Hamas Leader's Death Escalates Risk of Wider War; Former CIA Officer Mike DiMino and Civil Liberties Lawyer Jenin Younes on Middle East Developments
TIMESTAMPS:
Intro (0:00)
Escalation in the Middle East (1:35)
Interview with Mike DiMino (36:40)
Interview with Jenin Younes (1:09:05)
Outro (1:36:25)
- - -
Watch full episodes on Rumble, streamed LIVE 7pm ET.
Become part of our Locals community
- - -
Follow Glenn:
Twitter
Instagram
Follow System Update:
Twitter
Instagram
TikTok
Facebook
LinkedIn
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
It's Wednesday, July 31st, and welcome to yet another exciting new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7:00 PM each week on the show.
We're going to be talking about the latest news and the latest news on the show.
We're going to be talking about the latest news and the latest news on the show.
We're going to be talking about the latest news Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Glenn is still away, sorry, so I'm here, and I'm Michael Tracy.
Tonight, assassinations, reprisals, There's yet more turmoil in the Middle East.
Gee, what the heck else is new?
So will the U.S.
be drawn into a wider war?
Could the apocalypse be upon us?
We'll review the sorry state of affairs, both strategically and theologically.
Then, analyst and former CIA officer Mike D'Amino will update us on all the latest intel And finally, Janine Yunus, writer and civil liberties attorney, will join me to assess the political repercussions.
Before that, a few programming notes.
System Update is available in podcast form on Spotify and every other podcast platform.
If you would like to support System Update, you can sign up to Glenn Greenwald's Locals Community at greenwald.locals.com.
For now, welcome to a new edition of System Update, starting now!
So, the reputed political leader of Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh, died today, was killed In an attack that is largely and widely attributed to Israel.
Of course, they don't ever come out and fully and publicly acknowledge it.
But seems like a pretty safe bet that Israel carried out that particular attack and it was in the middle of Tehran.
Ismail Haniyeh, the political leader of Hamas, he had a target on his back for quite a while now.
Israel announced that it was going to attempt to assassinate all of Hamas' leadership, both political and military, in the wake of the October 7th attacks and of course the U.S.
as ever is both overtly and implicitly behind Israel in that initiative being the chief subsidizer and grantor of political backing to Israel so it's really a joint Whenever Israel goes on one of these assassination sprees, whatever operational role the U.S.
might have precisely had, it's always kind of looming in the background as the state actor that makes all this possible for Israel.
And if you remember, and we covered this rather extensively on the show last week, Benjamin Netanyahu was just on his grand tour of the U.S.
He gave his speech to a joint session of Congress.
He acquired a mathematically almost barely computable number of standing ovations.
He went and met with Kamala Harris.
He met with Joe Biden.
He met with Donald Trump.
He was just raking in the plaudits and all the Homages to his steadfast leadership and the fact that the US and Israel are these unswerving allies.
And sure enough, in the immediate aftermath, we see this rather drastic escalation in the Middle East.
That's just magnificent.
In its timing, isn't it?
Purely coincidental, I'm sure, but, you know, maybe eventually we'll get a TikTok, not the app, but the TikTok kind of readout of all the chronology that went into that series of events, because I'm sure it'll be fascinating for us to be informed of after the fact, which is usually how this stuff works.
So here's Ismail Haniyeh.
You see him, he has been the political leader of Hamas for quite some time.
He's been just killed today in Tehran.
So of course this is sending convulsions through the region.
And probably most ominous for Israel and for Israel's surrounding countries and for the world, I suppose, including the United States, because the United States is inevitably involved in this on a hugely intricate level, given how inextricable it really is with Israel in terms of Israel's conduct of Military affairs and economic affairs and diplomatic and political affairs, the U.S.
is always right there in the mix, whether you like it or not.
And so, today we got word from the New York Times that the Supreme Leader of Iran, the Ayatollah, not of Rock and Rolla, just of Iran, Khamenei, he has ordered retaliation directly against Israel
Because of how grievous this strike was seen to be at the national honor of Iran, because this assassination of the Hamas leader took place as he was there, purportedly to attend the inauguration of the new Iranian president.
You might remember that the previous Iranian president, Rouhani, was killed under somewhat mysterious circumstances, although I guess it is pretty well concluded now that He died due to inclement weather, which is strange, in a helicopter crash.
That was in May, if memory serves.
And so there was a new president inaugurated who had just won the election, which is, you know, ran in a somewhat idiosyncratic way in Iran.
But there was Haniyeh.
In Tehran, and right in the heart of the main metropolis of the country, which is, you think, among the most secure places in the country, if there ever were to be one, in the middle of inauguration.
I mean, think of how Washington, D.C.
turns into this militarized fortress where you could hardly even walk a block without a National Guardsman staring you down with a rifle hoisted.
I guess whatever Iranian equivalent of that exists, that was what was going on while this assassination took place.
So, yeah, I mean, obviously that's going to provoke or instigate a major response by Iran.
So whoever it was that carried out the attack, I guess, let's just assume it was Israel, because that's hardly being denied by anybody, even though they're not publicly acknowledging it, because that's not what they do for any of these assassinations, for the most part.
Because assassinations, believe it or not, it tends to be a pretty controversial policy.
You're generally not supposed to do that, at least if you claim to be abiding by the laws of war or laws of international law.
Now, of course, you can always quibble with international law.
International law is kind of fake, frankly.
There might be some people in the audience...
We'll take rave offense to that.
If there are any UN apparatchiks watching, I'm sorry to insult your very illustrious body of fake law, but I just don't think it really amounts to much.
But let's not go down that rabbit hole, although I would find that entertaining.
Because there's lots of chaos and tumult happening right now in the Middle East, and We don't know what this eventual retaliation by Iran is going to look like.
That's why we have our first guest on a bit later, Mike D'Amino, who's going to give us his best assessment of what the intelligence suggests.
But the U.S.
is, again, going to invariably be involved.
Again, whether you like it or not, I'm not endorsing that this is the state of affairs in terms of the U.S.-Israel relationship, but it's just an acknowledgment of reality.
I mean, Joe Biden is not going to relent on Israel at this point, especially because he's free of any political constraints.
And Joe Biden has been very clear, you know, having withdrawn from the race, He's free of the political constraints.
So to the very minor extent that he might have felt obligated to at least superficially cater to the small element of the Democratic Party that is aggrieved about U.S.
policy toward Israel and enabling and arming Israel to pulverize Gaza and potentially even now Lebanon.
Biden is totally free of that constraint now, or at least largely.
I mean, maybe he would want to maintain the appearance of taking into account the concerns of that faction of the Democratic Party on behalf of Kamala Harris, who we're told he has such a loving and tender relationship with.
I find that a bit dubious, but that's neither here nor there, I suppose.
The point is, Biden has been abundantly clear that he has an ideological and fervent conviction in the righteousness of the extremely profuse U.S.
support for Israel that he's provided.
So that seems like it is bound to continue, right?
Why wouldn't it in the event of the opening of a bona fide second front or third or fourth?
I don't even know how many fronts are underway in the Middle East right now.
It's hard to keep track because...
There have been so very many, but one thing you could probably rest assured of is that Biden is going to be supportive of Israel in its next incursion, such as it takes place with Lebanon or Hezbollah or whatever may occur with Iran.
Remember, Biden basically, I mean, the US basically ran the air defense system that shot down the Iranian missile strikes on Israel a couple of months ago in April and caused remarkably few casualties given the So that's probably going to be what's going to happen.
on at Israel after another fiasco that unfolded back then.
So that's probably going to be what's going to happen.
So we're all kind of stuck with it.
And Trey Yinks of Fox News, He actually gave an interesting summation earlier today to our friends there on the Fox and Friends set, who are, you know, experts in the Middle East, so they probably already knew all this, but they were apprised of the latest developments by Trey.
And he actually gave an unusually interesting rundown, so let's take a listen.
And I want to talk about this week and how rapidly things have changed.
On Sunday, CIA Director William Burns was in Rome, and he was meeting with Qatari and Egyptian negotiators, and the officials that we talked to were hopeful that a ceasefire agreement was about to happen between Israel and Hamas.
Within a few hours after that meeting, Hamas released a statement saying the Israelis were going back on their promises, and those conversations started to fall apart.
Now, just days later, the leader of Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh, the head negotiator for the organization, was killed in a targeted assassination in Tehran.
This is an indication that ceasefire talks are basically off the table.
And I do want to just quickly read you a statement from the Qatari Prime Minister, the man who has been responsible for a lot of the negotiations taking place.
And he had an extensive statement this morning, but he asks one question here, and it's an important question in all of this.
He says, how can mediation succeed when one party assassinates the negotiator on the other side?
end to the war in Gaza is not going to happen in the immediate aftermath of the killing of the top official from Hamas.
You still have more than 100 hostages inside Gaza.
No end in sight, no diplomatic solutions now on the table to end the conflict there.
As you noted, there are tens of thousands of Israelis displaced in the northern part of this country.
So Trey Yanks conveys what seems like it should be a pretty obvious observation, which is that if you go ahead and assassinate one side of an ongoing negotiation, that might complicate which is that if you go ahead and assassinate one side of an it.
You don't have to be a brain surgeon or a rocket scientist or some other big-brained profession to come up with that brilliant insight.
And no offense to Trey, I mean, Even the most straightforward observations probably should be relayed to the Fox and Friends crew there.
But that seems pretty reasonable to me.
And it kind of calls into question whether any of these alleged ceasefire negotiations that have been underway for a long time now Were ever even intended to begin with to bear fruit or to result in some kind of ceasefire?
Because one thing that the Democrats in particular have always tried to point to, to justify their ongoing support for Israel.
So you have a faction of the Democratic Party that is more stridently opposed to Israel now.
I guess you could say the Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib faction.
Pretty marginal, but they do exist in some small degree.
But the vast majority of the Democratic Party, they might have rhetorical or superficial qualms with Netanyahu or the current Israeli government.
They'll point to the fact that the composition of the Israeli government right now includes a lot of more fire-breathing religious extremists, they might say, than past governments that were more secular in their orientation.
But when push comes to shove, the Democrats will largely just fund all the same stuff that Republicans will fund.
Republicans will just do it much more bombastically, and they'll, you know, they'll slopper over Netanyahu and say what an amazing ally he is, and they'll be much more kind of...
Gregarious to Netanyahu when he's coming and gallivanting around in the U.S.
and they'll heap kind of religious platitudes on Netanyahu and go around talking about the second coming of Christ and that sort of thing.
But the Democrats will ultimately fund it and they'll fund it in part because they'll say look there's these ceasefire negotiations that are underway we really have to double down on our diplomatic initiative.
Well, They just, Israel, it seems, just assassinated their partners, supposedly, in the ceasefire negotiations.
So, was that all a ruse?
I think that might be a fair inference, don't you think?
So let's step back for a moment.
Do you remember October 7th?
I mean, that's a day that I'll always remember.
Just like 9-11.
I'll always be reflecting on where I was on those days.
Just like January 6th.
Just like, what was it, November 6th, 7th, 2016, when Donald Trump was elected.
Just like lots of other days.
Just like the first day that I had half-price appetizers at Applebee's.
What day was that?
It was like March...
15th 2005 or something.
These are days that will always be etched into my memory as days that just stir a flood of emotions for me.
But back then, the stated policy aim of the Biden administration was that they really were determined to contain the breakout of a wider regional war in the Middle East.
So here's what The Washington Post summarized that as, Biden administration scrambles, this is October 8th, so right the day after, Biden administration scrambles to deter wider Mideast conflict.
So the idea then was the U.S.
has to get super involved in the Gaza war that was just then ramping up by sending carrier strike groups into the Eastern Mediterranean and providing all kinds of Tactical support to Israel because the idea was they're going to really intimidate Iran and intimidate other groups that are seen to be connected to Iran and prevent a wider war in the Middle East.
Then you had the outbreak of the war in the Red Sea with the Houthis which still continues.
You have the airstrike campaign that continues to this day.
There was just more airstrikes in Iraq Within the past 24 hours, against these militia groups that have been firing at U.S.
force presences in the region, you have obviously the Hezbollah element of this conflict that's been brewing since October 7th.
With a decent amount of casualties.
I mean, they say that they're always kind of waiting to see if the war will break out, but there have been hundreds of casualties if you combine the publicly reported totals of both the Hezbollah and Israeli side.
You have mass displacement of Israelis from those northern border areas and then also of Lebanese from the southern border areas in Lebanon.
So if that's not a war, then I mean that really tells you a lot about Israel, right?
Or about the Middle East, I guess, generally where, you know, it takes a lot to qualify as a war.
I mean, imagine somewhere in the U.S.
in like Ohio or whatever.
I mean, maybe I shouldn't even bring up a U.S.
analogy because sometimes Defenders of Israel like to do that pretty speciously so I'll just move on from that thought.
The point is it's been pretty regular and even at times fairly intense warfare on that northern border of Israel and yet it's not widely categorized as a war quite yet but it's been Pretty serious.
And now you have everybody on the edge of their seat and then you had direct warfare between Israel and Iran in April with the rocket salvo that was fired.
And the U.S.
also obviously being a prime player there.
And now you have yet another phase of this that we just were Introduced today with these major assassinations and Israel also struck in Beirut.
So far from just this southern border area in Lebanon, they struck in like downtown Beirut to kill a major commander of Hezbollah.
Who they claim, Israel claims, was responsible for this attack a couple of days ago in the Golan Heights that killed something like 12 Druze residents there, many of whom were children.
And the attribution there, as per typical, is very fiercely contested.
But the point is we're in another, we're like brewing in another conflagration here.
So it's like conflagration on top of conflagration ever since October 7th.
And obviously you can go that way further than that.
But just starting our timeline there for the sake of convenience.
The point is the Biden administration stated objective that they're going to contain a wider regional war.
It's been a manifest demonstrable failure.
And this after all the Democrats who were showering Joe Biden with praise for what a sterling record he has.
Because they were first trying to butter him up to get him out of the race by saying, oh look Joe, take pride in how amazingly your presidency is gone, march off into the sunset, or ride off into the sunset on one of your stallions, or, you know, take corn pop by the arm and stride away into the good night.
And take solace in how great of a job you've done.
They're saying that he's like the best since Franklin Roosevelt or Lyndon Johnson or whatever.
I don't know.
It seems like kind of a big deal that by their own stated criteria they've been abject failures in the Middle East and now we're all on the verge of yet another outbreak of major catastrophe.
But maybe that's just me.
Maybe I'm weird.
You know, Democrats like to call everybody weird now.
I probably should be called weird for just, like, noticing this.
And, you know, this was all authorized, really, by Joe Biden himself.
Here's a clip that people probably forget.
Why would you remember this?
It's not that remarkable, I suppose.
This is Joe Biden on 60 Minutes in October of 2023.
Here's what he had to say.
But to going in and taking out the extremists, the Hezbollah is up north but Hamas down south is a necessary requirement.
Do you believe that Hamas must be eliminated entirely?
Yes, I do.
So that's Biden setting out a maximalist goal.
So he can register whatever complaints that he wants, and so can Kamala or Mamala or Meme Magic Mama, whatever we want to call her now, the half-Asian wonder, that they have these, you know, quibbles with Netanyahu.
But at the very outset, back in October, when everybody was in their peak war fervor, Biden set forth maximalist objectives, and if you notice, he also threw in Hezbollah there.
So the entire kind of policy architecture, it seems, has been oriented around these seemingly unachievable maximalist policy goals of eliminating Hamas, perhaps even eliminating Hezbollah, and we are where we are.
And here was Netanyahu today, back from his Globetrotting here in the U.S.
He's now running his war operation back there in Tel Aviv once more.
And let's listen.
And we will settle the score with anyone else who massacres our children, murders our citizens.
Anybody who harms our country will die, will be killed.
The citizens of Israel, we are facing some challenging days since the strike in Beirut.
We've been hearing threats from various directions.
We are ready for any scenario and we will stand together, determined to face any threat.
I mean, they can stand ready all they want, but without the support of the U.S., they're going to be standing fairly isolated and alone and unable to do very much.
Which gets to why, perhaps, Netanyahu was just on his American voyage to shore up that support in the run-up to a potential escalation.
Again, I'm not saying this is all factually provable yet.
I'm not trying to assert any undue causation that I can't empirically substantiate, but I'm just looking at the timeline here.
Just before we have this major escalation, Netanyahu is in Washington D.C.
and in Mar-a-Lago and wherever the hell else he was in the U.S.
solidifying the political support that he has for this unreserved support for Israel.
And now look at the consequence.
And something else interesting was going on in the U.S.
today, or this week rather, and it was fortuitous timing.
Theologically fortuitous timing, I should say.
You might even say there was some divine hand behind how that timing played out, because this week was the annual Or I think is, it's still going on.
Praise God, it's still going on.
It's the annual Christians United for Israel Summit.
Now, Christians United for Israel is one of my favorite groups.
I love it.
I wish I could, maybe I should join it.
It'd be the first group that I would ever join, I guess, of that nature.
But even just for a good time, I think you'll be worth it.
I actually wanted to attend this summit, but here I am in Rio.
Because sometimes life throws you curveballs, and then you take a swing, and you look to the heavens, and the ball, it just flies over, flies out of the stadium like a Mickey Mantle Homer, and you score.
That's me.
So Pastor John Hagee, He's quite a character.
Look at him.
Wouldn't you like to give that man a big bear hug?
I know I would, in a smooch.
He's the head of Christians United for Israel, and he has a theological take on the situation that is really one of a kind.
He views it as his biblical imperative to try to manifest A military conflagration in the Middle East because he believes that that will then bring about an end times prophecy as foretold in the book of Revelation and as such Jesus Christ will return from the heavens and rule over humanity from Jerusalem.
That's it.
And so that's what he's trying to bring about.
By his political advocacy and his lobbying.
He's lobbying in Washington D.C.
as we speak to achieve that goal.
And so, here's what he had to say in D.C.
this week.
He said, quote, you ask what is our aim and I can answer with one word.
Victory.
Victory at all cost.
Victory in spite of all terror.
Victory however long and hard the road may be.
For without victory there is no survival.
End of quote.
For Israel, victory is the survival of her hostages and her people.
Victory is ensuring that no terrorist can ever again rape and murder his way through southern Israel.
Victory is ensuring Israel's people can live peacefully in their ancient homeland, north, south, east, and west.
Christians United for Israel will not be silent, will not be placated, and we will never abandon the children of Israel in their day of need.
We will see this through to Israel's victory and victory will come.
We We will see this battle against anti-Semitism through, and we will have victory.
We pray for the peace of Jerusalem.
Jerusalem is the epicenter of the world.
Jerusalem is the shoreline of eternity.
Jerusalem is where Jeremiah and Isaiah pin the principles of righteousness that became the moral foundations of Western civilization.
Jerusalem is where Messiah is going to return to the earth and rule the world with a rod of iron.
We're going to be keeping the Ten Commandments in those days, my friends, for 1,000 years of perfect peace.
Next year in Jerusalem, God bless America, God bless Israel, and God bless each of you.
Okay, so people sometimes think I'm exaggerating when I just try to neutrally describe what this pastor's, John Hagee's theology is.
He said it right there, right?
He said, Jerusalem is where the Messiah will return and rule over earth with an iron rod.
So that's what he's trying to lobby for in DC today.
And this is not a fringe individual in terms of who he associates with.
Here he is with Speaker Mike Johnson, House Speaker Mike Johnson in April.
There they are, the two of them, best buds.
Pastor Hagee had made another trek, an earlier trek, to DC in April to advocate for the $26 billion in Israel funding that was attached to the National Security Supplemental that Johnson was instrumental in ushering through.
So they bonded over their shared conviction in the theological underpinnings of U.S.
military support for Israel.
And let's go to Johnson on Newsmax shortly thereafter explaining his views on this.
Israel is a critical ally of ours, and I think most people understand the necessity of this funding.
They're fighting for their very existence.
They're the only stable democracy in the Middle East.
I mean, of course, for those of us who are believers, it's a biblical admonition to stand with Israel.
We will, and they will prevail as long as they're with them.
And this is an important, very important symbolic Okay, so that's Johnson saying there's a biblical admonition to support Israel.
for example, of the Iron Dome.
The reason they shot down all those drones and missiles in the last attack by Iran is because we assisted with that.
I think the American people understand the importance of that. - Okay, so that's Johnson saying there's a biblical admonition to support Israel.
So I don't know if he shares every little last theological conviction with Hagee, but if there are some differences there, it's probably not too far off, okay?
And that's what's guiding a lot of the policy here.
Mike Johnson's the Speaker of the House of Representatives.
And Hagee also has another benefactor or another partner in their shared political project, and that is, one, Donald J. Trump.
There they are.
Hagee and Trump.
United.
Christians united for Israel.
That's the two of them, I guess.
Donald Trump claims he's a pious Christian.
I have no doubt about it.
I've read the R of the Deal and that's a very, that's a holy text in my mind.
And Donald Trump delegated lots of important tasks to Hagee.
We've been over them a little bit on the show during my Historic tenure.
Hagee gave the benediction at the opening of the U.S.
Embassy in Jerusalem in 2018 because Jerusalem is where Christ will come and rule over Earth.
That's the whole point.
Wow.
And Hagee in his speech at the Christians United for Israel event this week was saying Iran needs to be extirpated just like past Oppressors of Jews have been extirpated like the Romans and the Pharaohs and the Turks and the Ottomans.
That's his whole historical and religious narrative that he weaves.
And he has influence on policy.
So when we see this tumult erupting in the Middle East, know that at least part of the policy response is informed by this worldview.
And I'm not exaggerating.
Now another friend of ours, Lindsey Graham addressed the Christians United for Israel gathering this week, and here's what good old Lindsey had to say.
People ask me, what is this thing with Christians and Israel?
It's a God thing.
It's a God thing.
Why do Christians like Israel so much?
Because we get our news from the Bible, and in the Bible, Israel's the good guy.
Maybe not so much on NBC.
So the bottom line is, I've been raised in a Baptist church since I was that high.
I didn't get much higher.
As a young man in South Carolina, I was raised to understand that God blesses those who bless Israel, and that's my foreign policy.
It's not that complicated.
It's been working for about 2,000 years.
So, Lindsey Graham, Senator from South Carolina.
As we're all undoubtedly aware, one of the chief emissaries in the Senate for Donald Trump, I had a colleague of Graham's describe him to me as the Trump whisperer in the Republican Senate conference.
So Graham knows just how To utilize Trump to get their shared objectives accomplished.
And Graham really is into foreign policy, whether it's Israel, Ukraine, or whatever else.
And he sees Trump as a valued partner in that enterprise.
And there's Graham spelling it all out for us.
Stark detail.
No uncertain terms.
Graham claims that in the Bible, Israel are the good guys, and that's it.
That's his foreign policy.
Man, I wish everything were so simple.
That would probably simplify lots of things for us.
So, as we assess this latest phase in the never-ending turmoil that embroils Israel in the Middle East and therefore by extension the United States.
I do think it's useful to be a little bit more cognizant that at least part of how that policy response is being navigated gets dictated by views like this that are rooted in at least claimed theological convictions that are unshakable and that are apocalyptic.
And so there's a part of these people that seems to get excited when the prospect of apocalypse looks to be potentially on the horizon.
And if that's what we're facing now, then many of the policymakers in the United States are not filled with dread, at least not entirely.
They're filled with scintillation, and that should maybe Make us all a little bit weirded out, to use one of the verbs that's in Vogue.
I coined a new verb.
Weirded out.
That's what we are.
Okay, so I now want to go to... So now we're going to go to our first guest, Mike D'Amino.
He's a former CIA officer.
He's also an analyst at Defense Priorities, which is one of the vanishingly A few think tanks in Washington, D.C.
that is usually mostly sane.
So we're going to go to Mike for his latest kind of intel assessment of what's happening in the Middle East.
Mike, how are you today?
Doing well, Michael.
It's good to be with you.
You've been doing a good job this week.
I like the tie tonight.
Appreciate it.
You look great yourself.
I like the beard.
I'm one of my One of my few offerings of sincere praise for J.D.
Vance is that he's really been historic in combating what I think is the most pervasive prejudice in American politics, which is beard phobia.
So you and I are beneficiaries of him breaking the glass ceiling in that regard, at least for the first time since the 19th century or something.
So what do you make of this killing of Hania in Tehran.
And that was pretty shocking to me.
Maybe I shouldn't have been shocked when I woke up and saw the news right in the middle of Tehran, around the time of the inauguration of the new Iranian president that he was attending.
We're told, is this an even more brazen attack by Israel, assuming that Israel conducted the attack?
Obviously they're not publicly acknowledging it, but that seems to be everybody's assumption.
Is this more brazen on Israel's part?
Israel's part is the narrative that I was kind of sketching out there, to the extent that you heard it, that, you know, you could just look at the chronology.
Netanyahu was just in the U.S.
shoring up his political support, and then all of a sudden we have this massive escalation.
I'm not saying that it was like all For ordained or predetermined or I'm not asserting any kind of conspiracy but obviously Israel relies on the U.S.
for its political military backing and so you know that could have some role in maybe authorizing with even just implicitly they're undertaking this incredibly brazen attack it seems and then also with the assassination of the Hezbollah commander in Beirut.
Yeah, I think it is significant.
Unexpected, probably not, given the fact that if you look at public statements from Prime Minister Netanyahu, from Benny Gantz, from really any Israeli officials going back to October 7th, they vowed that they would do whatever it takes to go after the people responsible for October 7th.
So I don't think it's It's unexpected that they would do this.
I think the timing, though, is very notable, given the Beirut strike just hours before.
And then, you know, as you alluded to, I think a sense globally, but certainly also here in the United States, that hostage negotiations were proceeding.
In fact, you know, in candid conversations a couple of weeks ago, I recall Tony Blinken and Jake Sullivan, you know, to the to the press and at the Aspen Security Forum saying, you know, we're on the 10 yard line with hostage negotiations.
And so all of that has changed very, very rapidly.
And like you said, I mean, we can speculate about why that is or how we got here.
I think the bigger point, though, like you alluded to in your monologue, is You know, at what point are we in regional war?
I mean, you know, you kind of did a nice job running through the landscape of everything going on with the Houthis, everything going on in Lebanon, everything going on with Hamas in Gaza and Iraq and Syria with these Shia militia groups.
I mean, we're sort of already there.
We're very lucky that it hasn't gotten to a point where we are at what I would call an open state of war between Israel and Hezbollah, which I don't think is certainly in anyone's interest.
It's not in U.S.
interests.
And frankly, it's not in Israel's interests.
You know, Benny Gantz and other people have made statements that, you know, a war with Hezbollah, you know, they could defeat them in three days.
And I would just say, you know, as a military analyst and a former intelligence officer, that's just not true, just strategically speaking.
So it would be a huge change to where we are already, right?
I mean, a conflict with Hamas is relatively easy to contain for the Israelis.
But a war with Hezbollah, I think, would be even greater in terms of scope and scale than the last time that they really butted heads, which was, of course, in 2006.
And militarily, the Israelis did not fare super well during that conflict.
Yoav Gallant, the defense minister, talks.
tweeted that the strike in the Golan Heights that killed, I think it was the twelve Druze, mostly children or teenagers, crossed a red line.
Now, of course, that's a cliche that gets invoked a lot.
It's hard to really demarcate where any red line is or what it means to cross it and what kind of response that is supposed to engender.
But it did seem to signify that Israel was going to take more Do you anticipate that the Beirut strike is kind of the totality of it?
I mean, it's hard to say.
Nobody can predict the future, but just based on your assessment of what the lay of the land is thus far, does Israel appear to be gearing up for like a ground offensive into Lebanon or does a, you know, a rather Adventurous strike into Beirut.
Does that kind of suffice in terms of their, you know, red line proclamation as best you can tell?
Yeah, well I think you have to look at the statements of Israeli leaders, and I think you also have to look at what's observable on the ground.
And if you take those two indicators, everything points right now to Israel gearing up for additional military action.
There have been Iron Dome batteries surged to the north over the last just eight or so hours.
There's been movement as far as allocating of Israeli brigades from Gaza to the north.
And then, you know, you played part of Netanyahu's speech earlier today.
Part of it that you didn't mention, which I found very notable, around the middle of the speech there, he said, you know, there have been voices inside and outside of Israel, which I thought very notable that he used that phrasing.
I'm not sure if that was even potentially a shot at President Trump's early statements on this several months ago or something else, but he said, and I have a rough kind of translation here, voices inside and outside of Israel have told us to finish the war and we cannot win, and I will not listen to those voices now and have not listened to them before.
I think if you're taking those statements at somewhat face value, which I think we kind of have to do, every indication would point to a commitment on Israel's part to go forward with more sustained combat operations against Hezbollah.
And if you look back at broader Israeli actions and statements since October 7th, I think it's clear that They want to take, you know, the security environment that they faced prior to October 7th and now change all of that in the aftermath of October 7th.
And that, of course, entails a buffer zone in the South against Hamas.
And it also entails settling this open question, which the UN and other bodies have tried to address and they've failed to address.
Kind of as you pointed out in your monologue earlier, I don't know how effective international law is when the chips are down.
But this question of the Latani River, where Hezbollah is operating and about 60,000 to 100,000 Israelis have been displaced in the north, there's a lot of domestic pressure on them to settle that issue as well.
have been displaced in the north.
There's a lot of domestic pressure on them to settle that issue as well.
And of course, then the big question is Iran or some of these other second order security threats that Israel feels the need to try to fundamentally change the nature of the environment on.
And of course, then the big question is Iran or some of these other second order security threats that Israel feels the need to try to fundamentally change the nature of the environment on.
And the big question is, what is the U.S. going to do?
And the big question is, what is the U.S. going to do?
And I think, it's funny, we talk about the U.S. as slipping into war, getting dragged into war, whatever.
You know, last I checked, we are the global hegemon.
We are the undisputed global superpower, at least for the time being still.
And if the United States wants to avoid participation in a war, it has all the agency in the world to do so.
I can make it very clear to the Israelis, to the Egyptians, to everybody in the region, that the United States is not going to participate in this.
And I think you've seen some statements from the Biden administration about, you know, trying to emphasize defensive support for Israel.
But even that, you know, can get you into a potentially situation where American F-18s are bombing targets in Lebanon and things like that.
It is a very slippery slope.
I don't like to say that anything is inevitable, but I think you have to be concerned if you're a Middle East watcher over everything we've seen in the last, you know, 72 hours or so.
And as Ukraine teaches us, the line between offensive and defensive weaponry or military support, it kind of collapses into conceptual nothingness at a certain point.
Right.
So, you know, why wouldn't that same standard apply to Israel and Lebanon, theoretically?
On Lebanon, people might not be fully aware of this, but the Lebanese central government is a recipient, a longtime recipient actually, of U.S.
foreign aid.
The U.S.
subsidizes the central government of Lebanon, but Hezbollah controls the portions of the country to the south, and Lebanon is a very convoluted governance structure dating back to when it was a French colonial holding.
It doesn't have a strong central government because it's kind of divided into these disputed territories.
But one thing that I've been reading is that even the factions of the Lebanese government that are opposed to Hezbollah and loyal to the weakened centralized government would view any offensive by Israel into Lebanon as not just an attack on Hezbollah but an attack on Lebanon as a whole.
So how does that dynamic play into any kind of forecast that Israel or the US might make and just explain how Lebanon is constructed in that sense and how it would absorb or how its populace would react to any major escalation by Israel.
Yeah, Lebanon is a really fascinating case.
Having spent a lot of time in the region, you've had all sorts of strange arrangements where they have, you know, quotas for different, you know, government positions socially and all sorts of strange dynamics, a lot of which, like you said, goes back to French colonialism.
I think it's interesting After the Beirut ammonia explosion a couple years ago, Macron, I believe, came out and said, you know, we should reopen the question of, you know, French colonial involvement in Lebanon, which was, you know, totally mind-blowing and ridiculous to me.
But, yeah, Lebanon's an interesting case.
I think the big issue is who has a monopoly on violence.
If we're talking about Lebanon, it certainly has the law.
The Lebanese military is very small.
It's unprofessional.
It's poorly trained.
there isn't much that Lebanon proper can do about the fact that Hezbollah is so dominant in the southern half of the country and really does have a monopoly on violence there.
And I think, you know, problematizes the situation such that even if Lebanese civilians are not comfortable with this, or the average Lebanese person is not comfortable with this, you know, there could be a situation where because of Hezbollah, they're sort of enmeshed in this conflict.
And Hassan And Nasrallah has tried to be cognizant of that With some of his statements, he knows that a major war with Israel would be politically unpopular in Lebanon.
Certainly the legacy of 2006 is still very much alive in much of the populace there as a painful memory.
And so he can say what he wants about a boisterous response, but I think there is some sense that Even Hezbollah has to be careful about losing public support.
And the other thing I'd mention is that Hezbollah has a significant amount of capabilities.
And again, this gets back to my earlier point that this notion that they would be defeated in a matter of hours or a matter of days is just not accurate.
Right, so what about this report today, the New York Times, citing four Iranian officials, said that the Supreme Leader, Khomeini, has directed a retaliatory attack on Israel.
We saw one of these in April, the circumstances of which are still a bit mysterious to me anyway, where you had this volley of missile fire from Iran toward Israel, and obviously the U.S.
was heavily involved in the air defense, it was coordinated with the Jordanians, actually seen as a triumph of Israel's ability to coordinate with friendly Arab states in their mutual defense.
Now, some of that narrative could be self-serving, but it is true that the Salvo of missiles did not cause as much damage as you might expect just in a vacuum.
How do you compare and contrast the lead up to a potential attack by Iran on Israel now to the lead up of that attack in April?
Is this one more severe potentially in your mind or what are the differences there if there are any?
Yeah, I think April was a really interesting case.
You had a lot of people going on cable news the day after talking about how this was Iran's best punch and it was a total failure or whatever.
And that's just total context denial.
First of all, Iran used a very minuscule portion I don't think that Iran was intending to do grievous harm to Israel in conducting that attack.
knew it was coming, the Turks knew it was coming.
There was all sorts of diplomatic back-channeling that happened in advance of that.
And I don't think that Iran was intending to do grievous harm to Israel in conducting that attack.
I think they were looking for an escalatory off-ramp with a sort of middle-tier response in which they could say, look, we've shown that we can reach out and hit Israel, which of course had never been done by Iran to that point, and signal that, hey, if we have to do this again, potentially and signal that, hey, if we have to do this again, potentially at greater scale and potentially over a more sustained timeframe, we can
And so that would be my sort of question right now is, do we see a similar slow build where I think Iran is clearly trying to look for an off-ramp, or do we see a sudden and more sustained sort of attack using intermediate-range ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, or do we see a sudden and more sustained sort of attack using intermediate-range ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, one-way attack drones, similar to what we saw before, but maybe with additional armaments, which is being employed by these Shia militias in Iraq and Syria against
being employed by these Shia militias in Iraq and Syria against Israel, which they've mostly avoided hitting Israel, or the Houthis, right, which recently conducted that notable strike last week.
So that would be what I'm looking at now is...
How does Iran want to play this?
Do they want to telegraph in advance and try to seek a diplomatic sort of off-ramp here?
Or do they feel the need to make a more compelling statement?
I think if you're looking at Iran's position here, it's not great.
I mean, it's very hard for them, I think, to make the case that they're competent as far as their intelligence services, as far as their ability to project power, if you're going to have people that are your ostensibly close allies getting assassinated right in your capital.
And I think it gets to this broader issue, Michael, of how we talk about Iran in the United States.
Iran is not an existential threat to the United States.
Iran is a middle-tier threat to the United States, mostly as a result of the fact that the United States maintains 40,000 troops in the Middle East, right?
I mean, it's sort of a, you know, time and distance thing.
You know, Iran does not pose the kind of threat that, you know, you could argue China or Russia or other actors poses, right?
I mean, you even have a better argument, as critical as I've been at the war in Ukraine, you even have a better argument about being concerned about Russia being very dominant in Europe, than you do Iran, you know, posing some kind of massive and existential threat to the United States.
So I think we have to be honest about their capabilities.
They've got a very weak conventional military.
I don't think they want a full scale war with the United States.
I don't think they want a full scale war with Israel.
They've had several opportunities over the past six months to say and do things that would indicate the opposite and they haven't.
And I think all of that is notable.
I think Iran recognizes the limits of its national power and is sort of behaving rationally.
And like you talked about in your monologue, I don't think that folks like Lindsey Graham or whomever else are ever going to really recognize that.
But I think it is important to analyze these things objectively and sort of take stock of it for what it is.
If we're going to complain about Iran's influence in the Middle East growing exponentially over the last several decades, we have nobody to blame but U.S.
foreign policy.
Love or hate Saddam Hussein, he was the biggest regional counterbalance to Iran.
He had the third largest military in the world.
He kept the Iranians in check, if that's something that you claim to be worried about if you're Lindsey Graham.
And of course, the United States went in 2003 and overthrew Saddam.
And we had a total power vacuum that was filled first with ISIS and then was filled with these Shia militia groups that did most of the fighting against ISIS and now basically control Iraq.
So, you know, it's difficult to, like you said in your monologue, you know, where do you kind of start the conversation when you're talking about the Middle East?
You go back hundreds if not thousands of years to address some of these problems.
But I think the role of U.S.
foreign policy in the last several decades especially is also a big reason why we are where we are if we're not happy with, you know, Iran's influence and, you know, meddling in the region.
Well, what are the constant refrains, right?
Netanyahu and pro-Israel politicians in the U.S.
is to hype the threat of Iran and actually try to assert that whatever threat Iran is claimed to pose to Israel by extension is also a threat to the U.S.
So people like Naftali Bennett and others use metaphors like Iran is like the tip of the spear, not the tip of the spear, that's the wrong metaphor, but like the head of the octopus, or like they're always like they're the ones that are controlling all these militia groups and others and that, you know, the point is they try to like make it into this cosmic threat where once Iran is done with Israel then they're going to go after the U.S.
even if they don't have just basic military capacity to ever even Fathom doing that?
But that's the way to kind of galvanize support for Israel in their, you know, long-standing quest to take it to Iran, or at least Netanyahu's quest.
Remember his famous speech at the UN Security Council where he's holding the placard with the cartoon of the bomb and saying, like, the clock is ticking.
We have, I don't know how many weeks left before they get the nuclear weapon.
The nuclear weapon never comes, but then nobody goes and revisits that apparently.
He made similar dire warnings in his speech to the joint session of Congress last week.
It seems like however much you want to put a rational spin, and I appreciate that obviously, on the threat that may or may not be posed by Iran, it seems like it's very central to the case that pro-Israel politicians are always beating us over the head with in the U.S.
Isn't that right?
I think, you know, the bigger problem that I see is that the Biden administration has willingly conflated all of these various conflicts and sort of bolstered that narrative that you just outlined.
I mean, I think you had Kareem John Bihar and I think you had Adrian Watson, I believe the NSC spokesman, a couple of months ago, you know, when this conflict started between Israel and Hamas, you know, use phrases like the Russia-Hamas
Axis and stuff like this and you've seen the same thing in Ukraine that really you know Our fight with Russia is also our fight with Iran is also our fight with China It's all the same thing in this big battle for you know global Authoritarianism versus democracy and I think all of that is not just factually incorrect But it's also very dangerous because you know if we're going to act like we're basically already in a world war and that you know These are our indefinite adversaries forever
then it's sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
And I think that's completely irresponsible from a policymaking perspective.
And then I think on Iran, nobody ever gets into the actual nitty gritty, right?
Which, as a policy guy, you know, that's what I do.
Iran does not have the capability to hit the United States with a nuclear weapon, even if they had one.
They've tested two space launch vehicles, right, which sort of are, you know, dual use for something like an intercontinental ballistic missile.
They've had issues with both of those tests.
And they've shown no ability to bring something back down once you get it up there, once you get it up in space, which is really the hard part.
So, again, even if we're talking about, you know, what Iran's capabilities are, the math doesn't really math.
But I think the broader problem is this this rhetoric that, frankly, everybody has engaged from.
Right.
Whether it's Lindsey Graham, whether it's Joe Biden, it's the same rhetoric of this global war between democracy and autocracy.
And, you know, all of these, all of our enemies are exactly the same and they're doing exactly the same things.
And there's there's no there's no nuance to any of that.
And there's very little accuracy to it as well.
And I think that only puts us in a position where we have to fight this sort of existential conflict, which frankly doesn't exist.
And I think that's what I would come back to.
There are definitely real threats posed by the rise of China to the American economy.
Iran, yes, has killed American troops via its involvement in the Middle East over the last two decades.
I'm very clear-eyed about the bad things that many of these actors have done.
But I think we have to be treating each one of them uniquely, and we have to be looking at policy options to separate them rather than just push them together and sort of build an alliance of our own making, a raid against the United States, which I think nobody really wants to talk a raid against the United States, which I think nobody really wants to talk much about in D.C., the extent to which the United States has pushed together China and Russia and Iran and North Korea, and how dangerous that really is
Finally, Mike, I can't resist but put to you a more nakedly political question, because whether you and I like it or not, that has to be part of any... you know, comprehensive intelligence assessment that we make of any of these situations. comprehensive intelligence assessment that we make of any of these And, you know, you have Donald Trump going around and saying that Joe Biden and Chuck Schumer, they're Palestinians.
He uses that as a term of derision, I guess, to indicate that The Democrats have taken this hard turn toward being pro-Hamas sympathizers, which to me just seems ludicrous given that I think by any objective measure, Joe Biden and I guess by extension Kamala Harris have supplied more armaments to Israel in furtherance of an ongoing war effort than any presidential administration ever.
And yet the Republicans are attacking the Democrats for being insufficiently bellicose with regard to their support for Israel.
And likewise, you have Kamala Harris.
Garnered this seemingly unwarranted perception that she might be slightly more moderate on Israel than Joe Biden has been, or at least there aren't clips of her from the 80s and 90s proclaiming herself to be a Irish Catholic Zionist.
So that's potentially a distinction.
I don't think it amounts to much in practice, or I've seen very little evidence that it does anyway, in terms of the substance of their respective policy views.
But what's your outlook on the presidential campaign and how it would factor in to any kind of geo-strategic assessment of the lay of the land at this point?
Yeah, look, I think the notion that, you know, I've been asked about this a lot over the past couple of weeks, especially given everything going on in the Democratic Party over, you know, well, so, you know, what is Kamala Harris's, you know, foreign policy?
And I would say that, you know, it's what the Democrat foreign policy is, right?
I mean, she doesn't—I don't think we have a lot of evidence that she has a lot of clearly staked out, clearly fleshed out, really unique, really discreet, really idiosyncratic views on a lot of this.
And so I think those questions should be put more to her and to her campaign over the next several months.
I mean, we've got, what, 97 days to the election.
I don't think we really know much about her nuanced foreign policy views.
But I would say the idea that she's, you know, going to be significantly less supportive of Israel than her current boss, I don't think there's much evidence for.
And I would say, too, that, you know, broadly in the United States, both parties, like, you know, you've talked about a lot tonight.
Are pretty supportive of Israel, and I don't see, frankly, a significant difference as far as the policy outcomes.
I think, like you mentioned earlier in your monologue, you know, the language, the rhetoric, the branding is a little different.
But at the end of the day, yeah, the Democrats find a way to sort of support many of the same things that the Republicans do on these issues.
And so I think any kind of, you know, really unique Foreign policy perspective emerging from her is unlikely.
Of course, I'm open-minded to it.
I think we don't know.
But I would be a little skeptical of that.
And of course, any kind of rhetoric that is dehumanizing about an act of war as somebody that has spent time in war zones and seen these things firsthand, I don't really appreciate.
And I think that It'd be nice to have a more sane sort of discourse on this in the United States.
I don't know if that's ever going to happen.
I think part of me holds out for a lot of the generational divides that I think are very stark on this issue.
Who knows, you know, 20, 25 years from now, you may have a very different perspective in the United States on not just foreign policy broadly, but certainly on the U.S.
role in the Middle East.
I do think, you know, there is more space on the right at the moment for some of these, you know, more realistic It's a pragmatic, you know, we should be prioritizing things kind of argument.
You know, you've seen Bridge Colby make these arguments.
JD Vance has made some of these arguments.
No, on Israel, though.
I'm sorry to interrupt, but they haven't made these arguments on Israel, right?
I mean, JD Vance certainly hasn't.
Nobody, very few House Republicans, if any, aside from perhaps Thomas Massey, have made such arguments.
So I don't see where this space is emerging in respect to Israel.
Yeah, I think that's fair.
I think that's fair.
My point is more about, you know, I think it's becoming a little bit more commonplace in some of these discussions to say, look, whether people agree with it or not, the United States should be prioritizing China.
And I'm not particularly a China hawk.
I don't think we should be fighting a war with China over Taiwan.
Certainly, certainly not over semiconductors.
But I just worry.
I just worry that prioritization becomes a euphemism for preparing for war with China.
So shifting priorities doesn't really bring me much reassurance.
If it's just another word for, let's militarize the so-called Indo-Pacific, another weird euphemism, in anticipation of a war that we're going to claim we're going to deter, but then we could almost just as easily be provoking.
But that's another subject.
Yeah, I think what I'd say, just kind of to wrap a bow on that point, is just the mere concept, Michael, that the United States has to make any choices about its foreign policy, that it can't be everywhere and do everything all at once, is so novel that I'm frankly excited by it.
And of course, it's not going to solve every problem overnight.
And I do think you have progressives on the left that are also, you know, interested in realism and restraint or prioritization or whatever, you know, kind of buzzword you want to throw on it.
And so I am, you know, I am positive about that.
I'm not saying, of course, it's going to solve all these problems overnight.
And yeah, what good is it to delever, you know, from the Middle East if you're just going to, you know, repurpose all of those assets elsewhere and fight a bunch of wars So, I totally agree there.
I think the bigger point, though, is, you know, the neoconservative and neoliberal internationalist view on foreign policy for the better part of 80 years now, really since World War II, has said that there are no choices, there are no questions, and there are no trade-offs.
And so, you know, I think it is good, even if there are baby steps, to be at least pushing in that direction.
Right.
Well, Mike Domino, thank you for joining us.
Remind us where people can follow you.
Yeah, sure.
We've done a lot of great Twitter X spaces together in the past.
I've enjoyed those.
I'm at mpdomino on there.
And you can also check us out at Defense Priorities.
We're trying to instill a little bit of pragmatism into U.S.
foreign policy.
So whether you're on the left or the right or you're a libertarian, you know, please join us in trying to do that.
Because I think as we've seen over the last couple of weeks and as we talk about tonight, We're very close to some major conflict here, and so we got to do what we can to avoid it.
But it's been a great chat with you tonight, Michael.
Alright, you too.
Thanks a lot.
Take care.
All right.
Joining us next is Janine Yunus.
She is a writer.
She is a lawyer.
She delves a lot into civil liberties.
But I'm the type of guy who wants to pry the hottest Israel-related takes from anybody I can get my hands on.
So that's what I plan to do with her tonight.
So let's go to Janine Yunus.
How are you?
Good.
How are you?
Thanks so much for having me.
I'm fine.
Give us your general impressions.
You follow the Middle East conflict fairly closely, I guess in part due to your family lineage, so you can remark on that if you'd like.
But what's your latest impression of the tumult that's burst out as of today, where we have these fairly brazen assassinations that Israel has done in the downtown Beirut and downtown Tehran.
We have the Supreme Leader of Iran threatening a major reprisal against Israel.
Everybody's on knife's edge, it seems, waiting for the next shoe to drop.
So, what do you make of it?
Okay, well, there's a lot in there, so I'll start by saying... That was one of my least pointed questions I've ever asked, so I'm really giving you a doozy.
Okay, so I want to make sure it's understood.
I'm not an expert in foreign policy or the Middle East.
I'm a lawyer.
I practice domestic constitutional law.
My father is Palestinian, and so a lot of my knowledge on this topic comes from him.
I've been following it my entire life because he grew up in the West Bank.
He's told me a lot of stories about his life.
It's been of great interest to me, especially because I know that my relatives in the West Bank have not been doing so well for the past several decades, so that's sort of where my point of view comes from.
As for the latest developments, I have, you know, extreme concern that this is going to lead to war, a bigger regional war with Iran, which I think it's pretty clear Netanyahu is champing at the bit for.
And he's hoping that the United States will in some way sort of support Israel, whether through, you know, financially or actually sending our people over, which seems crazy to me, but I hope that doesn't happen.
And all of this, I think I want to couch and say until the situation of the Palestinian people is addressed and the abysmal conditions under which the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza and East Jerusalem live, there will not be peace.
And, uh, This is not a message that a lot of the sort of pro-Israel people seem to want to hear.
And I'm saying this because I'm concerned for all of the people in the region, not only my family and Palestinians, but for Israelis too.
And you just cannot have people living under the conditions that the Palestinians do under Israel's foot, essentially, and have peace.
Yeah, so one of the things that I've been covering in my glorious tenure here as Glenn Greenwald's guest host, I'm conspiring as we speak to prevent him from returning to the studio here in Rio because I'm going to do a coup.
And there's a groundswell of support for that.
There's already a crowd gathering in the streets.
Encouraging me to oust him, so I'm gonna heed their call, I think, and forcibly blockade him from the studio.
But one of the things I've been covering is this religious fervor that really is a principal driver, in my experience, of the Republican or conservative attitudes toward I know there are some aspects, especially of conservative jurisprudence that you're in sympathy with above liberal jurisprudence on civil liberties, maybe more limited government, and that kind of thing.
Perhaps complicating your potential support for the Republican Party is this fervent pro-Israel attitude, and that's everybody from Speaker Johnson to, yes, Donald Trump, even if he's not a fire-breathing preacher himself, but he still elevates and enables lots of those types and has them inform his policy views on the subject.
So, I want to play you an excerpt of an interview that I conducted with Lauren Boebert.
She's the Congresswoman from Colorado at the Republican Convention earlier this month, and get your reaction.
So when you say that there's a covenant that the Israelites or the Jews are God's people and therefore that requires or compels U.S.
support for Israel, some people maybe question the logical thread there.
Even if you have that theological view of Israel, does that therefore obligate the United States to send a ceaseless supply of weapons for Israel to use to attack Gaza or potentially Lebanon?
How do you square that circle in terms of the theological justification?
Well, I don't think Israel is straight up attacking Gaza.
Moss attacked Israel.
This is self-defense, and they have the right to defend themselves.
And I am a Christian before I'm a Republican.
I am a daughter of God before I'm a politician.
And I obey what God says.
I see his covenant and how he honors his people.
I know that God is a God of honor and those who so honor will reap it.
I want to do good by my God and by the people that he has chosen.
I don't believe in deficit spending for Americans.
Like I said, if we continue the deficit spending, keep borrowing from our greatest enemy, China, then There may not be an America to stand for Israel.
Your thoughts?
Well, once again, there's a lot there to unpack.
Lauren always brings a lot to the table.
Lauren brings a lot to the table.
I'll give her that.
I am not a Republican.
I know you sort of you insinuated I'm much more of a libertarian.
I found common cause with Republicans during COVID because I was very anti-COVID restriction.
And I've sort of I would say I'm a for limited government because this country seems to do government pretty poorly, especially the federal government.
And so from that stance, I tend to be kind of tend to Vote Republican, not that my vote matters, living in D.C.
However, Republicans' general stance on this, as you've identified, except for Thomas Massey, it's pretty across the board, is a major problem for me.
I probably would have voted for Trump in this election, mainly because of not just the Supreme Court, all federal courts.
I really want conservative justices because I want to see limited government, especially federal government.
But I really fear this unequivocal support for Israel and what it would do for Palestinians, what it'll do for Israelis, and what it'll do for the region more broadly.
And there's this extremist Christian element, as you know, that has this sort of support for Israel.
So yeah, it's certainly making me hesitate in being able to support Republicans at the federal level anyway.
Yeah, I mean, obviously everybody, when they're determining who to personally vote for, and not that who you personally vote for is the biggest decision in the world.
I don't think.
I mean, people put way too much stock in it.
It could just be a pure utilitarian thing.
I don't choose to vote for anybody that I can't really make an affirmative case for in most respects.
So that means I don't end up voting very much.
But other people have different calculuses, which I understand.
But at the same time, if the Israel issue is high at all on your issue matrix, the Republicans are unequivocal, as you say.
They're denouncing the Democrats as capitulating to some kind of pro-Hamas faction.
I would love to meet some of this pro-Hamas faction.
Well, apparently anyone who cares about Palestinian human rights is pro-Hamas.
Right, right, right.
And there's also the issue of civil liberties, which you obviously have a much, a very thorough background in, but the Israel issue is used as a basis to curtail lots of civil liberties, whether it's around speech, even assembly in certain respects, as we saw with the campus protests. even assembly in certain respects, as we saw with the We don't have to relitigate that entire saga.
Online speech restrictions.
You know, where X and other platforms, they were at one point saying you can't say from the river to the sea on the platform because it's genocidal or a call for violence or that kind of thing.
So where do you come down on that?
I mean, not that the Democrats getting back into power will change the status quo all that much either in that regard.
But just the implications of the Israel issues being so front and center, perhaps now even more so, with this latest escalation in terms of what it portends for civil liberties, the civil liberties of Americans.
Well, that's, I mean, that's, I should say, actually, it's one of the reasons I became a civil liberties attorney, was because I saw the cancel culture and speech restrictions that took place around Israel-Palestine.
And, for example, my father, who's a professor at Cornell, was always extremely afraid to say anything, even just describing what he endured living and growing up under the Israeli occupation, because he was worried he would be retaliated against.
And so I always had this sort of Understanding that if you criticize Israel, you're putting your career on the line, you're putting your family's, even your family's safety on the line.
And that's actually why I'm kind of a free speech absolutist.
As for the implications of either party for free speech in this country, I mean, there was the, I don't know if you know about this Anti-Semitic Awareness Act that passed the House, and it essentially prohibits racism of Israel.
I know all about it.
I interviewed, I've interviewed both sponsors of it, so Congressman Mike Lawler, Of New York.
He was the Republican sponsor.
I interviewed him at the Republican Convention.
You should Google it afterwards if you're interested because I tried to challenge him on some of the ADL statistics that undergirded his rationale for that bill.
And he went through how it was not an attempt to criminalize Christianity, which some people on the right were claiming was the case.
And then also Josh Gottheimer, the Democrat from New Jersey, was the Democratic co-sponsor of that bill.
So yes, I'm very familiar with it.
You'll also be tickled to know that this week the Christians United for Israel group, led by Pastor John Heike, who we discussed earlier in the show, they're on their lobbying trip in D.C.
this week specifically to compel the Senate to put up the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act for a vote.
It's already passed the House, they want the Senate to take it up as well, so there's a big lobbying push underway to get that fully enacted.
Yeah, it's an extremely dangerous proposed law.
I mean, what it essentially seeks to do is to punish universities who don't punish students by withholding federal funds for students saying things like, from the river to the sea, for people being critical of Israel.
Now, the bill has in it language saying this shouldn't be construed to diminish people's First Amendment protections, but that's kind of garbage.
That's just in there to try to pretend that it doesn't violate people's First Amendment rights.
And as a First Amendment lawyer, what we're concerned about in these circumstances is what's called a chilling effect.
So maybe the law will never be used, but students and professors and other people on campuses will be afraid to even, you know, talk about Israel because they're going to think, well, you know, maybe what I say, it can be used against me and I'll, you know, be punished.
And the definition of it, so it punishes anti-Semitism on campuses, quote unquote, and then it goes on to define anti-Semitism as, you know, various The IHRA definition, right?
That's what it codifies?
Yeah, exactly.
So like criticizing Israel, equating Israel to Nazi Germany or equating Israel to double standards.
I mean, these kind of vague things that, you know, we're very concerned about as a constitutional, as constitutional lawyers.
It's clearly a First Amendment problematic to me.
And this, you know, it's this groveling that I find really disgusting.
Why are our members of Congress passing these constitutionally questionable bills rather than focusing on problems that Americans actually have?
Well, there are many potential answers to that question, some of which are so spicy they might even get me banned from Rumble.
I mean, who's to say?
But I want to play to you, so this is Miriam Adelson.
That name might ring a bell for you.
She is one of the chief funders of the Republican Party.
And she was at the Republican Convention, which I was in attendance at as well, in Milwaukee recently.
And she was also one of the keynote speakers at this Christians United for Israel Summit This week.
And I want to get your reaction to what she had to say.
Christian United for Israel is about putting faith into action.
You, fine men and women, bravely and consistently stand up for Israel and the Jewish people without bravely and consistently stand up for Israel and the Jewish people without hesitation, You do it before it is the right thing to do, because it is the Christian thing to do.
Because your souls also pine to Zion.
And friends, never has this been clearer to me and to many of my fellow Israelis and Jews than over the past nine and a half months.
So that's Miriam Adelson, who was one of the chief funders of the Republican Party.
She pledged $100 million minimum to Donald Trump in this election cycle alone.
Her late husband, who we all revered, of course, and who was buried in the Mount of Olives in East Jerusalem, Sheldon R.I.P.
He was obviously also a huge funder of the Republican Party, one of the top funders of political causes in the United States over many election cycles.
And she's saying that what she shares in common with the Christian Jews for Israel, despite being an Israeli Jew herself, is that they both pine for Zion.
What do you make of that?
Well, I mean, we know that a lot of the support in this country for Israel comes from that Christian segment.
So there's, I mean, there are various factions and various reasons that people support Israel, and that's one of them.
That might be the faction of Israeli supporters in this country, or sort of unequivocal Israeli supporters, that might be the hardest to kind of change.
I listened a little bit to the guest on before me, and I do think there actually is a bit of a shift on the right.
There seem to be a number of younger, especially right-leaning people who have become critical of Israel from sort of a property rights standpoint, classical liberalism standpoint.
So the right in general, I think there might be some hope, but I don't see the Christian Zionists really changing because their support for Israel comes, I guess, from the Bible as they see it.
Although I don't see the part where Jesus says that you should bomb children to smithereens, but maybe I missed it.
I don't know.
Yeah, I'm still looking for the property deed that entitles the Ashkenazi Jews to a certain tract of land off the Mediterranean.
I mean, look, let's not get into the whole history of Zionism that's kind of...
Water under the bridge at this point, but I mean you can find whatever justification you want for virtually anything if you're saying that this is the holy text and it provides the justification for what we want to do.
In one last video, and I'm sorry to subject you to all these mad screeds from various Republican figures, but I can't help myself.
And I'm having fun here in Glenn's absence.
But here's our good pal, Donald J. Trump.
You may have heard of him.
This is him addressing the Republican Jewish Coalition Annual Gala.
This is Donald J. Trump in October of 2023.
So let's hear that.
When I'm back in the White House, the United States will stand with Israel all the way, 100%, without hesitation, without qualification, and without any apology.
We're not going to be apologizing.
We won't be apologizing.
We're not going to be apologizing.
We will fully support the Israelis in their mission to ensure that Hamas is decimated and these atrocities will be avenged.
They will be avenged.
In many ways, they'll be avenged.
I think even beyond what you're thinking about, the wars have to be finished oftentimes before the peace.
And if you don't do the wars, the peace doesn't happen.
And if you're not going to be tough and ruthless like they are, it's not going to happen.
We have to stop it.
We have to end it once and for all.
After decades of broken promises by past leaders, I kept my promise.
Recognized Israel's eternal capital, and opened the American Embassy in Jerusalem.
I actually got the building built, too.
Got it built.
They've been talking about that for a long time, Miriam.
That's what you and that great man, that's what you wanted, right?
Okay, so there's Donald J. Trump in one of his acts of admirable candor, I think, giving a shout-out to Miriam, who I just played the clip to you, that he moved the embassy to Jerusalem As an act of generosity to Sheldon, her late husband, because he gave Trump lots of money.
That's basically it.
Yeah.
So he's admitting he can just be bought.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, that's what it seems like to me, which is doubly ironic because Trump When he initially ran in 2016, part of the appeal was that he's a self-funder, he couldn't be bought off by donors, unlike the other Republican candidates who would become puppets, including of Sheldon Adelson.
That's what Trump accused Marco Rubio and others of being, puppets of Sheldon Adelson.
And there he is at the Republican donor gala, Republican-Jewish coalition donor gala, saying that he took a major policy action, at least in large part, at the behest of his chief donor.
Which is funny.
And then obviously he's also making these very bombastic statements about his unflinching support for Israel and how it's going to be even more unflinching than what Joe Biden was doing at that point, which is hard to imagine how it could be more unflinching than Biden, but I guess Trump will find a way.
And you mentioned these shifts on the right.
I guess they exist in some fashion if you look at online comments and things.
It seems like there are younger right-wingers who are amenable to argumentation on this issue, but I haven't seen very much attempt at all to reconcile whatever those shifts might be with their concomitant, stalwart support for Trump, right?
Have you seen any attempt to Resolve that quandary?
I haven't really.
I mean, maybe a little bit.
We did have this guy Nick Fuentes on the show on Friday, who was a bit ahead of the curve in terms of the Trump contradiction.
But he's kind of in his own little silo there for the most part.
I haven't seen a widespread attempt to try to come to some resolution on whatever that conundrum might be.
Have you?
No.
Well, so I I think the support on the right comes from younger people, but I do think it's much more from the libertarians, right-leaning libertarians.
I don't know about sort of hardcore right-wingers.
I did listen to your interview with Katie Helper, and that kind of actually changed my opinion, I'll say a little bit.
I was sort of one of those people who was like, well, they're both the same, and Trump has these isolationist instincts, so maybe they'll kick in when he's actually president, and he won't get us into a war.
After listening to your interview and the fact that he posted on some probably truth social or something about how Iran should be wiped off the face of the earth if they assassinated him, which I don't know why anyone would think Iran was going to assassinate Trump, but whatever, I've sort of...
It's come to be a little bit more fearful of what would happen in the Middle East under Trump.
So I myself would say I've changed my mind in the last couple of weeks and certainly since we've talked in the past.
Yeah, I mean, one of the things that I've pointed out that I don't think gets enough coverage is that although, again, Trump might not be some crazed messianic Christian himself, or crazed messianic religious believer of any sort himself, despite claiming that his favorite book is the Bible, He clearly does empower and elevate genuinely extreme religious Jewish elements within Israel itself.
And having been to Israel last fall, I talked to many of these people firsthand.
And then also you have the Christian Zionist element, which are desperate to get Trump back in power because they see him as a Vessel for enacting their preferred policy agenda.
Now, I'm not making any positive argument for Joe Biden or Kamala Harris either.
I'm just saying that, you know, it's got to be clear-eyed about what the alternatives are here in terms of what the policy would be.
Sure, and he's unprincipled and ignorant, so it seems that he'll just go to the highest bidder, which is definitely going to be Israel, because the Palestinians don't really have a very strong lobby in this country for obvious reasons.
Yeah.
Okay, so Janine Yunus, do you have anything to plug?
Do you have anything else you'd like to address?
Do you have anything that you want me to, you want me to perform any tricks?
Should I pull any crazy stunts?
Any concluding thoughts?
Yeah, so I guess I just want to, I think a lot of people might not understand the conditions under which Palestinians live, and I just think it's really important for people to understand that.
I just talked to my dad today, actually, and he was telling me that my cousin had come back from the Hajj in Saudi Arabia and was detained by the Israeli, the IDF, for four months, they said for four months, I guess, they gave him the period of four months, no charges, They never gave him an explanation.
They released him eventually, but said they could take him back at any time for four months, and they can repeat that ad nauseum.
Those are the conditions under which Palestinians live, not to mention you can just be executed and the IDF soldier can just say they felt threatened, your home can be bulldozed.
This situation has been going on for decades.
I mean, since 1948 in some places, since 1967 in others, and it's gotten worse and worse and worse.
And I just don't believe that you can have peace when you're keeping people in these conditions.
And they don't have any voting rights.
They just have no civil rights whatsoever.
So I really just I want to get that message across that Palestinians are not animals.
They're not violent people.
They, you know, I'm not saying there aren't any anti-Semitic Palestinians, but that's not where the hostility towards Israel stems from.
It stems from the fact that Israel is depriving them of their basic human rights.
As for what I'd like to plug, I'm actually starting my own podcast.
I've done a couple of episodes, so I have a link on my Twitter at Janine Eunice Esquire, J-E-N-I-N-Y-O-U-N-E-S-E-S-Q.
There's a link tree and you can get to everything from there.
Yep.
And certainly if there is another major escalation as seems to be portended by these assassination strikes in Tehran and Beirut.
The conditions of the Palestinians on the ground in West Bank and of course in Gaza probably are not going to be improved by that general intensification of warfare because what happens in a state of warfare is that whatever meager civil liberties or civil rights that the Palestinians enjoy probably get curtailed and encroached upon even further and just general conditions deteriorate so that's another
Another foreboding thing to look to in the event that this does spiral even further out of control.
Exactly.
And I mean, look, I'm not like, I condemn October 7th, blah blah.
I have to do the whole song and dance, you know?
I don't want anyone to think I'm a monster.
I'm going to do a Piers Morgan thing.
Wait, wait, wait.
So you condemn October 7th, right?
I'm Piers Morgan.
Exactly.
You condemn it, right?
I don't.
You need to stand up on your desk right now and condemn it, or else I don't believe you.
Yes, but here's the thing.
I mean, Westerners don't know about what's happening to the Palestinians in between these events.
And it's not good.
There are Palestinians being killed by Israel all the time and being deprived of their civil rights constantly.
And so when you keep people in those conditions, there will, unfortunately, be uprisings.
You just can't keep the prisoners in the cage forever and expect them Okay, Janine Yunus, we'll leave it there.
Thanks for joining us.
Israelis who really want peace should make some effort to understand this as well, rather than just perpetuating this cycle of war.
And people should understand that the media is not fair.
They don't cover the Palestinian deaths and suffering the same way that they cover Israeli ones.
So you just don't hear about it between times.
Okay, Janine Yunus, we'll leave it there.
Thanks for joining us.
Thank you so much.
Okay, thank you for watching another beautiful episode of System Update.
I don't know.
I know you all are just overflowing with joy and gratitude for my guest hosting tenure.
I regret to inform you that Glenn will allegedly be back tomorrow.
Now, I still have some last-minute conspiring I can do to thwart his return.
Some of the staff in the studio here I think are smirking with anticipation that I'll be able to galvanize them by my side and fully effectuate my plans to prevent his return and seize the reigns of System Update officially.
So, you know, I will probably try to organize that with some last-minute frenzy before Glenn triumphantly strides back into the studio.
So, but, you know, he claims he'll be back.
So if you are interested in seeing him, at least plan to tune into it tomorrow.
I'm not going to make any guarantees because I might be emboldened to pull some moves, to put it mildly.
Okay, well with that, That's the end of the show tonight, and we'll be back tomorrow.
