Taibbi/Shellenberger Clash with Censorship Regime in Congress (Again). DEBATE: Glenn & Israel Supporter, Max Abrahms Discuss War in Gaza
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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, Democrats in the House continue to defend the government big tech censorship regime, completely undeterred by the fact that there are now two separate federal court rulings, one from an appellate court, one from a district court.
that found that the Biden administration directly violated the First Amendment through its systemic program of pressuring social media platforms to censor political speech and political content from American citizens that it dislikes.
Yesterday at the latest House hearing of the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, the journalist Matt Taibbi and Michael Schellenberger made their second appearance before that committee to discuss new reporting on a previously unknown prong of the censorship regime.
The duo first testified back in May about the revelations of the Twitter files, which documented the extent to which government agencies such as the CIA, the FBI and the CDC routinely pressured and coerced and threatened Twitter to censor the political speech of Americans.
Just as happened at that last hearing in May, House Democrats continued to speak up vocally in favor of the U.S.
security state, in favor of the censorship regime, and this time even corralled an aide to former Vice President Mike Pence, who has turned into one of those loud anti-Trump voices to help them defend the censorship regime.
We'll show you some of the key highlights and exchanges at this House hearing.
And then, Early this morning, Israel resumed its massive bombing campaign in Gaza after a five-day or six-day pause to release hostages, with both Israel and Hamas blaming the other for fault for resumption of the hostilities.
But along with renewed bombing, Israel also announced that it was blocking most humanitarian aid from entering Gaza.
Despite the public urging of the Biden administration, the chief patron of Israel's war, the ones who are paying for it, to allow more of that humanitarian aid to enter.
Max Abrams is a political science professor at Northeastern University where he specializes in the study of several fields including international terrorism.
Abrams is also a vocal defender of Israel in general and specifically its ongoing war in Gaza.
He was on our show previously to discuss the war in Ukraine where along with us he was vehemently opposed To the Biden policy of fueling and funding that war.
But we obviously see this new war differently, this new war that Joe Biden is funding.
And we'll have him on to discuss and debate the key issues involving the Israeli war in Gaza and US policy toward it.
Before we get to all of that, as a few programming notes, we're encouraging our viewers to download the Rumble app, which works both on your smart TV and your telephone.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
If you stop and think about it, it's actually quite amazing that there have now been not one, but two federal court cases holding exactly the same thing.
That the Biden administration engaged in one of the most serious, one of the gravest direct frontal attacks on the free speech guarantee of the First Amendment by continuously not just pressuring or coercing But threatening big tech companies that they must censor a wide variety of political speech that are disliked by various agencies in the Biden administration, including the FBI, the CDC and others, including the Biden White House.
Or else, the Biden administration said, for failure to censor that content, these companies will suffer all sorts of legal and retaliatory reprisals.
Obviously, the executive branch has enormous control over Big Tech and punish them in all sorts of ways.
And with regarding numerous crises, there's been all sorts of censorship that nominally was implemented by Big Tech, but in fact was Pressured and cajoled and directed by the Biden administration.
And there's all kinds of case law we've covered before, which holds that the federal government cannot indirectly censor what they would be barred constitutionally from censoring, meaning they can't threaten private actors to censor for them.
And yet that's exactly what the Biden administration has done.
And the court was clear.
First the district court and then the three judge appellate court.
That this is not some small or tactical violation of the First Amendment.
According to the court, this is one of the gravest violations arguably in the history of the judiciary to take the internet and try and systematically censor it in this manner.
And yet, there's been almost no media coverage of this.
The people who claim to be the safeguards and the guardians of American democracy who have been found to have been supporting this have said almost nothing.
Media outlets have barely covered this at all.
And so just this week, the independent journalist Matt Taibbi and Michael Schellenberger, which who have done great work in exposing a lot of the censorship regime, including the Twitter files, published a new joint article investigative article that is also bylined by Alex Gutentag at the joint sub stack that they have to publish these articles.
And there you see the article on the screen is from the CTIL files.
Number one, they have a whistleblower.
And the title is U.S.
and U.K.
Military Contractors Created a Sweeping Plan for Global Censorship in 2018, New Documents Show.
A Whistleblower Makes Troves of New Documents Available to Public and Racket, Showing the Birth of the Censorship Industrial Complex in Reaction to Brexit and Trump Election in 2016.
Now, this is the key point.
The history of censorship is exactly this.
This type of censorship really did not exist prior to 2016.
It's all new.
Of course, there was some big tech censorship here and there, but for the most part, the entire system and the vast bulk of what we're discussing, people being banned off the internet for their political speech, really emerged in the wake of 2016.
And that's because the Western establishment suffered two severe blows in 2016.
First, when subjects of the United Kingdom, a majority of them, voted to leave the EU by approving the Brexit referendum.
And then just a few short months later when they delivered the real traumatic blow, which was rejecting Hillary Clinton and electing Donald Trump to the Oval Office.
And in the wake of those two events, Western elites, especially American elites, decided that the Internet can no longer be free.
That once the Internet is free, people are free to make up their own minds and no longer under the control of Western elites.
And that's when they began to implement this systemic censorship regime as a way of getting people under control, to control the flow of information that they can receive, which in turn allows them to control behavior.
That is why I spend so much time on this issue, why it's such a central cause of mine.
If you can dictate what populations can and can't hear, that is a level of control and authoritarianism that makes elections irrelevant.
Because if people are going and voting for who they're told to vote for because they've only been allowed to hear the information that power centers want them to hear, which is what the system is designed to do, the elections are basically illusory.
That's why the First Amendment of the Constitution guaranteed free speech, really in so many ways, Is one of the rights on which all the others depend.
And here's what they write, quote, a whistleblower has come forward with an explosive new trove of documents rivaling or exceeding the Twitter files and Facebook files in scale and importance.
They describe the activities of a, quote, anti-disinformation group called the Cyber Threat Intelligence League, or CTIL, that officially began as the volunteer project of data scientists and defense and intelligence veterans, but whose tactics over time appear to have been absorbed into multiple but whose tactics over time appear to have been absorbed into multiple official projects, including those of the Department of
Now, remember, the whole emergence of the disinformation industry, the people who are disinformation experts who decree what is disinformation and what is not, to allow big tech to censor, to allow governments to justify or demand that censorship, quickly emerged overnight.
There is no expertise called a disinformation expert.
That is a concocted and made-up field of discipline.
Amen.
And it emerged in order to justify the censorship regime, to make it seem like it was the byproduct of data analysis, rather than what it is, which is suppression of political speech based on ideology.
Quote, lock your shit down, explains one document about creating, quote, your spy disguise.
Another explains that while such activities overseas are quote typically done by the CIA and NSA and the Department of Defense, censorship efforts against Americans have to be done using private partners because the government doesn't have the quote legal authority The whistleblower alleges that a leader of the CTI League, a former British intelligence analyst, was quote, in the room at the Obama White House in 2017 when she received the instructions to create a counter disinformation project to stop a repeat of 2016.
Now a larger trove of new documents, including strategy documents, training videos, presentations, and internal messages, reveal that in 2019, U.S.
and U.K.
military and intelligence contractors, led by a former U.K.
defense researcher named Sarah Jane S.J.
Turp, developed this sweeping censorship framework Those contractors co-led CTIL, which partnered with CISA in the spring of 2020.
That is, the department inside the Department of Homeland Security.
CTIL's ultimate goal, said the whistleblower, quote, was to become part of the federal government.
In our weekly meetings, they made it clear they were building these organizations within the federal government, and if you built the first iteration, we could secure a job for you.
Terp's plan, which she shared in presentations to information security and cybersecurity groups in 2019, was to create, quote, mis-info-sec communities that would include government.
This is the creation of the disinformation industry right before your eyes, which in turn is intended to provide a justification, a cover, a pretext for how big tech censors political speech at the dictates of the government, not by claiming that it is.
Suppressing ideological dissent, but instead disinformation.
Who wants false claims being circulated?
The problem, of course, is that the people who are in control of determining what is true and false are the government officials themselves.
That's in whose hands this censorship regime resides.
Now, here is a video of Congressman Dan Bishop, who's a Republican on the committee, and we're going to include this because he provides such an impassioned and clear and articulate summary of what has happened with these judicial findings about the Biden administration directly violating free speech in a systematic way.
And the witness who's on this panel with Shellenberger and Taibbi is named Olivia Troyev.
She's a former advisor to former Vice President Mike Pence, who has decided to rebrand as an anti-Trump conservative.
She goes around talking about how dangerous Donald Trump is.
And so they had her there, the Democrats did.
The Democrats often ignore Tayabian Schellenberger, didn't want to hear about this censorship regime, of course.
To have Olivia Troyev, Vice President Pence's former aide, talk about the evils of Trump, but in doing so she also, they roped her in, into defending the censorship regime.
So listen to Congressman Bishop.
You're aware that the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals has reviewed that, found that the findings of the District Court were well supported by evidence, and modified and substantially affirmed the preliminary injunction against the government entered by... Are you aware of all that?
And does it affect your view that all of this is a figment of imagination?
I am aware of the decision.
I also want to clarify that I have not actually never said that this is a conspiracy.
You've not heard that comment from me.
So you believe there is censorship going on by means of the federal government on social media platforms?
Or has been?
I can only speak to my experience and I will say that I've sat in a lot of these interagency meetings with social media companies and ultimately it was their decision.
Okay, so that already is an incredible omission if you think about it.
She, as Vice President Pence's representative in these intra-agency meetings with the national security state, was frequently sitting in on meetings where the U.S.
government would meet with Big Tech and would instruct Big Tech on what content they wanted censored.
This wasn't the Trump administration or Biden political actors in this case doing it.
It was the CIA and the FBI and the CDC.
Trying to remove content that they disliked.
And in order to defend this, because she's there as a Democratic Party witness, she tries to say, ultimately, it was the tech companies that pushed the delete button or the censor button.
But of course, the courts found that they did so at the direction of the federal government.
And ultimately, it was their decision.
And I will say that when content was removed, it was ultimately up to them.
Yeah, but see, that's what the court has said is the problem, is that the agencies have engaged in this subterfuge where they say, well, we want you to make the decision.
But they're all over them to the point that their constant involvement makes it government involvement.
That's the threat.
Mr. Schellenberger, let me turn to you.
Because I was thinking about where we are.
Twitter files revealed these connections, right?
Direct connections between Elvis Chana, the FBI, and social media companies.
And then your further reporting and yours, Mr. Taibbi, revealed the next layer, which is what you call the censorship industrial complex.
The connection between CISA funding these adjacent agencies, Stanford, people at Stanford, people at the University of Washington, and so they could offload this exact subterfuge and they could pre-bunk stuff and stop whole narratives from taking hold.
And now your CTI League shows yet another dynamic in two ways, it seems.
You've got this guy, we ought to get his name out there for folks, Pablo Brewer, you said, a commander with
The Special Operations Command, I believe, and he's involved in this CTI League, but they got Israeli, you mentioned British intelligence, and you say in part of your report, the authors, talking about one of their reports, advocated for police, military, and intelligence involvement in censorship across Five Eyes nations, and even suggested that Interpol should be involved.
Why is that significant, Mr. Schellenberger?
It's not binding me, obviously.
Do it as quickly as you can, because I've got one other thing I really want to get to if we can.
Well, because we don't want the police and the military to decide what we can say and read.
And that's what makes our country amazing, is that our founding fathers, they said, speech comes-- it's the First Amendment.
It comes before governments.
Where it's not, in Europe, the king would decide whether you could say things.
We didn't want it that way.
We said, we want to decide.
Here's what it tells me that's chilling.
Ms.
Subramanya, I'm minded of your presence here as a Canadian.
So, if they can't do it directly from the FBI, then they get institutions, academic, pseudo-academic institutions involved.
If they find that that's going to be blunted because we can go take their funding away because there's U.S.
agency funding, then they get the five eyes involved.
If they can't stop it here in the United States, they can go get the European Union or the other governments to say, or Canada, to deem this stuff to be threatening.
That's what, and the dynamic deepens and deepens.
This is a big deal.
And here we are, every person on the minority side has talked about Donald Trump.
I would think, Ms.
Troy and others, that if you're concerned, if you're genuinely concerned about Donald Trump as a threat, what we're talking about today should be all the more threatening to you, because we're talking about setting precedents and diminishing the ability of Americans to express themselves.
Why?
Why is it that only Republicans in Congress are willing to say this?
You know, obviously I've been accused many times over the years of having switched sides or moved to the right and I'm listening to this and it describes in detail how the U.S.
security state In the Five Eyes countries, which is the subject of the Snowden reporting, the US, the UK, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, that's the Five Eyes alliance, the spying alliance, are working with outside contractors, military contractors, to create systems explicitly with the goal of controlling speech on the internet.
And the only people who care in the slightest about this in the Congress, the only people who are willing to object to it, are conservatives like Congressman Bishop.
While every single time this arises, this topic, Democrats don't just ignore it, they affirmatively defend it.
And so, yes, I'm a defender of free speech, I'm opposed to the U.S.
security state's censorship of the internet.
In conjunction with large corporations and neoliberal, billionaire-funded disinformation agents.
How does this become a right-wing principle?
How did this become a right-wing cause?
Why is Matt Taibbi on the right?
Because he's reporting on the efforts of Western military agencies and law enforcement agencies and security state agencies to control speech on the Internet.
The last time they were there, it was extraordinary to watch as every single Democrat, every last one of them on this committee, including AOC and Dan Goldman and that non-voting delegate who pretends she's a Congresswoman, Stacey Plaskett, every last one of them, Colin Allred, affirmatively defended The right of the CIA and Homeland Security and the FBI to determine what content should and shouldn't be on the Internet.
This is what left liberals do in the Congress.
I'm going to show you one more exchange here.
This is with Dan Goldman.
This wasn't on the censorship issue itself, but it was on the fact that right before the 2020 election, the CIA created a Outright lie, which was that the material from the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation, a lie that was ratified by the corporate media.
We've been over that many times, because what Taibbi and Schellenberger are saying is that this new censorship program is designed to manipulate and interfere in the 2024 election that's coming up.
It's designed to propagandize the public to make sure they vote how they want, which is, of course, to make sure Donald Trump doesn't get reelected, and Joe Biden does.
And here's Dan Goldman, I think, in a very kind of futile and pathetic way, even trying to engage Michael Schellenberger on the question of whether we really know for sure whether the Hunter Biden laptop, all this time later, when everyone, even the newspapers that he agrees with, like the New York Times, that is responsible for his election by endorsing it because the Sulzberger family that owns it is friends with his billionaire family, of which he's an heir.
Even the New York Times acknowledges that the Hunter Biden laptop is completely authentic, not Russian disinformation.
And here's Dan Goldman, not ready to acknowledge that.
In fact, fighting tooth and nail to cling to this conspiracy theory that somehow it was manufacturer fraudulent.
You talked about the Hunter Biden laptop and how the FBI knew it existed.
You are aware, of course, that the laptop, so to speak, that was published in the New York Post was actually a hard drive that the New York Post admitted here was not authenticated as real.
It was not the laptop the FBI had.
You're aware of that, right?
It was the same contents.
How do you know?
Because it's the same... You would have to authenticate it to know it was the same content.
You have no idea.
You know hard drives can be manipulated.
Are you suggesting the New York Post could participate in a conspiracy to construct the contents of the Hunter Biden laptop?
No, sir.
The problem is that hard drives can be manipulated by Rudy Giuliani or Russia.
What's the evidence that that happened?
Well, there is actual evidence of it, but the point is, it's not the same thing.
There's no evidence, so you're engaging in a conspiracy theory.
I'm glad you agree with me, Mr. Schellenberger, that transparency is the most important thing.
And my last question for you is, do you think it would be transparent if Hunter Biden came to this Congress and testified in a public hearing, and more transparent than if he testified privately?
I mean, literally, I've never thought about that.
I have no idea.
You don't know?
I really never thought about that.
Public testimony more transparent than private testimony?
Are you familiar with the First Amendment?
Mr. Chairman, I yield back.
Congress shall take no action to abridge freedom of speech.
Yeah.
And that's what you just described.
Mr. Schellenberger, is 13% censorship still censorship?
Absolutely.
And the other 87% is what we call the chilling effect that the courts have long recognized that they engaged in.
That is the problem.
By the way, part of the operation, Congressman Goldman, Part of the operation was to change the terms of service.
So you see them constantly trying to change the terms of service.
You see them, it was 35% of the URLs that were going to EIP were labeled.
So there it is.
I mean, it was mostly the Democrats on the hearing decided to ignore this reporting.
In order to talk to Mike Pence's aide, to talk about all the ways Donald Trump is dangerous.
And that is their posture.
They defend it.
They ignore it.
And I think it is amazing that we have two court hearings now, preliminarily finding that the Biden administration engaged in this mass constitutional violation.
And of course, the people who care so much about American democracy have no interest at all in talking about it.
So we have been reporting, and it's obviously been in the news as well, about this ongoing effort to drive away advertisers from any platform that refuses to comply about this ongoing effort to drive away advertisers from any platform that refuses There was a lot of controversy surrounding
The way in which advertisers have been driven away from Elon Musk acts because of the refusal of acts to censor in the way that liberal activist groups want, and that has driven away major corporations.
We covered that last night on our show.
The same thing has been done to this platform, to Rumble.
Where similar reports have been issued accusing Rumble of allowing ads from large corporations to appear next to content that is, according to Media Matters, filled with hate speech.
We went over how fraudulent that report is, but it's an attempt to drive away sponsors, to drive away advertisers that make sites like Rumble or others that are devoted to free speech sustainable, profitable, able to function.
So we're welcoming a new sponsor tonight, and one of the things we've asked our audience to do is not just go and patronize every sponsor that we have, whether you like the product or not.
What I hope you'll do is give them a fair hearing, in part because we really do vet these advertisements.
I've never done ads before I came to Rumble, and they told me, look, this is how we can sustain ourselves, through advertising dollars.
And I said, look, I'm willing to do ads, but only if I really believe in the product.
And I need to have the ability to vet, to meet with them, to kick the tires hard, to make sure I'm comfortable with it.
We've said no to many, so the ones that we offer, the sponsors that we have, are people's products who we really believe.
And that's the case for tonight, which is the Wellness Center, and it's actually an interesting story that connects to the news.
There is a pretty disturbing fact in the United States that 90% of the pharmaceutical products that people use are produced outside of the united states and one of the things that happened at the start of the covid pandemic was a serious concern about the breakdown of the supply chain and how if that pandemic had been much worse than it was there could have been serious damage done to those supply chains
which would have meant that the united states and americans inside of our country would have been incapable of obtaining all sorts of products including medications on which people's health and even lives depend.
And it doesn't seem like very soon at least there's going to be any change to this unpleasant reality that 90% of our medications of our pharmaceutical products are produced outside of the United States.
So what happens the next time there's a global crisis?
If countries that do produce these products decide to clamp down on their exports or to sanction or if they want to stockpile?
There's all sorts of reasons why medications may be unattainable in the United States.
The prices of drugs would rise.
The shelves in American pharmacies could go bare.
And that's what the Wellness Company and its medical emergency kit is intended to do.
It holds eight different life-saving medications that every American or a lot of Americans want to have.
Every American wants to have some.
Seems like most Americans should have them.
It feels like common sense.
Obviously people prepare in their lives for all sorts of emergencies and this is one that is very easy to prepare for.
It's a kit that you can order, you can go online, answer questions.
Some of them are medications available only with prescriptions that include antibiotics, antivirals, antiparasitics, things like amoxicillin and ivermectin and Z-Pak with a long guidebook on how to use them for safe use.
And if you get these prescriptions online, which you should be able to if you are healthy and answer their questions, then in the event that there's some kind of bioterror event or pandemic or any other kind of extreme event and there's a breakdown in the supply chains, you'll be able to have these eight different medications.
That's what the Wellness Center is trying to do to give you that peace of mind.
So in order to get them and to read about the product, you can go to TWC Health.
And if you go to TWC Health slash Glenn, G-L-E-N-N, and use the code name Glenn, that's my name, G-L-E-N-N, you will get 10% off at checkout on all the products that you buy.
We store Advil, we store Tylenol, we store all sorts of things.
So I think it makes a lot of sense to be safe and be prepared with this kit that will give you this peace of mind.
They're available only in the United States, not outside the United States.
And again, let's put that code back up.
It's TWC Health slash Glenn.
You use the code Glenn and you'll save 10% it.
And like I said, if you support free speech platforms, the show and rumble, at least giving our new sponsors a chance, checking out their products, seeing if you like it, is one thing that we absolutely hope you'll do.
Max Abrams is an associate professor of political science at Northeastern University, where he's an expert in international security, especially in the areas of terrorism, U.S. foreign policy, great power competition, and international relations in the Middle East.
He's held fellowship and other research positions with all kinds of Different academic institutions, including the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford, the Dickey Center for International Understanding at Dartmouth, the Moshe Dayan Center at Tel Aviv University, the Human Security Center in London, and think tanks, including the Center on Foreign Relations.
He has been on our show before to talk about the war in Ukraine.
He's going to be here tonight to talk about our very different views on the Israeli war in Gaza and U.S.
policy toward it.
Max, so great to see you.
Thanks so much for taking the time to talk to us.
Good to have you.
I'm delighted to be here.
Thank you.
And I actually really do appreciate that introduction because in the tweets you were just saying, you know, Israel supporter or whatever, and I was going to call you out on it because I don't actually think that that does a good job of representing my views.
It almost seems to imply that, you know, I'm consistently a pro-Israel person, almost reflexively, whereas That's really not true.
If you look at my foreign policy record over, say, the past 10, 12 years, on many of the most important foreign policy debates involving the United States, I haven't had a pro-Israel view.
That's true with respect to my position in Syria, where I opposed helping the rebels.
I opposed the bombing campaign in Yemen, right?
I've been very critical about the intervention in Libya.
I don't think being sort of pro-Israel is very predictive of my foreign policy views.
I think that a much better OK, just to be clear, as you well know, Twitter has extreme space constraints.
I had to talk not only about our interview, but also about the other topic that we just covered.
I should note as well that you also published your own tweet about your appearance tonight.
And you said Glenn is a critic of Israel and an ardent supporter of the Palestinian cause, which I think isn't quite as nuanced either.
But I understood it's just kind of shorthand for indicating my position on this war.
And all I meant With that, was that you, in this particular war that we're here to talk about, support the Israeli war in Gaza.
That's all I meant by it.
And as you said, when I had the space and time, I gave your full credentials.
So that's, I think, just understanding that Twitter space constraints are what they are.
It was just an attempt to kind of signify that we have different views on this particular question, not to impugn your worldview in any way.
So let me start with The area of agreement that we actually had and still have, which we talked about before, which is that you were, as I am and was, an opponent of the U.S.
funding of Ukraine's war.
And over the last, you know, almost two years now, I've interviewed a lot of people who share our view, members of Congress and journalists and scholars, and most of them said, look, The United States has so many problems at home that we cannot go around funding foreign countries' wars.
It's just not something that we should be doing.
It's not something that we can be doing.
That was at least in part one of my reasons for opposing the U.S.
funding of the war in Ukraine, along with others.
In the case of the war in Gaza, Joe Biden just requested $14 billion for Israel on top of the yearly $4 billion or so in various kinds of aid that they get, in addition to $60 billion more for the war in Ukraine.
What is the difference between the two, and I guess another way to ask that is why should the U.S.
government be funding Israel's wars in the billions of dollars, seemingly without limits?
Yeah, you know, the Biden administration also confounded these issues.
You know, when he hit up the American public, he said, we need to give to Ukraine and we need to give to Israel.
I view these conflicts as extraordinarily different.
I don't see much of a synergy there at all.
My North Star, in terms of my foreign policy positions, hasn't been so much, you know, or at all to reflexively support Israel, but to never be on the side of the terrorists, to not be on the side of al-Qaeda.
That was true in Syria.
That was true in Yemen.
That's true also in this case with Operation Al-Aqsa Flood.
Operation Al-Aqsa Flood is not sort of just an independent terrorist conflict that's far away.
Every single branch of Al-Qaeda is cheering it on.
The German intelligence just two days ago said that traditional barriers between Hamas, Al-Qaeda and Islamic State, they have differences ideologically, but actually this Islamist threat has merged.
Hamas has emerged As a leading actor in the global jihad.
If I have a bias, it's not for Israel, but it's against terrorists.
So just to be clear, one of the arguments for Ukraine was the reason we have to make sure Ukraine wins and Russia loses is because a win for Russia is a win for China.
There's all these other groups, countries like Iran, that hate us and that are also cheering for Russia to win.
And so the argument was we have to get involved.
It sounds a lot like that's your rationale here, not that Hamas can attack the United States, but there's all these groups that we hate that hate us and are cheering for Israel to lose and therefore we should have to make, we should intervene and ensure that Israel wins.
It sounds like that rationale for Ukraine and Israel there is the same, so why does it convince you in the case of Israel to get involved with U.S.
funding but not in the case of Ukraine?
Well, it's hard for me to remember a case where China actually attacked the U.S.
homeland in large numbers.
I don't think it's crazy at all to think that al-Qaeda would do so.
In fact, all you need to do is go to some of these big Palestine rallies, which have gotten completely out of control.
They are full of anti-Semitism and violence.
And you can see people openly calling for a caliphate.
They are waving flags, Glenn, of terrorist groups that are designated by the U.S.
State Department as foreign terrorist organizations, flags of terrorist organizations that actually have a history of attacking the United States.
So just this week, you know, we see PFLP flags, right?
Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
These are groups that are not limited in their target selection to Israel.
They hijacked a plane coming out of Los Angeles, and essentially they were the precursors to Al Qaeda, and that was sort of the model of the 9-11 attacks.
So I think that the danger to Americans is much more real, and it's certainly not distant.
But the $14 billion that Joe Biden is asking Congress to authorize isn't going to be used to round up these bad protesters who you say are being violent, who are waving flags of terrorist organizations in the United States or the West.
The $14 billion is going to be used to give Israel bombs, to drop on Gaza, to give them more weapons, to attack people in the West Bank.
So why, if the United States has all these problems at home, as you say, with It's all these protesters who are being violent and who are pro-terrorists.
Isn't that all the more reason why the United States should focus inward and use its resources on American security rather than transferring $16 billion to Israel to pay or $14 billion to pay for the Israeli war?
I find it extraordinarily hard to believe that that sort of sum to help Israel with its counterterrorism would in any way meaningfully undermine U.S.
security in terms of our, you know, material investments at home.
I do think that it's in the U.S.
interest for terrorists like Hamas to be punished and to be degraded.
Hamas, it wasn't before, but it has emerged as a very important actor in the global jihad.
Even not looking at Hamas, just looking at Al-Qaeda and ISIS, U.S.
intelligence services throughout the West, not just in the United States, but throughout Europe, are saying, you know what?
These organizations have had a resurgence.
Since October 7th, and that is not good for U.S.
national security.
What do you think should be done to the people who are protesting?
Obviously, if you use violence, that's a crime.
It's already a crime.
But in terms of people who are protesting without using violence, and obviously there are a lot of them, there may be, we can fight about how, what percentage are using violence in these protests.
I think people can see the protest and make up their own minds.
But in terms of the people who are just protesting non-violently, but they're waving flags, I guess you mean Hamas flags or Al Qaeda flags.
I haven't seen that many, but let's assume there's a good number of them.
What do you think the United States government should do to those people who are protesting but not using violence?
That's a great question.
You know, there's been a lot of focus on the controversial slogan, From the River to the Sea.
There's been a big backlash against that.
That is not actually as concerning to me, because From the River to the Sea, although, you know, I don't love the slogan, is an expression of a political preference.
What's much more concerning is when you have people expressing approval and encouraging violent tactics.
The other really big slogans that you hear at all of these demonstrations is for there to be a global antifada.
An Antifada revolution.
In my mind, from a free speech perspective, that's a little bit more complicated because there were two Antifadas, technically.
Antifada 1 and Antifada 2.
One in the late 80s and one after the Oslo period in the 1990s.
And they both featured violence, and the second one especially was terrorist violence against civilians.
And so when you have, you know, large numbers of people calling for an anti-FARA, that is concerning to me in a way that a expression of political preferences is not.
I would certainly not crack down on people for having a different political preference.
But the constant expression and encouragement of violence is something that should be looked at.
We've seen at many of the counter protests, the pro-Israel protest we've seen in the United States and in the West, but also in Israel from Israeli officials, people who are saying things like erase Gaza, erase Gaza from the map, flatten Gaza, turn Gaza into a parking lot.
Kill them all.
I've seen Israelis saying that.
I've seen Americans saying that.
I've seen Israeli officials saying that.
Is that, in your mind, something that also is concerning and that should be looked at?
Or are those kinds of sentiments permissible?
Well, you would never hear me say something like that.
No, of course not.
Of course not.
Of course not.
I'm not suggesting you would.
No, no, no.
So I agree.
That is concerning.
It is concerning if somebody were to say, flatten Gaza, because that would entail, you know, the killing of large numbers of civilians.
That, you know, the killing of civilians is always terrible, and it should never be expressed or advocated as a policy position.
How about things that Nikki Haley has said and Lindsey Graham has said, which is, I think we should go just start bombing Iran.
I want to drop bombs on Iran.
Let's say that there are people even kind of more hawkish than they, and they say, I think we should have a mass bombing campaign.
We should carpet bomb Iran.
Is this the sort of thing that also should maybe be legally looked into?
Or is that clearly legally permissible?
Well, here's a little bit of a difference, Glenn.
What you have oftentimes is on campuses throughout the United States, you have large numbers of demonstrators
who are screaming at Jewish students and they are wearing masks deliberately and they are explicitly advertising on their flyers that the purpose of the masks is to impose costs and to intimidate and that, you know, these students and these universities are, to quote them, complicit.
And so it's not as sort of remote as just saying, oh, our policy towards Iran, which is, you know, thousands and thousands of miles away, should be a very belligerent one.
The purpose of saying and screaming at, you know, the Jews at these universities that they're in favor of violence is to intimidate them.
And I don't know of any minority group at universities that are subject to this kind of abuse, where you have the majority screaming at them that they want to use violence.
They want a global antifada, which is understood to mean violence against Jewish targets, which indeed is not just some esoteric, abstract concern.
It is actually happening.
And so I think that there's a real important difference between advocating in a very aggressive way a global antifada to, you know, defenseless Jewish students versus a belligerent policy against Iran thousands of miles away from Washington, D.C.
Well, presumably, like, if Iranians were inside the United States or other Muslims who identify with Iran and they were yelling, let's go kill all Iranians, they would probably react in a similar way.
That would be really objectionable, wouldn't it?
But so, yeah, it would be objectionable.
But then the question becomes, would it be something that the FBI or the police would go and investigate?
And I don't think they would.
And let me just also note, there is some, you know, dispute about... Did you release the student?
Hold on, let me just finish.
There is a dispute as well about the extent to which this stuff is actually happening on college campuses.
Nobody doubts that there's incidents.
Max, if you just let me finish my sentence, I think you'll see that there is.
There was an op-ed by two Israeli-American professors in Harrods just last week, one of whom works at Georgia Washington University and is a tenured professor there.
The other of whom works, I believe, at the University of Pennsylvania.
It's another large university in the Northeast.
I think it was Penn, but it might have been a different one.
And they wrote an op-ed to say that they are very offended as hardcore Israeli supporters, as Israeli citizens, at the attempt to try and create this victim narrative around American Jews and American Jewish students.
And I've had other Israel supporters on my program, like Batya Ungar Sargon, who said the same thing.
And what they said was their experience and the experience of many of their colleagues is that overwhelmingly, when the war in Israel and Gaza is discussed, it is civil, It is things that are things that are being done in terms of very much well within the lines of peacefulness and reasonability.
I've had other professors on my show just in the past couple of weeks, including John Mearsheimer.
I had Rashid Khalidi on my show.
I've had other professors who work in academia who have said the same thing.
So there is a dispute about the extent to which This victimhood narrative surrounding American Jewish students is being exaggerated.
And like I said, many pro-Israel advocates, including the ones I've named, are saying that they are offended by this attempt to act like every pro-Palestinian or overwhelmingly pro-Palestinian protesters are being violent and threatening.
But I want to just get a sense of what rules you want there to be.
Like, should masks be prohibited for everybody?
Like, what's the rules?
Sure.
I mean, before talking about that, there needs to be an actual empirical understanding of what is going on.
Anti-Semitism on college campuses, although libertarians and people on the far left like to try to diminish it, it is unquestionably on the rise.
And that includes whether you restrict your sample, not just to statements, but just to violent attacks, to attacks on individuals, to Throwing rocks, for example, at ASU, to setting a dorm room on fire, like at Drexel.
And by the way, these reports of heightened, heightened levels of anti-Semitism, they do not come from one organization.
ADL, which I don't really like, has been a big punching bag, but across organizations, they are all finding the exact same thing using different methodologies.
Finally, Even when you restrict it to respondents who are not Jewish and who have personally witnessed what they deem to be anti-Semitic attacks, the numbers are absolutely through the roof.
So it's not just Jewish self-reporting.
This includes testimonies on a large-end sample across authors and methodologies also of non-Jews.
And so this is a very robust finding.
All right, so just so people can go in who are interested and look at the article to which I was referring.
It was from five days ago, November 26.
The title of it was, Toxicity Does Not Rule the Hamas-Israel Debate on U.S.
College Campuses.
As Jewish-Israeli scholars who work in U.S.
universities, we know that the image of polarization and betrayal on campus is overblown Most students and colleagues we encounter are curious and open-minded to learn more about the Israel-Hamas war, and it's written by Sakhar Pinsker, who's a professor of Middle East Studies and Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan, and Ari Dumbav, who is the Max Thitken Professor of Israel Studies at George Washington University.
So both Israeli-American scholars who are working directly on campus, just for people who want to get that...
Do they include a large-end study?
Do they include a large-end study?
Or is this purely anecdotal information, Glenn?
No, they're talking about... Both GW and the University of Michigan, for obvious reasons, are centerpieces of where Israel-Gaza or Israel-Palestinian debates take place.
And they're saying that it's not only their experience, but the experience of colleagues of theirs, that Overwhelmingly, the American college campuses are very peaceful and that these debates are being conducted, obviously with some exception.
Show me a large end study that supports that.
I'm all against you on this.
Well, I just referred to, I think, some evidence that I think is pretty persuasive.
Well, I don't have your study in front of me, but I already said that people who use violence are committing crimes.
So what I'm asking from you is some kind of a principle about the extent to which...
Yes, I'll tell you my principle.
My principle is the one under Brandenburg that says that it actually is permissible in the United States constitutionally to even advocate for violence.
Our country was born of people who said, I believe that the British crown has become so repressive that picking up arms against the central government, against the authority, is not only justified but morally necessary.
And the case that came before Brandenburg was a KKK leader.
Hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on.
Let's just have a discussion.
Let me finish my thought and then you can finish yours.
I haven't interrupted you.
The Brandenburg case was a KKK leader who was convicted of terrorism for saying, "I believe we should use violence against the federal government if it doesn't stop being so anti-white." The case went to the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court overturned the conviction and said that advocating violence is clearly within the realm of protected speech, which means that you're allowed to say flatten Gaza, erase Gaza, remove Gaza from the map.
I think all Palestinians should be killed.
There are no innocent Palestinians.
There's a huge number this week of Israeli officials and journalists who have said there's no such thing as an innocent Palestinian.
That's protected speech.
You can go on campus and say that.
You can say it in front of Palestinians and it's protected speech to go and say, I think the Israeli government and their occupation of the West Bank and the blockade of Gaza has become so barbaric and inhumane over decades that I think violence on the part of Palestinians is justified in order to resist it.
Those are both, to me, Clearly within the realm of free speech.
I would never send the FBI or law enforcement after students on campuses for saying these things.
So I'm trying to get you mentioned masks.
You mentioned, you know, people who are chanting loudly.
Is there like a volume limit?
Is there like a mask limit?
Yeah, sure.
Let me respond.
I think that there are two separate issues.
I mean, one is the question of constitutionality, right?
When sort of the FBI might intervene.
And the other is like the school, you know, code of conduct.
You are right that certainly some offenses would be not permissible on campus, even if they wouldn't, say, land somebody in prison.
But the problem is, is that these demonstrations, which are not all of them, but a very, you know, a sizable number of them, a sizable portion of them, are extraordinarily disruptive.
They, you know, interfere with class.
They negatively affect students in ways that shouldn't be affected.
They're intended to scare them, to interfere with their ability to learn, to go to class, To meet with each other, to study, right?
These are all things in violation of universities, and so that's a university issue.
I'm not a lawyer, but I also personally find it problematic
In a legal sense, if somebody is waving flags of foreign terrorist organizations that have a history of attacking the United States while simultaneously calling for violence against the United States at exactly the time where we're seeing elevated levels of violence against the West and intelligence agencies
are saying that these actors are indeed a real threat to the West.
I actually do think that that's problematic for public safety issues, even if you err on the side of civil liberties.
So I want to get to the war itself in just a second, but I just want to stick for one more minute on the issue, not of the war itself, but on the fact that the Biden administration has said it intends to pay for the war, that it will give Israel everything it needs, seemingly without limits, The U.S.
government has said Israel has no red lines, there's nothing it can do that could jeopardize its aid.
We have had many generals over the years, as well as terrorism experts.
You were mentioning the desire of groups in the Middle East, like Al Qaeda, to want to attack the United States.
And what they have said is that a major reason why there's so much anti-American hatred in that region, at least one major reason why, is because of the perception that we interfere in their region in so many different ways, one of which is by Providing the bombs and providing the weapons to Israel that Israel uses to kill innocent people in Gaza, to kill innocent people in the West Bank, that this elevates anti-American hatred and the desire for people to want to go kill Americans.
Since the war between Israel and Gaza began in the Biden administration, Biden flew to Israel and stood by Netanyahu's side and promised unlimited aid.
The State Department has repeatedly issued warnings Saying that if Americans intend to travel anywhere in the world, they should know that they are at heightened risk of violent attacks of anti-American terrorism because of this new war.
So, do you agree that, and this is what generals have said, this is what terrorism experts have said, studies have said, that one of the things that increases anti-American hatred and the desire to bring violence to the United States through terrorist attacks is exactly our policies in the Middle East, including our support for Israel?
I want to be clear about exactly what they are saying.
They don't say only that Israel's response to the terrorists is what puts Americans at risk.
These studies and the statements as well, they begin on October 7th.
They are inclusive of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood.
The beginning of these uprisings, etc., started on October 8th, well before the Israeli response.
In terms of whether or not U.S.
support for Israel puts Americans at risk, I do think that that is a concern, and it's a good question.
It can be hard to know what exactly motivates, say, al-Qaeda.
Al-Qaeda had a laundry list of complaints about the United States in both of its fatwas leading up to 9-11, I think that many U.S.
of course, the US stationing of troops in Saudi Arabia at the request of the Saudis as part of the 1991 Gulf War.
I think that many US foreign policies are objectionable to these kinds of people, and it would frankly be very hard to accommodate all of them.
Right, no, it's not a question of accommodating that.
It's the idea, I would think, is that the foundational goal of American foreign policy is to make Americans safer.
And if our attaching ourselves to this foreign country called Israel is making Americans less safe rather than more safe, Or making us more unsafe in the region, making us more unsafe at home.
The Bin Laden letter, which was recently discovered by a bunch of young people and then censored by TikTok, listed as one of the grievances in the Middle East.
Our support for Israel, along with other parts of our interference in the Muslim world.
But clearly a lot of people in the region are on Al Jazeera and other networks watching what the Israelis are doing in Gaza.
And they know that these bombs are coming from the United States.
Biden said it in front of the world.
Doesn't it stand to reason That that's likely to increase the risk of attacks on us?
And isn't that one of the costs we should weigh when deciding whether we want to make Israel's war our war?
We should always take very seriously U.S.
national security.
There's no question.
In 2006, there was a war in Gaza, and Hezbollah got involved and provoked Israel, and Israel responded in a very, very heavy-handed manner.
And in the immediate aftermath, the leader of Hezbollah, Nasrallah, said, That if he knew how powerfully Israel was going to respond, he wouldn't have provoked Israel in the first place by taking the Israeli soldiers.
The point is that a strong response can actually, in some cases, have a deterrent effect.
It's not entirely clear to me how you're making this assessment.
That a strong Israeli response in Gaza is not having a deterrent effect on terrorists.
If you do have a methodology for that, I would love to hear it.
No, no, no.
I wasn't talking about, for the moment, we're going to get to that, but I wasn't talking about the Israeli response.
I was talking about the fact that the United States is attaching itself to this foreign country.
Right.
The United States is funding Israel, which allows Israel to respond in a very powerful way.
In Gaza.
Right.
And it's very possible that that strong response, although blasted as immoral and bad for American security, actually does have a deterrent effect on other actors in the region, which
Well, let me ask you about that then, because for me, when I saw the footage coming out of Israel on October 7th, these kind of like horrific videos of brutalization of civilians, I mean, for me, the emotional reaction I had The kind of reference point that I had, at least in my own experience, was the 9-11 attack where I was in Manhattan on that day.
I lived and worked in Manhattan.
I was horrified by those images of seeing Americans jumping out of buildings to their deaths in order to escape the fires and having buildings collapse on them.
And like most Americans, I wanted vengeance for that attack.
I wanted us to go kill people, kill the people who did it, and show that we were not to be trifled with.
And what polls show, and it's certainly true of me, it's certainly true for most journalists that I know and have heard, is that a lot of people have a lot of regrets about what the United States did in responding to 9/11.
Not because anyone thinks the 9-11 attack itself is any less horrible, it's just as horrible as it was, but just that a lot of the things we thought we should do to avenge that attack or to prevent future ones ended up having the opposite effect.
Do you think that there were serious mistakes made in the U.S.
response to 9-11?
And if so, what were those?
The U.S.
response to 9-11 was very bad.
It was bad for civil liberties.
It was bad for U.S.
security.
It actually stoked the terrorism threat, and it was very, very costly.
I know that a lot of Americans, especially libertarians, when there's a big terrorist attack, they think of the Iraq War.
They think about it because of the availability heuristics.
So they draw an analogy between the Iraq War and Operation Al-Aqsa Flood.
and the Israeli response to it in Gaza.
But the two conflicts could hardly be more different.
One of the big mistakes after 9-11 was the United States dramatically overestimated the nature of the terrorism threat.
There were 19 hijackers, and there simply were not hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of al-Qaeda terrorists in the United States.
The United States then went to war against a country that was irrelevant to 9-11.
And it was thousands and thousands of miles away and ended up creating more terrorists that were there.
than were there previously, Al Qaeda in Iraq was a direct beneficiary of that invasion, and that would end up morphing, essentially, into Islamic State.
In the case of Hamas, though, that's totally different.
This is a group that we know has at least 30,000 members.
They are on Israel's border.
They have said that they want to carry out an Operation Al-Aqsa flood every single day.
They attacked Israel just today.
They attacked Israel just yesterday.
Two of the prisoners that were in Israeli custody were the actual attackers in Jerusalem.
And so, unlike the United States, which dramatically overestimated its terrorism threat, And then took the fight to an irrelevant place.
Nobody disputes that Hamas was the perpetrators of this.
They bragged about the beheadings, the torture, the mass killing over their own GoPro systems.
And everybody knows that they're located in Gaza.
Right so first of all I think something you said is super interesting and I want to zero in on it but just to be clear when I was asking about 9-11 for me 9-11 wasn't even so much about the invasion of Iraq because I don't even think in retrospect that ended up being a response to 9-11 even though at the time it was justified as that for me the war The war on terror was about so many more things.
It was about setting up secret prison camps where people were tortured.
It was about kidnapping people off the streets of Europe and sending them to Egypt and Syria to be tortured.
It was about bombing eight different Muslim countries, killing all kinds of innocent people at wedding parties all throughout the Middle East, not just Iraq or even Afghanistan, The last year Obama was in office, he bombed eight different countries in the name of the War on Terror.
And what you said, I thought, was so interesting because when we started off talking about the importance of this war, you said, look, there's groups that hate the United States, like Al Qaeda, that are stronger than ever.
And what you just said in that answer, I think, is totally true.
And I want to just dig into it a little bit, which you said, like, When 9-11 happened, Al-Qaeda wasn't that big.
The United States overestimated the size of it and actually it ended up, through its response, making Al-Qaeda bigger.
Why did that happen?
Why is it that Al-Qaeda ended up being stronger as a result of our response ostensibly in the name of breaking Al-Qaeda?
Sure.
I think that it's useful to think about some terrorism theory.
There are different ideas about what creates terrorists.
One of them is the grievance model, which would predict that you would see more terrorists, or at least that the terrorists would be more interested in attacking to the extent that their grievances are exacerbated.
And another model is called the Opportunity Model, which would predict that terrorists are more likely to strike when they have greater opportunity to do so.
I think that what Operation Al-Aqsa Flood did was to convince Israelis that actually Hamas cannot be deterred, that it is intent on striking Israel and killing as many civilians and engaging in rape and torture, and that they are already maximally extreme.
And so if that's true, then the concerns about increasing grievances are not quite as severe because you already have a massive number of terrorists who want to do the very worst things to Israeli civilians.
Instead, what I think Israel is doing is saying we need to reduce their opportunity to do so.
And so even though there is a risk of exacerbating grievances, Israel is taking out their tunnels, It's trying to take out their leaders.
It's trying to take out their caches of weapons.
And in a few stages away, if they're successful, they're basically going to try to make it even more difficult You know, through security fences, as well as assistance from Arab countries, in making it even harder for terrorists based in Gaza to strike inside of Israel.
So I think the Israeli thinking is that they're already dealing with a maximally extreme terrorism threat, where there already were massive grievances, and so right now they just need to focus on reducing the opportunity, even if that stokes grievances around the world.
I mean, just my thought on that is, you know, there's always going to be extremist groups.
There's always going to be ISIS, there's always going to be Al Qaeda, there's always going to be Hamas.
We know that there are a lot of people among the Palestinians who don't support Hamas.
The last time they were allowed to have an election in 2006, Hamas got 44% of the vote and the Palestinian Authority, or Fatah, got 41% of the vote.
So for me, the question always is not, are you going to have extremist groups, but how much Are you going to validate their grievance?
How much are you going to send people into their arms?
And I just can't imagine a single child who lives through what is now happening, not ending up consumed with hatred for Israel for the rest of their lives to the point that they will do anything, including giving up their own lives, to try and attack Israel and kill it.
But let me just ask you, in terms of the goal that you just said, Israel, and you can answer that too if you want, but in terms of the goal that you said Israel is trying to accomplish, Well, I want to get to that goal in a second and what it means, but in pursuit of this goal, do you think there are any limits, like legal or moral or ethical, on the number of Palestinians that Israel can kill in Gaza in order to achieve whatever the goal is that it's trying to achieve?
I'll combine those.
So the latest survey information, and we're led to believe that this is accurate, even though it's taken both in Gaza and the West Bank, it's considered accurate by Western academics, is that something like three quarters of Palestinians in both West Bank and Gaza support Operation Al-Aqsa Flood.
Now, you mean?
Now, after the Israeli bombardment?
Yeah.
Exactly, I'm sure.
They support Operation OxaFlood, and the numbers are actually even higher in the West Bank than in Gaza.
Why do you think that is?
Sorry, why do you think that is?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
When you look at their political preferences, which are also in the survey, what they say is they're committed to a Palestine from the river to the sea.
And the option of a two state solution or even a one state solution, sometimes talked about by academics in the West, has very, very little support.
And so the Palestinian public broadly supports, overwhelmingly supports, The political preferences as well as the tactics of Hamas.
Secondly, that does not in any way imply that I'm suggesting that innocent Palestinians are culpable or are legitimate targets of violence by the IDF.
I think that the IDF has to do everything possible to take out as many terrorists, especially as the leaders, with minimum harm to the population.
But in pursuit of that goal, is there some number of Palestinians who end up dead in Gaza at the end of this out of what was their 2.2 million population when this began, 50% of whom are children?
Is there some number of Palestinians who, once all is said and done and Israel has achieved all its goals as you've outlined it or as Israel has outlined it, will you take a look and say, Wow, we just wiped out like a seventh of the population.
That was, that can't be justified, or a one-tenth of the population, 10% of Gazans we've killed.
Is there some limit, moral, ethical, or legal, on the number of Palestinians that Israel has permitted to kill in Gaza in pursuit of whatever this goal is?
I think that there is absolutely a limit.
I do not think that it's as useful to use the metric of what's the absolute number of people killed, say, in Gaza as a limit.
The limit needs to be sort of a dynamic relationship between the severity of the threat that Israel faces and its response.
So, the greater the threat to a country, including its civilian population, the more, according to the laws of proportionality, it would be acceptable to respond in ways that otherwise would be unacceptable.
So, it really depends on perceptions of the threat to Israel.
That's true of every country in the world.
Well, a lot of there are a lot of numbers flying around about how many militants Hamas has, how many have been killed so far.
So let's let's take the Israeli numbers.
The Israelis say they have thus far killed 2000 Hamas militants and that there are 30,000 Hamas militants.
At least there were when this war began.
My strong guess is there are a lot more people willing to fight for Hamas now after what they've seen.
But let's take that more conservative number that comes from the Israeli military, that there are 30,000 Hamas militants.
They've killed 2,000 of them so far.
That means they've killed 1 15th Of all Hamas militants, I assume that the Israeli goal of destroy Hamas or dismantle Hamas or eliminate Hamas in Gaza at the very minimum means you have to take out all the Hamas militants, all 30,000 of them.
You can't leave Hamas militants, otherwise you haven't destroyed Hamas in Gaza.
Would that mean that you would be comfortable with a multiple of 15 times the violence we've seen thus far in Gaza to get to that number of killing the 30,000 Hamas militants when there's apparently 28,000 to go according to the IDF?
Yeah, this is an issue where I really don't agree with the Israelis.
I don't think it was smart of them, and I've said this many times, to say that the declared goal is to destroy Hamas.
That goal is impossible.
It will not happen, right?
Glenn, are you still with me?
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Yep.
Oh yeah.
They will end up failing if that's their stated goal.
Instead, what the goal should be is to degrade Hamas and to simply make it weaker so that Israelis don't have to worry about getting beheaded or raped or that they can go to music festivals and that Holocaust survivors aren't going to be taken hostage.
I do understand your question about sort of the asymmetry in numbers between the number of civilians killed in comparison to the terrorists.
And I think that that relates to sort of the law of distinction, you know, in terms of distinguishing who's a belligerent and who is not.
But I do think that the proportionality is frequently misunderstood, where they don't look at the threat of the target country, and they simply say, look at all these civilians being killed, therefore it can't be justified under international law.
But Israel's in a very unique situation.
There's no country in the world which has such a severe terrorism threat.
The severity of the terrorism threat can be understood, not just in terms of the huge numbers of terrorists, even beyond Hamas's 30,000.
You know, you have thousands of terrorists in the West Bank.
You have the Lion's Den.
You have the Al-Aqsa Mara Brigades.
You have Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Gaza.
You have Hezbollah on the North.
Hezbollah, according to its own numbers, says it has 100,000 terrorists.
These are states sponsored by Turkey, Qatar, and Iran.
They're all dedicated to the destruction of Israel.
And so this is very important information because Based on international law, our response must be commensurate with the nature of the threat.
And so it's very important not to sort of poo-poo that threat, because otherwise we're going to reach sort of a false understanding of what is permissible and what is not.
Well, just to be clear, though, you were saying before that there are a lot of Palestinians, arguably most at this point, who don't believe in a two-state solution, who believe that the Palestinians should be free from the river to the sea, that that's part of the Hamas charter, etc.
It's also true, is it not, that the Likud charter, and Certainly, many influential members of the current Netanyahu government also don't believe in a two-state solution.
They believe the West Bank and what they call What's that?
OK.
Yeah, the West Bank and Gaza are both part of Greater Israel.
That's why they call it Judea Samaria.
That's what they're trying to indicate, but also in terms of Gaza.
So there are a lot of Israelis, including very influential ones who also have the mere belief That no two-state solution.
In fact, the Israelis made that impossible with the settlement expansions.
There's no way to have a two-state solution at this point.
So the Israelis also have this mirror image view, right, of the conflict.
Yeah, there's no question that the right in Israel, which has grown over time during the Oslo peace process, gained support.
And that that has manifested itself in many ways, including who's in power today and the expansion of settlements in the West Bank.
And it is totally valid to point out, and it's actually You know, a necessity to point out that Israel's presence in the West Bank in the form of those settlements in particular are a major impediment to a two-state solution.
There simply could never be a two-state solution given the major Israeli population centers based in the West Bank.
even the most sort of moderate Palestinian position of a state would find that completely unacceptable.
After World War II, the world kind of looked at all the atrocities that were committed against civilians, not just by the Nazis, but by all the parties to that war, not just by the Nazis, but by all the parties to that war, and decided we can't ever let a lot of And all these
International legal structures were fortified, like the Geneva Conventions and the Nuremberg Trials, which convicted Nazis.
But they said what we're really doing is creating principles that govern all countries going forward, or else what we're doing is just victor's justice.
It has no real purpose.
With regard to those conventions and those legal structures that were designed to prevent things like collective punishment and indiscriminate killing of civilians, and I know you referenced earlier that you don't think Israel is doing that, but just to be clear in terms of this question, do you think that those things, things like the Geneva Conventions, the Nuremberg Trial Principles, bind Israel and limit what it can legally and morally do in this war?
I think that there are important norms which all governments, obviously including Israel, must uphold.
I very much disagree with the idea that Israel is engaging in indiscriminate That argument just simply doesn't make any sense.
If Israel was engaging in indiscriminate violence, then Hamas wouldn't use human shields.
There would be no benefit to Hamas of placing its headquarters under a hospital.
Hamas knows very well its entire strategy of survival is based on an understanding that Israeli violence is not indiscriminate.
Israel, especially Netanyahu, tried to open up corridors for civilians to get out, but especially Egypt and other Arab countries were uninterested in taking them in.
And the Palestinians were uninterested in leaving their land again, right?
Like, yeah, the Israelis were very happy to say to the Gazans, hey, you know what?
You can leave Gaza.
Go to the Sinai.
And the Palestinians were saying, yeah, I'm not really interested in leaving my homeland again.
That made sense, right?
When the Israelis said that, a lot of people thought that's the goal, is to cleanse Gaza of Palestinians.
Well, what I have favored is some way that would be sort of overseen by, you know, some kind of a trusted international authority, which would enable civilians to get out of harm's way
With a 100% guarantee and understanding that they would be welcome back into Gaza and the Israelis and maybe even the Americans would have absolutely nothing to do with this decision.
It would be automatic.
It would simply be an effort to Essentially help both Israel and the Palestinians by allowing the Israelis to crack down harder against the terrorists without inadvertently harming even more civilians.
At the start of the war, the Israeli Defense Minister, Yoav Golan, vowed what he called a complete blockade of Gaza.
He said, we're not allowing in any food, water, fuel, or medication.
And since then, we've heard from doctors and nurses talk about how they've had to do all these surgeries on children with no anesthesia.
We've heard international aid workers talk about how they had to leave Gaza because they were a day or two away from being in serious danger of dying of starvation, that they can't get clean drinking water.
In terms of that vow by the defense minister, and early today actually Israel announced they're again reducing the amount of humanitarian aid that they're allowing into Gaza in reprisals for what they said were attacks that provoked this new round of hostilities.
Was that vow by the defense minister to blockade all food, water, and medication into Gaza consistent with whatever moral or legal or humanitarian constraints you think Israel has to operate under?
I don't think that Israel should take any actions which do not have a military basis, any actions that are intended to deliberately harm Gazans, especially ones that don't have any advantage in terms of It's also true, Glenn, that Hamas doesn't give a shit about the Gazan population.
That when it, you know, engaged in the biggest bloodletting against Jews since the Holocaust, it knew damn well that Israel was going to respond and it didn't care.
And we also know that Hamas is a big bully in Gaza and that it takes all of the resources, the substantial resources, That the international community has, you know, for many years poured into Gaza.
These go to Hamas.
You know, we've seen the sophistication of their tunnels.
We've seen that when Hamas gets more fuel, there are more rockets fired.
So the real question is, what is the best way for humanitarian relief to get into Gaza in a way that isn't going to prop up this genocidal group?
No, I appreciate that.
I mean, clearly, I mean, everything's gotten worse.
I mean, before October 7th, those hospitals were functioning.
International medical agencies say that Gaza had some of the best health care providers, some of the best surgeons.
People weren't starving to death, although Israeli officials have talked before about things like putting them on a diet, using their control of what goes in and out of Gaza to kind of lower the food supply.
But Max, I honestly appreciate how candid you're being.
So I want to ask this, because I think it's such an important point.
You were saying earlier that you don't agree with how the Israelis have framed their goal of destroying Hamas, because unless you're willing to, you know, essentially engage in real genocide, like carpet bomb Gaza and just kill everybody, there is no way to do that.
And I appreciate your acknowledgement of that.
The thing is, though, The war that the Israelis, to this very day, insist that they are fighting is that war.
In fact, I've heard Netanyahu many times emphasize, we are not there to degrade Hamas.
We are not there to weaken Hamas.
We are there to destroy Hamas.
And has made that very, very clear.
So have so many other Israeli officials.
So it seems to me, and correct me if I'm wrong, as if you're supporting a war That is the war that you wish would be fought, but there's actually a different war, a much more severe war, that the Israelis say, and I believe, that they intend to fight until the end.
Does that discrepancy concern you?
To be honest, part of it is just a PR issue.
I think that what is inevitably going to happen is that Israel, no matter how powerful its response, will not be able to destroy An organization which has such widespread support.
Again, there are tens of thousands of members and they are not all based in Gaza.
Increasingly, we're seeing increased levels of Hamas support in the West Bank and even outside of the region.
There are probably more Hamas supporters based on the demonstrations that I've seen in the West.
And so Israel is going to, you know, sort of get mocked, I think.
After it ends its military operation and there continue to be Hamas attacks, I would reduce the stated goals, if I were Israel, in order to make it seem like its operation was more effective.
And I also think that Israel does need to continue to broadcast internationally All the efforts that actually it is doing in order to take out this genocidal threat.
It certainly doesn't appear that way to the casual viewer because they see all of this terrible civilian carnage and people can look at that and think that that must be Israel's goal, but it's not.
It's simply a consequence of a very terrible war.
You've been very generous with your time.
I just have a few other questions I really want to ask you, so if you could just indulge me for a few minutes longer.
And if you can't, just let me know.
And of course, I understand we've been at it for almost an hour.
But one of the things I saw you emphasize in an online debate that you had with an Israel critic, your credentials as a terrorism expert is something I emphasized at the top of the show when we announced you and also when I introduced you.
And a lot of people have argued over the years, including myself, that terrorism is a term, at least it seems to me, very similar to things like hate speech and disinformation and online safety, kind of a very vague term of propaganda whose meaning really more depends on who has the power to apply it than it is something that has a fixed meaning.
Now, I know that's something you probably disagree with.
You're an expert in terrorism studies.
So if you do disagree with that, can you tell me what the definition of that term terrorism is?
Sure.
There is a lot of disagreement over the definition of terrorism, but most of that disagreement is not between, say, political scientists who focus on the subject of terrorism.
If a student wanted to study terrorism at Northeastern or American or Georgetown or Harvard or Columbia, etc., All of the faculty would essentially use the same definition.
We'd be using the same data and we would include pretty much the same groups as well as the same incidents.
The definition that we tend to use is when Non-state actors, so we're not talking about national governments, we're talking about individuals like lone wolves, small cells, large organizations, use violence for some sort of, especially against civilian targets.
So we're not talking about blowing the treads off of a tank.
We're talking about, you know, attacking a music festival, for example, or going into kibbutzim and hunting down babies for some sort of a political goal, whatever it might be.
Could be on the far left, far right, could be Islamist, could be nationalist.
Non-state actors using violence against a civilian target for some kind of a political goal.
You're right, though, that that consensus erodes when you're talking about how do governments view terrorism.
The word terrorism is not a neutral term.
And so for that reason, it's often weaponized and abused.
And we saw that, for example, on January 6th.
Where, say, MSNBC and CNN was, you know, constantly saying that even sort of nonviolent, you know, protesters who were there were terrorists sort of by dint of their objectionable, you know, political affiliation.
There's also widespread disagreement, you know, between countries.
For example, the Saudis regard Hezbollah as a terrorist group, whereas Iran doesn't, because it's an Iranian proxy.
But here's what I've never understood or liked about the term, which is this exclusion of state actors.
terrorism and the way that the word terrorism is used by the general public as well as by governments, which tends to be more sort of self-serving and loose.
But here's what I've never understood or liked about the term, which is this exclusion of state actors.
Why isn't it the case that if a government does exactly the same thing as what a terrorist group by definition does, namely targets a civilian population with violence and death that goes to music festivals, it kills civilians on purpose in order to achieve a political goal, it kills civilians on purpose in order to achieve a political goal, seems to me like that would be terrorism every bit as much as when Why the exclusion for state actors?
To be fair, there are some, even academics, who do include states.
For example, Richard Jackson out of New Zealand, Noam Chomsky, who was at MIT, his big focus was on not state-sponsored terrorism, But when national militaries, you know, kill civilians deliberately in large numbers, I actually think that it's a good idea to keep them separate analytically.
A lot of what sort of terrorism scholars do is they use data in order to make predictions, which could sometimes have policy relevance.
When you include states with non-state actors, You're aggregating very unlike units and basically there would be no interesting sort of empirical findings.
Now you can certainly make the argument that from a moral perspective governments kill even more civilians than terrorists.
That's true.
We do have a very rich lexicon to draw upon, and I don't think that every bad behavior needs to be called, you know, the same thing.
I do view that as a very sort of different dynamic, and so I like to, as well as most people who study this, like to keep them disaggregated.
Well, one of the reasons I'm asking is that at the start of the war, the former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett wrote an article in The Economist where he He went to describe what the Israeli war aim is, and he described it a little bit differently than the Israeli government and also than the way that you said you would like to see it fought.
He didn't really say it was mainly to destroy Hamas.
He said instead it was to put fear in the hearts of Israel's enemies.
And there you see there's a headline in the screen.
I don't know if you can see it, but it's from The Economist.
Naftali Bennett argues that Israel's future depends on striking fear into its enemies' hearts.
This, I think, was more or less Similar to what you were arguing at the beginning, which is, look, this is to deter not just Hamas, but Al Qaeda and Hezbollah and all these other enemies that both the United States and Israel have.
And he wrote, quote, Israel's future depends not on pity from the world, but on fear in the hearts of our enemies.
The response now has to be one which will ensure that our enemies never contemplate such an attack again.
Now, I realize from a academic Perspective, if you exclude non-state, if you exclude state actors by definition, this can't be terrorism.
But from a moral perspective, like the reason we talk about terrorism, isn't this the idea that we're going to use such incredible terrorizing, frightening force that we're going to put fear and terror into the hearts of our enemies for generations so even if they hate us, They're going to be so bowled into submission that we'll be safe.
Isn't that the terrorist mindset?
Using violence to change human behavior by terrorizing and putting fear into people's hearts?
I would say no, because the definition of terrorism that I use not only requires it to be a non-state actor, but also for the violence to be deliberately harming the civilian population.
I THINK THERE WERE 1,500 TERRORISTS WHO WERE KILLED ON THE ISRAELI SIDE OF THE BORDER.
or captured.
And that actually provided a lot of information about the operation in terms of what the Hamas leadership told its operatives to do on October 7th.
And what we now know is that Hamas operatives were given the directive to explicitly kill and torture and kidnap and do absolutely whatever they wanted-- - According to the IDF.
According to the IDF. - That was actually part of the operation.
You will not find any instructions on the Israeli side for them to just engage in wanton slaughter of the Gazan population.
All of that is a very, very tragic result of a war to degrade Hamas.
Just to be clear, the original numbers that Israel issued about how many Israelis were killed that day was 1,400.
They since reduced it to 1,200.
And they had a reasonable argument, which is a lot of the bodies were burned beyond recognition.
They mistook some, I guess, 200 for Israelis, when in fact they were Hamas fighters.
But of those 1,200, roughly 350, close to 400, were active IDF soldiers.
We don't know how many were Police officers and other security forces, so probably around 700 or 800 civilians were killed on that day.
Obviously, the number of civilians is vastly, vastly higher in Gaza, though I understand it doesn't prove the argument of whether that's deliberate or reckless or whatever.
Let me end by asking you this.
We talked in the very beginning about this idea of, you know, Israel, your argument primarily is Israel has to stay safe.
And the way it's going to stay safe is by showing this level of deterrence, this use of massive force, not unlike Naftali Bennett's argument.
You didn't quite say we want to put fear in the hearts of our enemies, but that's more or less what deterrence is.
The idea that if you know, if you want to go and attack Israel, this is what you're going to get.
On some level, what I think a lot of people look at in this conflict is, well, it seems like a lot more effective and a lot more moral way for Israel to be safe.
Really, I think the only way is to solve the underlying grievance through a deal that finally gives These Palestinian people, the thing that every human being craves and wants and will engage in violence to get if they don't have it, which is self-governance and the dignity of sovereignty.
And I understand that there are people on the Palestinian side who don't want that deal, just like there are Israelis who don't want that deal.
But we know for sure there's a lot of part of civic society among Palestinians who have worked very hard for a two-state solution.
People who have engaged in nonviolent activism, like boycotting Israel as a way of undermining the occupation, much like the South Africans used to bring down that regime.
And a lot of that was declared illegal in the West.
On balance, do you really think that when Israel is all said and done in this war and it kills as many people as it kills and it destroys the infrastructure, the civilian infrastructure in Gaza to the extent it's going to and renders Gaza largely uninhabitable and the whole world watches this day after day after the civilian infrastructure in Gaza to the extent it's going to and renders
Do you honestly think, Max, that Israel is going to be safer than if it found a way to finally give the Palestinians the dignity of autonomy and self-governance?
Thank you.
So, a lot of people, very reasonable people, smart people, kind-hearted people, they look at the violence that happened in Israel, and they look at the violence that's happening in Gaza, and they say, isn't there some other way?
Isn't there a two-state solution?
Surely the differences between Israelis and Palestinians could be hashed out in a way which would be mutually beneficial, such that, you know, any rational actor would choose this solution over a constant state of war.
And that's an understandable impulse.
But I actually find the suggestion of the alternative for a two-state solution to be extraordinarily empty.
There's a reason why a two-state solution has not been reached before.
And without getting into it too much, those conditions are even more severe now.
And so without going into a two-hour lesson on this, I would say that a two-state solution is simply not viable.
It It's not viable on the Palestinian side.
It's not viable on the Israeli side.
The question for Israelis now is, what is the way for them to maximize their security, you know, right after Operation Al-Aqsa flood, given the severity of this terrorist threat, which pledges to commit an Al-Aqsa flood every single day, insofar as it Now, you're right, Israel does need to worry about major, major humanitarian concerns in Gaza.
We've seen a terrible number of Gazan civilians who are killed, and even more are surely going to die as the IDF goes into southern Gaza.
And also, Israel needs to worry, as you note, That it could possibly exacerbate grievances even more, redounding to the benefit of other terrorist extremists.
So Israel needs to deal with all of these sort of competing trade-offs, if you will, in this very difficult counterterrorism response.
All right, Max.
Well, clearly, we see these issues differently, but I'm genuinely so happy that we're able to sit down and have what's a spirited conversation, but a very, very civil one, an attempt to understand ideas.
I honestly think It's the only way out of whatever way out there is from any of this.
So I'm very appreciative of your willingness to come on.
We had a lot of people who are supportive of this war.
I'm sorry for being so argumentative.
No, no, we both feel very strongly about it.
And that's what I'm happy about is that we were spirited in our discussion.
You really are my favorite journalist, even though we don't agree on this issue.
I think you're not just a good one, but a really important journalist.
I really appreciate it, Max.
I really enjoyed the conversation.
I think our audience will enjoy it as well.
And I'm very happy that you are so generous with your time.
Hope you have a great evening.
You too.
Thank you so much. - Okay.
So that concludes our show for this evening As a reminder, System Update is also available in podcast form where you can listen to each episode 12 hours after their first broadcast live here on Rumble on Spotify, Apple, and all of the major podcasting platforms.
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