Will the Blockade & Bombing of Gaza Make the US/Israel Safer? Does That Matter? Plus: Briahna Joy Gray & Michael Tracey on Censoring Journalists Over Israel, GOP Speaker Mess, & Ukraine War | SYSTEM UPDATE #165
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Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight, Joe Biden arrived today in Israel where he stood at the side of Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu and pledged, quote, I come to Israel with a single message.
You are not alone.
As long as the United States stands, and we will stand forever, we will not let you ever be alone.
News reports today indicated that the White House would seek billions more for Israel, beyond the almost $4 billion a year it already transfers there automatically under an agreement signed by President Obama.
All as part of a $100 billion package of new spending that will also include more war funding for Ukraine, with some left over for border security and disaster relief for Americans.
The U.S.
government today further emphasizes support for the Israeli war effort by being the only country to veto a proposal at the U.N.
Security Council offered by Brazil, one that condemns Hamas' attack but also calls for Israel to allow humanitarian assistance, food, water, and medicine to enter Gaza, a place which Israel, as a response to the attack by Hamas last Saturday, announced it would prevent the entry of food, water, fuel, and medication.
When it came to full-scale U.S.
support for Ukraine in its war against Russia, one of the points we repeatedly emphasized on this program is that the central overarching question when it comes to U.S.
foreign policy in general and the involvement of the U.S.
government in other countries' wars in particular is whether such policies enhance the security of the American people or whether such policies weaken that security.
At least in theory, it is the fundamental duty of the U.S.
government to take actions which improve the lives of American citizens by promoting their prosperity or strengthening their security.
When it came to the U.S.
role in Ukraine, we repeatedly searched, I think in vain, For an explanation as to how the sending of tens of billions of dollars or hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayer resources and in war aid to Kiev benefits the American people and makes them safer, more prosperous, or more secure.
It plainly does not do that.
The only people benefiting from Biden's war policies in Ukraine besides the Ukrainians receiving that amount of money are a tiny sliver of American elites who work for or have ownership in weapons manufacturers such as Boeing and Raytheon or those who work inside the U.S.
security state whose budget and powers inevitably expand during times of war.
But because the American people are only hurt and not helped by U.S.
involvement in Ukraine, we could not see and still do not see how that policy could be justified.
It seems clear that the same inquiry Must be applied to the announcement today by President Biden that the U.S.
will be the central partner of Israel as it prosecutes its latest war in Gaza by funding their war effort, feeding them the weapons and bombs that will be used against Palestinians in Gaza, and providing critical diplomatic cover and support, as the U.S.
did today, by standing alone at the U.N.
and exercising his veto.
As is true for Ukraine, there is a lot of talk right now about the moral justification for the U.S.
involvement in this new war, but there's almost no discussion of whether American support for the war in Gaza, for Israel, will make Americans safer, or for that matter, whether it will make Israelis safer.
It's as though that question, yet again, is the least important inquiry in Washington.
We would submit it should be the most important inquiry.
And there are many lessons in the recent history of the United States and its various wars, including, but not only, Not only the United States' various responses to the 9/11 attack that shed significant light on whether increasing its bombing and violence in that region will make it less likely that people want to attack the United States and Americans or whether it will make it more likely that people will do so.
That inquiry is crucial and we will try and explore it and argue that it ought to be the dominant question.
Then, Breonna Joy Gray is the host of the daily morning show, Rising, which is broadcast by the longtime inside DC media outlet, The Hill.
That was the show, Rising, that catapulted Crystal Ball and Sagar and Jetty to a certain kind of success and fame by being the host of that show.
And then they left for independent pastors and Breonna took over and now hosts that show.
And she also is my former colleague at The Intercept, as well as the press secretary for the 2020 presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders.
And she has been doing something rare in the media over the last 10 days.
Rather than mindlessly recite the pro-Israel narrative that dominates the bipartisan consensus in Washington, she instead has done her job as a journalist by questioning and expressing critiques of both the Israeli response and Biden's war policies.
As we have pointed out many times over the last week, it feels as though we have jettisoned ourselves in a time machine back to September and October 2001 when no dissent was tolerated.
No matter how marginalized and rare as it was, it was adamant that there be no question that everybody be on board with the consensus.
And as a result, any attempts to question or dissent from U.S.
policy meant that one was branded as, quote, pro-terrorist or on the side of al-Qaeda, and now the most popular label is pro-Hamas.
As a result of Gray doing her job, asking questions and offering critiques rather than obediently submitting to the U.S.
and Israeli claims, colleagues of hers at The Hill have crawled in the most cowardly way possible to the media, or more specifically, the liberal tabloid The Daily Beast, in order to explicitly call for corporate bosses that own and control that program to fire her as a result of her off-key reporting and commentary.
We'll talk to Brianna about what this says about the prevailing climate for free speech and a free press in the United States, and we'll also talk to her about the war itself, as well as the current inability of the House Republicans to pick a Speaker of the House.
The second ballot, where they tried to elect Jim Jordan, resulted even in fewer votes for him than the first time around, and it looks increasingly unlikely that he will get the votes necessary to be the Speaker.
After that, we will also speak to the independent journalist and friend of the show, Michael Tracy, about the war in Gaza and Biden's support for Israel, as well as the war in Ukraine.
Remember that?
And the latest failure of Jim Jordan to secure enough votes to become Speaker.
In sum...
There are few more consequential policies than the one Joe Biden announced today while standing at Netanyahu's side in Israel.
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Whenever the United States announces a new policy, especially one that leads it to become heavily involved in a new war, there are a lot of claims that get made to justify why the United States and the American population should support U.S. administration involvement in a new war.
They're often moral type of claims about why we're fighting on the right side, why we're fighting for a just cause.
But very rarely is there any focus on what seems like it ought to be one of the leading questions, if not the paramount question, when it comes to U.S.
involvement in a new war.
Namely, will U.S.
involvement in this new war actually benefit, increase, and fortify the security and safety of United States government interests and the American people, or will it breach, or weaken, or undermine that security?
That is a question that has almost never been asked.
It's barely visible in the discourse surrounding this new war fought by Israel, a foreign country, and now the U.S.
decision to offer full-fledged, unconditional, and eternal support for its war effort of the kind that U.S.
leaders have repeatedly offered for the war in Ukraine.
Here you see the New York Times article on the Biden administration's trip and the headline is Biden Affirms Evidence Backing Israel's Denial of Causing the Hospital Blast.
The article reads, quote, President Biden also appeared to have secured Israel's agreement to allow food, water, and medicine for civilians to enter Gaza via Egypt.
We'll see if that ends up happening.
Making a rare wartime visit to Israel on Wednesday, President Biden firmly backed the Israeli government's assertion that it had nothing to do with the hospital's destruction.
Quote, based on what I've seen, it appears as though it was done by the other team, not you, he said, appearing with Netanyahu.
Mr. Biden was determined to allow no daylight between himself and Israel, even as he pressed privately for the resumption of humanitarian aid to Gaza, and stressed the importance of minimizing civilian casualties.
Quote, I want you to know you're not alone, he said.
Hamas committed atrocities that recall the worst ravages of ISIS, unleashing pure, unadulterated evil upon the world.
There's no rationalizing, no excusing it, period.
A position that we have defended from the first moment we began talking about this war on Monday night, that the massacre of civilians by Hamas was clearly mortally and legally indefensible.
But then the president went on, quote, Mr. Biden said he would ask Congress later this week for a, quote, unprecedented support package for Israel's defense, citing the need to keep Israel's air defense systems supplied with ammunition.
So it's very much the same kind of rhetoric as we heard from the U.S.
government, from the Biden administration when it comes to Ukraine.
Your war is our war.
We will stand with you until the very end.
We're opening up our treasury.
We're opening up our wallets and purses.
We are opening up our weapons stockpile and we will feed you everything that we need, that you need, in order to win this war until the end of time.
Same exact posture when it comes to Ukraine as now for this new war in Israel.
There's no daylight, said President Biden, nor will there be between the Israeli position and the American position.
And I don't see here in anything Biden said, nor in any of the overwhelming media consensus supporting what President Biden has done, any discussion Of whether that will make Americans more safe or less safe or whether that question even matters.
So that is one of the questions I think we need to confront is, is that a relevant question at all?
Does it matter?
Even if it's true that Biden's war policy in Israel does not increase American security or even if it's true That it undermines American security, and I think there's evidence to suggest that it will, as we're about to show you.
Should the United States just ignore that and support Israel anyway?
In other words, should it prioritize the interests of the Israeli government over the safety and security of American citizens if those two are in conflict?
It wasn't just Biden's announcement in Israel that tied the United States to this new war, not just in fact, but in the eyes of the entire world, including the Arab and Muslim world, which is increasingly enraged by what they're seeing in and they obviously blame not only Israel, but now the United States for that war effort at the UN today.
The United States stood alone in vetoing a resolution offered by Brazil to try and forge a resolution where humanitarian aid reaches the people of Gaza whose food and water supply are dwindling, who cannot access medication.
The lack of fuel is sometimes preventing surgeons from performing life-saving surgery or pulling people out of the rubble because they don't have the energy or the equipment to do so.
1,200 people, according to the New York Times, who are alive but trapped under rumble in Gaza.
Can't get out, including women and children.
And so Brazil offered a resolution designed to ensure the flow of humanitarian aid and that the United States vetoed it.
Here from CNN today, you see the headline, U.S.
Vetoes Security Council Call for Humanitarian Pause in Israel-Hamas War.
Quote, the United States has vetoed a draft resolution at the U.N.
Security Council which called for a humanitarian pause in besieged Gaza, sparking more criticism of political paralysis in the powerful global body.
The brief draft resolution proposed by Brazil condemned the October 7th terror attack in Israel by Palestinian militant group Hamas, which killed over 1,400 people in Israel, and urged the release of the hostages taken by Hamas.
It also called on all parties to comply with international law and protect civilian lives in Hamas-controlled Gaza amid a ferocious retaliation by Israeli warplanes.
The international community should engineer, quote, humanitarian pauses in the fighting to allow for aid delivery, it said.
Twelve of the council's 15 members approved the draft on Wednesday.
With the U.K.
and Russia abstaining, along with the U.S.
veto.
So had the U.S.
not vetoed it, it would have passed because it had an overwhelming majority.
The U.K.
abstained because it follows the U.S.
Russia abstained because it had offered its own resolution that didn't attract as much support because it failed to condemn Hamas, though it did call for humanitarian aid to enter Israel.
Quote, speaking after the vote, U.S.
Ambassador to the U.N.
Linda Thompson-Greenfield explained that the U.S.
wanted more time to let America on-the-ground diplomacy, quote, play out.
The U.S.
had previously delayed voting on the resolution.
Since the Hamas attack, Israel has been bombarding Hamas-controlled Gaza with airstrikes.
It has cut off the enclave's two million people from supplies of basic necessities, including food, water, and electricity.
More than 3,000 people have died in the Israeli strike, including more than 1,000 children and dozens of aid workers.
And UN experts are warning of the widespread disaster if water and electricity are not restored.
Now, The Guardian has some additional information on the U.S.
veto and how it's perceived.
You see the U.S.
vetoes the U.N.' 's call for a humanitarian pause.
And we have the video of what happened at the U.N.
resolution.
Here is Brazil offering its resolution and the reason why.
And then you have the U.S.
standing alone and raising its hand to veto it.
Watch what happened.
Those against.
Abstentions.
The result of the voting is as follows.
Twelve votes in favor.
One vote against.
Two abstentions.
The draft resolution has not been adopted owing to the negative vote of a permanent member of the council.
In other words, the United States vetoed it and therefore, even though it had overwhelming support, 12 out of 15 members of the UN Security Council voting yes, it could not pass.
Brazil offered the resolution.
There you see Brazil.
They have the presidency of the UN Security Council.
And obviously the U.S.
has done this many times before when there's a resolution designed to encourage Israel to reduce the number of civilian deaths or to allow humanitarian aid into Gaza or the West Bank.
The U.S.
often stands alone in vetoing resolutions to protect Israel and therefore the U.S.
is perceived across the Muslim and Arab world as the main partner that enables This sort of Israeli bombardment.
That is an important part of the question of whether or not the U.S.
posture will increase the security of the United States and American citizens or undermine it.
One of the few times the United States refused to use its veto power to protect Israel was when President Obama, on his way out, after he had signed a record-breaking aid agreement to give $4 billion, or close to it, to Israel over 10 years, or a $38 billion package over 10 years, so $3.8 billion a year.
Now they're about to give much, much more to Israel.
Above and beyond that, in this war effort, President Obama abstained on a resolution that declared Israeli settlements in the West Bank illegal and enabled it, therefore, to pass.
But generally, the U.S.
acts, uses its security power to protect Israel, causing a lot of animosity, not toward Israel, but to the United States and the Arab and Muslim world.
Right now, there are protests, major protests, all throughout the Middle East, the Gulf States, People with countries with powerful militaries like Iran and Turkey, Lebanon and Hezbollah, not to mention Saudi Arabia and Yemen, you're talking about major protests in Iran as well that are now directed not just at Israel but the United States.
And US support for the war in Israel is going to exacerbate that for obvious reasons.
Doesn't mean that the US shouldn't do it.
The fact that Muslims and Arabs in various countries are angered by U.S.
support isn't proof that the United States is wrong to do it, but it's certainly a relevant factor in the question of whether American security will be undermined rather than promoted by this policy, which seems to be a very important question when it comes to U.S.
foreign policy.
That should be, in fact, the overarching paramount one, shouldn't it?
Now we have a lot of recent history that sheds a lot of light on this question, that we don't have to rely on speculation as a result, including from the War on Terror.
Both before the 9-11 attack and after, huge numbers of Arabs and Muslims who tried to bring violence to the United States, or who did bring violence to the United States,
In various bombings prior to 9-11, aimed at military installations and American troops in the Middle East, and then 9-11, the first 9-11 attack, the first World Trade Center attack, and then the much more successful one, and then various attempts to detonate bombs in places like Times Square.
Over and over and over, the people who did that, this is true as well of the person Omar Mateen who carried out the massacre in Orlando at the Pulse nightclub, It was falsely reported that he was there out of anti-gay animus.
In reality, he didn't know it was a gay club.
The trial proved he never once mentioned LGBT issues or gay issues when carrying out that massacre.
He instead said he was doing it as retaliation for U.S.
bombing in Iraq and Syria.
All sorts of people in the post 9-11 era who either did or tried to carry out terrorist attacks in the United States made very clear that their motive was simple.
It wasn't that they hated the United States for our freedom.
That was the lie that David Frum and Bill Kristol and neocons invented.
The fairy tale fed to Americans after 9-11 when they rightly wanted to know why do people hate us so much that they want to do this kind of violence against us?
And the fairy tale that we were told was, oh, it's because they just hate us for our freedom.
They hate our democracy.
And of course, there are dozens of countries all over the world that are free that they never attacked.
One of the things I was recalling earlier this week is, and we're going to talk on Friday night about the insanity that emerged in the United States, the climate that is indescribably unhinged in the wake of 9-11.
That flooded American discourse with all kinds of deceit and lies.
Obviously, it led to the Iraq War, but one of the things that happened was right in the immediate aftermath of the 9-11 attack, when Americans were asking this question, why do they hate us?
Why would people want to come and do so much violence to the United States?
The U.S.
government ordered The television networks, ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, not to air any interviews with Osama Bin Laden.
Interviews that he had given in the past or interviews that he would now give to outlets like Al Jazeera.
And their excuse was, and this was an indication of how insane the post 9-11 climate was in the United States that I think we have to work very hard to avoid again.
The argument they gave was that you cannot show any excerpts of Osama Bin Laden interviews because he may, being the very tricky and clever person that he is, use a hand gesture or a facial expression or include a phrase That sleeper cells in the United States have been trained to understand and interpret as a green light for them to go and carry out a terrorist attack in the United States.
He was gonna, in the interview, rub his nose, or play with his ear, or offer some kind of phrase.
That was the excuse the US government gave to networks as to why they didn't want Osama Bin Laden appearing, but the reality was Americans would then get the real answer to the question, why do they hate us?
Osama Bin Laden wasn't saying, I want to bring violence to the United States because they have gay bars or women are allowed to walk on the street without burqas or they vote.
That wasn't his argument at all.
His argument was, I want to bring violence to the United States because they bring violence to our region all the time.
One of his examples was the United States imposed a sanctions regime on Iraq.
That a UN study concluded resulted in the death of 500,000 Iraqi children.
And there's the notorious interview with Bill Clinton's Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, where she was asked by 60 Minutes, is it worth it to have imposed a sanctioned regime and killed 500,000 Iraqi children?
And she said, yes, it was worth it.
And that was played all over the Muslim world as proof that the United States had a sociopathic disregard for the lives of Muslim children and Muslims in general.
And then he also cited the deployment of U.S. soldiers and U.S. bases on Saudi Arabia, which is considered sacred in Islam.
And then also the steadfast support for Israel when it bombs the Palestinians, that the bombs that the Israelis used to bomb the Palestinians come right from the United States.
Those were Al-Qaeda's arguments as to why it was justified to target the United States and American citizens that our active role in bringing violence to the Middle East motivated Al-Qaeda and Muslims to want to bring violence back to
The United States, and although it was supposed to be taboo to point this out, I pointed it out many times like people did and got very attacked as somehow offering excuses for those terrorists, even though I always made clear the actions were unjust, but it was still important to understand what motivated them so that maybe we can understand if we were doing things that would undermine the security of the American people.
The CIA itself has a term for this called blowback.
Where they acknowledge that if you go and involve yourself in the affairs of other countries, if you engineer regime change, or you bomb other countries, or you're perceived as bringing violence, it will blow back to the United States.
It will bring violence to the United States, which is one reason, according to the CIA's framework, you don't do that.
Or at least it's a serious cost to doing it.
I could spend all night showing you examples of people charged with trying to detonate bombs in the United States who are Muslim, explaining their reasons.
And on Friday night, we're going to do this kind of in-depth history.
On Friday night, we devote our show to a kind of historical review like we did last Friday of the 1990s and the war on civil liberties and the kind of genesis it had in terms of using the FBI and CIA for domestic dissent with Ruby Ridge and Waco and what that led to.
And of course there was FBI and CIA involvement in the 60s with COINTELPRO.
But I just want to show you this one case as illustrative.
There was a person who was accused, he was arrested, of trying to detonate a bomb in Times Square.
And it was a hot dog vendor who saw the bomb and called the police and detected it and they could defuse it.
But had that not happened, that coincidence, it was a powerful bomb that would have detonated and killed a lot of people.
And I reported on this case from the beginning.
Here you see my article when I was still at Salon in October of 2010.
The headline, Times Square Bomber, Cause and Effect in the War on Terror.
Yet again, an attempted terrorist claims his actions were in response to U.S.
violence in the Muslim world.
Let me just read to you what happened here.
Faisal Shahzad was sentenced by a federal judge to life in prison yesterday for his attempted bombing of Times Square, a crime for which he previously pleaded guilty.
Ever since Shahzad was apprehended, the media storyline has been one of bafflement.
Oh, why would a naturalized Pakistani-American citizen with an MBA and such a nice middle-class life in the U.S., which is what he had, possibly turn into such a vicious terrorist monster?
The media acted baffled about that.
Why would somebody who came here and built a life of financial prosperity want to bring violence to the United States?
But from the start, the evidence answering that question has been both clear and overwhelming.
The New York Times examined a decade's worth of emails and other private communications as Shahzad became radicalized against the United States, in which he railed with increasing fury against the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, drone attacks in Pakistan, Israeli violence against Palestinians and Muslims generally, Guantanamo and torture, and asked, quote, Can you tell me a way to save the oppressed?
And a way to fight back when rockets are fired at us and Muslim blood flows?
When he pleaded guilty in June, this is what he told the baffled and angry federal judge about why he did what he did.
Quote, if the United States does not get out of Iraq, Afghanistan, and other countries controlled by Muslims, he said, quote, we will be attacking the United States.
Adding that, quote, Americans only care about their people, but they don't care about the people elsewhere in the world when they die.
As soon as he was taken into custody on May 3rd at JFK International Airport on board a flight to Dubai, the Pakistani-born Shahzad told agents he was motivated by opposition to U.S.
policy in the Muslim world, officials said.
Quote, one of the first things he said was, quote, how would you feel if people attacked the United States?
You are attacking a sovereign Pakistan, said one law enforcement official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the interrogation reports are not public.
And then yesterday at his sentencing, this is what he said when asked if he still wanted to plead guilty.
Yes, Shehzad said.
And then he said he wanted to plead guilty and a hundred times more because he wanted the U.S.
to know that it will continue to suffer attacks if it does not leave Afghanistan and Iraq and stop drone strikes in Pakistan.
Calm but clearly angry and standing the whole time, Shehzad said the judge needed to understand his role.
Quote, I consider myself a Muslim soldier.
When Judge Cederbaum, that was the judge, the American judge presiding over his sentencing, asked whether he considered the people in Times Square to be innocent, he said they had elected the US government.
As we reviewed the other day, that was the theory of Osama Bin Laden about why it's justified to attack American civilians.
They're responsible for the government because they elected them.
And it's now, it was the same theory Hamas used to target Israeli citizens.
Well, they elected Netanyahu in the government and therefore are responsible.
And it's now the theory being used to suggest there's no such thing as a Palestinian civilian in Gaza because after all, they're the ones who elected Hamas.
After he said that, that American civilians are responsible, she asked this, quote, even children?
And this is how he responded, quote, when the drones in Pakistan hit, they don't see children.
He then said, I am part of the answer to the U.S.
killing people in the Muslim world.
We're killing the Muslim people.
Shehzad is far from unusual.
In fact, virtually every perpetrator of an attempted anti-U.S.
terrorist attack, beginning with 9-11 and even before, has cited similar rationale for why they are willing and eager, even at the cost of their own lives, To attack the United States, because the U.S., through its own actions and its enabling of Israel, constantly brings violence, constantly brings invasions, bombings, occupation, child killing, sanctions, overthrow, foreign control, and widespread death to their part of the world.
And has been doing so for many decades.
Obviously, religious fanaticism plays a role in causing people to be willing to give up their own lives.
But so constant and consistent is this claim rationale from terrorists, namely we're doing in retaliation to the U.S.
for actions the U.S.
has done in the Muslim world, that it should no longer be questioned or doubted what principally motivates these attacks.
So, I want to ask you this question.
The people in the Muslim world, and there are hundreds of millions of them, Who are watching the same things we're watching.
Israel bombing civilian infrastructure in Gaza, and they hear the Israeli defense that it's Hamas' fault, that Hamas uses civilians as human shield, but they also hear the Israeli defense minister calling the people of Gaza human animals, and announcing as a result they're going to cut off the ability for that population to get food, water, medicine, and electricity.
How do you think those people are going to feel when they look at that violence?
Do you think they're going to feel so much fear as Naftali Bennett, the former Israeli Prime Minister, said was the goal?
That they're just never going to want to hurt another hair on the head of an Israeli or an American out of fear?
Or do you think they might be erupting with so much rage and anger watching this?
That they're going to want to bring violence for the people who are, in their eyes, responsible, namely Israelis and Americans.
Isn't this going to increase the number of people wanting to bring violence to and hurt and harm American citizens?
Isn't it going to undermine American security rather than helping it?
And does that matter to you or to people who support what the U.S.
is doing in supporting Israel?
Here's Reuters today on the protest erupting across the Middle East.
Quote, protesters on Wednesday staged anti-Israeli demonstrations around the Middle East, some of them turning violent, to voice rage at an explosion that killed hundreds of Palestinians and the deadliest incident in Gaza of the Israel-Hamas war.
Now, as we pointed out yesterday and as we reaffirmed today, The Israeli government vehemently denies it was responsible.
The U.S.
said its own preliminary intelligence suggests the Israelis are telling the truth, but that's not the perception in the Muslim world.
And even if it were in this one case, there's enormous amounts of humanitarian suffering in Gaza as a result of what the Israelis and now the Americans are doing in Gaza.
Quote, in Lebanon, security forces fired tear gas and a water cannon at protesters who were throwing projectiles as a protest near the U.S.
Embassy north of Beirut turned violent footage by Lebanese broadcaster Al Jazeed showed.
Quote, America is the devil, the real devil, because it supported Israel and then all the world is blind.
You didn't see what happened yesterday, said Lebanese demonstrator Mohamed Tahir.
State-sponsored marches were held across Iran, Bakr of Hamas and Israel's sworn foe, with demonstrators carrying banners that read, quote, Death to America and Death to Israel.
Every drop of blood of Palestinians killed in this war brings the Zionist regime closer to its downfall, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi said in a televised speech.
In Iraq, about 300 supporters of Iran-backed Shiite militia groups protested near a bridge which leads to the fortified Green Zone, home to the U.S.
Embassy and other foreign missions.
Quote, Americans must know that their support to the terrorist Israel will bring them defeat and devastation, said militia member Saeed Ali Akbar, waving a Palestinian flag in Tunis.
Protesters burned Israel and American flags and demanded the expulsion of the U.S.
and foreign and French ambassadors for what they termed their unconditional support for Israel.
Just to give you a sense of what the magnitude of these protests are, here's one in Yemen from October 13th, so four or five days ago, well before the explosion at that hospital in Gaza.
Here is the magnitude of the protest against both Israel and the United States in defense of Palestine.
Now, this idea that 9-11 was motivated at least in significant part by U.S.
Now, this idea that 9-11 this idea that 9-11 was motivated, at least in significant part, by U.S. involvement in
the Muslim world, and that future involvement is likely to trigger not more security for the United States and Americans, and that future involvement is likely to trigger not more security for the United States and Americans, but more attacks against the United Ron Paul, who went into the reddest parts of Iowa and South Carolina when he ran in 2008 and 2012 and did remarkably well with this message,
was constantly warning about this and opposing U.S. intervention in that part of the world on the grounds that it was jeopardizing was constantly warning about this and opposing U.S. intervention in that part of the world on the grounds that it was jeopardizing the security of Americans and that wasn't worth it to help Israel since the government of the Here's what Ron Paul said in Politico, there you see the headline, Ron Paul, the U.S.
triggered September 11.
This is from 2013, quote, Ron Paul posted a message on Facebook on Wednesday calling the September 11 terrorist attacks, quote, blowback.
For decades of U.S.
intervention in the Middle East.
Quote, we're supposed to believe that the perpetrators of 9-11 hated us for our freedom and our goodness?
Paul wrote on the 12th anniversary of the attacks, quote, in fact, that crime was blowback for the decades of U.S.
intervention in the Middle East.
And the last thing we needed was the government's response.
More wars, a stepped up police and surveillance state, and drones.
Here in The Guardian from November 24, 2002, there was a letter Osama bin Laden wrote to the American people and he basically said, why are we fighting you?
And the answer was not, we hate you for our freedoms.
The answer was all the attacks that the United States has brought to the Muslim world.
In The Guardian in 2012, in September, when I was a reporter for The Guardian, I wrote about a study released by a combination of Stanford and the New York University study on terrorism.
And it talked about how the drones that President Obama was unleashing in multiple Muslim countries, constantly killing innocent people,
Was significantly increasing the terror threat faced by the United States on the obvious ground that the more people we kill, the more innocent people we kill in the parts of the world where Arabs and Muslims are, obviously the human instinct is to then want to bring violence back to the United States.
The more we interfere in that region, the more wars we wage in that region.
The more we interfere there.
The more people who consider that region sacred for religious reasons or simply because that's their home and they get infuriated seeing civilians dying at the hands of the United States want to bring more violence to the United States.
I want to ask two questions before we get to Breonna Joy Gray very briefly of those of you who do support the United States involvement in this war fully fledged as a participant on Israel's side.
How can it be differentiated?
What is the distinction that you can draw between opposing US support for Ukraine in its war against Russia, justified in the ground that Ukraine is an important ally of the United States and we should stand by our allies?
How is it possible to oppose that as many people on the right do, but then vehemently support the Biden administration's similar decision to offer unlimited and unconditional support of all kinds for the Israeli war against the Palestinians.
How is that from a MAGAR perspective or an America First perspective?
How are those different?
How does it serve America First To stand by the Israelis as they cut off humanitarian aid to the people of Gaza while the entire Muslim world watches with increasing levels of anger and rage.
And then the second question I have is, how does it enhance or increase the security of the American people in the United States to have our government so flamboyantly, so openly, so emphatically
Rushing to Israel for the President to stand by the side of Benjamin Netanyahu and take Israel's side in every single case while at the same time we do so at the UN, making clear that Israel's war is our war and that whatever rage people are feeling toward Israel should also be directed at the United States.
How does that increase the security of Americans?
Is Hamas a threat to the American people?
Doesn't it seem more plausible?
That by attaching ourselves to the rage being generated, we're ensuring that Americans in the United States all over the world are now going to be more vulnerable to attacks and to violent threat as a result of the anger that our interference in this war is producing.
I'm genuinely interested In hearing answers to either of those two questions, if people want to provide them in the chat or in the comment section or in the after show that we do tomorrow night on Thursday, I would honestly love to hear it.
I've been asking that question for a long time, both questions, and I've yet to hear an answer.
But whatever else is true, whatever your views are on this war, I hope we can agree That it is urgent we allow open debate of those questions in the United States.
That when our country involves itself in a new war, it's not only tolerable, but urgent and necessary for everybody, but especially journalists, to be able to ask those questions I just asked, and to be critical of the United States if they want to be.
And that no interests are served by suppressing dissent and demonizing it and getting people fired for asking those questions.
I hope that is a value around which we can unify.
And our guest tonight in the next segment, Brianna Joy Gray, is somebody who is currently being targeted with threats to her job because she's done her job, one of the few people in the media who has.
And we're going to talk about that with her, as well as her general views on this war, as well as the chaos currently engulfing the House as a result of their failure to select a Speaker of the House.
And we'll have Breonna back with us in just a second.
All right, Brianna Joy Gray, as I indicated at the top, is the host of the morning show Rising on The Hill.
She is also the host of her own podcast, the Bad Faith Podcast.
She's my former colleague at The Intercept.
She's a friend of mine.
She's the former press secretary for the 2020 presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders, and she's now the target of a truly slimy encounter.
Howard Lee firing campaign on the part of our colleagues for the coverage of Israel.
Brianna, welcome back to the show.
We are always delighted to have you.
Thanks, Glenn.
It's such a pleasure always.
Yeah, for me as well.
So let's just dive right into this.
Obviously, we asked you on because we always want you on, but in particular because of this report that some of your own colleagues hiding behind anonymity are trying to get you fired for your coverage.
And I want to delve into the specifics of that before I do.
Let's talk about this coverage that has angered people inside the company.
What has been the reporting you've done and the perspective you've offered on the Hamas attack on Saturday, the Israeli response in Gaza since then, and now the United States?
Full-fledged, full-throated support for the Israeli war effort.
Yeah, I mean, and on some level I feel like I don't, I shouldn't even deserve that much credit because it shouldn't be that abnormal, shouldn't be that unusual, shouldn't be considered that brave to say obvious, honest things about what almost every humanitarian group has said about the nature of Israel being an apartheid state and the Palestinians being under occupation.
However, if you want to bring that context into the conversation, much the same way... Brianna, can I just interrupt you there just to interject quickly because I actually just made this point.
It's not only human rights groups saying that Israel has become apartheid state.
Some of the most senior Israeli security officials, including just last month, Netanyahu's choice to lead the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, said that apartheid is now the accurate term to describe the Israeli treatment of Palestinians and the Israeli population.
The former Israeli Prime Minister and Defense Minister Ehud Barak warned 12 years ago that Israel was going to fall into an apartheid position if it didn't forge a two-state solution with the Palestinians, something that they failed to do.
Although you're not allowed to say in the United States, in Israel the debate is much more open and vibrant and senior Israeli leaders are saying what you said, which is that Israel is an apartheid state.
Nelson Mandela said it.
South African leaders said it.
It is a view expressed and can be expressed in every country, including Israel, just not in the United States.
Yeah, and in fact, Katie Halper did a really amazing Radar, which is what we call our kind of monologues on Rising, about this very subject, and cited any number of Israeli officials, as you just did, who have made this exact same point, and that was the monologue that preceded her Relationship with the Hill ending.
Now, I've been very open and vocal about how I disagree with that decision.
The Hill maintains that it wasn't a content-based decision, that they wanted to have that kind of a conversation happening in a more of a both sides arrangement.
But Katie offered, and she's talked about this herself, you know, she offered to have, you know, Rerecord the monologue to have it where in a situation where she could go back and forth with Robbie about it, to have it paired with another person's monologue.
And none of that seemed to be enough.
So many people believe that she was, you know, let go is not the right word, but the relationship was terminated with a hill with her overseeing exactly that, which should not be controversial and which should be obvious.
But we all know that that's not the case.
Right.
We all know that, frankly, that was just last year, about a year ago that that happened to Katie.
That even felt like a very different climate in terms of being able to simply say the words apartheid state in Israel in the same sentence than today.
So if there is a silver lining of what has happened over the last 10 days, I do think it has normalized very open conversations about that.
I'm feeling it and I'm experiencing it and I am being supported currently by the rising team at The Hill, but apparently not everybody feels the same way and there's someone, you know, anonymous, but the indications are from the article that they are on the print journalism side of The Hill who is concerned about, this is what they said in the article, concerned about their ability to talk to lawmakers because of things I am saying that are trying to center the core
I think it's important to note that this issue is a very polarizing issue and always has been in the United States.
There are a lot of people in the United States, Americans, who have a great deal of affinity for Israel.
Many seem to get as passionate about Israel as they do about debates regarding the United States.
Obviously, some of the reason is because there are Jewish Americans who are conditioned and taught since birth to treat and view Israel as something sacred.
Katie Halper is a Jewish journalist who is critical of Israel.
There are a lot of Jewish journalists, including myself, who are as well.
But I think that's one of the reasons you have an evangelical component in the United States that views Israel in theological terms, and it's important they consolidate control over all of those parts of Israel so that Jesus can return in the rapture.
And when he does, he's going to vanquish all Jews to hell, but no one seems to care as long as they're on the side of Israel for the moment, for whatever motives that benefits Israel.
And then you have kind of the national security complex that just sees Israel as an important military partner.
So I think it's worth noting that these issues are inflammatory, but I just want to get an understanding of what your views are And it seems like a kind of almost McCarthyite interrogation.
I want to make clear, I don't think you're required to have any specific views in order to have the free reign to kind of inquire about them.
But what has been your view on the Hamas attack?
And then what has been your view about the U.S.
decision to support Israel in such an open way?
I think the killing of civilians is not at all hard to condemn, right?
But the line that seems to have really Frustrated, whoever it was that was riding me out, was not me not condemning the killing of civilians on October 7th.
Although I think that the article seems to insinuate that I showed disinterest in the tragedy, I think I said on air shortly after it happened, I would be very happy to sit here for 45 minutes and do multiple segments going through the names of all of the people that were killed and what their families have been saying and Allowing them to have expressions of grief because I really do feel like we don't always hold space for that kind of, you know, honoring of the dead.
But that is not going to be used.
Like the idea that there is only time for mourning in this moment, I don't think should be used as a cudgel to avoid very serious questions about what should the proportionality of Israel's response be and why something like this happens.
Whether or not Israel's response is going to actually lead to ending Hamas, as they were sort of claiming or alluding to at first, that if they killed, dropped enough bombs, what was it, 6,000 bombs, more bombs than had been dropped in a year of the war in Afghanistan, dropped in the space of a week, whether any of that was actually tailored to getting to what Israel's objectives are, which are ending Hamas,
Or whether they're more likely tailored to committing a kind of genocide and ethnic cleansing, especially once we got the news that they were trying to evacuate half the population, a million people, into the southern part of the country in preparation for a land invasion.
So me raising questions about The proportionality of response got met with, well, does Israel have a right to defend itself?
And I think that what we've seen is that that particular line does a lot of rhetorical work.
It enables people to skip past a question about what it means to defend oneself.
Is it defending oneself when you are the one occupying a population of people over whom you control the flow of water, the flow of electricity, freedom of movement, all of the conditions which Get Israel described as an apartheid state in the first place.
And then at that point, if you're, what is your ultimate goal?
What is the ultimate goal?
And if the goal, if you're, if you're parsing this out and you're realizing that what Israel has said so many times and in so many words, which is that they want to raise the field, they want to cull the herd as it were and periodically bomb and lower the population of Palestine through outright Killing.
I don't know how else to characterize it.
Then I think that we don't have time to sit around and have mourning.
We need to have a conversation about whether or not America and our resources are being used to facilitate a sort of genocide or ethnic cleansing.
That is very spicy, I understand.
Honestly, I'm much less hesitant to talk about it today than I was a week ago, because honestly, to get any words out about this, you really got to do battle.
And after having these kind of really heated conversations with my co-host over the course of the week over and over and over again and really getting to the root of this issue.
Another root issue that people don't really want to talk about is whether or not you can ever end these apartheid conditions in a world where you have established a state where your rights and interests as a citizen are contingent on your religious ideology.
You know, that is the spiciest of questions.
And again, I think really one that really goes to the root of whether or not this conflict is ever going to be resolved.
Well, I think, and the spicier questions are, and especially the more consequential they are, including for Americans, The more imperative it is to defend the right of people to have open discussion, even if you don't agree with those people, this is a basic value around which we've been unifying.
Now, I want to point out, for those of the people who are watching who don't know, that the nature of your show, of Rising, is that it is a debate show.
You don't sit there by yourself and just opine.
The idea is you are sort of a representative of the left, broadly speaking, and then you have a co-host, Robbie Suave, who's been part of the libertarian right.
He writes for Reason.
And you two have had some very contentious debates on many topics, including this one, where exactly the sort of thing that you would want happening, namely two people with different views on this incredibly consequential policy decision of the U.S.
government, are having very spirited debates about what is the right way of thinking about this.
So it's exactly the kind of journalistic accountability and debates that I think we want to be encouraging.
Now, one of the reasons why I wanted to focus on your case is because you are far from alone.
We've been reporting over the last 10 days about the large number of journalists, of students, of people who work in various professions who have been targeted, often by the American right, with the sort of censorship and cancellation campaigns that they have spent many years denouncing.
And of course, there's the hypocrisy on the other side, which is a lot of people on the left and American liberals have been cheering that kind of censorship regime, urging its implementation and expansion, who now suddenly find themselves shocked or angry that it has been directed against them and their allies, even though people like me have been warning for a long time that it's inevitable That that will happen.
So let's just take a look at the Daily Beast article that we've been mentioning and exactly what it is that happened.
First of all, the issue got called to my attention, at least, by your tweet in which you said, quote, I've been incredibly proud of my coverage of Israeli-Palestine on the Hill, and I'm glad to have an opportunity to represent a view that is too frequently erased from corporate news.
Also, all my quotes in this article are based.
Meaning the ones that they're citing as the problematic quotes.
Now, here's the Daily News article itself.
The headline is there on the screen.
It says, Israel-Hamas conflict spills over in newsroom shadow matches.
And the idea here is that it's not just at your outlet, but in many outlets.
Any kind of dissent from the Israel-U.S.
line is creating rage and anger, and there's been reporting along this.
But as far as your situation, It says the following, quote, while anchors at the self-described centrist cable news channel News Nation blast MSNBC for supposedly, quote, pandering to the far left in its coverage of the bloody Gaza conflict, the network's corporate cousin faces its own internal drama over a host's strident criticism of Israel following the Hamas terror attacks.
Breonna Joy Gray, co-host of the OutHill's online morning show, Rising, has drawn fire from staffers of the Beltway political outlet for what some describe as her, quote, pro-Hamas and, quote, fringe commentary.
During recent broadcast, she has gotten into extremely heated and at times profane arguments, profane arguments, with Libertarian co-host Robbie Suab over Suab's belief that the, quote, American left, namely Black Lives Matter and DSA, is backing Hamas.
Besides getting into literal shouting matches with her co-star, the former Bernie Sanders press secretary has faced internal criticism for, as One Hill newsroom source put it, seemingly, quote, finding ways to justify Hamas's actions.
Her comments about Israel's longstanding tensions with Palestine raised some eyebrows.
Quote, so few of our conversations get to what it means to have a Jewish state, what it means to have a belief that you cannot be safe but for a demographically rigged situation like that, she stated on the episode on Thursday.
Adding, she obviously understands the historical conditions that make people feel that way.
Some Hill reporters expressed concerns over Gray's, quote, reckless commentary, worrying that her status as co-host of their morning show would make their job talking to lawmakers in Washington harder.
Quote, where is our leadership?
Clearly no one from Nextar, which is the corporate parent of the show, is paying attention, one source said.
There is no way they would be okay with this.
In fact, the program has been a source of controversy and friction at the outset for some time and has seen a fair share of its hosts leave abruptly.
Gray's commentary has yet to be noticed by NewsNation, which is also owned by Nextar.
And then they say this, the channel has taken on a largely pro-Israel stance in its reporting of the conflict, similar to the rest of conservative and mainstream media, leading it to take swings at MSNBC for its, quote, victim and blaming of Israel, and specifically taking aim at Muslim American hosts.
Now, honestly, I just have to say, and I'm interested in your view, is I honestly can't think of anything more reprehensible and slimy than going to the media, working at a media outlet and encouraging, begging corporate boxes to pay attention and to fire a journalist for expressing views that you dislike begging corporate boxes to pay attention and to fire a journalist for expressing views that you dislike and to make it worse, they don't even have the courage They're doing it anonymously, and of course, the Daily Beast airs that.
So I want to know what you think of that, but also if you agree with what the Daily Beast says, which is that almost the entire mainstream media is on the side of conservative media in terms of taking a pro-Israeli view, and if so, what does that mean about the importance to allow you to do the kinds of things that you're doing?
Exactly, you told him himself.
Of course it's true that most of the mainstream American media, including The self-described centrist channel over at News Nation that's owned by the same parent company Nexstar as The Hill, do take a pro-Israel response.
Every statement made by anybody in the Biden administration and also all of the establishment Republicans, which is the overwhelming bulk of the Republican Party, preface every comment about Israel with, it has an unqualified right to defend itself without any proportionality.
That's the subtext of that.
In pledging unlimited aid, Biden just asked for, what was, $100 billion in aid, as a combined Ukraine and Israel aid package, but still with 100 million, and the extreme difference between a million and a billion cannot be fully comprehended by the and the extreme difference between a million and a billion cannot be A million just, a hundred million just for humanitarian, the rest for weapons and military aid.
So of course, of course that's true.
And of course that's exactly why a show like Rising is so important, where we have a left chair and a right chair, and every single day we have to justify our beliefs to each other and face the pushback that we get from an intelligent co-host.
And I should say that Robbie and the Hill team, The Rising team has been incredibly supportive.
We're all very frustrated by this.
Robbie tweeted out how much he disagrees with this, and we all really value and want to protect the show and what it is able to do.
And my understanding is that some of the higher-ups are also very supportive and have defended our show against some pushback from the Hill.
That being said, the commentary in the article is so funny in part because, and again, I really like Robbie and I'm not trying to throw him under the bus at all, but when they call it like a profane, a profanity-laden This insinuation is the yelling of the profanity comes from me.
God bless Robbie.
He doesn't do this often.
But the reason that clip went viral is because he started saying the F word and hollering at me in the middle of the segment.
And with a very elevated tone.
Like I've never, I didn't even know Robbie was capable of that level of anger.
I've known him for a long time.
I've seen him for a long time.
You work by his side.
But you're right.
You sat there in this extremely calm way, like you were kind of drowning in Valium, purposely trying to keep this very calm demeanor.
And you're right.
The implication is that you're some kind of vulgarity-spewing radical going on these rampages.
And if people watch the clip, they will see that, in fact, the exact opposite is true.
Now, Brianne, I wanted to ask you, because this is not the first time this happened.
The journalist who kind of led this reporting, if you want to call it that.
Justin Bargona is sort of this like liberal activist, this resistance liberal.
He hates anyone who's critical of the Democratic Party, whether from the right or the left.
He's just like a standard DNC activist.
And he published a very similar article last year when Kim Iverson, who now has her own show on Rumble, was also at Rising.
And it was the exact same thing here.
Let's put this headline on the screen.
The headline was, Conspiracy Theorist Host Sparks Revolt at DC Insider Rag.
Now, I think it's kind of funny that the Daily Beast would refer to anyone else as a rag.
But the article is basically doing exactly the same thing, saying that people inside the Hill, again, totally anonymous, are angry and worried that they're allowing someone like Kim Iverson to have her own show on the Hill when she's nothing but a fringe conspiracy theorist offering all these views on COVID.
They accused her of being pro-Kremlin because of her opposition to the U.S.
involvement in the war in Ukraine.
What does this say to you about the sort of broader climate that our politics and our journalism now confronts.
There has been a lot of criticism, largely from people like me and others, about the American left or the American liberals.
There's a lot of exceptions, but a lot of support for this idea that if you deviate with your views, you should be fired and de-platformed, censored from big tech.
How have you viewed those critiques that have been offered against the left or American liberalism and how severe do you think it is now becoming in light of this new war?
I mean, honestly, the number of people who've been actually principled about this is so small that I hesitate to Assign it right versus left.
I mean, honestly, Glenn, it's like you, Michael Schellenberger has been very consistent on this in the wake of the events of October 7th.
Um, there are people, I'm like struggling even to come up with more names.
I mean, there are, my, my co-host is consistent.
Yeah.
And there's been some people on the right.
I don't know if you saw like Vivek Ramaswamy spoke out against this new cancel culture from the right.
Candace Owen attacked Megan Kelly for supporting it as well.
There have been some, yeah.
They did, although I do think on some other issues outside of this particular cancel culture.
So, for instance, I mean, if we're talking more broadly about, you know, kind of authoritarianism and broader freedoms, I do have some concerns with Vivek Ramaswamy wanting to make it harder for people to vote, for example, by raising the voting age.
And so I'm a little less hesitant to give him freedom credit for being a kind of like a big freedom guy.
It seems Kind of personal.
And I also do wonder if as a Harvard grad, I mean I admit to this too, but if as a Harvard grad that he saw how hard the hammer was coming down on students for their club affiliations, even if they didn't even personally subscribe to the content of the letters that were under such scrutiny, and realized that he himself had been members of groups at Harvard that probably would have gotten a lot of flag for being
More conservative or libertarian or whatever, and was able to really put himself in the shoes of the protesters in that situation in a way that he might not have in some other situations.
But regardless of his motives, I was very pleased to see that he and Candace Owens were consistent on that, and Megyn Kelly wasn't.
Megyn Kelly, I've seen her be consistent in certain other issues, and really... So it's all over the place, and humans are flawed, and I'm sure that I've had my moments as well, but I...
I sometimes do think that the urge to say, well, most people are on the one side or the other.
This happens a lot in the context of the anti-war conversation.
The only anti-war movement exists on the right.
I mean, that can kind of be true, but it doesn't end up misleading the public as to how sincere the anti-war movement is, quote unquote, on the right, as opposed to independent of our corporate duopoly.
Now that you're looking around and seeing all of these people who were so critical of the war in Ukraine and endless funding for the war in Ukraine, as they should have been in my view, but who are champing at the bit to send money to Israel.
Even people like RFK Jr., who I think a lot of folks on both the right and the left and independents were really excited about.
I think the first cracks in his armor were when he was on your show, and you did such a good job trying to make him understand the conflict.
You know, he said he was going to learn.
He said he was going to think about it and get some more advice.
But he just really doubled, tripled and quadrupled down in the weeks and months after that.
And it is now separated with his campaign manager, Denis Kucinich, who has been, I think, in my subjective view, really stridently on the right side of the Israel-Palestine issue for his entire career, taking some really hard stands 10, 20 years ago.
It was especially hard to make these kinds of arguments.
And I do wonder if some of that break there is partly because His view on this is indefensible in the wake of the events of October 7th, the Hamas attack.
So all that is to say, like, I hope this crystallizes what we should really be focused on, the power dynamics here.
Like, is there a difference between a bunch of students at a college lobbying for a speaker not to speak and people who fund the college to the tune of millions of dollars?
I think it's the Wexlers who just withdrew a bunch of their funding from Harvard, using that real financial leverage to have control over the speech rights of students at the college.
Or a law firm like Davis Polk saying, We're not going to hire people from these clubs.
Or the professor, I don't know if you saw this, there was a professor, I think at a West Coast school, who wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal saying, don't hire anybody from my classroom.
Don't hire any of my students.
They're anti-Semites.
Yeah, it is remarkable.
One of the things that struck me, I use this example, Dave Rubin built his entire career as a popular right-wing commentator and analyst on opposition to cancel culture and censorship, and when the French government, the nation of France, announced a nationwide ban on any pro-Palestinian protests, At the same time, you're still allowed to have pro-Israel protests.
So you're allowed to have a protest to support the French government's foreign policy because they support Israel.
Well, you're not allowed to, and you're even allowed to call for the complete destruction of Gaza.
What you're not allowed to do is have a protest opposing the French government's policy, which is the definition of tyranny, to only allow protest and speech in support of the government's policy.
Dave Rubin came out and said, and obviously has a huge affinity for Israel, a lot of support for Israel, and said, maybe the West can be saved after all.
So I guess it turns out that some on the right now think the way to save the West is by empowering French officials.
to ban any political dissent that people like Dave Rubin dislike or that the French government itself dislikes.
Let me just ask you a little bit to touch, to conclude with a couple questions about domestic policy, but as it relates to what we're talking about here, one of the things that I've noticed is there have been an escalation of criticism, there's been an escalation of criticism on the part of, let's say, the liberal left, By which I kind of distinguish it from the more radical left that never supports the DNC, but the kind of liberal left that criticized the Democrats from the left but still supports them on two issues.
One is the fact that Biden has announced that he is going to build and expand Trump's wall, the wall that we were told was a monument to white nationalism and white supremacy and even Nazism, and now Biden Who endorsed that is saying we're going to expand this wall.
We're going to build this wall.
And now, of course, as well on Biden's support for the Israeli attack on Gaza, which a lot of people on the left oppose.
The problem as I see it, and I'm interested in your view on this, is that most of these people have attacked anyone who suggests, including you, that maybe we shouldn't
Give our votes away without some concessions in return and maybe people like AOC and Bernie coming out before a single vote is cast before they even know who's running and saying we have to support Joe Biden no matter what and this is the prevailing view on the sort of soft American left that we vote blue no matter what because at the end of the day no matter what Biden does it's still better than the orange Hitler figure waiting in the wings Those people, and it's rational, are going to be completely ignored by Joe Biden.
Why would Joe Biden care about the critiques and the views of people who have already offered their unconditional submission to Joe Biden, who he knows have already promised, we're going to vote for you no matter what you do.
What do you think of that political dynamic and the fact that they have made themselves so impotent through this posture of subservience?
Impotence is right.
That's exactly the word.
If you want to be completely politically irrelevant, pledge your vote to someone a year and a half before an election and rest on your laurels.
I mean, I was actually kind of surprised pleasantly today.
I saw Waleed Shaheed, who is I think was formerly was associated with Justice Dems.
Maybe he still is.
But like a left person who I think is still committed to working within the context of the Democratic Party, I think in the group that you're describing here.
Tweet, not an opinion, but just an observation, that there are a lot of people, especially Muslim Americans and other brown people, who are going to look at this particular moment in Biden's administration and say, I can't vote for this.
This is going to be the thing that makes people want to stay home or vote for someone like Cornel West.
And even acknowledging that without saying, but they shouldn't and but Trump and be careful about the alternative does suggest to me that there's a kind of a shift.
Which I'm happy about, but it is also too little too late.
I mean, we saw the rage and indignation out of Rashida Tlaib finally doing a tweet that at the bare minimum, like, added the president, like, tagged the president in the tweet, which, yeah, low bar, I hate this world we live in, but that was a significant shift From what she's done before in the wake of the hospital bombing, which she believed at the time was done by IDF.
Now the facts are kind of up in the air.
We'll see what ends up happening.
But she clearly was galvanized.
It was a very personal issue to her.
She's obviously Palestinian American, was clearly galvanized by this in a way that other issues haven't galvanized her.
But as much as she's willing to say Biden, absolutely not very directly.
No one's willing to say, I'm not going to vote for you, I'm going to work against you, I'm going to endorse one of these other third party candidates that have emerged, unless you change your policy.
And it is very frustrating.
It's almost more frustrating to see how much something obviously matters to someone, how deeply personal it is to someone like Rashida Tlaib.
Still not have a kind of response that has any likelihood of changing the administration's mind.
Because at a certain point, you have to be willing to play the game of chicken if you ever want to be noticed politically.
At a certain point, you have to be willing to say and to make the pitch to the public.
But it is incumbent on me, politician, to court my vote and to the extent that he loses it is his fault and his negligence, as opposed to incumbent on me as a voter who has some weird responsibility to support the Democratic Party.
People have to be willing to say my investment is not in the Democratic Party.
My investment is in all these populist issues that majorities of Americans agree with.
Majorities of Americans want to cut the military budget.
Majorities of Americans want to have a universal healthcare system, including 49% of Republicans and 88% of Democrats.
Majorities of Americans want common sense gun reform.
Majorities of Americans want a minimum wage raise.
Majorities of Americans stand with all of these workers on strikes.
Did you see Cramer having an existential crisis on his show last week because he saw a poll showing that only like a single digit number of Americans actually sided with the bosses over the UAW strike.
And he was like, I'm so confused.
I thought people would look at their car and say, I like my car and I think the CEO should make money because they made me such a nice product.
They're in an existential crisis over it because they don't get it, but the populists are supposed to get it.
And the populists are supposed to have leadership that is able to make the case that government and politicians are failing by not appealing to the popular will.
Not people who are willing to say, oh, you're going to make Trump president again unless you do the Democratic Party's bidding.
Right.
It is interesting and I just want to ask you one last question because Michael Tracy's on the line and he gets very crabby and very like annoying and annoyed if he has to wait too long and by the time he's done he just has like this like scowl on his face and nobody can handle it.
So I'd rather talk to you but I want to make sure that Michael arrives with at least like our stable attitude.
But let me just ask you before I let you go along those lines.
And you know, I do think you're seeing actually, by the way, some of these newer Republicans, J.D.
Banz, went to the picket line to support a lot of those UAW workers, which would have been unheard of even a few years ago for Republican parties.
Did he go to the picket line or did he do what Trump did?
No, no.
He went to the picket line.
He saw Marcy Kaptur there.
She asked him, oh, is this the first time you've been at a picket line or been at this picket line?
He said yes.
And she was like, welcome.
But he did.
And you've seen a little bit of rhetoric.
More so than before from people like Josh Hawley.
But you can question how sincere it is, but clearly people, they're looking at those polls and understand that that is part of the populist sentiment.
But the last thing I wanted to ask you, Bri, is about this whole thing with the Republicans incapable of finding a House Speaker.
Because I think, if I remember correctly, the last time you were on my show, it was right after Matt Gaetz had led this group of defiant Republicans who refused to give Kevin McCarthy the votes he needed until the 15th ballot.
They kind of humiliated him.
And they didn't just humiliate him, they extracted a series of concessions that really make a difference in terms of the ability of individual House members to control or have some power and say over how the House functions because under Paul Ryan and Nancy Pelosi it was complete, it was like a dictatorship in the House.
And the only reason he was able to do that was because he was willing to do what Democrats won't do and say, "No, you're not getting my vote until I get a concession." And they did the same thing when they removed Kevin McCarthy.
And everybody, even people in the media who hate Kevin McCarthy, acted like, oh, having Kevin McCarthy as speaker is so crucial to the stability of American democracy.
But the people who were in the House, at least eight of them, had enough objections to what House Republican leaders were doing, like doing deals with Democrats to allow funding for the Ukraine war, even though a majority of the Republican caucus didn't want it.
And now they're kind of taking some time to find a speaker who's willing to make concessions.
How do you contrast that with what the Democratic Party is doing, which is, you know, as AOC boasts every day, she called it a well-oiled machine, there's almost no dissent at all within the Democratic Party, no disruption, they all just march in line.
Do you kind of feel a little bit of jealousy watching the populist members of the Republican Party being willing to use their power and defy party leadership to get what they want?
A little bit.
Glenn, you are baiting me!
That's what I'm here for!
I'm enormously jealous.
I'm enormously jealous because look, as anyone who knows me knows, I was a very strong advocate of Democrats doing this exact same thing back in 2001, where the slim House majority is leaning in the Democrat direction.
21 you mean? 2021?
In 2021, it enabled them to do the exact same thing.
So imagine if every time, every time I turn on the TV or look at a news clip and they say, this is the first time that we've ever been without a Speaker of the House.
It's unprecedented.
It's historical.
I think to myself, God, if only it had been Nancy Pelosi.
The squad.
One of the biggest lies that have been perpetrated on the American public and the left specifically is the idea that calling these people a squad meant they were going to ever vote as a bloc and exercise their power.
They could have held up Biden's entire government the same way that Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin did, I would argue, for evil.
They could have held it up to, again, deliver on these populist promises, at the very least to force Joe Biden to follow through with his own campaign promises, like raising the minimum wage, not disaggregating the $15 minimum wage from the COVID relief, must pass COVID relief bill, or not bifurcating bill back better, or actually canceling student debt, or having a more meaningful movement on some of these health care reforms.
Literally, or for some of these procedural rules that Matt Gaetz is asking for that prevent Democrats from being able to Say publicly that they support things that they know are popular in their districts, but vote them down because they're never single-issue bills.
Or for someone like Nancy Pelosi to never bring an enormously popular policy, like preventing members of Congress from insider trading, from simply being able to kill it by never bringing it to the floor for a vote.
Again, never bringing something like Medicare for All to the floor for a vote and allowing all these Democrats to sit around acting like they care about people when they don't.
So yes, I'm enormously jealous, and I also think that Well, I differ strongly politically from Matt Gaetz.
He has identified a number of issues that I think are universally good things that he's fighting for.
He's been talking a lot about corruption.
He was booed, as I'm sure you remember, by his own caucus for giving a speech on the floor about how corrupt and bought and paid for members of Congress are, and he was completely right about that.
Now, I think he and others need to also be transparent about their own own financing, but never mind that.
And he's been advocating for things like getting single issue floorboats, which are going to create a kind of transparency about who stands for what in Congress.
So I support it.
I support it.
Yeah.
I mean, it's it's I mean, it's you know, it's just such basic.
You know, people understand this intuitively, you don't have to study this.
Like if you're negotiating a contract and you basically announce ahead of time, "Look, I just want you to know there's no way I'm going to walk away from this contract.
No matter what you say or do, no matter how many concessions you make or don't make, I'm going to sign the contract in the end." You have lost all your leverage.
Like, why would they ever make a concession when they know you're not going to walk away?
And that is the posture of the Democratic Party.
It's pathetic and subservient.
And I think the fact that they now have a counterexample of what people really do when they are serious about using the power makes it even more flagrant.
Well, Brie, I'm sorry that you have these... The worst part of it is how Hakeem Jeffries, Democratic minority leader, Has made his entire career about ostracizing the squad, getting DMFI, the AIPAC PAC, to target them and get them out of office.
And how now they're all holding hands and singing hallelujah about how they'll support dear leader Hakeem to the ends of the earth.
That is perhaps the most pathetic part of all of this.
And there is reporting now about him mobilizing those exact forces to target all the folks that are advocating for Palestinian rights right now.
And so it's a very much a reaping, sowing situation.
Yeah, even if you leave all the considerations of politics aside and how to wield power, just on a basic level of human dignity, they just sacrifice their own dignity.
Why would you march behind and support and cheer for a person who would be clear that destroying your political career and getting you out of Congress is one of his top priorities because he thinks your ideology is rancid?
And then you turn around and repay that.
By saying, oh, we're so thrilled and grateful that Hakeem Jeffries, the person who wants to destroy our political career, is the first ever African American speaker because it's so historic.
I mean, I get uncomfortable watching these people just sacrifice their dignity at the altar of whatever it is that they think.
They're serving.
Well, I gotta let you go, Bree, because, Michael, I can just feel in my bones that he's getting all fidgety.
I'm sorry you have these cowardly colleagues trying to get you fired, but I'm glad to hear that people, your colleagues, even your bosses, seem to be standing by your side.
Obviously, that value of independent and editorial freedom is crucial.
As you know, we're going to continue to support it as well.
Lots of people have your back, so I'm glad you I'm glad I know that you're going to continue to say exactly what you've been saying without fear.
That's what makes you such an important voice, and I'm thrilled to have you back on our show.
Thank you.
I really appreciate you, Glenn.
Have a great evening, Bri.
All right, so we do have the much aforementioned Michael Tracy, who is an independent journalist.
He's a friend of the show.
He's a roving reporter who, despite people often mocking him for not doing real reporting, in fact, is found, more than almost anyone I know in the media, constantly traveling around to actual events so he can see for himself what's taking place there and then describe it to us, which is, for me, classic reporting.
He's also a little bit annoying, and that's the price we have to pay to get his wisdom.
Michael, thank you so much for taking the time to join us.
I hope you're not too irritated by the time you had to wait, but I promise it'll be worth it.
No, I spent about 90 minutes reading the Torah to pass the time.
All right, I know you're a dedicated adherent to that dogma.
Now, I want to ask you about the substance of this war, like I did with Brianna, but before I do, I just want to show you some examples of what we have been, with increasing frustration, denouncing as this kind of right-wing cancel culture and censorship of the exact kind that they've spent many years mocking.
Now, some of them Yeah, it's a tit for tat.
So we have no principles.
this as, oh, we're not doing this earnestly.
We're only doing it because this is the system the left created and have weaponized against the right, and we're just trying now to give them a taste of their own.
Yeah, it's a tit for tat.
So we have no principles, and it's all about just constantly mutually assured destruction.
Right, but at least in that instance, there's some candor to it, and I do think you can make a case.
I don't want to argue with you about this, but I think you can make the case that if someone has succeeded in creating a system where they impose it on you, turning it back on them and insisting they be subjected to it is at least more than a more viable than earnestly invoking the very tactics that you've insisted for so long have been eroding basic freedoms without any acknowledgement of this contradiction.
Let me just show you a couple of examples to illustrate the climate that has arisen.
Here is Ryan Fournier, who is a young activist who has become quite popular.
As a Trump supporter, and this is what he tweeted today, quote, Rashida Tlaib made some nasty comments today about Israel and its people.
I fully support her expulsion from Congress.
Do you?
So apparently, Michael, you can get elected to the Congress.
The people of your district reelect you.
And then if you make comments seem nasty, not about Americans and the United States, but about a foreign country, You apparently should be expelled from Congress.
Let me just show you one other example because this one is remarkable.
I doubt he would suggest expulsion if she said something nasty about America.
I think it's only really Israel that prompts him to recommend that severe of a sanction.
Right, because the American right has been saying all sorts of things about the deep state and Evil people in the U.S.
media.
Trump called the American media enemies of the people.
That's the sort of thing, if you really think are nasty comments about a country you would think would warrant expulsion, criticizing the United States, not this foreign country in Israel, which obviously members of Congress have the absolute right to do.
Here is Jeremy Frankel, who is a kind of neo-con, a hard supporter of Israel.
And I want to show you what he said in a second, but before I do, here's Congressman Dan Crenshaw, who embraced what Jeremy Frankel was saying.
Jeremy Frankel was talking about a conference that is being held in the Hilton Hotel.
I'm just laughing at the all caps.
Yeah, so there's this conference being held at the Hilton Hotel on the part of people who Jeremy Franklin called Jew haters, including Rashida Tlaib, Marc Lamont Hill, the Al Jazeera host who used to be at CNN, Linda Sarsour, and Omar Bergati, who are kind of pro-Palestinian activists.
And Dan Crenshaw, a congressman from Texas, said Hilton should cancel this event immediately.
And the tweet that he Embraced from this, Jeremy Frankel said, quote, for anyone in the Texas media, Hilton Hotels will be hosting a conference for Hamas supporters in Houston on 27th to 29th of October.
Organizer is the U.S.
Campaign for Palestinian Rights.
Notoriously proud Jew haters Rashida Tlaib, Linda Saucer, Marc Lamont Hill, and Omar Barghouti are among the featured hate-mongering speakers.
The conference will foment even more anti-Semitism in the U.S.
Now, leave aside the constant attempt suggests that anyone criticizing Israel is pro-Hamas or anti-Semitic.
It's the same bullshit tactic that the left uses.
Anyone who disagrees with the left is a racist or a transphobe.
It was a thing used after 9/11 to say anyone questioning U.S. policy is pro-terrorist.
But this is what he goes on to- Or even anybody who questions Ukraine policy is pro-Putin.
I mean these people on the right who have made those critiques recently and have incurred that kind of sleazy defamation ought to be caught more cognizant of how that logic gets twisted potentially even against them but apparently not.
Exactly.
And then here he goes on to say, call the Hilton hotels to voice your objection and remind them Remind them that they're breaking their own policy and this is what he said, quote, in compliance with the US Patriot Act.
As well as international anti-terrorism roles, Hilton does not support organizations that engage in terrorist activities or are involved in any way in acts dangerous to human life that are in violation of the criminal laws of any country where we operate.
So here you have a Republican Congressman, Dan Crenshaw, in the midst of Republicans in the House warning about the weaponization of the federal government to criminalize dissent, domestic dissent, suggesting That it's somehow illegal under the Patriot Act now to question the U.S.
support for Israel, to criticize the U.S.
government actions in Gaza?
I mean, isn't this exactly the sort of tyrannical effort to weaponize the law to crush dissent that Republicans are loudly insisting they oppose?
Of course, which is why I think you need to be mindful when assessing the public behavior of these people, whether they evince consistent principles.
I mean, it sounds like a simple observation to make in terms of what one should be assessing, but it really is worth emphasizing because What seems to be the paramount principle here?
Reprisal against one's political enemies.
Now that tends to be masked with appeals to principle around cancel culture quote-unquote or around free speech and maybe on the margins there are some Republicans and Conservatives who have become more genuinely on principle in favor of those issues over the years but
When the rubber really hits the road and there's an issue where they can demonstrate, even in the face of maybe some potential awkwardness or uncomfortability, that they actually have a steadfast adherence to those principles, if they just jettison them so summarily, then that's got to call to question whether they were at all sincere about other issues where maybe the partisan or kind of social political dynamics were not lined up in the same way.
Right, and I just think when you're motivated so principally by just sheer tit-for-tat vengeance, I think that almost innately leads to a jettisoning of principle because it's impossible to comport any real principle paradigm with that kind of base desire to just inflict punishment on your perceived
Yeah, and I just want to point out, and I talked about this with Brianna just now, there are some conservatives, I mean prominent conservatives, who are being consistent and denouncing this.
Vivek Ramaswamy, for example, said, what do you mean we're going to create blacklists of students in colleges who sign petitions that are deemed too pro-Palestinian or anti-Israel and we're going to ban them from employment?
And then when Megyn Kelly defended that and said, yes, we should be making these people unemployable.
If you want to hire Hamas supporters, go ahead as though all these people are Hamas supporters.
And then Candace Owen also came in and said, I'm not going to support the exact kind of cancel culture that the left does.
But in the case of Dan Crenshaw, and I think this is happening so often, this Twitter account, Turncode Dan, that does a lot of clever video editing, compiled a list of movies.
Moments in recent history when Dan Crenshaw denounced with great indignation left-wing cancel culture or censorship attempts.
There's so many examples.
Here's Adam Pokarenko, a fanatical Democratic Party supporter of the war in Ukraine, who said, just a reminder this domestic terrorist convention is being held at a Hyatt.
I don't know about you, but I won't stay in places that provide training grounds for propagandists and insurrectionists.
He was complaining, this Democratic partisan, about Hyatt Hotel hosting right-wing voices, and Dan Creshaw said, so in the midst of a pandemic with enormous job loss and businesses barely hanging on, woke leftists want to keep doing their petty cancel culture BS?
Just stop.
You're annoying.
I mean, it was a mirror image of what Dan Crenshaw was trying to do.
Same with Kimberly Strassel, the Wall Street Journal writer said, a defensive free speech published in Harper's about the Harper's letter and Dan Crenshaw said, good for these decent liberals.
The problem is that there is no longer space for liberalism on the left.
It's being trampled to death.
Call your Democratic rep and see if they'd sign a letter standing against mob tactics and cancel culture.
They won't.
There's no liberals left.
And now he's using his power as a congressman to demand the cancellation of an event at the Hilton Hotel in Texas because it contains people who oppose the Biden administration's policy of supporting Israel.
It's mind boggling.
Another funny one was your little buddy, that guy Stephen Miller or Red Steez, I guess is his handle.
I mean, I don't know what Red Steez is exactly, but my eyes just glaze over whenever I see him.
But he's kind of just all day, every day complaining that the media isn't nice enough to Republicans and isn't committed enough to getting Republicans elected or something.
And of course, that goes hand in hand or has at times with at least nominal objections to quote unquote cancel culture or how there are so many triggered snowflakes on the left and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And they need to just not be so offended all the time.
And just today or yesterday, he was saying, great, we're really making some progress now because that law firm, what was it, Polk something or other?
It was Davis, Polk, and Winston and Strom.
Both did it, yeah.
Yeah, they capitulated to this giant public pressure campaign and rescinded job offers to these students, law students, who had signed a letter at Harvard regarding the Palestine-Israel conflict.
Now, I'm not even going to get into the substance of that letter here because it's not even relevant.
It's just a matter of political speech that Stephen Miller or whomever doesn't like, is offended by, triggered by, feels threatened by, or feels constitutes some sort of violence or incitement That then impels them to say that there should be a jeopardization or even an elimination of the livelihood of people who engage in that speech.
But the kicker was how Davis Polk phrased its decision or framed its decision to rescind the job offer.
They said that they are rescinding the job offer because they are so deeply committed to a, quote, supportive and inclusive work environment.
So they're trotting out all this kind of like therapeutic, moralistic jargon that is usually associated with attempts to placate this kind of liberal, censorious impulse.
But now it's Stephen Miller and co who are the ones embracing it because it happens to align with their hardcore pro-Israel views.
And it's just amazing.
I love it because it's actually a clarifying kind of cleansing experience to show who actually does have no principles at all on this stuff.
And it's just entirely circumstantial and contingent.
So, you know, although there's a lot of death and destruction and potential for escalation to, I don't know, some kind of regional or even world war, at least we get this little side benefit of the punditocracy exposing it.
Yeah, I totally think it's worth it for this risk of gigantic conflict in like thousand year old religious conflict.
Since you brought up my little friend Stephen Miller, I do feel compelled to say that aside from the fact that I find his media criticism valuable, we've been on my show.
He's one of the people who is kind of alternating between, on the one, I know that's why you brought him up, between alternating between saying, I don't really support cancel culture of this type, I'm only cheering it because this is the left reaping what they've sowed, but then on other occasions, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on, and then on other occasions he said, no actually I earnestly believe that people who are Terrorist cheerleaders should actually not get hired.
And I just want to say there are several people who have I spent years, in seeming alignment with my views, denouncing left-wing cancel culture, denouncing left-wing censorship, who are now cheering it, who I've invited on my show in the hope to ask them to defend what seems to me to be this contradiction.
He's not one of them, but I will ask him on to do so.
But so far, nobody has been willing to come on and say that.
A perfect example, yeah, you're right, some of these people tried to suggest, oh, I'm not actually endorsing on the merits this imposition of cancel culture, I'm just making a meta-argument about how this is coming back to bite the left because they are the ones who drafted it, right?
So that was, I think, at least some of the followers of Dave Rubin tried to justify him saying about a week and a half ago, oh, Maybe the FBI will actually crack down on the bad guys once.
Forget about the Trump-supporting Nazis who they're always hounding.
Now maybe they have the opportunity to go after the real bad guys in our society and those are the ones who are supporting Hamas or who are anti-Semitic.
So he was actually enjoining or exhorting the FBI, the Security State Agency, to veil and stifle political speech When the first round of pro-Palestine protests, I guess a day or so after the initial Hamas attack, that's what Dave Rubin was supporting.
Josh Hawley, the senator from Missouri, who has railed against the FBI and the Justice Department and the U.S.
security state using or abusing their powers to investigate and stifle domestic dissent Call for it.
And it wasn't this kind of, oh, well, the left needs a taste of his own medicine.
It was obviously very earnest calling for the FBI to convene investigations, to start investigations to find out who is behind these people, who's financing them, who they're connected to in a way that is exactly saying the US security state should investigate and intimidate domestic dissent of the kind the Republican Party created a committee, an entire committee called Weaponization of Government Power in order to oppose.
And I also want to say that one of the things that bothers me the most is that while it is true that a few people, these kind of like marginalized fringe people whose names nobody knew until five days ago, like a stray speaker at a DSA rally and a chapter of BLM that later like a stray speaker at a DSA rally and a chapter of BLM that later apologized or Some random adjunct professor.
Yes, a random adjunct professor actually did defend Hamas and justify what they did as anti-colonialism or resistance of the legitimate kind.
The vast majority of people, almost everyone with a meaningful thought form, condemned what Hamas did and therefore this attempt to suggest that anybody who is critical of Israel or who is against the use of what they say is excessive force or humanitarian crisis in Gaza is pro-Hamas and cheerleading a terrorist group It's the kind of totally dishonest attempt to smear people.
Exactly like you said, you get called for being pro-Kremlin if you oppose the U.S.
war in Ukraine, or after 9-11 you got called to being on the side of Al-Qaeda, or being pro-terrorist for questioning Bush-Cheney war on terror.
It's exactly the same climate and exactly the same tactic.
Now I just want to follow up on that in terms of the substance of this war, because I thought, Michael, one of the lessons of 9-11 and the U.S.
response to it was that we came to understand That just because violence is depicted as being or justified in the name of fighting terrorism doesn't actually mean it accomplishes that.
You could actually do something that you say is fighting terrorism that has the opposite effect.
The war in Iraq, for example, according to Tony Blair, is what gave rise to ISIS.
Now, here's Naftali Bennett.
Who is perceived as being even to the right of Benjamin Netanyahu when it comes to the treatment of Palestinians.
He kind of doesn't even recognize the West Bank in Gaza, thinks that's Israeli land.
He wrote an essay in The Economist this week, justifying what Israel is doing.
And the headline of it was this, quote, "Neptali Bennett argues that Israel's future depends on striking fear into its enemy's heart." And this is what he wrote, quote, "The rules have changed.
We will not allow Hamas to hide behind Palestinian civilians while it murders our civilians.
We will never target civilians as they are not our enemy.
But if civilians in Gaza are killed while being used as human shields, Hamas will have murdered them as well.
Israel is now receiving the sympathy and support of the world.
But as prime minister, I was clear, Israel's future depends not on pity from the world, But on fear in the hearts of our enemies.
In the coming days and weeks, perhaps months, we will have no choice but to launch a war of unprecedented magnitude.
Unprecedented!
All Israelis, right and left, religious and secular, have cast aside the political arguments.
not the least over the government's judicial reform, which distracted them for the past nine months and are fighting in this war.
Every reservist I visited over the past week was over enlisted.
And while we're grateful for the support of American power with Joe Biden, it must be clear we have to fight this on our own.
Now, let me ask you this question.
What is a more viable theory?
Is it the one that Naftali Bennett is offering, that if you put enough fear into the minds and the hearts of your enemies, that you will terrorize them into submitting, into never again attacking Israel?
Or is it the case, is it more likely, that when you have hundreds of millions of people throughout the Muslim world who are highly religious and very impassioned watching the Israelis cut off food and water to an entire population and boasting about how what they're doing is trying to terrorize the civilian population into submission, that you will increase the number of people wanting to bring violence to the Israel and to the United States and therefore increasing, not decreasing, the threat of future violence?
Well, I think it depends on how ruthless the warring party is willing to be.
I mean, there's a reason they keep bringing up the precedent of World War II, saying we have to treat Hamas now just as the United States and the allied Nazi Germany.
I was on with a member of the Israeli Knesset a few days ago, or yesterday rather, on an Indian TV channel who is a member of one of these religious parties within Israel who was saying that the uncompromising zeal with which the United States battered Nazi Germany into total submission is the same approach that has to be taken with Hamas.
And it was effective because the United States really did fly and crush Nazi Germany and the population was subdued in a way into submission.
So it depends how far you're willing to go.
And all the evidence seems to point to the Israeli government wanting to go as far as they reasonably can, or at least far as the United States will allow them to go.
Now, Naftali Bennett says we have to do this on our own.
Well, the United States has sent two carrier strike groups into the eastern Mediterranean with missiles pointed directly at Iran.
And there's a few thousand troops that we know of that have been mobilized or called up to prepare for a possible deployment to Israel.
They're going to claim that they're in a non-combat role, but we know with mission creep how that can evolve.
So you just really have to look at the rhetoric of what the Israeli government officials are saying.
I'm in the U.K. at the moment, And the Israeli ambassador to the U.K. was on Sky News this week saying that one of the precedents for the kind of warfare that Israel is going to seek to wage against Hamas is the firebombing of Dresden by the U.S. and U.K. in 1945, OK, where they deliberately targeted and incinerated residential civilian populations for the purpose of just killing the morale of the German people under Nazism.
Now, I'm not trying to litigate anything to do with World War II, but if that's the kind of impulse that is driving the Israeli government at the moment, then they could take things potentially as far as way farther than we can perhaps conceive at the moment.
Remember, he's saying he's saying members of the Knesset that have called for nuclear dropping a nuclear bomb on.
Right.
Well, he's he's saying he's saying he's saying he's saying you think what we're doing now is severe, but what's going to happen in the coming weeks or maybe months is, yeah, it's going to make this look like nothing.
We're going to launch a war unprecedented in its scope and magnitude.
Now, this point that... And when members of Congress in the U.S.
and Joe Biden, who was just there today, all they can do in response to this situation is chant robotically, stand with Israel.
Israel has a right to self-defense.
And other than that, they get to switch off their critical faculties completely.
They're giving license to an incredibly radicalized Israeli drive toward a vengeance campaign.
I mean, they're open about it.
I pulled up with some sort of the Knesset recently.
Her name is Tali Gottlieb.
She's in Likud, so that's Netanyahu's party, and she's saying Flattening a neighborhood in Gaza is not enough this time.
We have to, quote, crush and flatten Gaza completely.
Otherwise, we did nothing.
And she explicitly disclaims any differentiation between Gaza and Hamas.
All of Gaza has to be flattened to teach them a lesson and to crush their morale.
Right.
But, you know, again, I think I had that said that.
But I think there's a, first of all, there's, let me just make two points.
One is there's the possibility that you can crush the morale of the people in Gaza, like actually terrorize them to such an extent, just surrounding them with so much death and random and indiscriminate slaughter, that they might Lose the will to fight and break their back through that kind of terror.
But it doesn't mean that people in the entire region will react similarly, that they will nonetheless be the ones who then want to bring violence.
The other point that I think is important here is, even before this happened, this idea that Naftali Bennett is saying, like, look, we're happy, we're grateful, we're thrilled that the Biden administration is giving us whatever we need.
We'll take that for as long as we want.
But we want to be very clear We're not dependent on the United States.
We're gonna do what we think we need to do.
And even if they try and urge restraint or impose restraint, we're not gonna do that anymore.
There was this kind of movement.
There was an article in Tablet Magazine by Jacob Siegel, who I've had on my show before, is a very hardcore supporter of Israel.
And what he was basically saying is Israel should be at the point where they don't want USA anymore.
They say, look, your aid's not worth it because it always comes with conditions.
And he was particularly angry at the perception that the only reason the Israelis haven't done what they need to do and should do, which is bomb Iran, bomb them into smithereens because they're moving, according to him, to nuclear weapons is because the United States is holding them back from to nuclear weapons is because the United States is holding them back I think there's this growing sense that we're not going to take orders from the United States anymore at the very same time that the Biden administration is showing the world
Make us responsible for what they're doing because everything they're about to do, we stand with them.
So it's the worst of both worlds from an American perspective.
You have the entire world thinking and believing because the Biden administration is saying that we are on their side in everything they do.
But the Israelis are saying, we don't care if you, the United States, tell us you don't want us doing something.
We're going to do what we think we need to do, even if you say no.
And that means an unprecedented war the likes of which the world has never seen.
Yeah, I think it's uncertain.
I mean, it wouldn't be entirely new for Israel to be bucking the United States, especially Netanyahu.
I mean, remember, when Obama was president, Netanyahu came to Congress and delivered a speech in vain against the Iran nuclear deal at the invitation of the Republicans, so basically just rubbed Obama's nose in, you know, a pile of you-know-what.
And there have been other episodes where there have been some pretty clear tensions between the U.S.
and Israel, where Israel is kind of trying to make it seem as though it can operate autonomously outside the—and it's not under the thumb of the U.S.
The conflict were to escalate to a point where it does expand into some kind of regional, regional Arab wide, Arab worldwide confrontation.
And it's not just about subjugating Gaza, but it draws in other parties, most notably Iran potentially, that I think the integration of the US and Israeli national security states are such that it almost would compel Some kind of intervention on the U.S.
or it would be almost like automatic or it wouldn't even be something worthy of necessitating debate.
Now it should necessitate debate for sure, but the point is that when you have such a integration or a co-mingling of the mutual kind of state apparatuses, then I think it's almost in a way a matter of inertia for it to happen.
They're trying to cultivate now with Ukraine.
I wanted to make one quick point, though, on Netanyahu in particular, because it's just so fascinating to how, you know, stand with Israel.
What does it mean in practice?
It means stand with Benjamin Netanyahu.
I mean, it's not just some abstract notion of Israel.
It's the guy running the government is this individual who, by the way, as a lot of people have just recently discovered, had it as part of his political strategy to maintain his uh... governing coalition in the parliament to bond and support hamas for the purpose of splintering hamas the uh... pillow and uh... basically politically uh... you know rule over palestinians in perpetuity
But Netanyahu, he hosted Biden today, right?
And Netanyahu said something that I think is really critical for people to bear in mind going forward.
He said that any civilian casualties that take place in Gaza, on principle, are the responsibility not of Israel, not of the IDF, but of Hamas.
So whatever Israel does in Gaza, Whatever targets it chooses to bomb or not, the civilian casualties that stem from that are not the fault, in any way, of Israel.
So Israel, as the bomb-dropping state, does not bear responsibility, morally, legally, politically or otherwise, for the consequences of those actions.
So they're preemptively exculpating themselves for any kind of moral sanction.
So when you have an event like this hospital bombing yesterday, which, you know, obviously there's a lot of debate and contentious disputation as to its actual circumstances, the circumstances in a way are not particularly relevant because what has the Israeli government done and what has the American administration and the UK and France, what have they preemptively endorsed?
They preemptively endorsed a Exactly.
Even if it had been proven, even if it had turned out that the Israelis were the ones who shot the missile, it wouldn't change anything because their argument is still the same, even if it comes from a rocket.
In Gaza, it comes from a deliberately targeted or an accidentally targeted missile from the Israelis.
It still goes on Hamas's ledger and not the Israelis, based on this principle.
I just have time for one more question.
And I wanted to ask you about the war in Ukraine in part because it seems like everybody got bored with that overnight and kind of forgot about it.
The reality was there already was a kind of eroding, weakening resolve on the part of the West.
Public opinion had turned against the war, the Republicans.
were impeding this new package.
Other countries in Slovakia, for example, the candidate who ran on a platform of cutting off all aid to Ukraine and extracting Slovakia from that war won, and they're fearful that that's going to repeat itself in other countries.
I don't think anything was ever going to hinge on Slovakia, but I take the point.
No, but the concern is it's symbolic or a telltale sign of what's to come.
If a country that close to Ukraine, that's in the region, that fears Russia, that was one of the first to stand up and support Ukraine, now elected somebody on a platform to cut off aid because he used the argument that... It was just the prior Prime Minister.
I know Michael, but the point is that the guy ran on a platform opposing more H-Ukraine, and the concern is that that's going to repeat itself in more significant countries.
The question I have is now that the entire world is ignoring Ukraine and focusing on Israel and is likely to continue to focus on Israel for all kinds of reasons.
It's a more dangerous war.
Israel is way more important to the United States politically, culturally, and in every other way than Ukraine is.
Is there now a real danger, especially given what has become this stalemate where the front line hasn't moved in 10 months despite tens of billions of dollars and all kinds of lives loss that the West is now going to just kind of slowly lose interest in It's going to be this frozen conflict that we just kind of forget about?
No, I don't think so at all.
I think if anything, the opposite.
First of all, I don't think any of those signs— You think that our commitment to the war in Israel and all the money we're going to spend and the attention we're going to focus is going to strengthen at the same time the U.S.
commitment to the war in Ukraine?
Yes.
Yeah, I'll explain why.
Number one, look at the aid package that's being proposed that's going to fund simultaneously the wars in both Ukraine and Israel.
One of the first thoughts I had when this broke out a week and a half ago was that it's a godsend for those who are attempting to galvanize further support for Ukraine because it's inevitably going to be paired with Ukraine.
Because you can come up with this convoluted geopolitical analysis that's being promoted by the likes of Nikki Haley and others where they're saying that because of Iran, which is said to have been supplying Russia with drones and is effectively a co-belligerent of sorts in Ukraine because which is said to have been supplying Russia with drones and is effectively a co-belligerent of sorts in Ukraine because of their central role vis-a-vis Hezbollah and
Then all these conflicts can kind of get merged together and can be seen as one in the same and therefore there's going to be a pressure to not distinguish between these conflicts as really separate entities, then all these conflicts can kind of get merged together and can be seen as one in the same.
And therefore, there's going to be a pressure to not distinguish between these conflicts as really separate entities, which is really dangerous because that shows a kind of gradual evolution into a genuine potential world war type scenario where there could be all kinds of different sparks and precipitate which is really dangerous because that shows a kind of gradual evolution into a genuine So I think it's actually the opposite.
I don't think there's going to be a huge amount of show why they're one and the same.
Biden tomorrow is apparently giving a speech where he's going to make exactly the same.
There's lots of Republicans who are in full vociferous agreement with him.
Now, it could be the case that just in the short term, it occupies less attentional space for people.
And so whatever kind of tactical developments take place in Ukraine might not register as potently.
But I don't think that means that there's going to be any less of kind of an inertia or momentum behind the actual policy, because they're going to get ready.
No, I don't think any of these signs of discontent have actually amounted to much.
Biden's only seeking $24 billion.
They already authorized the first one was $40 billion.
I don't think it's the biggest aid package yet.
The Ukrainians and their allies are extremely worried that they're losing now.
They were already losing the attention.
Take a deep breath for a second and let me just finish my sentence.
- Michael, Michael, Michael, Michael, just Michael, take a deep breath for a second and let me just finish my sentence.
The Ukrainians and their allies are expressing very serious concern that there was already eroding interest and belief in the West that this war can be won And now with this kind of new toy over here and with the need for the American military to send all of its assets and its money to the war in Israel, which is going to have higher importance, that that will deprioritize Ukraine.
I think you're right that these wars, once they start, can kind of continue on their own inertia.
But we'll see whether or not you're correct that this will actually somehow help Ukraine that everybody else is now ignoring that conflict and instead focused on the war in Israel.
We don't need to speculate.
We're going to see soon enough.
I have no doubt there'll be continuing spending packages, which probably would have happened anyway.
But we'll see whether or not this ends up being— Here's the reason why that's wrong.
Michael, first of all, we're out of time.
And second of all, I don't think we need to speculate any further.
I think you made your position clear that you think this will help the Ukrainian cause, even though the Ukrainians and their allies are certain that it won't.
And time will tell whether or not we're right.
We don't need to try and read our crystal ball.
I don't think they're certain that it won't.
What is the basis of you claiming that there's certain other ones?
Okay, Michael.
So if they get another, if they get 100 billion aid, that's going to be a certainty.
Nobody's proposing a $100 billion aid.
The $100 billion aid includes aid to Israel, aid for the border security, and aid for disaster relief.
The Biden administration is only seeking $24 billion in additional aid to Ukraine, which will be part of that $100 billion package.
It's not $100 billion to Ukraine.
Anyway, I really enjoyed...
This part of the conversation.
Michael, we're done.
Michael, we have to be done.
The show is over time.
We've covered this topic at great length.
I'm more than sick of you and ready to get rid of you.
As I said, I would much rather talk to Breonna.
I should have followed my instinct.
So thank you so much for joining us tomorrow.
Please just cut his mic.
Thank you for joining us, Michael.
We love to have you.
Your contributions were outstanding as always, and we hope to see you again soon.
Sigh.
All right, that concludes our show for this evening, thankfully.
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