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May 23, 2025 - System Update - Glenn Greenwald
01:22:06
Israeli Embassy Staffers Killed in DC: Reactions and Implications

Glenn Greenwald reacts to the killing of two Israeli Embassy staffers in D.C. and explains how the tragedy is being politicized and weaponized against free speech in the United States.  --------- Watch full episodes on Rumble, streamed LIVE 7pm ET. Become part of our Locals community Follow System Update:  Twitter Instagram TikTok Facebook LinkedIn  

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Good evening.
It's Thursday, May 22nd.
Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
The two victims, a couple in their mid-20s, soon to be engaged, were both staffers at the Israeli Embassy in Washington.
The shooter left behind a manifesto stating he was doing it, killing people, to protest Israel's ongoing destruction of Gaza.
And he yelled pro-Palestinian slogans, including Free Palestine, once he was arrested.
Now, it goes without saying, or at least it should, that randomly targeting people you don't know for murder is morally unjust in all cases regardless of the justness of the cause in whose name you're doing it.
But the reaction to this violence predictably lurched very quickly, well beyond condemning the shooter and mourning the victims.
Israel supporters, both in Israel and the United States, immediately insisted that the real parties that are responsible, the people who have blood on their hands, are not the murderer himself or anyone who has harshly criticized Israel and Gaza.
Such criticism, you see, they say inspires.
Meanwhile, the ADL immediately exploited these murders as well, while the bodies were still cold, to demand even more aggressive crackdowns in the United States on free speech, specifically on people with large platforms who have been vocally critical of Israel.
Even the ADL director named the Twitch streamer Hassan Piker as someone who he holds responsible for these murders and therefore he said must be silenced.
We'll look at all of the ramifications and the attempts to use these killings for various agendas.
Then the Department of Homeland Security announced today that it was immediately revoking all international student visas for Harvard, forcing all students of the school to try to find another school or face deportation from the United States.
All of this attack on Harvard has been justified in the name of not only so-called DEI policies at Harvard, but also specifically due to the campus's supposed tolerance for anti-Semitism, which is odd since Harvard is a school that has often been governed and continues to be governed by Jewish presidents of the university and which is largely funded by many big Jewish students.
Terrorism crimes.
For featuring a sign at one of their shows in support of Gaza and against Israel, as well as using images of Hezbollah in their show.
As global public opinion grows against Israel threatening to make it, in the words of an Israeli official, a "pariah state," the censorship campaign and the efforts to suppress Israel criticisms become more severe and more desperate.
Before we get to that, a quick programming note.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
*music*
What happened last night in Washington, D.C., by all appearances, and we should definitely wait for more investigations and for facts to unfold because often things aren't what they appear to be in the first day or week, but by all appearances, it seems as though somebody very committed To the cause of protesting the Israeli destruction of Gaza,
the Israeli ethnic cleansing in Gaza, the Israeli genocide in Gaza, decided that even though the world is starting to realize what's going on, even though the U.S. government itself understands the population is turning against it, that there's simply nothing that will be done to stop the slaughter of Palestinians by Israel.
And he therefore decided, based on some very twisted moral reasoning, that He thought it was justified and helpful to go and just randomly gun down two young Americans with ties to Israel, though he presumably didn't even know they had ties to Israel at the time that he did it.
And one of the victims, the female victim, and it was a couple that was going to be engaged when they went to Israel next week, she was actually somebody who She was Jewish, grew up in a Jewish family, had very strong ties to Israel, had often gone there.
But when she would go there, she would work with the groups that try and bridge gaps between Israelis and Palestinians to kind of create dialogue between the two to try and encourage peaceful coexistence.
And her soon-to-be husband was somewhat more fanatical in his support for the IDF.
His social media stream shows a long list of just kind of Retweeting at Yahoo and IDF, he himself made a claim that there's no real famine in Gaza, that it's a lie against Israel.
He is someone who was born to a mixed family.
His father is Jewish and was born in Israel.
He was born in Israel, but his mother is Christian, so his parents are of mixed religions, and he himself is a Christian and identifies as a strong Christian Zionist.
He's been to Israel many times.
He was born there.
His parents lived there.
So that's who they are, but obviously the person who shot them probably knew nothing about anything that defined their lives or who they were.
Here from the New York Times, describing all of this today, suspect charged with murder in the killing of two embassy aides.
The suspect in the shooting deaths of two Israeli embassy employees in Washington, and they did work for the Israeli embassy, Was charged with first-degree murder and other crimes on Thursday, according to an FBI affidavit filed in federal court hours after federal agents in tactical gear descended on his Chicago home.
The suspect, Elias Rodriguez, 31, told police officers, "I did it for Palestine, I did it for Gaza," when he was taken into custody Wednesday night after the shooting, according to the affidavit filed in the U.S. District Court in Washington.
Janine Pirro, Quote, we will add additional charges as the evidence warrant, she said at a news conference, adding that the authorities were reviewing, quote, massive amounts of evidence and had not decided whether to pursue the death penalty.
I put my money on the death penalty.
Given the victims.
The close-range shooting of the embassy workers occurred shortly after 9 p.m. Eastern Time Wednesday on a street outside the Capitol Jewish Museum, where the American Jewish Committee was holding a reception for young diplomats.
The area is the heart of official Washington, packed with federal buildings, embassies, and museums.
The two people killed in the attack were a couple, Yaron Lashinsky, 30, who grew up in Israel and Germany, And Sarah Milgram, 26, who is from Kansas.
As Ms. Milgram tried to crawl away from the gunman, he followed her and fired several more times, the FBI affidavit says.
Here's a video of the alleged killer who was peacefully subdued.
He didn't really try and resist or get away.
But this is what he did when he knew cameras were watching and the police arrested him.
I don't know.
I find that a little bit odd behavior.
I suppose if you're killing people in a cause, you do want to use whatever platform you have to promote that cause, and that's what he did.
At the same time, he waited for the cameras to be there, and he took this phrase, Free Palestine, that is the most common chant of people who oppose the Israeli destruction of Gaza, and in public, clearly linked it to the murders he had just committed.
Automatically.
And a lot of people's eyes dirtying that phrase as though that phrase now is somehow, or people who say it are somehow responsible for his murderous acts.
The accused killer left a manifesto.
A lot of times these manifestos left by these kind of killers are very frantic, very kind of rambling, evidence of a lot of mental health or instability.
This manifesto is actually quite cogent.
It's well written.
TRIES TO CONSTRUCT A MORAL ARGUMENT FOR WHY THESE MURDERS ARE JUSTIFIED.
NOT ONE THAT I ACCEPT, BUT IT IS A DOCUMENT WRITTEN BY SOMEONE WHO SEEMS TO BE WRITING AND THINKING AND EXPRESSING THEMSELVES CLEARLY, WHATEVER IMMORALITY THE ACT IS DEFINED BY.
HERE'S PART OF WHAT IT SAYS.
THE EMBASSY SHOOTER MANIFESTO, AND THIS WAS PUBLISHED BY KLEIN CLIPPENSTEIN, I THINK HE WAS THE FIRST PERSON TO PUBLISH IT, WHO GOT IT.
It's been confirmed as well.
It's a 900-word document that cites Gaza as his motive.
And this is what he said, quote, Halantar is a word that means something like thunder or lightning.
In the wake of an act, people look for a text to fix its meaning.
So here's an attempt.
The atrocities committed by Israelis against Palestinians defy description and defy quantification.
Instead of reading descriptions, mostly we watch them unfold on videos, sometimes live.
After a few months of rapidly mounting death tolls, Israel has obliterated the capacity to even continue counting the dead, which has served its genocide well.
At the time of writing, the Gaza Health Ministry records 53,000 killed by traumatic force.
At least 10,000 lie under rubble.
And who knows how many more thousands, more dead of preventable disease, hunger, with tens of thousands now at risk of imminent famine due to the Israeli blockade, all enabled by Western and Arab government complicity.
Public opinion has shifted against the genocidal apartheid state and the American government has simply shrugged.
They'll do what without public opinion then, criminalize it where they can, suffocate it with bland reassurances that they're doing all they can to restrain Israel while it cannot criminalize protest outright.
Right.
Aaron Bushnell, who, as you might remember, is the person who incinerated himself in front of the White House to protest the U.S. support for Israel's war in Gaza.
And others sacrificed themselves in the hopes of stopping the massacre.
And the state works to make us feel their sacrifice was made in vain, that there is no hope in escalating for Gaza and no point in bringing the war home.
We can't let them succeed.
Their sacrifices were not made in vain.
Those of us against the genocide take satisfaction in arguing that the perpetrators in a I sympathize with this viewpoint and understand its value in soothing the psyche, which cannot bear to accept the atrocities it witnesses even mediated through the screen.
But inhumanity has long since shown itself to be shockingly common, mundane, prosaically human.
A perpetrator may then be a loving parent, a filled child, a generous and charitable friend.
An amiable stranger capable of moral strength at times when it suits him and sometimes even when it does not.
And yet be a monster all the same time.
Humanity doesn't exempt one from accountability.
The action would have been greatly morally justified taken 11 years ago during Protective Edge.
That was the Israeli attack on Gaza in 2014 under Obama that he supported and armed that killed thousands of Palestinian civilians.
He says that would have been justified during Protective Edge around the time I personally became aware of our brutal conduct in Palestine.
But I think to most Americans, such an action would have been illegible, would seem insane.
I am glad that today, at least, there are many Americans for which the action will be highly legible.
And in some funny way, the only sane thing to do.
I love you, Mom, Dad, Baby, Sis, the rest of my family, including you, O, Free Palestine, Elias Rodriguez.
Let me just say something about the moral framework at play, at least in my view here.
And I talked about this after October 7th as well.
There is a notion, there is an idea that the Western world itself embraces that if you decide people are engaged in violence and murder and destruction to a sufficient extent, you have the right to go and use violence against them to kill them.
We've done that all around the world.
We've bombed wedding parties.
We were doing it up until recently in Yemen, killing huge numbers of civilians to say there was some Houthi among them that is a terrorist that's doing bad things.
And obviously the Israelis are doing that to an unprecedented extent in Gaza.
They think there's anybody remotely displeasing to the Israeli government and they'll just take out an entire This is not a standard, the idea that you can go and use violence against people who are using violence as well.
Wars are based on this, assassinations are based on this, all of which the West has done.
But if you're going to do something like this, if you're going to say, okay, I believe that the war in Gaza is not really even a war.
The destruction of Gaza by this extremely powerful army backed by the world's richest and most powerful country has gotten to the point so severely.
Let's say you're, you know, someone in 1942 and you're aware of the Holocaust and you say, like, I have to go do something.
I have to target a German general or a German leader who's responsible for this.
And there were assassination attempts on Adolf Hitler.
And there were Nazis who were murdered.
We look back on those as noble and just.
You can imagine reaching a certain point.
I'm not even saying whether or not that point has been reached here, where you say, okay, I think violence is justified.
But you don't go and just randomly, arbitrarily pick out two young civilians who don't work in the military, who aren't in fighting in Gaza, who have no power or influence or policy.
It's a very softball and pointless and counterproductive and I think immoral way to carry out this notion that sometimes violence is justified to stop worse violence.
It's strategically self-destructive for sure, but way worse than that.
I think it's just inherently immoral.
I thought one of the things that the murder of the health When Luigi killed the CEO of UnitedHealthcare in protest of a healthcare system and an insurance scheme.
That most people believe are inhumane.
You pay premiums, and then when you finally actually need the coverage, they find all kinds of ways to deny it, making huge amounts of money off sick people who are in desperate need of healthcare and denying it all the time.
He didn't go and just wait outside the building and just kill people who randomly walked out, like receptionists or, you know, HR people or bookkeepers.
He planned and— So you're actually using violence against somebody who's actually responsible for the crimes and violence that you believe is being imposed.
And this idea of just going and randomly killing people, you have no idea who these people are.
Or even if you do, I mean, they're low-level Israeli staffers.
There's nothing, absolutely no moral justification for that kind of violence.
And predictably it's being used, and it's so predictable, and being exploited to try and demonize and even criminalize the pro-Palestinian movement, the movement against the Israeli war in Gaza.
Nonetheless, he did lay out a clear framework.
He was obviously thinking clearly.
There's always the possibility that of a false flag or whatever, this is always something that should be investigated.
You know, there's nothing you could do.
To guarantee a weakening or an attack on the anti-war, anti-Israel movement than going and just randomly shooting to a couple in their 20s in cold blood, pumping bullets into someone's head while they're crawling away, and then screaming, "Free Palestine, free Palestine," then this.
But, you know, usually it's Oxum's razor, and I'm sure there are people who— Believe in violence against Israelis or people who work for the Israeli government.
And so that seems to have been what this is.
And I think, obviously, the person responsible for this violence, for these deaths, for this murder, is the person who went and pulled the trigger.
That's what I think in all of these cases.
Nonetheless, that's of course not how it's being used.
It's being used to somehow try to blame anybody who has ever said free Palestine.
Or anybody who has been protesting the Israeli genocide in Gaza, anybody protesting their ethnic cleansing.
It's a very left-wing tactic that has been used for a long time, too, as we'll get to.
Oh, if someone goes and kills immigrants, it means the people who have blood on their hand are people who speak against immigration because they're demonizing immigrants and inspiring violence.
If someone goes and shoots an abortion doctor.
The people who have blood on their hands and who are to blame are not the shooter, but the people who are pro-life advocates who call abortion murder.
Because if you call abortion murder, it makes sense.
Some people are going to go think you should murder the murderers, the abortion doctors, who are doing it.
I've always been disgusted by this inability to distinguish people who go and commit violence and murder on the one hand and people who peacefully express protected views on the other.
And when.
They get extremely outraged.
Like, how dare you try and say we can't speak our views because someone might go and kill somebody in the name of our views?
That's not our fault.
We didn't go and kill anybody.
But then those same people who...
Immediately exploit any kind of violence or murder to try and demonize their political opponents and claim that they're the ones who are responsible for the violence, that they inspired it, that they have blood on their hands.
Here's Donald Trump today on True Social.
"These horrible DC killings, based obviously on anti-Semitism, must end now.
Hatred and radicalism have no place in the USA.
Condolences to the family of the victims.
So sad that such things as this can happen.
God bless you all." Now, one of the big problems in our discourse about Israel has been this conflation of Jews and Israel, which is actually an anti-Semitic trope.
In fact, as we're going to show you, under this newly expanded definition of anti-Semitism that Donald Trump is requiring colleges to adopt, It's considered anti-Semitic to blame all Jews for the acts of Israel.
So if Israel goes and blows up a bunch of civilians, you can't just walk up to a Jew, at least under this framework, and say, oh, you're responsible for that murder because Israel did it and you're a Jew.
Because it recognizes this separation.
Many Jews oppose Zionism.
Many Jews are harsh critics of the state of Israel.
Many Christians are hardcore supporters of Israel.
So there's a difference between Israel on the one hand and Jews on the other.
And if you go and criticize Israel, it doesn't mean you're criticizing Jews or anti-Semitic.
It's so basic.
But this has been deliberately conflated to justify the suppression of anti-Israel criticism.
Oh, this is anti-Semitic.
But the distinction is very clear.
And therefore, if somebody goes and murders People who they think are associated with the Israeli government, who work for the Israeli government.
Obviously, it's anti-Israeli.
It's not necessarily anti-Semitic.
But what I want to focus on is not that distinction, though I think it's extremely important.
But instead, I want to focus on the reaction that has emerged almost immediately, just an exploitation of these murders in order to immediately squeeze political gain.
Here's Lee Zeldin.
Who used to be a congressman from New York and now he is the director of the EPA, a local supporter of Israel.
He said, quote, I just met Sarah two weeks ago in my office at the EPA headquarters.
That's the woman who was killed.
She struck me as a young woman filled with life and positivity, heartbroken to learn that she was one of two tragically murdered last night by a Jew-hating radical screaming free Palestine.
May Sarah and Yarin rest in peace.
You notice, I think that tribute that he was paying to this young couple, and there's a picture of him with the victim from last night, is perfectly appropriate.
It's moving.
It's well expressed.
But then he has to do this detour to try and politicize it and say the people who are yelling free Palestine are somehow linked to this murder, even though they're not carrying out any violence of their own.
Here's Jake Sherman, who's a longtime journalist in mainstream media, has worked for a bunch of corporate media outlets.
I believe he now works for Puck.
And in response to the AP article saying that two staff members of the Israeli embassy were shot and killed, oh, it's Punchbowl.
I can't keep any of these straight.
They're all the same.
Punchbowl, not Puck.
If you know the difference between puck and punch bowl, go ahead and say so in the chat.
I defy anyone to...
But in any event, this is what he decided to say.
It is scary being an American Jew right now.
We go to synagogues that are fortified with armed guards and police.
Kids go to schools that have layers of security.
Campuses and cities are filled with anti-Semitism.
This isn't the world I grew up in.
It's disgusting and disheartening, and I don't know how it will end.
Now, I understand the idea that you have Israel committing Some of the worst atrocities we've seen in our lifetime.
And a lot of people irrationally blame Jews for that in general.
And probably is increasing anti-Semitism to watch the state of Israel blow up babies every single day.
They just had an Israeli official today who said, I think our plan should be we should separate women and babies over here and men 13 and above over here, men 13 and above over here, and just exterminate, execute all the men.
Yet another Israeli politician two days ago say, even Palestinian babies are our enemies, but babies in Gaza, they're not innocent.
Those are our enemies.
They deserve to die too because they grew up to be terrorists.
So obviously it's going to produce a lot of anti-Israel sentiment.
AND THAT MAY SPILL OVER TO ANTI-SEMITISM AS WELL.
BUT HONESTLY, YOU KNOW, I GREW UP Gonna be there next week, the whole week, doing interviews and podcasts and debates and events, which I'll tell you about at some other point.
But I'm not the slightest bit afraid to go to the United States as an American Jew.
Like, that thought would never occur to me.
And to watch what is currently taking place in Gaza, the utter living hell.
That those people have been put through one day after the next for the last 18 months.
I'm not talking about Hamas members.
I'm talking about children and babies and women and men who are just civilians.
And say, you know what?
Put the spotlight on me.
I'm the real victim.
It's incredibly scary to be an American Jew right now.
Think of all the different minority groups that have been targeted with massacres and murders and hate crimes.
Everyone's so dismissive when the people from those groups want to say, oh, America is systemically bigoted against me.
I'm endangered.
All I heard from conservatives for the last decade was, oh, these are little snowflakes.
They just don't want to feel unsafe because they're hearing things that they don't like to hear.
There were several white supremacist attacks targeting black people, including Dylann Roof in that church in Charleston and the Buffalo.
Supermarket massacre that killed 10 black people by a white supremacist as well.
And conservatives have no interest in hearing some black person go onto social media and say, I'm just unsafe in America as a black man right now.
Those people get mocked.
So, obviously, again, this is a crime that I think is immoral and through every moral framework should be condemned regardless of the just cause that he cited.
That he claimed he was advancing vulnerability.
He probably subverted it.
But to immediately politicize it and start doing this, like, oh, American Jews are so endangered and uniquely vulnerable and hated.
When there's murders all the time against huge numbers of minority groups, including hate crimes, including against Palestinians, it's the kind of self-centeredness, everybody always wanting to be the real victim, I know the real victim, American Jews, that I think has been so unhealthy, this victimhood narrative from the start.
Speaking of victimhood narratives and people who want to be the victim, Dave Portnoy, who is a outspoken defender of Israel, long has been, he said this, quote, a domestic terrorist went hunting Jews last night in Washington, D.C., opened firing outside a Jewish event killing two Jews.
The 30-year-old male was not actually Jewish.
He was Christian.
He wasn't Jewish ethnically because he doesn't have a Jewish mother.
And so under Jewish law, he's not an ethnic Jew and he's not a religious Jew either.
He practices Christianity, identifies as a Christian.
He goes on, quote, the terrorist Elias Rodriguez yelled, quote, free Palestine as he got arrested.
This type of tragedy is the natural progression of events.
When the morons running our colleges, far-left politicians, and hate merchants on social media continue to normalize and seemingly encourage anti-Semitism in this country, the least surprising part about this tragedy is that the killer hated America long before the conflict in the Middle East.
He was an active member of the Party for the Socialism and Liberation in the People's Congress of Resistance.
Now that party came out and said they have no connection to him.
He briefly attended some meetings in 2017, but he was not a party.
You see, Dave Portner is trying to say that the real guilty party here is not the shooter, but all of the people who are critics of Israel, the people he hates.
He goes on, quote, he was a serial agitator, as so many of the free Palestine movement are.
For them, this isn't just about the war in Gaza.
This is about hating America and our way of life.
And the more that anti-Semitism is normalized in the country, the more it emboldens these lunatics to commit their heinous acts.
The bottom line is that nobody in the country should be intimidated or fear for their safety because of their religion, but here we are.
Now again, a lot of people have been in great fear of their safety because of their race or their ethnicity or their sexual identity.
Or a whole number of others.
Their immigrant status.
All these people have been targeted with violence.
And the Dave Portnoy of the world have always mocked this victimhood narrative.
That somehow they're in danger.
But the minute it comes to someone's own group, Jake Sherman or Dave Portnoy, saying, no, I'm an American Jew.
We are the real victims here.
And the guilty party is not just the people who shoot and kill.
The real culprits.
Are those who have been criticizing Israel, those who have been chanting Free Palestine, trying to link this movement against the Israeli war to violence and murder and anti-Semitism.
Here was a meme that circulated, created by JewBelong.org all day.
Make no mistake, if you screamed free Palestine, you helped pull the trigger.
You know, it's so...
First of all, this is all based on the idea that, now, if you express views that inspire other people to commit violence, you are responsible for the violence.
This has been a left-wing view for a long time to try and say, no, people on the right should be censored because their speech against black people or immigrants or Muslims incites violence.
And everybody mocked that and said, you can't blame people for what some crazy person does in response to their cause.
Every single political cause, every single political ideology has the potential to create violence, and often has.
Every single one.
If you say Trump and Russia are fascists, you may inspire a Bernie Sanders or a Rachel Maddow fan to go to a softball field and shoot up.
Republican Congress members has happened in 2017.
If you say that pro-life activists are responsible for the deaths of women, you can inspire people to go bomb or attack pro-life organizations, as has also happened.
If you're an environmentalist and You claim that a particular Dutch politician who's running for prime minister and leading the polls is an enemy of climate.
The climate and the planet may inspire a radical environmentalist to go kill him, as happened in Holland.
ALL OF THIS HAS GONE ON REPEATEDLY, AND I'VE BEEN WRITING ABOUT THIS FOR A LONG TIME.
SO, AS I SAID, BACK IN 2022, You know what, before I get to this, I want to show you what Jonathan Rebop, the head of the ADL, said today when he appeared on CNN.
And here's what he said on CNN to try and immediately exploit this trap.
I'm thinking about the New York Times doing a gauzy profile a few weeks ago of this gamer, Hassan Piker, who regularly employs Awful genocidal rhetoric against Jewish people in the Jewish state.
Like, extremists should not be empowered.
People who spout prejudice should not be platformed.
This is a moment when we need to look ourselves in the mirror and say, we've got to stop this because the consequences are deadly.
No, I have my criticisms of Hassan Piker, but I never once thought about trying to censor him, as it's true for...
And, you know, Nick Quentes is somebody who a lot of people find dangerous or repellent or whatever.
You can think about him, but he's never done anything criminal.
He's expressing protected political views.
I've always been opposed to the censorship of anybody based on the idea that their ideas are too dangerous to be heard.
But here's the ADL, and they've done this too.
Tucker Carlson to many other people where they demand they be censored or fired or deplatformed.
Now trying again to link criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism.
You'll notice they always say he's criticizing the Jewish state.
Meaning that if you're criticizing Israel and its wars and its aggression or its treatment of its, the citizens of the West Bank and Gaza, the apartheid conditions there, it means automatically you're anti-Semitic, you're criticizing Jews.
That's always the subtle implication.
And so here you have somebody who speaks to, has a large audience of young people, is a very, very vocal critic of Israel.
I defy anybody defying statements by Hassan Piker that are anti-Semitic.
I do not believe in any way that he's anti-Semitic, but even if he were, that's not a reason for the ADL to start coming and saying, we want these people deplatformed, these people who are criticizing this foreign country that we demand.
The American Constitution be basically suspended in order to shield from criticism.
There was a witness to the aftermath of this murder last night.
His name is Jonathan Epstein.
He was there for that event.
And he went on to CNN.
And the host kept trying to get him to distinguish between people who criticize As you go forward with what you have seen,
Can you give us any sense?
Because you said you looked the shooter in the eyes.
Can you give us any sense of what you saw in him as he was sort of getting help and people were tending to him as if he, too, was a victim of seeing this?
That's such a dumb question.
Like, oh, you looked at him for about five seconds and looked at his eyes.
Like, what did you see?
As though, like, this person is going to give some He's trained to look in your eyes.
And remember when George W. Bush said, I looked in his eyes and I saw his soul.
Why would you ask that question?
Like, what did you see when you looked in his eyes?
But here's how he answered.
Yeah, would you be clear?
I heard about that part because we were in a secure room when he initially walked in.
I just saw him screaming and then being handcuffed.
But what I saw in his eyes, I mean, I went to Columbia for grad school and I saw the same thing in his eyes as I saw in the eyes of all the protesters at Columbia.
Nothing different between him and them.
But they...
did not create this horrific shooting.
They did not, you know, sort of They didn't shoot They gave the permission.
And they have called for this.
They have called for Antifada revolution, which is the same thing he yelled last night.
Do you worry that there will be a conflation, though, of the two, those people who are speaking their mind, who really care about what is happening in Gaza, and those people who are like this person, who did this horrific shooting, who intend to do harm?
A conflation.
I mean, they are calling for intifada.
At Columbia University, they call for intifada constantly.
They're not quietly.
They're loud.
They're loud.
You can hear it.
They make recordings of themselves.
So what's the difference?
Are you afraid?
Yes.
We're all afraid.
Everyone should be afraid.
What are you doing to try to make yourself feel safer?
Okay, I can't stand it anymore.
They're all, yes, of course I'm afraid.
We're all afraid.
Again, I want you to think about the reaction if some black politician or just some black activist went on the air after somebody kills a black person and says, we're all endangered.
Black men and black people in America are afraid.
We should be afraid.
The level of mockery that that would produce among these kind of people who support Israel, the conservatives as well.
Would be endless and vicious.
We all heard it for the last decade about any of these victim narratives coming from these groups.
And again, those minority groups have suffered a lot more violence than American Jews have, certainly over the last several decades and in the last couple years as well.
But the really notable thing is, again, look at what they're doing.
They see these two corpses lying on the ground.
And they're like, oh no, we don't want to just denounce the shooter and To demonize people who criticize Israel.
To demonize people who protest against the destruction of Gaza.
By saying they're the same.
They're the same people.
Anyone who has ever chanted Free Palestine is exactly like this killer and responsible for him because he too chanted Free Palestine.
Which again would be like if someone goes and murders an abortion doctor and then screams abortion is murder.
And then suddenly everybody who has ever said abortion is murder, which is what the Probable Life Movement is based on, is now the same as the person who shoots the abortion doctor in his house, the same, they're responsible for the violence?
Of course not.
But they all move so quickly to exploit politically these killings to try and demonize and ultimately suppress criticism of Israel or protest against it in the United States.
Needless to say, one of the leaders of this sleazy effort was Barry Weiss, who spent a few years greatly profiting off of posturing as a free speech advocate or whatever when it came to, like, the college kids who criticized Israel.
She's like, oh, they're so illiberal and they want to ban a bunch of speech.
But now we've seen a massive assault on the First Amendment against people criticizing Israel, protesting Israel, and she has very little to say.
But she, needless to say, exploited these killings as well by saying this, quote, Venomous, untrue statements about Israel, its supporters, and the war against Hamas and Gaza have chipped away at the old taboo against open anti-Semitism in America.
Listen to what she's saying there.
Venomous, untrue statements about Israel, its supporters, and the war against Hamas and Gaza Is what is causing anti-Semitism.
So if you say what all human rights organizations on the planet basically are saying, that what's happening in Gaza is a genocide, that it's ethnic cleansing, that there are war crimes, just this week a former Israeli prime minister said Israel is right on the verge of a major war crime in Gaza, even though they've clearly crossed that line.
You have Israelis saying that as well.
But Barry Wise now wants to say The real crime here is not the murder of these two people.
The real crime is criticizing Israel, saying mean things about Israel, criticizing Israel harshly.
She goes on, "Constant demonization of American Jews and Zionists is how a democratic state and its supporters have been made into targets." You know what?
Zionism is an ideology.
It's a new ideology.
It's existed for maybe 120 years.
When it was introduced, Huge numbers of religious Jews thought it was blasphemy that Jews are not a nation state.
You don't build a nation state based on Judaism.
We've had Orthodox rabbis on our show who hate the state of Israel and Zionism.
Zionism has been debated for a long time.
You're allowed to oppose Zionism.
You're allowed to say you think it's an ethno-supremacist ideology?
Requires the stealing of land from people, the maintenance of Jewish supremacy.
And here's Barry Weiss, crocodile tears about the victims, excitement over how she gets to use it to try and say the real guilty parties are here are people who are criticizing Israel or Zionism.
She goes on, "It is how the permissive structure for violence against Jews in America has been erected." Growing up, Learning about Simon of Trent or other medieval blood libels, I wondered how something so unnatural, so deranged could ever happen.
How lies could spread so far, transmorgify into a movement, in fact culture so comprehensively and engender deadly action.
Young Barry was like, how could that happen?
How could it possibly be the case that this animus toward a group could manifest in violence?
She said, those who participated in this culture of lies and who now want to distance themselves from yesterday's violence will insist that the alleged killer's acts do not represent them.
Right, exactly.
Going up to two young people on the street and shooting them in the head does not represent people protesting against the genocide in Gaza.
In fact, it's the opposite.
The people protesting the destruction of Gaza are opposed to this kind of violence against innocent people.
That's what's driving the movement.
But she wants to reverse that and pretend that the only people who love violence, who are encouraging violence, are the people protesting the Israeli slaughter of huge numbers of civilians in Gaza, not the people actually doing it.
SO SHE SAYS, NOW PEOPLE ARE PRETENDING THAT THE ALLEGED KILLER'S ACTS DO NOT REPRESENT THEM, THAT IT HARMS THEIR MOVEMENT.
BUT HOW CAN ANYONE HONEST WITH THEMSELVES NOT DRAW A CONNECTION BETWEEN A CULTURE THAT SAYS ZIONIST ARE ANTI-HUMANS, EVEN NAZIS THEMSELVES, AND THE Because, Barry, you're allowed to compare the Israeli actions in Gaza to what Nazis have done.
The Nuremberg trials taught us, pronounced, That the only way the Nuremberg trials will be of any value, which found convicted Nazi war criminals and then punished them off and sentenced them to death, they emphasized the only way this will have any validity will be anything other than Victor's justice,
is if the principles we're pronouncing here apply to all countries in the future, including the ones presiding over the tribunal.
It's not a taboo to compare what the Nazis did to what other people are doing, what other countries are doing, what other genocides are taking place, and certainly not a prohibition to compare it to Israel either.
But do you see how these people are adopting this view that they've long claimed they hated?
That if Tucker Carlson says he's against immigration and somebody goes and murders black people based on the ground that he thinks immigration is replacing white people, that somehow Tucker Carlson is now the equivalent of or even responsible for the person who went and did that murder?
Here's Batar Worldwide, considered a terrorist group in Israel, but has now become the group that Marco Rubio relies on to deport students that Batar says is anti-Semitic.
They wrote this, "Will Washington D.C. and other American cities take responsibility for allowing violent chants of no Zionists here and intifada chants which have led to this terrorist attack?" here in the United States, maybe not in Israel, but here in the United States, you're allowed to chant political slogans.
There are almost no protestors So many Jews are part of those protests.
That's an absolute lie.
But even if you wanted to read it that way, these are political slogans that are protected by our First Amendment in the United States of Americans.
Though we're not going to dilute or suspend to protect a foreign country.
He goes on, this blood is on the hands of politicians who encourage and allow these violent radicals on American streets.
Here is the founder of the group Stop Anti-Semitism, which has basically spent the last year and a half taking pictures of workers at Starbucks or on airplanes who work for airlines, who have any sort of Palestinian insignia at all, the Palestinian flag pin, or clothing articles that they claim is linked to Palestinians who are trying to get them fired, generating lynch mobs against them.
They once took a picture and published it all over the place of a woman.
It was doing nothing more than sitting in a coffee shop and her laptop had pro-Palestinian stickers and they said she's an evil anti-Semite.
She purposely went into a coffee shop where there are a lot of Jews.
Just constantly trying to erode our free speech rights in America in defense of this foreign country.
They, of course, had this person on Fox.
Her name is Leora Rez and here's what she had to say.
Stop anti-Semitism and thank you for joining us today on this.
Thank you.
A day we will not forget.
That interview with Katie Kalischer was extraordinary.
We also had an interview last hour with a woman by the name of Jojo Kalin.
She organized last night's event and she addressed it the following way with us.
watch here?
I think as And this was far scarier than that.
It was so intimate.
And so to feel more fear as a diaspora Jew in the United States than in Israel is something I'm contending with and grappling with.
But I think what we need to do is not let the terrorists win and not let this act of depravity and hatred strip us of our humanity.
I imagine you reflect a lot of that same sentiment.
It's still early.
We're only 13 hours into this story.
Your thoughts?
Oh, that's plenty of time to exploit the corpses.
13 hours is plenty of time.
People were doing it way before 13 hours.
Shocked, heartbroken.
However, we're not surprised.
In 2023, Stop Anti-Semitism had actually featured Elias Rodriguez's group out of Chicago, the Party for Socialism and Liberation, where they had plastered a University of Illinois campus with, quote, exterminate the Zionists stickers, which is just a modern-day spin on Nazi-esque exterminate the Jews propaganda.
And when we had alerted the mayor's office and the university, Why would you call the mayor's office demanding that they do something about people protesting outside the embassy of a foreign country involved in a I
want you to understand how these people are trying very hard, seeing the public opinion polls, watching Israel be turned into a pariah to radically transform and destroy the foundational defining rights of the United States.
In service of this foreign country to which they have immense loyalty.
You call the mayor demanding that people not be allowed to protest outside the Israeli embassy?
And I want to get to the point, let me just play the rest of that and get to this claim that people were screaming exterminate Zionism or exterminate Zionists as though that is a Nazi type slogan.
I'm going to get to that in a second.
So this culmination of both events along with 600 days of calls for global intifado, calls to harm Jews across the country from coast to coast, this is exactly what we thought and expected or tragically happened.
Okay.
Exterminate Zionists.
I haven't heard that phrase.
I remember for the first year after October 7th when the Campus protest movement was being demonized and treated as satanic.
I kept hearing people tell me, oh no, these people aren't against Israel.
They're out there chanting, kill the Jews, kill all Jews, kill all Jews.
I kept saying, where is that happening on American campuses?
Show me who it is who's chanting kill all Jews.
And nobody could ever show me an example.
I asked many times on social media, please, anyone who has any example of student groups or protesters on campuses chanting, kill all Jews or kill the Jews, send that to me, because that didn't happen.
And the one example that they would point to is there was some protest in Australia outside of the Sydney Opera House.
In the two weeks following the October 7th attack and one guy in the crowd said kill the Jews and he was immediately shouted down by the other protesters.
That was not an American campus.
That was in Australia.
That was a single person.
This idea that people are going around saying exterminate the Jews, exterminate Zionists, that is not true.
But what is true is that people are constantly going around saying exterminate Hamas.
And in Israel, they're saying kill all Gazans, kill all Palestinians.
We had a member of Congress in the United States who dressed up in an IDF military uniform, the military uniform of a foreign country who went to the floor of the United States House and said there are no innocent people in Gaza.
There are no innocent babies in Gaza dressed in an IDF uniform.
You want to hear some Inflammatory and insightful genocidal rhetoric, here is Randy Fine, who Donald Trump endorsed as an America First candidate who took over Matt Gaetz's congressional seat.
I think he might have actually taken over Mike Waltz's congressional seat.
And he is this extremely obese, one-issue person.
His issue is Israel.
That's his only issue.
And he has said some of the most genocidal things I've heard when someone says, oh, babies in Gaza have been murdered.
He's like, oh, show me the pictures.
Show me more.
He's a sociopath.
He's a psychopath.
Donald Trump supported him as America First, even though his only issue is not America.
It is Israel.
I believe he's been taking Ozempic because he looks a little less morbidly obese.
But even on Ozempic, he's quite obese.
And he went on to Fox News.
And I want you to listen to what he says is the solution that he sees, the final solution, for what he called our Muslim terror.
Now, unfortunately, many of these people are very disappointed that the killer was not Muslim.
Some of them ignore that and pretend it is, and they keep calling this Muslim terrorism, Islamic terrorism.
The shooter was not Muslim.
I know they were deeply disappointed to find that out and that he wasn't.
Imagine how much political value they could extract from that.
But here's what this newly elected congressman of Tel Aviv said on Fox News.
The fact of the matter is, the Palestinian cause is an evil one.
The Palestinian cause is an evil one.
The Palestinian cause.
Trying to get the war stopped.
Trying to get a Palestinian state.
It is an evil cause, he says.
The White House is hoping both Israel and Hamas will sign on to.
Does this shooting change anything when it comes to the course of the war or the negotiations to end it?
Well, I think it speaks to the importance of the only end of the conflict is complete and total surrender by those who support Muslim terror.
In World War II, we did not negotiate a surrender with the Nazis.
We did not negotiate a surrender with the Japanese.
We nuked the Japanese twice in order to get unconditional surrender.
That needs to be the same here.
There is something deeply, deeply wrong with this culture and it needs to be defeated.
Okay, so let me ask you this question.
If you think chanting Free Palestine is some inherently violent, bigoted slogan that is likely to incite anti-Semitic violence, how about going on TV as a member of Congress and saying the pro-Palestinian movement is inherently evil and that this entire culture, this entire Islamic culture needs to be wiped out?
You think that might incite violence against Muslims or against pro-Palestinian protesters?
All kinds of causes, all kinds of rhetoric, all kinds of views have the potential to incite violence, and that one certainly has.
And there has been hate crimes against Palestinians since October 7th in the United States, even though it got 1 /100th the attention of last night's killing.
To say nothing of the ongoing ethnic cleansing and genocide in Gaza, which is killing 5,000, 10,000 people each week, children, babies, one after the next, destroying all Palestinian society.
The Israeli officials are saying that is our goal, to level the entire thing and drive everybody out and take Gaza for ourselves.
The level of— Horrific violence and genocidal behavior and evil is so much greater there.
But of course, we don't know the name of a single Palestinian victim.
Not one.
We don't know.
We don't hear about their life stories.
We don't hear about their dreams.
We don't hear about the couple that's about to be engaged or the newly married one who just had a baby and got blown up.
They're barely people.
We just almost never hear about them.
That's a typical propaganda tactic.
It could happen in the war on terror, too.
If one Muslim killed a Westerner, their name would be all over the place.
We would hear from their family members, their shattered dreams, their aspirations.
But nobody could name a single one of the hundreds of thousands of innocent people blown up in the war on terror because we make clear decisions about whose life we think has value and whose doesn't.
Now, one of the extremely ironic things about this attempt to say that anybody who opposes the war in Gaza, anybody who opposes Israel is responsible for the acts of individual murderers or individual acts of violence carried on the name of that cause is that that idea is prohibited if you want to hold Jews responsible or Zionists responsible or
Israel supporters responsible for the acts of Israel.
Let me show you this.
This is the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, the working definition of anti-Semitism, which Israel created and then pressured the EU to adapt and enact into their criminal law against hate speech.
It's a radically expanded definition of what anti-Semitism means.
It includes all sorts of common views about Israel, criticisms of Israel.
And now Donald Trump is demanding that colleges expand their hate speech codes.
To not just foreign students, but American students, so that any American student expressing any of these prohibited views will be immediately declared guilty of the university speech codes.
It's just one of the ways the government is eroding the free speech rights of Americans in the name of this foreign country.
But here are two examples of, formal examples included in the definition of what is now considered anti-Semitism.
Here's one example.
Accusing Jews as a people.
Of being responsible for real or imagined wrongdoing committed by a single Jewish person or group.
So if there's some Jewish, radical Jewish, Israel supporter who goes and murders a perceived enemy of the Israeli state, as has often happened, or goes and commits a hate crime against Arabs or Muslims, it's considered anti-Semitic.
To hold all Israel supporters or all Jews responsible for the violent act of that one Jewish person, as it should be.
The person responsible is the Jew who went and killed somebody, not all Jewish people or not all Israel supporters.
Here's another example of what's now barred under this new definition of anti-Semitism.
Quote, Quote, There's actually a definition I'm looking for here that, here it is.
This is one of the things you are not allowed to do under this definition.
You cannot hold Jews collectively responsible for the actions of the state of Israel.
So think about this.
If you criticize Israel, or as the ADL calls it, the Jewish state, it means that you are Anti-Semitic, you're attacking Jews because there's no distinction between Israel and Jews.
If you criticize Israel, it means you're anti-Semitic because you're criticizing Jews.
Except when it comes to the reverse, you cannot hold Jews collectively responsible for the actions of the state of Israel.
Why not?
Because people understand there's a difference between the state of Israel and Jews.
Do you see these double standards at play?
Of course Jews shouldn't be held Don't support the actions of the state of Israel.
Or don't support violence carried out in the name of Israel.
Just like many defenders of the Palestinian cause or opponents of Israel's war don't actually support violence being carried out in the name.
Hear from the Washington Post.
Today is the way in which Israel is trying to use these murders to demand that fewer criticism of Israel be permitted in the United States.
Israelis expressed horror at D.C. Embassy attack as politicians trade blame.
While many Israelis said they were at a loss for words over the tragedy, Israeli politicians began to trade blame for the attack.
At least four Israeli government ministers took to Acts to accuse their leftist countrymen.
Of fueling the deadly shooting with their criticism of the government.
So they're saying it's not just people in the United States who are criticizing Israel who are responsible for this murder.
Even Israelis in government who have criticized the Israeli war, they're somehow responsible for this killing too.
Far-right National Security Minister Idmar Ben-Gavir said that, quote, anti-Semites around the world are emboldened by the vile politicians opposed to the war in Gaza.
He singled out opposition politician Yair Golan, a former general in the IDF, who on Tuesday warned that Israel is in danger of, quote, becoming a pariah state.
And this former general in the IDF added, quote, a sane country doesn't engage in fighting against civilians doesn't kill babies as a hobby.
Quote, Yair.
So they had a former IDF soldier who's in the Israeli political system, the leader of the opposition, who said, we're crossing the line into war criminality.
We're becoming a war, a prior state.
Moral nations don't go.
Don't go and do what we're doing in Gaza.
And now they're saying, you have blood on your hands.
By criticizing our war and putting it in negative terms, you're inspiring the people who go and kill our people.
Quote, Isn't it amazing?
Isn't it truly amazing that you have Israel officials saying we're going to deliberately starve to death two million Gazans?
Who are saying we're going to flatten all of Gaza?
There's no innocent There's no such thing as an innocent baby in Gaza.
Truly genocidal language.
And all of that is fine.
None of that incites violence.
And then on the other hand, you have some guy who decided to go kill people, and because he said free Palestine, that means every person who says free Palestine, which is not remotely a genocidal or violent sentiment, is suddenly to blame.
That's the real problem.
Because, obviously, the tens of thousands of people dying in Gaza don't have any value.
Their lives have no value.
Whereas these two people in the United States who are big supporters of Israel, their lives are sacred.
I think all life is sacred.
And if you believe that, you would be far more upset and angry about What the Israeli government is doing with the support and funding and arming by the United States.
Quote, Netanyahu did not refer to Golan, but said in a statement that he has ordered increased security at Israeli diplomatic missions around the world, and that Israel would fight, quote, blood libel that is costing us in blood.
All in an attempt to say that anyone who criticizes the Israeli war in Gaza is basically a murderer and responsible for violence against Jews and antisemitism.
That's what all of today has been about.
Nothing about the victims.
They're just little instruments to use.
Now, I just want to tell you about a Supreme Court case that when I was practicing law and doing First Amendment law was always my favorite case because it stands for one of the most important principles when it comes to free speech.
It's a Supreme Court case from 1980, and it's entitled NAACP v.
Claiborne Hardware.
I've gone over this case before, but just to give you the summary because it's so relevant today.
NAACP leaders in the South during the 1960s civil rights movement would give inflammatory speeches about racism.
They would stand up and say, the United States is against us.
They would say things similar to what that guy on CNN said, or what Dave Portnoy said, or Jake Sherman.
Like, we're endangered.
We're a minority group that people hate.
They murder us.
THEY KILL US, AND WE SHOULD And they started advocating boycotts of white-owned stores in order to generate reform.
They didn't advocate violence.
They didn't advocate killing anybody or attacking anybody.
But they used very passionate rhetoric.
They were very charismatic speakers, and they emotionally affected the people in the audience.
And some of the people who listened to them went and attacked white-owned stores and beat Some white people up.
And obviously those people were arrested.
But then the state of Mississippi said, you know what?
It's not enough to punish the actual people who use violence.
We're going to punish the NAACP leaders whose speeches were so hateful or inciting that they're responsible for the acts of violence that they inspired with their speech.
In favor of the state against NAACP, held them liable with huge civil damages.
And when it got to the Supreme Court, the Supreme Court said, absolutely not.
You cannot hold NAACP leaders responsible for the violent acts committed by other individuals.
Because what the NAACP leaders were doing was expressing protected speech.
And the only way protected speech means something is if you can express your views.
And then not be held responsible if someone else who goes shares those views and the name of that cause goes out and engages in property damage or other forms of violence.
That's foundational.
It's so fundamental to how we think about free speech.
You can say abortion is murder.
That's protected speech.
IF SOMEONE YOU CONVINCE OF THAT GOES OUT AND KILLS ABORTION DOCTORS BECAUSE THEY THINK THE ABORTION DOCTORS ARE MURDERERS, YOU'RE NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR THAT PERSON'S SPEECH EVEN THOUGH YOU SHARE THE SAME IDEAS, EVEN IF YOU CONVINCE THEM OF THAT IDEA.
NOW, Now, anyone who doesn't agree with that, I want to show you two incidents that happened recently, in the last year, year and a half, in the United States.
And if you're somebody who believes that Israel critics or protesters against the war in Gaza are somehow responsible for the violence that was carried out last night, By somebody who screamed free Palestine.
I want you to tell me who's responsible for these two acts.
Here from the Guardian, February 17, 2025.
A Jewish man mistakes two Israeli tourists for Palestinians.
And he opened fire on them in Miami, wounding them both.
He shot two Israeli tourists.
He was Jewish.
He shot two Israeli tourists, but because he thought they were Palestinians.
The victims had reportedly posted, the victims, the people who were killed, also thought their shooter was Palestinian, so they went on to Facebook and posted, quote, death to Arabs on social media after shooting while the suspect was held on murder charges.
Quote, according to arrest documents at 9.30 p.m. on Saturday, surveillance video appeared to show Mordecai Barfman, 27, getting out of his truck and opening fire with a semi-automatic handgun in a vehicle as it passed.
Brofman allegedly fired 17 times, striking one victim in the left shoulder and grazing the other's left forearm.
While in custody, Brofman spontaneously told detectives that while he was driving his truck, he saw two Palestinians and shot and killed them both, arrest documents said.
Further complicating the incident, one of the injured men reportedly posted death to Arabs in a message on social media.
It was Facebook after the shooting.
"My father and I went through a murder attempt against anti-Semitic background." So the Jewish shooter shot those two because they thought he was Palestinian.
They were Arab, Palestinian.
And those two, who were Israeli tourists when they were shot, went and posted death to Arabs because they claimed that it was an anti-Semitic attack.
What it really was was an anti-Muslim, anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab hate crime.
On the part of a Jewish man in Miami.
So who's responsible for that?
I would say it's the Jewish shooter who thought he was killing people because they were Palestinian.
But if you use the framework that prevailed all day long today, you would say, no, no, he's not really to blame.
The people with real blood on their hands are the people who say things like what Randy Fine say.
This whole Muslim culture is evil.
It needs to be extinguished.
What Israeli officials say, there's no such thing as an innocent Palestinian.
What Brian Masks, that Republican congressman who dressed up in the IDF uniform to speak on the House floor to say there are no Palestinian innocent in Gaza.
You would say that rhetoric is responsible when a Jewish man in America goes to shoot and kill two people because they're Palestinian.
Here from the BBC, I want you to tell me who's responsible for this, other than the shooter, their killer.
February 28, 2005, an Illinois man is convicted for a hate crime murder of a Palestinian boy.
Prosecutors said Joseph Zuba, 73, targeted the family over their Muslim faith following the Israel-Hamas war.
Police found six-year-old Weida al-Foyme and his mother, Hansan Shaheen, with severe stab wounds inside the house that she rented.
From Zuba in a Chicago suburb on the 14th of October, 2023.
So, eight days after October 7th.
The boy later died.
The six-year-old boy, Palestinian boy, later died in the hospital.
Police testified that they found Zuba outside the house after the attack with blood on his body and hands.
Jurors found him guilty of the crime after a short deliberation.
Zuba faced his life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Scheduled is for May.
We've had two, we've had more, but two horrific, brutal attacks, violent attacks on Palestinians by people who were attacking them because they were Palestinian and Arab and Muslim.
So are people who speak out against Islam or against Palestinian culture, are they the ones to be held responsible for these crimes the way that we're told that?
Now the people really responsible for the crimes last night in D.C. are the ones who have been criticizing Israel.
It's either one or the other.
I've had a very consistent view for a very long time, based on my respect for that Supreme Court decision in Claiborne, that you cannot blame violence on people who express political views simply because the person carrying out the violence has some of the same political views or is enacting in the same cause.
And I wrote about this in May 2022 when I was still on Substack, and the headline was, The Demented and Selective Game of Instantly Blaming Political Opponents for Mass Shootings.
Just in case you think I'm creating this standard only for today, I've been writing about this for a long time.
And what prompted this article was the white supremacist who went to Buffalo, purposely found a grocery store in an overwhelmingly African-American community, went into the grocery store, targeted black shoppers, and slaughtered 10 of them.
And he left behind a manifesto.
Didn't mention Tucker Carlson, didn't mention Fox News.
It mentioned a lot of influences.
Tucker Carlson was not one of them.
There was not even evidence that he ever watched Tucker Carlson or even knew who he was.
But the manifesto was in the vein of the kind of murderers who carried out the attack on the mosque in New Zealand or Anders Breivik in Norway.
People who are white supremacists are saying that they want to cleanse their country of non-white blood.
And the media and Democrats instantly said Tucker Carlson was to blame for this crime because he, in his arguments about immigration, was saying that Democrats are bringing immigrants in to replace Native Americans, Americans who are here to change the population.
AND HE SAID DEMOCRATS WERE DOING THAT BECAUSE DEMOCRATS WROTE BOOKS ABOUT HOW IMMIGRATION WOULD ENSURE A PERMANENT DEMOCRATIC MAJORITY BECAUSE IT WOULD FILL THE COUNTRY WITH IMMIGRANTS WHO WOULD BE INCLINED TO VOTE DEMOCRAT.
It turns out that a lot of immigrants are actually quite conservative.
A lot of them voted for Trump.
But that was their argument.
And so because Tucker Carlson said that that's what the Democratic plan is, to replace Americans, because this killer had in his manifesto references to the white replacement theory, which is much different than the one that Tucker advocated, but even if it's the same.
The idea that Tucker Carlson was to blame because he expressed his views on immigration, and then some guy who went and slaughtered black people had similar views to Tucker Carlson that he's therefore to blame, all conservatives agreed that was repulsive.
You can't blame somebody for the violent acts carried out in a cause just because you're someone who advocates the cause.
And at the time I wrote, all ideology spawns psychopaths who kill innocents in its name.
Yet only some are blamed for their violent adherence by opportunists cravingly exploiting corpses while they are still on the ground, which is exactly what happened today as well.
Here from NBC News about that Buffalo white supremacist massacre, the title of the NBC News article, Fox News' Tucker Carlson under fresh scrutiny after a Buffalo mass shooting.
Can you believe that?
Why would Tucker Carlson be under fresh scrutiny because some white supremacists went to Buffalo and shot 10 black people and killed them?
Quote, the incendiary cable news host has drawn criticism for promoting the, quote, great replacement theory, ideas apparently espoused by the suspect in the Buffalo shooting.
thing.
That's exactly what is happening here.
Exactly.
And it's corrupt and it's exploitative and it's an enemy of free speech.
Because what you're trying to say is that If you express views that a killer also expresses in carrying out violence, even though you've never advocated violence, you don't support violence, you condemn violence, the blood is on your hands, and that view that you've expressed should be basically considered off-limits because it's now linked to murder.
That's exactly what Israel supporters have been spending all day doing today and will continue to spend weeks coming up as well.
Now, we have a couple of other stories that we were going to get to, including This Irish rap band, NICAP, who has been charged with terrorism crimes by the UK government because of their concerts, they held up a sign saying "Free Gaza" or "Free Palestine, fuck Israel." You know, they don't have to like that view.
It's obviously protected speech.
They obviously had a chant about Hezbollah and a Hezbollah flag.
Certainly free speech as well.
There's a crime against material support of terrorism, but it cannot be Committed just through speech.
You have to give money to a terrorist group or raise funds for them or give them arms.
That's the crime.
It cannot be speech.
J.D. Vance is going around saying the U.K. and Europe are enemies of free speech, constantly criminalizing views.
Of course, he won't talk about this type of attack on free speech, but they're under terrorism indictments for their expression about Israel and Palestine.
And then Homeland Security today.
In response to the claim that Harvard is anti-Semitic, which would come as a huge surprise if you look at the people who fund it and run it, are all the international students at Harvard are having their visas immediately revoked and Harvard is banned from getting visas for their international students in the future.
A huge attack on Harvard and because of its views that it permitted to be held on college campuses against Israel.
And that means the people who are in Harvard, who are in their fourth year of a PhD program, about to graduate, now have their visas revoked, and either they have to find another school they can go to and get their visas renewed, or they'll be deported with no visa and lose all their education, simply to punish Harvard for allowing too many protests against Israel.
That's what this whole thing is about.
And everything today, all of this stuff that's building up to it is all about trying to make it basically illegal or cause for immediate ostracization to criticize Israel or condemn the destruction of Gaza because they want to create this framework where doing so is either anti-Semitic,
hateful of Jews, and now Inciting violence against Jews, anti-Semitic murderers, and therefore anyone criticizing Jews in the future now has blood on their hands.
It's a huge attack on the American way of life, American political values, the Constitution, all in defense of this foreign country to the point where some woman went on CNN today and said she called the mayor's office to demand why they're not doing anything to stop people from protesting outside the Israeli embassy on American soil.
Yes, it's sad that these two people were murdered.
Yes, the moral framework that is invoked to justify it is, in my view, fundamentally flawed, immoral.
But everything that's being done in the name of these victims that's really about suppressing free speech is a far, far graver concern than this isolated attack by some fanatic who convinced himself that murdering Random people was a good idea.
This is a far, far more enduring and systemic threat to say nothing about Israel is doing in Gaza.
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All right, so that concludes our show for this evening.
As a reminder, System Update is also available in podcast form.
You can listen to every episode 12 hours after the first broadcast live here on Rumble on Spotify, Apple, and all of the major podcasting platforms where if you rate, review, and follow our show, it really does help spread the visibility of our program.
For those of you who've been watching this show, we are, needless to say, very appreciative, and we hope to see you back tomorrow night and every night at 7 p.m. Eastern Live exclusively here on Rumble.
Have a great evening, everybody.
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