After Going Viral on TikTok, the Guardian Removes Bin Laden’s “Letter to America,” Israel and “Audience Capture,” & Following Our Interview, Hotels Refuse to Serve Roger Waters | SYSTEM UPDATE #183
The Guardian Suppresses Bin Laden's Letter to America, Israel and Audience Capture, Hotels Refuse to Host Roger Waters | SYSTEM UPDATE #183
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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...
After the 9-11 attack in 2001, Americans understandably wanted to know, why would people be so enraged and hateful toward us that they'd be willing to give up their own lives in order to kill as many of us Americans as possible?
That very natural curiosity quickly morphed into media shorthand.
Why do they hate us?
It was obvious that there must be some reason, or a set of reasons, why people in the Muslim and Arab world were so filled with anti-American sentiment that they wanted to attack our country in the most violent and traumatizing way possible.
The neocons who dominated the Bush-Cheney administration, and who also dominated major media discourse at the time, had to provide an answer Americans wanted to know.
And what they settled on was this.
They hate us for our freedom.
According to this narrative, which was obviously designed to flatter Americans and tell them that our leaders bore no blame of any kind for provoking that attack, people in the Muslim world saw that we are free, that we get to choose our leaders democratically, that women are free to work, that LGBTs can live openly, that people have religious freedom, and this drove them so insane with rage and contempt That they just had to attack us and kill as many of us as they could over our freedom.
Why?
Because they hate us for our freedom.
A very patriotic and reassuring message to be sure, but also a childish and insultingly propagandistic one.
There are countless free countries all over the world that Muslims had not attacked that way.
From Japan, Greece, and Brazil, to South Korea, Norway, and South Africa, and so many more.
Obviously there was something about the United States That made it such a specific and unique target beyond the fact that it was sort of free.
One of the people who stepped into that debate was named Osama Bin Laden, who was widely accused by the U.S.
government, most Western intelligence agencies, and the U.S.
media of being the leader of Al-Qaeda and thus the perpetrator of the 9-11 attack.
So he denied responsibility for that attack.
He did write a letter in 2002 that he entitled, Letter to Americans, in which he purported to explain why so many Muslims in that part of the world feel resentment, rage, and hatred for the United States.
He did not say it was because the United States was a free country.
Keynstead cited several U.S.
policies that involved heavily interfering in their part of the world, including number one, imposing a sanctions regime on Iraq that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children before the U.S.
invasion in 2003.
Number two, deploying U.S.
military troops and military bases onto Saudi Arabian soil, which Muslims all throughout that region regard as religiously sacred.
And three, The US was arming, funding, and supporting Israel's abuse and bombing of Palestinians over many decades.
Bin Laden and many other so-called Islamic extremists, who had just a short time before been American allies in the effort to defeat the Soviet army in Afghanistan, had cited these policy grievances many times before 9-11.
While the 9-11 attack and the so-called War on Terror that followed was pivotal to my own political trajectory, more and more Americans every year that goes by are too young to have lived through it.
They don't know much about it.
And many who did live through it, as we see often with history, have forgotten major parts of it.
Within the last week, young Americans on social media, especially on TikTok, discovered this 2002 bin Laden letter on the site of The Guardian, the British newspaper where I once worked.
And that letter began to go viral by linking to The Guardian site that had this letter on it.
Many of these people who discovered this letter were shocked to learn that 9-11 and anti-American hatred generally was at least partially motivated by these concrete policy grievances, including US support for Israel.
As a result, that Bin Laden letter quickly went very viral.
It became one of The Guardian's most read items.
A 20-year-old item that had been on that site for two decades.
Seeing that so many people were interested now in this letter and were learning it for the first time, The Guardian did something genuinely shocking for an ostensibly journalistic outlet.
They removed the letter from their website at exactly the moment when people were craving to read it.
They just deleted a crucial historical document precisely so that it could no longer be read or found by the TikTok users who had been sharing it with one another and discussing and debating its significance.
We'll examine this remarkable act of journalistic self-censorship and also examine why this letter and similar statements have long been so dangerous to Western elites and to the narratives they try to propagate.
We knew when Hamas attacked Israel on October 7th, and then Israel made clear that it would respond by unleashing what it promised to be an unprecedented war, that many people in our audience, certainly not all, but many, would be highly supportive of Israel, many vehemently so, as one of their most important issues, if not the most important.
I haven't, I've been around for a long time and I've been a long time critic of Israel's treatment of the Palestinians as well as the bipartisan DC policy of arming and funding all of Israel and its wars and I obviously wasn't going to change my views suddenly or hide them.
In order to aggrandize or please the pro-Israel part of my audience, or pretend that I believe things that I don't actually believe in order to avoid angering part people in my audience, I would think that would be incredibly disrespectful to you, my audience, and it would be something that would require a sacrificing of all of my integrity.
But the term audience capture has become common in our new media ecosystem because it really does describe a real and dangerous phenomenon, especially in independent media, but even in corporate media now.
With so much of our media ideologically polarized, required by financial viability to only able to speak to various strains of the left or the right or to the Democrats or Republicans, there is a very strong incentive to only tell your audience what they want to hear.
With so many choices out there, so many podcasts, so many shows, so many voices on the internet and on television, it's easy for people to just write off any journalist or host or show or writer that expresses a view on an issue of great importance to them that differs from their own.
Out of anger, they'll just say, I'm not paying attention to that person anymore who has this view that I find so repellent on an issue I care so much about.
And because so many media platforms and journalists now rely on keeping an audience happy, You need it for whatever model you've chosen, whether it's subscriptions or advertisers or anything else.
It has led to a large number of journalists, I would submit most, petrified to ever take a view or even report facts that alienate a significant portion of their audience.
That is a crippling way to do journalism.
And from the start, as we knew what happened, we did lose some of our viewers to the show and even some of our subscribers.
Who are vehemently pro-Israel.
Barely a day has gone by where I haven't heard from someone, usually more than one, saying some variant of, you know, I used to really like and respect your work when it came to the rights of Americans, but given your criticism or a lack of support for Israel, I no longer can listen to you or subscribe to your show and to your work.
Now most of our audience, I'm happy to say, has not responded that way, including most pro-Israel supporters.
I've heard from a lot of them saying, I don't agree with you on this issue, but that's all the more reason I'm going to continue to listen.
I'm proud to have attracted an audience that does not seek or expect or demand full agreement on every issue, but instead demands an honest, well-prepared, and illuminating Set of reporting and analyses, but we have seen how real audience capture can be and the cost from angering a significant part of your audience.
So we wanted to spend some time examining this dynamic that most in media now face and that I would submit can be very corrupting.
Finally, two weeks ago or so, we interviewed the musical legend Roger Waters when he was passing through Rio de Janeiro for his world musical tour.
And during that interview, Waters made some statements about the Israeli-Gaza war and October 7th attack by Hamas that provoked some serious anger and controversy, as we expected might happen.
He's a very polarizing figure.
And as a result of those statements he made in that interview with us, there has been a pressure campaign that has succeeded.
For hotels throughout the next countries he's visiting in Latin America, Argentina and Uruguay, to deny him service, to refuse to let him stay at those hotels.
He has, in fact, had difficulty finding hotels to stay in.
Now I realize that people who loathe Roger Waters' views on Israel or even believe he's an anti-Semite may celebrate this outcome, but I'd like to discuss the implications of it for anyone with ideas that are also considered extremist, dangerous, and bigoted, which, in case you haven't forgotten,
Is how all anti-establishment voices on the right and even on the left have been regarded and still are regarded and who have been the focal points of similar types of punishment campaigns up until October 7th when it all switched to Israel critics, but it will be switching back very shortly to many people now cheering this.
So this is probably a case of like censorship is be careful what you wish for.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update starting right now.
One of the revelations I have been experiencing over, say, the past five or six years, as you do journalism for a long enough time,
as you start to climb a little bit in age, even when you think as you start to climb a little bit in age, even when you think you're one of the people who will never have that happen to them, you start to realize that what to you is extremely well-known history, every year to more and more people around you, becomes something in the very I've talked about many times how the 9-11 attack and the resulting war on terror was one of the pivotal moments in my life.
It's what led me to stop practicing law and want to write about politics and journalism.
I felt like there was a lot going on that was getting insufficient attention in the media.
A lot of propaganda in the media that I thought was very harmful.
And that is one of the main reasons I began writing about politics.
And for, I would say, the first two years or so, I focused on very little other than the civil liberty erosions and abuses that composed the Bush-Cheney-Neocon War on Terror.
That's when someone named Edward Snowden began reading my column.
And became inspired and animated by the arguments I was making and became radicalized in his job.
And my audience grew pretty quickly because there weren't a lot of people talking about that at the time.
And so for me, the history of 9-11 and the resulting war on terror is like second nature.
I wrote a book about it.
Eight months or nine months after I first began writing about politics at the request of a publishing company that made the New York Times bestseller list.
It was a history of the war on terror and the critiques I had of the Bush Administration.
So it's been something very central to my journalism for a long time.
And obviously the Snowden reporting that I did that played a major role in my platform and my journalism career was all about how the NSA was exploited in the name of terrorism.
But for a lot of people, 9-11 is dead history.
It was 22 years ago.
So that means that people who are 30 years old or 8 years old at the time of 9-11, people who are 25 were just born.
It's a large population.
People who were 25 were just born.
It's a large population.
And people 35 or even 40 were barely adults.
So you're talking about a big, big portion of the population that did not really live through 9-11 in a way that would have allowed them to really remember and process and understand what was happening on a sophisticated or detailed level.
And then you add on to that all the people who were apolitical or who weren't paying attention to politics then but now are.
I'm talking about a gigantic number of people for whom 9-11 is kind of a vague historical event.
They know that the United States was attacked, they know how, they know it was Al Qaeda, or they believe it was Al Qaeda, and they know it resulted in things like the Iraq War, but they don't think they know very much else about it.
And one of the things we tried doing from the very first moment the Hamas attack happened on October 7th, when I could see That a massive war was coming from the Israelis.
And it wasn't because I was Prussian, it was because the Israelis were saying so.
And I knew enough about the current composition of the Israeli government, filled with extremists and fanatics who have long wanted a reason to cleanse Gaza ethnically, to re-annex it, to move the Palestinians out of the West Bank, to annex that as well.
I knew there was this massive war coming.
And so from the very beginning, aside from trying to explain why I believe that the Hamas attack was so morally unjustifiable, no matter your view of the overall Palestinian cause, what I focused most on was trying to get people to say, look at what happened in 9-11.
Learn the lessons of 9-11.
Don't let the anger and rage that you feel of watching these videos coming out of Israel lead you to support things that You're going to end up regretting, as so many Americans did in the wake of 9-11.
They ended up supporting things, wars that they ended up regretting, acquiescing to an erosion of freedoms that they ended up regretting.
That history is there for us to learn from.
And that's why we've been encouraging people to look at it.
Now, one of the most important parts of 9-11 was the question of why it happened.
And one of the things I have seen with wars, I've been paying enough attention to enough wars to see all kinds of commonalities and propagandistic trends and the like.
To be an American journalist, to be an American means you're going to focus on a lot of wars because our country fights or ends up in other ways involved in more wars than any other country on this planet by far.
One of the things that happens is that there's always an attempt to say this side is the good side, the victims, that's our side.
This side is the pure evil side, the savages, the monsters, the terrorists.
And the bad side attack the good side for no reason whatsoever.
And in order to do that, you have to cut off all history and start on the day of whatever attack you're trying to isolate.
So the narrative became the United States was just sitting there minding its own business, a nice, peaceful, happy country.
And out of nowhere, these Islamic extremist monsters attacked the United States.
Same thing one day.
Muammar Gaddafi in Libya just decided to ethnically cleanse or commit genocide against his own people out of nowhere and all the decades of where he was a U.S.
ally got erased and suddenly just there was this monster in charge of Libya and we had to go and fight a war of regime change.
Same exact same thing with Syria.
The fact that the United States used to send The war on terror detainees that we would kidnap from the streets of Europe to Syria, where Assad and the Assad government would torture detainees for the United States.
All of that was forgotten.
He just became out of the blue this monster that we had to have the CIA remove.
And then obviously when it came to the war in Ukraine, people believe and were told that the war in Ukraine, the conflict between Russia, Ukraine, and NATO, began on February 24, 2022, which was the day Russian troops crossed the border into Ukraine and all the other events prior to it didn't happen.
So that way nobody asked whether the United States or NATO did anything to provoke that invasion, because history began on February 24, 2002.
And that's exactly what is being done now with the Israeli-Gazan conflict as well.
Oh, everybody was living there so happy, so peacefully.
Just one day out of the blue, these Hamas monsters, who are worse than ISIS, worse than Nazis, decided to attack Israel for no reason whatsoever, other than the fact that they're filled with hatred.
They hate Jews.
And that's when the war began.
Israel was the victim.
They were pure good.
The Gazans were pure evil.
And all of this is incredibly historical.
All of these conflicts had been going on for many years prior to that day that we tried to isolate as the start.
And that was most definitely true of 9-11.
Al Qaeda was a group that the United States had been allied with.
We used to finance, and he preys on what was then called the Mujahideen, including Osama Bin Laden.
We encouraged them to go to Afghanistan to defend Afghanistan from the Soviet invasion.
In 1980s, Ronald Reagan invited Muslim extremists, members of the Mujahideen, to the Oval Office, and he preys on them as freedom fighters.
And it was only once they turned against us did they morph from freedom fighters into terrorists.
But there were other attacks on the United States before the 9-11 attack.
There was an attack years earlier in the 1990s on the World Trade Center.
It just didn't succeed in the way the 9-11 attack did.
It killed a few people.
And there have been terrorist attacks on the United States, what we call terrorist attacks, from the Muslim part of the world.
Ronald Reagan had troops in Lebanon in the early 1980s and they were attacked and blown up, I think 240 or something like that.
American troops died and Reagan immediately withdrew those troops from Lebanon, saying, why do we have troops in Lebanon?
But there was a long series of grievances expressed by people in the Muslim world about what the United States was doing in that part of the world, not just bombing them, Not just imposing sanctions on the Iraqi nation that prevented food and medication from entering Iraq, killing hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi children.
Not just supporting Israel and giving them the bombs they used to bomb the Palestinians and the Lebanese and others in that region going back many decades.
But also we would constantly prop up their dictators.
We put secular dictators in control of many countries in that region.
In Jordan, in the United Arab Emirates, obviously we've been partners with the Saudis.
In Egypt, there were finally democratic elections in 2011.
They elected the wrong person, a person who was critical of Israel and the United States, and within a year he was gone in a military coup, where General Sissi, a brutal dictator, came in and took over in a military coup, and the United States cheered it.
John Kerry called that military coup an advancement for Egyptian democracy.
And so people in that region, even though Americans don't know that their dictators are supported and propped up by the United States, they have a wide range of grievances against the United States.
They had that before 9-11.
And that was absolutely a reason, a major reason, the major reason why people in that part of the world decided to attack the United States.
And remember, they were so fanatical about that attack that the ones who hijacked the planes gave up their own life in order to make that attack happen by flying the planes they were on into those buildings.
The World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and then that fourth one that somehow fell to the ground.
So obviously if you're having a series of attacks by people in that part of the world against one country, they have a reason for it.
But it had never been so significant that Americans paid attention to it in large numbers until 9-11.
And as I said at the start, after 9-11, which was a spectacular attack, a remarkably devastating attack, As I've said many times, I remember it like it was yesterday.
I lived in New York.
I was in New York on that day.
Anyone who was was traumatized by that.
It's like the World Trade Center collapsed on 3,000 of your fellow New Yorkers, and they died instantly.
People were jumping from buildings to their death as a way of escaping fire.
It was hideous.
It was horrific, at least as horrific as October 7th.
And in the wake of that, There was also, like there is in Israel, a question about how did it happen?
How is it possible we didn't detect that attack?
But we didn't focus on that as much as the Israelis are, who are very angry with Netanyahu and blame him for that attack.
We didn't, though, focus on this question.
Why did this happen?
Why did they hate us?
We couldn't figure it out.
People who live in the United States believe and are told and are taught that we are a nice, good, benevolent, democratic, free country.
We don't want to bother anybody in the world.
We're not here to conquer anyone.
To the extent that we involve ourselves in the world, it's to help, like we're doing now in Ukraine, we're told.
We just want to spread democracy.
We want to defend people.
We're like a really nice, benevolent uncle.
So why would anybody possibly want to perpetrate an attack on the United States of that brutality and savagery?
Americans rightly wanted to know.
And they were fed a complete bullshit answer by neocons, by the media, by the government.
They hate us for our freedoms.
One of the amazing things was that, as I said, there were all these interviews with Osama bin Laden, all these speeches he had given, where he laid out the real reasons why people in that part of the world hated the United States.
And yet, after 9-11, the U.S.
government instructed television networks, ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, Fox, do not show any speeches or interviews with Osama bin Laden.
Because they didn't want the American population hearing from him what their actual grievances were.
They didn't want Americans to think that maybe we had done things in that part of the world that caused it to happen, that caused this blowback, to use the CIA's term.
And so they caused Bin Laden's interviews to be censored through this moronic excuse But they gave to the networks that we're concerned he may have some secret code that he uses in the interview.
Some magic phrase, some gesture, like he twinkles his nose like the witch in Bewitched used to do.
Or he like rubs his ear.
That will activate sleeper cells in the United States as a signal to attack.
That was their excuse given as to why these networks shouldn't show anything from Osama Bin Laden.
And they obeyed.
They obeyed.
Americans never got to hear from the people they were told were responsible for 9-11 about why they attacked.
It just was kept from us.
A country that has a free press, free speech.
And in this place we got fed this narrative that they hate us for our freedoms.
And yet, In 2002, the person accused of having perpetrated that attack, Osama Bin Laden, wrote a letter that he entitled a letter to Americans.
He was trying to communicate directly to the American people and to outline in detail the specific policies the United States had undertaken that interfered and brought violence to and despotism to that part of the world.
As the real reason why people in that part of the world hate the United States and want to bring violence back and why they view it as not an attack on the United States but a self-defense of their lands and their families.
And obviously it doesn't mean Osama Bin Laden was telling the truth in anything he was saying.
It doesn't mean 9-11 was justified, obviously.
But if you're in a war, And you're radically transforming your own country in its name, the way we did with the Patriot Act and NSA spying and the rest.
And you're fighting all sorts of wars and bombing people all around the world in the name of this war.
Of course we should understand what the actual views are of the other side, rather than just listening to our government media that keeps that from us on purpose so they can feed us a propagandistic line that is way more flattering to them, that keeps the population in line.
And that's what happened.
This 2002 letter from Bin Laden was not very widely discussed at the time.
Most Americans, I guarantee you, don't know about it, didn't know about it, even adults who were paying attention.
In fact, a journalist friend of mine who was in media at the time, had a prominent media job, told me they did not know about this letter until this week.
That amazes me, but that's true.
Because the media does such a good job of suppressing it.
One of the very few places that actually contains this letter, where the letter was hosted, was on the Guardian website.
And for whatever reasons, a bunch of young Americans started to find this letter and talk about it among themselves and say, oh my God, there's this letter from Osama bin Laden in 2002 purporting to explain why the 9-11 attack happened.
And one of the things he said was that part of the reason why people in that part of the world hate the United States is because of the perception that we're responsible for Israeli attacks on the Palestinians.
And we've talked on our show over the last five weeks about how that is undoubtedly true.
The State Department has issued multiple warnings, multiple advisories to American citizens who are traveling That they face a significantly increased and heightened threat of attack, terrorist attack, anti-American attack, because people are so angry at the United States for supporting this Israeli war.
In other words, presumably our foreign policy is supposed to be about enhancing the security of American citizens.
But our support for Israel in this case, according to the State Department that supports this policy, has instead made it more likely we're to be violently attacked if we travel outside the United States anywhere in the world.
And so a lot of young Americans who didn't know this about 9-11 or Al Qaeda were shocked to discover it and they began talking about it on Twitter.
But mostly on TikTok, on Facebook, on Twitter, on Instagram, mostly on TikTok, where young people tend to be more so than those other platforms.
And it went mega viral because so many people were shocked to learn of it and its contents.
Here's an article from The New York Times.
about what happened there.
Videos about Bin Laden's criticism of the US surge in popularity on TikTok.
Quote, these are the videos of Osama Bin Laden that network news, all major network news outlets refused to air.
But it's really the video is essentially these videos that the New York Times describes are videos made by TikTok users, American TikTok users discussing this letter.
That's what went viral.
Quote, the videos discuss a letter the former Al Qaeda leader wrote in 2002 in which he defended the September 11th attacks and said Americans had become, quote, servants to Jews.
The letter, titled Letter to America, was published a year after the terrorist attacks of September 11th that were orchestrated by Bin Laden.
He defended the attacks in New York and Washington and said Americans had become, quote, servants to Jews who he said controlled the country's economy and media.
American taxpayers, he wrote, were complicit And harming Muslims in the Middle East, including destroying Palestinian homes.
Some TikTok users said this week that they viewed the document as an awakening to America's role in global affairs and expressed their disappointment in the United States.
One popular video showed a TikTok user brushing her hair with the caption, quote, when you read Osama bin Laden's letter to America and you realize you've been lied to your whole entire life.
One video with nearly 100,000 likes showed a TikTok user at her kitchen sink with the caption, quote, trying to go back to life as normal after reading Osama bin Laden's letter to America and realizing everything we learned about the Middle East 9-11 and terrorism was a lie.
In a video with more than 60,000 views, another user said the letter showed her that America was a, quote, plague on the entire world.
Early Thursday, a search for, quote, letter to America showed videos with 14.2 million views.
By midday, as TikTok sought to block the content, searches to the site for, quote, Osama bin Laden, bin Laden letter, and Osama letter, and the hashtag, quote, letter to America, yielded no results on the videos tab of TikTok, though some videos were still viewable with some digging.
Do I even need to point out, first of all, that conservatives who have been complaining viciously For the last seven years about big tech censorship, applauded TikTok's decision not to allow a discussion of this historical document on that platform.
I don't need to point that out, right?
You already know that a lot of conservatives as of five weeks ago became censorship advocates in the name of protecting Israel.
But this is exactly what happened after 9-11.
They did not want the Americans to hear from Al-Qaeda, from Bin Laden, from people in the Muslim world, about why they were so anti-American.
Because to do so would make people start wondering, why are we in that part of the world?
Why do we bomb it so often?
Why are we sending so much money to fuel wars there?
Why do we support so many dictators in that region and overthrow their governments?
And they might even start wondering, If I lived in a country and I knew there was some foreign power imposing a dictator on me or bombing my wedding parties of my fellow citizens and killing them, or giving bombs to people to kill people like me, I'd probably hate that foreign power as well, wouldn't you?
There is an actual war between the United States and people in the Muslim world, but this was censored in our free country.
Nobody knew about this letter.
The government all but prohibited anybody from hearing from bin Laden.
And yet TikTok saw the effect it was having.
It's a dangerous letter, obviously.
That's why it was banned after 9-11 and suppressed and buried.
And that's why TikTok is now doing everything possible To ban it again.
I know a lot of people have been convinced by the Obama administration that TikTok is some sort of arm of the Chinese Communist Party.
And it's there to propagandize on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party and to censor in order to propagandize Americans.
TikTok actually is petrified of being booted out of the United States.
The Biden administration has repeatedly threatened TikTok.
The CIA, the FBI, Homeland Security want to ban TikTok.
The reason is, as we saw from the Twitter files, as we've seen from everything else, the U.S.
security state can control every other big tech platform.
They were able to dictate to Facebook, to Instagram, to YouTube, to Twitter before Elon Musk, which content could be heard and which content couldn't.
TikTok was the one bastion where they couldn't control.
And so they told TikTok, we're going to ban you, not because it's an arm of the Chinese Communist Party, but because it's the one platform that wasn't subject to the rule of the US security state.
And TikTok in response, Said, we don't care about political messaging.
We just want to make money.
We want to stay in the United States.
And if it means turning over our censorship and content moderation processes to you, the U.S.
government, we'll be happy to do it.
These are capitalists who own TikTok.
They want to make money.
And that's what they have done.
We, our show, has had videos banned from TikTok that were critical of the CIA and its involvement in Brazil.
It went viral and it got banned.
Because it was critical of the CIA?
Do you think the Chinese Communist Party would want to censor our videos critical of the CIA?
We had another video critical of President Zelensky that also got banned and taken down.
Because TikTok has now, as a condition for staying in the United States, agreed to censor in accordance with the dictates of the U.S.
government, which is why TikTok immediately acted to ban The problem is, for people who wanted this letter to be banned, everybody had the link to the letter, which was on the Guardian's website.
And so the Guardian, incredibly, on its own, or at the behest of somebody, decided to ban it.
This is what you now see.
If you click on what had been a viral link to the 2002 Osama Bin Laden letter, this is what everybody was reading.
And now when you click on the link, look what this says.
I mean, if this isn't an avatar of what American journalism has become, I don't know what is.
So you go there and it says, removed document.
This page previously displayed a document containing, in translation, the full text of Osama Bin Laden's letter to the American people, which was reported on The Observer, that's the sister paper of The Guardian, on Sunday, November 24, 2002.
The document, which was published here on the same day, was removed on 15 November 2023.
on 15 November, 2023.
So it was up on Sunday, November 24th, 2002, almost exactly 21 years ago.
And then it was removed on November 15th, 2023, because people were becoming too interested in it.
In connection with Israel's war with Gaza and the US support for Israel.
The transcript published on our website has been widely shared on social media without the full context.
Therefore, we decided to take it down and direct readers instead to the news article that originally contextualized it.
What does that mean, the full context?
The full context, the letter is the context.
The letter lays out exactly what it's doing and saying.
Here, by the way, are the most viewed articles on The Guardian.
At one point, this was the most viewed.
This is a day later or so, November 16th, and there you see The second most read article on the Guardian's website is one that they removed voluntarily, apparently.
Removed document.
Is that Orwellian enough or Kafkaesque enough for you?
The article in which people had the most interest in reading Was one that the Guardian, precisely because people were too interested in it, decided to remove so that people couldn't read it any longer.
It's a document by a major historical figure, the person we're told was responsible for the 9-11 attack, explaining to Americans why people in that part of the world were angry enough with America to do that.
And the Guardian decided, even though it had been up on their website for 21 years, That now that people were discussing it in connection with the war in Israel, or the war in Gaza from Israel, and U.S.
support for it, you can no longer read it.
Removed.
Sorry, can't read that.
Here is, here are a few excerpts of what had been the letter on the Guardian's website for a long time, for 21 years, until they decided to remove it.
There you see the headline, full text, Bin Laden's letter to America.
Now that's what gives the lie to the Guardian's excuse for why they removed it, that it wasn't contextualized.
They had the full letter.
What's not contextualized is the Guardian article.
That just singled out particular parts that Guardian editors decided people should know.
This is actually the full letter.
This is contextualized by definition.
And this is Bin Laden saying why people wanted to attack the United States.
There's a sub-headline, quote, online document, the full text of Osama Bin Laden's, quote, letter to the American people reported in today's Observer.
The letter first appeared on the internet in Arabic and has since been translated and circulated by Islamists in Brazil, in Britain rather.
And here's what part of the letter said about why so many Muslims wanted to attack the United States.
You'll see it wasn't for our freedom.
A. You attacked us in Palestine.
Palestine, which has sunk under military occupation for more than 80 years.
The British handed over Palestine, with your help and your support, to the Jews who have occupied it for more than 50 years.
Years overflowing with oppression, tyranny, crimes, killing, expulsion, destruction, and devastation.
The creation and continuation of Israel is one of the greatest crimes, and you are the leaders of its criminals.
And of course there is no need to explain and prove the degree of American support for Israel.
The creation of Israel is a crime which must be erased.
Each and every person whose hands have become polluted in the contribution toward this crime must pay its price and pay for it heavily.
Now again, let me emphasize again, the point of this letter is not to show it to people because everything in it should be believed.
It's to shed historical light and relevant current light on what generates anti-American sentiment in that region.
Because Americans were fed a lie about why people in that part of the world wanted to come and talk.
It's just like the people on TikTok are saying.
I was fed a lie my whole life about why 9-11 happened.
B. You attacked us in Somalia.
You supported the Russian atrocities against us in Chechnya, the Indian government oppression against us in Kashmir, and the Jewish aggression against us in Lebanon.
C. Under your supervision, consent, and orders, the governments of our countries, which act as your agents, so they're saying they know that the leaders of Middle Eastern countries That act as your agents, attack us on a daily basis.
They're talking about these dictators under whose rule they live because the United States went around removing democratically elected leaders in the Middle East who gave too much force to the wishes and beliefs and sentiments of their people and said, you can't have democracy here.
If you have democracy here, the people are anti-American, they're anti-Israeli.
We can't have that.
You need a dictator that we're going to impose on you.
And a lot of Americans don't know that, but the people in these countries do.
They know who to blame for those dictators.
E. Your forces occupy our countries.
You spread your military bases throughout them.
You corrupt our lands and you besiege our sanctities to protect the security of the Jews and to ensure the continuity of your pillage of our treasures.
F. You have starved the Muslims of Iraq.
Where children die every day, it is a wonder that more than 1.5 million Iraqi children have died as a result of your sanctions, and you did not show your concern.
Yet when 3,000 of your people died, the entire world rises and has not sat down.
Is it in any way rational to expect that after America has attacked us for more than half a century, that we will then leave her to live in security and peace?
Three, you may then dispute that all the above does not justify aggression against civilians for crimes they did not commit and offenses in which they did not partake.
But this argument contradicts your continuous repetition that America is the land of freedom and its leaders in this world.
Therefore, the American people are the ones who chose their government by way of their own free will, a choice which stems from their agreement to its policies.
Thus, the American people have chosen, consented to, and affirmed their support for the Israeli oppression of Palestinians, the occupation and usurpation of their land, and its continuous killing, torture, punishment, and expulsion of the Palestinians.
The American people have the ability and choice to refuse the policies of their government and even to change it if they want.
Now, this is why we've been trying to point out repeatedly since October 7th, That the people, the Israel supporters who are saying that it's justified to take military action in Gaza that results in the death of so many innocent Gazan civilians is justified because those Gazan civilians voted for Hamas and therefore bear the burden or responsibility for the crimes committed by Hamas.
As we've been trying to say over and over, this is Osama Bin Laden's theory for why civilians are fair game for being targeted.
Although, as immoral as it is, it applies a lot more in a functioning democracy like the United States, where Americans get to vote every two years, and then for president every four years, than it does to say Russia, where I heard the same thing about why Russian civilians are responsible for Putin, because they don't overthrow him, even though we're always told that it's a totalitarian regime and people are killed for opposing Putin.
And it certainly applies to the United States more than Gaza, where they haven't had an election since 2005.
And in that election, Hamas got 41% of the vote, the Palestinian Authority's party got 35% of the vote, or something like that, which means that a tiny portion of the current Gaza population actually voted for Hamas the last time there was an election.
This theory comes from Osama Bin Laden, though, that civilians become fair game if they elect their leaders who then commit crimes.
That's what Osama Bin Laden was saying.
You may object to what we're saying by saying, OK, maybe the US government did all these bad things, but how does that justify killing civilians?
And his answer was, as I just read you, well, you voted for these leaders.
You must agree with those policies.
And therefore, we can hold you responsible for them.
Here is a video of the Clinton Secretary of State, the beloved Madeleine Albright, when she appeared on 60 Minutes in 1997, so four years before the 9-11 attack.
And amazingly, I think something broke in the Matrix that day, she was asked by Leslie Stahl What about all these Iraqi children that you killed in the sanctions regime?
And this is a notorious clip.
Here's what Madeleine Albright said.
Obviously, a lot of Americans don't know this, but I guarantee you, especially as of 2001, most people in the Muslim world were well aware of what she said.
We have heard that half a million children have died.
I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima.
You know, is the price worth it?
I think this is a very hard choice, but the price, we think the price is worth it.
Now, there's a dispute about how many Iraqi children died as a result of the U.S.
sanctions regime.
Bin Laden said 1.5 million.
Leslie Stahl cited a study that said 500,000.
There's no doubt, though, that many Tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children died as a result of U.S.
sanctions on Iraq.
It didn't weaken Saddam Hussein.
Sanctions almost never bring down the government.
They strengthen the government and immiserate the population.
It's doing that in Venezuela now, it's doing it in Cuba, it's doing it in Syria.
One of the very few opponents of the sanctions regime has been Ron Paul on exactly this ground.
That we claim we're imposing sanctions on a country to free them from their leaders, when in fact, the only thing it ends up doing, the only people who end up suffering, are the people themselves who can't get food and medication.
And it makes them more dependent on those leaders, who then get stronger as a result.
But whatever the number you think it is, Leslie Stahl asked Madeleine Albright, you've killed 500,000 people, the U.S.
has, with this sanctioned regime, is it worth it?
And she said, it's worth it.
Put yourself in the place of someone who's in the Muslim world or in Iraq and you hear that.
How would you react?
This is the sort of thing that we weren't allowed to know.
That they so desperately kept from us in 9-11.
And that they're keeping us from from us now.
Which is why TikTok acted to ban discussions of this and the Guardian helpfully removed The entire letter from their site knowing that that was the viral link.
And it cut Americans off, young Americans off on TikTok from finding that letter.
I looked for that letter today.
You can find it, but it's not easy.
It's around, but not easy, not readily available.
You have to look for a while.
That's why it was so important that it was on the Guardian site.
People could find it there.
And now they can't.
Now, let me just say that after 9-11, when I began doing journalism, I would frequently write about the fact that when we go and do violence in the Muslim world, we are not reducing the risk of terrorism.
When we go and bomb the Muslim world, even though it was called the War on Terror, it wasn't reducing terrorism, it was increasing the risk of terrorism.
Just like I think Israel is increasing the risk in the future that it will be attacked, not decreasing it, by having hundreds of millions of Muslims In countries, I mean big countries all over the world.
Joe Biden met with the President of Indonesia yesterday in the White House and he brought up out of nowhere, he said, I think you're doing nowhere near enough to constrain your client state Israel from killing civilians.
I promise you all over the world this is what people think.
That this war is morally repellent and the United States is responsible.
And I used to write all the time about terrorism cases.
After 9-11, where people would try and detonate bombs or carry out terrorist attacks on American soil, and every single time they were asked why, every single time, or maybe a couple cases, they said something else, but in essentially every case, they said, what do you mean, why are we trying to
detonate bombs in the United States, you're bombing our countries continuously and killing huge numbers of innocent Muslim people, including innocent Muslim children.
How can you even ask why?
And of course that's why.
You're bringing violence to our countries, we want to bring it back to yours.
And I would constantly write about this, obviously not to justify anti-American terrorism, which is of course what violence against us is called terrorism.
Our violence against them is not called terrorism.
But theirs against us, that's terrorism.
But I wasn't writing to justify terrorism.
I was writing to say, there's a reason they're doing this, and it's to be found in our policies.
Namely, the drones that Obama loved, the invasions that Bush, Cheney, and the neocons loved, the torture chambers.
The attacks on civilians.
These things increase the risk of terrorism against the United States.
They do not decrease it.
Just like our interference in the Muslim world for decades is what led to 9-11.
And I know that sounds radical.
People don't want to hear that.
It's not radical.
It's a recognition that even the CIA has long had.
It's called blowback.
And it means that if you go around the world and engineer coups in other countries, Or bring violence to other countries, it's going to blow back on you.
People are going to be angry at you for doing it.
It's extremely common sense.
It's about human nature.
Here from NBC on December 10, 2003, the headline was, Bin Laden Comes Home to Roost.
Michael Moran looks at U.S.
ties to Osama Bin Laden, trained and funded by the CIA, to wreak havoc on the Soviet Army and now turning his talents on Americans.
Quote, at the CIA, it happens often enough to have a code name.
Blowback.
Simply defined, this is the term describing an agent, an operative, or an operation that has turned on its creators.
Osama Bin Laden, our new public enemy number one, is the personification of blowback.
And the fact that he is viewed as a hero by millions in the Islamic world proves again the old adage, reap what you sow.
This isn't Noam Chomsky saying this, this is on a NBC News website about a CIA doctrine.
Quote, though we have still come to represent all that went wrong with the CIA's reckless strategy there, by the end of the Afghan war in 1989, Bin Laden was still viewed by the agency, the CIA, as something of a dilettante, a rich Saudi boy gone to war and welcomed home by the Saudi monarchy he so hated, as something of a hero.
One of the most notorious and celebrated attempts to attack the United States after 9-11 was when a Muslim man tried to detonate a bomb in Times Square.
Faisal Shahzad was his name.
And I wrote about the extraordinary court hearing where he was brought before a judge who asked him, why would you do this?
Why would you want to blow up, detonate a bomb and kill all kinds of innocent people?
She was baffled that anyone would want to do that.
It was 2010, nine years after the 9-11 attack.
I guarantee you she didn't read the Bin Laden letter.
Or she wouldn't have been baffled.
And here's what I wrote.
I was at Salon at the time.
Times Square bomber caused an 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.
Can we put the headline on the screen please?
There you see it.
Times Square bomber caused an 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.
Quote, 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.
Aside from proving yet again how uniquely effective our real judicial system is, as opposed to military commissions or lawless detention, in convicting and punishing terrorists, This episode shines substantial light on what I wrote about on Monday, namely how our actions in the Muslim world, ostensibly undertaken to combat terrorism, do more than anything else to spur terrorism and ensure its permanent continuation.
When he pleaded guilty in June, this is what he told the baffled and angry 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 Americans, quote, only care about their people, but they don't care about the people elsewhere in the world when they die.
And 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 that 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 condition of anonymity.
And then yesterday at his sentencing, this is what he said when asked if he still wanted to plead guilty.
Quote, yes, said Shahzad, and then he said he wanted to plead guilty a hundred times more because he wanted the U.S.
to know it will continue to suffer attacks if it does not leave Iraq and Afghanistan and does not stop drone strikes in Pakistan.
Calm but clearly angry and standing the whole time, Shahzad said the judge needed to understand his role.
Quote, I consider myself a Muslim soldier, he said.
When Judge Cederbaum asked whether he considered the people in Times Square to be innocent, he said they had elected the U.S.
government.
There was another exchange between Shehzad and the judge where she asked him, but what about all the innocent people you're going to kill, the children?
And he said, do you care about all the innocent people your drones kill in Pakistan and Afghanistan?
She couldn't connect those ideas.
Now, another major terrorist attack that happened after 9-11 was the attack on the Pulse nightclub in Orlando that was very deceptively described as a hate crime against LGBTs because it happened to be a gay club.
That was completely false.
The Justice Department, under great pressure, decided to indict the wife of that killer, Omar Martin, because he had been dead.
He was dead.
had to give the gay community in Orlando on a pike and so they demanded that his wife be prosecuted for aiding and abetting his attack.
She was put on trial.
She was acquitted of all charges, I think very fairly.
And in that trial, there was all sorts of evidence that emerged that proved he had no idea it was a gay club.
He wasn't even looking for a gay club.
He just wanted to find a large nightclub in Orlando.
The first Google search if you entered nightclub Orlando was the Pulse Nightclub?
He was there for hours with his victims, killing people, shooting them, talking on the phone to police.
Never once, never once did he make a single homophobic comment or any reference to the fact that he was in a gay club.
That wasn't his motive.
His motive was vengeance for the bombing that the United States was doing in Iraq and Syria and Afghanistan and that's what he said when he was on the phone with the police and the whole time he was in the Pulse Club.
Here, from The Intercept, this is, I believe, my article, along with Murtaza Hussain's, where I say, at the trial of Omar Mateen's wife, new evidence emerges that undermines the belief about the Pulse massacre, including the motive.
And there were a lot of other journalists who, I reported on the trial, I listened to the trial, I followed it, I talked to the lawyers involved, and every journalist who did came to the same conclusion.
And here's what I wrote, quote, as is true of most terrorists, As is true of most terrorists, Mateen was determined to ensure that the world knew the grievances and causes in whose name he was slaughtering innocent people.
That's why terrorists go and kill people.
They want the world to know their cause.
He accomplished this in multiple ways.
A running stream of commentary during the shooting spree, multiple statements to law enforcement officials by telephone from inside Pulse, and Facebook postings he published shortly before the killings.
All of these statements Contained numerous now-standard grievances about US foreign policy that are commonly cited by Muslims who attack Americans.
Specifically, the use by the United States and its allies of widespread violence against Muslim civilians in the Middle East, and the perceived need to bring violence back to US soil as a means of punishing past violence and deterring future aggression.
Many of Mateen's statements are filled with the sorts of denunciations of U.S.
violence in the region that are typically downplayed if not outright ignored when the U.S.
media examine why radical Muslims attack Americans.
Mateen's statements about his shooting spree contain pledges of loyalty to the Islamic State and praise for various radical groups, and some posts and statements profess that he was martyring himself on behalf of Islam, but they exclusively emphasize one cause.
The ongoing killing of Muslim civilians by the United States.
This is what you find over and over and over.
The more violence you use in the name of stopping terrorism, the more terrorism you cause.
That is what the United States is petrified that the American public will understand.
That's why they had to put a stop to the reading of this Bin Laden letter.
To the point that they got TikTok to censor it and The Guardian to remove this letter after 21 years.
This vital historical document from its own site so people couldn't read it any longer because it's too dangerous for people to start understanding what this conflict actually is about, what causes it.
Now, the Israelis have their own form of blowback that the United States had by financing and supporting Bin Laden and the Mujahideen.
It was Netanyahu, who everybody in Israel knows, He propped up and supported Hamas.
He wanted Hamas to be the representative of the Palestinian people because he was afraid that if more moderate groups prevailed, the world would be able to foster a two-state solution where the Palestinians would get their own state.
He didn't want that.
He wanted Hamas to be the face of the Palestinian people.
And so he propped up Hamas and did everything possible to hammer down The more moderate Palestinians.
And it's the Israeli press that says this.
Here from the Times of Israel on October 8th.
One day after the Hamas attack.
For years Netanyahu propped up Hamas.
Now it's blown up in our faces.
Quote, the Premier's policy of treating the terror group as a partner at the expense of Mohammed Abbas and Palestinian statehood has resulted in wounds that will take Israel years to heal.
For years, the various governments led by Benjamin Netanyahu took an approach that divided power between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, bringing Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to his knees while making moves that propped up the Hamas terror group.
The idea was to prevent Abbas or anyone else in the Palestinian Authority's West Bank government from advancing toward the establishment of a Palestinian state.
Thus, amid this bid to impair Abbas, Hamas was upgraded from a mere terror group to an organization with which Israel held indirect negotiations via Egypt, and one that was allowed to receive infusions of caste from abroad.
For years, the various governments led by Netanyahu, we just went through that, Most of the time, Israel policy was to treat the Palestinian Authority as a burden and Hamas as an asset.
Far-right MK, member of the Knesset, Bezalel Smotrik, now the finance minister in the hardline government and leader of the Religious Zionism Party, said so himself in 2015.
According to various reports, Netanyahu made a similar point at a Likud faction meeting in early 2019.
When he was quoted as saying that those who oppose a Palestinian state should support the transfer of funds to Gaza because maintaining the separation between the Palestinian Authority and the West Bank and Hamas and Gaza would prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state.
Now, just to conclude this whole series of events, on the one hand, it's completely shocking that the Guardian Which presumably published this bin Laden letter 21 years ago because they thought the public should see it, or that it was a journalistically important document, now removed it because too many young Americans got interested in it and drew dangerous conclusions about Israel and the United States.
On the one hand, it's shocking that they Censored their own document by removing it from their website right when people wanted to read it on the other hand We've seen it before as I said right after 9-11 the US government ordered networks not to show any tapes or interviews with bin Laden and They obeyed that's why Americans didn't hear any of this here is the Reporters Committee for freedom of the press on October 11 2001
So about a month after the September 11th attacks, White House urges TV networks to stop airing Bin Laden tapes.
Calling it, quote, an expression of concern, the White House asked news media networks to not air pre-recorded messages from terrorist Osama Bin Laden in their entirety, and the networks announced that they would comply with this request.
Behold our free press.
The government says, don't show this.
The networks say, no problem.
In a conference call with network executives on October 10th, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice warned that such tapes from Bin Laden and his henchmen could be used to frighten Americans, gain supporters, and send messages about future terrorist attacks to all five major news organizations.
ABC, CBS, NBC and its affiliate MSNBC, Fox and CNN agreed not to air unedited videotape statements from bin Laden or his followers and to remove language the government considers inflammatory.
They handed the government editorial control over what they were willing to show Americans about what our enemy was saying about why they attacked the United States.
Quote, this marked a rare moment when all of the networks decided in a joint agreement limiting prospective news coverage.
In a press conference, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said the Bush administration fears that the tapes are a way for bin Laden to send coded messages to other terrorists.
Quote, the means of communication in Afghanistan right now are limited, he said.
One way to communicate outside Afghanistan to followers is through the Western media.
He said airing tapes from Bin Laden, quote, is a forum for pre-recorded, pre-taped propaganda inciting people to kill Americans.
But he said it wasn't censorship, though perish the thought, quote, this is just a request of the media and the media makes their own decisions.
There is currently a pressure campaign on TikTok to censor content That celebrities, particularly Jewish celebrities like Amy Schumer and Sacha Baron Cohen and others, consider to be hate speech against Israel.
So they're engaged in the kind of pressure campaign to censor political speech that this show and many of our conservative viewers have spent years denouncing.
And yet I see a lot of applause for this now.
Here from the New York Times on November 16th, that's today.
Jewish celebrities and influencers confront TikTok executives in private call.
TikTok faces escalating accusations that it promotes pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel content.
Shame on you, Sasha Baron Cohen said on the call.
And it basically details how these celebrities talk to the two main TikTok executives.
Both of them are Jewish.
And demanded, citing the ADL, that there's too much content that's pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel.
You can't have that.
That has to be censored, they said.
And I guarantee you TikTok is in the process of complying.
Just like those networks refused to show that Bin Laden letter, just like TikTok, banned and blocked the links and the viral videos and the hashtags to this letter written by Osama Bin Laden.
When you're in a position that you have newspapers deleting and suppressing and removing from their own site documents that they published previously that a lot of people want to read, and a mass censorship campaign, which is what we've seen in the United States since October 7th where people are being fired in massive numbers,
Never for supporting Israel, never for going too far by saying erase Gaza, only by criticizing Israel or expressing Palestinian views.
When you have a censorship crisis of that magnitude, and an escalating effort to suppress from the American people authentic historical documents, so they cannot read the views and perspectives of people in the Muslim world, only what they're being told by the United States and the Israeli governments, That is a deeply dangerous situation.
That is the situation that prevailed after 9-11.
That is what led to the war on terror excesses.
People were lied to about 9-11.
For years, to this day, they are.
Because they still think that we were attacked because they hate us so much for our freedoms.
And not because we've been interfering in that part of the world and dropping bombs and bringing violence and bringing coups and imposing dictators for decades.
Now, maybe once you have all the information, you're going to still think, no, I believe in the good versus evil narrative.
I think the United States is pure good, the victim.
I think the Muslims who attacked us are pure evil.
That's fine.
Maybe you'll think that about Israel as well.
No, I don't accept that Palestinians are angry because they're the subject of a blockade and an occupation, a brutal, illegal occupation for decades, and have been bombed repeatedly by Israel.
That's not what I believe.
I believe that Israel is the purely good power, the victim here.
Even though they're way more powerful, they're also the victim.
That's fine.
You can believe that.
People believe that.
I know people who believe that about either Israel and or the United States.
But what you should not want is suppression of key facts unless you're afraid that the beliefs you say you have aren't actually supportable, in which case that is the behavior of somebody frightened by the truth or by other people's arguments.
That is the mentality of a censor.
I don't want people hearing these views because they regard these views as too dangerous.
Even though The American right has been unified against that mentality many on the right now supported ever since Israel was attacked.
That's the truth.
And as a result, it's getting increasingly dangerous.
This is not a case, by the way, where it used to be that the American right was censored and the liberals were the ones doing the censoring and now the American right saying, ah, we get to finally censor you.
The reason criticism of Israel is being censored, the reason pro-Palestinian voices are being censored isn't because the American right wants it to be.
It's because the establishment power centers in the West want it to be.
It just so happens that the American right, much of it, is aligned this time with the power centers in the West.
They're all in agreement.
They're pro-Israel views.
And that's why a lot of conservatives are thinking, oh wow, we get to do the censoring this time.
You're not doing the censoring.
The people doing the censoring are the same people who have been censoring you for years and will keep censoring you very shortly into the future.
You just happen to be on their side this time.
Don't fool yourself into thinking you have this power.
You don't have that power.
The people who have the power are the same people who have had the power for the last six years.
They're just pro-Israel now.
And I think that's a crucial point to realize.
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Just want to spend a little bit of time talking about our audience reaction to the now almost six weeks of coverage we have devoted to the Israeli-Gaza War.
As many of you know, we have this live after show every Tuesday and Thursday night.
Tonight's Thursday, we're going to go do it.
Where we, once we're done with this show, I sit in these chairs in our studio and I take questions and respond to feedback from our subscribers to the locals community.
I think it's $5 a month, $7 a month, something like that to subscribe.
A lot of people were with me at Substack who are subscribers who have renewed their subscription.
And the purpose of that live after show is for me to be held responsible to my audience by hearing criticisms of the things I'm saying and have to interact and respond.
Obviously, we knew early on that a good chunk of our audience was going to be supportive of Israel.
That was something of which I was very well aware.
But I also have a long history as an American Jew, as an American, of being very critical of the Israeli denial of Palestinian statehood, of the illegal occupation of the West Bank, of the blockade of Gaza, of the frequent bombing by the Israelis, of the U.S.
support for all of those Israeli wars.
These are ideas I have been defending and advocating for a long time, and I knew Once that Hamas attack happened that was so horrific that it was going to provoke exactly what it has, a really an unprecedented kind of war in terms of watching a trapped, helpless population, 50% of whom are children, relentlessly be bombed and killed.
One out of every 200 people in Gaza have been killed in the last five weeks and we're nowhere near the end of this war.
And so I was faced with this dynamic, which is I knew that by expressing my views of this war, by covering it in a way to try and show people things that I thought they weren't going to see from other places, that we were going to end up alienating a significant part of our audience.
That isn't just pro-Israel, but that supports Israel vehemently as a major, major issue for reasons we've covered.
And obviously I didn't have a choice.
If I had even for one second given thought to the possibility that I should avoid this topic or just cover it quickly and then run away from it.
I've seen journalists do this.
There are journalists who rely on their viewers or subscribers or their audience loyalty who have just ran in the opposite direction from this issue knowing that it polarizes their audience.
I've noticed who's doing that.
I'm not going to do that ever.
And I think I've talked about before the first time I had to alienate my audience, which was in 2010, when I had largely a left liberal audience, although I had a lot of libertarians at the time, too, because that's who was critical of the Bush-Cheney war on terror.
And when the Citizen United decision happened, it was a decision that enraged everybody left of center, from the furthest left-wing fringes to the most conservative members of the Democratic Party and everything in between.
And people started saying to me, you're a constitutional lawyer.
You talk about free speech a lot.
What's your opinion of Citizens United?
And I knew my position was the one of the ACLU, of labor unions, of free speech absolutists, which is I thought that and still think that the specific restrictions on campaign finance spending that were struck down in Citizens United are, in fact, an infringement of free speech.
That case emerged because a nonprofit group Wanted to fund and finance an anti Hillary Clinton campaign right before the election and were told they couldn't under these laws.
Of course to me that was an infringement of free speech.
And I had to write about it and I wrote about why I supported the majority ruling in Citizens United.
And to say that my audience was angry at me was an understatement.
I definitely lost readers.
But they were a minority.
A lot of my readers were angry with me.
I kept going to the comment section and engaging with their critiques.
I kept writing and addressing their major arguments to explain my position over the weeks.
And what I learned from that was that the audience I wanted was never an audience that would demand of me full and complete agreement But knew that there would be times, because I don't plant myself in an ideological camp, and refuse to serve every view of any one faction, that there were going to be times when I disagreed with them.
In fact, disagreed with them about issues that they felt very strongly about.
And so my pledge to my audience, to my viewers, to my readers, has always been, I'm not going to tell you what you want to hear all the time.
What I promise instead is I'm going to give you my completely honest view, Regardless of who it helps or hurts or pleases or angers, and I'm going to do my best to be respectful of critiques and criticisms, trying to seek out the smartest and best ones and address them in a substantive, persuasive, well-researched, fact-based way.
That's my promise.
But audience capture has become a very real thing because the way in which media has evolved, it used to be even 10 years ago that you were stuck watching CNN or reading the New York Times because that's all there was.
But now with the internet, there's such a proliferation.
I mean, you don't need to be a billionaire or a gigantic company more to produce a show like this.
You can have a very sophisticated studio, multiple cameras, a staff, Without a huge amount of money because the technology has evolved so well and you can reach a lot of people without owning a network or even cable news access.
And so there's a ton of choices.
And among those choices are always people who will tell you what you want to hear on any issue.
And so it's very easy to listen to somebody and say, all right, I'm done with that person.
I was with them as long as I agreed.
And now they disagree.
I'm gone.
I checked out.
And we've heard from subscribers canceling their subscriptions because they feel so strongly about this foreign country that they don't care if they like my work on the rights of American citizens, my criticism of the corporate media in the United States, my criticism of the U.S.
security state, my defense of free speech and civil liberties.
Israel is the issue that is at least as important, if not more important to them, and disagreement with them enrages them so much that they just can't follow me anymore.
I've lost thousands of followers on Twitter.
A lot of them have been replaced.
So overall, it's a net gain.
But the majority of my audience, the majority of this audience here, including people who support Israel, including people who disagree with me about my perspective of this war, have not only stayed, but said that they're staying.
But I just want to tell you that audience capture is very real.
You feel it.
Because the model that most media outlets now use is one that relies on subscribers or having a big enough audience for ads.
And either way, losing or alienating part of your audience can have a very direct impact on your ability to earn a living, to support your family.
And I see all the time people capitulating to that pressure.
And I felt it, not gonna lie.
I of course knew that was a danger.
But there's no way I can do this work if it doesn't come from a place of passion and honesty.
My integrity is just not for sale.
I'd honestly rather lose 90% of my viewers and subscribers.
Then have to go home at night after the show and put my head on my pillow and know that I somehow changed my view or altered it or suppressed it or modified it.
Not because I was changing my mind, but because I just wanted to avoid alienating people in my audience.
There's nothing worth that.
And we did lose some people, but a small percentage.
And I'm very thrilled to know that I have deliberately sought to attract and cultivate an audience of people who are willing to hear disagreements, who actually want to hear disagreements, who find that illuminating and stimulating.
I've had a lot of pro-Israel supporters in my life, a lot of my friends, but also in my audience writing to me and saying, I still don't agree with you.
I get angry sometimes, but at least it makes me think.
It's a check on what I think.
And that's the same thing I feel about the pro-Israel audience, pro-Israel viewers and correspondents that I hear from all the time, including on our after show.
It's a way of keeping each other honest.
And it really is true.
There are people, shows that do very well.
In terms of attracting a lot of your audience and making a lot of money for their hosts.
And they say, I'm here.
I'm in this part of the Republican Party.
I'm in this part of the Democratic Party.
I'm in this faction and that one.
Come to me and you will never hear anything that conflicts with your worldview.
It's a successful model.
But ultimately it's a model that has no nutrition.
It's a model that is soul draining instead of affirming, and it creates nothing good.
And I'm okay with losing 10% or 15% of our audience or our subscriber base.
I have no doubt that we will build that back and more.
It's happened many times in my career.
I lost 20 to 5% of my audience in 2009 when I extended my critique of the war on terror under George Bush to the identical war on terror policies of Barack Obama and a huge number of Democrats who thought I was so great.
Like, wait a minute, I'm not here for criticism of the Democratic Party.
I'm out of here.
And then over time it built back up and exceeded that.
But you have to be willing to take that risk and feel that pain.
But it's so worth it at the end.
And it's the only kind of journalism that matters.
Do not seek out and do not trust people who tell you what you want to hear all the time.
It is not good for you.
It's not good for journalism.
It's not good for our discourse.
Alright, last story before we go to our after show for our local subscribers, which is the musical legend Roger Waters was here on our show.
There's a website or a Twitter page that's funded by the Polish government that has been very responsible for a lot of disinformation online trying to induce the West to Participate in the war in Ukraine.
It's called VisGrad 24.
It's a complete propaganda page.
And they radically edited and shopped the interview I did with Roger Waters in part to make me look like I didn't push back on any of the things he said.
But also to single out statements that Roger Waters made that were genuinely controversial.
But it was all torn out of its context.
I'm not defending Roger Waters.
He said things that I knew at the time were going to cause controversy.
I probed them.
I pushed back on that.
And those were his statements.
I explained how I conducted interviews last week, what my philosophy is, whether I'm talking to Israel critics or pro-Israel advocates.
But here was the very, very, very viral tweet of this interview that this site, this propaganda site, achieved through a lot of sketchy editing.
Let's go ahead and play that.
I think I moved it around a little too much.
Oh, actually, yeah.
So that was the tweet.
Pink Floyd co-founder Roger Waters on the October 7th massacre, quote, we don't know yet what happened.
Maybe there were some individual cases of civilians getting killed.
Israel is making up stories.
And here's what they, what, is this the actual interview or is this what they edited?
So this is what they published that caused so much of the controversy.
When the attack on October 7th in Israel happened from Hamas, what was your reaction to that?
Let's wait and see what happened.
Well, that was my first reaction.
My second reaction was, how the hell did the Israelis not know this was going to happen?
And I'm still a little bit down that rabbit hole.
I mean, didn't the Israeli army in those 10 or 11 camps hear the bangs when they blew up whatever they had to blow up to get across the border?
There's something very fishy about that.
Do you think What Hamas did on October 7th can be justified?
Well, A, we don't know what they did do, but was it justified for them to resist the occupation?
Yeah.
But again, it's what you said, it's the Geneva Conventions.
They are absolutely legally and morally bound to resist the occupation since 1967.
It's an obligation.
But are there limits on the way in which they can resist?
As I said in the statement that I put out after it, I said if war crimes were committed, I condemn them.
Do you think there's been evidence that's emerged that suggests they committed those?
There may have been individuals.
I was reading a new story this morning, which Grayzone, our friend Max Blumenthal, so there's a long story which I read this morning.
Haaretz have finally come out with figures of how many people were actually killed and who they were.
On that day?
On that day, yeah.
And so probably the first 400 were Israeli military personnel.
Who are?
That is not a war crime.
No, but what about targeting civilians or abducting them?
No, of course not.
No, of course I don't condone that.
But the thing was, Okay, so that was the viral tweet.
A lot of that is true.
There were a lot of claims that the Israelis made that ended up being false.
There were hoaxes they published, including purporting to have two Hamas Operatives talking to one another, that was clearly a hoax based on their accent.
They've had a lot of those as well.
But obviously there were civilians, Israeli civilians targeted and killed, hundreds of them at least, on October 7th.
And we made our views of that very clear, but Roger Waters has had this kind of accusation hounding him for a long time that he's anti-Semitic.
He's been one of the most influential critics of Israel, and that's what's going to happen to you if you are that.
And as a result of that interview going viral, and it got heavily covered in Brazil, throughout Latin America, all throughout the United States, Roger Waters says this, he says that.
There's now a pressure campaign in Latin America where he's touring it.
He was in Brazil when we interviewed him.
He's now going to Argentina, Uruguay, other countries in Latin America.
There's a very organized pressure campaign to insist that no hotels allow him to stay at their hotel because of the views he expresses that are called hateful and bigoted and all of that.
And it's working.
There's now a precedent that these hotels cannot give Roger Waters access to their services because any hotel that does will be accused now of agreeing with his views.
He cannot get a hotel.
Here from AP, November 15th, Roger Waters denied hotel stays in Argentina and Uruguay over anti-Semitism allegations, report says.
The dateline is Rio de Janeiro from AP.
Hotels in Argentina and Uruguay reportedly rejected reservations from Pink Floyd co-founder Roger Waters over accusations of anti-Semitism, leveled at the British singer known for his pro-Palestinian views.
Rogers was due to stay in Argentina's capital, Buenos Aires, ahead of shows scheduled for November 21st and 22nd as part of his This Is Not a Drill tour.
But the reservations fell through, with hotels citing a lack of availability, the Argentine newspaper Pagina 12 reported.
Hotels in Montevideo, in neighboring Uruguay, also refused to host him, but did not provide a reason.
The story quoted Waters as saying, the president of the Central Israelite Committee of Uruguay, Robby Schindler, sent a list to the Sofitel Hotel, urging it not to host Waters.
Waters, quote, takes advantage of his fame as an artist to lie and spew his hatred toward Israel and Jews, Ginler said.
Quote, by receiving him, you will be, even if you do not want to, propagating the hatred this man exudes.
Waters has been dogged by accusations of anti-Semitism for years, including criticism by the U.S.
government earlier this year.
They're referring there to a U.S.
government official, Deborah Lipstadt.
Who's like the official anti-Semitism accuser.
She goes around putting the anti-Semitism label on critics of Israel on behalf of the U.S.
government.
Quote, the State Department said Waters has a quote, long track record of using anti-Semitic tropes to denigrate Jewish people.
In a recent interview with the journalist Glenn Greenwald, Waters said the surprise attack by Hamas militants in Israel on October 7th was quote, blown out of all proportion by the Israelis inventing stories about beheading babies.
Now, I know there are a lot of people, especially Israel supporters, celebrating that Roger Waters can't get a hotel room because he's regarded as having hateful, extremist, and bigoted views.
And I would like to just remind conservatives, or anybody else cheering that, that until October 7th, The people who were regarded as having the most extremist, dangerous, and bigoted views were people on the American right.
They were the ones getting excluded from services everywhere.
And if you're going to cheer a system, a regime, that now says that hotels have a moral obligation to investigate or to learn about the political views of those who seek to stay there and to reject anybody with extremist and bigoted views, you're going to have a lot of conservatives having to sleep on the couches of friends or not be able to travel at all.
In fact, there have already been conservatives, people who are regarded as right-wing extremists, Who are barred from the Airbnb system.
In fact, relatives of theirs are.
Lauren Southern is one example.
She's considered a far-right extremist and on February 7, 2023, she tweeted the following, quote, my parents just got banned from Airbnb for being related to me.
They have never booked anything for me.
They do not represent me in any way.
They aren't publicly political in any way.
How is this seen in any way?" And she has a notice that she shared from Airbnb saying, we have an update to share.
We've removed you from the Airbnb platform because your account is closely associated with a person who isn't allowed to use Airbnb, which is her.
Why have you made this decision for the safety of our community?
We remove accounts that are closely associated with people who aren't allowed to use Airbnb.
The far-right activist, in the words of The Hill, Laura Loomer, who happens to be a fanatical supporter of Israel, ironically, was banned by PayPal because of the view that her views are too extreme to allow her to enter and use the financial services system.
We've reported a lot on similar cases of people who are increasingly now being banned from using our society's services.
People banned from GoFundMe, raising charity accounts, from PayPal, from banks.
Because of their views of those institutions, views of ideology, or the pressure put on those institutions not to associate themselves or provide services to people with bad views.
So if you're a conservative and you're celebrating what happened to Roger Waters because you think he's anti-semitic and hate him or whatever, be careful what you wish for.
Because this system, once you strengthen it, it's already been used against you and it will continue to be.
You can applaud it, And that will have no effect but strengthening it.
Again, the American right is not in control of the system.
Roger Waters isn't being censored because the American right dislikes him.
He's being censored because the U.S.
government under Joe Biden and the bipartisan consensus regards him as dangerous.
And so just the fact that conservatives happen to be along for the ride in this case, because they also support Israel, don't convince yourself that you're now in the driver's seat.
Of these multiple-pronged censorship regime weapons that have been used against you in the past and will continue to be used against you in the future and in a strengthened way if you cheerlead for them.
That's the same for right-wing support for censorship in the name of protecting Israel.
You are strengthening a censorship regime that you've long complained about because it's targeting you.
That concludes our show for this evening.
As a reminder, System Update is also available in podcast form.
You can listen to each episode in its podcast version on Spotify, Apple, and all the major podcasting platforms 12 hours after they are first broadcast live here on Rumble.
And if you rate, review, and follow the program, it really helps spread the visibility of the show.
As a final reminder, because tonight is Thursday, every Tuesday and Thursday night, Once we're done with our live show here on Rumble, we move to Locals, which is part of the Rumble platform, where we have our live interactive aftershow for subscribers to our show, to our Locals community.
And that's where we take your questions and respond to your feedback and critiques, hear your suggestions for future topics and guests for the show.
And if you want to become a member of that Locals community, which is What gives you access to those twice a week after shows as well as the daily transcripts that we prepare in a very professionalized way to let you read the show with transcripts if you want.
It's where we're going to publish our original journalism as I write more in the future.
And it really helps support the independent journalism that we're trying to do here.
You can simply click on the Join button right below the video player on this Rumble page.
It will take you to that local community where you can join.
For those of you who've been watching, We are, as always, very appreciative.
We hope to see you back tomorrow night and every night at 7 p.m.
