Mass Famine in Gaza as 100 Die at Aid Convoy. Biden Reaffirms Israel Support. Oct. 7 Propaganda Collapses. PLUS: Bari Weiss & TIME Reveal Neocons’ New Self-Victimhood Narrative
TIMESTAMPS:
Intro (0:00)
Famine Grows in Gaza (10:52)
Fog of Lies (42:42)
Self-Victimhood Narratives (1:06:21)
Ending (1:36:25)
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It's Thursday, February 29th, which is leap day for those of you who are excited by that.
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, a mountain of new data proves that a significant portion of the population of Gaza is now in immediate risk of dying of mass famine.
One out of every six children in northern Gaza are classified as acute malnutrition and wasting, meaning their bodies have already entered the state of being emaciated.
There are now proven reports of children actually dying of starvation and dehydration, And as aid and hunger groups have been warning that this would happen for weeks, there are now all kinds of very strident warnings coming from aid organizations and nurses who have worked in Gaza that they have never seen anything on the scale of a humanitarian disaster this extreme.
Now, there's no mystery, nor is there any reasonable debate About why this is happening.
Israel's Defense Minister, Yoav Galant, vowed in the first week of the war, back in October, that Israel intended to impose a full blockade on Gaza that would, in his words, mean, quote, no food, no water, no fuel, no electricity.
While there has been a minimal amount of humanitarian aid let into Gaza after that, it is nowhere near close to giving the population of 2.2 million people any chance to survive.
Israelis have been physically blocking the entrance of aid convoys for weeks.
A scene of extreme desperation unfolded before the world's eyes earlier today as hungry and desperate Gazans swarmed aid trucks carrying food and other humanitarian necessities.
Moments later, dozens were dead and hundreds seriously injured.
While there are conflicting accounts about how many of them actually died and how they died, either through a stampede or by opening fire from the Israeli Defense Forces, some facts are agreed to by both sides.
as the New York Times summarized, quote, Israeli forces opened fire while a crowd was gathered on Thursday near a convoy of trucks carrying desperately needed aid to Gaza City, part of a chaotic scene in which scores of people were killed and injured, according to Gazan health officials and the Israeli military.
Whatever your views are on Israel or on the wisdom of Biden's policy of supporting and arming the Israelis without conditions, We are witnessing mass famine of the kind that is rarely seen in the modern world.
That is just a fact.
On top of that, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin testified in Congress today where he said that 25,000 Gazan women and children have been killed by Israel since October 7th.
That's 25,000 women and children killed in Gaza.
Now even if you want to assume that every adult male who was killed was a Hamas operative, and that's obviously an absurd assumption, that would still mean that roughly 80% of those Palestinians killed in Gaza by airstrikes and the Israeli ground invasion since October 7, 80% of those killed are innocent civilians.
Roughly 70% of the civilian infrastructure in Gaza is permanently destroyed.
And for those who believe it is important to note such things, Israel's claim is that the indiscriminate and widespread famine and killing now heading into its sixth full month, not between two militaries, but between one military that's among the most sophisticated in the world, backed by the world's largest and most powerful superpower in world history, the United States, Against a basically defenseless population composed almost overwhelmingly of women and children.
Israel's argument is that it is all justified by the October 7th attack in which Hamas militants killed several hundred Israeli civilians.
And that is the number that they killed, several hundred.
Meanwhile, the Biden administration remains absolutely steadfast in its support for Israel.
Repeatingly isolating our country on the world stage in order to block resolutions at the UN.
Resolutions that are supported by most countries on the planet that call for a ceasefire.
Biden, who has spent his career as one of Washington's most unyielding and vocal supporters of Israel, has vowed that the U.S.
will continue to fund and arm Israel's military and its war without conditions until the very end.
Biden remains adamant in his view, even though, by all accounts, his own re-election in 2024 is threatened by growing anger over this policy among key Democratic voting blocs.
On Tuesday, a campaign led by Arab, Muslim, and young voters in Michigan succeeded beyond anyone's wildest dreams.
More than 100,000 Democratic Party voters went to the polls to vote uncommitted, rather than for Joe Biden, as a signal of their willingness to abstain in November Over Biden's support for this Israeli war.
As all of this unfolds, the true extent of the war propaganda that sustains American support for this war is finally being revealed.
Some of the most horrific stories that circulated in the weeks and months even about what happened in Israel on October 7, things like 40 Israeli babies being beheaded, babies murdered by being baked in ovens, obviously recalling the Holocaust.
Babies cut out of their pregnant mother's wombs have been affirmatively debunked.
Those things did not happen.
They've been proven as lies.
As so often happens when we are fed stories designed to view the newest enemy as subhuman savages whose deaths we should not mourn but rather celebrate.
The New York Times in particular faces a real and serious journalistic scandal surrounding its highly influential December 28th article that purported to confirm the use of mass rape by Hamas on October 7th.
Wars are so horrific and the attack on core humanity so severe that governments know that the only way their populations will tolerate them for as long as those governments want is if people become convinced that the targets of the war are people who deserve suffering, largely because they are something less than human.
They're subhuman or savages or so singularly primitive that not only they but their children Culture and population deserves to be destroyed.
And all war propaganda at its core is designed to provoke that belief in us, and a lot of that propaganda typically ends up being debunked as the war proceeds, and that is most definitely the case for a lot of the propaganda surrounding October 7th.
Then, speaking of war propaganda, there were two major journalistic events this week in the United States designed to fortify a narrative that we've been covering from the start.
Namely, that American Jews, once safe in the United States, are now a uniquely endangered and vulnerable victim group.
Time Magazine, that is now owned by a fanatical supporter of Israel who is a billionaire, published an article by Harvard Law professor and longtime Israel supporter Noah Feldman arguing that the United States is now subsumed in what it calls, quote, the new anti-Semitism.
Meanwhile another fanatical and very prominent and wealthy and influential Israel supporter Barry Weiss was invited to give a speech on the quote state of world jury at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan just weeks after they canceled another scheduled speech by the Pulitzer Prize winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen due to his criticism of Israel and in that speech Weiss also announced
A new victimhood narrative for American Jews while also advocating the classic neocon worldview that demands that the United States either fight or finance multiple foreign wars, knowing that that is a mentality which of course will lead to and justify having the U.S.
continue to finance and arm Israel's military and all of its wars.
This mentality has become more dominant than ever Despite its self-victimizing claims that those who believe this are relegated to the dangerous fringes of society and are somehow silenced, yet we hear from them continuously in all the most influential venues.
And because of how dominant this worldview has become, we think it is highly worth considering.
Now, we know this topic is polarizing and divisive to a lot of people, but there's just no question that the war in Gaza has become something unlike we really have seen Certainly in the 21st century and it's just not something that can be avoided because some people prefer that we do or some people disagree with us on our perspective.
We do our best to show you the truth, our sources for them, the documentation for it in the hopes that you will evaluate it objectively regardless of your view and then decide for yourself.
That ultimately is our job, not to tell you what you want to hear or to flatter all your views, but to cover the things that we think most need coverage.
Before we get to that, a few programming notes.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
Immediately after October 7th, and I give the Israeli government and Israeli officials credit for this, Benjamin Netanyahu and his government made extremely unambiguously and undeniably Benjamin Netanyahu and his government made extremely unambiguously and undeniably clear exactly what Israel intended to do in response to October 7th.
In fact, they went out of their way to make clear that this was not going to be some limited military operation.
They were not going in in order to weaken Hamas for a couple of weeks.
They were going in, they said, to not only destroy Hamas, but to extract a price on the Palestinians in Gaza unlike anything we have ever seen before.
And if you look at the composition of the Israeli government and the way in which it has become far more extremist in terms of its views to the Palestinians over the past five years, anybody who wanted to see it understood exactly what the Israelis intended to do, which is to kill an enormous amount of people in Gaza.
Given the composition of Gaza, that it's a tiny little densely packed strip of 2.2 million human beings, over half of whom are children, it was very predictable and very clear that an enormous amount of human suffering and human death that would engulf all sorts of, not just civilian life, but civilian infrastructure was about to ensue.
And that it would create all kinds of humanitarian crises for a population that for two decades has been prevented from leaving by Israel, which bombed the only airstrip, the only runway in Gaza, the only airport, and said if you try and rebuild it we'll bomb it again so nobody can leave by air.
They know that if they try and leave by sea, the Israelis will shoot them and kill them, as has happened many times.
And all the borders in Gaza are closed by Israel, as well as by the military dictator that the United States helped install in Egypt and continues to support and fund.
And so you have 2.2 million people who have been trapped inside a tiny little strip of land for two decades, and their life is controlled by a foreign military, which determines What can go into Gaza?
What can go out?
The Israelis have over the years talked about putting them on a diet, meaning that anytime they want to punish them, they reduce the amount of food that can enter Gaza.
The Israelis control the airspace.
The Israelis control their sea lanes.
And the Israelis basically force them to live in an open-air prison.
And so when you have a population living under those conditions for 20 years, And then you have a government that makes very clear that they are about to go in and just with their massive air force and with the US government standing fully behind it, arming them, financing them, funding them with no limits.
The American taxpayer paying for everything, the Pentagon handing them the bombs in real time as they use them.
Everyone who wanted to see it knew that what was about to ensue was a catastrophe of immense proportion.
And I was definitely one of the people who understood that.
I objected from the very start, knowing that what was about to come was unfathomable.
And yet I have to say that the extent of the disregard of humanity and the extent of the suffering on the part of innocent people is much, much greater than even I in that time, knowing all the things I just laid out.
I was barely hardly alone.
A lot of people knew it too.
Didn't take prescience.
It just took having your eyes open.
It is much worse than I think a lot of people anticipated.
And I know there are people in our audience who prefer that we avoid this topic, that we've covered it enough, that our views on it are clear, but sometimes there are things going on in the world that I just don't feel comfortable ignoring, even if there's some pragmatic benefits doing so.
And that is definitely the case with this.
We've tried our hardest to cover a lot of other issues over the last five months of importance, and I think we've done a good job of doing that.
Not spending every night on this war, but when you have a war that is now bringing a massive population to the brink of famine, and we're already watching children die of hunger, the worst way for a human being to die, I mean we just watched somebody self-immolate in protest of this war, and obviously that is an extremely painful way to die, but at least it's quick.
People who die of hunger and malnutrition and dehydration die over days and weeks as their body just shuts down as it starts consuming itself.
And on top of that, there's no medication in Gaza.
People are still being bombed.
They get operated on without anesthesia.
And so you're talking here about a level of suffering that is genuinely unfathomable.
You have war-weary nurses and doctors and people with aid organizations who have been to almost every war zone and conflict in the world who have said that they have never seen suffering on the level of what they're seeing in Gaza.
It's just the truth.
And if you want to justify it, if you want to still support it, that's your right to do so.
I said many times, I have people in my life who do.
I understand the impulses that lead people to do so, but at least confront the reality of what's happening.
Now, one of the reasons why a lot of focus is on Gaza today, more so than usual, is because an absolutely horrific scene unfolded where some convoys of humanitarian aid, food and medicine and other Items that Gazans need for survival.
We're entering Gaza, in northern Gaza, and just imagine if you have children or parents or elderly people or young children near you who are wasting away from starvation and then you see a truck filled with food, imagine what you would do.
And so a very intense scene of very desperate people broke out and within a short period of time Dozens, if not more, of them were dead.
And the Gazans claim that they were all killed, or mostly killed, because the Israeli military opened fire and shot them.
The Israeli military claims that most of them were killed because they were trampled on, because of the crush of the people trying to get to these trucks, and the fights that broke out, and the stampede that ensued.
But the Israeli military admits that they also shot at Several of the people, or many of the people there, they claim that they only shot at them when they began approaching because the Israeli military felt fearful and so started shooting at their kneecaps.
But the Israelis admit that at least some of them died through Israelis opening fire.
I don't really know how a highly sophisticated military Occupying a land with tanks and all kinds of weaponry and intelligence and tech can feel sufficiently frightened by an unarmed group of people to just open fire on them when they're desperately trying to get food.
But that's what the Israeli claim is.
Here's from the New York Times today.
As hungry Gazans crowd a convoy, a crush of bodies, Israeli gunshots, and a deadly toll.
Quote, Israeli forces opened fire while a crowd was gathered on Thursday near a convoy of trucks carrying desperately needed aid to Gaza City, part of a chaotic scene in which scores of people were killed and injured, according to Gazan health officials and the Israeli military.
The details of what happened were unclear, with officials from both sides offering starkly different accounts.
The Gazan Health Ministry said in a statement that more than 100 people were killed and more than 700 injured in a quote massacre.
Israeli military officials said most of the casualties were from a stampede of Gazans as they crushed around the A-trucks, and that soldiers had fired only after a crowd separately approached them in a threatening way.
Israeli military spokesman Rear Admiral Dennis Haggery, Daniel Haggery, said in a televised briefing that the soldiers opened fire, quote, only in face of danger when the mob moved in a manner which endangered them.
Now, let us remember that from the start of the war, the Israelis have vowed at the highest levels of the government that they would cut off food and water on purpose to the Gazans.
Not that they wouldn't provide it, but they would blockade anyone else from trying to send aid in.
And that is something that they have absolutely done.
Now, here is a account of what happened, which is from Axios.
It just gives a little more detail.
Dozens of Palestinians killed in an incident around Gaza aid convoy.
An IDF official told reporters that shortly after the trucks crossed the Israeli military checkpoint on the way to Gaza City, thousands of Palestinian civilians arrived in the area and many began looting the trucks.
The IDF released a drone video showing Palestinians crowding around and looting the trucks the IDF officials said Israeli forces fired on dozens of Palestinian civilians who approached the IDF and got within tens of meters.
According to the official, the soldiers felt threatened and initially fired warning shots.
They then fired at the legs of the Palestinians, who continued their approach, the official claimed, adding that most casualties were the result of the stampede or truck drivers running over people.
Here is the drone footage released by the IDF.
It's a silent video, but you can see just the desperate crowd gathering at these convoys.
So you're seeing here a drone footage with a huge number of people, and they're gathered wherever the trucks are.
They're gathered in numbers.
You can see them kind of scampering and running around in a very misdirected and chaotic way.
These are obviously desperate people.
Who have been cut off from food for a long time, cut off from sustenance for a long time, and I think the IDF believes that this is designed to show that somehow, though you can't see anybody being trampled or stampeded, that it's the kind of an environment that might lead to that.
You see people running, desperately trying to get food off the truck.
And there are definitely a lot of people here.
There are a lot of people gathered in a very densely packed way.
You can see in a closer footage here, there are those trucks, the convoys of the trucks, and there are people running up to them, trying to grab things off of them.
This is what desperate, starving people do, who have been victimized by a siege for now almost six months.
These are people who survived bombing, who watched people die all around them, who are internally displaced.
They're jumping on the trucks.
They're trying to take things off the trucks.
Behavior that I at least think is extremely understandable if you're somebody who is in Gaza and surrounded by the kind of famine and death that has surrounded them.
Now, here is the Israeli Interior Minister, Ben-Gavir, who is considered one of the more extremist people in the Israeli government.
And at first the Israeli government was trying to deny that any of the people who died were killed because the Israelis opened fire on them.
And yet, this is the National Security Minister, Edmar Ben-Gavir, who came out in the tweet and seemed to contradict that denial by celebrating the fact that the Israelis did, the Israeli military did what They should have done, which is opening fire on the Gazans.
Here's what he tweeted.
Quote, he tweeted this in Hebrew and this is the English translation.
Quote, total support must be given to our heroic fighters operating in Gaza who acted excellently against a Gazan mob that tried to harm them.
Today it was proven that the transfer of humanitarian aid to Gaza is not only madness, while our abductees are being held in the strip under substandard conditions, but also endangers the IDF soldiers.
This is another clear reason why we must stop transferring this aid, which is in fact aid to harm the IDF soldiers and oxygen to Hamas.
So you hear people inside the Israeli government, at the highest levels of the Israeli government, explicitly saying it's a mistake to let any aid in.
We shouldn't be allowing any aid in at all.
Now, one of the bizarre parts of this has always been that people continue to justify everything the Israelis are doing by pointing to the hostages that were taken.
Over 100 hostages still remain between the ones who were returned, the ones who have died in the Israeli bombardment.
It seems like a very odd framework to say what we're doing everything to try and save the hostages when you're mass bombing, indiscriminately bombing exactly the places where you know the hostages are.
Obviously you're going to kill a lot of the hostages you're claiming you're trying to rescue.
And a lot of the hostages who have been released said That they ate very poorly but that they ate exactly the same thing as their captors were eating.
Their captors were sharing the same food with them and giving them the same portions because obviously if you blockade an area and prevent food from coming in and you starve the population to death, that's going to also end up starving the hostages that you claim you're trying to Save.
So it's always been a very bizarre rationale to say we're bombing massively and we're starving this area where our hostages are because we want to save our hostages.
It seems far more likely that you're going to end up killing them.
Now People will automatically dismiss, a lot of people will, whatever the Palestinian Health Authority says in Gaza by claiming, oh, well, that's controlled by Hamas, even though they have a record of providing very accurate data about how many people have been killed in previous Israeli campaigns.
And then, of course, if there's any journalists inside Gaza, they'll dismiss that and say, well, these are Hamas spokespeople.
So then what are you left with in terms of trying to understand what's happening in Gaza?
Well, there are aid groups, aid organizations that go around the world risking their lives in war zones to try and provide humanitarian assistance to a certain population.
And those rights groups have been very clear that the only reason why People in Gaza are deprived of aid and deprived of food is because the Israelis refuse to let any in, that they're deliberately starving the Palestinians.
Hear from The Guardian this week.
Israel is deliberately starving Palestinians, UN rights expert says.
UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Michael Fakhry, said denial of food is a war crime and constitutes a situation of genocide.
Nutrition screenings at health centers and shelters in January found almost 16 percent of children under the age of two, the equivalent of one in six infants, We're acutely malnourished or wasting in northern Gaza, where 300,000 people are trapped with virtually no food being allowed in by Israel.
Of these, almost 3% are suffering from severe wasting, at high risk of medical complications or death, without urgent help, according to a recent UN report.
Reports have emerged of parents feeding their children animal feed in hope of keeping them alive.
In Rafah in the south, where Israel is currently focusing military attacks, 5% of children under 2 years were acutely malnourished.
Internationally starving civilians by, quote, depriving them of objects indispensable to their survival, including willfully impeding relief supplies, is a war crime, according to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.
Indispensable objects include food, water, and shelter, which Israel is systematically denying Palestinians.
Starvation is a war crime under the Geneva Conventions and the Rome Statute.
For those of you who think to yourself, well, this is not really my business, this is not really my war, remember that this war is as much of an American war as it is an Israeli war.
That's how the world perceived it, for good reason, because it's factually true that the U.S.
is paying for this war, the U.S.
is financing this war, the U.S.
is providing Israel with the weapons and the arms that it's using to carry all of this out.
The U.S.
is isolating itself on the world stage by vetoing any attempts to call for a ceasefire.
So in every sense of the world, this is an American war.
If you are an American citizen, you're paying for this war.
Your government is incurring all kinds of costs to enable it.
This is not just a war on the other side of the world.
This is an American war, every bit as much as the war in Ukraine is.
Here from the AP today, A quarter of Gaza's population is one step from famine and A-trucks are looted, UN says.
At least one quarter of Gaza's population, 576,000 people, are one step away from famine, and virtually the entire population desperately needs food, resulting in some aid trucks being shot at, looted, and overwhelmed by hungry people, top UN officials said Tuesday.
The officials from the UN Humanitarian Office and the UN's Food and Agricultural Organization painted a dire picture for all 2.3 million people in Gaza, facing crisis levels of food insecurity or worse.
And as grim as the picture is today, UN Humanitarian Coordinator Ramesh Rameshgan told the UN Security Council that there is every possibility for further deterioration.
Carl Stau, Deputy Executive Director of the World Food Program, said that this is quote the worst level of child malnutrition anywhere in the world.
And he warned that, quote, if nothing changes, a famine is imminent in northern Gaza.
Israel's Deputy U.N.
Ambassador Brett Miller told the council that while fighting Hamas, it is doing, quote, all it can to care for civilians and is working constantly to ensure the entry of humanitarian aid from numerous countries and U.S.
aid agencies.
CNN has been a very vocal supporter of the Israeli government and the Israeli war from the start.
You had anchors on CNN like Jake Tapper and Dana Bash that have spoken of their personal connection to Israel.
Dana Bash said a prayer for Israel on one of the CNN shows on October 8th or October 9th, a Jewish prayer for Israel.
Their coverage has been almost uniformly positive in terms of the Israeli perspective.
Yesterday, though, they had on to their program, and this was, I believe, a version of international CNN that's hosted by Iza Soares.
And here is an Irish nurse, I believe she's Irish, who works with one of these aid organizations.
And I just want you to listen to what she said, having been to Gaza, having all kinds of colleagues in Gaza that she's worked with, a longtime healthcare workers and others, about the situation in Gaza.
Here's what she has to say.
Just explain first to our viewers why aid isn't being allowed in.
Where is the aid?
It's very simple.
It's because the Israeli military won't let it in.
We could end this starvation tomorrow, very simply, if they would just let us have access to people there.
But it's not being allowed.
This is what they said on the 7th of October.
Nothing will go in.
And so it remains the case.
And for people in the north of Gaza, it's even worse, because no food is reaching them anymore.
And so my own staff, my own colleague, Abir, has been eating animal feed.
And horrifyingly, The food that they were eating, which is food for horse and donkeys, is now running out and now they're eating bird seed.
The statistics also tell their own story.
One in six children under the age of two in the north of Gaza are now acutely malnourished.
This is the fastest decline in a population's nutrition status ever recorded and what that means is that children are being starved at the fastest rate the world has ever seen.
And we could finish it tomorrow, we could save them all, but we're not being able to.
I mean, I presume you heard and processed what she said.
She said that children are being starved at the fastest rate we have ever seen.
And unless you want to just dismiss every single health care worker, every dedicated aid organization as somehow propagandistic against Israel, all willing to lie collectively for some reason.
I know it's kind of a human impulse to believe that human suffering and humanitarian catastrophe on this scale probably isn't happening.
It's a comforting belief to convince ourselves or lure ourselves into accepting.
The evidence is just overwhelming.
It's overwhelming.
If you just listen to any of the people who have been to Gaza, who have colleagues there, everything they're describing is very uniform.
The data proves it.
Neutral aid organizations are all saying the same thing, that this is a catastrophe on a scale unlike anything they've ever seen.
Here is a different video from earlier this week of other aid When it appears, watch what happens, how desperate the people in Gaza are as they try and just get some of it for their family.
This is why social order is breaking down.
Thousands of hungry Palestinians scramble to retrieve aid packages.
airdropped by the Jordanian army.
So they're dropping them in sea.
People went out to sea to collect them.
But it wasn't clear if all could be saved.
And you see people walking around in massive numbers, Rights groups say that when Little Aid was reaching Gaza, it has decreased dramatically.
Israeli forces are accused of targeting trucks and firing on civilians.
As well as severely restricting the amount of aid getting in by road.
Last week, the World Food Program suspended aid to northern Gaza due to, quote, complete chaos and violence.
The UN says at least 500,000 people are facing famine in Gaza.
Red Cross officials say airdropping aid is seen as, quote, "a last resort." And you see some video there of food being airdropped.
They're Now, the United States actually leaked reports from the Biden White House today saying that it was considering, the United States was considering airdropping humanitarian aid in Gaza because not even the United States can get aid into Gaza because Israel won't allow it.
So here we are.
Paying for Israel's war.
We're financing Israel's war.
They're a patron state of ours.
We give them $4 billion every year, and then every time they have a war, they get billions more, they ask for billions more, we transfer arms to them on a level, whatever they ask for.
And yet, the position of the Biden administration is that we have no leverage over Israel, that they're a sovereign state, they do what they want, even though we're the ones on whom they're relying to fight this war.
And according to the Biden administration, they won't even let the United States deliver aid to Gaza, which of course the United States wants to do if for no other reason than to placate voting constituencies on whom Biden will rely this year if he wants to have any chance of being re-elected.
It just shows you this bizarre relationship that we finance Israel, we arm Israel, We shield them at the UN and yet whenever we ask them to do something or whenever we tell them that something that they're doing is contrary to our interests, they do it anyway.
And then U.S.
officials have to stand before cameras and say, well look, we have no leverage over the Israelis.
Here is Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin testifying in Congress today when he was asked about How many women and children have been killed?
And other questions by Congressman Ro Khanna of California.
Here's what the secretary said in Congress today.
Mr. Secretary, about how many Palestinian women and children have been killed by Israel since October 7th?
It's over 25,000.
Mr. Secretary, last week, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights warned that any transfer of weapon or ammunition to Israel violates international law.
About how many precision-guided munitions has the United States given Israel since the beginning of the war?
I don't have that number at my fingertips, but we have endeavors.
Mr. Secretary, it's about 21,000 precision-guided munitions to Israel since the start of the war.
Secretary Austin, last week you spoke to Defense Minister Gallant and you said clearly there needs to be a plan to ensure the safety and support of those sheltering in Rafah before any military operations proceed.
National Security Advisor Sullivan has said he has not seen any plan yet.
John Kirby said it would be a disaster to invade Rafah.
If Netanyahu defies the United States and invades Rafah, Will you commit today that you will halt any future military sales to Israel?
Obviously, sir, that's a presidential decision, but, you know, we expect that, and by the way, I spoke to Minister Gallant last night, and I expect that when we provide munitions to allies and partners that they'll use them in a responsible way.
The United States has been pretty clear that one of the lines that the Biden administration is setting, at least rhetorically, is that there's one part of Gaza where the Gazans were told to go, which is the Rafah refugee camp, where at least a million of them are there.
95% of the country is internally displaced.
And the Israelis were threatening to launch a ground invasion right into that camp.
And the horrors for civilians there would be inconceivable.
The United States has said, we don't want you to do that.
Abstain plan to ensure their safety.
And the position of the Netanyahu government is, well, we're going to do it anyway.
We think it's in our interest to do it, and we're going to do whatever we think is in our interest, regardless of what you, the United States, want, even though you're paying for a war.
And what the Biden administration has been doing is leaking News items about how frustrated Biden is, about how impatient he is with Netanyahu, about how he's had it with Israel.
And yet, the United States will not say at any point That Israeli aid, aid to Israel, is in any way jeopardized, that even if they do something so extreme like attack Rafah with a ground invasion when the United States has made clear publicly that the United States government opposes it, they still won't say that Israel could lose the aid and the money and the arms that we're providing them.
That's how serious the United States is about Joe Biden, is about doing anything meaningful to oppose Israel.
He's willing to take political steps To try and deceive the voters he needs who are angry at him to believe that he's doing something.
But Joe Biden has been a true believer for his entire Senate career.
We've showed you the videos in the 80s and the 90s and into the 2000s.
And then when he was vice president to President Obama, that he has been one of the most vocal and steadfast supporters of Israel in all of Washington for decades.
And he still is.
Instead of in any way taking any tangible steps to try and limit the number of civilian death and suffering in Gaza, which remember the United States is incurring a lot of harm for since everyone in that region blames the United States for our doing this because they understand it's our war.
Here's the type of almost condescending and knowing Self-delusion that people like the State Department spokesman Matthew Miller, who used to be right before Biden was elected an MSNBC spokesman, this is where these people come from.
This is the kind of thing that he has been saying.
This is what he said this week at a State Department briefing when pressed by reporters about what the United States would do if Israel continues to defy what the United States pretends is its wishes.
ready to work with them on how to achieve that vision.
But you have so many – you have so many tools.
MR PRICE: In the – yeah.
Just the last – my last follow-up, sorry.
But you have so much leverage over the Israelis, and this is fundamental vision of the President.
So you can use all the revolution you want, including weapons that you sell to Israel, to ensure that this plan is on the – at least on the right path for implementation, considering we have, like, short time between now and November.
MR PRICE: So one thing I will say about that, that people often tend to forget to forget, is that Israel, like other countries in the region, is a sovereign country that makes its own decisions.
The United States does not dictate to Israel what it must do, just as we don't dictate to any country what it must do.
We present what we believe are the – we present what the – we believe are the – Good one, Matt.
That was AP's Matt Lee, as he was saying, we don't tell any country what to do, we don't dictate to any country, and Matt Lee said, unless we're invading them.
And it got a little giggle, a little cackle, look at Al.
Kind of entertained Matthew Miller is because of course the idea that the United States doesn't tell other countries what to do doesn't use its aid as leverage to get what it wants from other countries.
It's an insulting joke that nobody with any knowledge beyond sixth grade civic class believes.
The reality is that the Biden administration does not want to in any way limit Israel in part because they support what Israel is doing and in part because they're afraid of the political ramifications
of having Netanyahu say that the United States is trying to limit what they're doing and ultimately they fear more the political ramifications of angering or alienating the people in the United States who are fanatical supporters of Israel and who vote for Democratic Party candidates, which is a huge number of them, more than they fear alienating the political left because they think and believe with good reason that the left will snap into line at the end of the day by simply fear-mongering against Trump.
But they know that fanatical supporters of Israel will not vote for Democrats if they believe that Democrats are doing anything other than offering unconditional and unlimited American support to Israel.
And that's why they're being so careful never to place any real limits on Israel.
Now, just to indicate how Powerful, the pro-Israel sentiment is in the Biden White House.
And I know there are a lot of people on the right who have been encouraged to believe that whatever conservatives believe Joe Biden is against, people get convinced he's soft on China, even though he's been militarily encircling China with bases and was the first American president in decades to explicitly vow that the United States would go to war with China if it meant protecting Taiwan.
And one of the things that a lot of conservatives have come to believe is that Joe Biden and Democrats are soft on Israel, even though the Democratic Party is at least as dedicated to the protection and financing of Israel as the Republican Party is.
And Joe Biden continues to insist on that, even though that policy is posing a very serious risk to his re-election in 2024.
Here's ABC News yesterday.
Analyzing the extraordinary vote in Michigan on Tuesday night, in which over 100,000 people in Michigan went to the polls specifically to vote uncommitted instead of voting for Joe Biden.
And the headline here is, could Arab American and Muslim voters cost Biden the 2024 election?
They're a small voting block but could make the difference in Michigan.
Quote, at least 100,000 Democrats in the Great Lakes state voted for, quote, uncommitted, a protest vote driven in large part by dissatisfaction with Biden's handling of the Israel-Hamas war.
Multiple groups had urged voters to reject Biden due to his support for Israel in the conflict.
And the, quote, uncommitted vote was particularly high in heavily Arab American and Muslim cities such as Dearborn.
where Uncommitted actually defeated Biden 56 to 40 percent.
The deep discomfort among these normally Democratic voting blocs could be a problem for Biden in November, particularly in swing state Michigan, which has the highest share of Arab Americans and one of the highest share of Muslims.
The Biden campaign is counting on Arab Americans and Muslim voters holding their nose and voting for him anyway when they consider the likely alternative, former President Donald Trump, who also supports Israel, And as a history of anti-Muslim rhetoric, In other words, what they're counting on is that there's no difference between the parties on this issue, and that at the end of the day, they will be scared by fear-mongering over Trump.
Oh, Trump will do these things to you that Biden would never do.
But there are a lot of Muslim Arab voters, and not just Muslim Arab voters, but younger voters, And leftist voters who are saying that this is a line too far, that Biden's crossing this line will mean that they will never vote for Joe Biden, unless there's a radical change in Biden's policy toward Israel, which is virtually impossible to conceive of.
But that is the extent to which the Biden White House is willing to embrace this pro-Israel support, knowing that it might even cost them the election.
Now, one of the most important parts of journalism when it comes to war is to scrutinize and investigate and debunk propaganda that comes from every side in every war.
Propaganda and lies are a part of every war.
You might remember at the start of the war in Ukraine, there were all kinds of lies told about Things that happened that never happened about courageous Ukrainian soldiers on an island saying F you Russia and refusing to surrender and being killed when in fact they all surrendered.
About some mythical fighter pilot called the Ghost of Kiev who had supposedly shot down single-handedly 50 or 60 different Russian jets and that was a complete myth as well.
Just lies that constantly get turned out.
You go to every war.
The war in Vietnam.
That was provoked by an absolute lie that the U.S.
security state now admits it lied about, which they claim was an act of aggression by the North Vietnamese in the Gulf of Tonkin, which is completely fabricated.
Obviously, the war in Iraq was provoked by fabricating claims of weapons of mass destruction in the Gulf War.
They had a woman who was paid to come and testify before Congress about how Saddam Hussein was pulling babies out of incubators.
And it just shocked everybody about the evil and the savagery of Saddam Hussein.
It turned out to be completely untrue.
It was almost every war.
And there's nothing different about the war in Israel, in Gaza.
What was necessary was for Israel not to just accurately describe the atrocities that were committed on October 7th, and there were absolute atrocities on October 7th.
Civilians killed in terrible ways, in brutal ways.
People shot indiscriminately.
But that wasn't enough.
Knowing what the Israelis intended to do in Gaza, they needed the world to believe that this was not just an ordinary attack, that this was done by a kind of evil we had never seen before.
Remember, they were describing them as worse than Nazis, worse than ISIS.
And all kinds of stories got fabricated.
That 40 babies were beheaded on October 7th, that babies were killed by being baked in ovens, that babies were cut out of their mother's wombs, and most importantly of all, that Hamas used on a mass scale sexual violence and sexual assault.
And one of the most important articles that sealed this narrative as being confirmed Was a December 28th article in the New York Times by their Pulitzer Prize winning Bureau Chief Jeffrey Gettleman, along with two journalists that nobody ever heard of before, Anat Schwartz and Adam Sella.
They had very prominent bylines on this article even though they were not New York Times reporters, had never reported on Israel previously.
And the article headline was Screams Without Words How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on October 7th.
And it read, quote, A Times investigation uncovered new details showing a pattern of rape, mutilation, and extreme brutality against women in the attacks on Israel.
Now, one of the things that happened was that a family That was featured in the New York Times article as having had a close relative who was raped by Hamas on October 7th came out and repudiated the story angrily, objecting to their inclusion in the story.
And it was covered only by a handful of small independent outlets that tend to be critical of Israel, one of whom was Mondoweiss.
Who on January 3rd, 2024, so just five days or so after this New York Times article was published, had this article with the headline, Family of Key Case in New York Times October 7th Sexual Violence Report, renounces the story, says the reporters manipulated them.
Quoting a New York Times story claiming a pattern of gender-based violence on October 7th hinged on the story of Gal Abdush.
But the Abdush family said that there is no proof she was raped and that Times reporters interviewed them under false pretenses.
A heartbreaking photo of Gal Abdush's family, a working-class Mizrahi Jewish family who lost their daughter and son-in-law, appeared on the newspaper's cover.
The newspaper devoted a third of its story to the Abdush story.
On December 29th, the Israeli website Ynet published an interview with Eti Braka, Gal Abdush's mother.
In the interview, the mother said that the family knew nothing about the sexual assault issue until the piece in The Time was published.
Quote, we didn't know about the rape at all.
We only knew after a New York Times journalist contacted us.
They said they matched evidence and concluded that she had been sexually assaulted.
Then on January 1st, Nissim Abdesh, Nagy's brother, appeared in an interview on Israeli Channel 13.
Nissim repeatedly denied that his sister-in-law was raped.
Nissim also stated that no official party informed them of these doubts or this investigation.
Neither the police nor forensic experts.
In the interview, Abdish reiterated that his brother's wife was not raped and that quote, the media invented it.
Gal's sisters also denied allegations of rape.
One of the things that happened when these rape stories began emerging and there was all kinds of demands that Western feminists who say that they defend women in rape cases have an obligation to come out and denounce Hamas and defend Israeli women.
This happened right at the time when hostages were being released from Gaza and a lot of them are giving interviews saying that they were actually well treated while in captivity.
This is not my claim, this is theirs.
They were back in Israel safe.
Several of them had no people left back in Gaza.
And they were saying things like they were well treated, they were never victimized by sexual assault, including women, that their captors shared with them the same food that they ate.
And that was becoming a big concern.
Because the only way the Israelis could, and they knew this at the time, justifier in people's minds, What they were doing and knew they were going to do to Gaza, namely destroy it all, was if they could convince people that the people in Gaza were not really human beings, that they were subhuman.
And that's how the Israelis spoke about them from the very beginning when the defense minister said, we're going to cut off all food and water.
He quickly added, we're dealing with human animals and that's how we're going to treat them.
And to this day, if you object to what's happening in Gaza, you'll have all kinds of people who want to defend it, insist that, oh, the people in Gaza deserve it because they're savages, they're monsters, they're not really human, and point to a lot of these debunked stories about what was done on October 7th that actually never happened.
And again, there were atrocities on October 7th.
There's no denying that.
But they had to manufacture some of the worst stories because they wanted to put in people's heads that everything we're going to do for the next eight months or nine months and the extreme suffering you're about to hear about, including the killing of children.
These are not really human beings.
These are monsters and mongrels and subhumans.
And all of these fabricated stories were necessary to do that, just like war propaganda of this kind always is designed to accomplish.
Now one of the things that happened is that a Twitter user named zsquirrel, who is an anonymous Twitter user, someone very smart, someone very vigilant, someone who does a lot of that kind of research that independent journalism is dedicated to doing, even though this person has no resources, works alone,
They're the ones who broke a story that the New York Times should have known on their own about the people they were using to report that story.
On January 24th, this account wrote the following, Oh my God, one of the three authors of the New York Times mass rape atrocity propaganda hoax is Anat Schwartz.
She liked posts that called for Gaza to be turned into a quote, slaughterhouse.
This is the person the New York Times hired to write about Palestinians and frame them as subhuman monsters.
By the way, Anat Schwartz never wrote a single word for the New York Times before November.
This is her first piece for them, and they chose a person who believes that Gaza, quote, must be turned into a slaughterhouse, and that Palestinians are, quote, animals who deserve a holocaust.
The squirrel then came back.
This week, instead, the other on-the-ground reporter who gave Jeffrey Gettleman all the materials for the hoax, which he then gleefully wrote up, is Adam Sella, the nephew of Schwartz's husband, a recent college grad who is an inspiring food writer who also has zero reporting experience.
And there you see his bio.
Adam Sella, he was one of three Reporters on this story.
He's obviously a very young person.
He describes himself as a freelancer at the New York Times who lives in Tel Aviv.
And in the about section, he says he went to Harvard.
He says, I am a writer, researcher, editor and translator coming to Israel, Palestine and the intersection of food and the environment.
He got a BA in Comparative Literature at Harvard, and he says, my background is working for various publication and food companies, combined with my hands-on work in kitchen and farms, which makes me well-suited to write about sustainable food.
That's who they got, along with this person who, Anat Schwartz, upon further investigation, also served in the IDF, has been liking all kinds of tweets over weeks, calling for mass death and Gaza, and those are the two on-the-ground reporters, quote-unquote, that fed Jeffrey Gettleman this story that ultimately came very dubious.
And it is a huge crisis for the New York Times to have so much questionable behavior in one of their most important stories covering this war.
The Intercept reported, based on sources of the New York Times, that their highly popular and influential podcast, The Daily, had planned on having Jeffrey Gettleman on to talk about this story, and then ultimately decided that it couldn't pass their fact-checking, and that given all the questions, including the denials by the Key family, decided not to feature it on The Daily at all.
And to this day, it hasn't been.
And as a result, there's all kinds of internal scrutiny now in the New York Times as a result of all these things that were found, including by this anonymous Twitter account that the New York Times could easily have found with the same investigative scrutiny.
Here's the headline in the Intercept.
From today, the New York Times puts, quote, the daily episode on ICE amid internal firestorm over Hamas sexual violence article.
Quote, as the Times faces scrutiny for the coverage of Israel's war on Gaza, it has capitulated to the pro-Israel media watchdog, Camera.
The New York Times pulled a high-profile episode of the podcast, The Daily, about sexual violence perpetrated by Hamas on October 7th amid a furious internal debate about the strength of the paper's original reporting on the subject.
Times news sources told The Intercept, Times newsroom sources.
The episode had been scheduled for January 9th.
And the critics have highlighted major discrepancies in the account presented in the Times, subsequent public comments from the family of a major subject in the article denouncing it, and comments from a key witness seeming to contradict and comments from a key witness seeming to contradict a claim attributed to him in the article.
Now, one thing that should give you a great deal of skepticism about things you've been told are some of the stories that shaped how people understood not just October 7th, but who the people in Gaza are deliberately.
Here from the NBC on October 12th, five days after the Hamas attack, Unverified reports of quote 40 babies beheaded in Israel Hamas war inflamed social media.
Quote, no photo evidence has been made public as of Thursday morning, cooperating claims that babies had been beheaded.
Israel has published photos of dead infants after the terrorist attack.
The most high profile claim came Wednesday night when President Joe Biden said that he had seen photographic evidence of terrorists beheading children.
And he then walked that back saying, actually, he hadn't seen those photos.
He had just been told about them by Netanyahu.
And then the biggest debunking came by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, which is a liberal newspaper, but also editorially in favor of the Israeli war in Gaza.
And on December 4th, 2023, so almost two full months after the attack, they published this article which said Hamas did commit documented atrocities.
But a few false stories feed the deniers.
So they were framing it as these false stories are damaging because it gives credence to the people who say Israel is lying.
But the article was very damning about the extent of the lies on October 7th.
This is their sub-headline.
Remember, this is not a leftist newspaper in America.
This is a mainstream newspaper in Israel that supports the Israeli war in Gaza.
Quote, the extensive evidence of crimes against humanity committed by Hamas terrorists on October 7th should not be contaminated by unverified stories disseminated by Israeli search and rescue groups, army officers, and even Sarah Netanyahu.
Quote, according to a reporter for I-24 News, an army commander told her that at least 40 babies had been killed, some of them beheaded.
The report above was later quoted on social media, often referenced as, quote, dozens of beheaded babies, though sometimes it was, quote, burnt babies or hanged babies.
For example, the Foreign Ministry of Israel published an account by Colonel Golan Vach from the Home Front Command, who said that in one house he found the bodies of eight burnt babies.
The Twitter account of the Prime Minister's office also referred to the murder of infants and showed very graphic pictures.
According to the tweet, President Benjamin Netanyahu showed the pictures to U.S.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
According to sources including Israel's National Insurance Institute, Kibbutz leaders and the police, On October 7th, one baby was murdered, 10-month-old Mila Cohen.
She was killed with her father, Ohad, on Kibbutz Beres.
So I just want you to remember what you were told about what happened October 7th, all those stories that circulated, including from the Israeli government, and contrast it to the very comprehensive report from Haaretz that demonstrated that on October 7th, there was a total of one baby who was murdered.
Other than deliberate lying and an intent to deceive, how is it possible to have concluded that there were 40 beheaded babies when there was a grand total of one infant that was killed on October 7th?
Only lying and fabrication would cause somebody to claim that.
You would see 40 beheaded babies.
They had none of those.
There were no cutting babies out of wombs.
There were no baking babies in ovens.
These were all absolute lies spread by the Israeli government and their supporters in the United States.
Not because there were no atrocities on October 7th, there were, but because the goal was to convince Americans that people in Palestine are something completely different.
They're not human.
They're somehow more savage than Nazis.
They're worse than ISIS.
And all of these lies were vital to sustaining that.
And at the end of the day, a lot of these lies were what led a lot of Americans to decide, including people who marched under the banner of America First and staying out of other foreign wars, that Joe Biden is right to finance the Israeli war because these people that are being killed are people who deserve it because they're subhuman.
And if you get to the point where you've let people lose your humanity, relinquish your humanity, cheer for some of the most grotesque acts that human beings are capable of imposing on others, including entire populations of women and children, then I would suggest that you need to seriously reconsider what it is that you then I would suggest that you need to seriously reconsider what it is that you
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And obviously Rumble has, if they've demonstrated nothing else, they have certainly demonstrated that they are an authentic devotee to the mission of free speech online, to refusing to censor At the behest of the neoliberal order, there are all kinds of programs and all kinds of voices that are banned in most other places on the internet that speak freely on Rumble.
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When I first started writing about politics in 2005 in order to focus on the war on terror, the word neocon was very much in vogue.
People used it all the time.
People understood what it meant.
It generally referred to a group of people who previously had been part of the Democratic Party who decided to migrate to the Republican Party because they perceived that their agenda that typically was focused on wars all over the world, a posture of endless war, convincing people that the United States would benefit by involving itself in all sorts of foreign wars, culminating in steadfast U.S. support for Israel.
They decided that in the era of the war on terror that they would benefit a lot more from joining the Republican Party and they turned out to be right about that.
And these are people like Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith and ultimately Dick Cheney.
So it kind of spread to the people who became their allies and advocates who weren't Originally liberals, but who nonetheless took on this worldview that the United States needs to crusade in the world through its military to spread democracy.
It's what led to the invasion of Iraq.
They wanted to do regime change in Iran.
They wanted to bomb Libya and remove Gaddafi.
They wanted to do the same in Syria with Assad.
It became an ideology.
And it was a very recognizable one because it was against the strain of Republican politics that was humble about or skeptical towards intervention.
It wanted a very, quote, robust foreign policy, meaning involving Americans in all kinds of wars all over the world, knowing that this kind of active mentality of militarism would also justify and explain to Americans why they should support Israel and all of its wars as well.
That Israel's wars are our enemies, are our enemies, and that became the predominant mentality.
Notably, neocons started re-migrating back to the Democratic Party, where most of them now are, primarily in the wake of Trump.
Although even before Trump, with Ron Paul's success, they started realizing that the Republican Party and the American right was becoming inhospitable to that worldview.
And as a result, ever since they've migrated back to the Democratic Party, people like Bill Kristol and David Frum and the like, that word neocon is rarely used anymore.
But I think it's still a very valuable word because it absolutely does reflect a certain kind of mentality about the U.S.
role in the world, about militarism, about our policy toward war generally, and specifically toward Israel.
And one of the things that has been done since October 7th in order to rejuvenate this idea among Americans that they need to be fighting wars all over the country, including wars that aren't ours, that aren't against enemies attacking the United States.
is to use October 7th to say that there is a new bigotry consuming the United States.
There is a new special victim group that once again has become vulnerable to racism and the like, and that is American Jews.
And then combined with that is an argument that we need to be supporting Israel and that anyone who questions that or anyone who opposes what Israel is doing is probably guilty of this new anti-Semitism.
And you can tell there's a lot of power behind this mentality, even though they're trying to claim that they're a marginalized group, that they're in danger in the United States.
They appear in every one of the most influential and powerful platforms to make this case.
And just this week there is a cover story in Time Magazine, which obviously is not the same Time Magazine as it once was.
It was probably the most influential media outlet during the Cold War, even into the 80s and 90s.
But it still packs a lot of punch.
It still carries a heavy brand name for a lot of people.
And particularly the Time cover is something that a lot of people see.
Time Magazine is now owned by a pro-Israel billionaire.
The editor-in-chief is also a fanatical pro-Israel long-time journalist who I think you can safely describe as a neocon.
And then this week they released this new cover story that is attracting a lot of attention.
And it's written by Noah Feldman, who was kind of a classic neocon during the Bush-Cheney years.
He was actually part of what was called the provisional government in Iraq, the one that Bush and Cheney put into Iraq during the invasion to try and control what that government would be, which was ultimately the purpose of the invasion of Iraq.
Noah Feldman was actually part of that.
He's not a very obvious figure to be a representative of a marginalized and oppressed group because he has basically had the most elite life possible.
He went to Harvard and Yale Law School.
He went to Oxford.
He's taught on the Harvard Law School faculty forever.
He's been a celebrated intellectual.
He was part of the Bush-Cheney government.
He became one of the leading witnesses in support of the first Trump impeachment.
And he has access to the cover story of Time Magazine to write an article saying that his own group, American Jews, are a uniquely victimized group and essentially that they are victimized by a new kind of anti-Semitism that basically includes anyone questioning U.S.
support for the war in Israel or questioning the Israeli government in any sort of a harsh way.
And this is now a celebrated Time cover, there you see, nie wieder ist jetzt, which is German for, I believe, never again is now, right?
Never again is now.
And you see the star David there, and then the headline is the new anti-Semitism.
So obviously using German, it's intended to evoke this kind of very alarming iconography.
And it's essentially arguing that there's a new radical anti-Semitism in the United States that is rendering American Jews, despite all their apparent power, the fact that they have been extremely safe in the United States and continue to be, in my view, for reasons we've gone over many times.
But this is an attempt to say the new anti-Semitism has arisen since October 7th and is based in opposition to Israel, which means if you're a critic of Israel, you're likely guilty of In the months following Hamas' attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, anti-Semitic incidents increased substantially.
The Anti-Defamation League, which I guess a lot of people trust now, didn't trust at all until October 7, but now do, which keeps track, said they tripled in the U.S.
over the previous year, although its criteria also changed to include anti-Zionism.
In other words, there's an expanded definition of anti-Semitism by the ADL that if you say something that the ADL interprets as anti-Zionist, they will count that as an anti-Semitic act.
The core of this new anti-Zionism lies in the idea that Jews are not a historically oppressed people seeking self-preservation, but are instead oppressors, imperialists, colonialists, and even white supremacists.
Now, Noah Feldman was part of the Iraq War.
He was part of the attempt to impose on Iraq a government by the United States.
He's a vehement supporter of the war in Gaza.
He's a vehement supporter of Israel.
If you call him an imperialist or an oppressor, or you look at his lineage and his very privileged life and deny that he's a victim, then according to him, you are guilty of this new anti-Semitism.
Quote, this view preserves vestiges of the trope that Jews exercise vast power.
It creatively updates the narrative to contemporary circumstances and current cultural preoccupations with the nature of power and injustice.
Israel, the first Jewish state to exist in two millennia, plays a central role in the narrative of the new antisemitism.
While a well-meaning person free of antisemitism could describe Israel as colonialist, the narrative of Israel as a settler-colonial oppressor on par with or worse than the US, Canada, and Australia is fundamentally misleading.
Those who advance it run the risk of perpetuating antisemitism by condemning the Jewish state despite its basic differences from those other global examples.
Most importantly, Israel's status as the only homeland for a historically oppressed people who have nowhere else to call their own.
To emphasize the narrative of Jews as oppressors, the new anti-Semitism must also somehow sidestep not only two millennia of Jewish oppression, but also the Holocaust, the largest organized institutionalized murder of any ethnic group in human history.
On the right, anti-Semites either deny the Holocaust ever happened or claim its scope has been overstated.
How big of a group is that of people on the right who deny the Holocaust or revise the Holocaust?
On the left, he says, one line is that Jews are weaponizing the Holocaust to legitimize the oppression of Palestinians.
All right, let me just say, that's something I believe.
I believe that the ADL and a lot of pro-Israel organizations weaponized the Holocaust to shield Israel from valid critiques.
The idea that that makes you an anti-Semite, to believe that or to criticize Israel, to question Israel.
Or to question whether Jews are a unique victim group in the United States, the idea that any of that is anti-Semitic is obviously unbelievably manipulative.
Probably the biggest grievance of people on the American right, of conservatives in the United States, about the left, has been that the left uses identity politics, they weaponize racism accusations in order to stifle debate, to destroy the reputations of anybody who agrees with them.
What is this, if not that?
Accusing everybody who disagrees with Noah Feldman on Israel of being part of the new antisemitism, of saying that anybody who rejects the idea that American Jews require special privileges in the United States is guilty of the new antisemitism.
This is exactly everything the American right has claimed that they hate.
Accusing people who disagree with you of being racist, weaponizing bigotry accusations to stifle debate.
This is all this is in its most blatant form.
Quote, During the Gaza War, some have argued that Israel, having suffered the trauma of the Holocaust, is now itself perpetuating a genocide against the Palestinian people.
Accusing Israel of genocide can function, intentionally or otherwise, as a way of erasing the memory of the Holocaust and transforming Jews from victims into oppressors.
If that's not an argument, To demonize everybody who questions Israel as an anti-Semite, and I've never seen that before.
It is that flagrantly, explicitly.
And as for the question of whether American Jews are victims, and whether you can question whether they are, let's look at who Noah Feldman is.
Here is his official biography from Harvard Law School, where he teaches.
Noah Feldman is the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law.
Felix Frankfurter, by the way, is one of the most influential Supreme Court justices of the 20th century.
He was Jewish.
Like many American Supreme Court justices throughout the 20th century.
And Noah Feldman is the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law, the Chairman of the Society of Fellows, and the Founding Director of the Julius Rabbanowitz Program on Jewish and Israeli Law, all at Harvard University.
Usually programs like the Julius Rabbanowitz Program are named after very large donors to the institution.
In 2003, Noah Feldman served as Senior Constitutional Advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq.
and subsequently advised members of the Iraqi Governing Council on the drafting of Iraq's interim constitution.
Feldman received his GED from Yale Law School, where he served as a book review editor of the Yale Law Journal.
He clerked for Justice David Souter of the U.S. Supreme Court and Chief Judge Harry T. Edwards of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.
If you don't regard Noah Feldman and people like him as a victim, but rather as somebody of great influence and power, then according to his cover story in Time Magazine, published in a magazine owned by an Israel supporter, run by an editor who's a fanatical Israel supporter, written by Noah Feldman, a fanatical Israel supporter, that if written by Noah Feldman, a fanatical Israel supporter, that if you don't see him and people like him as victims in the United States requiring special privileges, you are guilty of the new anti-Semitism.
activism.
Another person who is here to argue this is Barry Weiss, who used to work at the Wall Street Journal, then she quit the New York Times in protest of a lot of critiques she had of the paper that I shared.
She then created her own media outlet, Substack.
Where it's producing many millions of dollars to great financial success.
It's a hugely supported website.
She's become extremely prominent as a spokesperson against anti-Semitism.
And on behalf of Israel, she has access to every major platform.
She spoke this week at the 92nd Street Y. And luminaries like Jerry Seinfeld and other extremely wealthy supporters of Israel attended.
Very hard to depict Barry Weiss as well, a graduate of Columbia, as some sort of a marginalized victim in the United States.
And yet, she too was here to argue, not for the first time, that American Jews are uniquely vulnerable in the United States, that American Jews are endangered, actually.
And that one of the manifestations of this anti-Semitism that American Jews are endangered by is the criticism of Israel, the questioning of whether or not the United States should fight not only in Israel, but also for Ukraine, and in general, just the neocon worldview that the United States should be involved in multiple wars around the world. just the neocon worldview that the United States should be
The irony of her speech is that the 92nd Street Y had invited the Pulitzer Prize winning author who was critical of Israel and yet canceled his speech because he was a critic of Israel and instead invited Barry Weiss to come and speak instead, just to give you kind of a sense for who victims are, who is repressed in the United States and who isn't.
And here's part of what Barry Weiss said in outlining her foreign policy, what this new anti-Semitism is, and what all of our obligations are when it comes to Israel.
The world is changing.
The world that so many of us were born into.
The world that we thought we were going to get our lives inside.
That world is done.
There's no going back to it.
And the things that we took for granted That America would always remain exceptional, not just for us, but for the world.
And that Americans themselves would understand this as a place and as an idea worth fighting for.
Those are no longer certainties.
Nor is the certainty of the free world itself, which is burning right now at its outer edges.
All of it, the ideals and the architecture that have made the past 75 years of Jewish life the greatest in the history of the world.
It's up for grabs.
Ask the people of Southern Israel who saw on the morning of October 7th how brittle is the fence that separates civilization from barbarism.
So there you see that framework.
Israel is the civilized part of the world.
The Palestinians are the barbaric, the savages, the subhumans.
And the fact that Israel, which occupies lands that belong to it only since 1948, displaced a lot of Arabs from that land.
that chooses to occupy the West Bank illegally in the eyes of the world that blockades Gaza in all the ways that we've described and now is bombing Gaza.
The fact that Israel can be attacked by a much weaker group of people that they're now obliterating somehow is supposed to mean that American Jews in the United States are also endangered.
And that if you question this war in any way, you are part of the opposition to the defense of the free world.
If you question the war in Ukraine, you're part of this movement that is undermining the defense of the free world.
The only way you can be part of the defense of the free world, according to Barry Weiss, and the only way you can be relieved of the accusation of anti-Semitism is if you cheer for American wars.
All the ones that she supports, including in Ukraine, but also, most importantly, supporting the war in Israel.
Ask the people of Taiwan, who hear Beijing's threats and wonder how soon the dark shadow that has fallen over Hong Kong might consume them too.
Ask the people of Ukraine.
Ask the Navalny family.
In one of the beautiful and haunting letters that Alexei Navalny sent from a prison cell in the Arctic Circle to Natan Sharansky in Jerusalem, he wrote about how strange it was to be reading Sharansky's memoir, Fear No Evil, about his time in the Soviet gulag 40 years before.
I was amused by the fact, he writes, that neither the essence of the system nor the pattern of its acts has changed.
He continued, in the current situation, it is not them who are to blame.
He says amazingly of the KGB.
And this is the crucial part.
It is not them who are to blame, but us, who naively thought that there was no going back to the old ways.
So that is the neocon worldview stated perfectly.
Barry Weiss absolutely has a way with words.
When she was hired by the New York Times, it was exactly at the same time that the New York Times had hired Bret Stephens and liberals were indignant about the hiring of Bret Stephens.
He was a climate denier and all these other bad things.
And I read an article saying actually Barry Weiss is the much more consequential hire.
I knew that she was a very shrewd and savvy media operator.
And I knew she was going to have this kind of an influence, and what she's saying is a very pernicious but effective message, which is, if you want to be on the side of good, and you want to avoid being someone who's a threat to American Jews, you need to step up and cheer for American wars in all these places.
You need to fight China, you need to fight Russia, you need to fight Israel's enemies, Iran, This is what neocons do.
They, this is the way that they get Americans to constantly pay for and cheer for wars that are not in their interests, that have nothing to do with the way of life in the United States.
By constantly linking all of Israel's enemies to part of this greater battle that we are all facing between the civilized people, the Americans, Europe, Israel,
And all of Israel's enemies, Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah, Russia, so that we continue to view Israel as our great ally, whose military we should pay for, whose wars we should finance, because it's part of our duty to be part of this bigger vision to defend freedom.
And if you don't think that, if you question whether or not Israel belongs there, in that
Group, if you think that it's not actually in our interest to pay for Israel's wars and to tie ourselves at the hip to Israel and to fight for the war in Ukraine, then you're probably someone who's a coward, unlike Alexei Navalny, the former neo-Nazi that Barry Weiss loves, and the Azov battalion in Ukraine, the current neo-Nazi battalion that Barry Weiss loves.
And obviously the people in Israel currently starving the population of Gaza to death.
These are all your duties as a good human being to have America arm and fund all these wars.
That is the neocon tactic and it has been for decades.
They don't want it to say you're duty bound to finance and stand by Israel.
That would be too obvious.
They want to make it part of this broader vision where Israel is part of the civilized, superior peoples.
And Israel's enemies are savages, and so are anyone who defies the United States, and that's how we get endless war.
That is the neocon mentality, and it is more dominant than ever because it is attached now to the Democratic Party at least as much as the Republican Party.
They viewed Donald Trump as a threat to that vision, but they also viewed this kind of Rod and Paul anti-interventionism as a threat as well, which is why they began migrating back to the Democratic Party before Donald Trump appeared.
One of the things that I really appreciate is that there are some strong Israel supporters, some vehement Israel supporters, who are contemptuous of this attempt to turn American Jews into some new victim group.
One of them is Batia Junger Sargon, who was on my show in November, where she and I debated her support for the war in Israel.
And she was one of the first guests we had on who supported the war in Israel.
She's a vehement supporter of Israel.
And at the time, I asked her about this newfound attempt to try and turn Jewish students at Harvard and Yale and Penn into victims who were endangered.
And she scorned on that attempt on my show.
This is what she said.
There's never been a country as good to the Jews as the United States is.
I think most Jews should feel, if they don't, incredibly grateful to be American.
The First Amendment is an inextricable part of what makes this country, this country.
And this is at the time, by the way, when there was a very aggressive movement.
To impose censorship on American college campuses on the grounds that anti-Semitism was this wild bigotry that needed to be controlled through silencing and censoring of Israel critics.
And it was a right-wing view that mimicked perfectly the left-wing view for censorship on college campuses, that criticism of Israel was hate speech, it was threatening to a marginalized group, American Jews, and that American Jews could only be protected through censorship.
Exactly what the left-wing censorship case is, and Batya was one of the few people willing to oppose it on principle equally, and that's what she was saying.
To me, the idea of endorsing a ban on BDS is just so anti-Jewish.
Obviously, I'm offended by the idea of boycotting Jews.
I don't like that.
But what I like even less is the idea of exercising state power against an individual citizen or business' right or what have you to express their political views.
I hate all of that.
Please walk down the street in my neighborhood and chant, Palestine will be free from the river to the sea.
That is your, I don't want to say God-given, but you know, that is your right as an American.
And that is why I am an American and why I love this country and think this is the best country on earth.
So from the point of view, first of all, of just like state censorship, absolutely unacceptable and just so totally inappropriate.
The second level of things we're seeing is students facing what they're seeing as harassment on college campuses.
Now, is harassment happening?
There's a lot of this chanting.
There's a lot of protests.
There have been three instances by my count of actual physical physical violence, which of course is a crime that those are crimes.
Those are actual crimes.
Of course, it's a crime.
And we have like actual like laws on the books to protect people from them.
I don't believe in hate crimes because I think for something to get from a crime to a hate crime means you're policing somebody's thoughts.
I don't believe in that.
So I don't even think that there should be a such a thing as a hate crime.
But those three events are crimes will be prosecuted as such.
Three events, you've had thousands of people protesting.
I mean, like, obviously we've not met the bar of incitement to violence, right?
This is not mass violence.
And so, to me, the messaging to college students that they should see themselves as unsafe, it's just, it's, I hate it.
I hate to see it.
I hate to see Jewish students cowering.
Like, that is the wrong message for this moment.
Stand up straight.
Stand up tall.
Be proud of who you are.
Put on Tefillin, if you allow me to say that here.
Embrace your heritage.
Stop acting like... Stop embracing the safetyism.
Is there a double standard for Jewish students and for other minority students?
There is.
You know what?
The university system is hopelessly flawed.
It's deeply woke.
I'm sure, Glenn, you and I would have very similar critiques of the safetyism.
The way out of that is not to embrace the safetyism.
When I was talking today about this Time Magazine article and then Barry Weiss's speech, which are part of the same effort to convert American Jews into a unique victim group, I noted this video that Batya had when she appeared on our show where she was expressing her contempt for this narrative.
And I said, look, I don't know.
I haven't spoken to you in a while.
I don't know.
I don't want to imply that she still thinks this way, but this is what she was saying back in November.
And in response, she replied and pointed this video, this interview that she gave just this week, yesterday in fact.
about this kind of Time Magazine Barry Weiss narrative that American Jews are in danger, that they're one of the unique victim groups, that they need all kinds of special protections and privileges, and particularly people who criticize Israel need to be accused of anti-Semitism and the worst bigotry.
And here's the scorn she heaped on that this week again in a very convincing way.
Fighting antisemitism starts with accurately assessing it.
For Jewish students at the most elite universities on the planet, young people with more privilege than 99% of Americans could ever dream of, to be encouraged to see themselves as the victims of a bunch of chanting nincompoops is truly a betrayal, not just of America, but of what it means to be a Jew.
We are descended from the Maccabees, for God's sake.
Quaking in the face of some chanting leftists is So, obviously she and I have totally different views on Israel and the war in Gaza.
We explored that on the show.
our ideology.
I understand that it is uncomfortable, especially when you're 18 or 20, to know that your peers look down on you.
But that discomfort is your moral compass letting you know that it still works.
So obviously she and I have totally different views on Israel and the war in Gaza.
We explored that on the show.
But the idea that Jewish students at Harvard and Yale and Penn, let alone the highest elites that American culture has to create, like Noah Feldman and his editor-in-chief of Time and the owner of Time magazine, have the right like Noah Feldman and his editor-in-chief of Time and the owner of Time magazine, have the right to be looked
have the right to be looked at as special victims because they're part of a minority group that exercises enormous power in every major sector of American life from government to media to Wall Street to Silicon Valley to Hollywood is a disgrace.
It is exactly the kind of self-victimizing that is subject to the most intense mockery and scorn when it comes from the left.
And yet now in the name of Israel and protecting Israel and demeaning its critics, We're all supposed to suddenly embrace this same victimhood narrative of identity politics and vulnerability and prejudice and bigotry that has been laughed at for the last decade, even though the claims to it are negated by every relevant metric about how American even though the claims to it are negated by every relevant metric about how American Jews Whatever your views on Israel are, make the case.
Don't hide behind accusations that people who disagree with you are part of the new anti-Semitism, need to be silenced, need to be scorned.
There are a million reasons to oppose what Israel is doing in Gaza, and 10 million reasons To oppose the idea that it's the United States and the American citizen that needs to fund and arm that without being accused of anti-Semitism.
And as an American Jew, as somebody who's lived the vast bulk of my life in the United States as an American Jew, the idea that American Jews are this unique, vulnerable victim group is grotesque and manipulative and deeply insulting and yet is probably the leading instrument That pro-Israel elites in the United States are now weaponizing in order to coerce support for their cause.
All right, so that concludes our show for this evening.
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