Trump's DC Takeover: Is it Legal? Israel Kills More Journalists, Including Anas al-Sharif; Glenn Reacts to Pete Buttigieg and JD Vance on Israel
Glenn reacts to Trump's DC takeover, Israel's killing of more journalists, and JD Vance and Pete Buttigieg's latest comments on Israel. Note: on Tuesday, August 12th, Glenn will be debating Anna Gorisch at the Soho Forum in NYC. You can watch a livestream of the debate here at 6:30pm ET. --------------------------- Watch full episodes on Rumble, streamed LIVE 7pm ET. Become part of our Locals community Follow System Update: Twitter Instagram TikTok Facebook
There's a lot to get to because it's not quite as formal of a show.
It's not as heavily produced, given that we are on the road.
Sometimes that enables us to get to even more topics.
So we're about to do that.
Before we get to all of that, a couple of quick programming notes.
First of all, System Update is also available on in podcast form.
You can listen to every episode 12 hours after the first broadcast live here on Rumble on Spotify, Apple, and all their major podcasting platforms.
Where if you rate, review, and follow our program, it really helps spread the visibility of the show.
Finally, as independent media, we do rely on the support of our viewers and members, which you can provide by joining our locals community, which means you just click the red join button right below the video player on the Rumble page.
It takes you to that platform where we have a whole variety of special interactive features, exclusive video and interview content.
And basically, more than anything else, it is the community on which we rely to support the independent journalism that we do here every night.
Again, simply click the join button and it will take you there.
For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update starting right now.
Obviously, crime in American cities, especially large American cities, the vast majority of which are ruled and governed by Democratic mayors, has been a source of contention for a long time.
There are lots of people in both political parties across the political spectrum who have had the experience of going to one of America's largest and most important cities and feeling unsafe there.
Now, crime statistics don't always tell the record.
Sometimes there can be all different reasons why crime statistics make it look like crime is going down, and yet the perception of the people who live there can be the opposite.
It reminds me a lot of when the Biden administration kept telling people, Look, I know you think the economy is bad, you feel like your family is struggling economically, but you need to snap out of it because GDP is growing and the statistics show that you have it better than ever.
And people don't care about those statistics, they care about their perceptions.
And there definitely is a perception, and it's a perception shared not just by many residents of the city, especially in the poorer parts of the city, but also just people who visit the city, who work in the city, that Washington is an unsafe place.
Whether it's more unsafe than at any time before, whether it's gotten marginally safer, there definitely is a perception that it is unsafe.
There's too much crime, there's too much violence.
This has been a, if you look at President Trump's career over the last, say, 50 years of his time in the public eye, there aren't all that many consistent themes.
One consistent theme for sure is that America is getting ripped off through foreign deals, foreign trade deals.
We don't negotiate well.
Our leaders are stupid.
We get ripped off by Japan and China.
He's been saying all of that for decades.
None of that is new.
But the other thing that's not new is his belief that crime is too rampant in American cities, that it's not sufficiently punished.
And as a result, he has been talking now for quite some time about the potential need to federalize the police forces of various large American cities, again, most of whom are run by Democratic mayors, either by sending in the National Guard or trying to find a way to federalize their police department completely.
Of course, earlier this year, he sent in the National Guard, the California National Guard, which he federalized and then sent into the city of Los Angeles after there were some major upheavals involving protests or people trying to impede ICE agents from detaining people they accused of being in the country illegally.
And the mayor of Los Angeles, Kieran Bass, and others in the city were outraged and indignant.
And right now, that's making its way through the courts about who controls the policing responsibilities in a city and particularly who controls the National Guard.
Is it the governor of the state of California, Gavin Newsom, as has been typically understood?
Or does President Obama have the right to overrule him and send in the federal, the federal, the National Guard?
Earlier today, President Trump announced a new policy, not concerning any American state, but instead the federal district of Washington, D.C., where he announced that he is going to federalize the police department of Washington, D.C., as well as send in the National Guard in order to patrol the streets.
He also said that he's going to have FBI agents patrolling the streets at night as well.
This is prompted by a couple of incidents.
Number one, just the general perception that Washington is unsafe by a lot of people who work there.
Number two, Trump's belief and the belief of many in his White House that Washington has gotten too out of control.
It's the nation's capital.
It's a symbol of the United States.
And yet, the level of violence in Washington is way higher than it ought to be, they believe.
And then, number three, within the last several days, a prominent member of the Doge team, remember Doge, the person who goes by the name of Big Balls, was injured by a group of people.
It's a little unclear, all the details, but essentially he was with his girlfriend, and they were targeted for carjacking.
He threw her in the car, and at some point, he ended up getting beaten pretty badly.
There was a picture of him circulating where he was on the ground bleeding quite badly.
And obviously, when it comes to Trump, having somebody who he knows or who works for him be that subject of that crime, he does take those sorts of things personally.
And so he announced today this decision, which is on the one hand, a quite momentous decision that has never previously been done before, where the federal government goes in and federalizes the DC Police Department, sends the National Guard.
On the other, a lot of people are trying to raise questions about its constitutionality or its legality.
And there's really not any question that President Trump does have the power under both clear law and the Constitution to do what he's doing today.
There's really no basis for a legal objection, which we'll get to in a second.
So here's a clip of President Trump at the White House today.
He went to the White House press briefing room where he announced this policy.
And here's part of what he had to say: I'm announcing a historic action to rescue our nation's capital from crime, bloodshed, bedlam, and squalor, and worse.
This is Liberation Day in D.C., and we're going to take our capital back.
We're taking it back.
Under the authorities vested in me as the President of the United States, I'm officially invoking Section 740 of the District of Columbia Home Rule Act.
You know what that is?
And placing the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department under direct federal control, and you'll be meeting the people that will be directly involved with that.
Very good people, but they're tough and they know what's happening.
They've done it before.
In addition, I'm deploying the National Guard to help reestablish law, order, and public safety in Washington, D.C., and they're going to be allowed to do their job properly.
And you people are victims of it, too.
You know, you're reporters, and I understand a lot of you tend to be on the liberal side, but you don't want to get you don't want to get mugged and raped and shot and killed.
And you all know people and friends of yours that that happened.
And so you can be anything you want, but you want to have safety in the streets.
You want to be able to leave your apartment or your house where you live and feel safe and go into a store to buy a newspaper or buy something.
And you don't have that now.
The murder rate in Washington today is higher than that of Bogota, Colombia, Mexico City, some of the places that you hear about as being the worst places on earth.
Much higher.
This is much higher.
The number of car thefts has doubled over the past five years, and the number of carjackings has more than tripled.
Murders in 2023 reached the highest rate probably ever.
They say 25 years, but they don't know what that means because it just goes back 25 years.
Can't be worse.
Our capital city has been overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged out maniacs and homeless people.
And we're not going to now.
One of the things President Trump often does is paints a very dystopian picture of the United States.
He often depicts it in the most apocalyptic terms possible.
Like if you walk out the street, it's basically a bunch of barbarians running around.
There's really this complete societal breakdown.
I don't think that's really consistent with people's experience in Washington, but it is true that there have been a lot of very serious, violent random crimes, carjackings and assaults and murders.
And I think there is a good, valid Argument that when it comes to Washington, D.C., which is supposed to be the place where our federal government works, members of Congress are sent, their staff is sent, interns come, people from around the world come, and there are many, many people who live in Washington, D.C. as well, where those murders often don't get as much attention, even though they happen quite a bit.
I do think it's arguably in the interest of the federal government to try and fix a problem that, even if not quite as severe as President Trump said, nonetheless, a very real problem.
And I do think that this has been one of the failures of left liberal politics: there has always been this idea that if you acknowledge that crime is a problem, it means that somehow you are assenting to or giving support for or strengthening what really has become a prison state in the United States.
There's all those statistics where 25%, maybe it's a little less now, 23, 22, 23% of the world's population in prison.
So, if you take all the world's population that are in prison, 23% of that population is in the United States, even though the United States only represents 5% of the population on the planet.
You have countries like China and India whose population is four or five times greater than the United States.
And we have this massive incarceration issue.
It's not like we are a soft on crime country.
We've passed so many laws that require massive prison terms, even for nonviolent crimes.
And I think there's a sense on the liberal left that if you acknowledge that crime is a problem, if you acknowledge that crime is excessive, that people feel an impunity to commit violence, that they get out of jail too quickly, they're repeat offenders, that somehow you're both endorsing this prison system as well as defending the police.
And I think that's a huge mistake.
And this is one of the things I think has been a big failure about left liberal politics: this idea that you can advocate for policies, but it's not the liberal left bourgeois or the liberal left upper middle class or even middle class that pays the price.
I think immigration is a very good example of that, where people are saying, no, no, we can't restrict immigration.
Immigration is the lifeblood of the country.
Anybody who objects to the flow of illegal immigrants into the country is a racist, a white supremacist, an evil person.
And yet, if you look at the statistics of who is most affected, which communities are most affected, it's typically black and Latino, poor and working class communities, which is what has caused so many of them to migrate to the Republican Party and to Donald Trump.
I mean, this has long been recognized.
If you actually, there's a New York Times columnist called Jamal Bowie, who is a kind of hero to the liberal left in the United States.
He's a New York Times columnist.
I don't know how they ever get themselves to reconcile the fact that the New York Times is this very conservative establishment paper, and yet somehow this radical left writer is able to write there.
Of course, there's nothing radical left about him at all, but he knows how to sound the right tones about Trump being a fascist and they all love him.
He's a black writer that they all feel good about loving.
But back in 2013, this is very amazing.
He was writing at this liberal journal called The American Prospect, and he wrote an article warning the Democrats not to become too pro-immigrant, not to become too committed to an open border, because he said that it's black voters and Latino voters who feel the most grievance and resentment from that, that they're the ones, especially black wage workers and working class workers who are the first to lose their job, that wages are driven down.
That was back in 2013.
And I think that's still true.
And so when you have a lot of liberals kind of maligning concerns about immigration because they don't live in the neighborhoods where which are affected, and you have a lot of black and Latino working class people, that's what part of what gives the perception that these people don't care about our lives.
They don't care about our issues.
And the same has been true for crime, this prohibition on the ability to recognize that violent crime is a serious problem, that it kills a lot of people.
Mostly the violence and the criminality are in working class and poor black and Latino neighborhoods.
And that's why if you look at the polling data, even after Black Lives Matter, you would often find this huge gap between white progressives, white liberals on the one hand, who thought that there should be a defunding of the police, but black and Latinos, by and large, in poor and working class communities were saying, we don't want to defund the police.
We need the police.
We live in the communities that are riven by violent crime.
And I think this is very much the type of issue that liberals often fall into the trap.
And it's part of this liberal mindset that because they are part of this group of people who live in certain communities that aren't affected, they can advocate certain policies that make them feel sanctimonious, make them feel righteous, even though they don't pay you the price for it.
So here's a chart that has been making the rounds today.
And it is, I think, the official chart of violent crime in Washington.
It actually, yeah, it comes from the Metropolitan Police Department.
It includes homicides, assaults with a weapon, sexual abuse, and robberies.
That's included in violent crime.
And you can see that contrary to President Trump's depiction, violent crime has actually decreased from that peak that he talked about in 2023, where it kind of skyrocketed.
And it has now come down to 1,584 violent crimes in 2025 so far.
That peak that he was talking about was over 3,000.
But you can even see that going back 2011, 2013, 2015, it was much higher than that peak.
So it has really come down somewhat precipitously.
But who cares?
If you're the victim of a carjacking, if you're the victim of a violent crime, the fact that there's 20% fewer of such violent crimes now as there was previously doesn't make you any more willing to tolerate it.
And I also think that there's some, and there's a lot of reporting on this today.
We would show you this if we were in the studio because we're here, we're a little more constrained, but there's a lot of studies that suggest that these kind of statistics can be easily manipulated based on what crimes are included, based on how the reporting is done, that there really is not this decrease.
But even if this decrease is true, then it means that I think that's a pretty serious problem, especially again for a city that's supposed to be the kind of symbol of American democracy.
Now, we invite tourists from all over the country to come, from around the world to come.
And a lot of them are being victimized by violent crime.
Now, on the issue of whether what Trump did today is constitutional or legal, it's not really an interesting question because the answer is quite clearly yes.
The answer is: yes, what he's doing is constitutional, and yes, what he's doing is legal.
And the short explanation for why is that there has been this move on the part of in Democratic Party politics to create statehood for Washington, D.C., to make it a 51st state.
And the reason why is extremely obvious.
It's nothing noble.
It's the fact that 90% of Washington, D.C. voters are very loyal Democratic Party voters.
So if you were to make Washington, D.C. a state, you would have more, two more Democratic senators automatically.
You would have probably all new Democratic House members, a Democratic governor.
You would just increase the power of the Democratic Party on a federal level.
And the Republican Party is vehemently opposed, likely for the same reason.
One might wonder if these were all Republican voters, how the debate would come out.
My guess is the exact opposite.
But anyway, that's the state of the debate.
And the reality is that the founders thought it was very important that the seat of our federal government be independent, not be part of any state, so that it wasn't under the control of a Democratic legislature or Republican legislature.
It wasn't under the control of a Democratic or Republican governor.
It was kind of this neutral zone.
And in the Constitution, Article 1, Section 8, it's clause 17, the Constitution assigns the governance of Washington to the United States Congress.
It's not meant to be part of a state.
It was never meant to be a state.
And it's not like it was an oversight.
There was very good reasons for it, which is we think if it's part of a state, our federal government could be unduly co-opted by the politics of that state.
So we want to have it be this neutral zone.
The United States is not the only country where that's true.
There are other federally administered districts where the seat of the government is.
And there are a lot of Democrats who have been moving to change that, even though it's in the Constitution, even though it was intrinsic to the design of the founders, which is their right.
There's ways to change the Constitution.
They're not anywhere near close to being able to do it.
But there is a, you have to acknowledge, even if you agree with that design, which I do, there is an oddity, which is that all these people who live in the United States, the District of Columbia are not part of the government.
They're not there to administer the government.
They're there because they're American citizens who happen to live in Washington, D.C. And it is somewhat of a form of disenfranchisement not to have representation in Congress, not to be able to vote for any members of the Senate, not to have a governor.
They have a city council and they have a mayor, but even that's fairly recent.
And so during the 50s and 60s, there was this move to give D.C. more autonomy, that the people of the city deserve some better representation.
And so they kind of reached a compromise.
It was called the Home Rule Act of 1973, which basically said, okay, you can have a city council, you can have a mayor that you elect, the people of D.C. elect, and they're going to govern the city.
But it also said that the federal government remains in charge.
The Congress can override anything the mayor or the city council does because the Congress has that power under the Constitution, which hasn't changed.
And right in that law, it says the president has the authority at any moment to federalize the police department and take it over and run the policing of the district in the event that he declares an emergency, which he's now done on the basis of this overstated, but nonetheless not entirely invalid view of crime in Washington.
So even the mayor of Washington, the very Democratic Party, mayor of Washington, Bowser, admits today that there's nothing she can do because it absolutely is the president's prerogative to do.
I think the bigger concern is, and the plan is not really that radical.
It's not like there's going to be tens of thousands of National Guard troops having the military occupy all of Washington, D.C. It's going to be a much lighter footprint than that, but it is going to be a serious footprint.
I think the reason why people are discomforted by this and alarmed by this is because President Trump isn't just content to doing this to D.C., he clearly wants to federalize the police department and deploy and control the National Guard, basically the military in many of America's largest cities.
He's talked about doing it in Chicago and I believe in a couple other major cities.
Obviously, he is doing it in Los Angeles as well.
And that has always been a major concern in the United States for centuries, for at least two centuries, which is that we don't want to have our military operating inside the United States performing regular law enforcement functions.
There has been acts like the Posse Commitatis Act that's specifically designed to say that the military can't be used for law enforcement purposes in the United States.
Obviously, presidents have deployed National Guard troops before and federalized the police department.
George H.W. Bush did it during the Rodney King riots.
George Bush, rather, Donald Trump in his first term did it to some extent, not nearly as much as supporters wanted in response to the protests and riots of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020.
But in general, we have never been a country that wants, and I don't think we still want the military controlled by the White House deployed to American cities because of how obviously dangerous that is to have centralized control.
That's why we have local police departments under the control of our mayors, National Guard under control of our governors.
And if this presages some big, huge shift in policy, then I can think it will become dangerous.
If it's just a temporary measure designed to kind of pacify whatever needs pacifying in Washington, obviously we're going to have to pay a lot of attention to the civil liberties of the people who live in that city.
Trump's saying things like, yeah, I mean, if you walk up to the police officers and scream in their face, they're instructed not to do anything.
If you spit on them, they're not.
Now they're going to do something.
They're going to hit back.
They're basically authorized to do what, quote, whatever they want to do.
That kind of language, I think, requires some oversight, some concern.
But as far as the legality is concerned, as far as the constitutionality is concerned, Trump is 100% within his rights to do that, which isn't the same thing as saying he should.
The question will become if this starts to infect his views toward other cities.
And like I said, there's already a case in Los Angeles working its way through the federal court system.
In fact, there was a federal court hearing today on the appellate level about whether Donald Trump should be able to deploy the federal National Guard to California as he'd done in Los Angeles.
So we'll definitely keep an eye on that.
But I think that it's good to understand the legal background because this is likely to not be the last case of this.
All right.
So something we talk about here on this show among our team, the fact that we obviously spend a great deal of time covering not just the U.S. support for the destruction of Gaza by Israel, but also all the different ramifications for domestic politics inside the United States, which is multifaceted.
The bizarre control that the Israeli lobby obviously exerts over our members of Congress.
Last week, the entire or a massive portion of the Republican freshman class made a pilgrimage with Mike Johnson, the House Speaker, to Israel on a trip organized and I believe paid for by AIPAC.
And they met Prime Minister Netanyahu.
And this is typically the summer recess when traditionally members of Congress have used this to go home back to their constituents, back to their home districts, to at least try and maintain the facade of being in their district, of hearing from their constituents.
And instead, this time they're using it to go to their real district, which is Israel.
And today or this week, it's the turn of the House Democrats, the freshman House Democrats, who have done so on a trip created by and organized by AIPAC.
There's obviously issues about the hate speech and censorship codes being imposed at American Universities on behalf of Israel.
But really, in my view, there's really no way to avoid talking about Israel.
We don't look to talk about Israel every night.
It's not something like we want to do.
But I would just feel like I was abdicating my responsibility if we didn't cover it a very good amount of time.
I think it's worth remembering that when the war in Ukraine broke out in full, and not just the entire Democratic Party under Joe Biden, but most of the Republican Party as well decided they wanted to get involved in that war and finance that war and sent tens and tens and then hundreds of billions of dollars there.
We covered that with great regularity as much as we're covering this.
Because obviously foreign policy and intervention and how that relates to America first and the MAGA movement and civil liberties is a major topic that we have always covered, even before we did the show in Mighty Written Journalism.
But I don't want to make excuses for it.
I will just tell you straight up, and I've said this many times before, that I think what's happening in Gaza is the single worst crime against humanity that we have seen most definitely in the 21st century and arguably in our lifetime.
And I guess by our lifetime, I'm excluding Vietnam, though I think you can make an argument for a lot of different reasons.
And we had that famine expert on our show a couple of weeks ago who said that he's been studying famines all over the world and has never seen one so quite minutely engineered and deliberately implemented as the mass starvation program taking place in Gaza.
It just seems like every day there's a new horrific atrocity and it's impossible to turn away from.
We shouldn't turn away from it because it's ongoing and every person has a responsibility to, I think, do what they can to try and raise your voice as much as possible to inspire other people to see why it's so wrong.
And the undeniable fact is that's succeeding.
More and more people are seeing the true face of Israel and the bizarre, disturbing subservience of the United States when it comes to Israel.
And I think a lot of reasons for why that's why is because people are seeing the undeniable truth of what that is.
Yesterday, there is an Al Jazeera journalist named Anas Al-Sharif, who has become, for sure, in the Middle East, and I would say even more broadly in the West, one of the most important reporters documenting what is happening in Gaza.
Remember, at the end of the day, the IDF made the decision at the beginning of this war, and this decision continues through to today, that it won't allow any international journalists to enter Gaza.
They've taken a few pet pet pundits in, like Douglas Murray, and showed them five-second things or two-hour things protected by the IDF.
There's no actual reporters in Gaza except for Palestinian journalists.
And these Palestinian journalists, sometimes I really get irritated by this notion that, oh, because we don't have real reporters in there, we have to rely on Palestinian reporters and somehow they're less reliable.
I don't think this is true at all.
Palestinian journalists have done an extraordinary job of risking their life, of seeing and confronting some of the worst, most mentally destructive things you could possibly see day after day after day, not just once.
They have obviously made a target of themselves, knowing how many journalists Israel has deliberately murdered by targeting them.
We've had some on our show before.
And precisely because the U.S. refuses, the Israelis refuse to allow any international reporters in, these are the journalists who have become the way that the world knows about the unparalleled atrocities taking place in Gaza.
And from the beginning, the Israelis have been systemically murdering them one by one, targeting them, targeting their homes, targeting their families.
And last night, and the Israeli government admits this, it engaged in a targeted strike against Anas al-Sharif, killing him, along with four other Palestinian journalists who work for Al Jazeera.
And the reason why we have to rely on these journalists exclusively is because the Israeli government won't allow an international journalist in.
The reason the Israeli government won't allow an international journalist in is very obvious.
It's not because the Israeli government has a deep concern for the safety of international journalists.
They're happy to murder journalists all the time.
They killed an American Palestinian journalist in the West Bank two years ago, and barely anyone in the United States noticed by sniping her in the head.
And what is on the verge of happening now is that the Israelis are prepared, with Donald Trump's blessing, to make a full-scale invasion and occupation of Gaza, which in my view has always been the plan.
And in order to do that, they're already massively escalating their bombing, killing huge numbers of civilian, the kind of carpet bombing we've seen, especially at the beginning of the war.
And most importantly of all, they're systematically eliminating, eradicating the most important journalists because they don't want anybody inside Gaza telling the world about what they're doing.
Because what they're about to do is even worse than anything they've done before.
That's why they're going in.
Here is Al Jazeera, which we're going to start with, because it is their journalists that have been killed.
And I should say, Al Jazeera has been targeted by Israel over the last several years.
They basically were attacked many times.
It doesn't want journalists covering what they're doing because what they're doing will disgust the world even more than it already has.
That's the only reason why you do this.
So here's Al Jazeera's statement.
This is from today.
Al Jazeera condemns the killing of its journalists by Israeli forces in Gaza.
Al Jazeera Media Network condemns in the strongest term the targeted assassination of its correspondents, Anas al-Sharif and Mohammed Oreka, along with photographers Ibrahim al-Tahar and Mohamed Nafel by the Israeli occupation forces.
And yet another blatant and premeditated attack on press freedom.
In a statement by the Israeli occupation forces, admitting to their crime, admitting to their crimes, the journalists were targeted by a direct assault toward the tent where they were stationed opposite al-Sharif medical complex in Gaza.
So they were in a tent, the exact tent they've been using near the hospital.
Remember, they've been covering this war for two years.
And every time Israel murders somebody, every time Israel kills somebody, a journalist, a doctor, a nurse, an entire family, of course, immediately Israel will say, oh, it was a terrorist.
That was Hamas.
And it's gotten to the point where basically the operational definition of terrorists is anyone who the IDF murders or wants to kill.
And you just have all these people, these Israeli supporters who just have no idea who these people are.
But the minute Israel kills them, they all mindlessly walk around saying, he was a terrorist.
He was Hamas and justifying what the IDF is doing.
But most of the world is not buying that.
Basically, the people left defending Israel, other than Israel, are about a shrinking handful of Republican Party politicians and an even smaller contingent of Democratic Party politicians and the Trump administration.
That's it.
Here's the committee to protect journalists, which I should say this journalist in particular, Anas has been warning that there is a target on his head, that they have the Israeli propaganda machine has begun calling him Hamas, which is the prelude to murdering him.
He's been receiving threats.
And the Committee to Protect Journalists actually warned before that he was obviously trying to be eradicated by the IDF and warned the world to object to this, that he is a journalist engaging in vital press freedoms.
But of course, their warnings were unheeded.
Israel operates with no rules and no limits of humanity or any other kind because they have the United States there to fund them, to arm them, to protect them if they get into wars.
And here's the Committee to Protect Journalists statement from yesterday.
Quote, the August 10th attack raises the number of Al Jazeera staff journalists killed by Israel in Gaza during the war to 11.
With Sunday's killing of six journalists, 192 journalists have been killed since the start of the Israeli-Gaza war on October 7th.
At least 184 of those journalists were Palestinians killed by Israel.
Now, as I said, the minute that Israel murdered these journalists, who were well known to the world, people have been watching these journalists report every day because, like I said, we don't have international media.
They've been the eyes and ears of the world about what the Israelis are actually doing in Gaza.
It created worldwide repercussions.
And so the Israelis not only admitted that they killed him, but immediately started leaking insanely absurd images that purport to be evidence that this journalist was a member of Hamas, which of course leads to the question.
He's been openly reporting for Al Jazeera for two years now.
If he was Hamas, why didn't the Israelis kill him previously?
The reason they're killing journalists now is because, as I said, they're about to go in and they don't want anyone showing the true horrors and atrocities of what they're doing.
So once they started disseminating information to try and prove their Hamas, like for example, there's a picture of Anas, the journalist who was murdered with Hamas leaders.
And they say, oh, look, this proves that he's Hamas.
I don't know if people realize this in the Israeli propaganda complex, but journalists interview all sorts of people all the time.
It doesn't make them part of that.
American journalists interview American generals.
If there's a war, does that make those American journalists legitimate targets?
Because there's a picture of them with American journalists.
Fox News is Trey Yinks, who has been doing a spectacular job reporting on this and particularly leading the way among corporate journalists announcing the systematic killing of Gazan journalists, talking about them as his colleagues who he's duty bound to speak up on behalf of.
There's pictures of him meeting with Hamas leaders.
Does that make Trey Yankster Fox News a member of Hamas?
This is the kind of evidence on which the Israelis are relying.
And since a lot of people believe that any Palestinian is automatically a terrorist, not even a human, they're just willing to believe it.
And the Committee to Protect Journalists also raised their voice about this disgusting attempt by the Israelis not just to murder American journalists, but then smear them afterward as terrorists.
And here is the Committee to Protect Journalists statement from, I don't know, it's dated August 14th.
I think it's today.
Today's August 11th.
Oh, this, I'm sorry, this is August 14th, 2024.
This is a previous statement from the Committee to Protect Journalists about other times when the Israeli military has killed Palestinian journalists and then instantly set out to smear them as Hamas and terrorists.
Titles, Committee to Protect Journalists announces Israel's smearing of killed Palestinian journalists with unsubstantiated terrorist tactics.
That's what they've been doing all the time.
It's what Israel has been doing for decades.
Whoever Israel kills, ipso facto is a terrorist.
They kill teenagers in the West Bank.
Those are terrorists.
They wipe out entire families.
The uncle or the father is a terrorist.
They killed 21 people of the family.
Oh, the uncle once spoke to a few members of Hamas.
We think he's a terrorist.
And then every Israel loyalist in the United States nods their head.
And then if somebody protests, they say, oh, look, you're defending Hamas.
That's the propaganda industry that's just no longer working.
It doesn't mean it's not there, but it's no longer working.
The UN Group on Human Rights today issued their own statement, which says this: quote: We condemn the killing by the Israeli military of six Palestinian journalists by targeting their tent in grave breach of international humanitarian law.
Israel must respect and protect all civilians, including journalists.
At least 242 Palestinian journalists were killed in Gaza since October 7th.
We call for immediate, save, and unhindered access to Gaza for all journalists.
Yeah, that is the official number by the UN: 242 journalists killed.
The Committee to Protect Journalists using number 192.
I don't understand what accounts for that discrepancy, but it's not a very significant difference.
Clarissa Ward, for those of you who do need the imprimatur of Western journalists before you believe something, oh, yeah, those are all people in Gaza.
They're all liars.
They're all Hamas.
That's why the Israelis don't allow any journalism because they hope that by relying on the very brave and reliable journalists in Gaza, enough people will say, ah, they're Palestinian.
They don't count.
And we have had a lot of people, including Western journalists, say not necessarily that explicitly, but essentially that.
Oh, we need international journalists in there to verify and confirm what's happening, as though the reporting of Gaza and journalists somehow don't count.
They do count.
From what I've gotten to know some of them, I've seen some of their reporting.
Their journalism is at least as courageous and intrepid and reliable as anything I've seen from most corporate journalists who are unintentionally or otherwise maligning them.
But for those who do need the imprimatur of Western journalists, and we've showed you this before, Western doctors, Western nurses, Western human rights activists who come back from Gaza all say the same thing.
All say the same thing.
Here is Clarissa Ward of CNN, who has covered many wars around the world.
And here is her statement today on the killing of what she considers rightfully so to be five of her journalistic colleagues in Gaza.
I woke up this morning to the horrific news that Manas Sharif, the Al Jazeera journalist, and three of his colleagues were killed in a targeted Israeli strike inside Gaza.
This brings the total number of journalists killed in Gaza since October 7th to 176, which is frankly a mind-boggling statistic.
And I just wanted to say, and I realize that it helps nobody, but I think I speak for a lot of Western journalists when I say that so many of us feel angry and outraged and powerless and ashamed.
We are confronted with a stream of accusations from the IDF that seek to dehumanize our Palestinian colleagues, that seek to justify their killings, and the nature of the carefully calibrated language that we are using in our stories.
I understand many just feel so detached and so not proportional to the agony and outrage of the moment.
And behind the scenes, many of us continue to push and press and sign letters and write petitions and do meetings, and none of it seems to make a damn bit of difference.
So, just a reminder that journalism is not a crime and that the targeting of journalists is a war crime.
This is part of what I think is so important to note: you're seeing these kinds of condemnations of Israel from places previously where you would never have seen them before.
So many people who, even a year ago, would never have dreamed of condemning Israel all around the world are now doing so with increasing vehemence because just being a basic human being means that it's impossible not to see the level of barbarism and savagery and evil and war crimes and atrocities taking place.
I do think it's shameful how few journalists have risen up in defense of their colleagues in Gaza who are journalists who have been murdered for doing their job.
Trey Yingsted and the fact that he's at Fox News not only has been one of the earliest, but one of the most important because of where he works.
Sharif Abdul Qudis is a Egyptian journalist who has covered this region forever.
He's covered it for Democracy Now for a long time.
He was on with Krista Ball and Sagar and Jetty earlier today on Breaking Points.
There are a few people who know this region better.
He's been covering the Israeli Palestinian conflict for decades.
And I want you to hear what he has to say, what he had to say on breaking points earlier today about the targeting of these journalists and then the attempt to smear them as terrorists afterward.
Reaction to Anas's killing, I am still somehow shocked by it, even though I shouldn't be after so long by Western media institutions.
The National Press Club called for a thorough and transparent examination of the circumstances surrounding Enas's death.
What on earth does that mean?
They're putting out a boilerplate statement calling for an investigation.
Israel openly, publicly threatened him for months.
They bombed the tent he was in, and then they took credit for it and bragged about it.
What investigation are you talking about?
Reuters, the headline of Reuters, is Israel killed Al Jazeera journalist it says was Hamas leader.
And then it goes on to quote to quote the Israeli military saying, you know, he was responsible for advancing rocket attacks or some of this, you know, preposterous claims.
This is this is making this enabling Israel to do this.
And if we look, there's been a progression of brazenness of how Israel kills journalists in Palestine.
In the beginning, they would deny that they killed them or they would say it's collateral damage or that there was some mistake.
Then they started claiming that the journalists were in fact militants after they killed them.
They did this with Hamza Dahdur in January 2024.
They produced some ridiculous documents claiming he's a Hamas militant or Islamic Jihad.
I don't remember.
Then they continued to step it up.
They created this hip list in October and they put six Al Jazeera journalists and basically saying openly we're going to kill them and now they've killed two of them.
All right.
So you see how long the Israelis have been doing exactly that.
You can watch the full segment, which I highly recommend on Breaking Points from earlier today.
The journalist who was murdered yesterday, who works for Al Jazeera, the one who was targeted, Anas El Sharif, he's been tweeting, using social media as one of his platforms.
Obviously, he's been broadcasting for Al Jazeera as well, who has a press best every day.
And again, the Israeli government admits targeting him.
This is not collateral damage.
This was his very last tweet yesterday before he was killed in the early morning.
It was this: non-stop bombing for two hours now, Israeli aggressor has been intensifying in Gaza City.
And there's all kinds of posts about how the Israelis have masculated their bombing campaign in preparation for going in, where they're going to engage in unimaginable slaughter.
So that was the last post he wrote, just doing reporting about what's taking place in Gaza.
And then right before we came on the air, there was a statement released from his account by his family.
Like many people in Gaza, the six sad reality is that they often now write statements to be read.
If they're public figures like Anas, they write them for publication.
If they're not, they write them for their family because they all know death is around the corner, at least a very high likelihood.
And there's video of him with his kids.
There's video of him with his family.
And he has a statement about what he tried to do over the last two years in order to feel like he was doing his job to defend his people and his land of reporting on what's taking place.
And it was basically a death statement.
And it's incredibly gut-wrenching because this is the kind of thing that has been taking place every single day, every single day, day in and day out, in Gaza for 23 months, almost two full years, 22 months.
It's really unimaginable.
It wasn't just Anas.
There's also another journalist, Matasam Dawul, whose family had been previously targeted.
And I think several members killed when he was actually on the air reporting back in 2024.
And he too reported yesterday about the nature of the escalated Israeli bombing of Gaza.
as I always should point out, it's the U.S. that pays for it, the U.S. that sends the weapons.
If you're an American worker, your taxpayers go to fund all of this.
There's not just some war on the other side of the world that you're wondering, like, why is this our problem?
It's because we create the problem.
We pay for the problem.
We arm the problem.
We are the problem in that region because of our subservience to Israel.
And Mazasam Daul wrote and tweeted as again, doing his reporting earlier today, this tweet: Can anyone advise me where to move?
Israel carpet bombing and massacres have almost reached my location.
And I am other, am I, am I either to stay and get killed or flee?
The problem is there is no place remained empty in Gaza, middle area, or the south of the besieged enclave.
And this has been what has done to them for two years now as well.
This sixth psychological torture where they're told to evacuate where they are.
They have to walk very long distances, old people, disabled people, young children with their animals, with trying to save whatever is important to them.
And they're told to go somewhere that's a quote-unquote humanitarian zone and they get killed on the way walking by the IDF.
And then when they get there to where they're told to go, the humanitarian zone, they're bombed in their tents.
This has been going on for almost two years now.
Imagine being forced in the midst of starvation, in the midst of indiscriminate carpet bombing, the destruction of your entire civilization, to be told that 10 times, 11 times, as you're exhausted, as you just are trying to survive every day,
as your humanity is stripped of you, that you have to keep walking and changing locations, ordered by this foreign military that you despise as any human being would, and then just have to keep moving and changing and living in tents at the then bomb.
So the same Matasam Dawul who wrote that, his house was bombed very shortly after that.
And he went on to acts after he discovered that multiple members of his family in that house where he lives that was targeted were killed.
He miraculously survived.
And he posted this: quote, any rescue volunteers were under fire, were torn into pieces.
Help.
There's a professional journalist who has seen more than any human being should ever see in a lifetime, who has been extremely composed throughout all of this, who obviously is now writing desperate pleas for help for his life.
And I'm about to show you a video of what was done to his house.
What you're going to see here is the aftermath of the first bomb that targeted his house with people laying on the ground dead and wounded.
And then once people came to rescue them to help find the survivors to help them, Israel bombed again.
That's called a double tap bomb.
You bomb a group of people and then you wait for first responders, ambulance, doctors, nurses, neighbors, whoever's around to go and help.
And then when you bomb those people as well, once they get to that location, the U.S. has done that before in Yemen and Pakistan.
I wrote about it many times.
It's a sick, sick thing.
These are the countries that are terrorists.
United States, Israel, the people arming Israel.
This is terrorism.
This is a very strong video.
If you don't want to see it, turn away.
I feel like it's the responsibility of certainly every American, every European who's part of a country arming and funding this to watch this.
But this is the home of Matsum Daw.
it starts with the carnage and wreckage after the first bomb and then you're going to see the second bomb for the people who showed up on the scene to help
it's two o'clock The daily, that's Delhi, thanks to the Israelis and the Americans.
And we don't see most of it.
We see some of it.
And there's no end in sight because the Trump administration is absolutely determined to stand by Israel no matter what.
It justifies everything Israel does.
Trump has made very clear he's given the green light to the Israelis to go do whatever they want.
Biden gave that green light too, except for occasionally trying to pretend he didn't.
Our government is captured by Israel.
It does Israel's bidding.
It does what Israel says.
It pays for what Israel wants.
It pays for their wars.
We deploy our military to protect Israel every time it has a war.
Our military, our treasury is Israel's, even when they do, especially when they do unthinkable historic crimes of this magnitude.
One of the reasons why this hasn't stopped, and I absolutely believe historians, you know, and non-historians are going to look back on this and say, how was this allowed to happen?
How did the entire like civilized Western world stand by while a genocide and massacres of this sick, cruel, enduring nature were about to take place?
How did European governments keep sending arms with millie-mouth statements?
One of the reasons is because the Democrats, who, of course, didn't object to this very often with a few exceptions, because it was Joe Biden presiding over it.
At least now it's Donald Trump's war, so even the partisans hack should be.
But so many of them are just programmed to say nothing, to avoid saying anything potentially controversial, to deviate from DC bipartisan doctrine that they've been told forever they can't challenge.
And there's a big reason why Trump continues to beat them is because Trump never had that.
Trump never had the idea that, oh, I can't question Pieties.
I can't draw out of the lines.
I have to stay off afraid that I might say one word wrong that's not presidential.
And if you want to see the living embodiment of the soulless, frightened, craven, principle-free Democratic Party, I give you one Pete Buttigage who was on Pod Save America, a party podcast, remember, filled with former Obama operatives, speechwriters, and advisors.
And they are way more out there when it comes to the war in Gaza.
Tommy Vider, who was President Obama's advisor of national security on his National Security Council, he has been like that from the beginning.
But John Pharrell and John Levin and some of these other, Ben Rhodes, some of these other more cautious people who weren't that critical of Biden for doing this, though they were somewhat, have really gotten very much out there now.
And so Pete Buttigieg is on a show where even the very establishment mainstream of the Democratic Party can't get more established mainstream than Pod Save America is way out there on Israel demanding all weapons cutoffs and using very emotional language to do it as I think is appropriate.
He goes on their show and they ask him, there was just a vote.
I'm cutting off arms sales to Israel.
Sponsored by Bernie Sanders, half the Democratic Senate caucus voted yes.
How would you have voted?
And this is what he said.
I would have had no respect for him if he just said, no, I'm not going to cut off arms for Israel.
But he couldn't even answer the question and instead spouted this like completely just calculated, scripted, vapid, vacant, dead-eyed response.
Let's watch it.
More than half of Senate Democrats just voted to oppose the sale of over half a billion dollars worth of U.S. bombs and guns to Israel.
Would you have voted to oppose sending those weapons?
I think we need to insist that if American taxpayer funding is going to weaponry that is going to Israel, that that is not going to things that shock the conscience.
And look, we see images every day that shock the conscience.
So much of this is complicated, but what's not complicated is that if a child is starving because of a choice made by a government, that is unconscionable.
And we, I think, especially including voices who care about Israel, who believe in Israel's right to exist, who have stood with Israel in response to the unbelievable cruelty and terrorism of October 7th.
I think there's a reason why so many of those voices are speaking up now, too, Because this is not just something that is on its face and in itself a moral catastrophe.
All right, so I don't even know what to say about that.
I feel like it speaks for itself.
If you can't see what a scheming, just vacant, non-human Pete Buttigieg is, what a career striver he is.
How he basically will always work at McKenzie, a consultant that firm that just creates spreadsheets for how power centers can profit off the suffering and misery of others where everybody's just a number except for them.
That's what Pete Buttigieg is.
And so much of the Democratic Party in the age of Obama became this, became this like very technocratic, passionless, just like the managers of the status quo and imperial decline because that's what Obama was.
He seemed so full of passion when the con man did such a good job in 2006, seven, and eight of giving these very moving speeches, which he did.
He was of great order, no denying that.
And then he got into office and he basically became part of the DC Bob that he vowed to overturn within about three seconds.
And he was just a technocrat.
That's pretty much it.
And his elevation has given rise to this exact kind of person.
It's like Pete Buttigieg, Kamala Harris, obviously is that by far the worst and weakest part of her campaign was that no one had any idea what she believed in because she never said what she believed in because she was too frightened by what consultants were telling her not to say anything that might offend anybody.
Corey Booker, Beto Rourke, all these kind of people who are just mealy mouthed about everything.
And like I said, if this were confined to the left, I would still judge Pete Buttigieg's morally, but politically, it's so stupid too.
Here's what Ben Rhodes, again, this was President Obama's one of his top national security officials.
And this is what Ben Rhodes said after they had Pete Buttigieg, a highly talented future presidential candidate of the Democratic Party for some reason that I don't understand other than the fact that he's gay and they like that.
They had a woman in 2016 and then they played it safe with Biden and then a black woman in 2020 and so black Indie woman and at some point they're going to have a gay candidate.
It's just what they do to pretend that they're changing something, even though all these people are the most status quo perpetuating and defending individuals you could possibly find on the planet.
Even Ben Rhodes is willing to condemn Pete Buttigieg, a precious little star of the Democratic Party, after he came on their podcast.
And this is what he said, quote, Pete is a smart guy and I admire a lot of what he's done, but I have absolutely no idea what he thinks based on these answers.
Just tell us what you believe.
They can't.
They can't.
They cannot tell you what they believe because Pete Buttigieg spends all his time with large donors of the Democratic Party.
Many of them are deeply pro-Israel.
That's why that's the secret to keeping both parties captive to Israel.
These are people he wants and needs to fund his presidential campaign.
And he cannot come and say, I want to cut off farms to Israel.
On the other hand, he knows that the vast majority of the Democratic base, the people whose votes he actually needs, are disgusted with Israel and are done financially subsidizing Israel.
So he has to pretend and feign this kind of concern that you know he doesn't have for the humanitarian suffering in Gaza, but he also can't offend his donors.
And that's exactly what all these Democrats are.
Most of them are.
And then they can't figure out why everybody hates them.
That's the reason.
And it's just, it's so, you know, it's amazing.
It's like they're members of the Republican Party who say, look, I'm standing by Israel to the last second.
I don't care how many people in Palestine die.
I don't care how many Gazans we kill.
I don't care what people, how the rest of the world hates the United States because they believe they're a genocide.
Our fundamental religious duty, our political duty, is to stand by Israel no matter what.
Lindsey Graham says that, Tom Cotton says that, Mike Huckabee says that.
The ADL says that, Apex says that.
It's despicable, but I at least can give them credit and respect the fact that they say what they think.
Democratic Party politicians are petrified of their own shadow.
And that's why they're just such an ineffective force in American politics and deserve to be.
All right.
Last point that we want to cover is that the Vice President of the United States, J.D. Vance was on Fox News earlier today with Maria Bartaroma, which I think is the first time I ever correctly pronounced her name.
We have a colleague here who worked at Fox for a while, and he helped me kind of train for that.
I'm very proud of myself.
And he was asked about whether he thinks Netanyahu's plan to go into Gaza and occupy it for however much time they do that is the right thing to do.
And here's what J.D. Vance said.
What about Israel?
Benjamin Netanyahu today said that he is going to take full control of Gaza.
Is that the right move?
Well, ultimately, that's up to Benjamin Netanyahu.
Obviously, there are a lot of downsides, a lot of upsides to that.
But I think fundamentally, what we're trying to accomplish for America's perspective is: number one, we want to make this so that Hamas cannot kill innocent people, Israelis, Americans, or anybody else.
Number two, we want the hostages to come home.
And number three, the president's been very clear that you do have a humanitarian crisis there where there's a lot of innocent people who are really struggling.
And we want to make sure that the people of Gaza are able to get food, able to get medicine, and so forth.
And so we're trying to accomplish all three of those things.
And what the president has said is he wants to be again the president of peace.
He is encouraging through every diplomatic method possible, a rapid end to the conflict.
The hostages get to come home.
The people of Gaza get a free flow of humanitarian aid.
That's what we're working towards in order to keep on.
So there's a lot to say there, but he too wouldn't answer the question.
The question was: do you agree that Netanyahu with Netanyahu's plan to go in and send the IDF to occupy Gaza?
And he was like, hey, there's some really good parts of that.
And like, hey, there are some bad parts.
Like, which is it?
What is the position of the United States government with respect to that Netanyahu plan?
Okay, I see some good points.
I see some bad points.
So cowardly.
He's thinking about 2028 and like what the consequences are.
And will he take a position?
But the one thing he did say that I think is very notable that is a policy position is he said that is something for Benjamin Netanyahu to decide.
Yeah, is it?
That's something for Benjamin Netanyahu to decide.
We don't have any say in that.
It's the U.S. government and American workers paying for that war.
We send them the weapons that they use.
We raise our diplomatic veto at the UN to protect them.
We send our military assets to protect Israel, even though members of our military have been killed doing that.
How can it be, oh, whatever Netanyahu decides, we just follow along like little dogs.
Like he tells us what our decision is, what our order is, and we just follow along deferentially.
Is that America first?
You're paying for this country's military.
You're paying for their wars.
You're sending them billions of dollars every year, whatever they ask.
You're sending them the arms.
And they're making this major decision that's going to involve you paying for the occupation of Gaza.
And you don't have an opinion on that other than we do whatever Benjamin Netanyahu tells us to do?
What cowardice?
What pathetic moral abdication?
And yet that's been U.S. policy for quite a long time.
But you know when it wasn't U.S. policy, I think this really gets overlooked.
Israel under Menachem Begin, who was their prime minister in the early 80s, even though he used to lead a terrorist organization, he's kind of like Jalani in Syria.
He became the head of a country, but with a terrorist past.
He led the Argonne, which Hannah Arendt, the Jewish philosopher, compared to Nazis, which is why a lot of university professors are concerned they can't teach Hannah Iran's text anymore because she compared Israel to Nazis, even though she was a Jewish philosopher.
Because under the hate speech codes, Trump forced universities to adopt.
You can't compare Israel to Nazi Germany.
You can compare every other country in the world, including the U.S. to that, but not Israel.
So they're worried they can't keep Tetan or Iran.
But there was a time when Menachem Begin was the president.
He used to, the prime minister, rather, and he used to be a terrorist.
And he was bombing Lebanon the way the Israelis are bombing Gaza and using U.S. weapons and using U.S. money.
And the U.S. had marine barracks in Lebanon that became endangered by what the Israelis were doing.
And Reagan picked up the phone and compared what Netanyahu, what Menachem Begin was doing in Lebanon to what the Nazis did with their utter disregard for human life.
And he told them to stop it.
And within 15 minutes, Begin ordered the Israeli military to withdraw.
And after that, the U.S. barracks, the Marine barracks in Lebanon was attacked by Hezbollah, and 250 of them roughly were killed.
And they were there to help Israel.
And then when Reagan was told, because the Israeli attempt to manipulate the U.S. government to fighting Iran has been decades long.
Oh, this was Iran who did that.
You have to go to war with Iran.
Reagan said, I'm not going to go to war with Iran.
I'm taking these bases out.
Why are we even in Lebanon?
How does that serve the interests of the American people?
And then in the subsequent administration, Bush 41, you know, Bush 41 was a realist.
He ran the CIA.
He was a kind of like John Mearsheimer, like a hardcore realist when it came to foreign policy.
So were his two leading foreign policy advisors, his national security advisor, Brent Scowcroft, and his Secretary of State, Jim Baker.
They had a very strong position.
That was the position of the U.S. government forever, that the interest of the U.S. government was to get an Israeli-Palestinian settlement that held that created two states side by side, an Israeli state and a Palestinian state.
And the big impediment to that was that the Israelis kept expanding settlements in the West Bank, which, given that the two-state solution involved giving the West Bank and Gaza, huge parts of it, to the Palestinians that was going to be their state and then making it contiguous in some way, the more the Israelis expanded and stole that land, the harder that deal was.
And that deal was in the interest of the United States because it made it impossible for the U.S. to do other things in its interest in the region.
And that was when Bush 41 told Israel, we're going to take away your loan guarantees unless you stop building settlements.
The entire Israeli lobby erupted.
George W. Bush was called an anti-Semite.
So was Jim Baker.
That campaign to label George H.W. Bush an anti-Semite was led by one Bill Clinton, who was running against George H.W. Bush in 1992.
And the Democratic president accused George H.W. Bush of not supporting Israel sufficiently and of breeding anti-Semitism.
That's how cynical Bill Clinton was.
And of course, Hillary Clinton was by her side, and that's what they became.
And so that was basically the last time Obama had a little bit of defiance.
And now we're at the point where from Reagan and Bush and even to Obama, we have now a president whose vice president stands up and says, you know what, my policy toward Israel is?
It's whatever Netanyahu tells me it is.
If he decides going into Gaza is the right thing to do, then that's the right thing to do.
Period, end of story.
Even though we pay for it, even though we arm it, even though it affects us, we don't make decisions.
We blindly obey Netanyahu.
That's what is at the heart of this problem.
And the fact that it's the America First movement, the so-called America First Movement, this political movement that decided to baptize itself America First, and yet has one of its leading proponents who wants to be president in 2028 stand up and say, my America First view is that we do what Netanyahu tells us to do, whatever he decides is the right thing to do, shows the absolute fraud, the unsustainable fraud at the heart of this movement.
And it's the reason why so many people on the right, even though they don't want to, a lot of them, can't restrain themselves anymore.
Look at Marjorie Taylor Green, what she's saying every day.
She's at war with AIPAC.
She understands exactly.
She's one of the few people in Congress who got involved with politics because of Donald Trump's America First promise.
She took it seriously.
And when she sees it being violated, and she doesn't care by whom, she's going to loudly object to it.
She believes that's her duty on behalf of her constituents, and so do I. It's just that while this ever-expanding body of people around the globe emerge and unite who see the true face of Israel and the United States and when it comes to Israel, it's nowhere near enough to stop what is absolutely a genocide.
Which doesn't mean, by the way, as J.D. Vance said when he denied that it's a genocide in that same interview, that you go in and you murder every single person that you can.
He's like, oh, the Israelis aren't trying to murder every Palestinian, right?
They're trying to take some and put them in concentration camps and then force them to leave to destroy the Palestinian people, to send them to Jordan, to send them to Egypt, to send them all over the world.
There's no more Palestinian people.
They want to eradicate the Palestinian people.
And that's why leading scholars of genocide, including Israeli scholars, have been calling it a genocide.
But of course, J.D. Vance can't do that because there's no room in the Trump administration to do that.
So this is the major problem that the world faces, as far as I'm concerned.
And it's difficult to talk about other things again because it affects so much, not just what's happening in the Middle East, but American politics as well.
And the more atrocities there are, the more difficult it becomes to talk about it.
And I don't feel like apologizing for that.
I feel like I hope more and more people start talking about it because what we're seeing is unlike anything we've seen on this planet in many, many decades.
And if you're Jewish, it's being done in your name.
If you're American, it's being done with your money and your weapons.
