Media Converts Taboos About Ukraine Into Acknowledged Truths; Orthodox Rabbis on Condemning Israeli War; PLUS: Media Denies Biden’s Decline
TIMESTAMPS:
Intro (0:00)
Ukraine’s Censorship Regime (9:27)
Interview with Rabbi Yisroel Dovid Weiss & Rabbi Dovid Feldman (33:48)
Outro (1:22:10)
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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, ever since Russian troops entered Ukraine in February of 2022, it has been essentially taboo in Western media to express any criticisms toward Ukraine or its president, Vladimir Zelensky.
It was equally taboo To point out the reasons Ukraine had so little chance to win the war against Russia and the sense of how victory was defined, namely expelling all Russian troops from every inch of Ukrainian soil, including even Crimea.
It mattered little, in fact, not at all, whether any of those statements were true or false.
Worse than false, they were banned, declared off-limits.
And the price for uttering them was not only marginalization from mainstream media discourse, but also official attacks, official attacks.
On your character that usually included formal accusations that one was a Russian agent or a Kremlin propagandist.
Sometimes though the truth is too clear and visible to hide under waves of propaganda and threats of reputational destruction.
Slowly but surely the Western media has finally begun acknowledging the obvious.
That Ukraine is losing this war, that it has major problems manning its weakening front lines, that more and more Ukrainians are refusing, often with violence, to be used as cannon fodder by being conscripted and sent to the front line and perhaps worst of all, Ukraine under President Zelensky is very, very far away from the noble democracy we were told we were fighting for.
If anything, Zelensky is a classic authoritarian and wannabe tyrant who exhibited those traits even before the Russian invasion and is now accelerating them, as all authoritarians do, by using this war as his excuse.
It is truly bizarre yet deeply illuminating to watch how shamelessly media discourse switches overnight When facts force them to do so.
What was prohibited as Russian propaganda as recently as six months ago is now suddenly widely acknowledged by Western media outlets.
And over the past week in particular there have been at least three major articles by once blindly loyal pro-Ukraine media outlets that show just how grim is the situation for Ukraine.
Then, screaming racist or bigot at those who disagree with us has been a common staple of American political discourse for some time now.
to pay for and to arm without end.
Then, screaming racist or bigot at those who disagree with us has been a common staple of American political discourse for some time now.
We have seen over and over how this lowly rhetorical tactic was weaponized against right-wing thought.
Since October 7th, it has been endlessly used by pro-Israel loyalists against those who criticized the Israeli and American role in the war in Gaza.
Indeed, it is not an exaggeration to say that the functional, effective definition of anti-Semitism is quote one who criticizes or opposes Israeli actions in general and its war in Gaza specifically.
That is really meant what is meant when someone calls another person an anti-Semite.
Now there's virtually nobody who has expressed who has expressed opposition to the Israeli war who has not been publicly branded an anti-Semite at some point.
There are so many strange and disturbing aspects to this discourse of calling everyone an anti-Semite.
Chief among them is that there are a non-trivial number of Jews, a very significant and vocal contingent, both inside Israel and out of it, who have been very vocal in their condemnation of Israel's war in Gaza and in their mistreatment of Palestinians in general.
Now just as liberals often vilify black people or gay people as self-hating if they refuse to vote Democrat, President Biden, for example, famously pronounced, if you don't know that you're voting for me yet, then you ain't black.
It's extremely strange to label a viewpoint as anti-Semitic when a significant majority of Jewish people share that very view that is being maligned that way.
Now, among those who share the view that the Israeli war in Gaza is unjust are two Orthodox rabbis, Yisrael David Weiss and Rabbi David Feldman, who believe that the Israeli war is not only wrong, but a violation of core Jewish religious values and principles.
And we will speak to them tonight so that you can hear their not very often heard perspective.
Finally, videos of Joe Biden frequently surface that confirm what Americans already know about him.
That he is aging in a way that has left him with serious cognitive impairment, to the point where he sometimes barely knows where he is or what he is supposed to be saying.
The evidence proving that cognitive decline is overwhelming.
From reporting, to first-hand accounts, to simply comparing his conduct and speech now to what it was even 5 years ago or 10 years ago.
Nonetheless, most of the U.S.
corporate media will really say or do anything to ensure Trump's defeat, even if it means outright lying.
And if you think that's hyperbole, look at what they did in 2016 when they spent virtually every day spreading and ratifying the false Russiagate collusion conspiracy theory.
And then what they did again in 2020 when they claimed that incriminating reporting about Joe Biden was, in fact, the byproduct of fake documents, in other words, Russian disinformation.
With that goal in mind of manipulating the 2024 election, they are now insisting that the videos that show Biden's incapacitation are somehow fake.
And they really seem to believe they are able to convince Americans to trust the media's partisan claims more than they trust their own eyes and their own judgment.
We will examine their latest self-humiliation in pursuit of manipulating another presidential election.
Now, before we get to that, a few programming notes.
First of all, several weeks ago, I traveled To Maine, where Tucker Carlson spends much of the year, and that is where he broadcasts from and has his podcast, and I sat down with him for over two hours in order to discuss a wide range of topics, many of which we cover on the show frequently, including the issue of free speech and the right-wing hypocrisy on censorship since October 7th, the bipartisan war machine, the war in Ukraine,
The attempts to imprison whistleblowers and people who bring the truth like Julian Assange and Edward Snowden as well as the Israeli war in Gaza and a whole variety of other issues.
The funny part about this is I sat down at that table with Tucker and began what I thought was just chatting with him while we waited for the show to start and in fact the show had already started and it took me nine and a half minutes to ask him, because he was becoming very formal in his questions, whether we had already started.
And then he suddenly said, yeah, we've been rolling from the beginning.
And I said, okay, that's fine.
So it was interesting to go back and look at that because I really had no idea that we were rolling.
I thought we were just talking privately.
But I think the whole conversation is really worth hearing.
These are, like I said, are topics that are often covered on this show, but they got covered in a different way because of the exchange between myself and Tucker, because of the format that allowed for very deep dives into a lot of these topics.
You can find that podcast on any of Tucker Carlson network feeds, including on X, on his own site, on YouTube, and wherever else that podcast is found.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update starting right now.
One of the constants when it comes to the effort by the American government and their media to sell a new war is that we are always told the war is about much more than geostrategic considerations or fights for money or resources or capital.
We're always told that we can feel good about the war because what we're really doing is going to war in order to fight tyranny and help defend democracy.
We were told that about the war in Vietnam, that we were going to free the Vietnamese people from the government that they actually preferred.
We were told that in 2003 that we were going to invade Iraq in order to liberate the people there from Saddam Hussein and bring democracy to their country and therefore to the region.
We were told that about the journey where we fought to dislodge Bashar al-Assad in Syria and Muammar Gaddafi in Libya.
And of course, we are constantly told that and have from the beginning been told that about the war in Ukraine, that among the reasons we're there is because Ukraine is a pristine and important democracy that believes in freedom of speech and press, whereas the invaders are hardcore authoritarians who throw dissidents in prison, don't allow any oppositional media.
And for a long time it's been so obvious that this is a propagandistic fraud that Ukraine itself and Zelensky in particular have long attacked and eroded and even shut down core basic rights of free speech and free press and dissent even before Russia invaded in February 2022.
And since then, Ukraine has basically stopped even resembling a democracy at all and instead looks like the exact tyranny that it has long been.
Now, if you had said this in February 2022, pointed out that Ukraine and Zelensky are not Democrats, With a small D, or pointed this out all throughout 2023, you would be immediately accused of being a Russian propagandist, of a Kremlin agent, because you're spreading Kremlin propaganda by attacking Zelensky in Ukraine, something that was so prohibited.
And now here we are, two and a half years into this war, and even the very media outlets that rendered those views taboo, criticism of Zelensky in Ukraine, Arguments that there's no democracy in Ukraine at all are now finally having to acknowledge it and cover it.
Because even many people inside Ukraine are screaming and yelling and denouncing Zelensky for attacking basic free press rights, including journalists who had long supported Zelensky in the war.
Here from the New York Times, the paper of record on June 18th, quote, a big step back In Ukraine, concerns mount over narrowing press freedoms.
Journalists say they are subject to increasing restrictions and pressure from the government of President Volodymyr Zelensky, adding that the measures go beyond wartime security needs.
A Ukrainian reporter who revealed that a state news agency tried to bar interviews with opposition politicians said he received a draft notification the very next day.
Ukraine's domestic spy agency spied on staff members of an investigative news outlet through peepholes in their hotel rooms.
The public broadcaster has decried what it says is political pressure on its reporting.
Journalists in groups monitoring press freedoms are raising alarms over what they say are increasing restrictions and pressures on the media in Ukraine under the government of President Vladimir Zelensky that go well beyond the country's wartime needs.
Journalists and media groups say that a string of recent cases have pointed to an increasingly restrictive reporting environment.
Analysts say the government's efforts to control the media appear to be aimed at crimping positive coverage of the opposition, and suppressing negative coverage of the government and the military.
Reporters for the state news agency, Ukrinform, which is supposed to be nonpartisan, received a list from their management late last year of opposition figures and local elected officials labeled, quote, undesirable.
For quoting in articles, in the city of Odessa, reporters were instructed to cite only presidential appointees in some cases.
In leave, reporters were told to avoid quoting the elected mayor, Andrei Saadavi, a prominent politician seen as a possible future candidate for the presidency.
Ukraine's raucous and competitive television news landscape before the war was consolidated by Mr. Zelensky's government into a single state-controlled broadcast.
After Russia's invasion, the government presented the arrangement known as Telemarathon as necessary for airing reliable news during the war.
But it excluded opposition channels and ran such consistently upbeat reports, even as fighting bogged down that a majority of Ukrainians now say they do not trust it.
A U.S.
State Department report said the program had, quote, enabled an unprecedented level of control over primetime television news in Ukraine.
Does any of that sound remotely like a democracy?
Now, of course, the argument that Zelensky is making is one that all tyrants and authoritarians make, namely that you can't afford to give freedom to the citizenry whenever there's a threat to national security.
That was, of course, the argument that George Bush and Dick Cheney constantly made for eroding the basic constitutional rights and liberties of American citizens by saying we're involved in a war, a global war on terror, and we can't have the same kind of rights, like the right not to be spied on by our government without warrants, the right to due process if we're going to be arrested.
And it was all justified by the war, and I think one of the lessons we've learned as Americans, in fact, over many decades, going back to World War II when Japanese Americans were interned in camps, and all the way back to World War I when Woodrow Wilson succeeded in enacting the Espionage Act of 1917.
That criminalized dissent against his policy of involving the U.S.
in World War I, and people were actually in prison for questioning Woodrow Wilson's war policies, is that even in times of crises and in times of war, the Constitution is not suspended.
Elections still get held.
People still have basic rights of due process and free speech.
But even if you want to believe, if you want to give Zelensky credit, oh yes, he has turned Ukraine into something other than a democracy, it's now a tyranny, but that's only because there's a war going on, it'll revert right back to the freedom-loving country that it was under Zelensky before the Russian invasion.
You should recognize that even before the Russian invasion, Zelensky was exhibiting all kinds of tyrannical behaviors, including cracking down and closing media outlets by accusing them of being too sympathetic to Russia.
Here from Reuters on December 15, 2021.
So there's three months before the Russian invasion.
There you see the headline.
Ukraine's crackdown on media assembly violates rights, says the U.N.
Quote, Ukraine's government has restricted media and freedom of expression and peaceful assembly, violating international law, the U.N.
Human Rights Office said on Wednesday.
The finding by the U.N.
Deputy High Commissioner for Human Rights, Neda Elnashif, was presented in a debate at the U.N.
Human Rights Council in Geneva amid mounting tensions between Ukraine and Russia.
Ukraine's closure of television channels and online media outlets were, quote, not in line with international human rights law.
Activist journalists and critics have been persecuted for challenging Kiev government narratives or investigating corruption, and opposition political parties were under attack, she said in a report documenting incidents since 2019.
That's three years, three years before the Russian invasion.
Now again, Does anyone believe that we're actually in Ukraine to save democracy?
We don't go to war in order to save democracy or defend democracy.
We have no problem at all with tyranny, as long as the tyrants are pro-American.
That's why we are allies and partners with some of the most tyrannical regimes on the planet, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, the Gulf States and many more.
And that's exactly what our position is regarding Ukraine.
The idea that we're fighting for Ukrainian democracy is the pretext for the war.
It is never the actual reason, in part because Ukraine and Zelensky are not democratically inclined at all.
In fact, you can go back all the way to February of 2021, more than a year before the Russian invasion in 2022.
And here is DW, the German news site.
Ukraine bans pro-Russian TV stations.
Quote, three pro-Russian TV channels have gone off the air in Kiev after pro-Western President Volodymyr Zelensky signed a Ukrainian Security Council decree imposing sanctions for five years on eight media and TV companies.
The Kiev stations affected were ZIK, News 1, and 112 Ukraine.
Their broadcasts were only available Tuesday night via the video hosting platform YouTube, reported the Russian news agency TASS.
It identified the channel's owner as Taras Kozak, a lawmaker and member of the pro-Russian opposition platform For Life Party, quoting him as describing Zelensky's move as, quote, an act of blatant censorship.
Now, remember that the eastern part of Ukraine and the people who live there are overwhelmingly pro-Moscow and pro-Russia.
And, of course, their views should be represented in oppositional media outlets that have a different view to the pro-Western inclinations of Zelensky.
But long before the Russians invaded, he banned all those media outlets.
He closed them.
He decreed them no longer online.
The idea that this war was sold to us as going to protect Ukrainian democracy and Vladimir Zelensky as a flourishing democracy is laughable.
Now, on top of that, In June of 2023, this was not very well discussed, Zelensky himself announced that there will be no more elections in Ukraine indefinitely until he decides that elections can be safely had once the war is over.
In other words, Zelensky, who was in power, declared himself indefinitely in power, not able to be removed by the Ukrainian people because he has banned Elections in Ukraine and cited a constitutional provision that he says allows that.
Whether that's true or not, banning elections indefinitely, declaring yourself in power, no matter what people think, especially when polls show that there's a lot of discontent with Zelensky, is the very opposite of what democracy entails.
Here's the video where Zelensky in June of 2023 announces that there will be no more Ukrainian elections for the indefinite future.
Will there be elections in Ukraine next year, is the question.
The answer, this is a global question, Zelensky says.
If we win, there will be.
So there will be no wartime martial law, no war.
Elections should be held in peacetime, when there is no war, according to the law.
And that's why this is so.
In other words, no, there won't be any elections at all.
We basically have martial law.
We're under a state of war.
And therefore, I'll be the president for the indefinite future.
Now, again, if you had talked about Ukraine and its government as attacking basic constitutional rights at any point over the last two years, even though it was commonly acknowledged over and over in the Western press before that, You would be instantly stigmatized as a Russian agent if you were a professor with a specialty in Ukraine, as some of our guests have been, and you didn't support this idea that Zelensky was this noble, patriotic leader fighting for Ukrainian democracy.
You just wouldn't be heard from in the media, in the New York Times, in the NPR, on any news stations.
You'd be excluded.
As John Mearsheimer has talked about, as he was, as other Ukrainian specialists have talked about, they were for simply having a dissident view.
It was a one-view Western media narrative and nothing else was allowed.
Now, one of the other key facts about this war that has been utterly suppressed in Western media discussions is the fact that Ukraine and Russia We're negotiating a peace deal very early on in the war in February and March of 2022.
And those negotiations were ongoing and extensive and came very, very close to actually a peace deal to averting the need for this war.
Ukraine would have just simply declared itself neutral, that they weren't going to join NATO, that they would be a neutral buffer zone between Russia on the one hand and the West on the other.
And that would have satisfied the Russians, along with granting certain forms of liberty and autonomy to the Russian-speaking ethnic Russians in the eastern part of Ukraine who don't want to be part of the centralized government in Kiev, which is why they've been declaring and fighting a war of independence, a separatist war, since 2014 when there was this coup, when the elected Ukrainian president was removed with the support of the United States.
Now here is finally the New York Times this week, or last week rather, June 15th, not only admitting that these negotiations took place, but describing in detail how close they actually got.
The headline was, Ukraine-Russian peace is as elusive as ever.
But in 2022 they were talking.
Quote, representatives from the warring nations held peace talks in the early weeks of the Russian invasion.
They fizzled.
Documents from those talks show why any new ones will face major obstacles.
An examination of the documents shows that the two sides clashed over issues involving weapons levels, the term of Ukraine's potential membership in the EU, And specific Ukrainian laws on language and culture that Russia wanted repealed.
Ukraine's negotiators offered to forego NATO membership and to accept Russian occupation of parts of their territory, but they refused to recognize Russian sovereignty over them.
In Istanbul, the Russians seem to endorse Ukraine's model of neutrality and security guarantees and put less emphasis on their territorial demands.
That is extremely close to a full agreement on all major issues.
Afterward, Mr. Medinsky, Russia's lead negotiator, said Ukraine's offer of neutrality meant it was, quote, ready to fulfill those principal demands that Russia insisted on for all the past years that they were hearing from Ukraine.
We're willing to give you the key things you want in order to revert this war.
Ukraine summarized the proposed deal in a two-page document called the Istanbul Communique, which it never published.
The status of Crimea was to be decided over a 10 to 15 year period, with Ukraine promising not to try to retake the peninsula by force.
Mr. Zelensky and Mr. Putin would meet in person to finalize a peace treaty And strike a deal on how much Ukrainian territory Russia would continue to occupy.
Think about what would happen if Ukraine and Russia had entered a peace deal in February and March of 2022, as they got very close to doing.
Think about hundreds of thousands of lives, Ukrainian lives and Russian lives, that would have been saved.
Massive destruction in Ukraine could have been averted.
The United States and other Western countries spending hundreds of billions of dollars to keep this war fueled and arming it would have been unnecessary and Russia wouldn't have been dragged into a war, an enduring, sustained war, that caused them to focus all their attention on building their military.
The problem, of course, was that that was exactly what the West wanted.
Whether you believe or not that the West provoked Russia to interfere in Eastern Ukraine.
There are documents at the highest levels of the U.S.
government that made very clear for a long time that everyone in Washington knew that if you talk too much about Ukrainian membership in NATO, it will provoke the Russians to invade Eastern Ukraine and Crimea.
Leave aside that question of whether the West provoked it deliberately or even unintentionally.
The reality is there was a serious chance To avoid a horrific and destructive war.
And the New York Times is finally acknowledging how close the Ukrainians and Russians got to that kind of a deal.
They showed you the documents where both sides seemed very pleased with how much progress was being made with concessions from the other side.
Now, what the New York Times did not mention is the reason that peace deal never happened.
And that was because Western leaders, particularly the UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson and President Joe Biden, intervened to impede, prevent, and even ban Ukraine from pursuing that kind of peace deal.
Here from Ukrainska Pravda in October 21, 2023, quote, former German Chancellor claims he, quote, mediated the situation between Ukraine and Russia in 2022.
Gerhard Schroeder, former German Chancellor Democrat, German Social Democrat Chancellor, known for his friendship with Russian President Vladimir Putin, has claimed that the US disrupted, quote, peace talks between Ukraine and Russia at the beginning of the full-scale invasion and that Kiev invited him to mediate.
The former chancellor also mentioned the five points of what was supposedly a peace plan being discussed at the time.
Ukraine's rejection of NATO membership, two official languages in Ukraine, Donbass' autonomy, security guarantees for Ukraine, and negotiations on the status of Crimea, which is very similar to what the New York Times reported.
Quote, the only people who could resolve the war over Ukraine are the Americans.
During the peace talks in March of 2022 in Istanbul, Ukrainians did not agree to peace because they were not allowed to.
They had to coordinate everything they talked about with the Americans first, Shura said.
And then in February 2023, CGTN reported, quote, former Israeli Prime Minister, and this was reported in many different outlets, that the former Israeli Prime Minister said, quote, the West, quote, interrupted Russia-Ukraine peace talks.
Former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett revealed to Israeli media that he traveled to Moscow as Israeli Prime Minister late March to broker an early ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine and that the two sides agreed to make compromises.
But the ceasefire talks were, quote, interrupted by the West.
The West decided to, quote, crush Putin rather than to negotiate, he said.
Speaking on a podcast with Israeli television channel 12, which lasted for almost 5 hours and was published on Sunday, Bennett said that after the outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine conflict last February, he tried to act as a mediator as he believed that there was still a chance to end the conflict by diplomatic means.
Bennett said that during his mediation, Zelensky promised not to join NATO.
And Putin dropped his main goals of special military operations, seeking, quote, disarmament and denazification of Ukraine, adding in his oppression.
Both Russia and Ukraine want a ceasefire and have drawn about 17 or 18 ceasefire drafts.
But at some point, the West decided, quote, to crush Putin rather than to negotiate, the Israeli prime minister said.
The former Israeli Prime Minister also said that all of his actions had been agreed in detail with the U.S., Germany, and France.
Quote, they interrupted the talks, he said.
Now, we've covered this many times.
There's a lot of other aspects to this war, including the increasing levels of violent Ukrainian resistance to being drafted.
Ukrainians increasingly are hiding in their own apartments, avoiding taking the bus.
Hiding and fleeing from Ukrainian recruitment officers because of how unwilling they are to go to war.
We've heard anecdotes and anecdotes and anecdotes.
The BBC had a video report that they published just last week extensively documenting how pervasive this has become.
Again, all things that have been visible and obvious for quite some time And I think the most important one is how close Ukraine and Russia got to a peace deal two and a half years ago that the United States and NATO allies, specifically Britain, purposely disrupted because they wanted Russia to be entrapped in a war.
Or as Naftali Bennett put it, they preferred to crush Putin than to allow the Ukrainians to forge a peace deal.
That is morally repugnant.
And even if you believe that the Russians are to blame for having invaded, the failure of the two sides to come to a peace deal when they were so close is obviously on the ledger of Joe Biden.
Another thing that's on his ledger.
He wanted this war to be prolonged indefinitely.
That's why he funded it and armed it to the very end.
And of course, the people have paid the largest price.
are the very people that we were told we were going there to save, which are the Ukrainians, in defense of a democracy which under Zelensky has long ceased to exist.
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Rabbi Israel David Weiss and Rabbi David Feldman are spokesmen for the Netanyahu Karta Orthodox Jewish Movement in America.
That is a prominent Orthodox sect of Judaism that was founded in Jerusalem back in the 1930s.
Both gentlemen have been outspoken in their opposition to the Israeli war in Gaza, even appearing at anti-war protests in the United States.
And because there's an attempt to suggest that most Jews or all Jews are in favor of all Israeli actions, including the war, or that somehow it's anti-Semitic to criticize Israeli war actions, we thought that having these two rabbis on to share their Religious-based perspective and the reason they're opposed to the Israeli project was something that our audience would benefit a lot from.
Gentlemen, welcome to System Update.
It's great to see you both.
We're really grateful that you took the time to talk to us tonight.
Yes, thank you.
Sure, so let me ask you just to begin, and you can choose whoever goes first, but I'd like you both to answer this.
Just for people who aren't familiar with your background and your directory, can you just talk a little bit about where and how you grew up, when you began your religious studies, and when you became rabbis?
Yes, maybe start first, I pray to the Almighty to bestow upon me His truth, His wisdom that I may be worthy of conveying His message and so inshaAllah I'll sanctify His name and bring peace to the world.
Firstly, we're not only opposed to what is happening since October the 7th, we are opposed to the entire existence of the state of Israel.
The ideology behind the state of Israel is Zionism.
And Zionism is a corruption of what Judaism is.
Judaism is a religion of 3000 years to be subservient to God.
And a political nationalist movement started over 100 years ago, 130, 140 years ago, called Zionism, which is a transformation basically to a nationalism to have a piece of land.
And they, in order to give it legitimacy, this movement simply is incorporating the religion Judaism as its backbone, as its facade, to claim the right
to have the rule over the Holy Land and that is in totally a distortion and totally a corruption of Judaism because Judaism does not permit the Jewish people since the destruction of the temple 2000 years ago for us to have any Jewish sovereignty in any part of the world
And there's a special prohibitions that we are not to return in mass in large numbers to the Holy Land and to reestablish any type of Jewish nationhood in the Holy Land.
Secondly, we're not allowed to rebel against any nations.
We ought to be loyal citizens that every country reside.
And thirdly, we're not to make any attempt to end the godly decreed exilic existence that we are in since the destruction of the temple.
We were told by God that we were not on that high spirituality that's required to be as a nation in the Holy Land and therefore we were expelled from the land as a nation.
As individuals we can live there.
But not as a nation and therefore the whole concept of Zionism that started with this movement of both mainly I got pictures Theodor Herzl and Ben-Gurion, Chaim Weizmann, these are people who are purely non-religious, anti-God, anti-the religion and they simply wanted to create a state for their
feelings for their emotions for their will to have their own nationhood and this is totally contradictory to the concept of exile contradictory that we're not allowed to fear war against another nation that we should be loyal citizens in every country and so the whole concept of Zionism is really antithetical and contradictory to Judaism and the rabbinical authorities around the world
We're in total opposition to this movement of Zionism prior to the establishment of the State of Israel, while it was being developed in Europe.
And all the rabbis, we put out books called The Rabbis Speak Out, where we compiled A hundred thirty years of religious Jewish opposition to Zionism.
These are the major, the leading authorities, Torah authorities from around the world and each in their style spoke up and said that we as Jews are forbidden to try to establish our own nationhood.
We are and they spoke against Zionism and the leaders and the corruption and that it's not Judaism till today.
It goes till today where the state was created and that we are standing in total opposition and therefore you will find around the world Invariably, the very religious communities, because we are religious Jews, we stand in opposition totally to the mere existence of the State of Israel.
And there's a lot more to speak about how we're being harassed, murdered by the Zionists.
And me personally, as you asked, my father escaped from the Nazis when they invaded Hungary.
His parents were killed in Auschwitz.
The majority of my family were killed in both Hungary and Poland.
My mother's family was from Poland.
My father's from Hungary, all of blessed memory.
And my father came to the United States.
He was actually a student and a follower of great saintly rabbis in Europe.
One of them was the most vociferous, outspoken voice against Zionism.
His name was Rabbi Chaim Eleazar Shapiro, of blessed memory, the Min Katzureba.
And my father moved to the United States, got married to my mother.
I was brought up in a very religious family that were anti-Zionist.
The schools that I attended, Beersmuch, Sansofa, all these were from European-style, Hungarian-style schools and they were all anti-Zionist.
So I had the privilege, the blessings of the Almighty that I grew up in a religious family, very religious.
And our teachings were to be Jews and to serve God and not the concept of establishing the state.
My mother told me, bless memory, that in Poland, the people, if a child became a Zionist, they would sit in mourning on this child as if he had died.
So that's basically...
Yeah, no, that's very helpful.
That's obviously pretty stark.
Rabbi Feldman, I definitely want to delve into even more the religious foundations, as you said, not just for your opposition specifically to the Israeli war in Gaza, but to your opposition to the entire Zionist project and to kind of understand what those religious and moral foundations are.
But I wanted to ask you, put the same question to you, Rabbi, just in terms of These views that you have, what is the background that led to them?
What is the background of your religious studies, of your decision to become a rabbi?
What was the kind of environment in which you emerged as a rabbi opposed to Zionism?
Yes, thank you.
I grew up in New York in a strongly religious, anti-Zionist family community.
Anti-Zionism was part of my education all my life.
I studied in New York, then I studied in London, England for 10 years, and then when I came back in 2000, year of 2000, I became a rabbi here.
Now my religious education is well connected with, in other words, a major part of my religious education I received was anti-Zionism.
So let's get into the substance of your views.
I think it would actually surprise a lot of people to know that there are a non-trivial number of very religious people, especially Orthodox rabbis, who share your views.
Probably not a majority, but certainly a non-trivial number.
And when I've heard Orthodox rabbis who are anti-Zionist in the past speak of kind of what went wrong in Both in Israel and among the Jewish diaspora when it came to not just being Zionist, but sort of supporting this aggressive militarism that we've seen.
I've heard a lot the idea that it's because of the secularism that dominates Israel, both its government and the people who elect them.
If that's something that you believe, and if not, you can sort of fill your own views in there.
What does that distinction have to do?
Why is secularism a cause of Jews in general going so wrong in terms of the traditions of Judaism?
This is a very good point.
Basically, it's not the only reason, the secularism that have turned so many Jews to support Israel.
There's so much more to it.
It was the Holocaust.
So many Jewish people were desperate after the Holocaust and not necessarily out of the choice they ended up being in Palestine.
But this is a whole story for itself.
But what you were mentioning about secularism, definitely this is a very strong element which have turned so many people to follow Zionism.
And the reason to it is quite simple.
We need to understand the great difference between Judaism and Zionism.
Judaism is a religion, a religion only.
No politics to it.
While Zionism is a purely political movement, in no way represents the Jewish religion.
It happens to be the other way around.
Basically, Zionism is an uprooting or a transformation of Judaism from a religion into something totally new, which is a nationalism.
Now, we need to understand that, like, for example, if you take myself, I am an American Jew.
I'm Jewish by the religion I follow, and I'm American by nationality.
There is no contradiction there.
So can be other Jewish people, there can be Canadian Jews, there can be Palestinian Jews, and there can be Moroccan Jews.
In other words, the nationality doesn't affect or interfere in their Jewishness.
Therefore, A Jewish person doesn't have to have a nationality in order to be Jewish.
Now, but what happens with people that no longer follow Judaism, you know, regardless what the reasons might be, we are not here to judge the individual, but if people no longer follow Judaism, now they need something to replace this Jewish identity.
And unfortunately, what Zionism has done to the Jewish people and to the Jewish religion is basically replacing Judaism with something new, something different, and something contrary to what Judaism was for thousands of years.
Now, therefore, you find people who insist to identify with Judaism, which is a nice concept, and they refuse to give up the Jewish identity, which is excellent.
But unfortunately, if they dropped what Judaism was for thousands of years and they take up something new, they end up adopting Zionism, which is the replacement.
Yeah, no, that's great.
So let me just ask you, Rabbi Weiss, and actually both of you, because I know you're very familiar with the arguments in favor of Zionism.
I think it's surprising to a lot of people.
You mentioned Theodor Herzl, who's essentially often credited as the father of modern Zionism as a kind of thought that was only at the beginning of the 20th century in the first couple of decades.
And then, of course, the State of Israel was recognized only a very short time after the end of World War II when Europe saw what was done in the Holocaust.
There were huge numbers of Jews in Europe that nobody wanted to take, and it was a way of sort of saying to the Jews, here, you can go here, this is your land now, and you don't have to stay in Europe.
But the argument was essentially that if you look at Jewish history over centuries, over millennial, and especially World War II and what happened with the Holocaust, that maybe not as a religious matter, but simply as a matter of survival, as a matter of pragmatism, Jews need to have their own state as a matter of pragmatism, Jews need to have their own state where they can live and where they govern and where they have a military to defend themselves because history has proven that if they don't They will be extremely vulnerable to persecution and even mass murder.
I understand that's not a religious-based argument, but why isn't that valid as a kind of pragmatic or survival-based argument?
Okay, well, with the help of the Almighty, I'm very, very happy that you brought this point up because that goes to the root, the core of why Zionism is totally unacceptable and totally discredited because The Jew is a person who we believe that there is an Almighty, there is a ruler to the world.
He gives reward, He gives punishment, a tsunami, a plague, God forbid, prosperity, everything we believe is controlled by the Almighty.
We don't question the Almighty.
Judaism is to be subservient to God, to accept His commandments.
As Jews, we accepted to be, to accept the 630 commandments that was given to Moses on Mount Sinai.
That was accepted and respected by the Jewish people throughout this 2,000 years of our exile.
The destruction of the temple that happened 2,000 years ago was not because of our physical lacking.
We were warned by the prophets, Ezekiel, Isaiah, Jeremiah, they warned the Jews when we were living in the Holy Land and there was a temple, they warned the Jews that we're not on that level of pureness, of holiness that is required to remain as a nation and we will be rejected and sent into exile and that came about with the destruction of the temple.
Now we do not in for one minute think that God is less powerful.
God is the same God.
The Almighty is the same Almighty since He created the world until today.
But we have changed.
We are under an exilic existence and forbidden to re-establish a nationhood.
Zionism comes and says, huh, where was God to protect you by the Crusades, by the Inquisition, and so on and so forth, till Hitler, although they were before Hitler, so let's be real, we shouldn't bring that subject here.
But basically they scorn the religious Jew who looks to God and says God is our protector and to him we have a covenant to follow his laws and if he says that we are forbidden to re-establish a Jewish nation not only that won't be a protection for us but that will be to detriment as the Torah warns us that if we will attempt to leave exile we will be hunted like animals God forbid.
So Zionism in its root is is based on heresy, on blasphemy, on rebellion against God, saying, where is God to protect you?
We have to have an insurance policy.
So that is the core element of Zionism.
And that is why we as Jews and our rabbis have pleaded with the Jewish people around the world, do not fall prey to this movement.
They may look inviting, they look enticing.
We're going to have a piece of land where people will stop harassing you as Jew, but you can't run away from the hands of God.
If you do, at least don't have the audacity to use the identity of the Jewish religion that clearly specifies, that says that God warns us, that it's God who's all-compassionate, wants us dispersed amongst the nations, and we are forbidden to re-establish wants us dispersed amongst the nations, and we are forbidden to re-establish our nation, and it will only bring to catastrophe, God forbid, if we will attempt to do such
And as we see, the state of Israel is a quagmire, is 76 years of death and suffering, of course, to the Palestinians that we are standing by and mourning and jubilating, Just beyond words watching their suffering in Gaza and so forth, but they've been a death trap for both Jews and Muslims since their establishment.
There hasn't been a year that goes by that there's not more death and suffering and it's purely because of their establishment of a nation.
Every time they'll use an excuse and try to vilify And claim that it's because these people are anti-semitic, and they're anti-semitic, and they're totally ignoring that what they're doing is because they're rebelling against God by establishing the state, and that will cause, as God warns us, that we should suffer, and that they are exacerbating anti-semitism and creating a rift between us and the people who are living in it.
So, like I say, they're using the emotions.
You asked about secularism.
They preyed upon the Jews who unfortunately were as a general rule distant from God.
They were reformed Jews that started like a hundred years prior to Zionism.
Reform means they're going to change.
There was a movement in Europe that started by Moses Mendelssohn, his name should be erased.
He was a person who was a scholar and he decided that he's going to create a new type of Judaism called Reform Judaism where you don't have to keep all the laws of the Torah and he claimed that Moses didn't take the Torah from God and it became very popular so the majority of Jews in Europe became non-religious
And they weren't keeping the Ten Commandments, the Sabbath, kosher and on and on and he went and from these he wanted that the Jews should assimilate amongst the nations and they should become just like doctors and lawyers and not beards and look like the other people of the world and therefore they'll be able to assimilate in society.
But that wasn't working well.
Jews were still being harassed.
So Zionism came along And they decided our solution is not to return to God, but that we are going to make our own nationhood and therefore we'll protect ourselves.
So they decided reform of assimilating is not working.
We're going to establish our protection and the gun, the Uzi, The Iron Dome, that's going to be our protection.
So it's purely blasphemy and heresy that is the establishment of the state.
That's why they also changed the language to Hebrew.
It's called Evrit, Modern Hebrew.
That's why when they read the Declaration of Independence, as I was showing you the picture that you showed on your screen, when you're seeing the historic moment of David Ben-Gurion, the first prime minister, reading the Declaration of Independence in 1948, instead of having rabbis, sages, saints at the instead of having rabbis, sages, saints at the dais, they have almost none of them are covering their heads with a Jew to cover his head to show that there's a God above him.
It's a law.
And here they're sitting over there.
You barely see if anybody's covering their heads.
And there's certainly no rabbis.
And the picture of Theodor Herzl on the top there, who wrote, and they don't, by the way, in the Declaration of Independence, they didn't even put God's name in.
And they wrote, Theodor Herzl, which they put out a book, Traditional Torah Opposition to Zionism.
Theodor Herzl wrote in his In his own diary, page 14, he wrote, the way to solve the problem of anti-Semitism is to speak to the head priest of Vienna to get an appointment with the Pope to make a mass conversion of all the Jews of Austria to Catholicism.
It should be done on a Sunday in the middle of the day with music and pride publicly.
We are the last generation that held on to the faith of our forefathers.
The conversion will be in St.
Stephen's Cathedral.
My grandparents died because they were Jewish.
As in all the generations, by the Crusades, by the Inquisition, they let themselves be tortured and burnt to remain for our religion because our soul is the basic of our life.
And we were just, God gave us a clothing called the body.
And these guys come along and they throw everything away.
And yet they use the facade, the name Judaism, the Star of David, to intimidate, to silence anybody who wants to stop their national goal.
And to accuse the people who are trying to stop their onslaught on the people of Palestine and on the people of the Jewish community who are living in Jerusalem who are pleading that they don't want this.
They get brutally beaten.
And to them, to the world, they say, we are Semites.
And the only ones who are opposing us are anti-Semitic.
Although they're brutally and busy beating the Jews who are standing there and pleading, we want our religion.
We don't want the occupation.
These Jews are never militant.
We don't carry guns.
We don't carry knives.
We're simply demonstrating on the streets and brutally attacked for 76 years by this Zionist movement.
They prey upon the secular Jews who are non, who don't know their religion, and they prey upon their emotions that they know that we suffered in exile so long, and they say to them, hey, God said that he's going to take the Jews back to the Holy Land.
Here's what your grandparents aspired for.
Here's what your dream is.
We are the culmination of exile.
The beginning of the redemption.
So they use the words of the Torah and they pray upon the ignorant of the religion and they use the emotions to really build their state and they use it also to entice the evangelistic Christians to support them because in the Torah they count on their ignorance of the Torah.
Also it says in the Torah that the children of Israel have to go to the land of Israel.
Totally they ignore The admonitions of the Torah that King Solomon wrote in his prophecy, that Jews are forbidden to re-establish one inch of Jewish sovereignty.
We are forbidden to return en masse to the Holy Land.
We are forbidden to rebel against nations.
God foresaw there'll be people like Zionists with God who's above time.
And he saw this will happen and he warned us, do not attempt to re-establish the state.
God is all compassionate.
There will come a time with His compassion He will end exile when all humanity will gather together and serve God in harmony.
Not become Jewish, but serve God in harmony and then God will build the temple without any human intervention and we will all serve God in harmony.
That's what we pray and And yearn for and that is why we were never a threat to the Muslim nations that took us in when we were being harassed by the Crusades and Inquisitions.
They took us in because they knew the Bible.
They knew the Jewish teaching and they knew that we don't aspire to take the land away from them because that's not Judaism.
And then Zionism comes along and destroys all of this and unfortunately breaches the laws of the Torah and tries to establish a state which they did.
And they are continually oppressing the indigenous populace, the Palestinian people, in the name of my religion.
And Jews around the world are in total opposition and we take umbrage this, we are hurt, we are humiliated because it's being done in the name of the religion that clearly states, do not a rebel against nation.
You are required, the Jews are required to show loyalty to the nation where they're living, to show gratitude to the people.
It was the Muslim people who took us in by the Crusades and Inquisitions, the Arab and Muslim lands, and the Ottoman Empire.
We flourished.
We flourished in Iran.
We flourished in Palestine under the Muslim leadership, and it was never an impediment to peace, the difference of religion.
So we don't have a religious conflict.
We simply have a movement that has no basis in the Torah, has no support in the Torah, that was opposed by all the religious leaders around the world, the Jewish religious leaders.
Until today, the very religious communities oppose it.
They are forcefully establishing their rule.
They made a rabbinate.
They have the chief rabbis, and they are simply cunning the world into supporting them.
And those who dare to differentiate between Judaism and Zionism, they vilify them.
They accuse them of being anti-Semitic, which is repugnant and false and hurts us to hear.
Because you have the Nation of Iran, Islamic Republic of Iran.
You have the professors and students in the United States and around the world who are simply, who say we love the Jews, we are friends with Jews, and many are Jews who are protesting.
And they say we don't, we just simply cannot accept This, this rebellion against God, this carnage, this horrendous attack on the people of Gaza, and this horrendous attack against the Palestinians in general.
And so it's totally It's an insult to the logic, to the basic common sense that God gave to the humanity to accept the narrative of the Zionists when they are constantly harping and saying that the ones who are opposing them are anti-semitic.
And especially when I show you that they are they are busy attacking the Jewish people who are standing in opposition.
I have been standing for 76 years.
Of course, the leadership of the Jewish communities, the very religious come to New York.
Right across from Manhattan, the largest concentration of religious Jews.
Williamsburg, Brooklyn, there's not one Israeli flag.
The same thing is where Rabbi Feldman worked in London, Stamford Hills, where there's not an Israeli flag.
When you go to Canada, or invariably you go to Jerusalem, the streets of Jerusalem, the very religious communities is anti-Zionist.
You can see where they're flying the Palestinian flags over there.
You can see their support And for the people of Palestine, they stand in, they get again, brutally, they sprayed with stink water, that's that chemicals that destroys their clothing.
And they stand there in the streets and plead that they don't want, here you see, stop the Zionist terrorist massacre in Gaza.
They get arrested because they refuse to serve in the Israeli army.
That's actually the point I wanted to pick up on, and I'm glad you raised that.
They refuse to do that.
That's actually the point I wanted to pick up on, and that's the point I'm glad you raised that.
And by the way, I wish there was a lot more attention paid to the relative harmony that Jews and Arabs lived in, both in what is now called Israel and Palestine, but also throughout the Middle East and Arab countries, as you referenced, including in Iran, where Jewish synagogues were including in Iran, where Jewish synagogues were permitted to thrive and Jewish people were permitted to thrive.
And it really became this kind of war-like atmosphere with the creation of the state of Israel and the expulsion that it required.
But Rabbi Feldman, let me ask you, And if you want to address the arguments, the very familiar ones, in favor of Zionism that I mentioned, feel free.
But I'd also like to add into that this kind of conflict that Rabbi Weiss was just alluding to, which is the division inside Israel among Orthodox Jews on the one hand and secular Jews on the other, and this kind of growing resentment and strain on Israeli harmony where Orthodox Jews, as many people don't know, refuse to fight in the Israeli military.
They refuse to be conscripted into it.
They're immune from service, and it's kind of left to the non-religious Jews to fight in the Israeli army.
Can you explain a little bit about that tension in Israel between religious Jews on the one hand and the secular Jews on the other when it comes to things like fighting in the military and fighting wars?
Well, the difference and let's call it the fight or the division between the Orthodox, the seriously religious people and the secular is going on already for the longest time.
And when it comes to serving in the military, this is a tension Which is going on, but we need to understand this religious anti-Zionist community in Israel is not here, you know, just simply disagreeing and like for one simple reason, they refuse to serve in the army.
We believe that this movement of Zionism, as Rabbi Weiss eloquently explained, the movement of Zionism is the most horrific and embarrassing uprooting of our religion and for us to take part in this and to join this or to help assist this in any way is basically the greatest violation of our religion.
We would never do that and we would give our lives for this.
Therefore you find people who are so strongly opposed and they do everything they can They are facing all intimidations, harassments, night raids, arrests, and this goes on, and they would never join this army.
All right, let me just stay with you for a second, Rabbi Feldman, and ask, you know, we've been discussing your opposition to Zionism as a project, as an ideology.
Let's talk a little bit about The specific war that the Israelis are waging right now against the people of Gaza, you could, I guess, conceive of a Zionist state that was basically peaceful, that tried to avoid fighting in alignment with Jewish values and morals, but then you have
A war that I think has shocked a lot of people around the world just in terms of its brutality, its savagery, the level of destruction, the recklessness and seemingly indifference to killing civilians and destroying their infrastructure.
What do you think about the Israeli war in Gaza?
And do you see that as almost an inevitable extension of Zionism itself?
Yeah, what we are witnessing now in Gaza, what we are seeing, this is horrific, this is terrible.
It's shocking to many people and it should be.
And therefore we find so many people who didn't realize until now what is going on.
They wake up now and they realize how wrong and how bad all of this is, how criminal this is.
But we have to understand this didn't start just now.
It's just people, more people are realizing now what is going on already for decades.
This is criminal not only for the past couple of months, this is criminal from the very beginning.
Now in addition to all what was explained before, how anti-Jewish all of this, how contrary to Judaism this is, this is criminal and we also have to be very very clear, this is not only crimes in international law.
These crimes being committed, as I said, not only now, but going on already since the very beginning of Zionism, is a violation of Judaism.
Killing and stealing, oppressing an entire people, all what was done from the very beginning is a true violation of Judaism, is criminal, and finally people are waking up and seeing what is going on.
This was the intention of Zionism in the first place.
Now supposedly this was supposed to be like the land without a people, for the people without the land, being peaceful, and not harming anyone.
But this was not the reality.
From the very beginning, they had an intention of overtaking the rule of the land, oppressing or expelling, making room for the new Zionist movement to settle.
This was criminal from the very beginning.
Rabbi Weiss, let me ask you that same question about your views of the Israeli actions in Gaza, and then specifically as well about this argument that, look, we were attacked on October 7th in a very brutal and violent way, and therefore we have no choice but to go after the people who did that, and therefore we have no choice but to go after the people who did that, destroy their capacity to attack us What do you make of the war itself and that specific justification for it?
Well, with the help of you, my friend, I just wanted to clarify that when we're talking about the beginning, in 1947, there was a declaration before the United Nations by the real chief rabbis of the Jewish community that was existing there for hundreds of years.
His name was Rabbi Dushinsky, I've lost memory, and he pleaded with the United Nations in 1947.
The United Nations ratified the State of Israel in 1948.
He then pleaded to the committee that was there from the United Nations, he said, we furthermore wish to express our definite opposition to a Jewish state in any part of Palestine.
This was continued after he passed on, and then other chief rabbis, and then another, and then you can see the crowds in the streets of Jerusalem, and you can see the crowds in the streets when Netanyahu came to visit President Obama in this picture, or whenever he came.
In other words, that the Jews around the world, again, clearly Do not accept this concept of the existence of the state.
Now, Zionism, not that I'm trying to answer for the ones who are supporting it, as you said, they come along in order to build their legitimacy So they claim first that God gave them the land, as Netanyahu always, his hypocrisy, they're non-religious, they don't keep the Sabbath, but he'll go in the United Nations and to the Congress and always make statements about that the Bible, how God gave us the land and on and on.
Which, of course, as I say, repugnant, repulsive, ignoring the words of the Torah, the authorities of the Torah, but then he's always using, they use fear-mongering, they use panic, they tell the world, they tell the Jewish world that, you know, we just suffered through Hitler and the Palestinians, Muslim Palestinians are haters of the Jews and they are to be equated or actually to
conflated with the Nazis and therefore they're going to they want to destroy and kill the Jews and you simply have to protect yourself and many are Jews unfortunately buy into their and they have the most expensive PR firms they have an endless well of money and they therefore use that money to to re-educate them to tell the Jews that the narrative of us our coexistence with Muslims It's totally, they disappear, it doesn't exist.
What it is, is Muslims against Jews, Palestinians against Jews, and they're going to swallow the Jews alive if the land is given to them.
So first, of course, as Rabbi Feldman said, their narrative is that it was a land without a people.
But when people start questioning that, and they say there's four people who are opposing, what's happening?
What's going on?
What is the turmoil in Palestine and in Israel?
So then they start saying, well, it's because it just happens to be some backward people, camel-riding Bedouins or whatever, and they're simply the haters of Jews.
They don't countenance another people, and therefore they'll hate the West also, they'll hate the Christians, and you can't, these people are non-human.
So they dehumanize these people, and they tell the Israeli citizenship, they tell the people there, you should know that you have to fear for your lives.
If they're going to come back to rule here or any part, they're going to They're going to murder you.
They're going to throw you into the sea.
So these they use panic.
They use fear-mongering and in that manner and dehumanization of the Palestinian people.
So again, I'm not going to answer for the evil with the terrible satanic.
Attack on Gaza, but the the approach is that we have to protect ourselves Because if not, we're gonna be overrun by these people are inhumane and they're gonna murder us That's that tactic they use it and we never accused the Zionists of We accuse them of being evil, of satanic, but we don't accuse them of not being astute and not being successful in their missions.
So what they're doing is unfortunately confusing the Jewish people.
They bought into the hearts Through using fear in the places where they couldn't convince people that they have to have a state.
So thank God, though, as I say, the core Jewish people around the world never buy into what they're saying.
Not as many.
We would want that all these hundreds and thousands of Jews around the world should stand on the streets and demonstrate constantly.
But unfortunately, not everybody's right to stand up to the Zionists who viciously attack the ones who oppose them.
Murdered Jews, our rabbis, not from today, but from the 1920s and before that we had the great rabbis who stood up in opposition, was assassinated by them.
We have an ongoing record of that.
Maybe the first famous ones was Dr. Dahan, which was the In the 1920s, he was very close to the King of Denmark.
There's a monument for him in Denmark.
He decided to become religious.
He went to Palestine, and he thought he will be a Zionist.
But within a short period, he became aware that the very religious community was anti-Zionist.
And he stood in there to help them and he said he's going to go to Parliament in Britain and he's going to extricate the Jews from the hands of the Zionists and the Zionists at that time was called the Haganah which today is the IDF.
They went and they warned him they're going to kill him and they assassinated him in the streets of Jerusalem and that they've been doing this On and on since then, assassinating, besides arresting, killing our rabbis and threatening their lives.
So therefore, it causes that Jews around the world are afraid to speak up.
They get viciously attacked, both physically and accused of being self-hating Jews, people who lose their jobs as professors and so forth.
We're having in Gaza, the attack is a culmination of the mindset, of the brainwashing of the people that they're so fearful of the Palestinians that they're going to kill them.
And they're so successful, the Zionists, at dehumanizing the people of Palestine, that they're able, and actually successful at this new narrative, that they were able to convince the Western world and the Western leaders that these people are inhumane, that they were able to convince the Western world and the Western But there could be nothing more repugnant and repulsive and anti-God and anti-Jewish than these words of the Zionists.
Because the Palestinian people were the first amongst the Muslim countries, altogether Muslim countries, who befriended us and we flourished for hundreds of years in Muslim countries.
As Jews, distinctly different religion, and yet we flourished amongst them.
We were embraced and given a safe haven.
For hundreds of years, there was no human rights groups to protect us, yet we flourished in all these Arab countries.
So to vilify them and say that they're evil and they're anti-Semitic, the ones who are the personification of anti-Semitism is Zionism in their state.
In fact, the new edition of the dictionaries should have the definition of anti-Semitism Zionism and the State of Israel.
They've caused a hate of Jews, an exacerbation of anti-Semitism, a view of Jews as inhumane, committing genocide, and it is all purely
The diametric opposite of what Judaism is and what Jews around the world who are hurting and feeling and crying with the people of Palestine and our voices are not heard and when the students who get up on the campuses throughout the United States and in Europe, who many thousands and thousands of them are Jews and a lot of them are being led by Jews,
They're simply removed from their positions, they're thrown out of schools, and there's laws, new laws with ingenuity being developed that are such a concept of democracy and they skirt the issue of democracy and accuse anybody who speaks up against the Zionist onslaught, against Zionism.
As being anti-semitic again it's an insult to intelligence and it should not be accepted and we plead with the world leaders that they should please respect as you would respect the Pope and the priests when it comes to Christianity and the Imams and Ayatollahs when it comes to the issues
You should respect the voice of our rabbis who stood from day one in Palestine and those communities and pleaded with the leadership of the United Nations and while living throughout the world the very religious communities like we are in New York The very religious ones who give their lives for the religion.
We have our private schooling.
It costs us fortunes.
We give our lives for our religion.
These are the ones, invariably, who are opposed to this occupation.
We are opposed to what's happening in Gaza.
Respect that and they should stop and desist the assistance to the Zionists in their murder.
Mass murder and the torture of the people of Gaza.
We plead with them.
Respect our voice.
Respect the voice of humanity around the world who are pleading.
And do not be ensnared in this Zionist intimidation that you will be accused of being anti-Semitic.
Rabbi Feldman, I just want to pick up on everything that Rabbi Weiss just described.
In particular, everybody knows that essentially the functional definition of anti-Semitism, which is a very important term, but the functional definition of it has distorted it so much that it basically means anyone who criticizes The State of Israel, or certainly who opposes the idea of Zionism.
In fact, they'll say that anti-Zionism just is inherently anti-Semitism.
Everybody who questions or opposes Israel is accused and vilified that way.
If you're a Jew and you do that, the attacks are even more intense.
I can attest to that.
But I can only imagine What people like the two of you have to endure because you are religious figures and leaders of the Jewish people, rabbis and scholars in Judaism, and yet you have extremely vocal but very eloquent and well-founded opposition to what The State of Israel is doing in the name of Judaism.
What are the kinds of attacks that you've endured as a result of your moral position that you speak out on so much?
Well, there are all different kinds of intimidation and attacks that we receive.
It's difficult to list them, but we are physically attacked in our activities many times, we are threatened many times, and we are accused, not of anti-semitism, because everybody knows we are Jewish, but instead of anti-semitism we would be blamed as self-hating Jews.
But as was said before, people need to understand that this conflation of anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism is not only wrong.
Because Judaism and Zionism is not the same.
The state of Israel does not represent all Jews.
It certainly does not represent the Jewish religion.
But this conflation is evil.
It's not only evil and it's dangerous.
It's evil towards the Palestinian people.
It's evil towards people who deserve freedom, freedom of speech.
Silencing people is unjust and harming The suffering people of Palestine by silencing the world.
Palestine deserves our voice.
Palestine deserves people to stand up for them.
silencing this, assisting these crimes.
But I have to say that this is not only affecting the Palestinian people, it's not only affecting the people in the free world, it is affecting the Jewish people as well.
Because when you conflate anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism, you're making a statement.
This makes a statement saying that all Jews are behind the state of Israel and God forbid all Jews support all these crimes.
This ends up making a statement that all Jews are accountable to all what is taking place.
And this ends up being dangerous for Jewish people as well.
No, we have to overcome this propaganda and we have to, for the sake of everyone, we have to stop this.
We have to overcome this.
We have to stand up for what is right.
We have to stand up for humanity, including the suffering people of Palestine and including the Jewish people.
Well, I have to say, I really respect what the two of you are doing, as well as people who are like you and who share your view.
It's very obviously an act of conscience and moral conviction and religious belief.
And I know it can't be easy for you to say the things you're saying.
And I also really appreciate your taking the time to have this incredibly illuminating conversation.
You both did an amazing job of explaining the foundations of your views in a way that I think our audience will find Very educational and illuminating.
So I want to thank you both in general and for coming on the show tonight, and I hope to see you back soon.
Thank you.
Thank you for having us.
Yep, absolutely.
Have a great evening.
- Thank you. - All right, so that concludes our show for this evening.
We went longer than we expected with that interview, which I'm happy we did.
I thought it was fascinating, actually, to hear a view that you rarely hear, but that is a lot more common than you think.
As a result, we will cover the media attempt to dismiss what Americans are seeing with their own eyes about Biden's cognitive decline, perhaps tomorrow or on Thursday, whenever it makes sense to do so, with the time that we have to devote to things.
But we do I really appreciate everyone who's been watching this show.
It is Tuesday night, and so as a result, once we're done here, we will move to our interactive live show, our after show on Locals, where we take your questions and comment on your feedback and critiques, as well as hear your suggestions for future shows.
Those after shows are available solely to members of our Locals community, if you want to join, which gives you access not only to those after shows, but the whole variety of interactive features, And it's the community on which we most rely to support the independent journalism that we do here.
Simply hit the join button right below the video player on the Rumble page and it will take you directly to that community.
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You can hear every episode 12 hours after the first broadcast live here on Rumble on Spotify, Apple, and all the major podcasting platforms.
If you rate, review, and follow our program there, it really helps spread the visibility of the show.
For those who've been watching, This show, we are, as always, very appreciative and we hope to see you back tomorrow night and every night at 7 p.m.
