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Sept. 28, 2024 - System Update - Glenn Greenwald

01:22:55

Beirut Bombing: Is There Any Limit On Civilian Deaths? Interview With Harvard Grad Alleging Campus Antisemitism

TIMESTAMPS: Intro (0:00) Israel Bombs Lebanon (6:44) Interview with Shabbos Kestenbaum (35:59) Outro (1:22:42) - - - 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

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	Good evening, it's Friday, September 27th.
	Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
	Eastern.
	And when I say every, I mean every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
	Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
	Tonight...
	I'm suppressing a sneeze.
	And also, massive Israeli airstrikes are taking place in Beirut, as they have been for the last week.
	The IDF, by air, continues to flatten one apartment building after the next.
	Large, high-rise apartment buildings, whereby the IDF's own admission, numerous civilians live.
	Just today, 700 people are estimated dead already from a single or a series of airstrikes that Israel launched on Beirut that they claimed was targeted to kill Hassan Nasrallah, the longtime head of the Lebanese group Hezbollah.
	And they also claim that the reason They had to flatten those residential buildings was because Hezbollah had built its headquarters underneath.
	The same excuse the Israelis always use whenever they blow things up in Gaza or in the West Bank.
	The excuse always is it's because the people we were trying to kill are cowardly hiding behind it.
	And the question of course is, is there any limit at all on what the Israelis can do even if it's the case that they're aiming at a particular legitimate military target?
	Meanwhile, The Lebanese military announced today that it was substantially fortifying and cordoning off, through a very large number of streets, the U.S.
	Embassy in Beirut.
	There are two questions that emerge from all of this.
	First of all, even if we assume that everything the IDF says is true, which is generally a very precarious thing to do, but let's for the moment assume that everything the IDF says is true about today's destruction of these residential buildings, the question arises, When it comes to a quote-unquote moral army or the laws of war, is there any limit at all on the number of civilians a country or a military group can kill in order to get at a legitimate military target?
	Can they kill 700 people who are civilians to get at one target?
	Can they kill 7,000, 70,000, 700,000?
	Is there any limit at all And of course, if we apply it to the United States, which we should always do when we're creating some sort of moral framework or legal framework for other countries that govern what they can do, the question then would then become, if you look at any of the countries that the United States has bombed over the last 20 years,
	not just Iraq and Afghanistan, which we invaded and occupied, but numerous other ones that we bombed, if not just Iraq and Afghanistan, which we invaded and occupied, but numerous other ones that we bombed, if they were able to identify a military commander responsible for the bombing of their country, for the killing of civilians in their country, and he happened to be, say, at a baseball game, or if he lived in a high-rise residential tower in New York or Chicago, or if he lived in a high-rise residential tower in New York or Chicago,
	Would it be permissible to explode, to bomb the 80-story high residential tower, kill thousands of people in it in order to kill that one legitimate military target?
	That's the question that you always have to ask whenever you're imposing standards on what other militaries can do.
	Secondly, Why is it that the U.S.
	embassy needs much greater protection if it is Israel that's doing the bombing?
	I understand why the Israeli embassy in Beirut would need protection, but why the U.S.
	embassy in Beirut?
	Of course, the answer is obvious.
	It's because the whole world knows, outside of the United States that is, the whole world knows that this is at least as much of a U.S.
	war as it is an Israeli war because it's the United States that pays for these bombings of residential towers and it's American bombs that are used, that are furnished from the United States to Israel in order to do it.
	And yet again, we see how much threat, how much cost, how much danger, how much undermining of our country's interests we constantly incur in order to protect this one foreign country.
	And then finally, Chavez Kastenbaum is a self-described Jewish American activist.
	He came to public prominence as one of the leading voices accusing Harvard, the school he attends, and other Ivy League universities of being pervasively anti-Semitic since October 7th, and also for failing to protect its Jewish students.
	In July, just a couple months ago, he delivered a primetime address at the Republican National Convention Where he raised many of these issues in order to explain why he was at that convention, even though he's a registered Democrat, and then subsequently endorsed Donald Trump based on them.
	He's also now a plaintiff in a lawsuit seeking monetary damages, suing Harvard, his school, in a lawsuit brought into federal court in Massachusetts alleging that Harvard, quote, has become a bastion of rampant anti-Jewish hatred and harassment, and that college administrators failed to fulfill their duty of care to keep Jewish students safe.
	We will have him here tonight to talk about all of this in an interview that we recorded right before the show that I think is very illuminating, not just about his particular advocacy, but about the general narrative that people have tried to perpetrate in the United States since October 7th, that Jewish students and Jewish people in general are a unique victim group that needs special protection here in the United States.
	Before we get to all of that, a few programming notes.
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	For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
	The Israeli destruction of Gaza is ongoing.
	People continue to die in that strip in large numbers.
	All kinds of civilian infrastructure, the little bit of that that is left in Gaza, continues to be bombed and destroyed, rendering Gaza uninhabitable to the 1.8 million people who are still left there, 1.7 million people, as the death toll is at least 45,000 or 50,000, with a lot of estimates, including from Lancet, placing it much, much higher.
	and that war has no end in sight.
	We're about to have the one-year anniversary of October 7th, which is going to entail all sorts of propagandistic justifications that will ensure that that destruction and those civilian deaths continue at at least the pace that they've been going, if not at an even more rapid pace.
	At the same time, Israel has opened up a second front in a war, this one in Lebanon, and they are now treating Beirut Almost as if it's Gaza, they are dropping not just a number of bombs in residential areas, but they are dropping 2,000 pound bombs, the kind that they were using in Gaza in densely packed areas.
	They're exploding and decimating entire residential buildings.
	And as always, they're excusing it by saying that the terrorists that they're trying to get at are hiding under it or hiding beneath it and therefore it's justified.
	Here's a report from the Associated Press on the massive escalation in the bombing of Beirut today.
	Quote, Israel says it struck Hezbollah's headquarters in a huge explosion that shook Lebanon's capital.
	Quote, three major Israeli TV channels said Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah was the target of the strikes in Beirut's southern suburbs.
	The unsourced reports could not immediately be confirmed by the AP and the army declined comment.
	But given the size and timing of the blast, there were strong indications that a senior leader may have been inside the building struck.
	Israeli Army spokesman Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari said the strikes targeted the main Hezbollah headquarters located beneath residential buildings, six buildings.
	In the Hart Creek neighborhood were reduced to rubble, according to Lebanon's national news agency.
	Six residential buildings were reduced to rubble.
	The blast rattled windows and shook homes some 30 kilometers north of Beirut.
	Ambulances were seen heading to the scene, sirens wailing.
	Officials at a nearby hospital said they received at least 10 wounded, three critically, including a Syrian child.
	And that number has gone way, way up since those initial reports.
	Now, the estimate from the IDF is that at least 300 people have been killed in these blasts.
	The Lebanese government puts it at 700.
	If you look at the amount of destruction from these huge bombs that were dropped and the destruction that ensued, You won't have any doubt about the number of dead people being at least in the hundreds.
	And I would expect that to go higher.
	Obviously, when there's rubble, there's a lot of difficulty in figuring out how many bodies are buried beneath it.
	Now, Benjamin Netanyahu went to the United Nations and attempted to justify everything that Israel is doing by depicting everything Israel is doing and Israel itself as nothing more than an attempt to achieve peace in the region.
	Here's what Netanyahu said.
	Ladies and gentlemen, Israel has made its choice.
	We seek to move forward to a bright age of prosperity and peace.
	Iran and its proxies have also made their choice.
	They want to move back to a dark age of terror and war.
	And now I have a question.
	And I pose that question to you.
	What choice will you make?
	Will your nation stand with Israel?
	Will you stand with democracy and peace?
	Or will you stand with Iran?
	A brutal dictatorship that subjugates its own people, exports terrorism across the globe.
	In this battle between good and evil, there must be no equivocation.
	When you stand with Israel, you stand for your own values and your own interests.
	Yes, we're defending ourselves, but we're also defending you against a common enemy that, through violence and terror, seeks to destroy our way of life.
	Now that sounds pretty much almost verbatim, like the speech that George Bush gave on January 20th, 2001, to the Joint Session of Congress, speaking about the war on terror that he was about to launch.
	The problem for Netanyahu is that most of the world has already made their conclusions about what Israel is doing.
	The vast majority of the world is vehemently opposed to the Israeli devastation of Gaza.
	They have enacted resolutions against it.
	They have filed war crimes proceedings against it outside of Western Europe and the United States.
	Much of the world sees it as an act of unjustified aggression, even a crime against humanity.
	So, Benjamin Netanyahu is talking to a group of nations and governments that already have concluded that far from being the symbol of peace, Israel is the aggressor in that region, engaging in massive death of civilians and innocent people and children at enormous numbers, all in order to justify and continue their subjugation of the people of Palestine, of the West Bank and Gaza, which they intend to turn into greater Israel.
	Despite the fact that those borders are not recognized by anybody in the world.
	In fact, those bodies say that the West Bank is illegally occupied and Gaza does not belong to Israel.
	Israel intends to ignore the world, to ignore those recognized boundaries.
	That is what this war is about.
	A war of expansion, a war of aggression, a war of conquest to annex the West Bank and to annex Gaza and to cleanse it of Arabs and Palestinian people.
	And the war in Lebanon that Israel has now launched is going to be seen the same way because it's based on the same mentality, which is Israel has the right to extinguish the lives of as many civilians as they want every day, as long as they want, as long as they claim that nearby or underneath there was someone that they regard as a terrorist.
	Here is another part of Netanyahu's speech to the UN in which he describes, again, the mentality that has governed Gaza, which is that every civilian in Gaza
	They fired those rockets and missiles after they placed them in schools, in hospitals, in apartment buildings, and in the private homes of the citizens of Lebanon.
	They endanger their own people.
	They put a missile in every kitchen.
	A rocket in every garage?
	I said to the people of Lebanon this week, get out of the death trap that Hezbollah has put you in.
	Don't let Nasrallah drag Lebanon into the abyss.
	We're not at war with you, we're at war with Hezbollah, which has hijacked your country and threatens to destroy ours.
	We're not at war with you.
	We just consider the places that you live to be legitimate military targets because we regard your apartment building and your apartment itself as some sort of base of Hezbollah operations that we can destroy, no matter how many of you we kill, in order to get at one Hezbollah person.
	We can blow up wireless devices at supermarkets and at malls and kill children and innocent people in order to injure people that we regard as terrorists.
	which is what Israel has been doing over the past week.
	Now, one of the most bizarre, one of the strangest aspects of the U.S.-Israel dynamic is that Israel is treated in some sense like a puppet state The U.S.
	funds its military.
	The U.S.
	provides it with all the weapons it needs and wants to destroy all these locations.
	The U.S.
	sacrifices its own standing in the world and isolates itself at the U.N.
	to shield Israel diplomatically.
	Israel is completely dependent on the United States for all of its military actions, for all of these wars.
	So you would think the United States As is true of most countries that finance other countries, as is true of most people who finance other people, would have the dominant voice in that relationship.
	And yet the exact opposite is true.
	The Biden administration knew that if this war in Gaza were ongoing into the election, it could really harm their chances to win and beat Donald Trump.
	They were doing everything possible to facilitate a ceasefire in Gaza.
	Not only because of political reasons, but also because it radically subverts American interests.
	The world blames the United States equally with Israel.
	For obviously valid reasons.
	And the more there's anti-Israel rage in the region and the world, there's more anti-American rage and violence in the world.
	And the more our troops in that area, our assets in that area, our interests around the world are jeopardized by continuing to support Israel.
	And yet, the Israelis have made very clear they don't care what the United States says at all.
	They don't care what the United States wants at all.
	In fact, you may recall That midway through what is now the year-long war in Gaza, about six months ago, one of the few places where internally displaced Gazans could go in their refugee camp that had been at least reasonably safe was Rafah.
	And as a result of that, the Biden administration, upon hearing that Israel intended to start invading and bombing Rafah, said, we don't want you to do that.
	In fact, that's a red line for us, meaning that's the term used by presidents when they say, this isn't just a desire, this is a command, this is a decree.
	This is something that if you ignore or do, after we've called it a red line, there will be consequences for it.
	Otherwise, what's the point of proclaiming red lines?
	And Netanyahu immediately mocked Biden for that red line.
	He said, we don't care what your red lines are.
	We're going to do whatever we think is in our interest.
	And they did invade and bomb and destroy Rafa and dispersed all of those people.
	And the United States did nothing but send billions and billions of dollars more in cash and weapons.
	And so now the United States has been doing everything possible, again, because they perceive it in their interest to try and prevent escalation with Hezbollah, in part because it brings a massive risk of escalation regionally that could end up sweeping in Iran.
	And the United States has already made clear for whatever reasons that we will, the United States will involve ourselves in that war.
	We have major military assets deployed there, all of which will be endangered, but all of which will be Utilized if this war, as looks increasingly likely, actually does turn into a major regional conflagration.
	And so the United States has been pressuring Israel in every way to pull back from this escalation to have a ceasefire with Hezbollah.
	And Netanyahu is doing exactly the same thing as he did with Gaza, telling the United States, we don't give the slightest concern to what you want.
	From the Washington Post today, Netanyahu vows to continue Hezbollah war, defying a U.S.
	ceasefire plan.
	The Israeli leader speaking at the U.N.
	also issued a stark warning to Iran, saying his country's military could target its assets anywhere in the Middle East.
	His swaggering, bellicose remarks included a warning to all of Israel's enemies.
	Namely, Iran, that there is no place to hide from Israel's might.
	Quote, if you strike us, we will strike you, Netanyahu said.
	There is no place in Iran that the long arm of Israel cannot reach, and that's true of the entire Middle East.
	Friday's speech at the United Nations is the latest in a series of remarks from the Israeli leader that had embarrassed U.S.
	officials, who earlier this week touted a, quote, breakthrough in negotiating a proposal for a 21-day truce that they insisted was done in full coordination with the Israeli government.
	White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby was asked repeatedly Thursday why Netanyahu kept contradicting a proposal that the United States claimed had his support.
	But Kirby was unable to offer an answer other than to say that the Prime Minister's remarks were out of step with what his aides had told U.S.
	officials privately.
	That is an embarrassment to the United States that they have been publicly announcing that they successfully facilitated a 21-day truce, only for Netanyahu to very publicly ignore that and violate it, and right in the face of the Americans.
	Embarrassment is what the United States has been suffering at the hands of what should be its client state of Israel for decades, for years, and certainly since October 7th, where the Israelis just make increasingly clear that not only do they have indifference to what the U.S.
	wants and says, they have contempt for it.
	And they also know that the U.S.
	will just continue, no matter how much the U.S.
	officials are, quote, embarrassed, to send Israel all the money and all the weapons it wants.
	In fact, the United States just announced On Tuesday, that it was sending $8 billion more in weapons to Ukraine, and on Wednesday it announced the approval of an $8.5 billion package of arms to Israel.
	So this embarrassment never has any consequences of anything.
	The more the Israelis humiliate the United States, the more the United States gives to Israel.
	Now, it is true that The war in Gaza is getting increasingly smaller and smaller amounts of attention, in part because it's been going on for a year, but obviously this new war is going to get a lot of attention, even though the destruction in Gaza has not lessened at all.
	From the New York Times on September 24th, this was earlier this week, quote, families of hostages and Gazans feel forgotten as the war heats up in Lebanon, quote, talks to reach a potential ceasefire in Gaza and free the remaining 100 or so hostages have stalled.
	After nearly a year, roughly 100 of the more than 250 hostages held by Hamas remain in the clutches of Palestinian militants in Gaza.
	They include women and older people kidnapped from their homes, as well as soldiers abducted from military bases.
	With all eyes on Israel's escalating battle with Hezbollah in Lebanon, many families now fear any hopes to save the hostages are rapidly vanishing.
	Said Itzhak Horn, whose sons Eitan 38 and Yar 46 are still held.
	Quote, we've been abandoned again and again by the Israeli government, he said.
	And quote, now the resources and attention are heading to the north.
	Both Eitan and Yar were abducted from near Oz, a border village that was devastated by the Hamas-led attack.
	Many of its roughly 400 members were either killed or kidnapped by Palestinian militants.
	Noam Don, who was also abducted there, accused Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, of, quote, cruelly neglecting the remaining hostages in favor of the escalations.
	Mr. Calderon's children, Sahar and Erez, were released in the week-long truce with Hamas in November.
	Mr. Netanyahu had said that he is committed to securing the release of the remaining hostages, but he has repeatedly said he will not agree to a ceasefire with Hamas that compromises on what he called Israel's fundamental security needs.
	Like many close to remaining captives, Don said she believed Mr. Netanyahu was more worried about the future of his government than securing the release of the hostages.
	Some of his coalition partners have opposed recent ceasefire proposals.
	Quote, there's no momentum, no negotiations, not even a bit of anything.
	Everyone's now busy with the war in the north, Mr. Warren said.
	Recall that from the beginning of the Israeli destruction of Gaza, the rationale, the justification was, in large part, We have to get our hostages back, which never made any sense.
	Why would a strategy for protecting hostages in Gaza be to bomb Gaza indiscriminately?
	And there were far more Israeli hostages in Gaza killed by Israeli bombardments than Israel was able to rescue.
	And Israelis who were kidnapped and held hostage in Gaza, when they were released and returned, said that the thing they feared most was not getting killed by Hamas, but was getting killed by Israeli bombardment.
	Netanyahu has never cared about the hostages at all.
	Not at all.
	And it's the families who see that.
	There are people in Israel in hundreds of thousands of numbers going out into the street to protest that fact.
	What he cares about is his own political future, his concern that his government will fall apart unless he continues to go all out with war with all of Israel's neighbors, and the fact that he faces a serious corruption trial, which he will have to face the minute he leaves the presidency.
	He's killed a lot of hostages.
	He's done almost nothing to secure their release.
	And that's what their families are in large numbers saying.
	Hear from the UN news today on the Lebanon crisis.
	Quote, this is just the beginning, say those impacted by deadly escalation.
	Quote, we are witnessing the deadliest period in Lebanon in a generation and many express their fear that this is just the beginning, said Imran Reza, the UN's top aid official in Lebanon.
	Quote, the UN and its partners are closely coordinating with the Lebanese government to support the response efforts.
	This includes aligning and distribution, conducting joint assessments, and identifying urgent needs for affected populations.
	Speaking from Beirut, Mr. Riza, the UN humanitarian coordinator in Lebanon, said that for nearly a year, the country's people, and especially those in the south, had, quote, lived in fear that the war in Gaza could come to them.
	Today, across Lebanon, thousands of people in rural communities, previously unaffected by Israeli targeting Hezbollah infrastructure, have fled bombardment and widespread destruction that have claimed at least 700 lives.
	Injured thousands and uprooted around 12,000 people, quote, within mere hours, he said.
	"Need Now, obviously there's an enormous amount of hatred and rage and a desire for violent retribution against Israel for self-evident reasons.
	But every time, that also spills over to the United States, to the government, to our military, to the soldiers deployed there, to our interests all over the world.
	From the Times of Israel earlier today, quote, Security source says Lebanese army is putting up a protective cordon around the U.S.
	embassy.
	Quote, the Lebanese army is protectively setting up a security cordon around the U.S.
	embassy in Lebanon, which is north of Beirut, a security source tells Reuters.
	And at first glance, it may seem confusing.
	Why would The U.S.
	Embassy in Beirut need fortifying when it's the Israelis dropping the bomb.
	But of course, everyone in Lebanon, everyone around the world except in America understands that this is as much of an American war as it is an Israeli war.
	For many, many years now, people, even within the national security community, have been warning that our continuous, unflinching, unlimited support of Israel and every one of their wars and conflicts with their Arab neighbors is highly detrimental to American interests.
	They often have to apologize after they speak that truth because that's one of the taboo truths that is not permitted to be heard in the United States.
	But frequently they have said it, including David Petraeus, the general who led the counterinsurgency in Afghanistan and then ran the CIA for President Obama.
	In 2010, the Jerusalem Post reported, quote, Arab-Israeli conflict hurts the United States.
	General Petraeus tells Congress that hostility presents challenges to U.S.
	interests in the Middle East.
	Quote, U.S.
	General David Petraeus charged Thursday that the Arab-Israeli conflict hurts America's ability to advance its interests in the Middle East, fomenting anti-American sentiment And limiting American strategic partnerships with Arab governments.
	Petraeus called the conflict one of the quote, root causes of instability and obstacles to security in the region, which aids Al Qaeda.
	And argued that serious progress in the peace process could weaken Iran's reach as it uses the conflict to fuel support for its terror proxies.
	Quote, the enduring hostilities between Israel and some of its neighbors present distinct challenges to our ability to advance our interests, he said.
	In the written testimony, quote, Arab anger over the Palestinian question limits the strength and depth of U.S.
	partnerships with governments and peoples in the Middle East and weakens the legitimacy of moderate regimes in the Arab world.
	This is just blatantly and obviously true.
	That, moral questions aside, just on a strategic basis, our decision to elevate Israel and its military and wars to at least a level of priority equal to our own wars and military, if not at a higher level, there's a lot more criticism of American wars in the United States than there is of Israel wars.
	A lot more opposition to American military spending in the United States than there is for American military spending for Israel's military and wars.
	But it's not just a moral question, it's that strategically the United States ends up being hated by huge parts of the world that impeded its interest because of how closely it stands by Israel, how much money and the weapons, when the bombs fall, people understand those are American weapons that were provided for that reason.
	Now, one of the ironies of Israel constantly claiming that It's Hezbollah and Hamas that purposely build their military targets and installations in civilian areas?
	Is that Israel has done that for decades?
	Exactly that.
	The New York Times in May of 2021 published an article, quote, a look inside Israel's, quote, fortress of Zion military command beneath Tel Aviv.
	The country's military and intelligence commanded the recent assault on Hamas in Gaza from an underground bunker made for high-tech wars.
	So they are building, the Israelis are, their command and control centers, their military targets underneath civilian infrastructure in Tel Aviv.
	You think that if Hezbollah or Iran shot missiles and blew up residential apartment buildings in Tel Aviv, anyone in the West would dare suggest That if it killed hundreds of Israeli civilians, that was justified because there were military targets, legitimate military targets underneath that the Israelis purposely constructed under civilian infrastructure deep in the ground of Tel Aviv.
	Here's a Google map that shows where that military base is, that is in Tel Aviv, that under which the Fortress of Zion sits.
	And in this map you can see that that red dot there, which if we could pull up these pens so we can just emphasize them, this red dot here is the military base and many of these other very nearby infrastructure and buildings are civilian buildings.
	They're shopping malls, they're residential centers, Museums, art galleries, right in the middle of Tel Aviv, and the Israelis built this principal military command and control base, the Fortress of Zion, as the New York Times called it, right underneath that structure.
	So the only way that you can get at it is by dropping massive bombs that will blow up all the civilian infrastructure and the people inside of it as well.
	What possible ground would anyone have to object to someone doing that if they're defending the Israeli bombing of schools and residential buildings in Beirut and in Gaza.
	And as I said earlier, if you want to apply to the United States to make it a little closer to home, if you are Iraq or if you're Afghanistan, or you are Yemen, or Syria, or Libya, any of the countries that the United States has been bombing and killing civilians in with drones and airstrikes.
	Over the last 15 years, you were able to identify a military commander who designed those attacks that killed your civilians and found out where he lived inside the United States and it turned out he lived in some high rise apartment building in a major American city, which is probably likely since those types of people, once they leave the military, generally make a massive amount of money serving as consultants for the military-industrial complex, telling Raytheon and General Dynamics how to get massive contracts from the Pentagon, in which they once worked.
	By this moral framework, Any of those countries that we bomb in the future would be justified in just blowing up the entire 84 high-rise of apartment buildings filled with civilians.
	And their argument would be, oh wait, the military commander was in it and we wanted to get him.
	And the only way we could get him, because he lives among civilians, was by blowing up this building.
	That's exactly the moral and legal mentality and framework the Israelis are using to justify everything they're doing in Beirut and everything they've been doing in Gaza over the past year.
	Is that an acceptable framework when applied reciprocally to the United States or to Israel?
	Just to ask that question is to answer it.
	Now, just to give you a sense of the magnitude of the destruction, there have been videos taken by people in Beirut that have been verified by outlets such as the Associated Press and the Associated Press published several of those videos just to give you a sense for how massive these bombs were that were dropped in the middle of residential areas in Beirut earlier today.
	So, as I said, they flattened at least.
	We don't need to play that on a loop.
	The bombs that they dropped were huge bombs in a densely packed residential area that flattened at least six apartment buildings.
	And as usual, the Israelis used the justification that they always had.
	There's reports or speculation... Oh, I think we have actually more here.
	It wasn't actually on a loop.
	Let's just finish playing that just to get a sense of the magnitude.
	You'll see it from different angles.
	You'll see how many apartment buildings were exploded.
	You'll see how close they are to all sorts of residential facilities.
	The massive smoke clouds that are in the air hovering over Beirut.
	Obviously that's designed to be and of course is terrorizing.
	You can hear human screaming coming from those places where there's bombing.
	You can hear that in that part.
	So that's what the country that Benjamin Netanyahu said represents peace and tranquility and stability of the world is doing now to the city of Beirut.
	Now, as I was saying, the alleged target of this, these airstrikes, was the quote-unquote Hezbollah headquarters and specifically Hassan Nasrallah, who has been the longtime and very clever leader of Hezbollah.
	There is some speculation that he might have been there and had been killed.
	There's other speculation that he was not there.
	None of that is yet confirmed.
	But either way, the question continues to be whether there are any limits on what Israel can do.
	Can it just destroy all of Beirut, kill hundreds of thousands of people, and then just say, well, we had to get rid of Hezbollah and they're integrated into the civilian infrastructure in Beirut?
	And if that is a moral argument that works for Israel, that justifies Israel killing huge numbers of civilians as they did in Gaza, Then, by definition, that would have to be a justifying framework that other countries can use against, say, Israel, the United States, or its allies as well.
	And I think we need to be very careful about what it is that we're endorsing, but also questioning why it is that the United States continues to deliberately sacrifice its own interests, even to the point where it's being deliberately and flagrantly humiliated.
	By Israel, in order to stand by Israel, in order to continue to finance its military, in order to continue to give it the bombs that it uses to blow up huge numbers of civilian people, and then if there's an attack on the United States again like there was on 9-11, we'll all get to run around and say, oh my God, why does anyone hate us?
	Why would anyone attack us?
	Why would anyone want to kill us?
	And we'll hear, oh, they hate us for our freedoms.
	They hate us for that.
	And any rational person looking at that would feel the same way.
	Shabbos Kestenbaum is a self-described Jewish American activist.
	He came to public prominence earlier this year as one of the leading voices accusing Harvard, the school he attends, and other Ivy League universities of being pervasively anti-Semitic and failing to protect Jewish students.
	In July, he delivered a primetime address At the Republican National Convention announcing that he was supporting Donald Trump based on many of those issues.
	And he is also now a plaintiff suing Harvard in a lawsuit brought in the federal court in Massachusetts alleging that Harvard, quote, has become a bastion of rampant anti-Jewish hatred and harassment and that college administrators failed to fulfill their duty of care to keep Jewish students safe.
	And we are very happy to have him here to discuss all of this and more.
	Shabbos.
	Good evening.
	It's great to see you.
	Thanks for coming on.
	We appreciate it.
	Thank you for having me.
	So let me start with the lawsuit that you brought in January of this year against Harvard.
	It's a pretty long complaint and there's a lot of grievances that are expressed about things going on at the Harvard campus that you think are bad or inappropriate, but it is a lawsuit as well.
	And therefore, the allegation has to be that Harvard had a legal obligation to take certain steps to protect Jewish students or combat anti-Semitism that it failed to take.
	Can you just identify, say, two or three of the measures that you believe Harvard administrators had an obligation to take that they failed to take?
	Happily.
	So I'll give you one quick anecdote.
	There was a staff member who challenged me to debate him as to whether Jews were behind 9-11.
	That was after he had vandalized all of our hostage posters that we received permission to post, where he said that Jews did 9-11, that Jews are friends with Jeffrey Epstein on Kfir Bebas, who's the now two-year-old baby being held hostage in Gaza.
	His head is still on.
	Where's the evidence?
	So I, of course, don't respond to that email.
	A couple hours later, he's posting on his social media a video of him waving a machete with a couple of screenshots saying that he has a plan to take down the Zionist mafia.
	He wants to fight.
	A month later, he says that he has a posse that's coming after more than blood.
	So I frantically email.
	I frantically call.
	I request to meet with really anyone at Harvard, because you have to remember, this is a staff member.
	He knew where I lived because of the Harvard directory.
	He had access to campus, so I asked Harvard, what are you going to do to discipline this professor, and more fundamentally, you know, make sure that he can't harm me or other Jewish students.
	To this day, Harvard has not responded to a single one of my emails or my phone calls.
	That's pretty deliberately indifferent, and I can't imagine that any other minority group would be treated with the contempt, the disregard, and the disdain that Harvard treats its Jewish students.
	And, you know, I'll give you one last quick example, but again, we could delve more into it later.
	Harvard was ranked by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expressions 248th out of 248 universities when it came to free speech.
	They routinely rescind controversial speakers.
	They actually unaccepted 12 students who had posted sexist memes in a WhatsApp group.
	And when a noted anti-Semite, Mohamed El-Kurd, was invited, for the very first time, Harvard said, well, he has a First Amendment right and we want to engage in controversial ideas.
	Well, that's fine if that's how Harvard always played the game, but they've never played the game that way.
	So, you know, deliberate indifference and creating a double standard when it comes to Jewish students.
	So let's start with that first point.
	I realize, obviously, that speech is offensive to a lot of people to say that, you know, we want to raise a knife against the Zionist state, which is the Israeli government, obviously reacting to the bombing of Gaza on October 7.
	In general, the idea of academia and college campuses and professors and tenure and academic freedom is to be able to express any and all views where that's the one place where there's not supposed to be a prohibited idea or thought where everything is permitted to be questioned and nothing is taboo.
	Do you think that Harvard in this case should have but failed to, say, discipline or fire that staff member because of the expression of those ideas that you dislike?
	Yeah, so I'm totally with you, Glenn.
	The Carl Sagan line of the cure for fallacious argument is a better argument, not the suppression of ideas.
	I'm totally in favor of a university and a culture that really values free speech, the intellectual discourse, and the academic rigor.
	The problem is, Harvard University has never really cared about that.
	So if they want to play the game like the University of Chicago, that all speech is protected and you can really invite anyone you want, then fine.
	I really wouldn't have a problem.
	The problem is Harvard has never played that game.
	As I just said, they routinely disinvite speakers who are deemed transphobic, speakers who are deemed controversial, yet the only acceptance seems to be with Jewish students.
	I wouldn't say offense.
	My problem with that staff member was not that he challenged me to debate him as to whether Jews were behind 9-11.
	My problem is he filmed a video taunting me with a machete saying he's coming after from more than blood.
	I mean, that's a threat.
	We have to file a police report.
	Wait, did he send that video only to you?
	He emailed the video only to you of him holding up a knife?
	No, so he had emailed me earlier asking me to debate him in a secluded underpass.
	I don't respond.
	And then he had posted a video later that night with a machete.
	And then about a month later, he tags me on Twitter saying that yes, he's coming for more than blood and he has a posse, something to that effect.
	Oh, and he's going to bury me in the ground.
	So, you know, that's not appropriate behavior of any staff member.
	But again, I agree with you when it comes to speech.
	I do think speech should be protected, but that's really not what our lawsuit is about.
	Our lawsuit is about, hey, look, we weren't able to access our library because it was surrounded by masked protesters.
	We weren't able to access certain areas in campus because during the encampment, there was a sign that said, make sure to talk to us before you're allowed in.
	You know, these students have no control over whether students can go or not, yet they were able to do that for three weeks.
	So I think you and I can probably agree that has nothing to do with speech.
	That has to do with the actions and the behavior of students that Harvard allowed to materialize for weeks on end.
	So you're saying we're all sorry.
	Go ahead.
	I didn't mean to interrupt.
	I thought you were done.
	So the bottom line, the bottom line is I think each other when it comes to speech, However, most of our lawsuit, it's not about speech.
	It's about a double standard.
	It's about the violation of policies that Harvard refused to discipline students on.
	And in fact, the House Committee on Education and the Workforce just detailed yesterday how Harvard did not discipline any of the students who violated Harvard policy.
	But that's entirely separate from free speech, which again, we would agree should be protected.
	So when you turned over that email to law enforcement authorities, did they take any action?
	Did they arrest that staff member?
	Did they conclude that he had violated the criminal law?
	Sure.
	So the police told me to file a restraining order, which I did not do, simply because I didn't want to, you know, drown myself down in the technical bureaucratic details.
	You know, I had better things to do.
	However, it was very clear that he'd violated Harvard's internal policies as it pertains to bullying, intimidation, and harassment.
	So every time I emailed or called Harvard University about this particular individual, they never once responded.
	I mean, that's pretty odd.
	So you had mentioned the group fire.org of which I'm actually a big fan and at the same time you were essentially saying there's a double standard because when it comes to free speech Harvard will basically prohibit anybody from coming to campus that offends any minority group except for Jews.
	Now, one of the things that FIRE has been very vocal on since October 7th is denouncing all kinds of political figures, governors, academic administrators for their, for example, decrees shutting down pro-Palestinian groups, Students for Justice in Palestine, banning particularly incendiary pro-Palestinian speakers.
	Does that, I mean, that seems to me to kind of cut against your argument that the only types of students who are ever subjected to these double standards are Jewish students because in those cases, banning those groups are about protecting Jewish students from hearing opinions that they dislike.
	Is that something that you're comfortable with, that you've objected to?
	Yeah, so I can talk about Harvard specifically.
	Harvard, after about a year or so, they banned the Palestine Solidarity Committee temporarily.
	They reinstated them about a month ago.
	The reason they banned them had nothing to do with the speakers they were inviting.
	In fact, today at Harvard University, there was an event on a convicted Palestinian terrorist who killed a 25-year-old Jewish person, and the Center for Middle Eastern Studies is having that event as we speak.
	Or actually, I think they just had an hour ago.
	The reason the Harvard Palestine Solidarity Committee was temporarily banned, and again, they were reinstated, is because they kept violating the time, place, and manner restrictions.
	So you can protest.
	You can, and not only can, but you should do that.
	I 100%, let's make no distinction about this, 100% see people who disagree with me, who people who have controversial opinions, they should be able to protest.
	However, you can't interrupt the classroom, right?
	And that's what the Harvard-Palestine Solidarity Committee was doing.
	You can protest, but you can't block the entrance to the library, which is what the Harvard-Palestine Solidarity Committee was doing.
	So, every university has their own internal policies on what's considered appropriate and inappropriate protesting, and the Harvard Palestine Solidarity Committee, in addition with other groups like Harvard Out of Occupied Palestine, Harvard Jews for Palestine, the list goes on, they just kept violating time, place, and manner restrictions, and the best example, of course, is the encampment.
	So you can protest, but what you can't do, and this is what happened to me, is you can't follow people on their way to class.
	You can't record them with their phones.
	And I have former classmates, former friends, who would don these bright yellow safety vests, and they would quite literally follow me to class.
	And I would ask them what they were doing, and they wouldn't respond to me.
	And this happened for three weeks on end.
	So the reason they were temporarily banned was not to do with free speech.
	It had to do with their inappropriate behavior and the violation of internal policies.
	Absolutely.
	You have a right to be anti-Semitic.
	You have a right to chant controversial slogans.
	Like Death to Israel?
	Or Globalize the Intifada?
	Are those all permissible free speech expressions in your view?
	So when it comes to the public square, I think yes, the problem is Harvard has internal policies and they've routinely criticized speech in the past.
	So Harvard is the one that needs to make this distinction.
	Harvard needs to be the one to say either all speech is prohibited or all speech is permitted.
	What they can't do is say there is controversial speech that we're going to protect, but if it's controversial speech that targets Jewish students, yeah, that's fine.
	It's the double standard, Glenn.
	I get that.
	So on that question of the double standard, you're The lawsuit doesn't just talk about Harvard, it talks about Ivy League schools in general.
	I've heard you in interviews and speeches talking about American academia, American academic institutions in general.
	So you're right.
	The students for Justice in Palestine were temporarily banned or suspended by Harvard, but at a lot of other schools around the country since October 7th, they were just shut down.
	Ron DeSantis, for example, ordered Every Student for Justice and Palestine group shut down and banned from every campus.
	That's something FIRE objected to.
	Columbia actually did the same.
	So in terms of the double standards, while there's all these bannings and suspensions of pro-Palestinian groups, are you aware of any pro-Israel group that has been suspended or disciplined or punished in any way on American campuses since October 7th?
	Sure.
	I mean, I'll answer the question with a questioner.
	Are you aware of any pro-Israel group that has called for the ethnic genocide of Muslims, that have blocked the entrances of libraries, that have protested inside of classrooms, that have disrupted classrooms, that have targeted the Muslim Student Association with swastikas?
	The answer is no, of course not.
	So, in terms of the specifics, again, I'd rather focus on Harvard, but Ron DeSantis, for example, when he shut down Students for Justice in Palestine, he was citing a lawsuit that NJAC, the National Jewish Advocacy Center, I think that's the acronym, that they filed against Students for Justice in Palestine and a litany of other groups because they receive a lot of their funding from this dark outside money, including Qatar.
	And in the case of Code Pink, they actually get a lot of their money from the Chinese Communist Party.
	So I think that's what he was citing.
	In terms of Colombia, I think it's pretty obvious why Colombia shut down their Students for Justice in Palestine.
	And that's because a significant amount of their members took part in the occupation of Hamilton Hall.
	They took a maintenance worker hostage.
	They vandalized private property and they refused to leave.
	So again, I'm all for using free speech and exercising your First Amendment rights, but not when it comes to vandalizing property, not when it comes to threatening or harming other students physically.
	And I'll just close by saying this, I'm in Pittsburgh today.
	I met with students at the University of Pittsburgh.
	As I was talking to the students, there was a university-wide alert saying that there was a physical assault against a Jewish student last night, where anti-Semitic threats were being yelled at as well.
	This is the third physical assault against a Jewish student at the University of Pittsburgh this month alone.
	I mean, whether this was an African-American student, a Jewish student, an LGBTQ plus student, these threats can never be tolerated on our college campuses.
	But I guess just in terms of the argument that you just made about why pro-Palestinian groups are banned, you were essentially saying, well, pro-Palestinian groups are banned all over the country because they were actually violating the rules, whereas pro-Israel groups were never suspended because they didn't violate the rules.
	That sounds to me like a defense that you're making that college campuses and college administrators are actually applying the laws equally by Banning pro-Palestinian groups when they violate the law and treating pro-Israel groups exactly the same way.
	I guess what I'm saying is it's very hard to understand how you can claim that only Jews are not given these protections, only Jews are treated in these derogatory ways, when if you look at the last year, by your own argument, you're basically saying, yeah, there were tons of Palestinian groups that were banned, but they deserved it, and no pro-Israel groups were banned because they didn't.
	Isn't that exactly what you would want, assuming all those facts that you asserted are true?
	Yeah, well, no, I think you're lumping two things together.
	One is I'm talking about the double standard at Harvard University, and then broadly speaking, I would agree.
	The University of Miami, the University of Florida, they've never had a double standard.
	I very much encourage the American people to look at those universities because they really are about the free exchange of ideas, and they're not really into the political indoctrination.
	No, but I'm saying at Harvard, comparing the treatment of the pro-Palestinian group that was temporarily suspended to the pro-Israel groups that never were, it sounds to me like you're arguing that those rules were applied justly.
	They were applied justly to the pro-Palestinian group and to the pro-Israel group.
	No, no, not at all.
	I mean, I encourage all your viewers to read our lawsuit in full.
	Yes, it is true, I give Harvard credit for temporarily suspending the group, but then again, they unsuspended them, and they just had an unsanctioned protest literally yesterday, where they again surrounded the entrance to the library.
	However, if you want to talk about a double standard, forget about the Mohammed El Kurd when they invited that controversial speaker, which is the example I gave earlier.
	We could talk about the encampments.
	You had hundreds of students and professors who set up illegal encampments on Harvard property.
	They violated all time, place, and manner restrictions in clear violation of Harvard policy.
	And only 13 students were suspended.
	And as of a month ago, 13 of the 13 had their suspensions revoked.
	Not only that, in exchange for the encampment leaders leaving, the president of the university, Alan Garber, told them, you will be able to meet with the Harvard Management Corporation, which oversees Harvard's $50 billion endowment, to talk about divestment from Israel.
	You will be able to meet with Harvard senior faculty members to talk about the establishment of a Palestinian study center.
	Well, I've been asking for a meeting with Alan Garber and senior administrators for months, and they never once responded to any of my emails.
	So how come if you violate the law, if you follow Jews on their way to class, if you set up an encampment throughout the campus, you'll have your voices heard?
	But if you play by the rules, you won't have your voices heard.
	So that's just one example, I would say, of a pretty obvious double standard.
	But as I said, I'm happy How is your voice suppressed or silenced?
	Or fellow pro-Israel groups, how are your voices suppressed?
	It sounds like, I mean, from what I see, you're all over the media.
	You've had a ton of platforms to be heard, both at Harvard and more broadly in the U.S.
	media.
	How has your voice or the voice of pro-Israel advocates been silenced or censored?
	Well, to be clear, in this 15-minute interview, I never used the word suppressed or silenced.
	I don't think I am being suppressed or silenced by the national media, evident by the fact that I'm on the national media.
	I'm talking about a double standard.
	I never said we're being suppressed.
	I never said we're being silenced.
	I said we are treated categorically different.
	And again, you don't have to take my word for it.
	We have the president of Harvard University say under oath on live TV in front of Congress that you could call for the genocide of Jewish people, depending on the right context.
	When we know that that would never be tolerated if it was a different minority group.
	And the best case of that is just last year, there was a homophobic incident and the university immediately that day.
	I don't remember if they expelled, but they certainly suspended the student and then released a university wide email when what's it called?
	When George Floyd was killed, the university released a statement almost immediately saying that as an institution, they would rid themselves of white supremacy and racism, which I think is a good thing to say.
	The problem was after October 7th, they didn't really say much.
	It took them four days and they couldn't really condemn the 34 student groups who blamed the Israeli regime for all the ongoing violence in the Middle East.
	after Russia invaded Ukraine, Harvard immediately flied the Ukrainian flag.
	After October 7th, when we asked, can you fly the Israeli flag?
	They said no.
	So, you know, that's a double standard.
	But again, I never used the words suppressed or silenced.
	I'm very privileged and fortunate that I have a voice with the national media.
	Speaking of the encampments that you've mentioned a couple of times now, one of the things you said in your RNC speech was, quote, I was harassed merely for being a Jew.
	Were these encampments closed to all Jewish students or were there Jewish students participating in those encampments and even helping to organize them and participating in their duration?
	IN.
	Sure.
	So I think you and I would probably agree that an African-American saying that the Confederacy wasn't racist is probably wrong.
	So to a Jewish student participating in the encampments, yeah, they can do it, but that doesn't make it any less anti-Semitic.
	So it is true that there were many Jews who participated in the encampments in the same way that there are some African-Americans who believe in the Confederacy, in the same way that throughout Jewish history there is what's called the Erev Rav, which is literally translated as the mixed multitude.
	We have a history of Jews within the Jewish community who have not I would say endorse Jewish values.
	You know, the best example I would probably give was in Nazi Germany, when you have the National Association of German Jewry, which was the Jewish division of the Nazi party.
	So I get the question you're trying to arrive at, which is, look, the Canadians can't be anti-Semitic if you have Jews doing it.
	But at the end of the day, when you're calling for the violent destruction of the Jewish state, that is anti-Semitic.
	And when I talk about being harassed, Yes, I did not initiate any type of conversation with the encampment protesters.
	I did not try to initiate, God forbid, any type of violence.
	I was simply walking through it.
	And I encourage all of your listeners, go on my Twitter, you can see the videos for that yourselves.
	Every single time I walked through the encampment, which is on my way to class, which is on the way to prayers, every single time there would be at least 3 or 4 safety marshals, these students who would don these bright yellow vests, and they would just follow me, and they would record me with their phones, and in some cases, the National Lawyers Guild on the last week of the encampments would come, and they would write down what I was doing on their notepads.
	I mean, that's inexcusable and that's unacceptable, and even though you and I, Glenn, probably disagree on a lot of politics, we can both agree that no student should be targeted simply for going to class.
	I guess what I'm trying to get at is that there have been a lot of attempts to suggest that these encampments are hostile toward Jewish students, that they impede the flow of people simply because they're Jews.
	As you put it, I was harassed merely for being a Jew.
	But isn't the real distinction at these encampments, not who's Jewish and who's not.
	I mean, the Columbia one was often held up as the most anti-Semitic one and they were actually having Jewish ceremonies and Shabbat dinners within the encampment.
	It seemed to me like the difference, and I've interviewed a lot of Harvard students and Columbia students and others participating in these groups, many of whom were Jewish.
	The distinction was not who's a Jew and who isn't a Jew.
	The distinction was who supports the Israeli bombing of Gaza and who doesn't.
	Sure, so again, I think I answered that pretty well in the last answer, which is, yes, there's a tokenization, of course.
	I remember back when I was voting for people like Jamal Bowman and AOC, they would say tokenization is racism, and the tokenization of Jewish people, it's nothing new.
	As I said, There was a Jewish division of the Nazi party.
	Some of the most vehemently anti-Semitic communists under the Soviet Union were Jews.
	So, yes, it's an unfortunate part of our history, but I was not going around Harvard University saying, let's kill Gazan civilians.
	I was going around Harvard University going to class, and I was followed as a result.
	But you have spoken out in favor of the Israeli war in Gaza, right?
	That is a position that you had publicly expressed, that you publicly expressed before, that you support what Israel is doing in Gaza against Hamas.
	So before I answer that question, I guess I'll answer it with a question, which is, even if I did say that, are you saying it's acceptable to be followed for one's political alignments?
	I'm saying that it would be inaccurate to say that the distinction that the encampment was drawing, or that the protesters were drawing, is simply harassing people who are merely Jews, given that there are many Jews who are inside those encampments.
	Not a few token ones, but actually a large number of young American Jews are very opposed to what the Israelis are doing in Gaza and elsewhere.
	So the distinction that I'm seeing, both in the reporting I've done, the interviews I've done, and even based on what you're describing, is not between preventing people from entering the encampment based on who is a Jew or who isn't, meaning keep all Jews out, which would be anti-Semitic.
	The distinction is this is an encampment that is protesting the Israeli war in Gaza.
	If you agree with us, we want you to be part of our protest.
	And if you don't, whether you're a Jew or a Christian or even an evangelical or an atheist and you support the Israeli bombing of Gaza, that's where the opposition lies.
	So, I mean, I understand what you're insinuating, You're trying to say, well, I was being followed for my political ideologies, which again, isn't that much better.
	That's still against corporate policy and still something that you should condemn regardless.
	But again, I'm not in support of Israel indiscriminately bombing Gazan children.
	Yeah, I'm in support of Israel defending themselves after October 7th.
	But the reason I was targeted, and again, it wasn't just me.
	It was dozens of Harvard Jewish students and dozens of Harvard Jewish faculty.
	I'm not the only plaintiff in the lawsuit.
	There are five others.
	And again, your listeners should certainly read our lawsuit.
	They were being targeted because they were visibly Jewish.
	I mean, there's no other way around it.
	Okay.
	Let me ask you about your experience specifically.
	Can I make one last point?
	There are plenty of Harvard students who have been a lot more vocal about their support of Israel's campaign in Gaza, and they were not followed, and they were not Jewish.
	So I digress, but anyways.
	Before I was a journalist, I was a lawyer.
	I'm, I guess, a little bit ashamed to admit it.
	I like to forget about it, but I'm bringing it up here because it's relevant.
	You're a recovering lawyer.
	Yeah, exactly.
	A recovering lawyer.
	I did read your lawsuit in depth in preparation for talking to you.
	And in general, one of the things that happens when you bring a lawsuit, a civil lawsuit of the kind that you brought against Harvard on behalf of an individual is that you have to say exactly not just what the defendants did wrong or illegally, but what the damages were to the plaintiff who's seeking money damages as you are.
	You're seeking compensatory and punitive damages as part of this lawsuit.
	So I just, I've heard what you've said about being harassed and those things, but I just want to make sure we're being very specific and very concrete and very clear.
	Were there any times when you were actually physically assaulted or physically injured by pro-Palestinian protesters on Harvard's campus?
	So again, I understand what you're insinuating.
	No, I'm honestly not insinuating anything.
	I'm really just trying to ask.
	I'm trying to just get a sense.
	I understand you've talked about things that were done that you thought were wrong, following you around, taping you, all of that.
	But I'm just trying to get an understanding of what actually happened to you.
	And so my question is not really insinuating anything.
	It's really just asking, were you physically assaulted or physically injured in any way by pro-Palestinian students at any point during these protests?
	There were physical assaults against Jewish students at Harvard University.
	I encourage your listeners to read the lawsuit.
	Me, personally, no.
	Instead, I had private armed security outside my house for a week after a Harvard staff member taunted me with a machete.
	I've received countless death threats, both online and mail to me.
	So yeah, there were definitely instances where me being a Jewish student, and really any student, were experiencing things that should never really be experienced as a result of being a student at a university and having certain religious ideologies.
	And by the way, as I mentioned earlier, while it is true that I personally was not physically assaulted, thank God, and unfortunately that is not the case of Harvard University, that's also not the case of the many, many experiences of Jewish students across the country.
	Just as I said, just today there was a physical assault at University of Pittsburgh.
	There were three physical assaults at the University of Michigan in the last couple of weeks.
	So unfortunately this is happening a lot more often than is being reported.
	Well, I just want to point you to a couple of studies that were done exactly on this question, pretty recent ones.
	One was a study from the armed conflict location and event data from May of 2024.
	And the title was Demonstrations Related to the Israel-Palestine Conflict in the United States.
	And it said, quote, while some notable violent clashes have recently taken place, such as on the UCLA campus, where pro-Israel supporters actually initiated that violence, that was the one example they had, the overwhelming majority of student protests since October 7th, in fact, 99% have remained peaceful. the overwhelming majority of student protests since October 7th, in
	And then the Harvard Kennedy School issued a report as well entitled Crowd Counting Consortium, an empirical overview of recent pro-Palestine protests at U.S. schools that said only a few dozen of these thousands of protest days have seen even property damage or...
	or injuries to police or counter protesters.
	Despite that fact, many public figures continue to describe the protest as violent, and police have arrested more than 3,600 protesters.
	Our data also shows that protest participants have been injured by police or counter protesters, sometimes severely, about as often as protesters have caused property damage, much of which has been limited to graffiti.
	So it's analyzing essentially every campus protest In the name of the pro-Palestinian cause or the anti-war cause that has taken place since October 7th.
	And it's essentially saying there are very, very few instances of physical confrontation or violence that has taken place.
	And the one that was really entailing that was the one at UCLA, which pro-Israel activists from off campus came in and initiated.
	Do you have data that contradicts this or are you just talking anecdotally about things you've been hearing?
	Well, again, I think that's a pretty loaded question.
	First of all, with UCLA in particular, that was in response to a Jewish student who was assaulted the week before.
	But yes, if you want to talk about statistics, absolutely.
	The National Association of Jewish, excuse me, the National Jewish Advocacy Center showed that physical assaults on Jewish people were up 45%.
	Vandalizing incidents were up 65%.
	Harassment was up 164%.
	If you look at the overwhelming majority of religiously based hate crimes, the overwhelming majority are Jewish people.
	If you want to look at Columbia University, where maintenance workers were taken hostage.
	If you want to look at Harvard University, where there was a physical assault at Harvard Business School.
	If you want to look at the University of Michigan, where two Jewish students were attacked with a glass bottle.
	So I would have loved to have read this report earlier, which is why I asked your staff if there was anything they needed me to know beforehand.
	But even if we were to take what that report is, and I haven't heard of that organization before, even if we were to take what they were saying at face value, it does not in any way take away from the actual lived experiences of Jewish students who've been physically attacked and physically assaulted on their campuses.
	So I'm happy, if you want to send that over, I'm happy to read that study in more depth.
	But again, I can point to the FBI statistics that have shown that rates of anti-Semitism, and we're not talking about, you know, anything verbal or hate speech, we're talking about like physical assaults, they have skyrocketed since the October 7th attacks.
	Yeah, just to be clear, there were two studies, one of which came from the Harvard Kennedy School, the other which was very widely publicized in almost every major media outlet.
	Let me just add to that real quick.
	Can I add to that real quick?
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	I would just add that the Harvard Kennedy School employs someone by the name of Marshall Ganz.
	Marshall Ganz was found to have discriminated against Jewish students, not just through Harvard Kennedy's own internal investigation, but also by the Brandeis Center.
	He's still employed.
	So I wouldn't exactly take Harvard Kennedy School at their word.
	So you feel the data might have been fabricated or just invented?
	Well, again, that's why I asked your staff if they could send me anything.
	So, you know, if you were going to pull things out, I'd be able to read it before.
	But I would say, again, just talk to Jewish students.
	You know, talk to my friend Hannah from UC Berkeley, who had a rock thrown through her dorm window with a note saying F Jews.
	Talk to my friend Eden at Columbia, who was stalked to her dorm room one night because she was wearing a star of David.
	Talk to Eli Tsivis, who he went a little viral at UCLA.
	He was prevented from going to class because there were people who were preventing him from the academy.
	Talk to Talia, I shouldn't say her last name, you should talk to Talia at MIT, who had also a physical incident.
	So, you know, I would encourage you to to amplify the voices of Jewish students who've been saying for months now that they are under physical assault.
	And again, we are total in agreement here, Glenn, that peaceful protest is great.
	And it's great to hear that so many of these protests were, in fact, peaceful.
	But I would be very skeptical of the data that would show 99 percent were peaceful.
	I mean, just last night in New York City, which is where I live, the NYPD had to arrest dozens of people after they were smashing glass windows, after they were vandalizing.
	Even when Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu was speaking, they were burning American flags, they were desecrating World War II monuments.
	So I'd be pretty skeptical on any study that would suggest that 99% of all these protests were peaceful.
	Yeah, no, to be clear, I don't think that, like, burning flags or even vandalizing a building is typically regarded as violence.
	Violence is the injuring, the physical injuring of other human beings.
	I think that's what this study was trying to take a look at.
	Now, let me just ask the question, the next question, and then you can respond however you want, including by adding on another point.
	You're citing hate speech reporting, self-reporting by American Jews who are reporting in larger numbers what they claim to be incidents of anti-Semitism.
	That's the hate speech, the hate crimes increase that you're referring to are self-reporting by American Jews.
	In the same time, say during the last two years or three years, Those same statistics show a very significant increase in reported anti-black racism, anti-transphobic violence, anti-immigrant violence, anti-Muslim bigotry.
	Do you see essentially all of these groups as suffering similar forms of bigotry or do you feel like the group to which you belong has a kind of special or elevated danger that it faces in the United States?
	Sure.
	So, again, I have to reject the premise of the question.
	The Federal Bureau of Investigations, the FBI, is not an organization of Jews self-reporting.
	And the FBI, again, your listeners can all Google this, the FBI released their statistics on hate crimes on September 23rd or September 24th, and it found that Jewish hate crimes increased by 63%.
	And, again, this is not speech.
	This has nothing to do with verbal assaults.
	This has to do with physical attacks.
	It increased by 63%.
	Even though Jews make up 2% of the U.S.
	population, the fact that Jews are the overwhelming victims of hate crimes really points to the fact that, yes, what is happening to Jewish Americans is quantitatively and qualitatively different than what's happening to other Americans.
	And look, I remember marching with Black Lives Matter.
	I was very proud to do so.
	And I remember when people would tell me, well, it's true, black lives matter, but all lives matter.
	I would get very upset because yeah, it's true, all lives matter.
	But right now the focus is on black lives because they're the ones who are experiencing systemic oppression.
	They're the ones who are telling us that they're not safe.
	And I find it really odd that when it comes to antisemitism, a lot of reporters, and I don't want to say sisters yourself, because I have no reason to think You're acting in any way that isn't honest, and I'm a fan of yours.
	But I would say I do find it a little odd that reporters and certain politicians, they'll try to equate the Jewish experience to all forms of bigotry and hatred.
	The Senate Judiciary Committee finally had a hearing on hate crimes, and it was really meant to be a hearing on antisemitism, but it turned into this all-lives-matter spectacle.
	And I think that really points to what Jewish Americans are talking about, which is a double standard.
	You know, how come during Black Lives Matter you didn't have politicians condemning transphobia and sexism?
	Because yeah, those are bad things, but right now the focus is on black lives.
	Yeah, when it comes to anti-Semitism, all of a sudden we all lives matter the issue.
	So again, this is not Jew self-reporting instances of feeling uncomfortable.
	This is the FBI's own data.
	They found that close to 12,000 religiously motivated hate crimes were committed in the last year alone.
	Overwhelming victims were Jewish.
	What I'm getting at is I feel like, you know, all human beings are tribalistic.
	We evolved that way.
	We have to be part of a tribe for thousands of years in order to survive.
	We see the world through our own tribalistic lens.
	We typically see the world through our subjectivity.
	Do you ever question whether or not the reason you think that at the moment the most endangered or the most marginalized group or the focus of all the hatred is the particular group with which you identify that maybe the reason for that is because you're looking at things tribalistically?
	In other words, I identify primarily as a Jew and I'm here to say that my group, Jewish people, are uniquely or particularly endangered right now in the United States as compared to other minority groups including black people and trans people and Muslim people and immigrants.
	Well, again, it's an interesting question, but I would answer it by saying, if that's true, that I'm primarily motivated by tribalism, then how come I was protesting with Black Lives Matter?
	How come I was marching when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade?
	I mean, I'm not a woman and I'm not black, but I was particularly concerned about women and African Americans during those two time periods because they were the ones who were overwhelmingly being oppressed and being cut out of a system.
	So, too, when it comes to anti-Semitism, I think, yeah, the focus right now is on anti-Semitism, is on the Jewish people.
	Not because I'm tribalistic, just because the data doesn't lie, Glenn.
	I mean, look at the FBI statistics.
	Look at the Department of Justice.
	Look at the Department of Education.
	They overwhelmingly corroborate what Jews are saying.
	But what has happened to hate crimes to other groups in the last few years?
	What has happened to the rate of hate crimes with these other groups?
	Have they declined?
	Have they stayed the same?
	Have they increased?
	Do you know?
	No, correct.
	Hate crimes overall have gone up, and the overwhelming majority of those hate crime victims are Jewish people.
	We count for roughly two-thirds.
	So while it is true that anti-Black racism, while it is true that misogyny, while it is true that transphobia are problems, and again, that is why I proudly marched with Black Lives Matter, that's why I will continue to stand up For people who are being the victims of oppression, I would simply ask that just like we marched with them, and we showed concern, genuine concern for them, that they should show genuine concern for us.
	And I don't think that's asking too much.
	I'm not, God forbid, trying to suppress the freedom of other peoples.
	I'm simply saying we should protect all Americans, and right now the issue is Jewish Americans.
	And by the way, if it was Muslim Americans who were being disproportionately targeted, if they were two-thirds of all religiously motivated hate crimes, I would stand up with my Muslim brothers and sisters.
	The reality is, while it is true, acts of Islamophobia, I want to understand the claim you're making, because I heard you at first be saying that more than half of all hate crimes are against Jewish people in the United States, even though it's only 2% of the population, and then at the end you sort of amended that to say the majority of religiously motivated crimes, which obviously wouldn't count
	anti-black racism, attacks on immigrants, trans.
	You're saying that the majority of hate crimes in the United States, the majority, more than 50%, are directed at American Jews and black people and LGBTs and Muslims and immigrants and women, gender-motivated violence against women constitute a minority, all those together? - No, so let me be clear.
	Thank you for correcting that.
	68% of all religiously motivated hate crimes, according to the FBI, that were conducted in 2023, the targets were Jewish people.
	In terms of hate crimes more broadly speaking, we know that Jewish people are disproportionately targeted for hate crimes.
	They are disproportionately more affected than other minority groups.
	Again, Your group.
	The hostility against your group is the issue right now.
	that other minority groups experienced, which is why I'm very proud of my activism on behalf of other minority groups.
	But again, the issue right now, I would argue, because the data supports it, is certainly antisemitism.
	- Your group, the hostility against your group is the issue right now.
	That's what your argument is? - If you can point to transgender individuals who are not being allowed access to their libraries on campus, then I will gladly come back on this program and I will denounce that and I will stand with my trans allies.
	However, if you look at Harvard University, if you look at Columbia, if you look at UCLA, if you look at University of Michigan, I mean the list goes on and on, we have seen Jewish people who are being denied the ability to learn in the library because it is being surrounded.
	So, again, I don't think it's an either-or.
	I don't think we can only focus on anti-Semitism and shut out all other hate crimes.
	But I do think we have to be a little realistic, which is when you look at the statistics.
	Again, this is not a he-said-she-said.
	This is not a subjective policy or subjective narrative.
	The statistics bear out that, objectively, Jews in the 21st century, explicitly and specifically after October 7th, have been the victims of religiously motivated hate crimes.
	So let's look at Harvard, which you've been encouraging us to do specifically, and statistics as well.
	And I just want to cite a couple of statistics regarding Harvard.
	Over the last 25 years, Harvard has had a total of five presidents.
	One of them lasted about 11 months, Claudine Gay.
	Of the four other presidents, three of them were Jewish.
	So three of the last five presidents at Harvard, the people who ran the school, the top official, three out of the five of them were Jewish.
	More than 50% even though as you point out Jews are only 2% of the American population.
	For decades now, Jews have been wildly overrepresented at elite universities like Harvard in terms of their population in the United States.
	And even now, even as it's declined for a variety of reasons, it's still the case that the percentage of the Harvard student population is 10%, or four to five times the percentage of Jews in terms of the overall population.
	And by the way, although three out of the five Harvard presidents of the last 25 years were Jewish, the fourth one, though she wasn't Jewish, she was married to a Jewish Harvard professor who's a renowned historian of medicine, Harvey Rosenberg.
	Is it really possible to depict A institution that continuously empowers at the highest level a massively disproportionate number of Jews to run the institution whose student body is overwhelmingly filled with a lot of Jewish students as compared to their percentage of their population.
	Is that institution really possibly a bastion of Jew hatred or anti-Semitic?
	Yeah, I think I get asked this question a lot.
	I think the answer is actually really simple.
	Glenn, you and I would probably agree that there is systemic racism, or African Americans are in some level or another being disadvantaged by our political system.
	Yet, would I, God forbid, tell an African American in 2020, or excuse me, in 2012, what are you talking about?
	The President of the United States is black.
	The Attorney General Eric Holder is black.
	No, because while it is true, there are exceptions, and I'm very proud of the fact that Jewish people disproportionately have excelled in technological advancements, in medical breakthroughs, in academia, In media, in business, in Silicon Valley, in politics, in academic institutions like Harvard, pretty much every sector of American life Jews have and continue to thrive even though that's true.
	What is your conclusion?
	Yeah, as I was saying, a hundred years ago the population of Jewish students at Harvard University was 25%, today it's 4%.
	It's not because Jews got dumber over time, it's because Jews have been cracked down and there's been a systemic campaign to crack down on the amount of Jews at the university.
	Again, the numbers don't lie, the statistics don't lie.
	So in the same way that you can't look at disproportionate amounts of Jews being successful because Jews are successful, we invest a lot in our education, we invest a lot in our communities, we invest a lot in our values, we're family oriented, and I would encourage any community to take a look at what the Jewish community is doing and probably reciprocate or replicate what's Well, what that is all ab why you have so many asia who go to Israel.
	who go to Israel.
	When I was studying yeshiva at Eshetorah, we often would have Christian groups from Korea, from Japan, some cases from China, who would come to our yeshiva and study the Talmud with us because they wanted to understand what is it about Jewish success.
	So I think two things can be true at the same time.
	I think Jews can be successful because that's the way we're geared, because we very much value education.
	We very much value the family structure.
	And at the same time, it is so remarkable that we're so successful, given the systemic and pervasive nature of antisemitism, like the fact that our rates of being students at Harvard has plummeted, plummeted at Harvard University and at universities across the level.
	So I don't think The question is, well, how can there be anti-Semitism if Jews are so successful?
	I think we should ask it the opposite way, which is, wow, Jews are so successful, even though there's anti-Semitism.
	Yeah, I mean, I guess, I think a lot of people did view the election of Barack Obama as a pretty strong symbol of how much progress America had made based on race.
	And I think if you were to have a country like the United States, where three of the last five American presidents elected by the American people were all black, And the fourth one was married to a black person and black people filled the highest ranks of government overwhelmingly disproportionately to their numbers.
	I think you would start to have an argument that would say it's kind of difficult to continue to maintain that the United States is a systematically racist country in light of those statistics.
	Let me just ask you one question.
	There's been a few times in your answers where you have kind of suggested that, say, Jewish people participating in anti-war protests or encampments against the Israeli war in Gaza are tokens because they're betraying Jewish values.
	Jewish values was a phrase you used in your RNC speech where you said essentially Jewish values are American values, American values are Jewish values.
	After that speech, there were a lot of articles from a lot of Jewish people pretty vehemently objecting to what they heard you to be saying that you are the spokesperson for what Jewish values are, that you are a spokesperson on behalf of American Jewry.
	There was an article in the Jewish Journal Forward that said, I'm a Jew studying at Harvard Divinity School.
	Shabbos Kestenbaum does not speak for me.
	There was an article from a rabbi in the Jewish Journal Before it as well, arguing that you distorted, quote, what you call Jewish values.
	Do you feel like And what you're saying, and you told me earlier, go talk to Jews.
	I've had a lot of Jews on my show about this issue on both sides.
	Do you feel like when you're articulating these views, you are speaking for the vast, vast majority of American Jews as a spokesman, or do you feel like you're speaking only for yourself?
	Sure, so let's be clear.
	One of the criticisms I often get is that I'm the self-declared spokesman of the Jewish people.
	Nothing could be further from the truth.
	I'm actually glad you mentioned that article in Forward because it was written, I won't say his name, but it was written by a former classmate of mine who was literally a student leader at the encampment who was calling for an intifada.
	So yeah, obviously I don't speak for him.
	I would never want to speak for someone like him.
	Same thing with that rabbi who you mentioned.
	This is someone who has never met me as someone who made baseless accusations in that article.
	So no, I certainly don't speak for those two individuals and I certainly would not want to speak to those two individuals.
	What I can say again is I'm kind of a numbers guy.
	The data shows that the overwhelming majority of Jewish people consider themselves to be Zionists.
	And in fact, I'm a religious Jew, which is why I have to hop off soon for the Sabbath.
	As a religious Jew, I pray three times a day.
	You know the direction I face when I pray three times a day?
	Today, I face Jerusalem.
	You know what I have been saying in my prayers every single day since the day I was born?
	In addition to the fact that, for 3,000 years, Jews have been saying these things?
	The return to Zion.
	The centrality of the Land of Israel to our lives.
	In fact, we just had the holiday of Tisha B'Av, the 9th of Av, which is the saddest day of the Jewish year.
	It's a day where we don't wear leather shoes, we don't eat, we don't drink, we refrain from marital relations.
	Why?
	Because on that day, 2,500 years ago, our first and second temple was destroyed in Jerusalem.
	In fact, of the 613 commandments, A third of them can no longer be fulfilled because they have to do with Jews living in the land of Israel.
	Not only that, there is a positive command from the Bible itself that you must live in the land of Israel.
	So yeah, it is certainly true that Jews who primarily are not educated, primarily Jews who have not been to Israel, primarily Jews who cannot read the Talmud if you ask them to because they have very little education, It's true, they don't subscribe to those values and that's their choice, but just like a vegetarian can't say, I'm a vegetarian even though I don't eat, excuse me, I'm a vegetarian even though I eat meat, so too you can't say that I'm Jewish but we have no connection to the land of Israel.
	We are literally called Jews because we come from Judea, we're the only minority group that are quite literally named after the place we are from.
	So living in Israel is a positive command.
	Jews have been living in the land of Israel uninterrupted for 3,000 years.
	So look, I appreciate you having me on.
	I really do.
	And I'm always happy to come back, Len.
	But I'm not a spokesman for the Jewish community.
	I have never once described myself in such ways.
	And I would also argue that if you look at Jewish history, we have always had detractors.
	We have always had Jews who do things that are not in our best interest.
	I mean, the best example, as I said earlier, the National Association of German Jewry, which was the Jewish division of the Nazi party.
	And I would encourage all Jews, not just American Jews, but Jews across the world, to realize the centrality of the land of Israel, to stand up for Jewish Americans on college campuses, and yes, stand up for American values like life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, because those very much are Jewish values.
	All right, just one last question.
	I want to be super respectful of the time we said we're going to let you go.
	We have about a minute and a half, two minutes, so I just want to get this one last question in.
	Just in terms of who's a Jew and who isn't, who's speaking for most of Jews and who aren't, You went to the RNC and you said, I'm voting Republican.
	I'm voting for Donald Trump because I think he's the one who's going to combat anti-Semitism and protect Israel.
	In part, that is absolutely what you said.
	Polls show that three quarters of American Jews, 75%, intend to vote for the Democratic candidate.
	Only a quarter of American Jews intend to vote the way you intend to vote, which is for Donald Trump.
	Doesn't on some level that indicate that you're speaking for a minority of American Jews, not even a majority?
	Sure.
	So first of all, I did not endorse Trump at the Republican Convention.
	You can watch my speech.
	I actually took pains not to endorse him.
	It's true, I did endorse him two months later after I'd gone to the Democratic National Convention and after I'd worked behind the scenes with Democratic policymakers to get them more aligned with my values.
	But I took pains not to endorse Trump.
	And in fact, I ad-libbed a significant amount of my speech at the Republican Convention not to endorse Trump.
	So I'm a Democrat.
	I've only voted for Democrats.
	I can understand why Jews vote for Democrats, because typically they are more aligned with our values.
	I would say this, and again, I'm not a partisan, I'm happy to be swayed one way or the other, but we are all on the same page.
	Whether you're voting for Kamala Harris or Donald Trump, Jewish Americans, broadly speaking, want the American hostages to be released from Gaza, they want a strong U.S.-Israel relationship, and they want to confront anti-Semitism on college campuses.
	If they think that Kamala Harris would be the best person for that job, go for it.
	I disagree.
	I think Donald Trump would be better for those concerns, even though I disagree with him on a whole bunch of other issues.
	I think he'd be a lot better when it comes to issues that primarily affect the Jewish people.
	But again, I'm not a spokesman.
	I encourage every American Jew to make their own choices.
	I've been very clear why I'm supporting Trump.
	And if people disagree, that's fine, because we're all on the same page.
	We all want what's best, not just for Jewish Americans, but really for the American people.
	All right.
	Well, I super appreciate your taking the time.
	It was a good spirited discussion, which I always find revealing, and I hope you stay safe, and I wish you the best of luck.
	I'd be happy to talk to you again.
	Thank you so much.
	Take care.
	All right.
	Have a good evening.

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