New U.N. Report is Just the Latest to Debunk Many Key Israeli Claims About Oct. 7 Repeated by Biden and U.S. Media; PLUS: Calls to Capture Moscow as Western Derangement About Russia Grows | SYSTEM UPDATE #282
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Is It Permissible to Question Israeli/U.S. Claims about Oct 7? (6:42)
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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, there's no question that Hamas committed heinous and unjustified crimes against civilians inside Israel.
On October 7th, a new UN report issued today confirms that happened, along with Israeli war crimes since then.
But there is also no question That among the most publicized and discussed atrocities, once aggressively spread by the Israeli government, the U.S.
government and the media of both countries, there were a multitude of outright lies and fabrications about what happened on October 7th.
Those lies were deliberate and purposeful, and they did their job.
They depicted October 7th as not just a common terrorist attack, but as some unprecedentedly barbaric and savage act.
Worse than ISIS, we were told, and even worse than the 9-11 attack.
And the ultimate impact of those lies was to make Palestinians appear primitive, inhuman, and even subhuman.
Quote, we are fighting animals, said several Israeli officials in the weeks that followed.
But another effect, also an intended one, of those lies was to convert October 7th into a sacred event.
One whose core claims could never be questioned or investigated, let alone doubted or denied.
For many weeks and even months, many of these now debunked lies continue to shape how Americans and others around the world perceived October 7th and Palestinians generally, as well as the Israeli destruction of Gaza that followed.
That even extended to massively exaggerating the number of Israeli civilians killed on October 7th, as opposed to active duty soldiers and armed agents of the state that are considered legitimate military targets, to say nothing of the more melodramatic fabrications about how many of those people were killed.
And to this day, there are undoubtedly large numbers of Americans and Westerners who continue to believe that many of the key fabrications clearly and definitively debunked are in fact true.
The avalanche of lies that spewed forth about what happened on October 7th was, in an important sense, both familiar and yet unsurprising.
As Americans, we have seen this playbook used over and over and over.
Whenever a major event happens involving war or violence or some crisis, it is extremely common, one could even say inevitable, that the government will purposely issue all kinds of falsehoods in those key moments and days and weeks following that event.
They do that because they know that those falsehoods will forever shape the public's emotional reaction, as well as the political perception of those events in a permanent way, so that debunking of those lies weeks or months later will have little to no effect in altering those fixed perceptions, one that we're shaped by and are based in deliberate and official lies.
The examples of how this has worked are far too numerous to comprehensively chronicle, so a few illustrative examples will have to suffice.
But what makes the avalanche of horrific lies about October 7th particularly objectionable is that there were plenty of actual horrors and crimes that really did happen on October 7th inside Israel.
Yet none of those suffice to achieve the propaganda goals and the war aims of the Israeli and American governments, namely to create such a caricature, such a horror that would then allow Israel to destroy Gaza with unprecedented and indiscriminate violence aimed at its civilian infrastructure.
Over the last several weeks have made it virtually mandatory to take a hard evidence-based journalistic look at just how many lies about October 7th the world was deliberately subjected to and how many of those are still believed.
Then, a discussion featured on Barry Weiss's podcast earlier this week that we intended to cover last night but ran out of time provides an extremely disturbing window into the mind of many Americans when it comes to war, the risk of nuclear weapons, and all sorts of delusions of American power.
As we said, it featured a lengthy discussion of how easy it would be for the United States to engineer a coup inside Russia that would overthrow Vladimir Putin and then enable our forces that we control to, quote, take Moscow.
During the Cold War, concerns over a direct U.S.-Russia war were central for decades to U.S.
foreign policy, yet ever since Russiagate, hysteria over Moscow has caused so many American policy and media elites to find the prospect of nuclear war either impossible or even laughable.
Few things illustrate the widespread dangers of this thought about Russia like this conversation, so we will take a look at relevant parts.
Before we get to all of that, a few programming notes.
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For now, Welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
I think it's quite common for Americans to understand that oftentimes when the United States wants to go to war, it begins issuing a series of falsehoods and lies in it begins issuing a series of falsehoods and lies in order to sell the war to an American public that in poll after poll makes clear that they think the United States is involved in too many wars, that we go to war too easily and too often
that we go to war too easily and too often and oftentimes for unnecessary ends in a way that harms the United States.
So issuing lies that manipulate the public on an emotional level is extremely important to sell every new war.
But there's another type of lying that's a little bit more subtle, but I would say just as insidious, which is that whenever the United States does something short of war that might be questionable ethically or legally, The government will immediately disseminate all sorts of lies, again intended to manipulate the emotions of the public so that the immediate perceptions that the public has of those events is exactly what the government wants it to be.
And when those lies get debunked later on, as they always do, The die is already cast and people really don't end up changing their opinion about that because the emotional reaction that they had was so potent.
So obviously there are examples too well known to have to document the way in which the government lied about the Gulf of Tonkin incident.
In order to spark the Vietnam War, to get the Senate to overwhelmingly approve the use of combat force in Vietnam.
Obviously, the selling of the WMD lies and the nuclear weapon program of Iraq and the alliance with Al Qaeda were critical to selling the Iraq War, a country that had nothing to do with 9-11.
But there are also several others that may not be as well known when the United States wanted to go to War with Iraq in the first Bush administration over their invasion of Kuwait.
That was accomplished by all kinds of emotionally manipulative lies.
One of which, the primary of which, was documented by the New York Times in January of 1992.
Headline, Remember Naraya, the witness for Kuwait.
Quote, some claims were no doubt true, but the most sensational one, the one about Saddam Hussein's evil and brutality, namely that Iraqi soldiers had removed hundreds of Kuwaiti babies from incubators and left them to die on the hospital floors, was shown to be almost certainly false by an ABC reporter, John Martin, in March of 1991, directly after the liberation of Kuwait.
So you see, the lies get told to sell the war, the war then gets sold after it is done, The debunking of those lies begins, but by then it's too late.
Quote, he interviewed hospital doctors who stayed in Kuwait throughout the occupation, but before the war the incubator story seriously distorted the American debate about whether to support military action.
Amnesty International believed the tale.
And its ill-considered validation of the charges likely influenced the seven U.S.
Senators who cited the story in speeches supporting the January 12th resolution authorizing war.
Since the resolution passed by the Senate by only six votes, the question of how that incubator story escaped scrutiny when it really mattered is all the more important.
Amnesty International later retracted its support for the story.
Americans would have been interested to know the identity of Naraya, the 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl who shocked the Congressional Human Rights Caucus on October 10, 1990, when she tearfully asserted that she had watched 15 infants being taken from incubators in Al-Adan Hospital in Kuwait City by Iraqi soldiers who, quote, left the babies on the cold floor to die.
The chairman of the congressional group, Tom Lantos, a California Democrat, and John Edward Porter, an Illinois Republican, explained that her identity would be kept secret to protect her family from reprisals in occupied Kuwait.
But there was a better reason to protect her from exposure.
Naira, her real name, was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the U.S.
So, obviously Kuwait wanted the United States to go to war with Saddam Hussein in order to get the American population to support it.
They had to turn Saddam Hussein into an even worse monster than he actually was.
He was a monster.
So again, it was unnecessary to make up lies and fabrications, but they needed to go so far to really manipulate the public.
And not only did they invent a story about Iraqi soldiers pulling Kuwaiti babies out of incubators, they produced a completely fraudulent witness whose identity was supposedly hidden when in fact she was the daughter of the Quidi ambassador.
And it was only after the war that that all got debunked and of course by then it was too late.
We also saw the same thing happen when first France and the UK and then war hawks inside the Obama administration like Susan Rice and Samantha Power and Hillary Clinton persuaded Barack Obama to involve the United States in a NATO war that was supposedly designed to protect the people of Benghazi from the massacre that Gaddafi promised not to do regime change but of course it was about regime change and that was the result.
The The selling of that word was filled with lies.
From The Guardian in April of 2011, Gaddafi, quote, supplies troops with Viagra to encourage mass rape, claims diplomat, U.S.
Ambassador Susan Rice.
She said without offering evidence that Iran was helping Syria to suppress dissent.
None of that was ever proven.
None of that was ever documented.
There were no real witnesses who suggested that was true.
It turned out that it was just a total fabrication.
Similar to the Weapons of Mass Destruction one, but this one was about Gaddafi.
Now, one of the events that I particularly recall, because I did a lot of reporting on it at the time, was when the Obama administration located where Osama bin Laden was inside Pakistan, and they sent a SEAL team group, supposedly to arrest him, but with orders that they were authorized to use violence if necessary to protect themselves.
Now, if they had gone in and just shot Osama bin Laden, regardless of the circumstances, a lot of Americans would have been happy with that, would have been fine with it.
They wouldn't have cared what the circumstances were, even if he were just sleeping on a street corner and US soldiers walked up to him and pumped bullets into his head.
There would have been a lot of Americans fine with that.
But a lot of Americans would have wondered, well, why didn't we put Osama bin Laden on trial if we could have taken him alive?
And a lot of the international community, as well, Would have been asking those same questions because obviously no government has the right to just go murder somebody out of suspicion that they did something, especially if they're not using violence to resist.
And as a result, there were all kinds of lies told by the Obama administration in the immediate aftermath of the Osama bin Laden raid.
In the 24 to 48 hours, things like he was armed and in a firefight with the troops that we sent.
They said that he had taken one of his wives and used her as a shield to prevent himself from being killed, sacrificing her life to protect himself, to make him seem like this massive coward willing to even use his wife.
And all of that turned out to be false, but in the immediate aftermath of the raid on Osama bin Laden, it gave Americans, even ones who would have wanted to know what happened, enough rationale to emotionally support that raid.
Hear from The Guardian, May 5th, 2011.
Osama bin Laden, quote, was not armed when killed.
New York Times reports that U.S.
Navy SEALs killed sole gunmen at the start of the raid.
There was one gunman that they killed while Pakistan angrily defends its record on terror.
"Further doubts have emerged about the official U.S. account of the raid in which Osama bin Laden was killed, with reports saying U.S. Navy SEALs were fired on only at the very beginning of the operation and that four of the five people who died, including the Al-Qaeda leader, were not armed." This is a markedly different version of events to that released by the Pentagon, which said the U.S.
forces were, quote, engaged in a firefight throughout the operation.
Now, again, you may support the killing of Osama bin Laden, but nobody should be tolerating having our government deliberately feed lies to manipulate public opinion about its conduct.
Here from The Guardian in August of 2012, quote, Navy SEAL account of bin Laden contradicts White House claims.
Quote, No Easy Day, to be published next week, raises questions over whether Osama Bin Laden presented a clear threat to US forces.
Bin Laden apparently was hit in the head when he looked out of his bedroom door into the top hallway of his compound as SEALs rushed up a narrow stairwell in his direction, according to a former Navy SEAL.
Owen writes that Bin Laden ducked back into his bedroom and the Seals followed, only to find the terrorists crumpled on the floor in a pool of blood with a hole visible on the right side of his head and two women wailing over his body.
"No one writes that Bin Laden ducked back into his bedroom and the Saudis followed, only to find the terrorists crumpled on the floor in a pool of blood with that hole visible." Now, in May of 2011, I wrote an article summarizing everything that we knew about the raid and how it completely contradicted so many of the core claims that the Obama administration deliberately released in the immediate aftermath that made most of the population unwilling to question anything.
And here's part of what I wrote in the citations that I included.
Quote, in Bin Laden, in the Bin Laden killing, the media, as usual, regurgitates false government claims.
Several of the key assertions framing the narrative of the killing turned out to be false.
Quote, yesterday it was widely reported that Bin Laden, quote, resisted his capture and, quote, engaged in a firefight with US forces.
Leaving most people, including me, to say that his killing was legally justified because he was using force.
And that was the first article I wrote saying, okay, if he was actually shooting at the troops, obviously they have the right of self-defense to then kill him based on the claim that he was armed and shooting at American soldiers quote it was also repeatedly claimed that bin Laden used a woman his wife as a human shield to protect himself And that she was killed as a result that image of a cowardly though violent to the end bin Laden framed virtually every media narrative of the event all over the globe
And it came from many government officials, principally Obama's top counterterrorism advisor, John Brennan.
Those claims have turned out to be utterly false from the pro-Democrat, pro-Obama talking points memo.
Quote, it was a fitting end for America's most wanted man, as President Barack Obama's deputy national security advisor, John Brennan, told it.
A cowardly Osama bin Laden used his own wife as a human shield in his final moments, except that apparently that wasn't what happened at all.
Hours later, other administration officials were clarifying Brennan's account.
Turns out the woman that was killed in the compound wasn't Bin Laden's wife.
Bin Laden may not have even been using a human shield, and he might not have even been holding a gun.
Politico's Josh Gerstein adds, quote, the White House backed away Monday evening from key details in its narrative about the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, including claims by senior U.S.
officials that the al-Qaeda leader had a weapon and may have fired it during a gun battle with U.S.
forces.
Gerstein added, quote, a senior White House official said bin Laden was not armed when he was killed.
Now, why would the U.S.
government Having done something that I'm certain most Americans would have supported, regardless of the circumstances, have felt the need to inject into the discourse and into the bloodstream obvious lies to justify what they did.
And the reason is because the way that human beings react to things is not usually rational, but emotional.
We are emotional beings.
And if we hear that Osama bin Laden was actually shooting at our soldiers and resisting being captured, we're naturally going to say, oh, of course that was justified.
And as I noted, I said that based on that claim as well.
And if we believe that Osama bin Laden picked up his wife and held her and sacrificed her own life to protect his own, we're going to think this is a monster of such evil.
But hey, you just go and kill him no matter what the circumstances are.
And that is a very emotional response that will get the public to then support what Obama did.
And then in the days and weeks later, when journalists and others debunk the lies, it doesn't matter.
Those perceptions are fixed.
And this is a tactic the government uses all the time.
And I say all that as the context for understanding why it is that both the Israeli government and the American government told a multitude of lies, serious lies, impactful and consequential lies about what happened in Israel on October 7th, even though, had they told the truth, it would have been clear that Hamas committed crimes and engaged in atrocities inside of Israel.
They really did.
They didn't need to fabricate these stories in order to demonstrate that Hamas acted criminally.
Hamas did, in the way that they killed a lot of civilians.
But that wouldn't have been enough to turn Palestinians into unprecedented subhumans and to get the world to be so emotionally enraged, blindly enraged, that they would have decided that Palestinians in Gaza basically are animals, which is what Israeli officials repeatedly called them, that they were worse than ISIS, that this attack was worse than 9-11.
that it was the worst thing the world had seen since the Holocaust.
Those lies that were told, which ended up shaping media accounts for not just days, but weeks and months, because everybody was afraid to question it, even though a lot of it had no evidence and there was much evidence that disproved it, ended up shaping how October 10th and the subsequent Israeli war was understood.
And to this day, Even with all of this debunking that we're about to show you continues to be how so much of this was debunked.
Now, here you can watch in real time, this is on October 10th, so three days after the Hamas attack inside Israel.
By this point, the Israelis were massively bombing Gaza, dropping an amount of bombs on them that was just unprecedented for that amount of time for a densely-packed population.
And here is how one of the most viralized lies, one of the most consequential lies, that I guarantee many Americans and Westerners and people around the world believe to this very day, even though it was a complete lie, here's how this started.
So really, all of these soldiers are... And I should say here, this is from I-24 News.
This is a journalist who is on the ground inside of the kibbutz that, and you see the graphic on the screen, horror scenes at kibbutz that is liberated from Hamas.
And here's what she said.
Really, all of these soldiers are doing their best to protect us, the journalists who are also out here, because they want us to see exactly what's happening and what they've been witnessing with their own eyes for these past three days.
Many of them coming here Saturday night, and they knew that no other soldiers had been here yet, and so they...
Okay.
Do you hear that?
First of all, note the melodramatics.
But no one could expect that it would be like this, the horrors that I'm hearing from these soldiers.
As I mentioned earlier, about 40 babies at least were taken out on gurneys.
Still, right now, they're going to the house.
Okay.
Did you hear that?
First of all, note the melodramatics.
This is three days after Hamas attacked.
There's no further fighting in Israel, but they're all wearing the press vest as though they're in grave danger.
And she just slips this in here.
And what she said was so shocking that the anchor interrupted her and had to confirm.
He couldn't believe what he was hearing.
And he had to confirm that that's really what she meant.
And then she confirmed that it was.
Listen to what she said.
As I mentioned earlier, about 40 babies at least were... 40 babies.
Dead babies were taken out on gurneys.
40 dead babies.
I have to cut in.
It's such a shocking, jarring statement there.
And just for our viewers, we're in a new hour here on the broadcast, who very likely weren't with us last hour, to understand that you've come in there to find this small community littered with the dead and slaughtered bodies of Israeli civilians, primarily, and you're saying 40 babies, dead babies.
That is what one of the commanders told me and you continue to see just now first of all she said at least 40 babies were killed just in that part alone and that's an extraordinary thing to hear and that's why the anchor interrupted her then she sort of said yeah that's what some commander told me but She put it out on the air.
She had no idea if it was true, but some person with the Israeli military told her that, and then she felt justified as a journalist in going and repeating it without having the slightest idea whether it was true.
She said it multiple times because he interrupted her to ask, is that really what you mean to say?
And she said, yes.
And it is hard to overstate how far and wide that claim was repeated for days and weeks.
That 40 babies were killed, although it turned into something much worse, as we're about to show you, all of which were complete lies.
Now, here's the official account of the state of Israel, the government of Israel, and here's what they said.
They put a trigger warning on the tweet, and they wrote the following, quote, listen to the eyewitness accounts of the eight burned babies and one beheaded baby.
which were butchered by Hamas terrorists on October 7th.
Pure evil.
And here's the video that they promoted by a colonel at the IDF. - I found here two couples, two men and women.
And inside we found eight babies burned in this corner among another people burned in the house.
Okay, so a total of eight babies just in this one house.
Eight babies burned solely in this house.
Now, let's listen to what else he says.
19 people really knew where it was.
I pointed the house.
Did you see that baby yourself?
I evacuated the mother and the baby.
So you saw the dead baby?
Yeah, I saw it.
I saw that baby.
Beheaded?
Beheaded.
That must have been absolutely awful.
Yes, it was.
So here we have two claims promoted by the State of Israel, the official account of the State of Israel.
Number one, that just in that one house alone, there were eight burned babies.
And number two, one of them was beheaded.
Now, these claims took on a whole new level of credibility in the eyes of many when Joe Biden claimed That he saw the proof that this was true.
Listen to what he said.
Thank you for the intensity of your support.
It matters.
It matters that Americans see what's happening.
I mean, I've been doing this a long time.
I never really thought that I would see and have confirmed pictures of terrorists beheading children.
And then he kind of faded out, his brain started turning off, forgot what he was saying and went on to something else, as he usually does, but that was his claim.
And he repeated it multiple times after this as well, that he saw the photos of the multiple babies that were beheaded by Hamas on October 7th inside Israel.
Now, What this claim became very quickly, and it could have been a morphing of that original claim from that reporter that she knows for sure there were 40 dead babies burned in that place where she was, combined with the claims of beheaded babies, it quickly turned into Hamas beheaded at least 40 babies inside Israel on October 7th.
Even NBC News Generally unbelievably loyal to President Biden and everything that he says.
Questioned that almost immediately to their credit.
This was October 7th.
This specific claim you see the headline there unverified reports of quote 40 babies beheaded in Israel Hamas war in flames social media quote No photo evidence has been made public as of Thursday morning corroborating claims that babies had been beheaded Israel has published photos of dead infants after the terrorist attack quote a series of shocking reports
have spread horrific claims of baby beheadings by Hamas militants across social and mainstream media in recent days, adding a particularly incendiary element to an already violent and bitter war.
The most high profile came Wednesday night when President Joe Biden said he had seen photographic evidence of terrorists beheading babies.
The White House later clarified that Biden was simply referring to news reports about beheadings.
Which had not included or referred to photographic evidence at all.
On Wednesday, spokesman for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told CNN that babies and toddlers were found with their, quote, heads decapitated in southern Israel after Hamas' attack.
By Thursday morning, an Israeli official told CNN the government had not confirmed claims of the headings.
Many of the reports appears to have originated from Israeli soldiers and people affiliated with the Israeli Defense Force.
Quote, Stranger Things star Noah Schnapp, who is a young actor with a huge following and a vehement supporter of Israel, posted the shocking claim about 40 beheaded babies to his 25 million Instagram followers.
Quote, Where beheaded and burned alive in front of their parents by Hamas.
That's what he posted.
Senator Ted Cruz, the Republican of Texas, mentioned the beheaded babies in a post on X. And Congressman Mike McCaul, the Republican from Texas who's the chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, echoed those allegations on CNN.
Jones found that the, quote, 40 Beheaded Babies claim had over 44 million impressions on X alone, with over 300,000 likes and more than 100,000 reposts.
The main accounts propagating the claims were i24news and the official Israeli account, Jones Data Show.
So we analyzed how this claim viralized, and it came from that original news report combined with the Israeli claims about beheaded babies.
Now, on December 4th, One of the most comprehensive and important investigations was published, journalistic investigations, by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, that is an Israeli newspaper, editorially supported the war in Gaza, and they took all the available evidence that was public, but that they also got from sources inside the Israeli government,
And they separated fact from fiction, or at least they did their best to, based on what was known as of December 4th.
And this report made very clear that so many of the most prominent claims that emanated from the Israeli government and from Joe Biden and from the media of both countries about October 7th were absolute and complete fabrications.
Here was that article, quote, Hamas committed documented atrocities, but a few false stories feed the deniers.
So there you see them trying, they're inside Israel, almost the entire country supports the war.
So they're trying to frame this as like, look, we're publishing these false and debunked claims not because we want to undermine the war effort, but because by lying constantly about what happened, it feeds the ability of those who want to deny all atrocities on October 7th.
That's how they framed it.
The journalism, though, was what was most important, and here's what they wrote.
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, the wife of the Prime Minister.
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 was then later quoted on social media, often referenced as, quote, dozens of beheaded babies.
Though sometimes it was burnt babies or hanged babies.
For example, the Israeli foreign minister, foreign ministry, published an account by Colonel Golan Vach from the Home Front Center who said that in one house he found the bodies of eight burnt babies.
The ex-account of the Prime Minister's office also referred to the murder of infants and showed very graphic pictures.
According to the tweet, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu showed the pictures to U.S.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
Last week, Ishe Cohen, a journalist for the ultra-Orthodox website Keker HaShabbat, interviewed Lieutenant Colonel Yaron Bouskila of the Israeli Defense Forces Gaza Division.
Bouskila talked about babies who had been hung on clotheslines.
That they hung babies on clotheslines.
His remarks were cited by a host of Twitter personalities around the world.
Cohen wrote that he was later informed that the story was inaccurate and deleted And deleted the post quote, why would an army officer invent such a horrifying story?
I was wrong.
He added.
So you had this claim that went viral, and then afterward, after it did its damage, even the person who spread it said, whoops, I got that wrong.
Now, many of the lies came from a person named Eli Beer, who is with the United Hasel of Israel, and he spoke to the Republican Jewish Conference in the United States on October 28th, 2023.
Listen to the amount of lies that he was able to spread in just a minute.
We saw the most horrific things I saw in my own eyes.
A woman who was pregnant, four months pregnant.
She was in a little village, a little kibbutz.
They came into her house in front of her kids.
They opened up her stomach.
She was pregnant.
They opened up her stomach, took out the baby and stabbed the little tiny baby in front of her and then shot her in front of her family.
Okay, so he saw with his own eyes there was a pregnant woman These Hamas terrorists came in, they cut her stomach open and took out her unborn baby and stabbed it to death in front of her other kids and then shot her after they did that.
That was the first claim that he said he saw with his own eyes.
Then he goes on to say this.
And then they kill the rest of the kids.
These are not regular enemies.
These are not regular situations.
I saw little kids who are beheaded.
We didn't know which head belongs to which kid.
I was crying for five days straight.
I couldn't get out.
I couldn't stop crying.
See, little children.
Some of them had grandparents who were Holocaust survivors and they were murdered in a Holocaust in Israel in 2023.
I mean, can you even believe this?
He's just making things up as he goes along, trying to think of whatever the worst thing he could possibly imagine is.
in an oven.
They put them in, these bastards put these babies in an oven and put on their oven.
We found the kid a few hours later.
I mean, can you even believe this?
He's just making things up as he goes along, trying to think of whatever the worst thing he could possibly imagine is.
And obviously, when Jewish people, Israelis, talk about putting Jewish babies in an oven, it's obviously designed obviously to invoke the Holocaust.
And as he said, these are not regular enemies.
These people, they are monsters of the kind we've never seen before.
They're subhuman.
They cut a woman's womb open and stabbed her unborn baby in front of them.
And then they took babies and baked it in an oven.
The longtime American neoconservative John Pororitz, who inherited commentary magazine from his dad, and is, needless to say, an ardent Israel supporter, went on to ax and tweeted this on October 30th.
They baked a baby in an oven!
Say ceasefire one more time, you fucking baby-murdering, loving ghouls!
I mean, this was the discourse, and it was based on complete fabrications.
Now, even the Israeli media was doing a better job than the American media of investigating and then debunking these claims.
Here from the Jerusalem Post, which is not a left-wing magazine, newspaper to put that mildly, on November 8th, so barely a month after the Hamas attack, a month and a day, had this headline, quote, "Controversy surrounds reports of an Israeli baby found burned alive in an oven.
The media watchdog fake reporter continues to maintain that it has not yet been able to independently verify the story of the baby burned in an oven." Now let's go back to that Haritz article, the one that I said was the most comprehensive investigation up until that date, December 4th.
And there you see the headline and then this is what it goes on to say.
According to sources, including Israel's National Insurance Institute, Kibbutz leaders and the police on October 7, one baby was murdered.
On October 7th, according to their data, their sources, and even they say Israel's National Insurance Institute, as well as Kibbutz police and the police said that on October 7th, a grand total inside Israel of one baby was murdered.
This was when we were hearing that there were eight babies burned in a single house, that they were hung from, babies were hung from clotheslines, that there were 40 beheaded babies.
The Haaretz investigation proved, and then many investigations subsequent to this have also affirmed, that the number of babies killed inside Israel on October 7th was one.
She was 10-month-old Mila Cohen.
She was killed with her father, Ohad, on Kibbutz Bere, In another incident on the morning of October 7th, a heavily pregnant Bedouin woman was on her way to Soroka Medical Center because her contractions had begun.
Terrorists shot her in the stomach.
Later, hospital staff delivered the baby girl, who died a few hours later.
So that's about as close as anyone could find to this claim that terrorists had, Hamas had, cut open a woman and took out her womb and stabbed it to death in front of the whole family.
Quote, according to the National Insurance Institute, Five other children aged six or under were murdered, including Omar Siman Tav, the age of two, and his six-year-old twin sister, Arbel Saker, who were killed on kibbutz near Oz.
There was also a five-year-old from Arara in the southern Agave who was killed in Hamas' rocket strike, and five-year-old Eitan Kapsher, who was murdered with his parents and his eight-year-old sister, Aline.
There is no evidence That children from several families were murdered together, rendering inaccurate Netanyahu's remarks to US President Joe Biden, that Hamas terrorists quote took dozens of children, tied them up, burned them and executed them.
And another story that spread a few weeks ago, United Hatsala President Eli Beer, that was the speech we just showed you, told of a baby girl that was placed in an oven and burned to death.
Beer made the remarks at a donor conference in the United States.
The British newspaper, the Daily Mail, changed it from quote, baby to babies.
But this story also is not true.
10-month-old Mila Cohen was murdered in the massacre, along with the baby still in the womb of her mother, who died after her mother was shot on the way to the hospital.
The police have no evidence showing that other babies were killed.
So you had that one 10-month-old baby, the other baby that was unborn on its way to the hospital, and no other babies in Israel killed.
A source at United Hotslaw said a volunteer mistakenly interpreted a case at the Shura base and passed the inaccuracy on to Beer.
Another doubtful claim, doubtful claim meaning a lie, was made by the Prime Minister's wife, Sarah Netanyahu, in a letter to U.S.
First Lady Jill Biden.
Sarah Netanyahu wrote that one of the women was in her ninth month of pregnancy when she was abducted into Gaza, where she gave birth.
People on social media published a photo of the hostage, who was a Thai citizen, in a magazine interview where friends, employer, and families denied that she was pregnant.
Munkim was released over a week ago.
She was not pregnant and had not given birth.
The Army currently has no information about an abducted pregnant woman and defense officials consider the story an unsubstantiated rumor.
The Prime Minister's office did not respond.
Now, you would think that maybe in response to some of this affirmative, definitive debunking of these lies, that some officials involved in spreading them would have the humility or at least the strategic sense to admit that they were spreading false claims.
Definitely not the case for our president, Joe Biden, here at The Intercept in December of 2023 by my former colleague Jeremy Scahill.
Documented quote, Joe Biden keeps repeating his false claim that he saw pictures of beheaded babies.
Who knows if Biden believes that he saw those pictures?
You just, there's no way to know.
His brain doesn't work.
It's very possible that got put into his brain at some point and then he fabricates some memory of it.
But the fact that he claimed to see photos multiple times of things that didn't happen should be disturbing enough on its own, not only about his willingness to lie, but also his cognitive abilities.
Quote, many atrocities were committed during the Hamas-led attacks on October 7th, yet the President of the United States continues to repeat debunked falsehoods.
Now, as I said, subsequent investigations continue to document just how many lies were told, how deliberately they were constructed, how widespread they became.
Here is the French newspaper Le Monde just in April of this year.
Quote, 40 beheaded babies deconstructing the rumor at the heart of the information battle between Israel and Hamas.
This is not a rumor.
This was something that official Israeli accounts repeated over and over.
And Lamont does a good job in doing an autopsy on exactly how this lie began, how it spread, and all the reasons why it's a lie.
Quote, Sorry, on October 10th, official Israeli accounts relate a sorted but unfounded allegation.
Six months later, it continues to circulate, fueling accusations of Israeli disinformation.
But amidst this flood of accounts of murder, looting, and mutilation, one rumor took on extraordinary proportions.
40 decapitated babies were allegedly found in the Kfar Azza Kibbutz, one of the communities most impacted by the attack.
This story and its variants went viral like never before, going as far as being mentioned by the White House.
However, in the horror of this massacre, in which 38 minors, including two infants, were killed, there were never 40 decapitated babies.
So note again, on all of October 7th, and this is now In April of 2024, by a French newspaper, the French government is very pro-Israel, a total of 38 minors were killed on October 7th, meaning people under 18, and that includes two infants.
Presumably they're counting the baby that was close to being born on its way to the hospital when his mother was shot, as well as the 10-month-old that Herod's documented, and then they just simply state there were never 40 decapitated babies.
Now, again, as they note, there were terrible acts by Hamas, so why do they have to invent all these lies?
The reason is because people who go to war, ordinary people who are engaging in violence, political violence against the country, don't go around beheading babies.
Only the worst monsters would do that.
And that's what they needed to have people believe about, not just Hamas, but Palestinians in general, because they knew they were going to go destroy all of Gaza.
And so they needed people to believe that these were not human beings that Israel was about to go murder and kill in huge numbers and destroy their society, that these were worse than ISIS.
That's what they said, worse than ISIS.
That's what these lies were for.
They were not the confusion or fog of war.
They were very deliberate and purposeful.
Here from the Times of Israel in December of 2023.
Just to give you an Israeli newspaper, which again is far hardly anti-war, far from the left.
An up-to-date breakdown of October 7th victims that we know about.
The age gender data for most civilian victims of the Hamas onslaught based on the media tally provides a picture authorities aim to complete as they continue to efforts to identify bodies.
Here's what they said.
Almost two months after the unprecedented Hamas onslaught on southern Israel, which left some 1,200 people dead, the exact data on those killed in the biggest checktack in Israel history is still shrouded in uncertainty.
Authorities have identified a total of 274 soldiers And 859 non-soldiers killed during the brutal assault.
The latter figure includes 57 Israeli police and 38 local security officers.
It is unclear which of these individuals were on duty when killed.
Removing those victims leaves a figure of 764 civilians, which is also very close to the definitive final total offered by Haaretz about the number of civilians killed in Israel.
On October 7th, we were told at first that 1,400 civilians were killed.
That was then lowered to 1,200.
It only weeks later turned out that a very significant portion of those people were actually members, active duty members of the military on legitimate military targets, and that the ratio of civilians to military and soldiers killed was a little bit over one to one.
That was the ratio for every civilian that was killed, a little less than one military target was also killed as well, a soldier, a combatant.
None of that was part of the discourse for weeks, if not longer.
Now, the Times of Israel went on, quote, partial data by Hebrew media covering the civilians killed by thousands of invading terrorists and some of the thousands of rockets fired that day at Israeli cities reveals that many, that they include two infants.
So there you see, again, the confirmation that only two babies died on October 7th.
And when I say only, I'm not minimizing the horror of that.
I'm simply comparing it to the claims that were made to show what not even minimalized, but massive lies, we're told, 12 other children under the age of 20, Wait a minute.
A grand total of 14 children under the age of 10.
Two infants were killed.
36 civilians aged 10 to 19 and 25 elderly people over the age of 80, accounting for 75 of the 764 civilians.
It goes on.
Actually, the next article here is from France 24 in December of 2023.
You see, Israel's social security data reveals the true picture of October 7th death.
On October 14th, Israeli authorities announced a preliminary toll of more than 1,400 people killed by Hamas terrorists.
On December 10th, the foreign ministry published a updated estimate saying the number murdered in cold blood was around 1,200 people without further details.
The final death poll from the attack is now thought to include, is now thought to be 659 Israeli civilians, including 36 children, 695 Israeli civilians, including 36 children, as well as 373 security including 36 children, 695 Israeli civilians, including 36 children, as well as 373 security forces and 71 foreigners, giving
It then goes on, quote, the data also gives a clear picture of the scale of the atrocities at the Supernova Musical Festival in Rheim, where 364 people were killed.
But it also invalidates some statements by Israeli authorities in the days following the attack.
Testimony called into question was that on October 27th by Colonel Golan Vak, head of the Army Search and Rescue Unit, who told a group of journalists, including one from AFP, that he, quote, personally transported a, quote, decapitated baby found in the arms of his mother in the Beret kibbutz.
According to Bitwa Naomi, only one baby was killed in Beret, the 10-month-old Mila Cohen, whose mother survived.
Just lie after lie after lie after lie.
People claiming they saw this with their own eyes, so they were clearly lying on purpose.
Here from the American Prospect in March of 2024, I think this says a lot of the most important points well.
It's entitled, quote, What Really Happened on October 7th?
Quote, and why, wonders a new Al Jazeera documentary, did the media go to such lengths to concoct gruesome X-rated versions of an attack That was harrowing enough to begin with.
Quote, the Israeli regime and its noxious mouthpieces in Washington have spouted so many lies about what Hamas did on October 7th that the conversation is often driven toward rebutting the charges that the group, quote, beheaded 30 babies or sliced a four-month-old fetus out of a dead woman or gouged the beheaded 30 babies or sliced a four-month-old fetus out of a dead woman or gouged the eyes and breasts out of a mother and father before moving on to the figures and toes of the son and daughter
Secretary of State Antony Blinken testified before Congress in the weeks after the attack and he said, Indeed, it is almost as though the Israelis channeled all of the efficiency and efficacy that failed their military on October 7th into the deployment of a vast edifice of instamythology designed to bolster a notion of Palestinians as an inherently subhuman people.
Which brings us to one of the incomprehensibly less scrutinized parts of the disaster explored on October 7th.
The hundreds of civilians, dozens of their cars, and numerous homes and buildings charred beyond comprehension on the day of the attack.
Hamas had some rockets, but did it really have the weaponry capable of mounting that level of destruction?
By November, the IDF conceded that it had actually deployed Apache helicopters and tanks to the Nova Musical Festival that, quote, may have killed, quote, some of the Nova Festival concert goers in accordance with something called the Hannibal Doctrine, a doctrine named for a Carthaginian general who poisoned himself rather than be questioned by his Roman captors.
Whereby the Israeli Army is ordered to fire upon its own troops to prevent the enemy from taking those troops hostage.
Around noon on October 7th, according to Israeli newspapers citing the documentary, the IDF may have invoked a version of the Hannibal Directive expanded to include Israeli civilians.
And in accordance begin blindly opening fire with rockets and helicopter gunships on any person or vehicle seen moving across the border with Gaza.
In particular, the documentary Visits Kibbutz Bere, which looks a bit like present-day Gaza in parts, with a munitions expert who demonstrates strong evidence that some of the houses had been hit with IDF tank fire.
It was Israeli troops.
Not Hamas quote murderers according to one resident who killed 12 longtime residents there.
Now there was a recent story that we intended to cover about how Israeli officials have been meeting with big tech to demand more and more censorship of what they call anti-Israel disinformation.
And there's now actually a report out that suggests that Israel adopt EU-style censorship laws online that would require platforms to remove anti-Israel disinformation and to punish them if they don't.
And one of the primary examples of anti-Israeli disinformation that this report cites is the claim that the IDF killed dozens of civilians on October 7th, even though There is ample evidence to prove that that's exactly what happened.
Things that the Israeli government is calling disinformation that ought to be removed from online.
Now, we haven't spent a lot of time delving into one prong of all of these conflicts, which is the issue of mass rape and the like.
There are other people who have covered that extensively.
But just to give you a little bit of a perspective on this, The New York Times ended up publishing what it thought would be the definitive article proving once and for all that Hamas engaged in mass rape of Israeli women.
It was written by Jeffrey Gettleman, who is the longtime reporter for the New York Times, but then it was also written by Anat Schwartz, who really isn't a journalist at all, she's an Israeli activist, and someone named Adam Sella.
And it turns out that he also has some very sketchy credentials, clearly is a pro-Israel activist as well.
It was titled, this December, it was titled, Screams Without Words, How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on October 7th.
And it reported to say the following, quote, a Times investigation uncovers new details showing a pattern of rape, mutilation, and extreme brutality against women in the attacks on Israel, A video was shot in the early hours of October 8th by a woman searching for a missing friend at the site of the rave in southern Israel where, the day before, her mass terrorist massacred hundreds of young Israelis.
One family knew exactly who she was, Gal Abdush, mother of two from a working class town in central Israel who disappeared from the rave that night with her husband.
Based largely on the video evidence, which was verified by the New York Times, Israeli police officials said they believed that Ms.
Abdush was raped and she became a symbol of the horrors visited upon Israeli women and girls during the October 7th attacks.
Now, immediately upon publication of this definitive article proving mass rape on October 7th by Hamas in Israel, people quoted in the article and family members of alleged victims said the New York Times got everything wrong, including identifying certain victims of rape who were not in fact raped.
It then caused a massive conflict within the New York Times newsroom.
It was supposed to be the lead story on the very popular New York Times podcast, The Daily, and it ended up never being included on that podcast because of concerns over its journalistic integrity.
All sorts of outlets have affirmatively debunked that New York Times article.
When it came time to submit the Pulitzer articles about Israel that the New York Times wanted to win a Pulitzer for their coverage of Israel, they very notably did not include what was supposed to be the definitive document.
They then subsequently announced that Anat Schwartz would never work with the paper again because the Twitter account ZSquirrel had found that she had liked all kinds of genocidal anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian statements, that she was clearly far from anything that resembled an objective reporter.
Today, a comprehensive UN report was issued.
And its bottom line was that Hamas committed war crimes on October 7th and Israel has committed multiple war crimes in Gaza in its response to that October 7th attack.
It also said this, quote, factual findings, acts committed by the Hamas-IS and Al-Qassam brigades and other Palestinians armed groups on 7th October 2023 in Israel.
The commission found indications that members of the military wing of Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups committed gender-based violence in several locations in southern Israel on October 7.
The commission has reviewed testimonies obtained by journalists and the Israeli police concerning rape but has not been able to independently verify such allegations.
Due to a lack of access to victims, witnesses, and crime sites, and the obstruction of the investigation by Israeli authorities, the Commission was unable to review the unedited version of such testimonies for the same reason the Commission was also unable to verify reports of sexualized torture and genital mutilation.
Additionally, the Commission found some specific allegations of rape to be false, inaccurate, or contradictory with other evidence or statements.
and discounted those from its assessment.
The New York Times article from today, summarizing that comprehensive UN report, which again, There's a lot of institutions that criticize Israel and pro-Israel advocates are trained to say that every institution willing to criticize Israel is anti-Israel and inherently even anti-Semitic and the UN is obviously one, even though the UN report concludes that Hamas is also guilty of war crimes.
Here was the headline in the New York Times about this report, quote, "UN report accuses both Israel and Palestinian groups of war crimes.
A commission produced the United Nations' most detailed examination net of the October 7th attacks and the subsequent wars in Gaza.
Quote, a United Nations commission investigating the October 7th attacks on Israel and the subsequent conflict in Gaza has accused both Palestinian armed groups and Israel of committing war crimes.
And the panel said that Israel's conduct of the war included crimes against humanity.
The commission also reviewed allegations by journalists and the Israeli authorities that Palestinian militants had committed rape, But it said that it had, quote, not been able to independently verify such allegations because Israel had not cooperated with the inquiry.
The report cited, quote, a lack of access to victims, witnesses, and crime sites and the obstruction by the Israeli authorities.
Quote, crimes against humanity committed by Israel and Gaza, the commission said, included, quote, extermination, murder, gender persecution targeting Palestinian men and boys, forcible transfer of the population, torture and inhuman and cruel treatment.
The panel said Israeli forces use sexual and gender-based violence.
Yes.
Including forcing nudity and sexual humiliation as, quote, an operating procedure against Palestinians in the course of forced evacuations and detentions.
Quote, both male and female victims were subjected to such sexual violence, the report said, but men and boys were targeted in particular ways.
The treatment of men and boys was intentionally sexualized as an act of retaliation for the attack it added, referring to October 7th.
Now there was just a report in the New York Times that had traced and tracked what a lot of human rights organizations have been documenting for a long time.
Israel has detained thousands of people in Gaza with no trial.
And has long been imprisoning residents of the West Bank with no due process at all.
And people get out of those prisons and they say they were abused, sexually assaulted, tortured in all kinds of extreme ways.
And the New York Times investigation essentially confirmed that all of those things are in fact happening.
That indeed, when it comes to, for example, beheaded babies, We see a lot of videos and a lot of evidence and documentation of beheaded babies in Gaza from Israeli bombs and other kinds of attacks.
And we see the widespread use of sexual violence and sexual assault inside these Israeli dungeons, these places where people get put by the thousands and disappeared with no right to any contact with the outside world, with no ability to speak with lawyers, That is the massive torture system, the massive assault and abuse and sexualized violence system that is actually documented.
Now again, none of this is to deny that there are horrors committed by Hamas inside of Israel on October 7th.
That's beyond debate.
We said that the very first night we came on the air on October 9th, and we talked about this for the first time, as well as making very lengthy arguments about why that attack by Hamas could not be justified because of the civilian targeting that it entailed, although a lot of that analysis was based on claims that have turned out to be false about what Hamas did inside Israel.
And whatever your views are, you might support Israel, you might support the war, the US financing and arming of the war in Israel.
But whatever else is true, you should never tolerate being manipulated and propagandized with deliberate lies that come from the government and the media.
And that is exactly what happened over and over in the most consequential ways.
that not only shaped the world's perception of what happened on October 7th, the subsequent Israeli attack in Gaza, but continue to shape it to this very day.
All right, one of the topics that I have covered most over the last five years is the obsession that has been deliberately cultivated inside the United States with viewing Russia not just as an adversary or even an enemy, but an existential threat to the United States.
And it's been very bizarre to watch the trajectory of this because if you go back to the very first president who dealt with Vladimir Putin, which was Bill Clinton, and then go through every president after that, George W. Bush, and then Barack Obama, and then Donald Trump, as well as a wide range of diplomats and secretaries of state,
They always said the same thing, which is Vladimir Putin is a rational, constrained actor in the world, that you can deal with him, that you can make deals with him, that he's very wise, very smart, very shrewd, and basically takes rational actions to protect Russian interest.
Never once did any of these people, these presidents or diplomats, ever claim that he was some kind of genocidal monster, some Hitler figure, some psychopath.
That all appeared overnight.
And it happened for two reasons.
One, that many Americans were convinced that the reason Donald Trump won in 2016, defeated Hillary Clinton, was because of the Kremlin.
And so they learned to really hate Vladimir Putin and Moscow again, because they were convinced that that was the reason Hillary lost.
But the other reason, the related one, was the Russiagate fraud.
And my biggest breach, my first breach with, let's call it the left, my most serious breach, took place in the middle of 2016 and then for the next several years when I immediately started doubting and heaping a lot of skeptical scorn on this Rushgate narrative that I knew was coming from the CIA and the FBI.
And one of my main concerns was that it was just fake.
Journalistically, it was, there was no evidence to demonstrate the core claims as Robert Mueller ended up concluding But the other concern I had was that it was creating a very dangerous environment between the world's two largest nuclear powers, to the point where any conversations between American officials on the one hand and Russian officials on the other were deemed treasonous, virtually.
And it created a climate where no American official wanted even to talk to Russian officials.
Jeff Sessions had too trivial in passing conversations with Russian officials when he was in the Senate and by then he was Trump's Attorney General and they tried to put him in prison over it.
They put, they charged Michael Flynn.
With felonies because he was the National Security Advisor incoming in the transition for picking up the phone and calling the Russian ambassador to the United States to try and create good relations, what has always been done during the transition.
So the climate that was created was a very dangerous one.
It insisted that Russia was our grave enemy and that it was somehow even treasonous to talk to the Russians.
And you can see that it had not only a domestic political aim, but also a geostrategic one, a geopolitical one coming from the US security state to turn Russia back into a hardcore American enemy.
And I would suggest you could draw a straight line from that narrative.
to all of the anti-Russian phobia inside both the established wings of both parties to the war in Ukraine.
And now that it appears likely, almost I would say inevitable, that there's no way that the U.S. and NATO can win this war as they defined victory at the start, which was expelling every Russian troop from every inch of Ukrainian territory, including Crimea, If anything, the Russians are gaining more territory as we go along.
People are getting more and more desperate.
We've talked about Emmanuel Macron openly and repeatedly talking about the potential to deploy NATO troops as combat soldiers to fight against the Russian army inside Ukraine.
The Biden administration for the first time just permitted the Ukrainians to use American-provided missiles and other weapons to strike Russians inside Russia on Russian soil?
This is all escalating still in a very dangerous way.
And just to illustrate just how far away we are from anything even remotely rational, I want to show you a discussion that the Free Press, which is Barry Weiss's media outlet, published and produced.
It was on Barry Weiss's podcast, which I believe is called Honestly.
I believe that's the name of the podcast, or Honestly Speaking.
And the guest host was Michael Moynihan.
He's been around for a while.
He used to work at Vice.
He hosted his own podcast.
He's a fanatical supporter of aggressive Warhawk policy in general, but Israel in particular.
That's obviously a prerequisite to working at the Free Press as somebody who's whose views are published and he was speaking to a Russian dissident Ilya Padomarev who is a former member of the Russian Duma but has turned into one of those kind of dissidents
like you know we heard from all those Iraqi dissidents in the run-up to the Iraqi war assuring Americans that it would be extremely easy to topple Saddam Hussein that we would be welcomed as liberators these dissidents who laughed who don't speak for the people but you know we hear from Iranian dissidents all the time who say the same thing so listen to this conversation that Barry Weiss's news site promoted a
About how easily the United States could facilitate a coup in Russia and then how we could take Moscow.
Just listen to how detached from reality, but how incredibly dangerous this is.
You have a leader in Vladimir Putin who has effectively shut down all opposition media, controls the courts, the judiciary.
By the way, that's all true of Vladimir Zelensky as well.
He has shut down opposition media, he controls the courts.
Any dissent from him results in prison, as happened with the American citizen Gonzalez who died in prison.
They suspended elections.
Zelensky is the president of Ukraine indefinitely.
But we don't talk about that because Ukraine is our ally.
We only pretend to be concerned about that sort of thing when it's our enemy, which is Russia.
- ...really in the hands of the state, invades countries, participates in the 500, 600,000 dead in Syria, can poison people multiple times, can assassinate them in foreign countries, and no one does can assassinate them in foreign countries, and no one does a thing. - By the way, the United States also invades other countries The United States assassinates people in other countries with no due process.
No one does a thing.
These people are so drowning in nationalistic propaganda that I don't, I mean, Mike Moynihan, I know him reasonably well.
I've been on that podcast a couple times.
I think I've met him a few times, talked to him.
He's a reasonably smart person.
It's just that they get so blinded by propaganda that he can say all these things about what Putin does without realizing that Zelensky does the same things, without realizing that the United States does the same things, far more than Russia does when it comes to invading other countries, bombing other countries, killing people around the world, including American citizens, as happened under President Obama, where he claimed the right to assassinate by drone even American citizens with no due process, and then carried that out twice in Yemen, where he killed two American citizens, and
See, that's how you get a lot of these deranged conclusions is by beginning with a world that is completely made up and is just trenched with propagandistic blindness.
I mean, how do you dislodge a person like that when the international community kind of shrugs their shoulders and says, you know, we can supply Ukraine with weapons, but even that comes up against resistance in most Western countries.
You know, yes, there is a problem because many countries, and first of all is the United States, are very shy to support this Russian resistance.
They find a gazillion different excuses why it shouldn't be done.
Okay.
Remember how we're always told that one of the worst things that ever happened was that the Russians interfered in our domestic politics?
Think about what they're saying, what they're angry about, which is that the United States is too cautious, too reluctant to go arm and fund and finance opponents to Vladimir Putin inside Russia.
So we're supposed to go and massively interfere in their politics, but if they produce a few Russian Facebook bots and a few fake Twitter accounts, this is a grave assault on everything decent.
And by the way, it's amazing to say that we're reluctant to interfere in Russia's sins.
You can find a Time Magazine cover story when the fall of the Soviet Union happened, and the Russians had an election, and Boris Yeltsin, a good friend of the West, was elected.
And the Time Magazine celebrated on its cover story the fact that it was Americans responsible for his election, that we facilitated his election.
But even more recently, one of the reasons Vladimir Putin hates Hillary Clinton is because when Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State under President Obama, They openly funded opposition groups to Vladimir Putin, openly, through things like the National Endowment of Democracy, which is a fund that the United States government uses supposedly to promote democracy as if that's our aim in the world.
That's designed to do not interference in other countries through fake Facebook pages or Twitter bots, but by financing opposition groups and riling them up like we did in Ukraine to overthrow the elected president in 2014.
And he's complaining we don't do enough of that inside Russia, that we should be controlling and manipulating domestic Russian politics even more, but it gets so much worse.
Yeah.
The government's not going to meet with you.
You know, we meet in private with a lot of different people, but not officially.
And they're very much afraid of showing and expressing any public support.
They like people who do like human rights things, you know, maybe a little bit of counter propaganda.
But those who have a real role in actual resisting and fighting for freedom, no, that's, you know, they prefer to keep out.
So according to him, the United States government is very happy To interfere in Russia by pushing human rights narratives, by engaging in counter-propaganda, meaning spreading all kinds of agitation and riling up the Russian population against Putin, the exact thing that we claim we were so offended by when they did to us in the 2016 campaign.
He's saying, no, the US government is very happy to do that out in the open.
And even for those of us who engage in real resistance against Putin, which as you're about to learn means that they want to overthrow him in a violent coup, he's saying the US government will meet with us in private.
They just don't want to meet with us out in the open.
They don't want to admit that they are working with people who want to facilitate regime change and a coup against the president of the country with the largest nuclear stockpile in the world.
This is the mentality that you're hearing here.
The regime is actually way more fragile than it actually looks.
And if you saw the mutiny that that was done by Evgeny Prigozhin, that's the illustration of my words.
I know many people in Washington, D.C., after that happened, I was saying this all the time, that if you have 5,000 armed and trained people, you can actually go and capture Moscow.
And I say, ah, it's a fantasy, you know?
Okay, listen to this rationale.
He's saying that all you need are 5,000 armed people to take over Moscow, overthrow the Russian government, and his proof of that, his proof of theory, is what happened with the Wagner Group and Pregosian.
Now, just to remind you of what actually happened there, when Purgosian did his little rebellion, his little insurrection, that wasn't even aimed at Putin, really, but it was aimed at the defense officials whom he had decided were constraining him in Ukraine.
He had 25,000, not just armed men, but highly trained soldiers.
I mean, these were people who were working for him as mercenaries, who were extremely good fighters.
The people under Prigozhin were the ones who had some of Russia's most important victories in Ukraine.
These were hardcore fighters.
And he didn't have 5,000 of them.
He had 25,000 of them.
And although I remember so well when it happened, Pretty much every alleged Russian expert and fake Russian expert in the United States on social media and in Europe were acting as though this was the end of the Putin government, that this was a real coup.
The Russian government crushed that in 12 hours.
By the time you woke up the next morning, there was no more rebellion.
There was no more insurrection.
And then Purgosian, of course, ended up dead two months later.
And they crushed it like that.
I mean, it would be like saying, oh, all you need is 5,000 people to march into Washington.
All you need is 5,000 armed people.
You can take over the government.
You can overthrow Biden, enter the White House.
That's how insane that is.
Russia is a major military power, even more so now than they were two years ago when they ended up in a proxy war with all NATO.
But this is the kind of thing we heard before the Iraq War.
Oh, don't worry.
You just go in.
Everyone hates Saddam Hussein.
The minute you're there, the whole population will turn against him.
They're way more fragile than you think and we ended up stuck there for over a decade with thousands of our own soldiers and over a million Iraqis ending up dying from that conflict.
Again, this is what Barry Weiss's media outlet, her podcast called Honestly Speaking, is promoting.
He's saying the proof that all you need is 5,000 people is what happened with Purgosian.
What happened with Purgosian was he had 25,000 extremely well-trained fighters and they took a Russian helicopter out of the sky.
That's how sophisticated and well-armed they were.
And within 12 hours, they didn't exist anymore.
You are dreaming.
And when they saw it, they actually called me and said, Ilya, looks like you have a proof of your concept.
You know it.
Honestly, with Barry White.
People called him after the Prigozhin coup that lasted barely 12 hours, with five times the number of soldiers that he says he needs to perpetrate a coup inside Moscow.
And someone apparently told him, this is proof of your concept, as if that coup succeeded.
But I think the more important point here is that if you are a minimally sane person, the idea that you think the United States should perpetrate a coup inside Russia and overthrow the government of Vladimir Putin, and that's what Michael Moynihan was saying, he was saying, how do we get rid of this guy?
What do we need to do to get rid of this guy?
Obviously the international community won't.
Yeah, you know why they won't?
Because it's unbelievably insane to even muse on the possibility, let alone contemplate a plan for overthrowing Vladimir Putin, in part because, again, they have the largest stockpile of nuclear weapons on the planet.
But also, precisely because of that, you have no idea who would come next after Putin, who would then take over after Putin.
And why would anyone want to roll the dice?
As I said, Putin for 25 years has obviously been a responsible steward of the nuclear arsenal that Russia is sitting on because there's been no use of nuclear weapons.
And every president, if you go back before Biden and look at what they said about Putin, and the government's position was about Putin, you'll all hear the same thing as I said.
So the fact that anybody with any kind of platform, let alone one on this Barry White site, can seriously sit there and talk about how the US government should be doing more to overthrow the Russian government, should overthrow Vladimir Putin in a coup that the United States openly finances, arms and supports, is a level of insanity that is hard to describe.
But I think it's such an important... The reason why I wanted to show you this is because, you know, you go back in the Cold War and fear of nuclear war was a driving factor.
And that's because we should fear a nuclear war.
It will end the species.
It will end the war.
It will end the world.
The United States and the Soviet Union came very close on at least two occasions of blowing up the entire world through their use of their nuclear arsenals.
And everything the United States did in the Cold War and everything the Soviet Union did in the Cold War was about trying to ensure, whether it was through miscommunication or misperception or unintended escalation, that the countries didn't end up in a nuclear conflict unintentionally.
And it succeeded, though barely.
I'm talking about, these are like little kids playing with, you know, like a machine gun and thinking it's funny.
We have completely lost the fear of nuclear weapons.
Even though the kind we have now are infinitely more powerful than the ones that almost blew up the world during the Cuban Missile Crisis and during the Cold War.
Trump talks about that a lot.
He was obviously affected when he got briefings about what these weapons are and what they will do.
Talks about that a lot.
And obviously, that's of course true.
But we are so Drowning in this this kind of antipathy toward Moscow and to this view that Russia is the supreme enemy as though they're a threat to our country and to our way of life and to our government as if it's 1957.
That it's not just that people want to go to war with Russia, There are a lot of people wanting a lot more U.S.
involvement in Ukraine against Russia.
It's that they scoff at this point at the fear of nuclear weapons.
In fact, there were articles written in places like the Atlantic trying to claim we don't need to worry about nuclear weapons.
There's a survivable nuclear war.
There are limits to nuclear war that would probably happen.
It wouldn't destroy the entire species.
We can't be blackmailed by it any longer.
I mean, this conversation, though it seems like it's a kind of rational and reasonable one because the way they're talking and the platform on which they're talking is a kind of insanity that I would suggest to you is beyond dangerous and is much more pervasive in the United States than we typically realize because of how normalized it's become.
All right, so that concludes our show for this evening.
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