a Guardian cartoonist today who worked at The Guardian for 40 years who was fired because he created a political cartoon that mocked Benjamin Netanyahu.
This is the kind of climate that is being created.
If you didn't live through 9-11, then on some level you should be happy because you're living through the sequel and you're actually learning what it was really like.
But we will continue this.
Our show, as a reminder, System Update is available in podcast form, where you can follow us on Spotify, Apple, and all other major podcasting platforms.
If you want to review and rate and follow the program, it really helps spread the visibility of the show.
And as a final reminder, every Tuesday and Thursday night, once we're done with our program here, we move to Locals, which is part of the Rumble platform, where we have our live interactive after show, where we respond to your questions, take your feedback.
And in general, have a dialogue with our viewers, which is more valuable than ever now when it comes to such an inflammatory and divisive policy or debate such as the one involving the United States and Israel in the Middle East.
For those of you who've been watching, we are, as always, very appreciative.
We hope to see you back tomorrow night and every night at 7 p.m.
