Will the War in Gaza Finally End? Flotilla Activists Predictably Abused in Israel's Dungeons; Van Jones' Revealing Joke about "Dead Gazan Babies"
Glenn breaks down the early stages of the Israel/Hamas negotiations for a potential ceasefire. Then: Israel's horrific treatment of the flotilla activists reveals the extreme measures taken by Israel to silence and intimidate its critics. Finally: Glenn reacts to Van Jones's disgusting joke about dead Gazan babies. --------------------------- Watch full episodes on Rumble, streamed LIVE 7pm ET. Become part of our Locals community Follow System Update: Twitter Instagram TikTok Facebook
Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight, President Trump seems genuinely determined to force through a peace plan that he and various Arab dictators negotiated for the end of the war in Gaza.
Will that really happen?
And if so, under what circumstances?
We will take a look at everything we know.
Then, hundreds of people from around the world sailed on a flotilla attempting to deliver food and medicine to the people of Gaza.
Among them were elected members of various parliaments, journalists and the activist Greta Thunberg.
They were predictably intercepted and then arrested by the Israeli military despite being an international waters, and then immediately began reporting of the severe abuses to which the Israelis subjected them.
Are these accounts reliable?
And what do they say about the character of Israel?
And then former Obama advisor and CNN commentator Van Jones appeared on Bill Maher's HBO show on Friday night, along with fellow Israel supporter Tom Friedman of the New York Times and the pro-Israel Bill Maher.
Amazing amounts of viewpoint diversity there.
Jones made what he clearly had rehearsed and regarded as an absolutely hilarious joke about what he called dead Gaza babies.
But afterwards, when people reacted with pretty widespread revulsion, he issued groveling apologies.
Even though the joke fully represents what he has long believed, will examine the event as a broader as a window into broader themes.
And then finally, the UK Home Secretary over the weekend justified her country and her government, the labor government's arrest, a pro-Palestinian activists.
They're arresting hundreds of them literally every weekend.
Old people, disabled people, Jewish protesters, the whole wide panoply.
And what makes it so amazing is that she herself, just a decade ago, built her political career by posturing as a pro-Palestinian activist.
We will and protest her.
So we will take a look at this for many reasons, including just how willing so many people are to radically transform themselves and renounce their core views in order to gain some political power.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update starting right now.
System Update It's sometimes easy to know what Donald Trump thinks about various issues.
That's when he's been saying essentially the same thing for decades, long before he ever entered politics, but on many issues, it's quite difficult to understand what it was that he does believe, what it is that he will come to believe, often because he has different conflicting instincts on certain issues, and oftentimes it's a question of who angers him most or who influences the most.
And it can be very difficult to predict.
But one thing I think we can say for certain is that Trump really genuinely believes that he deserves the Nobel Peace Prize and is actively campaigning for it.
He's repeatedly pointed out that he deserves the Nobel Peace Prize.
He always adds, of course, I'm not gonna get it, but clearly he's hoping he will.
And I have to say, as far as uh instinct for a president or an ambition for our president is concerned, there are a lot worse ones than wanting the Nobel Peace Prize, because he obviously knows that in order to win the Nobel Peace Prize, he needs to show that he is successfully resolved wars.
Now, the two by far largest wars which have been raging over the last several years, including from the very first day that he assumed the presidency for the second time, is the war in Ukraine with Russia and NATO, which he has definitely tried but has been unsuccessful in resolving.
He seems now to want to put pressure on Russia by feeding Ukraine even more amounts of intelligence and weapons, although at the same time cutting off the supply of money.
And clearly he's trying to pressure each side to try and bring an end to that war, which he finds irritating and annoying at best, and and and wants the United States out of it, but hasn't been able to.
And then the other biggest war, the one that has actually captured more of the world's attention because of the extreme atrocities committed, is the Israeli war in Gaza, which the United States from the start has financed, funded, armed diplomatically and militarily supported, protected, and enabled, first under Joe Biden and then under Donald Trump.
And Trump obviously knows that a Nobel Peace Prize or anything, any chance for it would be impossible if the United States is continuing to arm and fund Israel in what the United Nations and multiple human rights groups and all sorts of scholars of genocide, including Israeli ones, have concluded is a genocide.
You don't win the Nobel Peace Prize by arming, funding, cheering, protecting, and fighting to protect a genocide.
Trump knows that, even if he doesn't consider it a genocide.
And he has made it a obvious priority to try and end that war.
Remember, before he even was inaugurated, the day before he was inaugurated, he sent Steve Whitkoff to the Middle East, and Steve Whitkop, by all accounts, is very aggressive in demanding the Israelis and the Palestinians agree to a ceasefire, the first real ceasefire of a sustained duration in that since that war began, exactly two years ago tomorrow.
And the problem with it was that Benjamin Netanyahu was under a lot of pressure from his right wing, and he was promising basically from the start look, don't worry, Trump promised me he just wants a ceasefire to come into office undistracted.
He wants it for his inauguration, maybe for a few weeks, but we'll get right back to bombing the Gazans, and that's exactly what they did.
The ceasefire happened, a few exchanges of prisoners, and then Netanyahu made good on his promise that he made in the Israeli press to just go right back to killing the Gazans.
In fact, they escalated their use of force under Trump, killed huge numbers of more people, engaged in far more reckless and destructive uh behavior than even before, and before it was bad enough.
So Trump clearly wants to end this war.
And he last week unveiled what he called the 2020 plan that he said he had negotiated with the leaders of the Saudi Arabia, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Jordan, and Turkey.
And those governments also came out and said that they were participants in the negotiation of this deal and favored it as well.
And Hamas basically issued a statement saying that they accept the terms, although made reservations to refuse to comply with some of the more extreme ones.
And then the Israelis did exactly the same thing.
Netanyahu said we agree to these terms, but made statements making clear that they don't agree to all of them, and now there's a negotiation underway to see whether or not this deal can actually make it across the finish line for obvious reasons the very complex and difficult task to end this war in a meaningful way, not just end it for a little while while there's an exchange of hostages and then go back to it.
And this is what Donald Trump is doing.
So here from the Wall Street Journal, this is from last week, September 30th, Trump gives Hamas an ultimatum to release the hostages or face destruction by Israel, quote.
For months, President Trump warned Hamas that it had to release all remaining hostages or face Israel's wrath.
On Monday, he issued an ominous message, agree to a 20-point peace plan for Gaza or suffer complete annihilation.
In effect, Trump threatened the prospect of more war in order to end nearly two years of fighting.
If Hamas doesn't accept or the plan falls apart, quote, Israel would have my full backing to finish the job of destroying the threat of Hamas, Trump said.
Now, I'm not really sure what's new about this.
Trump has repeatedly threatened that many times.
The Israelis clearly have had the full support of Donald Trump and Marco Rubio and everyone else in the administration to destroy Gaza, the people of Gaza, the infrastructure of Gaza without any limits.
But Trump has escalated his rhetoric on several occasions to threaten quote unquote annihilation.
Meaning annihilation is exactly what it sounds like.
He would say annihilate Hamas, but in order to annihilate Hamas, you'd have to annihilate the people of Gaza, even more so than they've already been doing.
Whether that's really what Trump intends to do or whether that's him putting pressure on Hamas remains to be seen.
But I certainly believe that if this deal doesn't go through, regardless of who's to blame, Trump will blame Hamas.
The Israelis will get him to blame Hamas, his advisors loyal to Israel will get him to blame Hamas and this war will actually escalate.
Here from the Washington Post more recently, this is October 6th, this is uh today, Gaza ceasefire talks to begin in Egypt as Israel strikes the enclave.
And ever since Trump announced his peace plan, he tweeted or put on uh true social, he said Israel is to stop the bombing.
That was the instruction that as President of the United States, he very publicly issued to Israel.
And of course, Israel is a vassal state, we pay for their arms and finance and finance their war, so Trump has every right to say it.
Here he is on October 3rd.
We can put that back up there, the post itself where he gave these uh instructions.
He said, based on the statement just issued by Hamas, which is the one I referred to earlier, where they at least signaled agreement and concept.
He said, I believe they are ready for a lasting peace.
As a result, Israel must immediately stop the bombing of Gaza so that we can get the hostages out safely and quickly.
Right now, it's far too dangerous to do that.
We are already in discussions on details to be worked out.
This is not about Gaza alone.
This is about long-sought peace in the Middle East.
Now, despite telling Israel, or telling the world, quote, Israel must immediately stop the bombing of Gaza, Israel ignored that, has done nothing of the kind, has killed over 150 people at least since then, including scores of children, as usual, just trying to annihilate as many lives in Gaza as they can out of fear that this might actually come to an end.
And Trump hasn't really objected at all.
But in any event, uh, this is what they are now trying to do to actually get this over the finish line.
They're heading to Israel.
And the article reads, quote, Israel and Hamas officials were sent to gather Monday in Egypt for high-stakes negotiations over a U.S. backed plan to end the Gaza war, even as Israel continued to pummel the enclave with air and artillery strikes that per Gaza Health Ministry data continued to kill Palestinians at the same rate as before Hamas conditionally accepted the deal Friday.
Negotiations to end the two-year-long deal war were revived last month after Israel launched airstrikes targeting Hamas's political leadership in the Qatari capital, Doha.
Senior Hamas officials emerged from the attack unscathed, but Qatar and their Persian Gold neighbors, outraged by the operation, leveraged their ties to Donald Trump to push for a ceasefire agreement that was acceptable to Arab states.
Khalil Alhaya, the negotiating lead for Hamas, who survived the Israeli assassination attempt last month, arrived in Egypt on Sunday to head its delegation.
In turn, Egypt, Qatar, and Turkey pressured Hamas to respond positively to the 20-point plan that Trump unveiled a week after meeting with Arab and Islamic leaders at the UN.
Still, Hamas wants to see a clear timeline for Israel's withdrawal, according to a former Egyptian official familiar with the negotiations.
The group fears that once it hands over the remaining hostages, quote, the Israelis will say they will not leave, the former official said.
Hamas also wants a guarantee for the United States that Israel will not resume its attacks in Gaza after the hostages are freed.
Now, to me, this is by far the biggest problem with the deal.
And a lot of this is the fault of the United States and Donald Trump.
Remember, Trump and Netanyahu basically imposed on the world through the media, through particularly one journalist in particular, the Israeli journalist for Axios, Barak Ravid.
The Biden administration used him for the same way.
He's just a pure stenographer of the court.
He writes down what they tell him.
And for months, he was writing down that there was a huge rift between Trump and Netanyahu.
Netanyahu wanted to bomb Iran.
Trump was telling him he couldn't.
And Trump was instead negotiating with Iran, was almost certain that he was going to get a deal.
He was saying this up until the day or two before he and the Israelis launched an attack on Iran.
And the Iranians concluded, obviously, the only thing you could conclude was that the whole thing was a ruse.
There were no real negotiations.
It was pretend negotiations to try and get Iran to sort of have their guard down in order to let Israel attack without much preparation, without much defense, heightened defense, and in a lot of ways that's happened.
Not only did Israel do that, right as Trump was saying, we're still negotiating, we're close to a deal.
I think we're going to get a deal.
There's no bombing need necessary.
But also, the first thing they did is killed The negotiators killed the negotiators for Iran, the people negotiating with the United States through intermediaries.
And a lot of the world looked at that and said, why would I ever believe the United States when they say they want a deal on behalf of Israel when they work hand in hand with Israel, even when they're pretending publicly they don't want that.
And this is the same thing that's happening now.
Trump and his uh White House officials have leaked to the same Israeli journalist who used to be in the IDF, of course, Barak Ravid.
And you say what he used to be in the IDF reserves until 2023, just very recently.
And they released him that uh here you see the headline: Trump to Netanyahu on Gaza talks, you're always so ethnic negative, again, trying to create this perception that Trump and Netanyahu are at loggerheads, that Trump has had enough of Netanyahu, that he's forcing this deal down his throat, despite Netanyahu's opposition.
There were leaks from the same reporter saying that Netanyahu and his officials were surprised by Trump's announcement.
So again, they're trying to create this perception that Trump and Netanyahu aren't on the same page, that Trump is trying to force Netanyahu into a deal that he doesn't really want.
And so obviously, if you're Hamas, if you're the Gazans, if you're people negotiating on behalf of the Gazans, of course you're gonna be extremely skeptical that if you give back the hostages, anything that you're promised is actually going to happen.
If I were Hamas, my assumption would be that if I gave back the hostages, then Netanyahu would concoct some reason why we didn't adhere to the deal, why we violated it, and why they're not only justified but obligated to go and now bomb us even more and finish the job.
And it seems like that's at least what Netanyahu is telling his far right flank and the Israeli press that they intend to do.
And so there are a lot of reasons to be extremely dubious about all of this.
But I have to say, in Trump's defense, that would be the case no matter what this deal was like.
You're talking here about two sides that absolutely despise each other.
One, not just for two years, but for many decades, it's always extremely difficult to end the war that way.
And there have been people who tried to forge peace deals over the many decades between Israel and the Palestinians, of course, and none of those have really come to fruition.
So if Trump is actually able to end this war in a way that is enduring, meaning the Israelis don't go right back in as soon as they get back to their hostages and start bombing, if they actually withdraw from Gaza in the way that the peace plan envisioned.
I do think Trump will deserve credit for that, notwithstanding the huge mar on his record, not just as a president but as a human being, for having financed this genocide for for so long.
And they're trying to also create the perception that this time Trump is genuinely angry at Netanyahu.
They released a photo where Trump forced Netanyahu to call up the Qataris and apologize to the Qataris for having bombed their uh country with no notice, with no consent of any kind, and they released a picture the White House did of Trump holding the phone next to Netanyahu.
Well, Netanyahu had the phone in his hand, he was reading off a piece of paper.
That was his apology to the Qataris.
And I do think this is actually a genuine factor in what's happening here.
That makes this something other than just a full ruse.
I talked about this last week, that obviously Trump is completely captive to and and beholden to and loyal to the Israelis.
He all but has said that, including during the campaign, when he promised to make Israel great again.
When he talked about how the Edelsons come to the White House, came to the White House more than anybody in the first uh term, always demanding things for Israel, and Trump always gave it to them.
And how he tends to do that again, how he wants to be the most pro-Israel president in history.
So that is genuine, obviously.
Trump loves the Israelis.
He views it as politically in his interest.
By all accounts his favorite child is Ivanka Trump, who herself is now Jewish.
He converted when she married Jared Kushner.
So he not only has a Jewish daughter, but Jewish children.
And Jared Kushner is not just Jewish, but he's Orthodox Jew and not only supportive of Israel, but the most radical factions in Israel, including the settlement movement that wants to steal the West Bank from the Palestinians.
So Trump is surrounded by this, not just politically but and and financially, but personally, that is very real.
But what's also very real is that Trump loves the Persian Gulf dictatorships, loves them, loves Saudi Arabia, loves the Emiratis, and loves the Qataris.
And that too is very genuine.
And part of the reason it's genuine is because he sees those places as the model for what maybe not just the Middle East, but certainly the Middle East, but maybe large parts of the world should be, which is a U.S. captive or at least pro-U.S.
dictatorship that keeps the population and its views and beliefs and desires completely repressed under an iron fist.
No elections, no anything like that, just transfer of power through monarchical faction, dictatorial faction.
He loves the king of Jordan, loves the dictator in Egypt.
And on top of that, these countries are obscenely wealthy.
They're just flooded with money.
And they have used a lot of that money to personally enrich Donald Trump's associates, his friends, his family.
Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump and the Trump organization and Jared Kushner all have billions of dollars worth of business in Qatar and the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabian, of course, the Qataris just gifted Trump a 400 million dollar airplane because Trump doesn't like Air Force One because it's old, 40 years old, and he wants something far more elaborate.
And just I think aesthetically, if you can picture Trump, you know, the aesthetic of Dubai and Doha and Riyadh is this very ostentatious display of wealth, you know, very high ceilings, everything, gold and marble, just like the finest materials from all over the world.
Just very, you know, brazen displays of wealth, which is Trump's aesthetic, too.
That's I don't think that's controversial to say.
I think it'd suffice to say that Trump is far more comfortable in, say, Doha or in Dubai than he is in Jerusalem.
So he does have a genuine affection for these countries.
He has a genuine belief that it's in the interest of himself and his family in the United States to maintain very positive relations.
And I believe this is the one thing I do believe is that Trump was genuinely angry when Netanyahu bombed Qatar.
Because Qatar is a country Trump cares about.
And I think the Qataris felt like look, everything we do, same with Saudi Arabia, same with the Emirates, is based on our belief, our our our understanding that our the guarantor of our security is the United States.
We do a lot for the United States.
We do a lot for you, Donald Trump and your family, because our understanding is you're going to protect us.
And here you have your closest ally using your weapons that you give them and that you pay for, bombing our country.
Right in the middle of Doha.
And I do think Trump was genuine angry about that.
I don't think that was a ruse.
And I think that became potentially a mistake that made, especially because they didn't even kill the leadership of Hamas as they were trying, that made Trump A, kind of get to the point of being fed up with this war and just determined to shove an ending down the throat of all the parties.
But B, genuinely angry with Netanyahu for bombing his friends.
And I think that was the opportunity.
Now, just one last thing that I think has been so often misunderstood is that the reason Hamas officials are in Qatar is because the United States and Israel always have wanted Qatar, uh, the leaders of Hamas in Qatar.
That's how they negotiate with Hamas when they need to, through the Qataris.
This is going back to the Obama administration even earlier.
It's not like Qatar just decided on their own to have Hamas there.
There's a gigantic U.S. military base in the middle of Doha.
If you go to Doha, you will see as many U.S. generals and military officials and officers as you see Qataris, for sure.
Way more, in fact.
There aren't that many Qataris.
There are a lot of foreign slave labor in in Qatar.
You see those two.
But what you principally see are just U.S. military officials everywhere, because there's the biggest military base in the region.
It's an important place for the United States.
And the fact that Israel bombed Qatar is something that I think genuinely offended Trump, and then Trump said, all right, enough.
Now again, whether Israel is actually going to be dictated to by Trump, or whether Israel will find ways around this, find ways to manipulate Trump to provoke Hamas or pretend that they provoked Hamas into violating the deal, remains to be seen.
But one thing is for certain.
Here's Heretz over the weekend yesterday, Gaza officials report 63 deaths in the past day, despite the Israel's announced pause in the offensive operations.
The Gaza Health Ministry said on Sunday that 63 Palestinians were killed and 153 wounded in the past 24 hours, despite Israel announcing a pause in offensive operations.
And you don't have to just take their word for it.
You see videos of it, you see reporting from about it and people from people in Gaza with videos with documentation, foreign aid workers, medical uh foreign medical workers, Western uh healthcare workers all documenting the same thing.
So Israel is hardly a country.
Netanyahu is hardly a government that's just going to immediately do whatever Trump tells them to do.
They're gonna pretend to, they have they can't just uh admit that they're ignoring Trump's uh ignoring Trump's uh directives, but they're gonna try and find ways around it.
Now, it's interesting what Trump has been support, what has what Trump has been posting about this.
Here's from his truth social account on October 3rd, uh rather October 4th, he posted this picture, which is a protest in Israel led by the hostages' families who have long been angry with Netanyahu and believe that Netanyahu would deprioritize the fate of the hostages in order to keep this war prolonged for his own personal interests.
And this is a large protest of uh Israelis demanding an end to the war, and you see the sign there, it's now or never, with a yellow ribbon, which signifies the the Israeli hostages in Gaza.
And Trump himself posted that to his account.
And I think he's saying here, trying to put pressure on Netanyahu and saying, look, this is an anti-Netanyahu protest, they're pro-Trump, they want an end to this war, I want an end to this war.
And so I absolutely believe that Trump wants an end to this war, even if it's for his own personal reasons.
And again, I don't really care what motivates Trump to want an end to this war.
And obviously, I put a lot of blame on Trump, as I said, for the continuation of this war for 10 months for its escalation for the horrors that it entailed.
But anyone who pretends to oppose what Israel is doing or to care about the Palestinian cause and the Palestinians themselves and U.S. policy toward Israel should want an end to this war, no matter what motivated motivates it.
Here was Trump yesterday, uh also on True Social, clearly trying to generate momentum for it.
And he wrote this quote there have been very positive discussions with Hamas and countries from all over the world, Arab, Muslim, and everyone else, this weekend to release the hostages and end the war in Gaza, but more importantly, finally have long sought peace in the Middle East.
These talks have been very successful and are proceeding rapidly.
The technical teams will again meet Monday in Egypt to work through and clarify the final details.
I am told the first phase should be completed this week, and I am asking everyone to move fast.
I will continue to monitor this centuries old conflict.
Time is of the essence, or massive bloodshed will follow, something that nobody wants to see.
Now, obviously that's not true.
It's not true that nobody wants to see massive bloodshed.
There are huge amounts of people in Israel, including the worst elements in the Israeli government and the millions of people in Israel who support them and follow them who want to see ongoing bloodshed.
They don't want an end to this war in a way that allows the Palestinians to maintain any kind of autonomy or agency in Gaza.
They've been very upfront that they want to cleanse the Palestinians, to cleanse Gaza the Palestinians and take over Israel.
But I think that Trump here is, and again, you see him both when he announced the deal and in the one yesterday where he tried to suggest it's moving forward and wants to see it move forward.
He's talking about a broader peace in the Middle East.
That's what he wants his legacy to be.
And he Thinks that not just because he don't he'll get credit for bringing an end to the war in Gaza.
He's also concerned, as I think are the Qataris and the Saudis and the Emirates that this war really can spill over into their own countries, as evidenced by the fact that Israel just bombed Qatar.
And then also, you even saw a week or two ago that when asked in the Oval Office about the annexation of the West Bank by Israel, Trump said he didn't just say, I'm not in favor of that.
He said, I'm not going to let them annex the West Bank.
And in part that's because those three countries, the Saudis, the Qataris, and the Emiratis have said any annexation of the West Bank by Israel would immediately not just destroy any attempts to have better relations, but would cause us to abandon the progress we made, including the Abraham Accords.
Trump doesn't want an abandonment of the Abraham Accords.
He wants a significant expansion of it.
Trump in the Middle East wants his legacy to be that he's gotten these countries that he loves, the ones he thinks are the good ones, to normalize relations with Israel, to isolate Iran, probably bring about regime change in Iran, turn Iran into a country like these others.
There's been reporting of totally unsurprising if the Israelis are financing and funding internal dissent in Iran to try and bring back the Shah of Iran, which was the U.S. puppet for decades that did the bidding of Israel and the United States that made Iran a pro-Western outlet, gave access to their oil.
And of course, that's what many in the West want, especially Israel supporters in the West want is a return of that monarchy, the Shah's son, who very much wants to rule Iran despite not having lived there for decades.
That's Trump's vision.
I don't think it's a good vision.
I think it's a repressive vision, in fact.
But if the result in the interim is actually ending the war in Gaza, ending the slaughter and the killing and destruction and genocide.
And I don't think I should be the one to decide whether that's worth it.
I think the Palestinians should be the ones who decide that, but they seem all Palestinians do for understandable reasons, to want an end to the war, provided it doesn't mean a complete relinquishment of their autonomy.
They don't want an end to the war if it means having to leave or turning control over to Israelis or some puppet regime.
And a lot of this is very much in flex, in flux, rather.
That's what happened after the deal was announced.
Was the Arab countries signed onto a deal, and then Steve Whitkop and Jared Kushner belt with Netanyahu for hours, and the deal that emerged was actually different in substantial form than the one to which these Arab countries agreed, making a lot of these clauses much more pro-Israel than the ones to which those countries had agreed.
There's gonna be a lot of back and forth, a lot of push and pull.
This is not gonna end easily.
But if it ends, and the Gazans have time to breathe and to get true humanitarian aid in there and try to return to some semblance of an ordinary life, provided they are content with the price that they're paying with the things they're giving up, with the things to which they're agreeing.
I think anyone in the world who's been watching this with so much horror and so much anger that the United States is supporting it and funding it, would have to consider the end of all of this to be on par a positive development, but by no means is this a done deal, and I could easily see the Israelis concocting all sorts of reasons to continue to bomb the Gazans.
They've done that with Lebanon after the ceasefire, they just do whatever they want in the West Bank.
And nobody should trust the Israelis as far as they can throw them.
So a lot of this still is is remains to be seen, but it's worth talking about only because of the potential to end this this genocide finally.
Speaking of the Israelis acting without any moral, ethical, legal or human humanitarian constraints, as you will undoubtedly know, there have been several flotillas, groups of ships that were sent by multiple countries from around the world with people and activists opposed to the Israeli genocide from all around the world.
This is not the first time this has happened.
This has been going on for many years, ever since Israel has been blockading Hamas in 2005.
They often don't let food in, they often don't let medicine in, and these flotillas have been ways, at least symbolically, to say we're gonna try and get food and medicine to the people of Gaza because Israel Is blockading them with the naval blockade with the land blockade.
Obviously, it's intensified ever since Israel began imposing mass starvation.
And this was the largest such flotilla yet.
I believe there were dozens of ships.
I think there were something like 40 in excess of 40 of them.
And obviously everybody knew that the Israelis were never going to permit these ships to land in Gaza, even though Gaza doesn't belong to them.
But they believe they have a legal naval blockade, which entitles them to intercept ships even in that international water.
But the idea is to say, look, all we're trying to do is deliver food and medicine to the people of Gaza.
Why is Israel denying that?
In early September, as the Jerusalem Post reported, the Israeli finance minister Ben Gavir announced that he plans to designate the Gaza Summit flotilla, which is this flotilla, and its activists as terrorists and to seize the boats.
And he said, quote, under the new suggested directive, all activists arrested in connection with the flotilla will be detained in Israel's Ketsuite and Daimon prisons, which are used to hold terrorists under stringent conditions typically reserved for security prisoners.
The activists will be held in prolonged detention, unlike the previous practice of releasing detainees after brief overnight stays.
Activists will be detained, will be denied special privileges, such as television, radio, and specialized food, in an effort to impose a clear message that supporting terrorism will not be tolerated.
Quote, we will not allow individuals who support terrorism to live in comfort, they will face the full consequences of their actions.
I really am at a loss to understand how anyone can support the notion that people trying to deliver food in humanitarian aid and medicine to people who are deprived of it can with a straight face be defined as terrorists, no matter what you think of their mission, no matter how much you might love Israel.
I mean, terrorism used to have a meaning beyond just opposing the United States and Israel.
Actually, it never really did have that meaning beyond that.
That's always what it has meant.
But the more it becomes transparent that that's what it means, the better.
These are people who, by definition, are not using violence of any kind.
Which used to be kind of fundamental to how people understood the word terrorism, threatening or using violence against civilians for political ends.
These people are not doing that.
Israel is doing that.
But that was Ben Gavir's announcement that he, and I'm sorry, he's not the finance minister, he's the director of internal security, national security, or the minister of national security for Israel.
Smutrich is the finance minister who's as much of a fanatic.
But that is Ben Gavir's idea was look, we're going to treat you as terrorists.
And those two prisons he referenced, which are really more like dungeons, they're not really prisons.
Prisons are for people who are put through the court system, charged with crimes, convicted of crimes, and then sentenced to prison.
These are really dungeons.
These are filled with Palestinians who have never been charged with any crime.
They're just kidnapped off the street.
They're really the more the hostages than, say, IDF soldiers in Gaza.
I think you could certainly say Israeli civilians in Gaza are hostages, but IDF soldiers who are picked up on October 7th fighting in tanks and uniform, who were picked up and taken, those are usually prisoners of war.
Hostages are the people held in these dungeons with no due process, no charges of any kind.
And these prisons are notorious for starving people, for deliberately subjecting them to illness, putting them in filth.
Many are malnourished, many come out emaciated, dehydrated, and some die in prison, young people who die in these Israeli dungeons of hunger.
And these were the people, these were the facilities that Ben Gavir was threatening to put these people in his terrorists.
CBS News, October 2nd, the Gaza Flotilla activist boats are intercepted by Israeli forces dozens of miles from the Gaza coast.
So it was in international waters.
It didn't even penetrate the blockade, but obviously the Israelis were going to do it.
And eventually they picked up every ship.
Some ships got closer than they thought.
They could actually see Gaza, which, you know, for activists coming from around the world was something emotionally affecting, kind of a victory.
They felt a greater connection with the people to whom they're trying to deliver food and humanitarian aid and just general relief.
And these both are filled with members, elected members of various parliaments in the West and throughout the world with journalists, with well-known activists from throughout the West.
And yet they were all detained, they were all arrested.
Ben Gavir arrived where they were being held once they were arrested.
And he basically ordered the Israeli military and the police to treat them abusively, to treat them on purpose with psychological humiliation and torture to deprive them of the basic amounts of food and water that prisoners in civilized countries are entitled to get.
To treat them as as terrorists, as he promised to do.
That's basically what they did.
Here from CNN yesterday, returning Gaza flotilla Gaza flotilla activists claim jail mistreatment in Israel and fear of fear for remaining prisoners.
Quote, 21 of the former detainees landed at Madrid Airport on Sunday and were seen hugging relieved relatives and supporters in a video published by news agency Reuters.
They were among some 450 activists, including climate campaigner Greta Thunberg, arrested last week aboard the global Summit Flotilla.
A coalition of more than 40 humanitarian aid vessels carrying food, water, and medicine toward Gaza.
Those detained between Wednesday and Friday were brought to Israel, where many remain in prison.
Garetti Saraspar, among activists deported from Tel Aviv on Sunday, told Reuters that after being released in their cells, they were forced to watch images of the October 7th Hamas attack on Israel when militants killed 1200 Israelis and took 250 hostages.
Quote, they didn't give us food all day, he said, adding, quote, now we are super happy eating as we were starving.
Dutch activist Marco Tash recounted being unable to breathe at one point, quote, because they put something to my face and they tied my hands to my back.
Fellow deportee Rafael Borjago showed the handcuffed marks on his wrists and described the jail conditions.
Quote, at any time that any of us called a police officer, we risked that seven or more fully armed entered people entered our cell as they did online, pointing us with weapons at our heads, with dogs ready to attack us and being dragged to the floor, he told Reuters.
This happened on a daily basis.
I don't know if you recall, viewers of this show recall, but we interviewed an American journalist, Jeremy Lafredo, who does work for various media outlets.
And he has done some great work documenting interviews he conducts with Israelis in the West Bank, with Israeli settlers to show their mentality.
And this is after the first exchange with Iran of ballistic missiles, not the one that the United States participated in, but the one prior to that.
And several of these Iranian missiles, despite Israeli denials, actually struck military installations and caused damage.
And the Israeli government falsely denied this.
And Jeremy Lafredo went to the West Bank and showed parts on uh runways and the like at military facilities where these bombs had landed to prove that the Israeli government was lying, and when they caught him doing that, they arrested him, and they kept him in detention as an American citizen for over 48 hours,
and he came on our show and described the unbelievably abusive treatment, including hearing people screaming from being beaten in cells next uh next to him, being denied access to a lawyer, purposely being subjected to psychologically terrifying conditions, being denied food and water for long periods of time.
And I remember thinking, wow, this is what they do to an American citizen, a citizen of a country that pays their entire military and subsidizes their monstrous society.
Just imagine what they must do to non-Americans, let alone to Palestinians, whom they absolutely regard as subhuman animals.
And of course, that just confirms all the reports about what is taking place inside these dungeons.
Lovna Tuma is a uh is one of the uh people who uh represents uh some of the activists on the flotilla, and she spoke yesterday about the reports of how her clients had been treated.
When we arrived at the Ashdot port, uh we realized that they started the uh hearings before we got there.
That means that numerous activists started the administrative procedure without having a legal counsel.
Many activists testified that from the beginning of the kidnapping from the international water, a series of uh uh violation and ill-treatment started.
They were forced to sit on knees and and elbows.
Their forehead was on the floor, and they kept that for more than one hour.
They were not allowed to move or to talk to each other.
Many activists as well testified that they were kept in small rooms.
We are speaking about three meters room.
Fiftees stay there together.
They were handcuffs from behind for more than five hours.
And it goes on like that.
I mean, you can only imagine.
And Ben Gavir came there, and they were chanting free Palestine and the like, and Ben Gavir said, You're gonna be treated like terrorists.
And you can obviously imagine what that means.
Now, here uh actually is uh Ben Gavir, who was filmed uh taunting uh these activists when they were already handcuffed, they were completely peaceful, none of them tried any violence, none of them resisted violently.
They were on a peaceful political mission of resistance of symbolic attempts to deliver food and aid to the Palestinians.
Again, you can regard them as whatever you want.
But the idea that they're terrorists or deserve a denial of basic human rights, let alone the horrors that happened in these Israeli dungeons from genuine psychopaths like Ben Gavir, is is preposterous.
Here's Ben Gavir mocking and taunting him.
These are the flotelator terrorists, they are terrorists, look at them, supporters of the killers by the bay the boats were a huge mess, they did not come for aid, they came for Gaza for the terrorists.
They are terrorists, they support terror.
This is their boat, the police chief saw me.
All right.
But how they just throw the word terrorists around.
They it's just it's it's like liberals in 2020 calling everybody racist, but they've been doing this for decades.
There are a lot of reports about the treatment of Greta Thunberg, including the fact that uh they held her purposely in an infested cell, uh, wrapped the Israeli flag on her, um, made others sit in front of the Israeli flag, watch October 7th films.
You know, just the exactly the sort of thing that are regarded as violations of human rights.
Now, as I said, nobody's to be remotely surprised by this.
Here from Harris in September on September 2nd last month, Israel refuses to release the body of a Palestinian teen who suffered from malnutrition in jail.
Quote, the Israeli authorities are holding Walid Walid Ahmad's body despite the completion of an official autopsy, the results of which found that the 17-year-old Palestinian suffered from extreme malnutrition, colitis, and scabies at the time of his death.
I believe this is the Palestinian who's also a Brazilian citizen.
This is 17-year-old who died of malnutrition in one of these Israeli dungeons.
Well, of these flotilla activists that they were put in bed with scapies, where with bed bugs that caused scapes and all kinds of idiots.
Compare the people who come back from Gaza.
There definitely were a few who had lost weight and who were even looking emaciated because all of Gaza was emaciated because there was no food, and obviously, if you starve Gaza, you can't uh have food, enter only for the Israeli hostages.
But there were a few who came out emaciated for sure.
And then they had that recent video of the Israeli hostage taking a grave, and he was emaciated as well.
Again, at the same time that it was well documented that all of Gaza was suffering from famine.
But for the 18 months prior to that, go compare how the Israeli hostages were when they came back.
And the ones that came back originally in the first few months, gave interviews and talked about how They were well treated by Hamas.
And then the Israelis obviously understood the serious PR disaster of allowing them to say that, and then the story began to change.
But even the ones that got released subsequent.
Compare them to what people look like when they come out of these Israeli dungeons.
These deals always involve a return of hostages from Gaza with the release of Palestinians who are held inside these Israeli dungeons because they're not convicts.
They're not prisoners.
They're just hostages as well.
And there are thousands of them.
The Israelis just detained whoever they want, and don't just put them in in a prison in a normal prison, put them in the kinds of dungeons that violate every kind of human right, which is why 17-year-olds are dying of starvation in them, and coming out with all kinds of illnesses that you only come out of if you're deliberately subjected to the most unsanitary of conditions.
This is who the Israelis are.
Now, as I said before, this is not the first time that these flotillas have been sent.
And I know it's very easy to mock Greta Thunberg for whatever reason.
I get it.
You know, when someone comes onto the scene at 16 or 17 and they're kind of hectoring the world about climate change in a very melodramatic way that you know a lot of adolescents adopt.
They just have like think they know everything.
It's very typical adolescent behavior.
I get it.
The daughter of Ben Affleck and Jennifer Gardner, Garner went to the UN this last week for whatever reason.
She's 19, she's a freshman at Yale.
And she went wearing an N95 mask and ranted and raved about how adults were evil because they were leaving young people like her with exposure to COVID because we won't wear masks.
or NSHE demanded a re-imposition of mask requirements in light of COVID.
She had the same kind of demeanor, very hectoring, very, you know, no one wants to be hackered by a teenager.
If I get white, it could be annoying.
At the same time, I have a lot of respect for people who sacrifice, genuinely sacrifice and take risks for their beliefs.
It's not a very common trait.
And I think it deserves a lot of respect.
Greta Thunberg was, you know, her climate activism was pretty unthreatening to the world because most governments around the world regard climate, at least ostensibly, as a serious threat, as something that requires activism.
The fact that she's pushing for more isn't really a threat to population centers.
And she could have had an easy life of celebrity and wealth, gone all over the world, been fed and been making tons of money, using her mainstream platform for other similar mainstream causes that Western liberals love.
That was a path that was absolutely available to her.
And instead, from the start of the genocide in Gaza, she became vehemently outspoken against Israel.
And of course, everybody knows that there are major forces inside the United States, that if you become outspoken, genuinely outspoken against Israel, you are gonna be giving up a lot of career options.
Just today it was confirmed, the deal that we reported on many times, that Barry Weiss has sold her free press to the Ellison family for 150 million dollars, personally enriching her beyond her wildest dreams, and at the same time making her the editor-in-chief of CBS News.
Obviously, that doesn't happen to you if you're a vehement opponent of Israel.
It happens to you if you're a vehement supporter of Israel.
So Greta Thunberg alienated a lot of allies, cut off a lot of opportunities, financial and career opportunities.
I'm not saying she's gonna be impoverished for life because of it, but I'm just saying it wasn't something she needed to do.
And not only she did she do that, but she now has twice gotten on ships and sailed into international waters, thousands of miles away, knowing that she was delivering herself into the hands of an Israeli government and Israeli military that are responsible for all kinds of atrocities for many years.
I personally wouldn't trust my my life and my freedom to the Israeli government, who would.
And you can mock her all you want, you can make fun of her all you want.
Yeah, she's annoying and she's sometimes like very sanctimonious, self-steroid, whatever.
But somebody who's willing to risk their career and their reputation and especially their well-being and their life and their liberty for a cause is someone who is gonna earn my respect just for that reason alone.
And in case you think I'm overstating the case, there was a similar flotilla in 2010, which was at the time the Israelis were blockading food from entering Gaza as well, just in case you think this is because of October 7th.
And here from the Guardian article, Israeli commanders kill activists on flotiller flotilla bound for Gaza.
Turkey calls the incident unacceptable as 10 members of an aid convoy are killed during the storming of Turkish ship in international waters.
And one of the people who was on that ship and whom Israeli commanders shot in the head and killed was a 19-year-old American citizen.
It's not surprising that you don't know about that if you don't, because American politicians, American media don't really seem to care much when Israel uses our weapons and money to kill our fellow citizens.
Israel kills a lot of Americans, and we barely hear about it.
So this was 15 years ago, before the Israelis were in their post-October 7th state, before they were even more radicalized by the infiltration of their government by religious extremists who believe all of that land is theirs given by God, who are just fanatically uh more militaristic, a lot of immigrants to Israel who have become more extremist.
And even back in 2010, when they had a better reputation, deserve it or otherwise, this is what they did to peaceful uh activists on the flotilla just trying to deliver food and aid to Gaza.
And they weren't attacking Israel with weapons, they weren't, they were doing the same thing.
And Israeli commandos were ordered to go and attack their boat by by just riddling it with bullets, and 10 of them were shot, including a 19-year-old American.
So you can mock Reddick Thunberg, you can mock all these other people on this ship, but people who did this knew that this was what they were subjecting themselves to.
There were absolutely people inside the government wanting to attack those ships.
There was evidence that in fact they did attack the ship with drones.
And you know, when I look around and see a lot of people who like to herald themselves as courageous truth tellers or whatever, like the Barry Weisses of the world.
Oh, I'm so brave from my heterodox.
When they do something like this, let me know.
Would you guys consider anything less than a championship to be a failure from this year?
I wouldn't say anything is a failure, especially because we all grow every day.
Obviously, the goal is a championship.
That's there's no doubt in that, and that's the goal.
We want to win a championship.
I'm Christina Williams, host of the podcast.
In case you missed it with Christina Williams, the WNBA playoffs are here, and I've got the inside scoop on everything from key matchups and standout players to the behind the scenes moments you won't find anywhere else.
It's really, really hard to be the champions, but we have to remember how it feels and embrace the new challenge that we have.
For all the biggest stories in women's basketball plus exclusive interviews with the game's brightest stars.
So to be here, I think it's one that we definitely don't take for granted.
But we also know, you know, that's just one stop along the way, and we're hoping to, you know, make it run.
So listen to In Case You Missed It with Christina Williams in iHeart Woman Sports Production in partnership with Deep Blue Sports and Entertainment on iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
Would you guys consider anything less than a championship to be a failure from this year?
I wouldn't say anything is a failure, especially because we all grow every day.
Obviously, the goal is a championship.
That's there's no doubt in that, and that's the goal.
We want to win a championship.
I'm Christina Williams, host of the podcast.
In case you missed it with Christina Williams, the WNBA playoffs are here, and I've got the inside scoop on everything from key matchups and standout players to the behind-the-scenes moments you won't find anywhere else.
It's really, really hard to be the champions, but we have to remember how it feels and embrace the new challenge that we have.
For all the biggest stories in women's basketball plus exclusive interviews with the game's brightest stars.
So to be here, I think it's one that we definitely don't take for granted.
But we also know, you know, that's just one stop along the way, and we're hoping to, you know, make a run.
So listen to In Case You Missed It with Christina Williams in iHeart Woman Sports Production in partnership with Deep Blue Sports and Entertainment on iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
And like I said, the Israelis have no limits.
Not even in terms of PR.
They really don't care.
They're a rogue country and they are fine because they have the support of the United States and the finance of the United States and the military protection of the United States.
And when you're a fanatic, you don't care about what other people think.
You care only about the fact that your cause is so righteous that anything is justified.
And there's no question that people on that flotilla put their lives in danger, put their liberties in danger.
When you have Ben Gavir calling you a terrorist and you're purposely making yourself vulnerable to their attacks, that takes amount of courage, moral courage, physical courage that I think deserves a lot of respect.
Obviously, no one thought these potas were going to get by, but I think the attention that they brought was certainly a positive, and it just sheds more light on the true character of Israel given their treatment of these non-violent uh peaceful protesters.
Bill Maher has hosted an HBO show for 25 years, and whatever you might want to say about him, one thing has been constant.
One thing is absolutely certain that Bill Maher, whose mother, I believe, is Jewish, uh, or or his father, I believe it's his father, actually.
It's one of his parents who is Jewish, has always been a very outspoken, unyielding supporter of Israel.
I mean, the kind that actually says things like the Israeli military is the most moral military in the world.
One of his main causes is the evil of Muslims.
He's like exactly like Sam Harris, who also has a parent who's Jewish.
And it just so happens that Sam Harris, who was raised Jewish and always loved Israel, just so happens to see Israel's enemies, Muslims as the world's greatest enemies.
Same with Bill Maher.
That's like one of his few consistent views.
And he assembled a panel on his HBO show Friday night in part to talk about Israel and Gaza, filled with two other people who are at least as hardcore Israel supporters as he.
One of them is Van Jones, who has a left-wing reputation because he worked for Obama, because he's black, because he opposes Trump, but he's been wearing a yellow ribbon on his shirt for every day for the last two years to symbolize his love and support for the hostages in in Israel.
Van Jones, you might remember, was given 100 million dollars by Jeff Bezos about 10 years ago, in case you think he's some sort of radical threat to power centers.
He's a very outspoken supporter of Israel.
And he was also there with Tom Friedman, who spent much of his career based in Jerusalem.
Tom Friedman is married to a woman who is a uh billionaire heiress of the singer machine sewing machine fortune.
So he lives life as a billionaire.
He's been as dedicated to Israel, probably the single most influential pro-Israel media figure for the last several decades.
The only other exception possibly being Jeffrey Goldberg, who's the editor in chief of the Atlantic, who, by the way, despite being an American citizen, went and volunteered to work for the IDF, Jeffrey Goldberg did, and worked in one of those dungeons where they keep Palestinians.
Jeffrey Goldberg actually worked there as a prison guard.
Just to get a sense for how pro-Israel, let's call it and uniformed the American media.
So this was the very view uh diverse viewpoint, diverse panel.
Bill Maher, Van Jones, and Tom Friedman of the New York Times, all talking about Israel.
And Van Jones and Bill Maher were kind of having a debate about whether Americans are becoming more pro-Palestinian and more opposed to Israel because of DEI indoctrination by left-wing colleges, or whether it's for some other cause.
It can't possibly be because on their own they've gathered information and made up their mind that Israel is actually the bad guy in the region, that we shouldn't be financing Israel.
Can't be because of that.
So they have a debate about who's manipulating people in America to become less supportive of Israel.
And here was how that debate unfolded, culminating with what Van Jones and Bill Maher and Tom Friedman and their audience thought was an extremely funny joke that Van Jones had obviously rehearsed and then unleashed.
But isn't part of That because we had to fold everything into critical race theory.
And somehow the Middle East became part of the.
I see it differently.
And I love this conversation because I think people who those of us who went to college give a lot more credit to college courses for how the world works than I do.
This is not about critical race theory on college campuses.
This is about Iran.
Iran and Qatar have come up with a disinformation campaign that they are running through TikTok and Instagram that is massive.
If you are a young person, you open up your phone, and all you see is dead Gaza baby, dead Gaza baby, dead Gaza Baby Diddy, dead Gaza Baby, dead Gaza baby.
That's basically that's not that's not DEI.
That is a geopolitical adversary that is that is that is deliberately trying to divide the West against itself.
That view is not a.
Now, you know, there's so many bizarre things about that.
Obviously, the most bizarre being is that you would make Dead Gaza Baby your punchline of your joke and just repeat it over and over with such joy, such pride in thinking that you did something so witty.
Like imagine the sociopathy necessary to just, as we've all watched babies being blown up every day, starving to death, subjected to the worst horrors, to be so sociopathic about that that you construct what you think is a joke around just repeating dead Gaza baby, dead Gaza baby as though it's some annoying meme on the internet as opposed to an actual horror that the United States government is paying for.
But also what's so bizarre about this is that liberals like Van Jones were convinced for the longest time that all American problems, all American debates, all American divisions were due to Russia's disinformation campaign.
Russia is doing a disinformation campaign, they're turning us against one another.
People aren't really angry about this or about that.
They're not really angry about the disappearance of the middle class or the de-industrialization of their communities or the flooding of it with fentanyl, or the massive gap in wealth and income between the the richest and and the majority, the disappearance of economic security caused by the financial no, they're not really mad about that.
They're just deceived and manipulated and propagandized by this evil foreign power, Russia.
And this is exactly now what he's doing.
He's taking that same moronic framework and applying it to the reason why people are turning against Israel.
He's saying, Oh, it's not because human beings are empathetic to the Palestinians and angry about what Israel is doing.
They're not angry because we see our politicians constantly making pilgrimage to Israel and pledging allegiance to Israel and talking about how to support Israel.
And it's not, as Bill Maher says, because left-wing colleges are propagandizing.
No, it's because Iran and Qatar, not Israel and AIPAC, but Iran and Qatar are involved in a foreign influence campaign through TikTok and Instagram.
The reason why there are so many videos of babies in Gaza and children Gaza and people in Gaza that Israel has killed is because there's so many people in Gaza that Israel has slaughtered in the past two years.
That's why you constantly see it.
Because that's what's happening, and we're paying for it.
And people are talking about it, especially young people.
But imagine the do you see the seamlessness with which Van Jones takes what had been the prevailing view in the United States, and if there's anything about Van Jones that you will know for sure, is despite his previous radical past, he used to be someone who actually was a 9-11 truther who questioned the official story on 9-11, had to actually resign from the Obama administration when that was discovered.
He was considered kind of like a real radical on the left, and now he's just the most reliable vessel for conventional wisdom and establishment dogma, which is why he got a hundred million dollars from Jeff Bezos.
But if so he took this this this moronic conventional view about how Russia was contaminating us with disinformation and then just seamlessly applied it to why people are turning against the United States, and in doing so, made a big joke.
His big punchline was about dead Gaza baby.
Just saying it over and over and over as kind of a joke.
And obviously, people also laughed at the part about Diddy, but that was the joke that was constructed.
And Tom Freeman and Bill Mar loved it because they were like, yeah, people are being deceived into hating Israel.
They don't hate Israel for any valid reason, but only because they've been deceived by social media.
And thankfully, Larry Ellison, the biggest single single donors of the IDF, has now bought TikTok so that so that uh there'll be no more of that.
No more Israel criticism on TikTok.
Just IDF propaganda.
The same person who just made Barry Weiss, editor in chief of CBS News.
And also Instagram, where Van Jones says this big anti-Israel campaign is taking place, is owned by Meta.
The controlling shareholder of which and CEO and founder is Mark Zuckerberg.
Mark Zuckerberg is presiding over a massive Iran and cutter-driven disinformation campaign to turn the nation's youth against Israel.
I don't think that's very persuasive.
Would you guys consider anything less than a championship to be a failure from this year?
I wouldn't say anything is a failure, especially because we all grow every day.
Obviously, the goal is a championship.
That's there's no doubt in that, and that's the goal.
We want to win a championship.
I'm Christina Williams, host of the podcast.
In case you missed it with Christina Williams, the WNBA playoffs are here, and I've got the inside scoop on everything from key matchups and standout players to the behind the scenes moments you won't find anywhere else.
It's really, really hard to be the champions, but we have to remember how it feels and embrace the new challenge that we have.
For all the biggest stories in women's basketball, plus exclusive interviews with the game's brightest stars.
So to be here, I think it's one that we definitely don't take for granted.
But we also know, you know, that's just one stop along the way, and we're hoping to, you know, make a run.
So listen to In Case You Missed It with Christina Williams in iHeart Woman's Sports Production in partnership with Deep Blue Sports and Entertainment on iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
Would you guys consider anything less than a championship to be a failure from this year?
I wouldn't say anything is a failure, especially because we all grow every day.
Obviously, the goal is a championship.
That's there's no doubt in that, and that's the goal.
We want to win a championship.
I'm Christina Williams, host of the podcast.
In case you missed it with Christina Williams, the WNBA playoffs are here, and I've got the inside scoop on everything from key matchups and standout players to the behind the scenes moments you won't find anywhere else.
It's really, really hard to be the champions, but we have to remember how it feels and embrace the new challenge that we have.
For all the biggest stories in women's basketball plus exclusive interviews with the game's brightest stars.
So to be here, I think it's one that we definitely don't take for granted.
But we also know, you know, that's just one stop along the way, and we're hoping to, you know, make it run.
So listen to In Case You Missed It with Christina Williams and iHeart Woman's Sports Production in partnership with Deep Blue Sports and Entertainment on iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
But anyway, a lot of people reacted to the disgusting audience laughter and the whole panel after sociopathic and humorous reference to dead Gaza Baby, Dead Gaza Baby, that he repeatedly apologized over the weekend.
He posted several tweets apologizing, including this one on Saturday.
Quote, I made a comment on real time with Bill Maher about the war in Gaza that was insensitive and hurtful.
I apologize.
The suffering of the people of Gaza, especially the children, is not a punchline.
I'm deeply sorry it came across that way.
What's happening to children in Gaza is heartbreaking as a father.
I can't begin to imagine the pain their parents are enduring, unable to protect them, their kids from unimaginable harm.
I'm praying and working for an immediate end to this war and for peace and safety for every family caught in the path.
I'm truly sorry for the pain my words cause to people who are already suffering more than anyone should.
You'll notice the word that's missing, which is Israel.
He's like, children are dying in Gaza, people are suffering in Gaza.
This like passive form of the formula of the construction with no agent that's actually causing the killing in the suffering.
Here's another response from Dr. uh Dr. Omar Sullivan in response to this video, posted truly disgraceful and vile Van Jones.
I'm sorry dead Gaza babies bother you so much.
Maybe tell the people paying you to put lipstick on a genocide to stop killing them.
And then Van Jones replied, Yeah, I messed up on this one.
And I'm sorry, I was trying to raise awareness about foreign adversaries creating chaos online, which is undermining democracy everywhere.
But what I said was easily misunderstood, and the way I said it was filed out insensitive.
Babies are dying every day in Gaza.
Who why are they dying?
Who's killing them?
Babies are dying every day in Gaza.
Nobody should dispute that fact or make light of it anyway.
To the people living in fear and burying family members every day of all ages, I apologize.
I really don't know why people apologize when they said what they actually mean.
Van Jones is vehemently pro-Israel.
He doesn't wear anything representing the dead children of Gaza on is lapel when he goes on CNN or when he went on Milmar, he wears a uh yellow ribbon for the dozen or so 20 uh hostages left in in Gaza, including members of the IDF.
Even in those apologies, he makes clear that he won't even mention the word Israel in a critical light.
He's too afraid to.
And I mean, the idea that you're worried about foreign influence, but will never talk about the foreign influence exerted by Israel and AIPAC.
I mean, even like the most politically normy people understand that the foreign influence predominantly comes from Israel.
U.S. politicians aren't going to Tehran or to Qatar to make daily pilgrimage.
They're not giving press conferences about Iran and Qatar every day.
They're not sending billions of dollars to Iran and Qatar.
They're not deploying US forces in defense of Iran and Qatar.
They're doing that all for Israel.
Members of Congress aren't removed almost automatically when they criticize Ron or Qatar.
They're removed when they criticize Israel.
Because that's where APAC ports is 15 million dollars.
There are no lobbying groups that support Iran and Qatar and remove members of Congress from failure to support it.
So even there, it's just so deceitful the idea that I'm worried about foreign influence, but I'm gonna talk about Russia and Qatar and Iran and not the actual main source that shapes American media and American politics and US Congress and executive branch policy, which is Israel, shows what a complete and utter fraud he is.
And I don't think he should have apologized for that joke.
That joke absolutely represents his worldview, which is that there are suffering in the world that he cares about, which is in the country to which he's loyal, and that has rewarded him very much, which is Israel, and the country, and the place that he doesn't regard humans as really human, which is Gaza.
And I just again, you look at the diversity, like both Mars debate shows, so we invites on three hardcore Israel supporters.
You know, lots of conservatives think, oh, CNN is the left, Van Jones is the left, they hate Israel.
Van Jones is a hardcore Israel supporter, just like Tom Friedman, just like Bill Maher.
And that's the CNN's left-wing presence on these panels.
Someone who's as supportive of Israel as that conservative who also wears that yellow ribbon on his on his lapel every day, Scott Jennings.
So, although Van Jones is a repulsive and vapid fraud, a sociopath, it also does give some insight into how our media works and into broader event as well, as does our last segment.
Alright, now as I said, Van Jones is just the trap the directory of him is just a little ironic, even though it's common at this point because he used to be the kind of like radical leftist that the Abba administration could show the left.
Like, look, we have one of yours here too.
He's Van Jones.
That's what the radical leftist.
Would you guys consider anything less than a championship to be a failure from this year?
I wouldn't say anything is a failure, especially because we all grow every day.
Obviously, the goal is a championship.
That's there's no doubt in that, and that's the goal.
We want to win a championship.
I'm Christina Williams, host of the podcast.
In case you missed it with Christina Williams, the WNBA playoffs are here, and I've got the inside scoop on everything from key matchups and standout players to the behind the scenes moments you won't find anywhere else.
It's really, really hard to be the champions, but we have to remember how it feels and embrace the new challenge that we have.
For all the biggest stories in women's basketball plus exclusive interviews with the game's brightest stars.
So to be here, I think it's one that we definitely don't take for granted.
But we also know, you know, that's just one stop along the way, and we're hoping to, you know, make it run.
So listen to In Case You Missed It with Christina Williams and iHeartWoman Sports Production in partnership with Deep Blue Sports and Entertainment on iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
Would you guys consider anything less than a championship to be a failure from this year?
I wouldn't say anything is a failure, especially because we all grow every day.
Obviously, the goal is a championship.
That's There's no doubt in that, and that's the goal.
We want to win a championship.
I'm Christina Williams, host of the podcast.
In case you missed it with Christina Williams.
The WNBA playoffs are here, and I've got the inside scoop on everything from key matchups and standout players to the behind-the-scenes moments you won't find anywhere else.
It's really, really hard to be the champions, but we have to remember how it feels and embrace the new challenge that we have.
For all the biggest stories in women's basketball plus exclusive interviews with the game's brightest stars.
So to be here, I think it's one that we definitely don't take for granted.
But we also know, you know, that's just one stop along the way, and we're hoping to, you know, make a run.
So listen to In Case You Missed It with Christina Williams in iHeart Women's Sports Production in partnership with Deep Blue Sports and Entertainment on iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
And there's a woman who is the home secretary in the UK.
She's in the Labor Party.
Her name is Shabana Mahmood.
And as you probably know, and we've reported on this before, the UK government under the Labour Party, the center left party, has become extremely aggressive about arresting protesters who are protesting the Israeli war in Gaza and the UK government support for it.
To the point that the UK government under the Labour Party classified as a terrorist organization, a group called Palestine Action.
That's a pro-Palestinian group in the UK, whose most extreme act of everything they've done, they've never killed anyone, they've never planted a bomb, they've never threatened violence.
Their most extreme act, the only one anyone can point to, is that they spray painted a couple of military jets, ones that were part of a base that fly to Gaza and give intelligence or bombs to Israel about where to bomb in Gaza.
They spray painted those planes.
And based on that, the UK government said this is a terrorist organization from now on.
It is illegal to be part of Palestine Action.
And not only is it illegal to be part of Palestine Action, said the UK government, now that Palestine Action is a terrorist group, you're not even allowed to say anything positive about Palestine Action.
You're not even allowed to protest our decision to designate them as a terrorist group.
Even though we're a country of the UK with a rich history of freedoms and the Magna Carter and all that iconography and mythology that we love to tell ourselves, it is illegal to pro to be a member of Palestine Action, it is illegal to protest in favor of Palestine Action, it's illegal to mention them positively, it's illegal to protest their inclusion on the terrorist list.
You're not allowed to do that in the UK or you will be arrested.
And it's not just a theoretical risk or threat.
Dozens of people, hundreds of people, eve each weekend go out to London or Manchester or other places and protest what Israel is doing, the UK support for Israel, or who holds signs saying free Palestine action, Palestine Action has been uh unjustly persecuted and classified as a terrorist group, are being arrested.
And you see, these are not people rioting or doing anything.
They're just sitting there with signs or marching.
And you constantly see 80-year-old British people or old Jews, some of whom are actually like concentration camp survivors whose parents weren't concentration camp survivors, protesting Israel.
They're constantly now being violently and physically arrested and carried away by the Metropolitan Police in London or by British police in general.
And the home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, is in charge of all this.
She's like the attorney general.
And she went on a BBC show with Laura Custenberg, who, I don't know, what would the analogy be to Laura Cussenberg, who she is in the United States, maybe like Dina Bash or like Nora O'Donnell, you know, just like a very embedded into the political power structure journalist who never is adversarial to anyone.
And Shabana Mahmoud was there to justify why her party, her center-left party, is now presiding over the constantly presiding over the arrest of people peacefully protesting Israel's war and her government support for it.
And here's what she said it's like whenever you think there's no more orbilian formulations left to justify an attack on free speech as freedom, these people find a way to do it and always surprise you.
And that's what she did.
Here's what she said.
Firstly, I I don't think it's offensive to ask people to show a little humanity towards a community that has suffered such a terrible tragedy.
That's the first loss of Jewish life, simply for being Jewish on British soil in in centuries, actually, as it happens.
It's a very, very long time since that's happened in our Country, and I think just because you have a freedom doesn't mean to say you have to use it at every moment of every day.
No, what she's saying here is actually quite amazing unto itself.
Not just the part if you have a freedom, doesn't mean you have to use it.
We'll get to that in a second.
But what she's saying is what the Labour Party has been saying, which is like, look, there was this attack on a uh synagogue in Manchester.
And someone rammed the car into a synagogue, somebody who is Muslim, and injured a couple of people, and the police came and then shot and killed by accident, one of the congregants, the Jewish congregants of the synagogue.
So I believe the attacker injured two people.
He may have killed one, but for sure the police arrived and killed one.
There's still some question about the others.
A bad attack, people died, obviously you should condemn it.
But the idea that now suddenly people who oppose the war in Gaza, the destruction of Gaza, the UK support for it, have to suspend protests because they don't want to offend the Jewish community is such a foul claim.
For one thing, it conflates Israel and Jews.
It's saying like if you protest Israel, it offends Jews.
And it's so ironic because if you conflate Israel and Jews, if you say, I think all Jewish people are responsible for the acts of the state of Israel, under the expanded definition of anti-Semitism that Trump has been imposing on American universities that Israel promulgated, the IHRA definition, that is an example of anti-Semitism that is illegal.
You cannot conflate Israel and the Jews.
And yet these people do this all the time.
A Jewish community or Jewish synagogue was attacked, Jewish people are mourning, therefore you shouldn't protest Israel because you don't want to offend them.
What is the Jewish community have to do with protesting Israel?
Israel and the Jews are not the same.
In fact, huge numbers of people, as you all know, leading these protests in the UK, just like the campus protests, are themselves Jewish.
A recent poll out this last week shows that something like 60% or 65% of American Jews oppose what Israel is doing in Gaza, of democratic voters who are Jewish, which are the majority, something like 50% believe what Israel is doing is a genocide.
Massive amounts of Jewish people around the world oppose what Israel is doing in Gaza.
The idea that protesting Israel's war in Gaza is offensive to Jewish people writ large is obnoxious.
It's actually offensive and even anti-Semitic.
But what she's also saying there is look, we're gonna we arrested you this weekend because even though we don't like your protests in general, we particularly don't like your protests this weekend.
You could have waited a few weeks.
Because there was an attack on a synagogue in which one person died.
Now you're supposed to suspend your pro right to protest against a genocide.
A hundred and fifty people were killed in Gaza by Israel in the last 24 hours, and we're supposed to wait three weeks.
Because one person died in the synagogue and it might offend certain Jews to protest.
And her explanation for this as to why you're gonna be arrested is yeah, maybe you have a right to protest, maybe, but just because you have a right to protest doesn't mean you always have to use it.
No, actually, that's what it means.
When you have a right, it means you can use it whenever you want.
If you can only use it when the government says you should use it or can use it, like, oh, now's a good time to protest, you don't actually have that right.
Yes, the right to protest means you can protest whenever.
This weekend, next weekend, whenever, not just when the government thinks it's a good idea for you to protest.
It's an amazing thing she said, both the rationale and the Orwellian formulation.
Here's the rest of it.
Just because you have a freedom doesn't mean to say you have to use it at every moment of every day.
That those people could have just waited a day or two and given people the chance to grieve and process what is that beyond this week.
I don't think there's anything offensive about that.
I think that would have been a British response to what we beyond this weekend.
What you are suggesting as home secretary is a response to limits, particular protests that many people believe are part of their fundamental right to go and object to something they see in another parts of the world that has horrified them.
Well, look, I um what what we are doing is And I should just say the the thing they're protesting is not just on the other side of the world.
They're also protesting the British support for Israel.
The British provide intelligence, they provide arms, they provide money, just like the United States does.
It's none on the other side of the world.
It's the government that this journalist, BBC journalist Laura Cusenberg is loyal to, the labor government.
That's part of what they're protesting.
What we are doing is enabling the police to put more conditions and restrictions.
So people will still be able to protest.
But I think it is right that we look again at the balance that is being struck at the moment between that right to protest and also the wider rights of our communities as well.
So it's always a balance.
And I'm recognizing that I think that balance has been not necessarily in the right place.
I want to have more consistency of police practice when it comes to the conditions they put on these protests.
And I have recognized that there is a gap in the law here.
There is an inconsistency of practice, and that is why I want to make it absolutely explicit that cumulative disruption is a relevant factor for the police to take into account.
So what she's saying there is that if you exercise your right to protest a little bit too much, if you're out there every weekend or every other weekend, instead of maybe just like once or twice, like a good British bit of moderation, like a good tasteful protest, like maybe I'm gonna go once and then wait six months.
If you're one of the people out there every weekend or every other weekend, a cumulative disruptor, she wants the police to use that as a guarantee essentially that you'll be arrested because you're like a chronic protester.
As she said, yeah, you have the freedom to protest, but just because you have the freedom doesn't mean you have to use it whenever.
And she's saying if you're one of those people who has a freedom and you decide you want to use it whenever you want, yeah, we're gonna arrest you.
Now, this is amazing in and of itself to just watch a government official justify using such distorted twisted reasoning.
Arresting people for peacefully protesting, a major policy of the government.
What's extra amazing about it, or maybe not extra amazing but extra illuminating, is that Shabana Mahmood, just 10 years ago, just a decade ago in 2014, she herself was a vocal, ardent pro-Palestinian protester.
She built her career, like to got elected the parliament, built her career within the labor party as somebody who was very vocal and vehement and passionate about the Palestinian cause.
Look at her just a decade ago.
From uh Foreman Films, this is her at a rally speaking in defense of Palestinians.
So many of the MPs, particularly on the government benches, had to stand up and say, I have received many emails from my constituents about this issue.
So please keep up the pressure on your members of parliament.
Go to their advice surgeries, take 20 people with you and ask them to justify their views on Palestine and on Gaza.
And if they say they support Gaza and support the plight of the Palestinians, ask them to evidence it and to take some action to show solidarity.
That's how we can make a difference because Israel's actions, it's killing of children, it's bombing of schools and hospitals, must be condemned without equivocation.
We know what they've done is wrong.
If David Cameron fails to speak out, that is a moral outrage.
He may stay silent, but we will never stay silent.
So let us, I would like to vote and tell this government we will not stay silent until the Palestinians are free.
You know, I can't find the words to express the contempt that she merits.
But Again, she wasn't just somebody who answered on a forum, like, yeah, I'm opposed to Israeli oppression of the Palestinians or she she was a pro-Palestinian protester.
And she went and said, We're never gonna rest, we're never gonna stop screaming about this, we're never gonna stop making demands for more action in defense of Palestinians.
We're gonna demand that our MPs, our government, do the right thing and stop these attacks and killings and human rights abuses of the Palestinian people on behalf of Israel.
And she rallied, she she she kind of uh got this crowd all agitated in defense of it.
And she was saying, go to your MPs and don't let them rest.
I mean, that's who she was, that's who she presented herself as being.
That's how she generated attention and support for herself.
Could you imagine going to that rally and being like, hey, I know she seems good.
I know she seems like really passionate, like authentic in her views, really devoted to this cause.
Ten years from now, ten years, not 30, 10 years from now, she's gonna be the home secretary in charge of law enforcement in the UK, and she's gonna lead the way in overseeing and implementing and justifying the arrest of peaceful pro-Palestinian protesters on the grounds that they're protesting too much.
Or that it's not the right time to protest and it offends people in the Jewish community to protest on behalf of Palestinians.
And you'd be like, no, that's impossible.
I mean, she's she's a hardcore pro-Palestinian activist.
And yet this isn't it's like Van Jones, you know, 2011.
Oh, here's the hardcore leftist.
And then, you know, ten years later, he's the hardcore pro-CIA, pro-FBI, Russia is invading our country, and now the pro-Israel, Ron and Cutter are corrupting our government just in a very short period of time.
They start off as outsiders, and the more they see what they need to do to gain access to power and money and standing and prestige and careerism, they'll just morph into whatever is demanded of them.
Not overnight, like gradually but inexorably.
So that in a very short period of time, they become exactly that which they pretended to oppose.
And just as I was saying before, that I think people who risk their lives or their careers or the reputation of their liberty in defense of a cause deserve immense respect.
Conversely, people who renounce their core beliefs, who are willing to become the puppets for the causes and forces that they claim to oppose if it provides them any meaningful amount of material benefit, deserve the greatest amount of scorn.
These are the most disgusting people.
These people are worthless.
Because they don't have any fixed belief.
They don't have any core beliefs.
They're completely corruptible.
You just offer them just a little bit more, and they'll do whatever you tell them to do.
Of course, she's the home secretary.
I'm sure she imagines one day she's going to be prime minister.
Imagine what she's willing to do to be prime minister.
Remember the current prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer, Sir Keir Starmer, who's one of the most unpopular politicians on the planet, also began on the left wing flank of the labor party.
He was a human rights lawyer.
He was a supporter of Jeremy Corbyn.
And then his opening he saw was no, I'm going to present myself as the moderate.
I'm going to accuse Jeremy Corbyn and the Labor Party of anti-Semitism.
I'm going to promise to cleanse the party of anti-Semitism, and then becomes like the most outspoken government official in defense of Israel.
Because he got to be Prime Minister, the leader of the Labor Party and the Prime Minister by doing it.
He just morphed into whatever he needed to be.
This is what people hate most about politicians.
I'm absolutely convinced of it.
And this is what I talked about before.
This is Trump's superpower.
Trump does do this, of course, sometimes.
We all make compromises sometimes.
None of us is incorruptible entirely.
But I think one of the things that people perceive about Trump is that he says what he believes, and it doesn't matter how much it horrifies people, how much it might jeopardize his political career.
And I think that was part of what explained Bernie Sanders' popularity.
Even now you'll hear conservatives say, look, I'm totally against what Bernie Sanders thinks, but at least like he stands for something, unlike Hamel Harris or those types.
People like this, who in 2014 are a pro-Palestinian protester, demanding and agitating crowds to never stop protesting, and then 2025 they're justifying the arrest, overseeing the arrest, ordering the arrest of pro-Palestinian protesters, exactly what they were a decade ago, in order to worm their way into positions of power and authority.
These are the most reprehensible people we have.
These people are utterly worthless.
Because they'll just morph into whatever they need to be.
And those people are untrustworthy and utterly without merit or value of any kind.
They're just utterly interchangeable.
And it's just amazing how extreme this particular case is.
All right, so that concludes our show for this evening as a reminder, system update is also available in podcast form.
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