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Oct. 18, 2023 - System Update - Glenn Greenwald
01:50:20
Gaza’s Devastating Humanitarian Crisis Worsens. The US & Israel Revive War on Terror Framework: Dissenters Labeled “Pro-Hamas.” And Is the US Establishment pro-Israel or pro-Palestine? | SYSTEM UPDATE #164

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Music.
Good evening.
It's Tuesday, October 17th.
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.
The Biden administration has repeatedly made clear that it intends for the United States to participate in and fully support Israel's war in Gaza, not necessarily with combat troops, although perhaps, but by doing what it's been doing in Ukraine, funding and fueling and providing all the weapons needed for Israel to prosecute this war.
Tomorrow Joe Biden will travel to Jerusalem to stand at the side of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and pledge even more support for that war, more money, more weapons.
All while, just 50 miles away, the 2.2 million people living in Gaza are experiencing what can only be described, without exaggeration, as hell on earth.
Regardless of your views on this conflict or how you think blame should be assigned, what is happening in Gaza is one of the worst humanitarian crises in years.
The death toll in Gaza is now in the thousands and rising every day.
Over the last week, Israel has dropped more than 6,000 bombs on Gaza, one of the most densely populated places on earth, with a population that is composed of at least half.
of children under the age of 18.
That bombing amounts to more than what the United States dropped on Afghanistan, a much larger and more sparsely populated landmass in an entire year.
Let me just repeat that for emphasis.
Israel has dropped in the last week on Gaza more bombs than the United States had typically dropped on Afghanistan in an entire year.
The food supply and access to clear drinking water in Gaza is dwindling to near zero.
Unless you believe that there is no such thing as innocent civilian life in Gaza, or that there's no such thing as life in Gaza that has value, And that view, as we devoted last night's show to documenting, is indeed one that is now commonly and explicitly asserted in both Israeli and American discourse.
Then there is simply no way to look at what is happening there with anything other than horror, immense sadness, and a desire to see this increasingly horrifying war come to an end as soon as possible.
There is, though, no apparent diplomatic effort on the part of the United States to end the war, just as was true of Ukraine, and a steady desire on the part of the United States to do everything possible to prolong and to fuel it.
Then, one of the primary points we have emphasized from the start of this new war is that the lesson of the U.S.
response to the 9-11 attack must be preserved and applied.
As is true for Hamas' attack on Israel last Saturday, virtually everyone in the United States, and the West, reacted to the 9-11 attacks with rage, indignation, and a desire for vengeance.
But Americans quickly learned, and polling data confirms that they still believe this, Not everything the United States government did in the name of waging war on the terrorists or destroying the perpetrators of those attacks turned out to be wise, justified, or even moral.
To the contrary, so many actions undertaken by the U.S.
government in the months and years following the 9-11 attack were self-destructive and shameful.
That is the reason that the neocons who dominated the Bush-Cheney administration and George Bush and Dick Cheney themselves ended up discredited and in disgrace, at least until they magically rehabilitated themselves by denouncing Donald Trump, what absolves all sins.
But the reason they were discredited and in disgrace is not because people reconsidered whether the 9-11 attack was morally unjustified.
Of course, Americans still overwhelmingly believe that it was.
The shame and horror from that era is, instead, due to the fact that so much of what the United States did that was justified by, quote, fighting terror, had the opposite effect, either by inflaming terrorism, turning the world against the United States, or engaging in actions that destroyed the moral credibility of our government.
We cannot fall into the same trap this time.
We can't allow Israeli and American institutions of power, which are completely united, to tell us that we have two and only two choices.
Either we uncritically approve and applaud everything our government does, or we stand accused of being pro-terrorist.
Or, in the new language of this new sequel we're now watching, quote, pro-Hamas.
Yet rejuvenating and reimposing that repressive post-911 framework is exactly what American elites are attempting to do right before our eyes, all with the goal of rendering it off-limits to question or dissent from the acts of American and Israeli officials in this unbelievably, not just horrific, but very dangerous war.
We'll review exactly how this resurrection of the post-911 climate is being attempted and why it is so vital that its manipulative, propagandistic foundations be rejected.
And then finally, ever since this new war erupted, parts of the American right, not all but parts, have been copying, at times verbatim,
The core rationale of the American liberal left when it comes to things like justifications for censorship, for cancel culture, and for narratives of grievance and victimization, to hear some in the mainstream tell it, and that includes the mainstream right, the American establishment and American elite are largely and radically anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian.
That is the framework we're being presented, that in the United States, anti-Israeli and pro-Palestinian sentiments are pervasive among American elites.
There are several problems with this narrative, starting with the fact that vehement support for Israel has been foundational to the establishment wings of both political parties for decades.
Just today, a resolution was introduced in the United States Senate that affirmed the United States government's commitment to standing by, funding, and arming this new Israeli war.
A resolution that was immediately co-sponsored by all 100 senators except for one.
99 to 1.
The people who are being censored right now, who are losing their jobs, who are being put on blacklists, are not those who are defending Israel, but instead those who are criticizing Israeli actions and the policy of the Biden administration to support everything Netanyahu does.
Now, we understand, of course, that issues involving Israel provoke more intense emotion and passions among many Americans than almost any other issue, including even American wars themselves.
There are few issues more polarizing than this one.
We also realize that many people in our audience view this war through a different perspective and a different prism than we do.
On the show and with my journalism, I never guarantee that I will always align with or validate the views and perspective of all my readers and viewers.
I do, though, guarantee that I will always do my best to approximate the truth in my journalism and reporting as best I can.
That everything I say is the byproduct of my actual conviction, rather than a strategic desire to please my audience, or worse, out of fear of provoking disagreement among some viewers.
And that one of the paramount values for which we battle on every issue is the ability of people to engage in free inquiry, free dialogue, and free debate without being censored, fired, or subject to unjust vilification campaigns.
Such is the effort to claim that anyone questioning Israel is either pro-Hamas or anti-Semitic.
In all debates, but especially ones involving the wars of a foreign country, that should be an overarching and unyielding unified value.
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It is, to me, an important form of journalistic accountability to have a dialogue with one's readers.
We're going to talk, of course, about the coverage that we've been offering of the war in Israel and Gaza, as well as a bizarre new attack by CNN's Oliver Darcy, the very partisan media reporter for CNN that he launched against Rumble to try and shame the Republican National Committee the very partisan media reporter for CNN that he launched against Rumble to try and shame the Republican in this new presidential debate.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
In every new war, it is, I think, very crucial to maintain two different forms of analysis at the same time.
One is the question of who you think is to blame for the war and what sorts of responses you think are justified.
I believe this country is to blame because they engage in this behavior.
I believe this other country has the right to respond in the following manners.
I think there should be these limits on how the country responds.
Or maybe I think there should be no limits at all.
I don't believe in the laws of war.
I don't believe in the Nuremberg Trials.
I don't believe that there's any Restraints of any kind that are morally valid or recognizable once a war begins, whoever the strongest country is, is free to do whatever they want without regards to any constraints.
So that's one debate.
What is the war itself?
Who is to blame?
And what kinds of responses are morally valid or strategically wise?
But then there's another aspect to this question of a new war, which is humanitarian in nature, not geopolitical or strategic or even moral.
Just the question of what is the humanitarian effects of the war itself?
How many people are dying?
How many innocent people are dying?
How many innocent people are suffering?
The sorts of circumstances that can emerge in war that are deeply shameful because they degrade what it means to be a human being, whether or not people's humanity, common humanity, is being recognized.
And I'm going to ask you for just a minute to leave that first question aside, the question of who is to blame for this war, whether you think the blame lies with Hamas because of the civilian massacre they carried out on Saturday, or whether the blame lies with Israel because of the broader context of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and blockade of Gaza.
Or the blame might be equally divided.
I want to ask you just for the moment to leave that question aside in order instead to focus on what actually is happening in Gaza.
What are the human beings in Gaza experiencing?
And obviously that includes, I insist, not just Hamas and the terrorists who carried out the attack in Israel, whatever you want to call them, But the human beings, the women and children and innocent men in Gaza, what are they experiencing?
Are they experiencing things that, as a world, as an international community, we ought not to tolerate?
Or are there no limits at all?
Do we not care about the humanitarian effects of wars?
But in order to have any kind of understanding of those questions, we at least need to understand what life is actually like for the people of that region under this war.
We heard a lot about An enormous amount about, and we're still hearing an enormous amount about the Israelis who suffered gravely on Saturday.
We heard from their family members, the people who were murdered or abducted.
We saw an endless array of images and video and details and reporting, as we should, and that produced a lot of empathy with and rage on behalf of the people in Israel, the Israeli civilians who suffered.
We have a clear understanding of that.
There are a lot of media outlets that are based in Israel.
There are a lot of people in the United States with positions of influence and power who have relatives in Israel or have spent time in Israel or have friends there.
It's a nation that we hear a lot about in the United States because of this long-standing cultural and political partnership.
We hear a lot less about Gaza, especially when there's a war.
The nature of the war, how dangerous it is, makes it very, very difficult for journalists to even be active there.
People often don't trust journalists who are based in Gaza, and so it's very difficult to actually hear anything about what their lives are like.
But we can have insight into it, and I think we have a responsibility to, once our government announces that it tends to be an active participant in the prosecution of this war against Gaza, as the Biden administration has done repeatedly, and as Joe Biden intends to do when he flies to Jerusalem tomorrow to meet with the Israeli Prime Minister.
Earlier today, there was an explosion at one of the most crucial hospitals in Gaza City.
And originally, media outlets and the Palestinians insisted that it was a missile or a bomb that was launched by the Israelis either from the ground or from the air.
and and the Israelis insist that instead it was first they said that there was a justification for that kind of an attack that that's where Hamas often hides their ammunition or hides their military assets and that they use the hospital as a human shield but now the official position of the Israeli government and the Israeli defense forces is different which is
No, actually, this was a rocket launched by the Palestinians, and they didn't say it was from Hamas, they said it was from a different group, Islamic Jihad, and the rocket misfired and it didn't land in Israel, but instead it landed in Gaza and fell on this hospital, and that's what caused the explosion.
Independent of exactly what happened here, and I think it's way too early to know, obviously the claims of the Palestinians and the claims of the Israelis ought to be subject to scrutiny.
Media outlets seem to have jumped to endorse one side or the other prematurely, but we're going to find out quickly enough exactly what happened there.
But regardless of what did, it doesn't change the fact that this is a horrifying scene at this hospital.
At least 500 people have been killed at this hospital.
Talking about people in critical care and intensive care.
Gaza has been ravaged by this bombing campaign that we talked about.
Every part of the Gaza infrastructure is crippled or being destroyed.
And obviously an explosion of this type, severely worse than everything.
Where are the people who are injured in this hospital going to go?
Where are the other people who are injured by these bombs that are being dropped going to go if hospitals are now also being exploded?
Now, again, even before the strike of this hospital happened, the crisis in Gaza from a humanitarian perspective is one of the most repellent things I've seen in many years, reporting on wars, focusing and analyzing wars.
It's unlike anything we've really seen in quite some time.
I would think you would have to go back to the mass starvation and famine in Yemen that was caused by On the one hand, Saudi Arabia and the United States and the UK supporting the endless bombing campaign in Yemen, as well as the participation of the Iranians on another side of that conflict in Yemen that caused mass starvation and enormous amounts of death from the poorest country on Earth.
That was, at the time, undoubtedly one of the worst humanitarian crises the globe had seen in a long time.
That was President Obama, who gave the green light.
And the bombs that the Saudis used to drop Enormous amounts of ordinance on Yemen, but now the situation in Gaza definitely compares to that, if not on its way to surpassing it.
Here from the New York Times, they had multiple headlines about who was to blame.
Their current headline reads the following, quote, Israel and the Palestinians blame each other for a blast at Gaza Hospital that killed hundreds.
Quote, at least 500 people were killed by an explosion at a hospital in Gaza City on Tuesday that Palestinian authorities said was caused by an Israeli airstrike.
The Palestinian Health Ministry said the number of casualties was expected to rise.
Many civilians were sheltering at Ali Arab Hospital.
Before it was hit, so you had civilians who were seeking refuge from the endless array of Israeli bombs on people's houses and apartment buildings and all sorts of public spaces, in addition to the patients who were at the hospital.
Quote, the Israeli military said it was investigating if it was responsible for this blast.
Quote, we're checking, said Major Nir Dinar, a military spokesman.
And then the New York Times goes on to endorse the Israeli version, or at least suggest that it's quite viable.
Quote, in the past, rockets fired by Palestinian armed groups have occasionally malfunctioned and hit civilian neighborhoods.
Now, since this article was published, as I said, the Israeli Defense Forces on its official accounts came out and said it had concluded its investigation, and the conclusion was that it was a rocket launched by Israeli Jihad.
But I think the important thing is found in the next paragraph quote the deadly blast on the hospital came as President Biden was preparing for a visit to Israel on Wednesday as conditioned in besieged Gaza grew ever more desperate.
Again blame who you want for the moment Have whatever views you have about whether this should be an American war, whether the Biden administration should tell the Netanyahu government just like it told the Ukrainians that it was going to supply it with arms and funding for as long as necessary in order for this war to be won.
What there is no denying is that the situation in Gaza is desperate from a humanitarian perspective.
Here's the IDF tweet that I referenced.
It reads, quote, following an analysis by the IDF's operational systems, a barrage of rockets was launched toward Israel, which passed in the vicinity of the hospital when it was hit.
According to the intelligence information from a number of sources we have, Islamic Jihad terrorist organization is responsible for the failed rocket launch that hit the hospital.
And there you see the graphic breaking.
Which is intended to suggest or imply or insinuate this is some kind of news announcement.
It's a claim by the Israeli government that very well may be true, but until there's evidence presented, and this is the same for claims that the Israelis were responsible, journalistic skepticism is required.
But again, I just want to emphasize that regardless of who did it, the outcome is severe beyond what can be described.
Here is a journalist who I have found reliable over the years, Asmat Khan, who has worked on investigative reporting for the New York Times.
She won a Pulitzer.
I believe it was for analyzing the lie that the Biden administration told on its way out of Afghanistan when the Biden administration claimed that it had launched a, used a drone to launch a bomb that, according to the Biden administration, killed 12 people who participated in the terrorist attack on killed 12 people who participated in the terrorist attack on the airport in Afghanistan, what it called the terrorist attack.
and And as it turned out, the Biden administration lied.
The people who were killed in that bomb, in that bomb attack, every single one of them We're innocent civilians, in fact, all part of the same family, including at least half of them to be children.
The New York Times did what I said at the time was a very thorough and impressive investigation, proved the Obama administration had lied.
I believe she was the one responsible for that.
We'll check on that, but she is a good investigative reporter who has done a lot of reporting in the field along these lines, and this is what she said about the hospital attack.
And again, this is independent of who did it.
She wrote, quote, I've spent years investigating civilians killed in US-led airstrikes in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan.
But an allegation like this, 500 killed at this hospital per the Palestinian Health Ministry, is higher than any other claim in my database.
Recklessly or intentionally targeting hospitals is a war crime.
And that would be true of, again, whoever did it.
She wrote, "Palestinian authorities allege an Israeli airstrike killed at least 500 people in a hospital in Gaza City.
The Israeli military said it was checking if it was responsible for this blast." But to put this number, 500 dead, in context, and again, that number is expected to rise, It's only been about three or four hours.
Quote, of 1,300 assessments I have for claims of casualties from US bombing campaigns against ISIS and the air war in Iraq and Syria, These are the five highest civilian death ranges that air wars have tracked, according to local sources.
And you see the numbers there between 40 and 420, the number 250 to 300.
The number 250 to 300.
So what she's saying is that whoever is responsible, 500 people or more dying at once, and the scale of a single incident is monumental.
It's stunning for a single incident of a bomb or a bombing attack or a missile to kill this many people at once, people in a hospital.
Now, the New York Times, which I think is important to note, has always editorially supported Israel.
The New York Times is a newspaper owned by the Sulzberger family.
It has Op-Ed columnists, almost all of whom are vehement supporters of Israel at any given time.
It has Bret Stephens, who was a longtime neocon from the Wall Street Journal.
He's a vehement supporter of Israel.
It has David Brooks, who got his start working at the Weekly Standard in 2002 and 2003 under Bill Kristol, where he was one of the nation's most prominent advocates of the war on terror generally and the invasion of Iraq in particular.
And then you have Tom Friedman, who has spent a lot of time in Israel.
He will criticize the Netanyahu government, but he's certainly a vocal supporter of Israelis and Israel in general.
And the New York Times editorial board itself is a vehement supporter of the war, of Israel and the war that they're currently waging on Gaza.
They've repeatedly weighed in over many years and over the last week in favor of Israel.
And I say all that to indicate that if the New York Times is reporting, it's very difficult to make the case that they're doing so in a way that's biased against Israel.
There's a lot of things you can say about the New York Times.
If they're biased against Israel, it's most definitely not one of them.
And yet here's what the New York Times reported today as President Biden prepares to go visit there as part of his vehement support for Israel about the situation on the ground in Gaza.
Quote, asked why Israel continued to strike in southern Gaza after calling for people to evacuate there.
And remember, the Israelis several days ago announced without warning That everybody in northern Gaza, in Gaza City, has to evacuate to southern Gaza if they want to be safe, and they gave them 24 hours to do that, a country already flooded by a lack of stability, a lack of food, a lack of clean drinking water, a lack of hospitals that are functioning, a lack of electricity.
They then extended the time, but the New York Times is referring to the fact that after they told everybody to move to southern Gaza, they continued to bomb Southern Gaza, the place where they told civilians in Gaza to go, to be safe.
Quote, Asked why Israel continued to strike in southern Gaza after calling for people to evacuate there, Major Nir Dinar, a spokesman for the Israeli military, said Israel sought to avoid civilian casualties, but that Hamas fighters were hiding out among Gazan civilians.
He added that southern Gaza was relatively safer than the north, though not entirely safe.
Now here's the part I want to emphasize.
This is the part that I really urge you to pay close attention to.
And let's see if we can put that on the screen, but also here on my desk so that I can see it.
This is what the New York Times says about the situation in Gaza.
By Tuesday, the consequences of the blockade And the strikes were inescapable.
Rescuers were struggling to free some 1,200 people under the rubble.
There are 1,200 people, human beings, trapped under rubble.
And they cannot get those people out.
They don't have bulldozers or equipment necessary to do it.
There's a lack of fuel and energy and electricity.
And there's horrifying videos, I mean harrowing videos, of women and children trapped underneath the rubble where Israeli bombs dropped on buildings and exploded.
And they're alive!
And they're begging to get out, as of course anyone would do when trapped under rubble.
And yet the Palestinians don't have the capability to rescue them from under the rubble because there's a blockade on Gaza, and there has been for many years, and nothing can come in and out.
And the Israeli military, as we showed you at the beginning of this week, announced that they intended to block all food and water and gas and electricity from entering Gaza.
These are just facts.
You're free to cheer that and support it and say you think the Israelis are justified in collectively punishing the entire Palestinian population, but the fact is that that is the Israeli policy.
Cutting off food and water, not allowing that to enter Gaza, and so there are 1,200 people trapped under the rubble.
At the same time, fights were breaking out over loaves of bread.
Which obviously is what human beings are going to do when they're facing food shortages.
They're going to physically fight with one another and presumably the physically strongest will end up eating while the weaker people die of starvation.
And hospitals were grappling with how to treat the rapidly growing number of wounded and ill as their generators ran short of fuel.
So imagine you have a loved one in the hospital And they need, they're wounded and they're ill and they need surgery or they need life support machines, incubators, dialysis, the kind of standard equipment that physicians use to treat wounded and ill people to keep them alive, to prevent them from dying, to prevent them suffering.
There have been reports that Gazan surgeons are sometimes forced to perform surgery without painkillers because there's a lack of medication in Gaza.
I'm sorry, but that is a violation of basic humanitarianism.
And I don't understand the mindset, I will confess, that justifies that.
That thinks that's a good thing to be celebrated.
Or that the country that's doing this, that's effectuating the blockade, is somehow free of all responsibility.
And by the country effectuating that blockade, I don't just mean the Israelis, but I mean the Biden administration, the United States government as well, which is empowering and enabling the Israelis to do this.
If you're an American citizen, you have a responsibility of a certain kind.
It's not enough to just wash your hands, say this war has nothing to do with you.
It does, whether you admit that or not.
Because if the United States government Funding it.
When the bombs are dropping, those come from the United States government or from money that the United States government transfers from the Treasury to the Israeli government.
And this is the undeniable outcome of all of that.
That people, more than a thousand, are underneath the rubble and can't get moved.
That hospitals can't function in performing the most basic treatment While bombs are dropping everywhere.
I want you to conceive of what that's like.
That's why we called it Hell on Earth.
It's not an exaggeration.
It's not hyperbole.
And I just am not capable of pretending that it's better than it is.
Or that this should disturb everybody with any kind of moral conscience.
What we're not just witnessing, but what we're participating in as a country.
And I know a lot of people are going to say, Hamas just ended up attacking the Israelis, what do you expect them to do?
That's what I heard in the wake of 9-11.
That was the rationale used to justify everything the United States government wanted to do.
If you were one of the people who stood up and said, this seems to be a level of violence that is killing huge numbers of civilians for no end, or You stood up and said, I don't think we should be using the techniques we ourselves have long prosecuted as torture, or that we shouldn't be kidnapping people off the streets of Europe and sending them to Syria and Egypt to be tortured by our allies or to CIA black sites that are hidden from human rights groups.
The same answer was given.
Well, the United States was just attacked.
What do you expect the United States to do?
And if you objected to any of these things, you were accused of being on the terrorist side.
And that rationale, that tactic turned out to be completely corrupt.
And indiscriminate mass violence did not keep the United States safe.
It was not an answer to those terrorist attacks.
The invasion of Iraq, according to Tony Blair, Who was the British Prime Minister at the time who not only participated in the invasion of Iraq but was the primary spokesperson for it because George Bush was incapable of offering the kind of oratorical defense that Tony Blair could.
Tony Blair admitted that one of the primary effects of the invasion of Iraq was the rise of ISIS.
That The reason ISIS emerged was in the vacuum of instability that we created when we destroyed Iraq and removed the government that had been ruling it.
So, at the time, people opposing the invasion of Iraq or similar things done in the name of supporting terrorism were met with this same objection.
Well, what do you expect the United States to do?
Just allow terrorism to happen?
And yet, sometimes the things that you do in the name of stopping terrorism can actually have the opposite effect and fuel it.
And I simply don't think that Israel is going to be safer by having the world watch it starve a population of food and water and killing huge numbers of people or watching people die if you want to absolve Israel of all responsibility by the thousands soon to be the tens of thousands
I don't think Israelis in Israel or around the world or the West itself is going to be made safer as a result of this.
The New York Times goes on.
Let me just pull this up.
The deadly blast on the hospital.
The deadly Boston hospital came as President Biden was preparing for a visit to Israel on Wednesday as conditions in besieged Gaza grew ever more desperate.
What little remains of the enclave's food, fuel, and water supplies was dwindling fast on Tuesday.
I just, I need to emphasize that.
What little remains of the Enclave's fuel, food, and water supplies was dwindling fast on Tuesday.
So, we know this is happening.
We know that there's a tiny strip of densely populated people Whose water supply and food supply are dwindling because where they live is blockaded, where the government that controls the borders won't allow food or water to enter the country.
That includes not just Israel, but the United States ally in Cairo, Egypt, that controls part of the border with Gaza as well.
But this population's food, fuel, and water supplies are dwindling fast, said the New York Times.
And hundreds of thousands of people were on the move.
Hundreds of thousands of people internally displaced in an incredibly poor country under the best of circumstances.
Fleeing the Strip's northern half to escape a planned Israeli ground invasion.
Israel has blocked basic necessities from reaching Gaza and has launched daily airstrikes in retaliation for the October 7th cross-border attacks in which 1,400 Israelis died and 200 people were taken hostages by the Hamas militants who control the enclave.
By Tuesday, the consequences of the blockade and strikes were inescapable.
And then it goes into, again, the 1,200 people who are fighting over the food supply and the people who are even fighting over food.
Here's the latest death toll.
Palestinian officials said that at least 2,800 people have been killed and 10,000 others have been wounded in the Israeli airstrikes.
You can quibble with these numbers.
You can claim the Palestinian officials might be exaggerating it for their own purposes.
I don't see how that is true by any meaningful degree given the independent analysis that says that Israel is dropping more bombs on Gaza in a single week.
Then the United States often dropped on Afghanistan an entire year.
Of course, people are going to die by the thousands and soon to be the tens of thousands when you continue to do that.
And we haven't even gotten to the point yet where the Israelis enter a ground invasion and start having street by street fighting with Hamas and other soldiers and armed militants in the Gaza Strip.
And that assumes that there's no regional instability at all.
That there are no efforts on the part of other actors, including ones with major militaries, to respond.
That is an increasingly dubious assumption.
That this war is not going to escalate.
You have other countries in that region with large Muslim and Arab populations who sympathize with the Palestinians.
The leaders of these countries typically don't, but the populations do.
And there's, just like the Israeli government was constrained by the reaction of its own population, it would have been virtually impossible for the Israeli government not to bomb Gaza after an attack of the magnitude and severity and barbarism that occurred in Israel.
It's also the case that a lot of these governments are going to start to feel constrained.
They're going to have to act if there continues to be this sort of humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
And here you see today the leader of Iran, Imam Khamenei, who said the following, quote, if the Zionist regime's crimes continue, Muslims and resistance forces cannot be stopped.
Let's listen to this video.
So I'm just going to read this for the people who listen by podcast.
If these crimes by the Zionists continue, the Muslims will lose their patience.
The resistance forces will lose their patience.
No one will be able to stop them at that point.
They should know this.
They shouldn't expect others to stop this or that group from doing these or those things.
No one will be able to stop them once they have lost their patience.
This is a reality.
Of course, no matter what the Zionist regime does, it will not be able to compensate for this disgraceful defeat that it has experienced in this matter.
Now, really, dismiss that as bluffing or bloating, chest-beating, if you like, and probably there is a component of it that is that.
But all you have to do is look at what happened in the Middle East as a result of U.S.
military action.
The destruction of Libya we ushered in, where we removed that government and created a gigantic migrant crisis that flooded Europe with all kinds of people fleeing Libya, the slave markets that returned, the ability of ISIS to take over.
The utter Humanitarian disaster that Syria became as a result of the United States government and its allies.
By its allies, I mean groups like Al-Qaeda who were fighting on the same side of the United States to remove Bashar al-Assad under the Obama administration.
And the violence that spawned, and of course, as I said, the emergence of ISIS in the wake of the Iraq War, according to no less a person than Tony Blair, who, I don't know, if I were him I would not want as the first paragraph of my obituary that I led a war that led to the emergence of ISIS, and yet he himself has said that's what that war did.
All of that, what we just talked about, the number of deaths that are skyrocketing, the misery that is proliferating, the level of humanitarian deprivation, this is just if the war stays confined to Israel and Gaza.
But the longer this goes on, and by all accounts we're only at the beginning, Israel is nowhere near done and the United States is never going to get to a point, I mean never going to get to a point where politically it's viable to tell Israel it has to stop.
As we documented last week, the United States government hasn't told Israel it has to stop at anything since the Bush 41 administration, the first George Bush, George Herbert Walker Bush, with the Secretary of State James Baker and his National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft, told the Israelis, we're going to withhold loan guarantees from you if you continue to expand the settlements in the West Bank and therefore make a two-state solution impossible.
And they told them that because And many generals have repeated this since.
When the Israelis engage in behavior that generates anti-Israeli rage and the United States is seen as a partner of it, it endangers American national security as well.
The partnership with Israel can produce national security benefits.
We, the United States government, partners with Israel in all sorts of things, but there's a gigantic cost as well from being seen in the Muslim world and the Arab world as the enablers of this kind of humanitarian crisis.
And this is one of the points we tried making last week about the argument between Tucker Carlson and Ben Shapiro.
At least in theory, at least ostensibly, the United States and Israel are two different countries.
And what might be in the interest of Israel is not necessarily what might be in the interest of the United States.
And having a war that is devastating.
2.2 million Arabs.
2.2 million.
They're not all Muslim.
A lot of them are Palestinian Christians.
But they're primarily Muslim.
Having the United States be attached to a war that does that can, of course, jeopardize the security, not just of the United States, but of American citizens all over the world.
And again, whatever else is true, it is not acceptable to ignore the humanitarian suffering, even if you're in favor of the Israeli war and the Biden administration's decision to become actively involved in it.
There are limits.
There have to be humanitarian limits based on our common humanity on what laws, on what wars can permit.
Obviously wars are always going to be ugly.
They're always going to be horrific.
They unleash the worst instincts on ourselves.
But the whole point of the international order that we hear so much about when it comes time to talk about the war in Ukraine was that we all agreed, the entire planet did after World War II, that there had to be limits.
On things that are permitted in wartime.
That's why there are things like crimes against humanity.
Again, Vladimir Putin is currently officially charged as a war criminal.
He can't travel to certain countries that will arrest him and turn him over because of it.
And that's based on the belief that the West claims and affirms that just because a war is going on doesn't mean everything and anything is justifiable.
There are humanitarian limits.
That are imposed, and I would submit that already after just a week of Israeli bombing in Gaza, before Israel has even invaded, what is being done in Gaza from a humanitarian perspective is at least as bad as what has happened after 18 months of fighting in Ukraine.
We didn't see the Russians airbombing Kiev.
And major population centers, obviously they have used violence indiscriminately, they have killed a lot of people who were innocent.
The invasion itself, I think is hard to justify, to put that mildly, but if you believe Vladimir Putin should stand accused of being a war criminal, it's very hard then to turn around and tell the Israelis that whatever they do, you get the thumbs up and the green light from the United States, unless you believe That Ukrainian lives have value, but Palestinian lives for some reason don't.
And I do think that's a lot of what is generating some of the support for what's going on or the indifference toward it.
And regardless of the geopolitics, I think if you're an American citizen, that's at least a responsibility you have to assume.
So one of the topics of my journalism since the time that I began writing about politics involved the abuses of the post-9-11 era in the United States, what was called the War on Terror, and that obviously encompassed a lot more than just the invasion of Iraq. - Yeah.
It encompassed the bombing under George Bush and then Barack Obama of nine different predominantly Muslim countries.
It involved an invasion and occupation of two of those countries.
It involved regime change operations in two additional countries.
Iraq and Afghanistan being the first two.
Libya and Syria being the next two.
A torture regime, CIA black sites, rendition, the Patriot Act, the transformation of our government at home, mass domestic spying.
And what propelled me to want to do journalism in 2005 when I left the practice of law to do it was not even so much objections to specific policies that the Bush administration had adopted in the name of fighting terrorism, but really it was the climate that had been created in which dissent It was very difficult.
People's reputations were destroyed.
There were people, right after 9-11, who announced that anybody opposed to the war on terror was, in the words of Andrew Sullivan, who later came to regret it, a fifth column operating in the United States, that to oppose or question the Bush administration meant that you were a traitor, that you were on the side of Al Qaeda, that you were pro-terrorist.
And what is happening now is the explicit attempt To resurrect that post 9-11 culture, even when it comes to rehabilitating the very people responsible for ushering it in.
And one of the main purposes of doing that Well, there are two, really.
One is to, again, affirm the idea that as long as the government takes action and justifies it in the name of fighting the bad guys, the terrorists, back then Al Qaeda, now Hamas, or soon to be Hezbollah, perhaps, and the Iranians, then by definition, it's justified.
By definition, it ought to be applauded, because after all, who could possibly oppose things done in the name of fighting the terrorists, unless you're pro-terrorist?
So part of it is to justify everything the government does and then part of it is to render off-limits the ability to dissent because anyone who does, anyone who questions what the Israeli government is doing, what the American government is doing, stands accused of being pro-Hamas.
That has already happened.
Or stands accused of being anti-Semitic.
Just like a lot of left liberals in the United States try and shut down debate over things like affirmative action, or policing, or immigration, or gender ideology by unleashing accusations of bigotry.
If you disagree with them, you're a white nationalist.
If you disagree with them, you're racist.
If you disagree with them, you're xenophobic.
If you disagree with them, you're transphobic.
On and on and on and on.
The similar tactic is deployed when it comes to people who dissent from either the Israeli government's actions or U.S.
support for it, which is to brand everybody who does anti-Semitic.
The same exact tactic, just aimed at a different population and a different group of people from whom it emanates.
Meanwhile, though, at the very same time that that's happening, one thing that is remarkable to witness are the number of Israeli citizens Who either lost people, loved ones, because they were murdered by Hamas on last Saturday, or who had loved ones abducted.
At the same time that there's an effort underway to stigmatize calls for restraint by the Israeli government as anti-Semitic or pro-Hamas, A lot of Israeli citizens are being outspoken in their view that what the Israelis are doing in Gaza is excessive and unjust and indefensible and are steadying calling for constraint.
And that includes a lot of the family members of those who Hamas killed or who they have kidnapped.
In part because the place that Hamas chose to strike, ironically, is a place where there are a lot of peace activists, a lot of people who have long argued that The Israeli government has treated the Palestinians unfairly.
Some of the people they killed, some of the people they kidnapped, are people, Israelis, who have devoted their lives to trying to forge better relations between the Israelis and the Palestinians and to argue that the Israeli government needs to treat the Palestinians better.
And so their family members are saying, don't use the memory of our Murdered a loved one or kidnapped a loved one to justify what is being done in Gaza because the people whose names you're invoking oppose this sort of indiscriminate use of military violence.
So it's very hard to claim that calls for restraint on the part of the Israeli government or objections to what they're doing is pro-Hamas or anti-Semitic.
Or a byproduct of hatred for Jews or Israel when the Israeli relatives of those who were killed are themselves issuing those calls.
Here is one of them who spoke to Channel 4 News in the UK on October 13th.
Listen to what he says.
She was hiding in her closet.
And we decided to stop talking on the phone so she wouldn't be heard.
And we wrote each other until she wrote me there inside the house.
And then we just said our goodbyes.
I wrote her, I'm with you, she wrote back, I feel you, 10-54, that was the last message.
He's talking about his mother, who was hiding inside a house when Hamas came, and he's describing the last conversation, the last communication he had with her, and now he's going to tell you what he believes she would have wanted based on the entirety of her life and her work and what he believes as well as an Israeli citizen.
What would your mother think of what's happening in Gaza now?
She would be mortified.
Because you can't kill babies with more dead babies.
We need peace.
That's what she was working for all her life.
I don't want people to hear what I'm saying.
in Israel.
I stand by my message.
But my friends, how can you not want, you know, everybody to die?
Pain is pain.
And I talk with people from the kibbutz and we cry together.
You can't mend that.
But the only way To have safety and to live good lives is with peace.
Vengeance isn't a strategy.
Does that person seem to you to be motivated by anti-semitism or affection for Hamas or hatred for Israel?
First of all, let me just express my Astonishment at the human capacity for empathy and compassion even in a moment where I'm sure there must be immense temptations to capitulate to a desire for bloodshed and vengeance after knowing that your mother was brutally murdered.
And it's almost impossible to conceive of someone capable of this level of grace and empathy and noble compassion.
So let me just observe the praise I think he's due.
But beyond that, the reason he's saying this is because he lives not in Tel Aviv but very close by to The people of Gaza, the people who are now without food and water, and whose relatives are underneath rubble, alive but can't get out, or who are madly evacuating to the southern part of their country as bombs fall all around them.
And what he's saying is, as somebody who lives in this region, it's very easy to call for this when you live very far and the consequences are near you.
But what he's saying is, as somebody who lives in this region, as somebody whose mother has worked for peace, I don't think, in fact I know, that killing more Gazan babies, killing more Gazan civilians, is not a solution to having Israeli babies killed.
It's only going to ensure this cycle continues.
Now, you don't have to agree with him.
Obviously, you can think that he's wrong, but having heard that, is it really viable to claim that people who call for Israeli constraint or who object to the American enabling of this massive use of force against the defenseless population are doing so out of anti-Semitism or some kind of affinity for Hamas?
That of course is the same tactic as people who at 9-11 said if you question the Bush administration you're pro-terrorist or who now say if you question the war in Ukraine it means you're pro-Kremlin.
It's the same scummy, intellectually dishonest, manipulative tactic.
And when you see the human beings who are doing it, I think it becomes very vivid.
Let's listen to another person.
There you see the Title on the screen, victim of Hamas attack, speaks to the BBC.
This is another Israeli who is saying similar things.
Just watch.
Now, of course, as you know, we've got a situation in which Israel is preparing for a ground offensive going into Gaza.
What are your thoughts on the military response that we've seen from Israel this past week?
Elena, I must tell you that I'm not crying for my parents.
I'm crying for those who are going to lose their life in this war.
We must stop the war.
The war is not the answer.
And I beg you, I beg all the viewers and listeners to do everything in your power to put pressure Offer over everyone that is relevant to stop the war immediately.
To freeze the situation.
In our family, we are not seeking revenge.
Revenge will just lead to more suffering.
And to more casualties.
And even though it's the most horrible day, it was the most horrible loss in lives in Israel since the foundation of the country, I'm afraid that the numbers can be much bigger.
An enormous number.
And we must do everything to stop the war.
And I'm afraid for the soldiers, for the civilians from both sides, in Gaza, from Gaza and in Israel, that will pay in their life.
And this is why I'm crying and this is why it was so important to me in this very hard time to go on this interview and to cry to the vote.
Stop the vote.
Please, just stop the vote.
So that's somebody whose parents were just murdered by Hamas in Israel on Saturday.
And if you compare what he's saying to the people who are saying things like, I want to see Gaza turned into a parking lot, it's time to obliterate, not Hamas, but all of Gaza, or to conflate Palestinian civilians with terrorists to say they're all alike.
As we reviewed yesterday, there's theories now being promulgated that were copied from Osama bin Laden to claim there's no such thing as civilians in Gaza.
I think that far better outcomes are likely from adopting this mindset than that one.
There was an interview in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, which again, as somebody who's been reading that newspaper for a long time, but particularly over the last week, I'm always struck, not just in this paper, but in most Israeli newspapers, at how much freer and more open the debate is about the Israeli government, Israeli actions.
Then it is in the United States.
We should of course be free to criticize our own government, but also foreign governments, and yet there's much more criticism of Israel aired in Israeli newspapers than in American newspapers.
There are a lot of op-eds I see in Israeli newspapers that could never see the light of day in the United States.
I think it's worth asking why that is.
Here, as you may recall, one of the very first videos on Saturday that What was circulating about the Hamas invasion was a video of a young woman who was being carted away by Hamas and she was crying out for her boyfriend who was on the side of the road and he was being marched after being handcuffed and they were both being taken back to Gaza.
There was a lot of focus on her and this is one of the very first videos that made people connect to the pain that Israelis were experiencing.
No one knows exactly what happened to her, where she is, if she's still alive or not, but her father, the father of this woman, gave an interview to Haaretz on October 17th, and here you see the headline.
Father of Israeli woman abducted by Hamas.
Quote, Gaza parents are in pain too.
Quote, I'm fighting in my own way, not with anger, through dialogue, says Yavok Agamani, whose daughter Noah was seen in a video being captured by motorcycle riding Hamas terrorists during the attack on the Supernova Musical Festival.
The journalist asked this question of him, quote, what are your expectations from the government right now?
And this is what her father said, quote, I don't blame anyone.
Such chaos.
They should do everything in their power.
They should listen to the families.
Our children are there.
She's my only daughter.
Let's do everything.
Don't just use your logic, use your emotions.
Let's be honest.
In Gaza too, families are mourning their children.
There are two fathers worry about their children.
They have fatalities too.
What will a few more deaths achieve?
They're in pain just like us.
These are a mother's feelings, a father's feelings.
These are the feelings of parents, brothers, sisters, grandfathers, and grandmothers.
Understand those feelings.
Now, I know this sort of thing is easy to mock if that's what you're looking to do.
Kind of mock it as this sort of kumbaya naivete that, oh, do you really think terrorists are going to stop killing because you issue P's for police?
I know that's what a lot of people think when they hear something like this.
But I think some humility rather than that kind of arrogance is called for here, especially given that these are the people who actually live in that region and who have to live with the consequences of these actions.
And they've seen this over and over and over before.
This is not the first time.
How many times have we seen people from Gaza or the West Bank carry out violence against Israelis and then the Israelis return it by tenfold or fiftyfold or a hundredfold and whether it's morally justified or not in some sort of academic exercise where you sit in a philosophy class.
And ponder these abstract questions.
The question that he cares about, and that I assume most people in this area care about, is what's actually going to end this violence?
And he's trying to say that as gratifying as it might be to watch people's blood being spilled, when you're looking for vengeance, it doesn't actually solve that problem that you think you're solving.
So when you say, oh, well, it's time once and for all to end Hamas, Do you know how long this sort of rationale has been offered?
World War I was presented as the war to end all wars.
Oh, we're going to go and we're going to put an end to this war and that's going to be the last war anybody fights.
No one needs to explain whether that was a valid form of reasoning.
This idea that Israel is going to just bomb its way out of threats to its security by just killing enough people so that one day there's no one left.
To want to bring violence to the Israelis, that to me is the naive view.
Not the humanitarian being shown here.
Earlier today, this afternoon, the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave a speech and this is why I say that it's so clear that they are deliberately attempting to resurrect the framework of 9-11.
The framework imposed by George Bush and Dick Cheney and by the neocons in that administration, not just about the right way to respond to what are called terrorist attacks, but the discourse surrounding how we think about that as well.
First of all, before I even comment on this law, let's listen to what Prime Minister Netanyahu said earlier today in Jerusalem.
are the new Nazis.
Hamas is ISIS, in some instances worse than ISIS.
And just as the world united to defeat the Nazis, just as the world united to defeat ISIS, the world has to stand united behind Israel to defeat Hamas.
This is part of an axis of evil of Iran and Hezbollah.
And Hamas.
So, note there, I mean, first of all, we're again at the stage, we were just at the stage six months ago where people were actually saying that Vladimir Putin is not just the new Hitler, he's actually worse than Hitler.
You had people, obsessive fanatics, when it comes to Russia, like Michael McFaul, the former ambassador under President Obama to Russia for the United States, who went on MSNBC and basically said, Whatever you think about Hitler, there are certain things he wouldn't do that Putin is now doing to try and say Putin is worse than Hitler.
Worse than ISIS?
Remember, we had Al Qaeda that we were told had no limits, was the worst thing ever to appear.
We were told then it was they were as bad as the Nazis, if not worse.
And then when it was time for a new group to emerge, it had to be scarier than Al Qaeda in order for it to work.
So we were given ISIS.
The most savage.
It didn't get more inhumane than ISIS.
They were sadists and they were.
But now we're at the point where you have to go even further.
So now we're being told that Israel's enemies are worse than ISIS.
Basically as bad as Nazis, if not worse.
So the entire world now must unite.
Not just against Israel's enemy in Gaza, but all of Israel's enemies.
All of Israel's enemies are the world's enemies.
And it is obviously not a coincidence that Benjamin Netanyahu decided to call this kind of tripartite union of Israel's enemies, Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran, to describe them as the axis of evil.
The Axis of Evil, of course, was the notorious phrase that was written by David Frum when he was the neocon speechwriter for George W. Bush in 2001 and 2002.
That was the phrase that emerged in George W. Bush's State of the Union Address in January of 2002.
When he blamed the anthrax attacks on Iraq, preparing the nation to go to war with Iraq, based on the multiple lies, but including the lie that the anthrax attacks had come from Saddam Hussein.
And he also, because the neocons didn't want just a war against Iraq, they wanted a war against multiple countries, he called the axes of evil Iraq, Iran, and North Korea.
And it was like a cartoon phrase.
It was a villain caricature of how children are taught to think about the good guys versus the bad guys in every cartoon film and children's film and cartoon and comic strips.
And it was mocked incessantly at the time, but it became the kind of symbol of neocon deceit.
This phrase, axis of evil.
Then Netanyahu, who's very well steeped in American history and American politics, especially obviously when it comes to 9-11.
He was the Israeli Prime Minister in the 1990s.
He's very well aware of what that phrase is and what it means and it's designed to not just subconsciously but quite explicitly essentially say this is another 9-11 moment and because it's another 9-11 moment the world now must unite to fight Israel's enemies just like the world united or some of the world united to fight the United States.
And so he's purposely using the insignia, the kind of ethos of 9-11, including adopting the very phrase that came to define it, and define the neocon attempt to essentially divide the world into good and evil.
And to say you're either on the side of good, which was the United States and now is Israel, or you're on the side of evil, which means anyone who questions what those governments do.
He used the phrase axis of evil on purpose.
This is, to them, 9-11, and they want to reintroduce the mindset that dominated.
A lot of people didn't live through 9-11.
It's one of the things about getting older that you realize.
History becomes deader and deader every year to more and more people.
And for people who did live through it, it was 22 years ago.
It's a long time ago.
And a lot of people can be oriented to recall the emotions associated with 9-11 without remembering those lessons.
Let's listen to the rest.
Their goal, open goal, is to eradicate the state of Israel.
The open goal of Hamas is to kill as many Jews as they could, and the only difference is they would have killed every last one of us, murdered every last one of us, if they could.
They just don't have the capacity, but they murdered an extraordinary 1,300 civilians, which in American terms is like many, many, many 9-11s.
First of all, capacity, the question of capacity kind of matters.
It matters.
There are probably some people who were at the Capitol on January 6 who would have liked to have overthrown the U.S.
government.
They would have liked to.
They don't have the capacity because They were not a military and they were confronting the most powerful and militarized government and the most paramilitarized government ever to exist in human history.
So maybe in their imagination, they would have liked to have overthrown the government.
Not all of them.
Some of them were just protesting what they perceived as fraud in the election, but some of them probably would have liked to.
But the fact that they didn't have the capacity makes a gigantic difference in terms of how we respond.
When Purgosian and the Wagner Group were marching on Moscow with 25,000 heavily armed soldiers, heavily trained soldiers, including people who have the capacity to shoot down jets from the sky, that was a much different threat than a thousand or so largely overweight and highly inactive Trump supporters from Facebook.
It matters a lot.
The Israeli government is incredibly powerful.
The Israeli military is the most powerful by far in that region.
And so when you're thinking about comparing this to Nazi Germany, the government, the Nazis who had this incredibly industrialized military, the likes of which the world had never seen before, that came very close to conquering all of Europe.
The fact that Hamas is just a kind of ragtag bunch of people who don't have any, they don't have an air force, they don't have a navy, they don't have an army.
They're capable of doing some damage, but nowhere near enough to threaten the existence of Israel.
That actually matters, that it's not just a detail.
And when we're thinking about how to respond, that matters a lot.
Let me just say one thing about this too, this kind of math.
This new math that's now being used.
That because Israel has a smaller population than the United States, it means that when one Israeli dies, The impact of that loss of life is greater than when an American dies because it's a smaller percentage of the population that America lost in 9-11 than the Israelis have lost from the Hamas attack because it's a higher percentage of the population.
First of all, the Gazans have an even lower population, so when you kill 2,000 of them, based on this math, that's like 80 9-11s or 100 9-11s.
That's not a valid way of looking at things.
Every human life has equal value.
And if you are going to apply this and say, well, this event in Israel was worse than 9-11, it was like 10 9-11s or 100 9-11s, then how many 9-11s has Gaza suffered over the last 10 years or the last week?
And I say this not to be glib, but because one of the things that's happening is an attempt to insist there are no universally applicable principles.
That the United States and Israel live by one set of rules and everybody else lives by another set.
That American-Israeli lives have greater value than the lives of people in Gaza or Somalia or Yemen.
Or Syria or Libya where the United States brings violence or where Israel does.
I think this is becoming a pervasive way of thinking and it seems kind of innocuous but I think it's pretty pernicious.
So obviously we must take action to defeat Hamas and to ensure that this doesn't happen again.
But this is not only our battle, it is our common battle.
The battle of civilization against barbarism.
Is Hamas a threat to the United States?
If you're an American, do you feel threatened by Hamas?
Menaced by Hamas?
Do you believe Hamas is going to come to the United States and bring violence to your shores the way it did to Israel?
I don't think that's going to happen.
And if it is going to happen, I think the way to make that threat worse for the United States is to involve itself and stand up and say, we are going to sponsor and fund and arm this attack on all of Israel's enemies, which apparently includes under the sacks of evil, not just Hamas, but Hezbollah and Iran.
That seems the way to endanger American national security, not Refusing to join in Israel and everything that it wants to do.
Now, speaking of an attempt to resurrect 9-11, we showed you this last week.
Here's the official Instagram account of the Israeli Defense Forces.
Here's what they posted on October 11th.
You either stand with Israel, or you stand with terrorism.
You have two choices, and only two.
Stand with Israel, applaud everything Israel does, support everything Israel does, applaud Israeli leaders.
That's one option.
Or, be on the side of terrorists.
Stand with the terrorists.
And again, that is not a coincidence.
One of the things that David Frum also wrote that came out of George Bush's mouth, Was his notorious declaration on September 20th, 10 days after the 9-11 attacks, September 20th, 2001, when he addressed a joint session of Congress.
And George Bush said, the world now has a choice.
Either you stand with us or you stand with the terrorists.
Either you're with us or you're with the terrorists.
Same thing that was, just like the Axis of Evil, this cartoonish attempt To tell the world they had a binary choice.
You either applaud George Bush and Dick Cheney and the neocons, or you stand accused of being on Al Qaeda's side.
When I say that they're trying to revitalize and resurrect and reimpose the framework of 9-11, you don't need to rely on what I'm saying.
You can just see it in the words they're choosing to use themselves.
And if that wasn't enough, they actually dragged George Bush himself out from wherever it is that he hides and does his paintings.
And he came forward to share his views, which he rarely does.
This time he shared his views on the war in Israel.
And it's like we all got time-machined and jettisoned back to 2002, where conservatives, a lot of them at least on Fox News and elsewhere, are partying like it's 2002.
And they brought out George Bush himself.
As if the point needed to be even made more explicitly and this is what he said.
It's going to be chaotic and it's going to be, look, it's a democracy and in a democracy the people's voices matter and there's going to be a weariness.
You watch.
The world's going to be, okay, let's negotiate.
You know, Israel's got to negotiate.
They're not going to negotiate.
These people have played their cards.
They want to kill as many Israelis as they can, and negotiating with killers is not an option for the elected government of Israel.
And so we're just going to have to remain steadfast, but it's not going to take long.
It's gone on too long.
Surely there's a way to settle this through negotiations.
Both sides are guilty.
My view is one side is guilty, and it's not Israel.
I mean that is what George Bush was saying in September and October of 2001 and then January of 2002 and then August of 2002 and then February and March of 2003 as the world and the United States prepared to invade Iraq.
So you kind of just like have all the greatest hits being played by the aging rock stars who are now being wheeled out to same them.
We have the Axis of Evil, and you're either with us or with the terrorists, and we have George Bush.
Here we also have Condoleezza Rice, who was George Bush's Secretary of State and National Security Advisor.
She was the primary architect.
of the torture regime.
They would have meetings in the White House where they would endorse specific interrogation techniques that, again, it's not controversial to call it torture.
The United States itself had always prosecuted it as torture, had argued it was illegal.
It wasn't just waterboarding.
It was sleep deprivation and stress positions and using extreme heat and cold and threatening people with mock executions.
Horrific kinds of abuse.
Unhelpless detainees that the United States had always argued was a war crime and a violation of the most basic humanitarianism.
It was Condoleezza Rice who chaired those meetings where those methods were approved and choreographed.
But she was also probably most known for her fear-mongering about what would happen if we didn't invade Iraq.
She stood up in a speech, I believe it was in Ohio in the fall of 2002, so less than six months before the United States invaded Iraq when there was a debate about whether the United States government had provided the evidence that Saddam Hussein had nuclear weapons.
And she was scornful of the people questioning that.
And she said, it seems like what you're waiting for is a smoking gun, but we don't want the smoking gun to be a nuclear cloud.
Telling Americans, if you don't let us go and remove Saddam Hussein, he's going to take the nuclear weapons he has and pass them to the terrorists who are going to detonate it in the United States.
That all turned out to be false.
And it wasn't just that it was false, it led to one of the biggest disasters that the United States has ever engaged in.
Not just a mistake, but a moral crime.
That ended the lives, unnecessarily, of hundreds of thousands of innocent people, if not above a million.
And, as I said earlier, according to Tony Blair, is what gave rise to ISIS and instability in that region that we're still dealing with today.
In a decent society, in a healthy society, people like Condoleezza Rice or George Bush would be afraid to show their face.
The thing we're seeing now is that there is nothing more devastating to the human condition than unleashing the monsters of war.
It triggers and facilitates and nurtures the most savage and barbaric parts of us, which we all have lurking near the surface because we evolved for thousands of years with that savagery and barbarism that's necessary for survival.
And civilization is designed to suppress that, to keep it under wraps.
And war necessarily unleashes it.
The worst human impulses.
Which is why we're seeing this kind of rhetoric.
People in Israel can go and find civilians and know they're civilians and just gun them down.
Or countries being willing to admit that they're cutting off the access to food and drinking water for two million people or more.
We're calling for an entire country or an entire place of land to be turned into a parking lot.
That's the sort of savagery war unleashes.
And people who end up ushering it in, who end up invading countries in an aggressive war, the way Condoleezza Rice and George Bush did, the way Joe Biden approved of and voted for and advocated, the way most of the people in our media who now run most of the most influential media outlets actively cheered for,
The people who were in positions of authority and power in 2002 and 2003 in media and politics who did this should be discredited for life unless they come forward and express extreme remorse like Robert McNamara did about the Vietnam War, which most people did not think was sufficient given the magnitude of those crimes.
And none of these people did that, and yet here's Condoleezza Rice.
Being presented, interviewed by Barry Weiss, who is one of the most vocal supporters of Israel that exists anywhere on the planet outside of Israel and maybe even inside Israel.
She is, when the topic is Israel, Barry Weiss is there and firm and loyal and dedicated.
No one cheerleads for Israel more than Barry Weiss.
And what she decided to do this week to encourage how people should think about this war in Israel is to present Condoleezza Rice as the model that we ought to follow.
Not just that Israel ought to follow, but that we in the United States ought to follow.
That we should learn from Condoleezza Rice.
We should accept the fact that Condoleezza Rice forged the correct path after 9-11.
This is what they're trying to do.
And to do that, they need to rejuvenate their credibility, rehabilitate the credibility of the people who did it, including Condoleezza Rice.
And that is what Barry Weiss did today in this clip that I'm going to show you.
Because again, if having Benjamin Netanyahu say, axis of evil and you're with us or you're with Hamas and wheeling out George Bush wasn't enough, listen to what Barry Weiss did today with Condoleezza Rice.
What lessons do you draw from the policies that America pursued in the aftermath of 9-11 that could serve as a lesson or a warning for the Israelis in this moment?
I have to say that question that she asked, that Barry asked, was not an unreasonable question.
If anything, it's the point that we've been urging on this show, that we look to 9-11 and learn lessons from the mistakes we made when thinking about what the Israelis should do and what the United States should do in terms of its involvement.
I don't actually have a problem with the question itself, but the entire show is designed to present Condoleezza Rice as the person who can teach us that, even though Condoleezza Rice was the one who made all these mistakes and continues to this very day to defend them.
Listen to what Condoleezza Rice said.
Do you think that remorse is coming?
Do you think an admission of guilt or error is coming?
That where she says, I made a lot of mistakes, and the Bush administration made a lot of mistakes, and those are what we should learn from?
Let's listen.
I was the National Security Advisor on that day, and I will tell you, Barry, that the next day, the only thing that we thought was, don't let it happen again.
I heard somebody say once, a very important American leader, they led from fear.
You bet we did.
While I understand those who now want to second guess what were some very tough decisions, the President said, anything within our law and consistent with our values, we will do to protect the country.
And my gratitude that there was not another attack on our territory in the time that we were there.
My gratitude that I think we dismantled the kind of Al Qaeda that could do what they did.
I'll take the criticism that we did too much.
So not only does she have no remorse to offer for anything that she did, I mean, until like seven days ago or nine days ago, it was canon.
It was gospel.
That the United States and the path it chose after 9-11 was wildly misguided and destructive.
That's the reason that when I would go on Fox News over the last five or six years, many of the hosts would say, you know what?
I used to look at you and people like you and think you were crazy, think that you hated America, and you know what?
I realize now that by supporting all these things, I was wrong.
Just two weeks ago, Matt Taibbi went on to Greg Gutfeld's show, and Greg had prepared a musical Apology for Matt and for people like Matt, which Greg Gutfeld has expressed for me before and for other people like Dave Smith, basically based on the premise that all your critiques of the United States government and the security state after 9-11 were ones I used to think were crazy, but I realized that instead, they were wise.
And it just took one thing to change all that.
Israel.
A war that involves Israel.
And now suddenly, We're being told that we should celebrate what the United States did after 9-11, that we should listen to Condoleezza Rice.
She's not saying I regret anything I did.
She's saying, quite to the contrary, I'm proud of what I did.
I forged the right path that we were on.
Now, I want to show you a clip that's not about the war in Israel, but about the war in Ukraine involving Condoleezza Rice, just to give you a sense for how deluded these people are.
Like if you're inclined to start remembering Condoleezza Rice in a positive light, she's obviously very... She presents herself very well.
She's highly educated.
She's smart.
So if you're inclined to start thinking positively about her, like yeah, Condoleezza Rice is somebody who understands what we should do when faced with a 9-11 attack or an attack like Hamas.
Let me just show you a clip from February of 2022.
It was the first week After Russia invaded Ukraine, she went on Fox News to talk about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and she was interviewed by the Fox News anchor Harris Faulkner, and this was the exchange that ensued.
I found this exchange to be mind-blowing at the time.
Again, I mean, one of the things that maybe I'm naive about is sometimes it amazes me How some people have the capacity to say things and do things that are such glaring contradictions of what they claim they are and they believe in, and they seem to be able to do it without a recognition of that contradiction.
It was the thing I was expressing shock about last week, that people like Dave Rubin, who built his career on opposing cancel culture and opposing censorship, Are now turning around and applauding the French for banning pro-Palestinian protests or other people who are supporting the compiling a blacklist of college students or law students who signed petitions deemed too pro-Palestinian or trying to get journalists fired for questioning the Israeli government.
And I just can't understand how someone who devotes their career to opposing censorship and cancel culture can then turn around and cheerlead for those things without at least some attempt to reconcile it.
They seem to do it without any recognition that they're acting in such a self-contradictory way.
That was the reaction I had to what I'm about to show you with Condoleezza Rice.
Let's watch this.
Well, and I have argued that when you invade a sovereign nation, that is a war crime.
I mean, I think we're at just a real basic point there.
Well, I agree.
It is certainly against every principle of international law and international order.
And that's why throwing the book at them now, in terms of economic sanctions and punishments, is also a part of it.
And I think the world is there.
Certainly NATO is there.
He's managed to unite NATO in ways that I didn't think I would ever see again after the end of the Cold War.
Really?
Yeah.
Really?
Really?
Seriously?
I gotta show you that first part again.
Just listen, I don't know what to say about it.
Listen to what Harris Faulkner tells Condoleezza Rice is a moral view and a legal view that everyone agrees with and recognizes, only for Condoleezza Rice to stare at her with a straight face and say, absolutely, I agree, and people who violate this have to be held accountable.
Listen to what the principle is that Harris Faulkner told Condoleezza Rice that everyone agrees with.
Well, and I have argued that when you invade a sovereign nation, that is a war crime.
I mean I think we're at just a real basic point there.
How is that possible?
How is that possible?
Now, in addition to offering Condoleezza Rice as the person who is the person that we ought to be thinking about and talking about.
Here was the Free Press, which is Barry White's news organization.
Not only offering Condoleezza Rice, there you see the new axis of evil in a changed world, but also George Packer, who was a journalist at the New Yorker, who also was a huge cheerleader for the war on terror in the Iraq war, and he's here to tell us, George Packer, on what Israel can learn from America's 9-11 response.
Now, again, if you are somebody who believes, if you're one of the dwindling number of people who believe that what the United States did after 9-11 was wise and moral and helpful toward Containing the terrorism problem, then by all means embrace this framework again and equate any questioning of our government's actions with being on the side of terrorists.
Here, by the way, is someone else who's from that era who's being dragged out.
Let's put that on the screen.
Douglas Fyfe.
He was sort of the intellectual avatar of the neoconservative movement.
He worked inside Donald Rumsfeld's Defense Department.
He worked for Paul Wolfowitz, who was an extremist neocon, but Douglas Feith was even more so.
And here he is as well.
I believe this is an article from him where he is Offering all sorts of things, that's his bio on Substack, and here he is offering a article, Hamas's strategy of human sacrifice.
Never before has a party adopted a war strategy to maximize civilian deaths on its own side.
So they're really judging up all these neocons from this era because they want to replicate it.
So again, I mean, if you want to talk about binary choices, to me there's a binary choice, which is
Embrace the framework of 9-11, believe the United States did the right thing, and cheer Joe Biden as he goes to Jerusalem tomorrow to pledge eternal support for Benjamin Netanyahu and what he thinks or is presenting as his attempt to destroy Hamas by incessantly bombing Gaza and depriving those people of the most basic rights of dignity and humanity, or reject that framework, insist that as an American citizen it's not only your right but your duty
To question whether or not you want the United States government, your government, to be involved in yet another war on top of the proxy war in Russia or in Ukraine against Russia, the war that some are urging we fight against Iran, the attempt to continue to militarily circle and threaten China, and now this bloody end Horrific war that the Israelis are waging with full American support.
If we have to choose any binary, that's the binary that I suggest we choose.
Now, we have a final segment prepared for you, but in the interest of time, we've got about an hour and 40 minutes.
We have our local show coming up.
I just want to kind of truncate it.
It was designed to ask the question whether or not The US establishment, the mainstream bipartisan consensus in Washington, whether you believe it's pro-Israel or pro-Palestinian.
Because it's very commonplace now for, as we know, for the left, for the American liberal left to use narratives of grievance and victimhood on the part of, on behalf of many different marginalized groups.
But a lot of people on the right, not all again, it's divided, the right is, as we saw from Tucker Carlson versus Ben Shapiro about whether this war should be our war.
But some on the right use the same tactics of victimhood to insist that American elites are aligned against Israel, aligned against Jews, only sympathizing with the Palestinians, even though support for Israel has been the centerpiece of the bipartisan consensus in Washington for decades and continues to be.
And maybe we'll postpone it tomorrow where we're going to show you What the people who really exercise power and influence in the United States have been doing and are doing right now when it comes to the question of Israel.
It's not opposing Israel.
It's not siding with the Palestinians.
Much to the contrary, it's doing what the American institutions of power have done for decades, rightly or wrongly.
I'm just pointing out this is the reality.
It is not to align themselves against Jews or spread anti-Semitism or side with the Palestinians.
It is to offer unconditional and limitless support for Israel.
Much the way the United States has spent the last 18 months doing with Ukraine.
In fact, President Zelensky said three months ago in an interview that he wanted Ukraine to become America's new Israel, meaning a country that the United States funds and arms and supports independent of the outcome of elections, a consensus that is shared by both parties.
That is the American view when it comes to Israel on the elite level.
And we went through the votes over the last several years that whenever it comes time to talk about Israel or debate the question of Israel, the question that becomes whether Congress wants to do that, and by a vote of something like 411 to 8, It's always overwhelming.
The vote is always in favor of Israel.
Let me just show you.
There's a ton of examples.
I just want to give you a kind of taste for what's in the air.
This is from Amy Schumer.
And granted, she's Amy Schumer, so I understand.
She's not exactly a thought leader or one of America's brightest intellectual lights.
But this is not her thought.
She's copying this from what she's hearing.
And I've seen this in a lot of places.
And she's spreading it to millions of people who follow her on Instagram.
There you see the Jewish star and this is what Amy Schumer said.
This is the grievance of victimhood.
The narrative of victimhood and grievance that I think has become quite popular.
This is what she wrote.
Quote, first they came for LGBTQ and I stood up because love is love.
Then they came for immigrants and I stood up because families belong together.
Then they came for the black community and I stood up because black lives matter.
Then they came for me.
But I stood alone.
Because I am a Jew.
Does that seem like an accurate representation to you of the state of American Jews in the United States?
I grew up in a Jewish community.
Almost all of my friends were Jews.
I went to school with Jews.
My family is Jewish entirely.
And...
Most people I know moved away from home to go to college and then start their own lives.
And not only is it true for me, but every single Jewish friend I have, people will tell you I have never encountered, I've never experienced an anti-Semitic event in my life in the United States.
This idea that, oh, everybody comes running for the LGBTQ community, everybody comes running for immigrants, and everybody comes running for the black community, but me, I stand alone.
Nobody comes for me because I'm a Jew.
And in the United States, everybody hates Jews.
That is self-victimization.
That is not just neurotic, but honestly, it merits treatment.
And yet this is the narrative being spread that somehow in the United States, Nobody cares for Israel.
Nobody cares for Jews, even though you have the New York Times and the entire U.S.
Congress and bipartisan policy over decades that supports Israel, that gives Israel more aid than any other country, that is a linchpin of American policy.
And we went through all the votes.
Every Israel vote produces these incredibly lopsided margins in favor of Israel, unlike any we see anywhere else.
And a resolution was introduced today in the United States Senate.
There you see the resolution.
It's labeled, Standing with Israel Against Terrorism.
And of 100 senators, 99 signed on to the resolution.
The only one who didn't is Rand Paul, the Republican of Kentucky, and he did so because in general he opposes foreign aid and the idea that we should be involving itself in the affairs of other countries.
I don't want to speak for him, I haven't seen his statement about why, but in general that is consistent with what he thinks.
You have 99 U.S.
Senators 99 out of 100.
You can't get that on barely any issue, especially one that's controversial around the world like this war is.
But in the U.S.
Congress, contrary to Amy Schumer's, I stand all alone because I'm a Jew, you have 99 out of 100 senators standing with Israel.
And here's what part of what that resolution says.
Resolve that the Senate 1.
Stands with Israel as a defensive self, including Israeli efforts to diminish the threat posed by Hamas.
2.
Reaffirms Israel's right to self-defense and is committed to helping Israel safeguard its people from future aggression.
That doesn't seem like Amy Schumer and American Jews are standing alone.
That seems like the entire U.S.
Senate is very much on the side of Israel.
diplomatic, and intelligence support need, both during the immediate crisis and in the near future, including by accelerating delivery of defense articles and systems.
Now, it doesn't seem like Amy Schumer and American Jews are standing alone.
That seems like the entire U.S. Senate is very much on the side of Israel.
Now, one of the arguments cited in this resolution is the fact that there are Americans who are included among the hostages that were taken to Gaza And it's true, there are American hostages in Gaza.
Now, certainly the United States has a duty to protect them.
And I question whether dropping enormous amounts of bombs all over Gaza is something that will protect American hostages in Gaza.
It doesn't seem to me if I had a loved one in Gaza who had been kidnapped that that would be something I would want done.
And you heard some of the relatives of abducted Israelis suggesting exactly that.
But I think it's worth noting, although the resolution doesn't note it, that while it is true there were Americans among the dead in Israel and among the abducted, and we haven't heard, though I'd like to know, how many of those Americans in Israel who were killed or abducted are there because they serve in the Israeli military.
It's not uncommon for American citizens to go serve in the Israeli military who are Jewish.
Jeffrey Goldberg, who did more than any other.
Journalists who spread the lie that Iraq participated in the 9-11 attack to sell the country in the Iraq war was a soldier in the IDF and a lot of Americans go there and were.
But what's also true is that there are American civilians in Gaza because they're hostages but there are also American citizens who live in Gaza and who are desperately trying to get out and obviously the government has a duty to them as well.
There are no hierarchies of American citizens.
American citizens are American citizens and they're all equal under the law.
And in fact, here from NBC News is an article, Doubts Fears Run High for Palestinian Americans Stuck in Gaza.
Hundreds of Americans gathered by Egypt's Rafah crossing, which remains closed Monday, following promises from the U.S.
State Department that it would be open.
This is about the hundreds of American citizens in Gaza trying to get out.
Obviously endangered by this bombing campaign the American government is fueling.
Quote, the crossing remained closed Monday, despite promises from U.S.
State Department officials, leaving many Palestinian Americans frustrated but, quote, not surprised.
Quote, we are surviving on sandwiches, said Maa Barakat, an American citizen desperate to cross the border into Egypt.
She is one of 600 Americans still stuck in Gaza, according to the State Department's tally.
Quote, we are American citizens and should be treated the same as the Americans who got put on planes out of Tel Aviv.
She said in a telephone interview with NBC News Monday, now in her seventh day of waiting to cross since she moved her nieces and nephews to a family friend's house in southern Gaza, her own children live in New Jersey and are in college.
Quote, we are human beings.
We are not human animals.
That's referring to the Israeli officials description and at least two occasions of people in Gaza, human animals.
Quote, we are human beings and we are not human animals, said Adi Salem, an American trying to cross Rafah to get back home to Missouri.
Quote, there is no safe haven in Gaza.
There is no safe road in Gaza.
There is no humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza.
There is nothing, there's nothing but bombs and bombs and bombs and blood and bodies, he said.
There have been calls for a ceasefire in Gaza to enable the opening of a humanitarian corridor.
Those came largely from a handful of House progressives.
And when asked about that, as we showed you last week, Karine Jampierre said, the White House regards them as repugnant and disgraceful.
There is no other issue besides Israel that could induce the White House to describe House Democrats as disgraceful and shameful.
There are all sorts of reports of journalists in the West being fired or taken off the air for being too critical of Israel, too pro-Palestinian.
There are none being fired for being too pro-Israeli.
Just today there was a report in the Daily Beast concerning my friend, the left-wing host of The Rising Show on Hill TV, The Hill, Breonna Joy Gray, who has been a critic of Israel, a defender of the Palestinians.
They leaked an article with the obvious intention to get her fired.
There you see the Daily Beast article, the Israel-Hamas conflict spills over into newsroom shouting matches.
And it contained quotes from people at The Hill saying, how can we allow Breonna Joy Gray to continue to be so critical of Israel?
I seriously doubt our corporate bosses or advertisers would tolerate that, trying to get her fired.
That is the climate being created.
It is a climate in the United States, again, for better or for worse, I think it's important to recognize the facts, that is overwhelmingly pro-Israel.
The United States is not a country hostile to Jews.
It is not a country hostile to Israel, as some are suggesting.
The reason they had to go searching for people who were obscure, whose names nobody knew, at a DSA rally, or a local chapter of Black Lives Matter, or an assistant professor who's not even tenured.
To find people supporting Hamas or cheering or celebrating what Hamas did is because the reality is overwhelmingly almost everybody with a meaningful platform in the United States, including critics of Israel, like myself, found and denounced the Hamas attack as reprehensible and morally indefensible.
This is not a sentiment that exists in the United States in any meaningful way among any powerful and influential people.
The American establishment is overwhelmingly pro-Israeli, and always has been, at least for decades.
And that's why Joe Biden is doing the exact same thing that George Bush would do, or that a Republican president would do, that Nikki Haley is urging, that Marco Rubio is urging, that Mike Pence wants.
As always, there's bipartisan consensus.
He's flying to Jerusalem tomorrow.
Not just to offer rhetoric to Benjamin Netanyahu in support of the war, but money and arms in addition to the $4 billion that the Americans transfer to Israel every year.
You may not want it to be true, but if you're an American citizen, this is your war.
This is a war that is creating immense human suffering, and we're only at the start.
And again, If you're somebody who supports what the Israelis are doing, if you want the Biden administration to be weighing in on the side of Israel as a participant in this war, or a war that escalates to Hezbollah and Iran, that's fine.
That's your right.
We're going to continue to report and analyze in the best way we can.
But I would hope that what we can all agree to is preserving the space for dissent for the kind of questioning that was not allowed in the wake of 9-11.
Where people who criticize the Israeli government or who criticize or question the American support for the Israeli government can do so without being branded as anti-Semites or on the side of Hamas or on the side of terrorists.
That is a grotesque slander.
And worse than that, it prevents the kind of questioning that is so urgent and necessary and healthy, especially when We're talking about questions of war as we very much are now, not just in Ukraine, not just with Iran, but also when it comes to this remarkably bloody and inhumane and barbaric war taking place, at least for now, in Gaza.
So that concludes our show for this evening.
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