Pro-Israel political opportunists exploit the tragic shooting on Bondi Beach in an attempt to escalate anti-Muslim hatred as Israel support dwindles. Plus: how Israel pressures Western governments to censor pro-Palestinian sentiment. ------------------------------- Watch full episodes on Rumble, streamed LIVE 7pm ET. Become part of our Locals community Follow System Update: Twitter Instagram TikTok Facebook
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| Good evening. | |
| It's Tuesday, December 16th. | |
| Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 o'clock p.m. Eastern on the dot, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube. | |
| Tonight, there was a truly horrific massacre that took place in Sydney, Australia, in which two people, apparently, according to the government, connected with or at least strongly inspired by the terror group ISIS, remember them, attacked a gathering at a park that is well known in Sydney for being a gathering of Jewish people, especially for Hanukkah season. | |
| Evidently chose to target it for that reason, gunned down 15 people who died, a couple of dozen injured in what was just a random spray of bullet, obviously aimed at killing a bunch of innocent people. | |
| The fact that both of the shooters were, according to the government, again, not just inspired by ISILs, but also Muslim has set off a very predictable wave of all sorts of exploitation, and that's really all you can call it, of the victims of this very tragic shooting, whose bodies were still on the ground when all kinds of supporters of the Israeli government began sweeping all over Western media and the American media to A, | |
| blame people and put the blood that was spilled in Sydney at the doorstep and on the hands of people who have been criticizing Israel over the last two years, as though criticizing Israel spawns anti-Semitism, which in turn spawns attacks of this kind. | |
| Makes no sense for all sorts of reasons if in fact the shooters were, as the government claims, inspired by ISIS. | |
| ISIS notoriously cares almost nothing for the Palestinians or the Israeli conflict with the Palestinians. | |
| In fact, ISIS has been notably uninterested in attacking Israel. | |
| Obviously, the animosity of ISIS goes back toward Jews, toward people in the West, long before October 7th. | |
| But that's what exploitation means. | |
| You take an event that produces a lot of emotions, like seeing dozens of people gunned down while peacefully observing their holiday, and you attempt to exploit it into some pre-existing political agenda, such as accusing Israel critics of spreading anti-Semitism, which in turn endangers Jews around the world. | |
| And that quickly became a call for a crackdown on free speech in the West, which is something that we've seen a long campaign calling for in the West, in order to shield Israel from criticism by eventually, by essentially criminalizing a wide array of free speech in Israel. | |
| So that was one prong of it. | |
| And then the second prong of it was to fuel the campaign that we've been covering over the last several weeks, really that I've been covering since I began writing about politics. | |
| And so this is a fuel that sustained the war on terror to try and convince people in the United States and the West more broadly that the main problem in their life, the main threat to all the things that they're concerned about isn't Wall Street, isn't the corruption of the bipartisan political class in Washington, isn't the wildly unequal distribution of resources or the sending of their money into the coffers of large corporations that have no loyalty to the United States, | |
| the military industrial complex to finance endless wars, or the proliferation of monopolies that destroy choice or the access to healthcare. | |
| No, the problem is Muslims. | |
| And that's where they ought to be focused. | |
| Not even sending money to Israel, fighting wars for Israel. | |
| No, the problem is Muslims. | |
| And so inflamed did that claim become as a result of these attacks that what was once considered to be an absolutely fringe view of maniacs and freaks like Valentina Gomez, who we covered a couple of weeks ago when she went on Piers Morgan and said, I'm running for Congress to expel every single Muslim from America. | |
| This was so far outside the Overton window that Piers Morgan and people like him couldn't even believe it. | |
| Now it's becoming a fairly mainstream call within the Republican Party. | |
| Members of Congress joined her in calling for that as a result. | |
| So you see this two-pronged, very interrelated agenda of cracking down on free speech in the West and in Americans when it comes to criticizing Israel, accompanied by the attempt to convince people that Muslims are their problem, not power centers, not Israel, not anything else. | |
| And this attack in Sydney, tragic though it was, was not particularly shocking or extreme in the context of the amount of violence we've seen over the last two years, especially coming from the Israeli state. | |
| And yet it was treated as such in order to advance this political agenda. | |
| And this is always a very pernicious tactic that we've seen from many groups that we've covered many times before, that you take an individual case that is very upsetting to any decent person, gunning down of civilians. | |
| You try and take the characteristics that motivated the shooters, attribute it to the group at large, and then call on government crackdowns on basic speech rights, on basic civil liberties. | |
| As I said, that's what drove the war on terror. | |
| That very much is what is being done now. | |
| And so it's really worth breaking down not just this incident, but the reaction to it and the way in which it's part of a larger campaign. | |
| And then there have been all sorts of changes at CBS News ever since CBS News was purchased by Larry Ellison and his son, who are not just fanatical supporters of Israel and the Zionist cause, but also, in Larry Ellison's case, the largest private donor ever to the IDF, to Friends of IDF, which supports not American soldiers, | |
| the country of which he's a citizen and that made him wealthy, but Israel, and the elevation of Barry Weiss as editor-in-chief of CBS News. | |
| And what happened on CBS after as part of the coverage of this incident so completely illustrates how overtly propagandistic the objective was of purchasing CBS News. | |
| Remember, this is the same consortium led by the same family that is trying and about to acquire TikTok that wanted also to buy the parent company of CNN, that to watch our American media outlets being turned into an arm of Israeli propaganda right before our very eyes in such a brazen way is also really something worth watching. | |
| It was really the first time that Israel was so in the news that opportunity to exploit it to manipulate American public opinion was so visible that you can really see the wheels churning at ABC at NBCS, engineered by Barry Weiss, and especially the Ellisons, that that is also worth taking a look at. | |
| And then finally, there was a very much talked about article in Compact magazine that confirmed what a lot of people already believed, but it really broke it down in a very personal way. | |
| And it describes how efforts to implement DEI, diversity, equity, inclusion, especially in the world of media and Hollywood, wasn't just some misguided, well-intentioned effort that ended up creating all sorts of inequities, | |
| which I think even a lot of once supporters of DEI who are now critics have come to believe that it was like very nice, well-intentioned effort to correct some inequities in our society with racial discrimination and the like that just went too far that replicated some of the errors, but in fact, was far more pernicious than that. | |
| really kind of a aggressive hostility toward the one group that was perceived, perhaps correctly or not, of being the beneficiary of anti-DEI policies for so long, which was not just white people, white men in particular, and is really set out to exclude and effectively did end up excluding huge numbers of them from almost every field, which is the sort of thing that led to the alienation of young men, their inability to get jobs, | |
| the sense that society is has it out for them that is affirmatively against them. | |
| And this is the sort of thing that in turn is inspiring the backlash of a lot of white men feeling like they have been targeted, that they have been unfairly treated, that their lives are basically impeded no matter how much they work because of these systems. | |
| And I'm not saying that I buy into that argument 100%, but this is an article that really does explore the questions in a very effective way, which I think is why it went viralized. | |
| And of course, it's feeding a lot of these movements, a lot of these popular podcasters and new people who have emerged on the political scene purporting to speak on behalf of this population that feels so aggrieved and that you can make a case has been aggrieved, regardless of whether other groups were previously aggrieved in the same way. | |
| And if you think they were previously aggrieved in the same way, then those groups that had been previously aggrieved developed a very strong sense of resentment towards society, a sense that they were being unfairly treated, anger toward the government, anger toward the country, a sense they had to band together in order to demand a kind of collective rectifying of the injustices they face. | |
| And so, of course, any group, including young men in America, young white men in America, are going to react in a similar way if they perceive that they have now been targeted with similar types of exclusion or marginalization or discrimination in order to rectify injustices for which they weren't responsible. | |
| We'll probably delve into this more. | |
| We'll have some guests on. | |
| We tried to get a couple of guests on tonight, but it was short notice, so we weren't able to, but we'll probably have some on during the week because it's a very important part of our political ecosystem, our political discourse. | |
| A lot of the sentiments that drove the Trump campaign that are driving parts of the American right, even parts of the American left, the anti-establishment sentiment, the emergence of people like Andrew Tate and then Nick Fuentes. | |
| I think a lot of that is explainable, not entirely, but certainly in large part by these kinds of trends. | |
| It's been very difficult to talk about them, though, because of the fact that it's so saddled with all sorts of jargon and all sorts of accusatory language about taking one or the other and what it means about you that rational, sober examinations have been very difficult, I think, now that we feel like we've kind of reached the point of the peak of what might be called wokeness or DEI and are now on the backside of it of kind of retreating from it. | |
| We have some space to kind of examine in a more sober way, in a more data-driven way, exactly what it is that happened. | |
| I think this article does a very good job of doing so. | |
| Obviously, a lot of other people do as well, which is why it's been so widely discussed. | |
| So I just want to give my own thoughts preliminarily on that, and then we'll delve into some of the more substantive aspects later in the week. | |
| All right, before we get to all of that, a couple of very quick programming notes. | |
| System update is also available in podcast form. | |
| You can listen to every episode as well as watching it 12 hours after the first broadcast live here on Rubble on Spotify, Apple, and all the major podcasting platforms. | |
| Where if you rate, review, and follow the show, it really helps spread the visibility of the program. | |
| Finally, as a reminder, we are independent journalists doing independent media. | |
| And as such, we rely on the support of our viewers and members, which you can participate in by joining our local community where you get access to a wide range of exclusive benefits, exclusive content. | |
| But really, it's the community on which we most rely to support the independent journalism that we do here every night. | |
| All you have to do is click the join button right below the video player on the Rumble page, and it will take you directly to that community. | |
| For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update starting right now. | |
| If you are somebody who reports on and defends civil liberties, one of the things that is central to your work is the recognition that one of the ways governments get people to sacrifice their civil liberties or at least acquiesce to their seizure is by scaring them enough to believe that their lives or their family lives are in jeopardy unless they give the government more and more powers and give up more and more of their rights. | |
| And one of the ways that's done, in fact, probably the central tactic for doing so is to take what is obviously a horrific event engaged in by a limited number of people that results in the death or destruction of innocent lives and of the death of innocent people and tries to use the emotions generated by that event to wildly exaggerate the threat that's behind it. | |
| And in doing so, convince people to be scared enough that they ought to just embrace whatever the government says they need to be able to do in order to keep them safe because the threat is so growing, so rapidly growing, so large, so existential that what good are their civil liberties? | |
| As many supporters of the war on terror and the Bush years and even Obama years say, what good are civil liberties if you're dead? | |
| Meaning, if you want to keep your freedom, you can keep it, but you're going to die. | |
| What good are your freedoms then? | |
| So your only real choice, if you want to stay alive, is authoritarianism, to give up your rights. | |
| And this was the explicit ethos of the war on terror for 20 years. | |
| It's something I had been writing about because there's no way to argue against the war on terror without getting to the root of that psychological tactic of that very manipulative attempt to exploit tragedy, or even not just tragedy, but in this case, crimes. | |
| And for a while, it subsided. | |
| People stopped believing that Muslims were a direct threat to their lives. | |
| There hadn't been very many attacks, but there has absolutely been an attempt to rejuvenate and revitalize and even extend this claim, this fear-mongering over the presence of Muslims in the United States to fight despite the fact that they're a very tiny part of the population, that they have close to zero representation in Congress in contrast to other minority groups that have wild overrepresentation, very little representation in the halls of power or in power centers. | |
| Nonetheless, the idea that Muslims are a great threat to the United States, that they're kicking over, has become central to the campaign to crack down on civil liberties in all sorts of ways in exactly the way we saw during the war on terror. | |
| And I would argue, even worse. | |
| Now, the worse the precipitating event is that allows this kind of propagandist exploitation, the easier it is to convince people that anyone like me who objects is somehow minimizing the crime or is blind to the danger. | |
| And sometimes if you don't wait a respectable amount of time for people's emotions to die down, it can be an even more difficult battle. | |
| But I've come to learn that you can't wait very long for people's emotions to die down because once their emotions die down, the propaganda that others have been propagating and exploiting the emotions, those remain fixed. | |
| And once the emotions subside, so do people's interest in examining what exactly it is that they ingested in their brain. | |
| And it sort of stays there. | |
| And then like a virus begins to grow and metastasize. | |
| And you really do have to attack it and address it right when it happens. | |
| So the event that is precipitating a lot of this is what is obviously a heinous, unjustified attack by two people who, again, are alleged to be Muslims. | |
| I believe the Australian government today said one of the attackers is an Indian national who has been in Australia for many years. | |
| So these are not newly arrived immigrants. | |
| They're not illegal immigrants inside of Australia. | |
| They will seem to have been there legally. | |
| The argument of the Australian government or the initial investigation suggests that they have an alliance with or an allegiance to ISIS. | |
| There are preliminary reports that they traveled to the Philippines, where parts of the Philippines remain kind of a hotbed for ISIS activity. | |
| Maybe to get training there, maybe to plan there. | |
| A lot of it is still unclear to the investigative stages, but it seems reasonably clear, although we should absolutely wait for the investigation to conclude, that this was perpetrated in the name of ideological adherence to ISIS. | |
| And it clearly did target a gathering of Jewish people. | |
| There's no question about that in Sydney who were not gathering for some sort of march for Zionism or the Israeli attack in Gaza, but for traditional Hanukkah ceremonies in a park that is known for that in Sydney. | |
| So the horror of the crime is manifest. | |
| 15 people lost their lives. | |
| There's more than a couple of dozen injured. | |
| I think some in very critical condition. | |
| The death toll might climb. | |
| So any decent person obviously looks at this and is horrified. | |
| But, and that should be all there is to it. | |
| That should be the story. | |
| There was a horrible, violent attack. | |
| But of course, politicians can't let stories like that that generate a lot of the media emotions go unexploited and Nor can politicians and Norcan activists and Norcan journalists. | |
| So there's a lot of exploitation, a lot of multiple level exploitation of what's happening in Sydney, not just in Australia, not just in the West, but especially here in the United States, that I think reveals very vividly a much broader propaganda campaign that has been underway for the last couple of years as support for Israel has unraveled largely because we all watched Israel spend two years blowing up babies and starving them to death and incinerating them in camps. | |
| And playing a starring role in all of this is the new version of CBS controlled by the Ellison family, as well as the person they installed despite having no experience in television, but a very long proven record of loyalty to Israel, which was Barry Weiss as the director of the editor-in-chief of CBS News. | |
| So let's just take a look first of all at what it is that happened. | |
| Here from the New York Times, this was yesterday. | |
| Australian police planned to charge suspect in the Bondi massacre. | |
| Quote, officials said a father and a son killed at least 15 people at a Jewish holiday celebration. | |
| More than three dozen others were hospitalized, including a surviving suspect. | |
| Quote, Australian police said on Monday that they expected to bring criminal charges against the surviving gunman in a deadly shooting spree that targeted a Jewish holiday celebration in Sydney. | |
| The authorities said they had concluded that the attack on Sunday at Bandi Beach, which it was said was carried out by a father and son, was an act of terrorism. | |
| Prime Minister Anthony Albanese told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that they had acted alone and there was no evidence they were part of a wider terror cell. | |
| At least 38 people remained hospitalized following the mass shooting. | |
| Hundreds of people had gathered at the beach, a famed half-mile crescent of sand for a Hanukkah event. | |
| Children played as music and bubbles filled the air until the attackers emerged from a silver hatchback near a pedestrian bridge and open fire. | |
| Gunshots ripped through the celebration. | |
| Here is, I believe, a police investigator in Australia, Chrissy Barrett, talking about what the investigation in its early stages has revealed. | |
| Early indications point to a terrorist attack inspired by Islamic State, allegedly committed by a father and son. | |
| There is no evidence to suggest other individuals were involved in this attack. | |
| However, we caution that this could change given it is early in our investigation. | |
| So this is a classic what the West calls terrorist attack. | |
| And we've done many shows before. | |
| I've written many articles about what terrorism means and the very selective way in which it's applied. | |
| We don't need to get into that now. | |
| Whatever the colloquial definition of terrorism is, it certainly fits it. | |
| I don't have any discomfort, except for a broader abstract discomfort with the word terrorism and the vagueness of the term, but I don't have any problem with applying it in this case. | |
| I think we all understand what that means, assuming the investigation in its early stages is correct. | |
| These are two Muslims with allegiance to ISIS who purposely targeted a gathering of Jewish people for political aims. | |
| And as I said, no decent person can defend this. | |
| This is not a gathering of Israeli officials or Israeli government officials or military officials, which present different questions. | |
| These are just ordinary Jews in Australia who were targeted randomly. | |
| I don't think anyone decent can offer any kind of remote justification for that. | |
| Now, what is more than debatable, I think quite objectionable, is the obvious attempt to take this crime perpetrated by two Muslims. | |
| And according to the Australian government, which has been quite pro-Israel in a lot of ways for a long time, not fully, but overwhelmingly. | |
| And to say, look, these are two Muslims acting in defense of their religion, even though ISIS is not just a religious group, but a very political group as well, with a lot of political grievances, not just religious ones, but it's certainly a religious group as well. | |
| And to say, okay, look, here are two more Muslims who engaged in a heinous crime. | |
| We're now ready to take this crime and connect it to other crimes that were also perpetrated by individual Muslims and make sweeping generalizations about the evils and the dangers of the world's second largest religion, a religion that has more than a billion adherents across the world. | |
| I think it's actually two or two billion adherents. | |
| In fact, it's close to Christianity, which is the world's largest religion. | |
| It's just a little bit behind. | |
| And this is obviously something that is being done with a political agenda, a quite obvious political agenda. | |
| There, however, is one complicating factor in this series of events, one unfortunate complicating factor for the people who are trying to exploit it for this political agenda, which is that there was one person who was on video performing with remarkable heroism, a kind of physical courage and self-sacrifice in defense of innocent people that he did not know, | |
| where he put his own life in jeopardy in order to try and disarm and disable the terrorists who were shooting. | |
| He could have just run away, but instead he ran toward the shooters in an effort to save huge numbers of innocent people. | |
| And the internet saw this video and everybody began to heap praise on this hero. | |
| And it is, that is the definition of heroic, certainly one of them, when you sacrifice your own life to try and save the lives of innocent people whom you do not know. | |
| And everybody was applauding this and praising this in contrast to the monsters who perpetrated the crime. | |
| And then it turned out that this hero is himself a Muslim. | |
| He's a Syrian Muslim who immigrated to Syria. | |
| And his, Here is from the Sydney Herald morning focusing on this far more inspiring part of the story. | |
| Quote, Bandi hero prevented a massacre, stopped gunmen advancing on a helpless crowd. | |
| Quote, Ahmed Al-Ahmed saved more than 30 people when he prevented one of the Bandi shooters from advancing on a helpless crowd. | |
| Ahmed, who is being held around the world for his bravery, told his lawyer that he charged at one of the gunmen on Sunday after seeing he was walking toward about 30 people lying on the ground, attempting to avoid being shot. | |
| Ahmed is receiving, is recovering at St. George Hospital in Cograp after staining about five bullet wounds that were sprayed across his left arm during the attack. | |
| The 44-year-old tobacco shop owner is the father of two daughters, aged five and six, and arrived in Australia from Syria in 2006. | |
| So, this to me is about as vivid of an example of the extremely large problem I have with this tactic of taking the very horrific acts of individual members of a group. | |
| And of course, not the first Muslims who engaged in acts like this. | |
| But you tell me the group, tell me the group that does have, that is without a large number of individual members in it who have not engaged in truly gruesome behavior. | |
| I often have people on X, whenever I mention my family, or even when I don't mention my family, whenever I just say something that bothers them about something totally unrelated, they'll post me to me all sorts of articles about a gay couple who adopted their kids and molested them. | |
| And for everyone that they can show me, where they do, I can show them 10 of heterosexual couples who adopted children and got arrested for abusing and molesting them, or stepfathers who molested their stepdaughters or uncles who molested their nieces. | |
| So this tactic is always this very anecdotal way of trying to defame and villainize groups is just so blatantly anti-intellectual, so easily manipulated and deceitful. | |
| So in general, I've always had a large problem with it. | |
| But in this particular case, it's very, very difficult to explain, I think, why it is that the actions of the two shooters are attributable to demonstrate the overall violence and barbarism and danger posed by Muslims. | |
| But the extraordinarily heroic act of the person who intervened, knowing that it was a gathering of Jews, he's a street vendor who lives in Sydney for the last 20 years after emigrating from Syria. | |
| He wasn't intervening to save the lives of Arabs or Muslims. | |
| He was intervening to save the lives of innocent Jewish people. | |
| Why isn't that act of remarkable self-sacrifice and humanitarianism and bravery as attributable to Muslims as a whole as the actions of the two shooters? | |
| Obviously, it is. | |
| And it's not really attributable at all. | |
| Neither is really attributable to a broader group. | |
| You have extremely heroic, benevolent, benign people in every single conceivable group that you can define. | |
| And you have awful, heinous monsters in every single group that you can define as well, which is why in general, we try not to judge people based on the group to which they belong, but rather on their individuality, which is often, not often, almost always, a far more relevant metric for understanding who they are. | |
| And yet it's very politically beneficial to try and use the far less rational approach because of how appealing it is to our primal instincts. | |
| All right, let's get into now the people who tried to instantly exploit it based on all of these lowly, deceitful, manipulative tactics that I just described. | |
| you'll be unsurprised to learn that one of the leaders in the effort to not just demonize Muslims, but to go far beyond that and blame not just Muslims, but critics of Israel. | |
| Critics of Israel and its conduct of the war in Gaza, critics of the United States financing of Israel, the argument that people who spent the last two years harshly condemning Israel for what it did in Gaza, that these people are responsible for exercising our constitutional right to citizens of the United States, to citizens of the West whose governments are paying for this war, when we exercise our constitutional rights to criticize Israel, to object to our government paying for it, | |
| we now stand accused of not only spreading anti-Semitism, but inspiring attacks of the kind that happened in Sydney. | |
| Again, as though adherents of ISIS need a bunch of college kids at Columbia or podcasters condemning Israel for their treatment of Palestinians as though ISIS cares anything about that. | |
| The whole thing is a fraudulent connection. | |
| But you'll be unsurprised to learn that one of the people who immediately took the lead in not just issuing demands to the West, but actually threats to the West, that they better start acting to not just reduce, | |
| but start crushing and suppressing criticism of Israel or stand guilty of being responsible for these kinds of attacks was Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who coincidentally is a person formally charged as being a war criminal at the International Criminal Court and stands accused of committing genocide by all sorts of scholars of genocide, including Israeli ones. | |
| Here's what he went on television and said speaking in Hebrew earlier today. | |
| On August 17th, about four months ago, I sent Prime Minister Albanese of Australia a letter in which I gave him warning that the Australian government's policy was promoting and encouraging anti-Semitism in Australia. | |
| I wrote, your call for a Palestinian state pours full fuel on the anti-Semitic fire. | |
| It rewards Hamas terrorism. | |
| It emboldens those who menace Australian Jews and encourages the Jew hatred now stalking your streets. | |
| Anti-Semitism is a cancer. | |
| It spreads when leaders stay silent. | |
| It retreats when leaders act. | |
| I call upon you to replace weakness with action, appeasement with resolve. | |
| Instead, Prime Minister, you replaced weakness with weakness and appeasement with more appeasement. | |
| Your government did nothing to stop the spread of anti-Semitism in Australia. | |
| You did nothing to curb the cancer cells that were growing inside your country. | |
| You took no action. | |
| You let the disease spread. | |
| And the result is the horrific attacks on Jews we saw today. | |
| I want you to think about how distorted that is, how twisted and demented it is, but also how emotionally manipulative and probably in a lot of ways effective it is for certain people. | |
| The Australian government, who Netanyahu is trying to blame, not subtly but explicitly, for creating a climate of Jew hatred and anti-Semitism that enabled and fueled and was responsible for the massacre that happened in Sydney. | |
| The Australian government did not participate, for example, in the international criminal court action to ask that the court condemn and convict Netanyahu and Israel of committing genocide. | |
| The Australian government didn't call for the elimination of Israel as a state of Jews. | |
| They didn't condemn Zionism or oppose Zionism. | |
| The crime that the Australian government committed, for which Netanyahu is now trying to exploit the emotions around the Sydney attacks in order to not just condemn for Australia, but obviously to make radioactive enough limits for any government, was the call of the Australian government, which just so happens to be the bipartisan policy of the United States for the last eight decades, is to recognize a Palestinian state. | |
| So in Netanyahu's formulation, if you believe in the humanity of Palestinians, if you believe in the right of self-determination and autonomy, not just autonomy and self-determination for Jews, but also for Palestinians, about as benign of a policy as you could possibly announce, and he was joined by a lot of European countries in doing so. | |
| Just for that, Netanyahu accuses the government of Australia, the prime minister of Australia, of essentially having the blood of Jews on his hands for calling for the recognition of a Palestinian state and therefore spreading anti-Semitism. | |
| This is the reason why Israel is losing the information and PR war in the United States, because people are sick of being badgered that way, sick of being manipulated that way and bullied that way, of being told that if they don't immediately proclaim their allegiance to and support for every single last thing the Israeli government, this foreign government demands of them, it means they are evil people. | |
| They're bigoted people. | |
| They're racist people who are going to have terms attached to them designed to destroy their livelihood and reputation forever. | |
| People have had it with that. | |
| And the idea that calling for a Palestinian state is what inspired ISIS to go and kill a bunch of Jews is so deranged and far from anything that a minimally rational person could even begin to accept as an argument that shouldn't be laughed at. | |
| But Netanyahu knows what he's doing. | |
| He's not speaking rational. | |
| He's speaking to the very primal anger and fear and disgust that people have for the two Muslim shooters who did this and is trying to redirect it away from Israel and toward anybody who in any way supports policies that oppose the desire for Israel to dominate Palestinians forever. | |
| I just want to give you a sense for why anti-Semitism has completely lost any of the sting that it once possessed, why no one cares any longer if they're called anti-Semites, why calling people anti-Semites doesn't even barely dent their reputation anymore, whereas 10 years ago, it would pretty much be a career ender if you were called it in any meaningful sense. | |
| Benjamin Etanyahu, Israel, Israel supporters have single-handedly not just made that term empty, but made it a term of resentment. | |
| And so while it's sickening to watch on the one hand, on the other, I hope they continue to do things like this. | |
| Here's what he was talking about when claiming that the prime minister of Australia actually has blood on his hands and was responsible for the spread of Jew hatred. | |
| This is a statement from the Department of the Prime Minister and the cabinet in Australia. | |
| Again, following the policy of numerous European states, including many who have armed Israel and funded Israel, have been overwhelmingly pro-Israel at the UN forever. | |
| This is all the policy was. | |
| Title, Australia Recognizes the State of Palestine. | |
| Quote, effective today, Sunday, the 21st of September, 2025, the Commonwealth of Australia formally recognizes the independent and sovereign state of Palestine. | |
| In doing so, Australia recognizes the legitimate and long-held aspirations of the people of Palestine to a state of their own. | |
| Obviously, this statement assumes that Israel will continue in its current form, that Israel will continue to be an ethnostate dominated by Jews. | |
| It's not calling on Israel to dismantle its government, dismantle its system of Jewish supremacy, its military, its nuclear weapons stockpile that's outside of the safeguards and controls of any international inspection system. | |
| It's just saying the Palestinians deserve a state. | |
| And for that, Netanyahu, who accused the prime minister of Australia and the Australian people and government of being so viciously anti-Semitic that they have responsibility for the 15 people who were just killed. | |
| Lots of people in the United States who are become just utterly unhinged and reflexive Israel fanatics and supporters. | |
| They defend Israel far more vigorously and robustly and automatically than they ever have defended the United States, the country they're supposedly representing, echoed a lot of the same sentiments. | |
| Speaking of people like that, John Vetterman, the Democrat from Pennsylvania, went on to X yesterday and said, quote, this, after years of anti-Israel protests in Australia, at least 11 Jews were just gunned down at a Hanukkah event. | |
| Tree of Life to 10.7 to Bondi Beach. | |
| Anti-Semitism is a rising and deeply deadly global scourge. | |
| I stand in grief with Israel and the entire Jewish global community. | |
| Note how October 7th was included in there, just kind of thrown in manipulatively that like that's the same sort of attack as ISIS attacking a Jewish gathering or an anti-Semite acting alone attacked a synagogue in Pittsburgh. | |
| Not that it was the reaction of people who have been brutally occupied and blockaded for decades by Israel, who have been bombed by Israel, including all throughout 2023. | |
| But the far more sinister and pernicious part of this is to link protests against Israel to Jew hatred. | |
| Whenever you say that, in effect, anti-Semitism now means anyone who criticizes Israel, you'll always be accused of a straw man. | |
| Oh, no one thinks that. | |
| Everybody agrees you can criticize Israel without being anti-Semitic. | |
| No, there are ways to do that. | |
| But they don't actually think that. | |
| Here's John Fetterman explicitly saying that because Israel, that because Australia allowed their citizens, you're not Israeli citizens, you're Australian citizens, because the government allowed their citizens the right to protest the Israeli war in Gaza, it means that they've allowed anti-Semitism to fester because anti-Semitism does in fact mean criticism of Israel. | |
| And these kinds of formulations say it clearly. | |
| Here is Tom Cotton of the Republican Party, at least as fanatically devoted to Israel as John Fetterman. | |
| And here's what he had to say about all this. | |
| Australia and some European nations have recognized a non-existent Palestinian state in an open and blatant reward for Hamas's depraved attack on Israel. | |
| That's the exact opposite of what we should be doing. | |
| I mean, it's like the bodies aren't even removed yet. | |
| And these ghouls who are pretending to be so concerned for the victims don't have the slightest interest in them, other to the extent that they can kind of parade them around and try and shame those who don't have anything other than full-scale support for Israel. | |
| If you recognize Palestinian autonomy in part, the little parts of that land that they have remaining, it means that you hate Israel and are the kind of person who spawns murderous attacks on Israelis. | |
| I don't think this works on anybody any longer. | |
| Like I said, it's not ineffective propaganda. | |
| This is the kind of propaganda that's effective. | |
| Exploiting emotions in order to get people hating whoever you direct their hatred towards and then getting them to adopt policy as a result. | |
| It has to have some basis of reality, though. | |
| I just don't think the idea that if you find Israel objectionable or if you don't want the U.S. supporting it any longer, that somehow you're the kind of person who's evil and hates Jews and is responsible for what happened in Australia. | |
| This is too far removed now from what people believe. | |
| That ship has sailed a long time ago. | |
| This is flailing propaganda. | |
| This is no longer effective Israeli propaganda. | |
| This is panic-driven propaganda as they watch support for Israel unraveling. | |
| All right, here's the statement I actually referenced earlier. | |
| I was talking about a different clip, and it's this one where Netanyahu in Hebrew gave a speech, and he has recently been not just condemning Western governments, but issuing explicit threats. | |
| He's not specific about how these Western governments will pay if they don't stop doing what he demands they do, but he is threatening them that they will pay. | |
| And here is what he said in Hebrew about the responsibility of Western governments. | |
| Do what is necessary to fight anti-Semitism and provide the required safety and security for Jewish communities worldwide. | |
| They would be well advised to heed our warnings. | |
| I demand action from them now. | |
| There's a tiny little country that depends on the kindness of the rest of the world, on the kindness of the American worker, on the kindness of the American government, on the guilt of European countries to supply them with arms, to supply them with money, to protect them at all times. | |
| And these countries have been doing it for decades, largely out of guilt over the Holocaust, but recently because of the power of the pro-Israel lobbies that exist in most of these countries. | |
| And it's given Netanyahu this increasingly arrogant, almost like global imperial attitude that he can dictate to the Western governments on which he relies, on which his country depends to be able to wage the wars that give them imperial dominance in that region, that he can issue them demands to their citizenries, to their democratic governments about what steps they have to take to protect Israel, | |
| accompanied by very explicit warnings of the price they will pay if they don't adhere to it. | |
| I also think this is the sort of thing that is increasing not just anti-Israeli sentiment, but anti-Semitic sentiment as well. | |
| But it's also understandable because typically when Netanyahu issues demands of that kind, the United States, Australia, Canada, and most of Western Europe ask how quickly, how much time they can have before they comply. | |
| And they have. | |
| And that has given them this belief and given Netanyahu belief that he can speak openly now to Western governments this way. | |
| And I think it's just causing more and more people to notice. | |
| Here is the deputy foreign minister of Israel, Sharon Haskell, talking today on Sky News Australia about what Israel's view is of all of this. | |
| Well, fight racism, fight violence against the Jewish community, fight racism in workplaces as strong as possible. | |
| Look, when you see those hate march in the streets, whether it's London or Sydney, and in the opera house, they chanted, gas the Jews, gas the Jews. | |
| Not even a single arrest, not even a single person who had to answer for that, but they tried to cover that. | |
| When you hear them chanting to globalize the intifada, what do you think that mean? | |
| Globalizing the intifada mean exactly that. | |
| To go on massacres, shooting people in the streets to violently attack them. | |
| This is what it means. | |
| And if you let that continue and run in your street, waving flags of terrorist pictures of people who murdered innocent children, you know, if you don't fight it, in your silence, you actually support that. | |
| You justify that. | |
| And to globalize the intifada means exactly that. | |
| A terrorist attack on a beach in Australia where Australian civilians are being murdered and killed. | |
| This is what it means. | |
| So when you hear that, start acting, enforcing, persecuting, punishing, so that people understand this is absolutely unacceptable. | |
| No racism, no violence will be accepted, not in Australia and not in the UK either. | |
| Let's leave aside just for the moment the sickening irony of a high-level Israeli official going on television and purporting to be such, so morally outraged by the killing of innocent civilians, given what we've all watched Israel do, especially over the last two years, but for many, many decades. | |
| Leave that aside. | |
| That's an obvious point. | |
| It is amazing to just watch these Israeli officials, again, this tiny little country, just so openly spread throughout all of Western media and go on television and start demanding that these governments crack down on speech that in their countries people have the right to express. | |
| When these campus protests in the United States first broke out for the first several months, and Israel supporters were petrified of them, because student activism in the past has been very effective. | |
| It was a big factor in. | |
| It single-handedly prevented Lyndon Johnson from seeking re-election in 1968 over the Vietnam War, created a lot of turbulence in the 60s. | |
| It helped bring down the apartheid regime in the 1980s. | |
| A lot of that boycott South Africa energy came from college students. | |
| College students typically are, or people of that age, younger people are more politically active in those ways for their own families. | |
| They have the energy. | |
| And that's why when the boycott movement aimed at Israel started on college campuses, that's why Israel made it a point to fund huge amounts of efforts to target American college campuses as a place of bigotry and hatefulness and radicalism. | |
| That's why so much of the American pundit class focused on what was happening with sophomores at colleges. | |
| A lot of it was about Israel. | |
| And you have these Israeli officials going on television in every Western country saying, you're allowing this speech and you need to stop it. | |
| And I remember when those campus protests broke out and there were a lot of people on both political parties calling them criminals and terrorists, including under the Biden administration, the Biden White House is what really set the groundwork for considering these protests against the Israeli war in Gaza to be anti-Semitic, even though the encampments were filled with Jews, all things we've been over before. | |
| I remember when I would defend the right of college students to politically organize and to express their political views, kind of foundational to the whole idea of the United States and Western democracies. | |
| I would constantly hear from conservatives who had spent the previous decade posing as free speech absolutists that it's not free speech to go around chanting kill all the Jews, kill all the Jews. | |
| And I remember on social media, I spent about six weeks when I kept hearing this at the beginning saying, where did that happen? | |
| On what American college campus did students gather and chant, kill the Jews, kill the Jews. | |
| It did not happen. | |
| Every time I asked that question, no one had an answer. | |
| They knew it happened, but nobody could show me a news article, a claim, because it didn't happen. | |
| That wasn't part of what they were chanting. | |
| They were chanting opposition to the Israeli government, but since that's protected speech and much easier to much harder to demonize, they had to pretend they were chanting kill the Jews. | |
| As it turns out, the reason why people started claiming that was because at one of the earliest protests against the Israeli bombing of Gaza in Australia, there was a gathering of about 100 activists and one guy who knows who it was, could be some stray idiot, some unwell person, some government plant, | |
| or maybe just a genuinely anti-Semitic person, took up, picked up a cardboard amplifier and said three times, kill the Jews, kill the Jews, kill the Jews. | |
| One guy in Sydney, Australia. | |
| And from then on, it became, oh, these protests are people chanting, kill the Jews. | |
| That was not what the protests were about. | |
| The protests were about protesting what Israel was doing in Gaza. | |
| And yet here you have Israeli government officials going to every Western country, telling their governments, you better stop allowing free speech of your citizens. | |
| You need to put people in jail for these things. | |
| You need to stop letting them say this, or you are going to be the ones guilty of allowing Jews to die. | |
| Is that actually going to help how Israel is perceived around the world and in the West? | |
| Do you think Western citizens are going to appreciate turning on their TV and hearing Israeli officials in a heavily accented English telling them and their governments and their countries that they better stop allowing people to protest in the streets against Israel or their government support for Israel? | |
| I think that's a lot more likely to produce resentment. | |
| I think it's going to put pressure on these politicians who are funded by the Israeli lobby. | |
| I do think it works that way. | |
| But I also think it's going to continue to feed what people are, what used to be taboo to say, but which is now completely tolerated to say and commonly said because it's so true that there is an extremely disproportionate, almost inexplicable influence and power of Israeli officials and their supporters inside Western democracies to dictate to Western democracies how they can function when it comes to Israel. | |
| And as support for Israel has unraveled, they've become more out in the open, more explicit. | |
| John Mearsheimer has talked about this, one of the pioneers of making public how the Israeli lobby operates, that they have been forced out into the open in a way that they never wanted to be. | |
| And you just, do you hear these people? | |
| They're demanding that Western governments curb their own citizens' free speech, not to protect that country's interest, but to protect Israel and are insanely trying to claim that if you protest Israel or even allow a protest of Israel, you're now responsible for ISIS targeting individual Jewish civilians. | |
| Just to give you a sense for how often this, how this works among the elite class, the cowardly elite class, probably the most cowardly elite class in the West is the British government. | |
| I got to know the British government and British political culture, unfortunately, very well. | |
| I worked at the Guardian. | |
| The Snowden story had a major pardon in the UK. | |
| They were probably the most authoritarianism defending NSA surveillance. | |
| They actually sent armed agents into the Guardian's newsroom in London to demand that they physically destroy the Snowden files. | |
| Even knowing that these files were kept all over the world and would achieve nothing, they still demanded it. | |
| They were the ones who detained my husband as part of the reporting to intimidate him, threatened to arrest. | |
| They detained him, threatened to arrest him on terrorism charges. | |
| In any event, they got super repressive. | |
| And they've only become more repressive in arresting people who protest the Israeli government. | |
| And it's a Labour government. | |
| It's a center-left government. | |
| It's not the Conservative government. | |
| But they're all filled with worms, like careerist worms who are petrified of their own shadow. | |
| And here is one of the worst. | |
| His name is Wes Streeting. | |
| He's kind of like the Pete Buddigig of the UK Labour Party. | |
| He's openly gay, but he's like very, I don't even want to call him centristy because there's too much credit. | |
| So he has a set of beliefs. | |
| He's just an absolute vacant careerist. | |
| And as the current British Prime Minister, Kier Starmer, shortly after being elected, has shockingly high, almost historically high levels of hatred and disapproval among the British people. | |
| There's not an election for four years, but there's an attempt now to get him out of the leadership of the Labour Party and therefore the prime ministership. | |
| This Wes Streeting is one of the top two or three candidates to replace him, as vacant and soulless as a person you will ever find. | |
| Here he is on BBC today, also essentially blaming the free speech rights of Israel critics for their rhetoric somehow leading to this ISIS attack in Sydney. | |
| Here's what he said. | |
| I think the Chief Rabbi is absolutely right. | |
| And the term globalize the intifada, there will be a whole bunch of daft people in this country who've used those words online or used them in the streets and watching the TV right now be shouting, of course it doesn't mean terrorism against Jewish people. | |
| I have to say to those people clearly and robustly, what on earth do you think globalize the intifada means? | |
| And can't people see the link between that kind of rhetoric and attacks on Jewish people as Jewish people? | |
| Because that's what's really struck at the heart of Jewish people in our country today. | |
| An attack on Jewish people organizing around Hanukkah, coming together as Jewish people. | |
| It's an attack on their faith, their culture, their family, their community. | |
| And those of us who are not Jewish have a responsibility to stand with the Jewish community. | |
| But it's more than standing with them, isn't it? | |
| I mean, people are saying, you now need to do something. | |
| Do you think protesters who use that phrase should be prosecuted? | |
| What are you doing? | |
| In terms of changes to the law, those are decisions for the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary. | |
| I'm not aware of plans at this time to change the law in that way. | |
| Do you think it should be profitable? | |
| And I'm not going to step outside my lane now and to start making decisions for the Home Secretary and the Prime Minister. | |
| Honestly, I'm not asking to make decisions. | |
| But I don't, I mean, put it this way. | |
| I think that's a lot of people. | |
| Globalize the intifada. | |
| Globalize the intifada is not an expression simply of solidarity with the Palestinian people and their just cause. | |
| Globalize the intifada is received by and seen as support for terrorist action against Jewish people. | |
| I continue to find it bizarre how normalized and customary it is now for Western governments that have long supposedly stood for Western values of civil liberties. | |
| And we're talking about here the country that gave birth to the Magna Carta that was part of the Enlightenment that became the foundation for the U.S. Constitution and civil liberties to just so openly discuss now and even be pressured by journalists. | |
| She was pressuring him to go further than he wanted to say, don't we have to criminalize these terms? | |
| Just they have explicit discussions now about which political terms, which political ideas ought to be criminalized to the point where police come to your home and arrest you. | |
| And of course, that happens in the UK. | |
| It happens throughout Western Europe. | |
| And yes, right-wing speech is often targeted. | |
| But in the UK in particular, they have spent months now arresting anybody who wears any kind of clothing or carries any kind of signage in support of a pro-Palestinian group called Palestine Action because the Israeli government, the UK government, at the behest of the Israeli government, characterized it as a terrorist group, which means it's not just illegal to join that group, but it's illegal to express any support for them. | |
| In fact, it's illegal to even protest the government's designation of them as a terrorist group. | |
| They never killed anybody. | |
| They never tried to kill anybody. | |
| The worst they ever did was they spray painted two planes at a military base that the UK government was using to help the Israelis destroy Gaza. | |
| And for that, they got called a terrorist organization. | |
| And so you have 70 and 80-year-old women going to protest every Saturday against the Israeli war in Gaza. | |
| And if they have a sign that says Palestine action, they get arrested. | |
| And now this journalist is saying, don't we have to do more? | |
| Don't we have to even ban more of these phrases? | |
| I just want you to realize, think about what Israel has done here so successfully in the West with the help of Western governments. | |
| Every form of protest against the Israeli government is deemed illegitimate. | |
| If you want to support a boycott of Israel, again, used and boycotts are unbelievably common political tactic. | |
| It was used by civil rights leaders. | |
| It was used to stop the apartheid regime in South Africa. | |
| And boycotting Israel is a way of saying we're going to boycott Israel until they withdraw their illegal occupation from the West Bank and their blockade of Gaza. | |
| It's a, by definition, peaceful means of protesting. | |
| But that got criminalized in Europe. | |
| Advocacy of boycotting Israel is considered a crime. | |
| It's hate speech in Europe. | |
| And in the United States, the Trump administration has succeeded in basically making it illegal despite the First Amendment. | |
| Huge numbers of red states and even some Democratic states have said that if you support a boycott of Israel, you're not eligible for contracts for states. | |
| They've even made hurricane relief. | |
| If your area is hit by a hurricane, you have to sign a form saying you don't support a boycott of Israel as a condition to receiving aid from the government, the U.S. government. | |
| So boycotting Israel is out. | |
| Obviously, using violence to drive out Israeli occupiers is considered terrorism, even though the Israelis themselves use that kind of violence to drive the British out and drive the Palestinians out. | |
| And generally, violence against occupiers is considered justified, not for the Palestinians. | |
| So no boycott, no violence against as resistance. | |
| And now no chanting. | |
| Can't chant from the river to the sea. | |
| Palestine will be free. | |
| Can't chant, globalize the intifada. | |
| These are now also going to become criminal. | |
| Every form of protest against Israel, other than the most like, and maybe you're allowed still at some point for the moment to write like a very polite editor letter to the editor saying how much you love Israel, but think they've gone a little too far. | |
| Maybe that'll be left legal just to create the appearance that it's not completely totalitarian. | |
| Globalize the intifada. | |
| The intifada just means resistance, just means struggle. | |
| And globalized antifada means don't force Palestinians to fight for their sovereignty and their right to autonomy alone. | |
| Globalize it. | |
| It doesn't mean join ISIS and going murdering Jews. | |
| But the Israelis are now telling Western governments, you're going to regret it. | |
| You're going to pay a price if you allow this free speech against us to continue. | |
| And you have little worms like West Streeting and a lot of other politicians going on there saying, this language is no longer acceptable. | |
| We're losing our free speech rights in the West, in the United States, not because our own country is defending its interests, but to defend the interests of this other country. | |
| And you can see it all here taking place in real time in the most explicit ways possible. | |
| All right, here is the aforementioned chief rabbi in the UK, who Wes Streeting referred to as somebody whose comments he supported. | |
| He went on Sky News today and he gave a lecture to the UK about what needs to be done about what he called, quote, anti-Israeli speech. | |
| Here are the orders and instructions of the chief rabbi in the UK to the United Kingdom about how they need to start cracking down even further on speech critical of Israel. | |
| You said there about hate speech being translated into action. | |
| And I just wondered if you could expand a bit on that. | |
| There has been some criticism, obviously, of the Australian political response to it, but particularly here in the United Kingdom. | |
| What is your message to political leaders, to the Prime Minister? | |
| We have to crack down on hate speech in a far more forceful and emphatic way than we previously have been doing. | |
| By the way, the Prime Minister called me yesterday to express his solidarity and support, which I genuinely appreciate. | |
| Let's take, for example, cries such as from the river to the sea or globalize the intifada. | |
| What does globalize the intifada mean? | |
| It means what happened at Eaton Park Synagogue in Manchester and Yom Kippur. | |
| It means what happened on Bondai Beach. | |
| The time has come once and for all not to allow such rhetoric to poison the minds of people. | |
| Okay, do you see how this is expanding? | |
| No marches in Sydney, no globalizing intifada, no from the river to the sea. | |
| These are to be criminalized. | |
| These are orders coming from the Israeli government, from our binocular leaders, from Jewish leaders. | |
| And if you don't think that Western governments take this seriously and are going to obey and follow, you haven't been watching because they have already been cracking down on anti-Israel speech, including in the United States under the Trump administration that was elected on a promise to restore free speech and oppose censorship. | |
| We have all kinds of expanded hate speech laws that the Trump administration forced on college campuses, not to ban comments offensive to black people or Muslims or Christians or white people or immigrants or gate just to Jews. | |
| Codes that take a whole variety of common views of Israel or Jews that were once perfectly legitimate to express, even if a lot of people didn't believe them, and to turn them into something legally sanctioned. | |
| Now, it's not only happening in Western Europe. | |
| Here, first of all, is Ted Deutsch, who is the head of the American Jewish Committee, and he's on a little tour, media tour, talking about all of this. | |
| And he had very similar march borders. | |
| Here's what he said. | |
| We have to speak out against the kind of language that puts Jews at risk. | |
| We have to adopt policies that recognize that fighting anti-Semitism needs to be a priority. | |
| And we have to do more to make sure that on social media, what would never be tolerated on Main Street isn't tolerated online. | |
| The kind of language, the kind of calls for violence that put Jews at risk and that lead to the kinds of atrocities like we just saw in Bondi Beach. | |
| It's a horrible situation indeed. | |
| The message is simple. | |
| Please, please listen to us when we tell you that the attacks against the Jewish community in Word and in social media can and have led to violence and that we all have to stand together to stop that from happening because when you see this kind of anti-Semitism on the rise and the violent, deadly attacks like this, it is not just an attack on the Jewish community. | |
| It's an attack on society and on democracy. | |
| We all have a stake in stopping this right now, but it's only going to happen if bold action is taken around the world, all of us standing together. | |
| Do you remember, because I remember, I spent a lot of work, a lot of time on this, that one of the major controversies of the last 10 years was the attempt by Western power centers to police and control and suppress political opinion and political speech on the internet. | |
| All of that big tech censorship, remember the controversy over that? | |
| Or the Biden administration calling up big tech and saying this opinion is very dangerous, allowing people to question the efficacy of the virus or the origin of the virus, kills people. | |
| The EU government trying to censor its views and claims about the war in Ukraine on and on and on. | |
| Remember how much anger there was over that? | |
| Or the effort to censor criticism of Black Lives Matter because it puts Black people in danger? | |
| Or the effort to censor certain opposition to the views of gender ideology and on the grounds that it's endangered trans people. | |
| We are all so angry that our free speech would be suppressed in the name of protecting and defending a minority group. | |
| This is exactly what this is. | |
| The only thing that's changed is the minority group on whose behalf it's being advocated. | |
| And yet one can't help but note, can one, that most of those free speech crusaders who are so enraged by identical efforts to do this in defense of other groups seem perfectly content, even supportive, when it comes to this group. | |
| And remember, let's not forget that TikTok, the single most popular social media app among young Americans, and one of the top two or three apps that Americans voluntarily chose to use to get information to express their views to politically organize, to find community. | |
| Originally, the ban, the proposal was to ban it because the Chinese controlled it. | |
| That went nowhere. | |
| And it was only after October 7th when Democrats became convinced that one of the reasons Americans were turning against Israel is because TikTok allowed too much criticism of Israel and showed too much carnage that Israel was producing and blowing up babies every day. | |
| Only then did the TikTok ban gather steam and finally pass with the Biden administration's support and lots of Democratic votes and Republican votes. | |
| And then it was forced to be transferred into the hands of Larry Ellison, the largest single donor ever to the IDF, whose son also now owns CBS News and installed Barry Weiss there to ensure a pro-Israel orthodoxy. | |
| This is not a joke. | |
| For all the talk about the big tech censorship that has happened over the last 10 years, which I was covering constantly and denouncing and working together, this is 100 times worse. | |
| This is an extremely coordinated systemic effort to take control of American internet and social media and other major outlets of information dissemination to repropagandize the American people on behalf of Israel. | |
| And Netanyahu himself said that. | |
| Netanyahu said when he was meeting with a bunch of American influencers trying to encourage them how to defend Israel Online, that at least as important as the war as Israel fights militarily is the information war on the internet and their greatest success was the forced transfer of TikTok into the hands of some of Israel's most fanatical supporters, the richest or second richest person in the world, Larry Ellison, who at the same time is buying CBS News and trying to now buy CNN. | |
| Speaking of CBS, under the control of Larry Ellison's son, fanatical supporter of Israel, and under the editorial direction of one Barry Weiss, an equally fanatical supporter of Israel, they today also covered not just the Sydney massacre, which is news, but also the implications of it, like what we as democracies have to do now to serve Israel better, to protect Israel better. | |
| And in order to do that, CBS News under Barry Weiss' direction decided to invite onto the airwaves to tell us what we had to do as an American people, not an American citizen, but an Israeli citizen, which is so ironic because it has become this kind of consensus conservative ethos. | |
| And it really emerged after Twitter made public the locations where a bunch of Twitter users were and a bunch of them posing as MAGA supporters turned out to be in Indonesia or the Philippines or wherever. | |
| People like Matt Walsh, tons of other people started saying, we don't care what you think about our country. | |
| You're not an American. | |
| We don't care what you think. | |
| You have no right to comment on our country. | |
| Even though we comment on other countries all the time. | |
| I mean, Americans constantly condemned Australia's policies in COVID or Canada's treatment of the truckers. | |
| I didn't hear any of them objecting today when CBS under Barry Weiss and the Ellisons decided to bring on an Israeli citizen to tell us what we had to do in the wake of the Sydney massacre to protect Jews. | |
| And I want you to listen to the very first question after they called this Israeli on to tell us what we had to do. | |
| Listen to the question that they asked her. | |
| Let's play this. | |
| So anti-Semitism is a shape-shifting conspiracy theory. | |
| And what had shifted into today is this Israel-related Jewish hatred, Israel-related violence, and it is lethal. | |
| Now, when any group is under attack here, you're looking for government intervention, of course, and then also civilian allies. | |
| So as we stand here right now, what can we do to help a Jewish people feel safer? | |
| Thank you so much for actually asking us this question. | |
| This is such a beautiful thing and so important. | |
| So listen, first of all, strong language against it. | |
| The second thing is strong actions against it. | |
| And to be honest, one of the most powerful things that anybody can do, any government, any organization, any group, any company, is adopt what's called the IRA definition of anti-Semitism, the International Holocaust Alliance definition of anti-Semitism is a non-binding, non-legal definition, the prism from which to see what anti-Semitism is, because a lot of people don't understand what it is. | |
| If you understand what it is as a company, as an organization, as a government, you can actually fight against it. | |
| And we need to acknowledge this threat is real. | |
| This threat is lethal. | |
| It's killing people and we have to stop it. | |
| It has to stop. | |
| Yeah, no, Tishby, thank you so much for joining us. | |
| Thank you so much for having me. | |
| All right. | |
| Can you believe that? | |
| So this ISIS attack happens in Australia. | |
| And the Barry Weiss, David Ellison-led CBS News decides in response to call an Israeli citizen onto our network news to tell us what we as a government and country need to do to better protect Israel and Jews. | |
| And the question that this journalist asked, and remember, these people know they now work for Barry Weiss. | |
| These people know they work for David Ellison. | |
| They know they're part of a news organization that sees its mission as serving a foreign government and that their jobs depend upon aligning with that mission. | |
| And it was like a hostage video. | |
| It was like scripted North Korean television. | |
| The question, she came on and she said, you need to get stricter on the language that you allow. | |
| And he didn't say like, well, what about our First Amendment rights? | |
| Are you really saying that people who criticize Israel are now responsible for hating Jews as she tried to link them? | |
| If he had asked a single pushback or adversary question, he probably would have been fired on the spot. | |
| You know what he asked her instead? | |
| He said, whenever something like this happens, the question is what our government can do about it. | |
| So please tell us, Ms. Israeli, how we Americans and our government can serve you better. | |
| What can we do to protect you and make you feel safe? | |
| Tell us what we need to do for you. | |
| I mean, I think this is something that has become, again, this used to be much more subtle, but it's now so out in the open that I actually think this is going to, as sickening as it is to watch, I think it's going to backfire. | |
| And she said the most important thing you can do is adopt the radically expanded definition of what anti-Semitism actually is. | |
| It doesn't just mean you hate Jews. | |
| That's the definition that I was referring to earlier that Europe adopted into its code that criminalizes a wide variety of criticisms of Israel and that the Trump administration forced on colleges. | |
| You're not allowed to say that Israel is a racist endeavor, even though you can say that about every other country, including the United States. | |
| You're not allowed to compare the actions of the Israeli government to Nazis, even though you can compare the actions of every other government, including the United States, to Nazis. | |
| You're not allowed to say that people in the United States seem to have a higher loyalty to Israel than the United States, even if some of them come out and basically admit that they do. | |
| You're still not allowed to say that. | |
| You're not allowed to say the Jews are responsible for the killing of Christ, even though lots of people read the Bible quite validly to say that. | |
| Not that all Jews for generations bear responsibility, but the people who are Jewish worked with the Romans to kill Jesus. | |
| It's a sort of historical fact. | |
| That's not allowed. | |
| It's a censorship law that these idiots who work for CBS, and I kind of want to be generous because their jobs do depend on not pushing back on this. | |
| But Mike, if you're a journalist, you're not supposed to have political opinions, but you're supposed to have a commitment to certain basic values of journalism, like free speech. | |
| And there she is, this Israeli citizen telling us we can't have free speech anymore. | |
| We have to adopt censorship codes for her country. | |
| And they're like, oh, thank you so much. | |
| No pushback because CBS News is now a place where Israel criticism is not allowed. | |
| And if you think I'm being hyperbolic or speculative, I ask you to take note of this Wall Street Journal article from less than a month ago, November 20th. | |
| The title was, I want to blow this up: how Barry Weiss is trying to overhaul CBS News. | |
| Quote, according to executives familiar with the plans, foreign correspondent Chris Liv Say was among the staffers who were going to be let go as part of company-wide layoffs in the works before Barry Weiss's arrival. | |
| In an email to Weiss, though, he spoke of his affinity for Israel and suggested he was being, quote, bullied and isolated for his views, according to a person familiar with the matter. | |
| Weiss weighed in on the layoffs and spared Liv Say, people familiar with the move said. | |
| Other CBS News correspondents said that Liv Say wasn't bullied for having pro-Israel views. | |
| He knew exactly how to save his job. | |
| He told Barry Weiss, look, I know you want to fire me. | |
| I know I'm part of your layout plans. | |
| I know I don't fit into CBS News. | |
| Just want you to know, though, I love Israel. | |
| I love Israel. | |
| I love the foreign country that you love. | |
| And I've been going around CBS News saying how much I love it, how much I support it, how devoted I am to it. | |
| And I've been bullied. | |
| I've been stigmatized. | |
| And then magically, Barry Weiss removed him from the list of layoffs because the layoffs are not designed to get rid of poorly performing journalists or people whose functions are unnecessary or repetitive. | |
| It's designed as an ideological purity test. | |
| Not one having anything to do with the United States in which CBS News is based, but one having to do with the foreign country called Israel that CBS's new owner, David Ellison, and its editor-in-chief, Barry Weiss, are both fanatically devoted to. | |
| And if you had any doubts about what happened there, just look at the behavior of those people who called that Israeli woman on to tell us what we had to do for her country and just how different, I mean, imagine interviewing someone and saying, tell us what we can do to better serve you. | |
| Actually, you know what it reminds me of? | |
| When the Biden administration first got inaugurated and Jen Sackey became the press secretary, it was very obvious that Brian Stelter had a sort of, let's say, unhealthy, bordering on creepy affection for Jen Sackey. | |
| And he would do segment after segment about how the truth has returned to the White House press briefing room in the form of Jen Sackey. | |
| And he finally got to interview her. | |
| He was so excited. | |
| He like, I know he got a new suit for it that his wife helped him pick out. | |
| He like took the part of his hair that was left and like brushed it extra to impress her. | |
| I'm not kidding. | |
| He's in, he's he's interviewing, real journalist, Brian Stelter, interviewing on CNN the person who speaks for the president of the United States, the person to whom you're supposed to be most adversarial. | |
| And he had the opportunity to ask her about anything the Biden administration was doing. | |
| And his first question was, I know that you often have criticism of the job that we do. | |
| So I want you to tell us, what can we do better? | |
| How is it that we can help you help us? | |
| Like how, Jen Sackey, please tell us how we can serve you better. | |
| What can we do to please you more? | |
| That was the question Brian Selter asked of her because he was, of course, a Democratic partisan. | |
| And he wanted to understand how they could do a better job in servitude to the Biden administration. | |
| It was creepy. | |
| It was gross. | |
| It was unjournalistic. | |
| But at least he was saying that about his own government. | |
| These CBS news people who now work for David Ellison and Barry Weiss are saying exactly the same thing. | |
| Please tell us how we can serve you. | |
| Please tell us how we can change our laws to please you, to help you, to protect you, to make you feel better and safe, even though you're not an American citizen. | |
| But they're not asking that of an American. | |
| They're asking about an Israeli and they're not asking about how they can serve better. | |
| The U.S. government would do bad enough. | |
| They're asking how they can serve this foreign government on the other side of the world. | |
| A government to whom or to which the owner of the network and their boss have made very clear their whole lives they maintain principal loyalty, which, by the way, is something that if I were on campus on American college campus instead, I'd be deemed punishable for anti-Semitism since you're not allowed to say, even though it's so blatantly true for so many people that a particular Jewish person has greater loyalty to Israel than the United States. | |
| This is the sort of thing that's happening. | |
| It's not new with the Sydney massacre, but it's unbelievably visible, which is why I wanted to take you through it and to see how desperate they are and then therefore how explicit it is. | |
| And as I said, there's other aspects to it. | |
| There have been members of Congress who have called for the expulsion of all Muslims. | |
| I'm talking about all Muslims, not illegal immigrant Muslims, not Muslims who say things critical of Israel that are deemed treason. | |
| I always laugh. | |
| I'm amazed whenever someone says, we don't want people in our country who hate the United States when what they've actually done is criticize Israel. | |
| And I always have to say, but Israel is a foreign country. | |
| They're not talking about that. | |
| They're saying all Muslims. | |
| I mean, the First Amendment guarantees freedom of religion. | |
| You can pick whatever religion you want and practice it, no matter how weird people think it is, or just have none at all. | |
| That's like foundational to our government. | |
| They want to eliminate that. | |
| They want all Muslims out of the United States. | |
| That's becoming increasingly acceptable in the Republican Party to say. | |
| And I believe part of that is the operation to try and distract Americans from the role Israel is playing, as well as from the other power centers that are ruining their lives and trying to focus them on a group of people who are basically powerless inside the United States. | |
| We covered that last week, so I won't repeat that. | |
| But that's a big part of this too. | |
| But the immediate exploitation of this by Israel and its supporters to order American and Western governments to censor the free speech rights of their citizens in order to criminalize protest against Israel or condemnation of Israel or activism against Israel after every other form of resistance or protest to Israel has been criminalized is something very alarming. | |
| And I say that, by the way, as a Jew too, who, despite the fact that I think anti-Semitism is incredibly weaponized, cynically exaggerated, I do think the biggest danger in spreading anti-Semitism is this sort of thing. | |
| You keep going around the world and telling people that they're going to lose their rights because some foreign government somehow has a lot of power in their country and is demanding it and directly going on television and giving out orders to governments to saying prevent your citizens from criticizing us upon pain of being prosecuted. | |
| Tell me what's going to spread anti-Semitism more than that. | |
| I can't really think of much. | |
| Other than, I guess, spending every day for two years blowing up babies in the name of a Jewish state. | |
| That probably fuels a lot of anti-Semitism as well. | |
| But that's for other people to worry about. | |
| My interest is in the protection of the rights that we're supposed to have and the way that they're being eroded, again, not in the name of serving the interests of our country, but of some foreign government that has really convinced itself and a lot of other people that they have the moral right and the political power to go around the world, no longer just issuing threat instructions, but accompanying them with explicit threats about what will happen to government if they don't instantly comply. | |
| And I think the more this backfires and the more the polling gets worse, the more panic and desperation you're going to end up seeing. | |
| Alright, we have a second second planned, uh, Alright, I spoke a little too prematurely That was actually my fault. | |
| We had a second segment planned, as we mentioned at the start, where I wanted to cover this article in Compact Magazine that was actually a great article about the effect of DEI policy on a kind of lost generation of very alienated, angry, | |
| resentful, primarily white men, although men of different races as well, and the kind of not just misguided effects of well-intentioned DEI policies, but the kind of sinister motives behind a lot of them. | |
| It was a very in-depth, provocative article. | |
| It's been something that's been widely discussed. | |
| I think the article did a great job framing it. | |
| I don't want to rush through it. | |
| And as I said, we're probably going to have a guest or two on who has worked on this more than I have. | |
| I've thought about it a lot. | |
| I think it informs a lot of different things, including a lot of political sentiments that people struggle to understand about the United States, about why certain views and people who express those views have become increasingly popular, despite the views of a lot of other people that what they're saying should make them radioactive and not popular. | |
| So we'll definitely have a guest on for tomorrow night, or at least reserve the time. | |
| Tomorrow night, obviously, if you ask me to talk about Israel and free speech, I'm going to have a lot to say on it. | |
| And I did have a lot to say on it. | |
| And I think it doesn't leave enough time to do that second segment. | |
| So it's not very time urgent. | |
| I think it's worth taking the time to do it more in depth and quickly. | |
| So probably do a show or even two, a guest or even two this week to try and kind of extend that conversation that I do think is important. | |
| So that will conclude our show for this evening. | |
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