Big Tech Censors Crowder’s Release of Long-Awaited Nashville Shooter Manifesto. PLUS: Interview with Israel-Supporter, Batya Ungar-Sargon | SYSTEM UPDATE #178
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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...
On March 27th of this year, a person identifying as a trans woman entered a private Christian school they once attended in Nashville, Tennessee.
This person began randomly shooting and ended up shooting and killing six people, three teachers at the school and three school children, all of whom were nine years of age.
The shooter's name was Audrey Hale.
They fired 150 rounds in the school until the police entered and ended their life.
It was clear from the start that at least part of Hale's motives were political.
Almost immediately, it was reported that they left behind a manifesto explaining the causes in whose name they were acting on the shooting spree.
When mass shooters attack minority groups favored by corporate media and their ideology can be said to be right wing in some way, media outlets have a field day with these types of documents, using them not only to blame the right wing ideology that they say inspired the shooting, but also to pin the blame on prominent people in media and politics who they can assign blame to for having, quote, inspired the shooter by expressing their political quote, inspired the shooter by expressing their political views.
Yet in this case, where the shooter was trans, the ideology was evidently left liberal, and the victim group were white kids at a private Christian school in Tennessee, There was almost no curiosity about or interest in the manifesto on the part of the media.
The Nashville police and the FBI immediately refused to release that manifesto.
And there were very few media outlets suing to compel them to do so.
We on this show retained counsel in Nashville to file a Freedom of Information request and then a lawsuit but shortly after we understood that a court was ordering its disclosure.
Yet the Nashville Police Department and the FBI appealed and the appellate court stayed the order requiring disclosure and to date they have not ruled which means we have never seen the manifesto either in whole or in part six or seven months later.
Until Monday.
That was when The Rumble host Steven Crowder announced he had obtained several pages of the manifesto.
He published them on Twitter and on his online show.
The Nashville Police Department acknowledged their authenticity, expressed rage at the leak, and ordered an investigation to find the leaker immediately.
The pages published by Crowder of Hale's writings contain vicious and hateful anti-white and anti-Christian sentiments, prompting the question, who in media or politics radicalized Audrey Hale to go murder people in the name of these anti-white and anti-Christian bigotries?
Yet immediately big text platforms including Google's YouTube and Facebook's Instagram censored the publication by Crowder of these excerpts.
We only know about them and we're only able to read them because Twitter, Axe, and Rumble refused as usual to censor, highlighting yet again the vital importance of these free speech platforms if it weren't for them, Nobody would have ever been able to read these pages because Google and Facebook acted to suppress them for reasons they haven't yet explained.
We will report on the latest developments in this case and examine their implications.
And then, as we said a few days ago, we have been trying for weeks To book a prominent Israel supporter to come on our show to discuss their perspectives with me, especially one who has been cheering the kinds of censorship measures and cancellation campaigns which the right has long claimed to despise and yet suddenly embraced about a month ago.
Unfortunately all the ones we had asked on Including people who had previously been on our show or whose shows I have been on were extremely booked for all of November, bizarrely so, and were sadly unable to schedule an appearance.
But over the last couple of days, we have been able to schedule several of the most good faith and most knowledgeable supporters of Israel and media that we know to come on our show, and they will be on over the next several days.
We start tonight with Batia Unger-Sagan, a journalist who is currently the opinion editor of Newsweek.
She is a stalwart supporter of Israel, both in general, but also in terms of their military actions and bombing campaigns underway right now in Gaza.
But she's also been one of the very few who has remained consistent in opposing the types of censorship and cancellation measures and victimhood narratives that most conservatives and people like Batya have long denounced.
I have known and admired botches work and over the last several years got to know her personally a bit and have a lot of respect for her as a person and as a journalist.
So I'm delighted that she will make tonight her system update debut to talk about these obviously inflammatory and difficult issues.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
Ever since the shooter in Nashville, Tennessee entered a Christian private school and shot it up with 150 rounds, murdering three teachers at the school, all of whom were either 60 or 61 years of age, and murdering three school children along with them, all of whom were nine.
There has been a very pronounced and noticeable and bizarre lack of interest and curiosity in getting hold of the shooter's manifesto, which we heard almost immediately they had left as an explanation for why they ended up going into the school and randomly shooting people that they didn't know.
We heard that the manifesto contained explanations of the causes on whose behalf they thought they were acting and the political motives that they believed were driving them.
And in general, whenever there's a shooting of this kind, a mass murder by people acting for political motives who are shooting people they don't know, The media has a party breaking down the manifesto, reporting on all of its passages, trying to assign a certain ideological label to the person who went into the shooting in order typically to discredit the ideologies they most dislike, and to even try and disgustingly blame
Other people in media or in politics who have never, ever once called for violence, but who have expressed views that are similar in nature to the ones cited by the shooter.
That's a game that the media love to play.
They love to say, this blood belongs in the doorstep of this journalist or this person with whom I disagree, because some of their views seem to have similarities or overlaps with the views expressed in the manifesto by this mass shooter.
And yet, in this case, there was just almost no interest.
And as a result, both the Nashville Police Department and the FBI immediately said that they refused to release the manifesto, and they had very little pressure on the part of the national media, on the part of the corporate media, to do so, because the media had no interest in finding out what this person's ideology was, for obvious reasons.
This was a person who declared themselves to be a trans woman.
They were clearly acting in partial defense of left liberal ideology, not right-wing ideology.
And their targets were in a black church in Charleston or a black supermarket in Buffalo or an LGBT bar in Colorado or a store filled with Latinos in Texas, but instead was a private Christian school in Tennessee filled with mostly white Christian students.
And the dynamic and the political narrative just wasn't one that interested the media.
And yet, as we reported on our show, and here was the show where we did it, We talked about how we've been stonewalled in our attempts to obtain the manifesto.
This is back in April of 2023, so the month after the shooting, just a couple of weeks, in fact, after it took place, we had We contacted the Nashville Police Department.
We filed a FOIA request and a local FOIA request.
We contacted counsel in Nashville and were told that it was unlikely we would win the lawsuit, but we decided we would proceed with it anyway.
And we talked about the barriers, the strange barriers we had faced, the refusal of the police to release his manifesto, and the lack of media interest in making them do so.
Over the next couple of months, though, it turned out that there were other people who had filed FOIA requests earlier, local journalists, other kinds of activists.
And we heard that the release of this manifesto was imminent.
That's what the police department said.
That's what the FBI said.
And yet they were fabricating these obviously pretextual and false reasons.
Why they wouldn't release the manifesto.
There is a provision in Tennessee law, an exception to the Freedom of Information Act requirements, that says if there's an ongoing investigation that might be jeopardized by the release of information, the police department can withhold it.
Only in this case, what was to investigate?
The shooter was immediately identified.
There was no suggestion they had accomplices or hadn't acted alone.
And the FBI and the National Police Department couldn't come up with any arguments about why there would be an ongoing investigation into this shooter that would be prejudiced or jeopardized by disclosure of this manifesto.
They just obviously didn't want to release it.
Here is CNN in May of 2023 reporting on some of the attempts, clearly not CNN and the media, to try and shake this manifesto out of the hands of the FBI and the National Police Department.
Quote, the National Police Association and the Tennessee Firearms Association separately sued after the Metro National Police Department denied open record requests for writings left by Hale, a 28-year-old former student at the Covenant School whom officers killed amid the attack.
According to the plaintiffs, in denying the request, police cited a state Supreme Court ruling that found state law provides an exception to the Public Records Act by allowing police to withhold the release of information in a pending criminal case except to a defendant.
Authorities already publicly have said Hale's writings show the March 27th massacre was, quote, calculated and planned, and Hale scouted a possible second attack location, had, quote, considered the actions of other mass murderers, and, quote, acted totally alone.
So once they determined that Hale had acted totally alone, there was no reason whatsoever, other than improper political ones, to hide the contents of this manifesto.
One, as I said, that the media and every other similar case treats as a matter of great public interest.
And it's now been seven months since the shooting and the death of those teachers and students and the pressure by some people to try and get that manifesto, and we haven't seen any of it.
And all of that changed on Monday when the online host, Steven Crowder, who has a show on Rumble, also one on YouTube, posted on Twitter and on his Rumble show Pages of what he said had been leaked parts of the manifesto and very quickly the Nashville Police Department confirmed that those are in fact authentic excerpts from this manifesto that Crowder had obtained and then published.
Here from Newsweek on November 6th, Nashville Shooters Manifesto released by Steven Crowder, what we know.
Quote, in a video posted Monday to YouTube, Crowder said the manifesto was leaked and shared screenshots of portions of the document.
Which was believed to be the work of Audrey Hale, 28, whom authorities identified as the shooter.
They also said Hale, who died at the scene, once attended the school.
Quote, The ongoing investigation into the March 27th murders of six persons inside the Covenant School continues to show, from all information currently available, that the killer, Audrey Hale, acted totally alone, the Metro Nashville Police Department said in a press release in April.
Now, here is Steven Crowder, this is what he posted on Twitter, on X, on November 6th, breaking Nashville School Covenant shooter Audrey Hale's death day manifesto, targeted, quote, crackers with, quote, white privileges.
And here are some of the phrases that appeared in the manifesto.
Quote, wanna kill all you little crackers, I hope I have a high death count, I'm ready, I hope my victims aren't, ready to die.
So that obviously provides some insight into the ideology motivating the shooting.
They were ranting and raving against the privilege of Christian students, of white students, against white privilege, against white crackers.
That's something we should have known from the start for the same reason that the media talks about the manifestos and motives of the other shooters.
Here you see excerpts of the page that Crowder posted that contained those writings.
Now here, the local newspaper, The Tennessean, on November 7th, that was yesterday, published this article, Nashville Shooter Writings, what MNPD Chief John Drake says about unauthorized release.
Quote, I am greatly disturbed by today's unauthorized release of three pages of writings from the Covenant Shooter, said Drake in a release.
That obviously confirms the authenticity of those pages, that there were in fact a leak.
Crowder didn't invent them.
Someone else didn't invent them.
They were actual pages from the manifesto that the police, for whatever reasons, continue to conceal.
Quote, this police department is extremely serious about the investigation to identify the person responsible.
That's their excuse for not releasing this.
Even though they've been saying from the start they know exactly who did it, the person they killed.
And they know they acted alone.
Quote, Drake said the release of the documents showed a total disregard for Covenant families, as well as the court system, which currently have control of the shooter's journals due to litigation filed earlier this year.
Quote, we are not at liberty to release the journals until the courts rule, he said.
Our police department looks forward to the ultimate resolution of the litigation concerning the journals.
Here is Fox 17, the local affiliate.
Also yesterday, graphic writings left behind by the Covenant school mass shooter leaked, reigniting debate.
Quote, social media photos claiming to show some of the writings by the Covenant shooter, Audrey Hale, are authentic.
Fox 17 News has confirmed through a source.
So Fox was able to independently confirm what the police department obviously confirmed in that statement, which is that these pages are in fact authentic excerpts from the manifesto left behind by the shooter.
Now, immediately almost, upon Crowder posting these excerpts that he wanted the public to read, for the same reason the media reports on these manifestos in every other case, The platforms on which he appears, Facebook, or rather Instagram and YouTube, removed the content, blocked him from reporting it, censored this reporting on the manifesto left by the shooter.
Here's from Newsweek today, National Shooter Manifesto released by Steven Crowder removed from YouTube.
Quote, according to a Tuesday post to X, formerly Twitter by Crowder, YouTube removed the video containing clippings of the manifesto because it violated the platform's guidelines.
In a screenshot shared by Crowder, which appears to resemble an email sent by a YouTube representative, he was told that the platform's guidelines, quote, prohibit linking to content containing manifestos from individuals who have committed violent attacks, including the tragic event that took place in Nashville, Tennessee in February 2023.
YouTube removed our video exposing the Nashville shooters manifesto Crowder wrote on Crowder wrote on X With the screenshot of the email quote.
This is why we stream to rumble He continued you determined what matter do you determine the content not YouTube not the rest of Big Tech not their lackeys not a gaggle of sponsors Who don't have the balls to stand up behind the kind of content you actually want to see?
Now maybe YouTube does have a Policy of that kind but In the past, we've always learned about the content of manifestos.
We heard all about the manifesto of the shooter in Buffalo who went into a grocery store deliberately in a predominantly African-American community and shot ten black people dead.
We heard about the manifesto of the mass murderer who entered two mosques in New Zealand a couple of years ago.
These are always publicized.
These are always reported on.
Here is Crowder today on X, breaking Instagram just removed the photos of the Nashville Manifesto from my page.
And he has screenshots there saying your post was removed, it violates community guidelines, we don't allow people to share symbols, praise or support people and organizations who we define as dangerous.
And this includes people praising a terrorist attack, obviously he wasn't doing any of that.
So just think about this.
He got a hold of something that is plainly in the public interest, that people have a right to know and an interest in knowing, and Big Tech decided you're not allowed to see that.
Thankfully, Elon Musk bought Axe in part to defy censorship, collusion of this kind, and Rumble exists to ensure that people are able to report things that they want to report without Rumble executives sitting in judgment of what people should see or hear and what people shouldn't.
An absolutely crucial value for a platform to have.
Because look at what would have happened.
Had Big Tech maintained that monopoly, had the old regime been in charge of Twitter, certainly they would have joined Google and Facebook in censoring this and most people would have been prevented from hearing about what this manifesto contains.
Now just to give you a sense for how these manifestos are typically treated when they can be exploited to advance the ideology of the corporate media, NBC News May 16, 2022, Fox News' Tucker Carlson under fresh scrutiny after Buffalo mass shooting.
Why would Tucker Carlson be under scrutiny?
Because some guy went into an African American neighborhood in Buffalo and purposely killed black people.
Why would Tucker Carlson be under scrutiny for that according to NBC News?
This was written by Ben Collins.
Is somebody who surpasses every conceivable standard for requiring journalists to at least pretend that they're not using their platform for political ends.
Ben Collins doesn't make any bones about the fact that he hates the right, that he's a liberal, that he's dedicated to the advancement of the Democratic Party, and he is a reporter for NBC News and he does this all the time.
So this is a news article trying to blame Tucker Carlson or at least ascribe blame to For the mass shooting that took place in Buffalo, even though the manifesto that was left by the shooter never once mentioned Tucker Carlson.
Never even indicated he knew who Tucker Carlson was.
Never said he watched his show.
He left a long list of names of people who inspired him.
None of them was Tucker Carlson or anyone at Fox.
But this is how manifestos are typically used.
Quote, the incendiary cable news host has drawn criticism for promoting the quote, great replacement theory.
Ideas apparently espoused by the suspect in the Buffalo shooting.
Now we spent a lot of time back then explaining why that is a lie, that Tucker Carlson does not advocate, has never advocated the great replacement theory in the sense that this shooter endorsed it.
But this is what this manifesto is.
Here's another NBC News article from May 15th of last year.
The Buffalo supermarket shooting suspect allegedly posted an apparent manifesto repeatedly citing Great Replacement Theory.
Quote, the manifesto includes dozens of pages of anti-Semitic and racist memes, repeatedly citing the racist Great Replacement Conspiracy Theory, frequently pushed by white supremacists.
A manifesto allegedly written and posted by the suspect In a mass shooting at Buffalo supermarket that killed 10 people, laid out specific plans to attack black people, and repeatedly cited the Great Replacement Theory, the false idea that a cabal is attempting to replace white Americans with non-white people through immigration, interracial marriage, and eventually violence.
Here was NBC in March of 2019 after that mosque shooting that I mentioned in New Zealand.
There you see the headline, Attackers Apparent Manifesto Probed.
Do you see how interested they are in manifestos and mass shooting cases, typically?
Only for, in this case, the media to have no interest at all in getting a hold of it?
And then for Big Tech to censor it to prevent you, once Steven Crowder finally gets a few pages of it, to block you from being able to read it?
Here's what NBC said about the manifesto then.
Quote, although not confirmed by authorities, a 74-page manifesto titled, quote, The Great Replacement was posted online that matched several details about the attack.
The main suspect accused of carrying out a massacre at two New Zealand mosques on Friday was described by officials as a, quote, right-wing extremist terrorist and appeared to post a lengthy manifesto before the attack detailing his white supremacist worldview.
Now, this, I think about what the policy is that big tech is trying to create here.
I'm not sure.
Obviously, when a manifesto is left of this kind, left online, journalists know where to find it.
They do find it.
They find it and they read it.
And then they write about it in news articles.
And they're able to pick the parts that help them push the narratives they want, conceal the parts that don't.
So Ben Collins took the manifesto and decided to pretend that Tucker Carlson was somehow linked to it, even though the manifesto didn't mention Tucker Carlson, didn't indicate that they watched his show.
Ben Collins didn't say any of that because he was on a mission.
And the reason he was able to succeed was because you weren't allowed to see the manifesto.
You're only allowed to hear journalists.
This priesthood, this special priesthood are allowed to see it.
And then you have to rely on them to describe it to you.
And that's what Big Tech was doing.
They were saying, look, if NBC News wants to tell you about what is in the manifesto, we're going to let them.
Obviously, we're not going to censor Rachel Maddow if she talks about the manifesto in Nashville, which she wouldn't do.
But assuming she did, of course, we're not going to censor her.
We'll let her tell you what's in it.
We just won't let you see it for yourself.
We won't let Steven Crowder show it to you.
Here was The Guardian in May of last year, as well, trying to link Fox News To that shooting in Buffalo, Fox News suddenly goes quiet on Great Replacement Theory after Buffalo shooting.
Quote, suspect was allegedly motivated by the theory, but the network has barely mentioned the gunman's reasoning, even after Tucker Carlson pushed the concept in more than 400 of his shows.
The absence of coverage of the motive was revealing, given Fox News' most popular host, Tucker Carlson, has pushed the concept of replacement theory in more than 400 of his shows, and has arguably done more than anyone in the U.S.
to popularize the racist theory.
Fox News, according to Oliver Darcy, a media correspondent for CNN, quote, largely ignored the fact that the shooter had been inspired by replacement theories.
Darcy searched transcripts for Fox News' show and found one brief mention by Fox News anchor Eric Schon.
As Americans absorbed news of the shooting and had struggled to understand why it had happened, It seemed a glaring omission.
Okay, I've already explained, and you can go watch those shows if you want, why it's a complete lie to claim that Tucker Carlson pushes the Great Replacement Theory of the white supremacist version.
What he does is point out that Democratic Party operatives and analysts have long boasted of the fact and written books about the fact That they expect immigration to change the demographics of the United States in a way that's favorable to the Democratic Party.
They're the ones who pushed the replacement theory by saying we're replacing the current set of Americans with a new type of person that we're integrating into the population through immigration.
This is Democratic Party officials talking.
And we want to do that because we want to change the demographics of the country to make it more favorable to the Democratic Party.
That's what Tucker Carlson talks about.
Never once has Tucker Carlson said, What the shooter said, which was, the only real American citizens are white Americans.
There's no such thing as a non-white American citizen.
That's the Great Replacement Theory in its white supremacist version, and it was a complete lie.
That the theory was promoted by Tucker Carlson, but look at how they use the manifesto.
Here is the Guardian mocking Fox News for their lack of interest in a manifesto and the Buffalo case for not describing its contents, for not talking about it.
And yet the entire media virtually has essentially been silent about this manifesto, both at the start, over the next seven months while it was concealed, and even now that it's released.
One of the main books that pushed that democratic replacement theory, by the way, is A Democratic Majority by John Judas and another Democratic operative that essentially says we're going to win forever, the Democrats are, because of immigration.
Now, the joke of that is that they were so wrong because so many immigrants who become naturalized citizens don't like the Democratic Party, aren't voting for the Democratic Party.
But that's where the replacement theory came from.
from the Democratic Party boasting about how it would keep them in power.
Just to show you how selective this disgusting tactic is of trying to use these manifestos to link someone who never advocates violence based on their ideology to the shootings themselves was when a suspect was
He was killed in 2017 when he went to a softball field, a congressional softball field, where he knew Republican Party members of Congress gathered each Saturday to play softball and he shot up the softball field trying to kill Republicans.
He almost killed Steve Scalise, the Republican congressman from Louisiana.
And it turned out that he was a gigantic fan of both Bernie Sanders and Rachel Maddow.
And had been constantly churning out content about how Republicans are Kremlin agents, how they're traitors.
And he was clearly feeding on Rachel Maddow's core ideology all the time.
And Bernie Sanders.
But no person in good faith ever tried to say that Bernie Sanders was responsible or Rachel Maddow was responsible or had blood on their hands.
For having disseminated an ideology that ended up motivating the shooter to go and kill people at that, try and kill people at that softball field.
Because it's an idiotic attempt to try and claim that someone's responsible for a murder when they never advocate violence.
But there's a CNN article saying that the suspect in the congressional shooting was a Bernie Sanders supporter, strongly anti-Trump, and that he also had Posted frequently about things he saw on Rachel Maddow, was a huge Rachel Maddow fan as well.
So, we now have a few pages of this manifesto.
We should have the entire manifesto.
And the fact that Big Tech will not let you see it, and that we only know what it says by virtue of the fact that we have a couple of platforms, one of which is this platform, Rumble, and most of the time Elon Musk acts That refuses to submit to these censorship demands, shows why this battle is so important, this battle to keep a free internet.
This is a perfect story to illustrate the vitalness of that cause, that it's not just abstract, that it's not just something that we talk about because it sounds Like an abstract idea that's worth supporting, it is crucial to whether or not you get a free flow of information or whether you can be propagandized without challenge.
So we're going to talk to our counsel that we had retained or came close to retaining in Nashville.
I don't know if we ever signed the retainer agreement or not and see if there's still value in pushing this, but the case is on appeal and the court has not ruled on it.
And for that reason, the position of the Nashville police is we cannot release it and will not until the appellate court rules.
Who knows when they're going to rule?
This is something that should have been released months ago because there is no basis for continuing to conceal it.
And the fact that Big Tech acted to keep you from it shows how many people have an interest in ensuring that this stays hidden.
So, Batia Ungar Sargen is a journalist who is currently the opinion editor of Newsweek.
She's also a columnist with Compact Magazine, where I believe I'm still on the board of advisors.
I should've checked that.
I think I was.
I know I was at one point.
She's also the author of the book, Bad News, How Woke Media is Undermining Democracy, and she's a steadfast supporter of Israel, which is one of the reasons we wanted to have her on the show.
We're gonna talk to her about the ongoing war between Israel and Gaza, whether or not the U.S.
should Support Israel in that conflict with arms and money as it's currently doing and the Biden administration with the support of both parties as well as the various censorship measures and cancel culture campaigns and victimhood narratives that have emerged in the United States over the last month.
As I said, we are now in a position where we scheduled several Israel supporters to come on the show.
I know Batya's journalism.
I have a lot of respect for it and for her and so I am very delighted to welcome her to the program tonight.
Batya, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us.
We're thrilled to have you.
I cannot even express to you, Glenn, how honored I am to be here with you and how grateful I am to be here with you.
I think this is probably the most important interview I will have given in the last four weeks.
I believe so deeply in this idea of Yeah, I feel the same.
And, you know, just to be clear, I mean, there was a good chunk of our audience that most definitely is on the pro-Israel side.
We knew that from the beginning.
We've heard from a lot of them.
It means the world to me that you are willing to expose your audience to my views, which I know may not be theirs.
And I think the world of you in general, Glenn.
So I'm just so honored to be here.
Thank you so much for having me.
Yeah, I feel the same.
And, you know, just to be clear, I mean, there was a good chunk of our audience that most definitely is on the pro-Israel side.
We knew that from the beginning.
We've heard from a lot of them.
Most of them have said, we don't we don't we don't agree with your coverage.
We don't agree with your perspective.
But we're going to stay with you because we understand what we want from you is that you do your best to be honest in your coverage.
But there have been some people who said, I can't watch your show anymore.
I can't subscribe anymore.
And we knew that was going to happen.
But that's just the nature of this topic.
And I do absolutely agree that the more inflammatory a topic is, the more sensitive it is, the more difficult it is, the more important it is to seek out dialogue.
As long as it's in good faith and civil and that's what I knew would happen when we invited you on.
So, let's just get started this way.
On October 7th, I sat, like most people did, watching these horrific videos of Israelis being terrorized, being murdered, being tortured in the most sadistic manner possible.
People, children being carried off and kidnapped to Gaza in front of their parents.
Old people being shot in front of their children.
All kinds of just horrifying stories.
And I think any person, decent person by definition, was enraged by what Hamas did on that day and found that there's no moral justification for it.
That's certainly something I felt and that I've said many times since then.
We are now, though, a month later.
And that means there has been a month of Israeli response.
And that response has largely consisted of a relentless and massive bombing campaign in Gaza, which is a place where most people cannot get out.
The borders are closed with Israel and long have been and then also closed with Egypt.
So you have this trapped population of 2.2 million people, half of whom are children.
You can bicker about the numbers, but many thousands of them are dying, including people who obviously have their children or sometimes when they're not, are not supporters of Hamas, don't bear responsibility for what happened.
It has to be a tragedy for any decent person as well, and I know, I'm sure you look at that with empathy as well.
So given where we are now, what is your overall view of this conflict between the Gazans and the Israelis?
Wow, overall view.
I mean, yeah, the word tragedy definitely comes to mind.
The images coming out of Gaza are unbearable.
Of course, like you said, the images coming out of Israel on October 7th, I think really, for me and for a lot of people, changed the world in many ways.
So just this overwhelming feeling of tragedy, but I think that Israel must eradicate Hamas.
I mean, I don't think that they can allow what happened to stand.
And to me, the view of a ceasefire Which is what Hamas is asking for, unsurprisingly, would allow Hamas to regroup, would allow them that space that they need in order to recover and to continue to exist.
And I think it would be immoral for Israel to allow the group that perpetrated the massacre of October 7th to continue to exist in that way.
And to me, and I'm curious what you make of this, Glenn, the only lens in which Israel has a responsibility to step back and allow Hamas that space to regroup is a very woke lens.
And by woke, I mean one that replaces an objective sense of what is moral and what is right with a view that the party with less power has an inherent virtue associated with it.
And if that is Hamas, then that is Hamas.
And I think that that is, to me, the only lens that it makes sense to say that we should exceed to the demand of Hamas, who is still holding 240 Israelis and Americans and other nationalities hostage and perpetrated that event.
And I think that that view that sort of valorizes weakness is the one that people apply when they ask Israel to have suffered October 7th and then just sit back and allow Hamas to continue to exist.
So I understand and I think you're right that probably some people are looking through it through that prism.
The prism through which I'm looking at this though is the prism of the laws of war which have been developed over several centuries now but really became
Very kind of established and clear and formidable in the wake of World War II, when the world looked at the atrocities that drove that war, including the Holocaust, but things like mass bombings of Dresden and other places, the use of nuclear weapons, the lack of regard for civilians, the intentional bombing of civilians, and created a body of rules and laws that were designed to limit what countries can do, even when they're fighting a just war.
And part of those are things like, it's a war crime if you try and collectively punish a population.
There are restrictions on what kind of structures you can bomb.
You can't bomb ambulances or hospitals or schools or places of worship.
And I understand all the Israeli responses that sometimes those are used by Hamas and all of that.
But Do you see, whether it's in that body of law, the Geneva Conventions and the Nuremberg Trials and all of that, any kind of limit on how many people Israel can kill in Gaza in the pursuit of this goal of destroying Hamas?
It's an extremely important question.
I'm sure that it could arrive at a place where I would say, I am no longer comfortable with this.
International law does stipulate that if a hospital is being used to launch rockets as a terrorist hotbed as a location that is a military base that it then forgoes its status as a protected space.
I believe that there is plenty of evidence that I have personally seen of the IDF doing their best to get civilians out of harm's way.
They opened up a humanitarian corridor that they were protecting civilians who were leaving from the north to the south, protecting them from Hamas, who was shooting at civilians who were trying to flee because they are their human shields and their protection.
So I think that from an international law point of view, I feel very convinced that the IDF is doing its best to operate according to those laws.
But I have to say, Glenn, international law doesn't mean very much to me.
I'm much more of a kind of America first nationalist person.
I don't believe that international law or human rights are real because, not because I don't want them to be, but because a right is a contract that you make with a government that can exercise state power against you.
And there is, thank God, no international body that can impose, for example, the laws of the EU, which I'm sure you hate as much as I do because they don't believe in free speech upon us.
And the tragedy of the Palestinians is that they are stateless, is that there is no government that is answerable to them to protect their civil rights, that in the West Bank, the Israeli government exercises state power against them without giving them the civil right to vote for that government, and that they're living the Israeli government exercises state power against them without giving them the civil right to And so to me, I think that if you look at the international law, I feel very convinced that Israel is doing its best to follow it.
But at the same time, I don't know that I put that much stock in it.
And I have to say that the question to me is this, Glenn, and I'm very curious what you think of this.
It seems to me that to say that if Hamas puts a rocket launcher under a hospital, which it seems like they have, and they are actually lobbing rockets at Israeli hospitals, even as we speak, which they are, it cannot be that Israel must allow Hamas to win because it is using its own people in this horrific way.
And it seems to me that that is kind of the argument that is being made in the name of international law.
But I'm super curious about what you make of that.
Well, so I think obviously in the fog of war, every government lies, every side lies, that's one of the weapons of propaganda, it's a part of an information war.
I have no doubt that there are times that Hamas has used schools and mosques and hospitals, we've seen evidence of that, to launch rockets or to do other things.
At the same time, You can go and interview healthcare workers, surgeons, nurses, people who provide, trying to provide care to wounded children, to people who are suffering from all kinds of sickness, and they will say adamantly, we want you to come and examine our hospital, investigate our hospital.
There is no Hamas in our hospital.
We are trying to take care of hundreds or thousands of patients who are barely clinging to life.
We don't have anesthesia.
We don't have food and water to give them.
And we're being told that we have 24 hours to evacuate, which would mean the death of all of our patients.
And there's no Hamas here.
So I don't deny that Hamas does those things.
But I do wonder about the morality of two things.
One is, if, for example, there was some horrible criminal who we knew had murdered, who was a serial killer, and he took a bunch of hostages, ten people, and he had ten children or ten innocent people with him, that's what a hostage is, Generally, we would not say, well, sorry, we're just going to bomb the place where that person is and kill those 10 innocent people just to get the one person that we want to get at, because very quickly the body count for innocent people piles up.
And then the other thing is, you know, when I'm talking about international law, I don't mean things like the little EU bodies, you know, passing judgment.
I mean things like the Geneva Conventions, like the bedrock of the morality of law that we decided we needed after World War II.
And so Article 33, for example, of the Fourth Geneva Convention is the one that prohibits collective punishment and says, Quote, no protective person may be punished for an offense he or she has not personally committed.
Collective penalties and likewise all measures of intimidation or terrorism are prohibited.
And that was in part to ban things like what the Nazis would do, which is that they harbored a single person the Nazis wanted.
They would go and kill the entire town or just start randomly shooting people to terrorize them.
That was collective punishment.
I mean, are you saying that you don't think Israel is bound or should be bound by things like the Geneva Conventions? - It's a good question.
I really have lost a lot of respect for these international bodies because of the way that they are used.
In general, there's not anything I could point to in the Geneva Convention that I don't agree with and that I don't think Israel should follow.
What does bound by mean, right, Glenn?
I think that's the question I'm asking is like, who binds them?
And I am very glad that there is no one that has the capability to bind them because I think that I believe in sovereignty and I believe in nation states.
I don't think it's accurate to say that what Israel is doing is collective punishment or to compare it to things that the Nazis did.
They have given so many warnings.
They have made millions and millions of phone calls, sent millions and millions of SMSs, opened up a humanitarian corridor.
They have gone—I've never seen anything to this extent.
I mean, I'm not the most well-read person, but I've never seen an army do this before.
And I respect people who say it's not enough.
You have to let Hamas win because they are hiding amongst civilians.
I don't accept that as moral.
And I think what you said on October 9th really resonated with me, Glenn, when you said that morally you just can't compare what Hamas did on 10-7, intentionally targeting Thousands and thousands of civilians, you know, destroying entire families, all of these atrocities that we've seen with an army doing its best to avoid those civilian casualties, really doing its best to avoid civilian casualties.
And what I believe to me, it sounds like when we call that collective punishment, despite every effort that's been made, what we're saying essentially is Hamas must be allowed to win because it is willing to sacrifice its own people, the Palestinians. what we're saying essentially is Hamas must be allowed to And I don't accept that.
I think that those Palestinians also have to be liberated from Hamas and from their dictatorial rule.
I mean, heaven knows they're brutal to their own people as well.
And so to me, that is what that means.
And so, like, do I want these children to die?
Of course not.
But I don't think that you can allow Hamas to win, and that's what that would mean.
So I think, you know, step one is I recognize the effort that the IDF has gone to, which has surprised me, to be honest, the lengths that they went to.
And second of all, to say after those lengths, to call that collective punishment is to insist that Hamas has the right to win because it is willing to commit atrocities against its own people.
And I don't think that's moral.
I want to talk about that statement that you referenced on October 9th that I made in explaining why I could never find justification for what Hamas did no matter how much I might sympathize with the Palestinian cause or believe that the Israeli expansion of settlements and the denial of statehood is immoral.
I was basically saying you have to draw a moral line somewhere no matter how much you support a particular cause.
There just has to be certain things that are over the line and going to a place and Seeing a bunch of kids at a music festival or breaking into a house and seeing a family.
I mean there were a lot of people killed that day in Israel.
We never got real numbers but a lot of them were in the military, were police forces, people that you would normally think are legitimate targets.
There were a lot of obviously civilians.
We saw probably hundreds of them at least that were treated in the most horrific ways and I was saying you have to have a moral line and that has to be over the moral line no matter what the cause.
My question then becomes for you, do you also agree that there have to be moral lines that, you know, Hamas's view is, look, we're fighting against this repressive state and so we just need to win.
And, sorry, if civilians end up dying or we end up having to terrorize the civilian population or kidnap them to protect, to prevent Israel from bombing us because now we have their civilians, we don't recognize the laws of war.
We just want to win.
And one of the things that I think really started disturbing me about what Israel was doing was when the Israeli defense minister announced that, you know, Israel has been blockading, controlling what gets in and out of Gaza for many, many years.
They control the airspace.
They bomb the airport.
No one can leave by plane because Israel bombed the only runway, the only airport in Gaza City.
They control the sea lanes and they control what gets in and out of Gaza.
And the Israeli defense minister said, we're going to block Food and water and medication from getting into Gaza and when I don't know if you saw this interview with this American nurse who has spent the last 26 days in Gaza.
It's incredible if you didn't see it.
She was with Anderson Cooper and she basically said the reason we had to leave Was because we were going to die within two days or three days simply from starvation.
There's no food in Gaza.
There's no clean drinking water.
She also was being menaced by the population.
But she was describing conditions there that seemed very connected to me to what the defense minister vowed they were going to do, which was blockade food and water and only a tiny portion of what you need for survival in Gaza is getting in.
So you're right.
I did say there needs to be more lines for whatever cause you support.
And so I guess what I'm asking you is, what are those lines when it comes to Israel?
Like, is blockading food and water and preventing that from getting into the entire population over a moral line that you think Israel should observe?
I was very glad that, you know, President Biden and Antony Blinken convinced Israel that that was a mistake and that they reversed course on that.
I don't know how I would feel if I myself had a family member who was being held hostage, but I wasn't comfortable with that.
Yeah, I think that that for me was a red line.
Yeah.
So, let me just ask you, this idea of destroying Hamas, I absolutely understand why after every single person I know, Jewish person I know in my life, was genuinely traumatized by October 7th.
Like, I know people who are barely political, who don't really, haven't really cared much about Israel, who are kind of even critical of it, who just transformed as a result of what they saw on October 7th in a way that made them much more supportive of Israel than ever before.
And so this idea that, well, we have to go and destroy Hamas, so they can't do that.
You can't have a country when you have, you know, armed men coming into your country and doing that to civilians.
You have to protect your citizens by taking action.
The idea of destroying Hamas, though, I mean, this is not the first time that Israel has massively bombed Gaza.
There have been many times, nowhere near this scale.
But back in 2014, many other times, thousands of people in Gaza were killed through sustained bombardment campaigns.
That was a 51-day bombing campaign.
What does that mean, destroy Hamas?
Like, does it mean kill every person who's currently affiliated with Hamas?
Because even if you do that, Don't you think that on some level, when people in the West Bank, when people throughout the Muslim and Arab world watch what Israel is doing in the name of destroying Hamas, that it's going to increase the amount of anti-Israel rage and hatred and increase the number of people who want to bring violence to Israel, even if this group, quote, Hamas no longer exists.
It'll just be done under some other name.
I don't think that.
Let's take the West Bank, for example.
There's always been this rivalry between Fatah and Hamas in the West Bank.
I think right now there's this attempt to sort of build up Abu Mazen as an alternative, which is not going to get very far.
He's deeply unpopular.
I think there's a lot of anger at Israel, but to me, if you take kind of a step just a little bit further back, the Abraham Accords by and large are holding, which I think is very surprising as well.
I really think that President Trump changed the calculation there.
We do see that the Saudis do still seem interested in normalizing relations with Israel, which I think is a really big deal and one of the reasons that Israel is different from Ukraine and why I think we should be supporting Israel, and I don't think we should be supporting Ukraine, because of Israel's ability to pull its own weight as an ally and bring something to the table.
Something like Saudi Arabia.
And so to me, these Arab countries are, they have, look, for better or for worse, I mean, it's also bad that they have abandoned the Palestinian cause, right?
I mean, it's never been more devastating to be Palestinian because these countries where that used to be terrified of the Arab street, you know, and saying anything, you know, that was not like extremely pro-Palestinian.
It's clear that the game has changed thanks to President Trump.
And so to me, it's, you know, what happens the day after in Gaza is an extremely important question.
You know, how do we ensure the rights of the people there are protected in a way that they haven't been?
By the way, as I'm sure you've, you know, told your audience many times, you know, Bibi Netanyahu was very involved in building up Hamas as an alternative to Fatah because he thought that weakening Abu Mazen would forestay, you know, the Palestinian state, the possibility of a Palestinian state.
That seems to me to be sort of obviously over.
So to me, yeah, I would say killing every last person who was involved in planning and executing this attack, killing the leadership, getting rid of that leadership.
And then I mean, to me, the obvious choice for who would negotiate, who would be the people to negotiate would be the Saudis.
That's maybe wishful thinking.
But thinking about this, you know, for the West, The West, which always uses a kind of racial lens to look everything right, we impose this racial binary onto everything, especially Americans.
You know, we see this as Jews versus Palestinians.
But for the Israelis and for, I think, a lot of the Arab states, this is a much larger, this is a sort of an Arab-Israeli conflict.
This is about the region.
And much of the Arab-Israeli part of that was just completely changed with the Abraham Accords.
And so we're looking at a very different picture.
It's very hard to say what's going to come.
Let me ask you, you mentioned earlier that you consider yourself an America first dictator.
That was kind of your ideology.
And the position of the United States in terms of like, what is the United States interest in this region?
Why do we send so much money to Israel more than any other country by far over decades?
Ukraine now gets more.
But I'm saying over many decades, Israel has always gotten the most amount of arms, most amount of funds.
The idea that that is a partnership.
Yes.
that benefits U.S. interest was always dependent on the idea that there would be a two-state solution.
And in fact, it's always been the position of the U.S. government that settlement expansions in the West Bank, which make a two-state solution more and more difficult, if not impossible, are against U.S. interests.
interests, actually endanger U.S.
interests in the region because the more this goes on where there's no resolution, where Palestine doesn't have a state, the more anger in the Arab world there is, not just to Israel, but to the United States as well, which undermines American interests.
For a long time, the official position of the Israeli government was, yes, we too want a two-state solution.
There were times when they actually got pretty close under Ehud Barak and Yasser Arafat and the Oslo Accords and that whole history.
But now there's this kind of new, you know, more ideologically extreme, or whatever you want to call it, right-wing, religious, whatever you want to describe it as, coalition that Netanyahu partners with in his government, and many of them don't even pretend they believe in a two-state solution.
In fact, they see Gaza and the West Bank as Israels, as part of greater Israel.
What is your view on that?
Do you still think a two-state solution is possible?
And do you think it's viable and desirable?
Or do you agree with the Israelis who say, no, that land is ours and that shouldn't be a Palestinian state?
You know, as someone who's neither Israeli nor Palestinian, I feel like, and somebody who's very committed to the idea of national sovereignty, I feel like it's not for me to say.
I mean, my preference has always been that Israel give all the Palestinians in the West Bank citizenship, mostly because I have dear friends there and I don't want them living under the Palestinian Authority, because when they get arrested by the Palestinian Authority, they're actually even meaner to them than when they get How would that work?
by the Israelis, and I would rather they be part of, live under, you know, a democratic rule.
But I mean, it's not really for me to say.
Wait, wait, wait, how would that work?
Because obviously the concern has always been that if you give the Arab citizenship, not just the Arabs who are already citizens in Israel, 20% of Israelis are Arab, but if you give citizenship certainly to everyone in that from the, sorry to say this, but from the river to the sea, that there'd be sorry to say this, but from the river to the sea, that there'd be at some point very soon, if not now, more Arabs than there were Israelis, and you would lose the idea So how would that work if you integrated the West Bank into Israel?
Wouldn't at some point, because of demographics, that jeopardize the idea of an Israeli state if everybody had equal voting rights?
I don't think that that, I don't see the math that way.
Like, I don't understand why people say that.
I mean, the average Israeli woman has four children and the three different Palestinian populations, you know, the Arab Israelis, I believe the Arab is, you know, Israeli Arab woman who has Israeli citizenship only has two children.
And, you know, of course in Gaza they have many more because they're very, very poor.
Oh, so you don't mean integrating Gaza into Israel.
You mean just the West Bank?
All right, so then what do you envision?
Because the idea of a two-state solution was always that West Bank and Gaza would connect and there'd be a contiguous Palestinian state.
But let me ask you about that.
So let's put that aside.
But to me, the problem with the West Bank is that the Israelis feel very rightly that they need to have security control over the population there because of the Second Intifada in which 1037 Israelis were killed.
You know, that's the equivalent of 30,000 Americans, right?
Like, so if you, if there was a population that killed 30,000 Americans in three years, we would feel we needed to have security control over them.
The problem is, is that they don't have civil rights and there is a government exercising state power against them that they can't vote for.
That's like a real problem, right?
That's very, very bad.
So, I mean, the obvious solution is just to make them citizens, to me.
But again, I'm not, I'm not a voter.
I'm not Israeli.
And so it's sort of, I feel a little bit like it's, it's not really my business.
My question here is, To me, the real question for me as an American citizen, as an American Jew, like, well, what is in America's best interest?
And to me, it seems like there's a lot of evidence that having Israel as a strong and independent sovereign ally is very much in our national interest.
The reason to not give aid to Israel, and by the way, that's a debate that's alive and well in the pro-Israel community as well, who many people think that aid to Israel is actually a way that the U.S.
weakens Israel and controls Israel, and I sort of see that point.
I think that the main difference between Biden and Trump is that Biden, like Obama, wants his allies to be weak so that they will be pliable.
hates weakness because he thinks it's lame and he doesn't want his friends to be lame because he takes pictures with them.
And so he wants his allies to be strong and strong allies bring something to the table.
And so, you know, to me, that's a very live debate.
I, you know, I could see both sides of it.
I'm not like totally committed to us, you know, funding Israel, although I do think we get more than our money's worth.
And of course, all of that money goes back into most of the vast majority of it goes back into the American economy.
Right.
And Israel has made concessions in terms of research and development of its own weaponry, which has helped our economy a lot because, you know, as a result of these negotiations, So I think that is the real question to me is like, what is the America first position here?
I am so totally bought into the idea that it is unbelievably infuriating, especially to working class Americans, that their taxpayer dollars go to fund other countries when they themselves are struggling.
I think that was so obvious with the war in Ukraine.
And so when people say that to me about funding Israel, I completely hear that.
But even from the question of our relationship and what is best for our relationship, is it best for our relationship for us to be giving this money or is it best for our relationship for us not?
I mean, that is a very open question and I don't hold it against anybody who falls on one side or the other side of that.
The violence that is taking place in that region is obviously concentrated in Gaza.
But in the West Bank, there has been some really horrific reports, not from Palestinian media outlets, but even from Israeli media outlets, including Haaretz, which I know is considered kind of left-wing by some people.
But if you read that newspaper, as I've been doing every day, along with several others, they're clearly supporters of the Israeli bombing campaign.
They're supporters of the idea that Hamas has to be destroyed.
This is not some kind of like fifth column working against Israel.
And there have been, I mean, all kinds of reports that will turn your stomach about the abuse, sadistic abuse that settlers have been doling out to people, to Palestinians in the West Bank, backed up a lot of times by the Israeli military, where they'll go in and they'll sexually assault people.
They'll humiliate them.
They'll beat them.
They urinate on them.
They've told them if they don't fight, I'm sure you've seen those stories.
Do you acknowledge that there is part of Israel, a non-trivial part, composed of people who seem very extremist and very much of the view that Palestinian life doesn't have equal life to Jewish life?
I wouldn't say it's significant.
The settlers, even among the settlers, okay, let me put it this way, even among people who are on the other side of the Green Line, right, in the West Bank, there are wildly different types of people living there.
Some people live there because they were encouraged to move there by the Israeli government, and they live in settlements that are, you know, just feel very much like normal Israel, where they have very good relationships with Palestinians.
Some of the settlers are fanatics and horrifically violent people.
I mean, I've encountered them with Palestinian friends.
It's horrible.
And the fact that there has been this kind of tacit, you know, a refusal to police them under this government, this extremist coalition, is horrifying and inexcusable.
There's two things happening right now in the West Bank.
There is kind of a military campaign against militants in which many people have been killed.
But again, right, military targets, right, like you said, right, killing a soldier is very different from killing a civilian.
And then there have been these horrific reports of violence by settlers against Palestinians that are just revolting and inexcusable.
Israel's at war right now.
And I wish I could say that this started during the war, but I know that it didn't because I've seen it firsthand and it's inexcusable.
One of the things that I've been trying to do a lot is, you know, and it's one of the reasons I brought you on.
I'm going to have Jacob Segal on my show tomorrow night.
I'm going to have people similar to both of you in the near future.
Jacob was your idea, although we had him on my show before.
I should have asked earlier.
I know for a fact that a lot of people who support Israel are not people who, like those settlers we were just talking about, are bloodthirsty people who don't value Palestinian life, who are happy to see Palestinians being killed.
There's been, though, this tendency to kind of imply, or often even sometimes explicitly state, that people in the West or people in the United States who are marching against the Israeli bombardment are somehow overwhelmingly or highly likely to be if not inherently anti-semitic or pro-Hamas.
Do you agree that many of those people are motivated by very similar motives to the ones that motivate you, namely they're looking at these images coming out of Gaza, they're hearing testimony about the extreme humanitarian crisis taking place there?
and are simply acting in the desire to stop that and especially stop their government's support of it, as opposed to because they hate Jews or believe that all Jews should be killed?
I mean, do you agree there's a significant number of people who are critical of the Israeli government who are not anti-Semitic or pro-Hamas?
I think if you are, if they are chanting from the river to the sea, even Palestine will be free, which is a slogan that Hamas has used, the burden of proof that they are not which is a slogan that Hamas has used, the burden of proof that they are I mean, Rashida Tlaib tried to say, that's not what it means to me, that's not what it means to the people I know.
Hamas uses that slogan, and Hamas are people who set babies on fire.
So, like, the burden of proof then shifts to you to prove to me that you don't endorse that because you're singing their song.
That's kind of how I feel about that.
I think a lot of people genuinely, genuinely, their heart bleeds for the bloodshed of the innocent.
But I think a lot of us also feel that, specifically on the left, There is just a difference in how they feel about Jewish victims and the right of Jews to stand up for themselves when they are victimized.
It's sort of a feeling that a lot of us have had for a while.
And I think it comes back to this.
I mean, to many of us, to me, I'll just speak for myself.
It seems like there is this wokeness afoot.
So, for example, If you look at the way people treat the atrocities that Hamas committed and specifically I'm talking about leftist media demanding a level of proof that goes beyond anything like not right like we have many many many first-hand accounts from first-hand witnesses who have been handling the bodies for a month now of mass rape of beheadings And yet they're still out there saying, this is a canard, this didn't happen.
And, but when Hamas gives them a number, right, like 500 people killed in this hospital bombing, and then the next day it turns out that hospital is still standing, right, and those 500 people were not killed, you know, they immediately accept Hamas's numbers.
But when it comes to the Jews, they want, they want to literally like see, look at the, they need to hold the baby's skull to accept that it was beheaded.
That, like, you know, how you get to a place where you are so comfortable accepting something from the people who committed this and it is, the standard of proof for the people who suffered it is impossibly high.
Like, again, the burden of proof is going to be on them to prove to us, like, that there's nothing there about Jews specifically that's influencing that approach.
And you think that about the pretty significant number of left-wing Jews who are participating in these pro-Palestinian protests and who share many of the same critiques of the Israeli government?
You know, we know that support, like pro-Israel, being pro-Israel, over 90% of Jews would call themselves pro-Israel.
I think the last number, the last pew was 95%, so I do think it's an insignificant number.
Obviously, they're still Jews.
I'll fight for the death, like I would fight for any American.
I will fight, you know, to the death for their right to say what they think.
But to act like they're representative of where the community is at right now, I think, would be a big mistake.
And it's sort of wishful thinking on the part of people who want to escape from being called anti-Semitic.
I want to get to the censorship angle, but I just have a couple more questions before we get there.
And one of them is about this question.
I spend a lot of time thinking about how human beings end up Believing certain things or attaching themselves to certain causes.
And I know I'm somebody who grew up Jewish.
Every single person in my family was Jewish.
My grandparents, one of them, one of the grandparents with whom I was closest was a immigrant from Germany.
She emigrated to the United States and fled anti-Semitism and the Nazis and her family that stayed there were extinguished.
These are all things I heard growing up that I was inculcated with.
Most of my friends growing up are Jewish.
The people who have been my kind of lifelong friends are Jewish.
And as a result of that, I know how people who are Jewish in the United States grow up, which is they are inculcated from the time they're as young as they can be to look at Israel as something that they should have a lot of affinity for and feel a lot of a connection for and support.
And there's all kinds of things Israel does, like offer free trips to young American Jews to come to Israel, where they kind of get a sense for and there's a program to sort of make them understand why they should have that affinity for Israel.
Given that that is something that happens to all of us who are Jewish or almost all of us who are Jewish, do you have those times when you wonder whether the reason you have the views of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that you have?
Is not because sitting from an objective place, that's the views that you've reached, but because you've been inculcated from birth to kind of get to that conclusion?
I don't mean it's wrong, I just mean, do you wonder that about yourself?
Like, is that a, do you ask yourself, do you question yourself, is this really the reason why I see things from such a pro-Israel perspective?
I think that's a great question.
I was going to say, it's even worse with me because I'm religious, so I have an even higher power that I have to answer to that's telling me what to think about this.
But here's what I'll tell you.
In 2014, I was on your side of things.
So in 2014, Hamas lobbed I don't know how many rockets in Israel, and I believe that they killed two people.
And in response, Israel killed, I think, something like 1,500.
And I was of the mind that that was immoral because that is not defense.
You have the Iron Dome to defend you.
Hamas is not capable of killing In those numbers, you know, it's sort of like it's incapable of doing what it wants to do, which is annihilate you.
And so as a result, you cannot go to the extent of your ability to fight back.
And so back back then, I guess I had, you know, bucked the trend that you're describing.
I obviously still felt very like I would call myself both pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian, which I still would today.
But I but but now I don't think that now I think that that way is And I asked myself, OK, what changed?
And I think it was I I I law I got rid of that woke white liberal progressive view of things where the less powerful party has an inherent virtue of associated with it by virtue of its powerlessness.
Right.
Like that that white progressive mindset where, you know, that where we have white progressives are the only group that has more loathing for their more in-group hatred than in-group affinity.
Right.
That is a hallmark of white progressivism.
And that is the thing that I lost is this idea that to be strong and to stay.
to stand up for your values is inherently to be morally compromised.
And that somehow there is no right and wrong.
The first thing you should ask about a situation is who has more power and who has less power inside with the person who has less like, to me, that is the thing that has changed between then and now.
And so I do feel very much that I feel very much an agent of my point of view, only because I used to have very, very different ones.
And I've also been tracking like, Oh, Oh, it's interesting, Batya, you see this differently.
Like, you lost all those friends back then.
Now you're like, but yeah, but it's so it's So Glenn, I would ask you, how do you think you managed to escape what you see as this kind of cultural thing that you were supposed to believe in?
I mean, I think we're all a byproduct of our environment, and I think that includes myself.
I think we're subjective beings.
We're not computers.
We can never reach this place where we eliminate all of our cultural and childhood influences so that we can just kind of be a brain that's just analyzing the world with this perfect objectivity, though I think we should aspire to that.
And for me, I mean, maybe it's because that really never took for me.
I never really, you know, I see how animated people get in the United States about what is a foreign country, Israel.
It's obvious that there are a lot of evangelicals in the United States who are obsessed with Israel for religious reasons in a way that they don't feel about other countries.
There are American Jews who obviously feel a great affinity for Israel and have that color what they say and what they think and what they feel.
And I just never, identified that, that just never became a part of my identity.
And I think for that reason, I'm a little free of it.
It doesn't make me any more reliable as a source because I have my own biases and my own influences.
We all have them.
But I want to just ask about this one thing that you said, and then I do want to get to the censorship part because that's a place where you've been saying some things that I want people to hear as well.
And you've been saying them in a way that's a little bit different than most people.
So I want people to hear that.
But you were saying earlier, I think one of the things we have to acknowledge is we don't, so we don't, if we're in American, for American Jews, we don't just have this bias that we're told from birth that Israel is on the right side, that the Palestinians are wrong or the Arabs are wrong, even though that is a part of our culture bias.
But then we live in a country which is the United States or we're We're citizens of a country, the United States, that is also very pro-Israel.
I mean, both political parties have had the support for Israel as a centerpiece of their politics for decades.
If there's an Israel resolution that comes up, it always passes something like 409 to 8 on the side of Israel.
And so our media has a lot of that same inclination as well to be pro-Israel, although there is a kind of left-wing influence, and I get that if you're very pro-Israel you think the media is anti-Israel, but I promise you if you're pro-Palestinian you think the media is completely pro-Israel.
It's so true!
Yeah, I know.
Both sides are so sure that the media sold them out and it's on the other side.
It's so true.
Exactly.
And I think that's even truer in this case.
But for me, I always see the ideology of the media as being Kind of dedicated to the vision of the government and the U.S.
security state and there's no question they tend to be more pro-Israel certainly than anti-Israel or pro-Palestinian that's reflected in our policies and in all kinds of things.
And so what you were saying before about this kind of extreme evidence burden that people impose on Israel before they'll believe that Hamas engaged in certain atrocities, I think is a fair point.
But then I get back to what you were saying earlier when I asked you about targeting of hospitals and mosques and you were saying, well, Hamas, you know, operates from these places and that's the only reason why Israel bombs it.
And you were saying earlier people just believe whatever Hamas says.
But isn't there a sense where, you know, when you have these doctors in these hospitals, these nurses in these hospitals saying there's no Hamas here, When you have American nurses or people from reporters or Doctors Without Borders who go to Gaza and come back and say, Israel is bombing a bunch of places where there are only civilians.
Isn't there also a sense that, well, we're just going to disbelieve all these people and until there's affirmative definitive proof of the negative that there's no Hamas there, we're going to justify everything Israel is doing the minute they utter the phrase human shield or Hamas is there.
Like it seems like there's some evidentiary problems on the other side and being too willing to believe everything the IDF or Israel says in these situations as well.
Yeah, nobody should believe any government, especially a government at war.
I completely, I mean, yeah, I would not recommend believing everything Israel says or the IDF says.
I mean, yeah, you should bring a critical lens to everything.
I think the problem is just specifically on the left.
The critical lens only goes in one way.
I certainly do not believe everything that I've heard.
You know, I've been in debates with friends about whether to believe what the Hamasniks that they captured are saying about You know, there's been reports coming out now about what they're saying under interrogation.
I'm not at the place where I would believe any of that right now.
I mean, might turn out to be true, might not, I don't know.
That's the kind of thing that I would bring a very heavy dose of salt towards because it is literally wartime propaganda.
I totally agree with you.
And Israel's not perfect.
And for sure, mistakes are made.
There are sociopaths everywhere.
I mean, in every army.
I mean, it's for sure.
Yes, bring a critical lens to everything.
I totally agree with that.
There is, you know, there are some things that seem to me to be pretty incontrovertible evidence that have satisfied me.
But you know, again, like you said, we all bring our point of views.
Possibly.
It's, you know, I have, you know, my biases are making me be easier on the evidence on one side.
I do have very, very, very close friends who are Palestinian.
You know, I have very close friends who are very much on the other side of this.
And so, to me, they, like you, Glenn, are my godsend because, you know, you and I, like, I think probably agree about this, that the The problem with the American left is that the minute you say something they disagree with, they cancel you, they block you, and then they get really stupid and lazy because they don't know any smart people they disagree with, and so they become convinced that everybody they disagree with is a moron.
And, you know, I treasure so deeply people who I disagree with and still have mad respect for because they make me ask myself every time, like, Are you being honest?
Are you being good?
Are you being just?
For example, when I saw Rashida Tlaib's tweet, I didn't think it was great that she tweeted that, but I certainly know people who truly believe that.
That from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free means that Jews and Palestinians will live side by side in peace.
Now, most Israelis are The children and grandchildren of refugees from Arab countries, like, you know, they're the ones who are going to get to decide whether or not they think that living under an Islamic Sharia law rule of Hamas is a place where their civil rights are going to be protected.
You know, most of them, surprise, surprise, don't think that, right?
But I have dear, dear friends who have explained to me why they think from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free is not genocidal.
I disagree with them, but they have met the burden of proof to me that they are not anti-Semitic.
And, you know, so it's it's I think it's extremely important, all of which is to say is to check your biases and have, you know, be as as strict as you can about the humanity of the people you disagree with.
That is literally the most important thing and the only way that we get out of this both here and there.
I couldn't agree more.
You know, we have this after show we do every Tuesday and Thursday night with subscribers and we've been purposely seeking out the smartest, most thoughtful, most introspective pro-Israel comments for me to engage with because I always, in general, not just that you think that kind of interaction is a critical form of journalistic accountability, but also just like accountability as a human being.
I mean, if you're not willing to talk to and seek out the smartest people who disagree with you to kind of kick the tires on what you think, You're doing yourself a huge disservice.
All right, just in the little time we have left, let me ask you about the kind of spate of firings that we've witnessed for people who, some people who praised Hamas, but some people who did far, far short of that.
There was an editor who retweeted an Onion cartoon about criticizing Israel for not caring enough about Palestinian life.
He was fired the next day.
There's been a lot of those.
There's been kind of cancel culture campaigns of putting students at Harvard and other places on lists for signing statements critical of Israel.
Ron DeSantis banned a pro-Palestinian student group, and fire.org was very, very, very, Vehemently objecting to that because you can't have material support for terrorism simply with words, no matter how pro-terrorist those words might be.
What have you made of this kind of spate of censorship and cancellations coming from the same American right that has spent years denouncing it?
There's never been a country as good to the Jews as the United States is.
I think most Jews should feel, if they don't, incredibly grateful to be American.
The First Amendment is an inextricable part of what makes this country, this country.
And so to me, the idea of endorsing a ban on BDS is just So anti-Jewish, and I, you know, obviously I'm offended by the idea of, like, boycotting Jews.
I don't like that.
But what I like even less is the idea of exercising state power against an individual citizen or business' right or what have you to express their political views.
I hate all of that.
I, you know, please walk down the street in my neighborhood and chant, Palestine will be free from the river to the sea.
That is your, I don't want to say God-given, but you know, that is your right as an American.
And that is why I am an American and why I love this country and think this is the best country on earth.
So from the point of view, first of all, of just like state censorship, absolutely unacceptable and just so totally inappropriate.
The second level of things we're seeing is students facing what they're seeing as harassment on college campuses.
Now, is harassment happening?
There's a lot of this chanting.
There's a lot of protests.
There have been three instances by my count of actual physical violence.
Which, of course, is a crime.
Those are crimes.
Those are actual crimes.
Which, of course, is a crime.
And we have actual laws on the books to protect people from them.
I don't believe in hate crimes because I think for something to get from a crime to a hate crime means you're policing somebody's thoughts.
I don't believe in that.
So I don't even think that there should be such a thing as a hate crime.
But those three events, our crimes will be prosecuted as such, faithfully.
Three events, you've had thousands of people protesting.
I mean, like, obviously we've not met the bar of incitement to violence, right?
This is not mass violence.
And so to me, the messaging to college students that they should see themselves as unsafe, it's just, it's, I hate it.
I hate to see it.
I hate to see Jewish students cowering.
Like, that is the wrong message for this moment.
Stand up straight, stand up tall, be proud of who you are.
Put on tefillin, if you allow me to say that here.
But, you know, embrace your embrace your heritage.
Stop acting like stop embracing the safetyism.
Is there a double standard for Jewish students and for other minority students?
There is.
You know what?
The university system is hopelessly flawed.
It's deeply woke.
I'm sure Glenn, you and I would have very similar critiques of the safetyism.
The way out of that is not to embrace the safetyism.
Now, in terms of the firings, you know, like I was never a big like, oh, cancel culture is, you know, terrible because all these people are feeding their families.
I'm, you know, hopefully you'll have me back on when my book comes out in April.
It's all about the working class.
I'm much more focused on the working class.
And to me, like elites, interstitial elite policing has never been like the focus of my ire.
I think probably there's a difference between somebody who has a personal fund where he can choose to hire people and pay them.
I don't know how much these bankers make, like $500,000 a year or something like that.
If he wants to say, I'm not hiring these people, I sort of feel like that's kind of his right.
But I'm not celebrating it.
I think we should be able to handle people's opinions.
If you supported Hamas and a person owns a hedge fund, I kind of think it's their right to be like, I'm not going to...
I don't want you in my office.
But I'm definitely not celebrating it.
And I also, like you, was very surprised to see the right sort of embracing the safetyism about Jewish students.
Now, I have to tell you, Glenn, I have to admit, like when I first saw it, it of course, like it warmed the cockles of my heart, you know, like, oh, all these people standing up for Jews.
And then I I just thought for a second, like, no, actually, this is really bad.
We're not weak.
Nobody's weak.
That's a problem with wokeness.
Like, no one is weak.
No one is in danger.
This is the greatest country on earth.
And I'm sorry, but it is a slander on this great nation to suggest that Jews are somehow physically under threat.
And I think the media is really whipping up this thing.
And it's bad.
You know, I'm just so happy you said that and you have this article in the Free Press where you say it as well as you just said it that I hope everybody will read, the anti-Semite screen and I stiffen my spine and it's kind of, you know, I remember after the whole George Floyd thing and there was this like constant drumbeat.
Yeah.
of narrative that, oh, black students and black people are unsafe in the United States.
And obviously I look at race discourse now a little bit more intently because of my own children.
And like, I was so angry about this messaging, trying to convince everybody who is black on this planet that they're unsafe, that they're constantly under threat, that they're constantly an inch away from being murdered It's like this kind of neurosis, this kind of attempt to put people into a corner and quiver.
It's the exact opposite of what you want to teach people.
And I thought exactly this, you know, there was that campaign, like, would you hide me?
Basically saying, like, we're an inch, we're like a moment away from a new Holocaust.
And would you hide me like Anne Frank?
And then you had like Meghan McCain and celebrities saying, like, I would.
And I was that is more than the censorship stuff, which I mean, I've seen the American right embrace before when it comes to this question.
It didn't really surprise me.
Censorship is a human impulse.
We all think there's certain views that are so threatening that we have an impulse to try and say this can't be allowed.
It's really more this victimhood narrative that has always been viciously mocked by the right.
Oh, you poor little students, you want your safety blankets, your security blankets, your safe spaces, your meditation rooms, your comfort dogs, whatever.
And then suddenly to turn around and create this narrative about Jewish students that, you know, I thought that was just incredibly harmful and untrue and also a way to kind of usher in all of these sorts of So I'm glad to hear you say that because I think you have a lot of credibility to say it and I think it needed to be said.
Bacha, I'm so happy you came on.
I thought this was as illuminating as I hoped it would be and as I expected it to be.
I will definitely have you on.
When your book is out, I hope to have you on again.
This should be your debut episode, but not your last episode.
So thank you so much for the time and for the conversation.
Glenn, I just adore you and God bless you and your children and your family and keep doing what you're doing.
And yeah, talk to you soon.
All right.
Thanks so much.
Have a great evening.
So that concludes our show for this evening.
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