Luca, Firas, and Stelios critique the UK Labour government's rushed abortion amendments that decriminalize late-term procedures while leaving doctors liable, sparking fears of a black market. They celebrate potential US oil blockades against Cuba but warn of humanitarian fallout, then dismantle Benjamin Netanyahu's claims regarding Iran's nuclear program by citing British testimony of an almost-dealt agreement and exposing his pipeline proposals as delusional war profiteering. Ultimately, the hosts argue that Netanyahu's permanent preemptive war strategy ignores theological extremism and realpolitik, contrasting it with a need for prudence and domestic energy independence. [Automatically generated summary]
Hello and welcome to the podcast of the Load Seaters, episode 1379 for Friday, the 20th of March, 2026.
I'm your host Luca, joined today by Firas and Stelios.
Hello, everyone.
We're mixing it up a bit.
What is normally the Monday panel is now the Friday panel.
So now you don't know what to do, do you?
Wild things.
Yeah.
And today we're going to be talking all about the dark developments regarding abortion in the United Kingdom.
We're then going to be talking about what's happening in Cuba.
And we're also going to have a, I don't know what to call it, a light palate cleanser of a Friday segment talking about the theological differences between Israel and the West.
I think it's going to be spicy and nice, but also I want you to appreciate my Cuban attire.
Oh, you've come dressed for the occasion.
Yes.
All right.
Two announcements for you, ladies and gentlemen.
Well, actually, three.
Obviously, you can join us at three o'clock today for Radz Hour, where we're going to be having a fantasy parliament.
Now, Carl has been playing this all morning, chuckling to himself.
So I can assure you, it's going to be wildly entertaining.
We're also, I just wanted to, if that would have worked for me, but it's not.
So dragging along.
There we go.
Thank you.
Also, part two of my conversation with Harry on Chronicles is out now.
This is going to end up being a three-part discussion all about William Shakespeare's Macbeth.
And at the end of it, Harry and I were joking about the fact that our analysis of Macbeth is going to be longer than the play itself.
But it's one of the most famous and most wonderful tragedies ever put to stage.
And so there's a lot to explore there, isn't there?
And another thing just to say is, of course, you'll be aware by now we do have a live event at the Mecca and Swindon on the 11th of April.
And it's on a Saturday, so there's really no excuse for you not to be there.
So come join us.
There are tickets on sale to the general public, VIP tickets as well.
And there'll be all sorts of your favourite hosts, those that you tune in to enjoy.
And we'll be having a Radz Hour.
We'll be having a debate about Star Wars.
It's going to be really, really good fun.
So if you want to get in on it, tickets are on the website.
All right, then.
Abortion Legislation Debate00:16:02
Well, so, gentlemen, shall we just address the fact that whilst the Labour government are going around calling anyone who believes in common decency an extremist, should we just turn our eye to what the people, you know, alleging us of being extremists are actually doing with the United Kingdom?
Because we have here, so this is on the left, Stella Creasy, MP, and on the right, the architect for this new just awful, awful legislation, Tonya Antoniazi, MP for somewhere in Wales, I do believe.
And both of them are mothers, which makes it even more, I think, sickening what they've actually tried to do here.
And so let's just go through it with some clarity before we discuss what happened yesterday in the House of Lords, shall we?
So there is a crime and policing bill that has been going through Parliament towards the end of, sorry, last year.
And basically, an amendment to this was put forward by Tonya over here, which basically decriminalises women acting in relation to their own pregnancies in England and Wales.
So one of the things that people have been, you know, what about and sort of, you know, just trying to obfuscate it all with and make it unclear is they're saying, well, actually, the abortion laws in the United Kingdom are exactly the same as they simply were last week.
It's all, you know, through the NHS.
It's 24 weeks, which is already, you know, not good enough.
But frankly, you get the point.
That is what it has been basically since the 60s when the Abortion Act of 1967 was put through.
And this seemed to have been the settlement.
However, due to some antagonisms about an old Victorian piece of legislation back all the way from 1861, which was the Offences Against the Person Act, this basically meant that, of course, women, mothers to be, were rightly visited by police, investigations could be had if they took abortion into their own hands and all these sorts of things.
Now, this is, of course, not just against the very sensible Christian morality of Victorian England, but there are also real concerns here about safety, of course.
Well, obviously for the mother, the child would already be gone at this point.
But all of this is very, very dark.
And really, for my own personal feelings on it, isn't a conversation we should really be indulging in the United Kingdom.
All of this is incredibly dark, and it's all just gotten quite a bit darker because, as we can see, the Lords have moved to decriminalize abortion up to birth.
Now, this is not in the sense that you are, as a pregnant mother, going to be able to go to the NHS in the 39th week and say, I would like this.
They will turn you down and say no, say that's not legal.
But what it does is mean that the authorities cannot arrest you, they cannot prosecute you, and you cannot be imprisoned if you go and do this all of your own volition outside of the law in a way, which is absolutely maddening to think about.
An invitation to have very late-term abortions illegally outside the NHS.
Isn't that one of the side effects?
Yes, it's basically giving the law a license to turn the blind eye.
Essentially.
So when they would say that we want abortion to be safe, legal and rare, what they are doing is making it much more common, less safe, and more legal.
Excuse me, if they do this and they say, well, it's legal up to six months and now we're going to take it up to nine months.
How is that pushing people to the black market?
I'd say it's the exact opposite.
Because it's very, because it decriminalizes the mother, but it doesn't decriminalize the medical practitioner.
And since that's what it does.
And since the since it's actually very impractical for a mother at week 27, 28, 30, to have an abortion herself, she would need that assistance.
So she'd be able to go somewhere and get it, but claim that she did it herself, which means that it creates a demand for a black market.
The other thing as well that was all very dangerous about this was that when this initial amendment passed in the House of Commons back last year, the House of Commons passed the legislation back in June, despite it only having 46 minutes of debate on the issue.
And so it was rushed through very much at the last minute.
There was no real time for any debate on it.
And obviously, it goes without saying this was entirely by design, because once such an issue is put up to debate, it would naturally require a more robust defence for it.
But Baroness Monckton, who is a Tory peer in the House of Lords, did her best to come out very, very strongly against this and tabled an amendment to the bill in the Lords to remove the radical proposal, which she said was passed in the Commons without any evidence, scrutiny, public consultation or impact assessment.
And she argued that decriminalization actually put women in danger by removing the current legal deterrent against administering abortion away from a clinical setting right up till birth.
And peers rejected the amendment, however, in a vote of 185 to 148.
So just to be clear on this, when you want to make some kind of adjustment to your home, very often you'd have to get an impact assessment on what this does to bats.
When you want to build any piece of infrastructure, you will spend hundreds of millions of pounds doing impact assessment studies.
But when it comes to killing babies and exacerbating the fertility crisis that already exists in Britain, you do zero impact assessments.
So this is the sort of madness of this sentimentalism that animates the British government and the British ruling classes, where you have to have due concern for bats, but heaven forbid that you have due concern for babies.
Well, this is a point that I was going to bring up as well, because of course in Britain, you know, the natural disposition of the state, certainly throughout the entirety of my lifetime, has been for it to be, you know, ever-expanding, for its oversight, for its jurisdiction, for its power, to always be expanding and to put the private individual into more and more contact with the state as possible.
However, we see that when it came to this particular issue, all of a sudden it was, well, we need to make sure that everything just gets out the way so that the woman can exercise absolute sovereignty over herself, or she just takes all of this.
But also, so we're empowering the woman to make this decision whilst denying any sense of legal recourse against it, right?
So she's simultaneously absolute agent and also has no agency whatsoever, according to the way that it's all laid out.
Just to sort of add one point, in the legislation that you mentioned, it was crimes against the person.
So it was recognized by the Victorians in that horrendously backwards time, which it wasn't, that this is a person that you're dealing with.
The baby is in fact a separate person, which we know for an absolute fact because it has unique DNA that is not the DNA of the mother.
It is a separate person.
Now, that baby has been erased as a person in the law, more or less, and has zero protections, and any crime against its person is permitted.
And the same baby, I think somebody, Lander, might have made that point on X, you know, if it's born prematurely at 34 weeks, 35 weeks, and you kill it, obviously it's a crime, but in the womb, you're still allowed to kill it up until week 39 and a half.
Yeah, I was going to pull that tweet towards the end, but you're absolutely right.
But the peers rejected the amendment, as I say, 185 to 148.
And they also rejected another amendment that would have reintroduced in-person consultations with a medical professional before being prescribed medication to terminate a pregnancy, ending the so-called pills-by-post scheme.
Because when COVID came around and everyone was locked into their homes, all of a sudden you could just do a consultation for this on the phone as well.
And again, something that was laxed and rolled out under the cover of lockdown, which should never have been removed in the first place as a safeguard, is now just the status quo, which is as it always seems to come.
The Lords, however, supported Lady Thornton's amendment to pardon women convicted of having an abortion and remove their details from police databases by 180 votes to 58.
Now, one thing that I must stress, and I forgive me, I've not come with this particular point with any statistics other than just to say the fact that, of course, this will work for in the state's way for basically covering up a lot of the worst excesses of what happened with the rape gang scandal.
If you're deleting all of these files based on abortions from these sorts of things, it's a way to basically hide those numbers and the impact assessment, which is really horrible.
Let me ask you here, how is it hiding?
Because let's say if you say that the state, I allow abortion up to the ninth month, and when this happens, it's not in the black market, you are registering it.
And you can see that these things happen.
How is that erasing?
Because they're going to be erased from the police databases.
Yeah, they're going to be erased from the databases.
So, sorry, it's done this again.
Don't know why that keeps happening.
So, as you see, Right to Life here did quite a large write-up of many of the conversations that were happening in the House of Lords yesterday.
And I do think it bears going through some of them in just some detail.
So, I've written a lot down.
Baroness Moncton took exception to the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists' support for introducing this extreme change to the abortion law, saying that in their reasoning, the infant who, without the intervention of lethal drugs, would be a fully living person at that stage, if born, is completely unmentioned.
And it's as if this is in itself unmentionable.
Obviously, it's deeply distressing, as we have heard, for the mother to be questioned by the police in the aftermath of math of an illegal abortion.
This should be done with compassion and sensitivity, but the police cannot act as if it hasn't happened at all, which is what it is really granting permission to do.
She also went on to say, voice her support for Baroness Stroud's amendment, which would have required women to have the in-person medical appointments that I'd mentioned.
And the Baroness reminded the House that she had warned of the potential dangers of the pills-by-post scheme before it was introduced, stating that these warnings now proved to be prescient.
One of the examples that was given in the House of Lords was that by having the pills able to be delivered by post, what had actually happened in one particular scenario was that there was one particular mother to be very happily pregnant, ready to have her child, and someone else had gained access to these pills and basically spiked them with these pills, which is, of course, absolutely monstrous.
And so, yes, there is a very real danger there.
She continued saying that allowing these abortions to take place would allow traffickers and abusers to cover up the effects of sexual exploitation by coercing their victims to phone up and ask for the pills as well, which is absolutely true.
And says, what do supporters of Clause 208, which is what it is in, think the police should do if they discover, and I apologise for the graphic nature of the words, but it is, if they're going to do this, then this is a sort of conversation it forces us to have and put forward the stark reality of it.
What should the police do if they discover a dead body of a 39-week-old baby in a rubbish bin?
Like, what are they supposed to do?
Not investigate it, not ask the mother, because this clause means that they can't investigate it now because a woman is basically just acquitted of such a thing.
And as you point out as well, Ferras, just purely on the distinction, not over whether or not the baby could live, but simply whether or not it was already outside of the womb.
And the Lord Hogan Howe explained in committee that investigations would often still be required, even if clause 208 passed, as the police would need to investigate the circumstances, of course, of such full-term babies' bodies, of course, being disposed of.
And sorry, this isn't the easiest thing to prevent.
It's to present, it's absolutely terrible.
So we also have Samantha pointing out here as well that the Archbishop of Canterbury was present at this debate, but shall we hear what she has to say?
Decriminalisation of abortion is a question of such legal, moral, and practical complexity that I do believe it cannot be properly addressed in an amendment hastily added to another bill.
Consideration of any alteration to the abortion laws needs public consultations and robust parliamentary processes to ensure that every aspect of this debate is carefully considered and scrutinised.
So she came out against it in the end, which is a rare example of the Church of England coming out on the right end of an issue.
But her framing is, of course, I feel wrong, certainly for someone who is supposed to be of faith, the idea that it's a complex issue when surely it should be quite a black and white issue.
But she is absolutely right in saying that, of course, this was not an actual abortion bill that was put forward.
This was merely an amendment to a criminality bill.
And of course, it is being used by the most progressive voices in Parliament to, of course, smuggle in an agenda that is entirely without consent.
Alison Pearson, as she points out here, says abortion term limits, 12 weeks.
Germany, Italy, Greece, Denmark, Austria, 14 weeks, France, Spain, and now 24 weeks plus no penalty for a mother aborting up to full term Britain, vying for the infanticide cup with the People's Republic of China.
And again, just so we're not getting abstract about this, this isn't just words.
You know, this is life.
This is the most precious thing that we humans can hold to.
And this is a 34-year-old, sorry, 34-week, weak baby outside of the womb.
And as you can tell, it's absolutely confident and it has its entire life ahead of him.
It's strong enough to live.
Democratic Process Questions00:06:23
And this is the story of basically every life that never got a chance to happen across the West.
It's a deeply terrible thing.
And the reason that I put in this part from the House of Lords as well, and it being banned, you know, the hereditary peers are basically going to be abolished.
Now, this is not something I want to spend too long on.
It warrants really an entire segment in and of itself.
So I'll probably come back to you on Tuesday to talk about this.
But one of the reasons that I wanted to bring this up here and now is not just because the House of Lords have put through the legislation that we've just been talking about, but also because look at the way that the Cabinet Office frames this.
This morning's 700-year-old system of hereditary membership in the House of Lords was abolished.
Membership is now earned through public service and merit, not granted by an inheritance.
It's like, okay, but does that make the legislation more moral?
Does it make it more, does it make it more democratic?
Does it matter when the House of Lords are putting through legislation that is only supported by 1% of the British public?
How can this possibly be right?
This wasn't in Labour's manifesto.
They had no right to do this, no license to do this, no mandate to do this.
And no wonder they didn't put it in the manifesto because, of course, they knew what the answer would be.
And quite right, as to reiterate the point, as Lander says, Fairhouse, if a baby born one month prematurely and I suffocate it, that is murder.
However, a mother can now abort her child at eight months in the United Kingdom and face no legal consequences.
This was passed as law, despite only 1% of the public supporting it.
Is this really democracy?
Well, of course, it isn't.
A point about the House of Lords.
Chesterton said that tradition is the most important form of democracy because it is the democracy of the dead.
That the past generations who had experienced so many things and so many horrors and so much and gained from them so much wisdom passed down tradition.
And that tradition is democratic because it encapsulates the wisdom of a nation.
And he called it the democracy of the dead as well as the living.
And in his view, that is what true democracy is.
You respect tradition.
So these guys are attacking the past and they're attacking the future at the same time, forcing everybody into the eternal present.
Every day is day zero.
Every year is year zero.
And this is madness.
This is purely destructive.
I think that Chesterton is committing a category error there because tradition is 99% subconscious.
It's not something we think about.
It's something we do without thinking about it.
Whereas democracy is conscious decision-making.
You can make horrible decisions.
You can make good decisions, but they're conscious ones.
So I think that in, I mean, whether it's democratic or not doesn't mean it's right.
No.
Well, if it were a democratic process, it would have to be a sort of a sort of referendum or something, because this is not the kind of we are living in a in a situation where lots of parties have an agenda and people are choosing every four or five years in other countries about overall agendas.
But within these overall agendas, they can smuggle in policies that are incredibly unpopular and in that respect, undemocratic or not.
And Labour do this every week now.
Yes, that's an issue.
You could say that it's just.
No, no, I take that's all right.
I take your point.
That's my point.
It's just that they are smuggling lots of things that we don't know whether people want or not.
But even if they want them, doesn't make them right.
No, actually.
It doesn't make them wrong necessarily, but what people want and what they decide based on what they want is not the criterion of what's.
Well, exactly.
Just because the House of Commons voted through some radically progressive legislation that we know is totally out of whack with the sensibilities of the British public and it's been passed now by the House of Lords.
It's gone through all the proper official channels.
That doesn't mean that all of a sudden it's a good decision or a moral decision.
It's legalized murder at the end of the day.
And you can see here that it's an absolutely mind-blowing figure of almost 10 million babies lost to abortion since the original UK Abortion Act came into effect back in 1968.
And just to put that in clear figures for you as well, it is about 10 million people, foreigners that have arrived here since Tony Blair took power, you know, back in 97.
So we talk about the fact that, oh, we don't have enough people and we've got a net, our birth rate replacement is too low.
It's like only because we're constantly, as you say, pinning ourselves between eradicating our past, eradicating our future, and then just bringing in a whole supply of foreigners who bring innumerable problems as we chronicle here all the time on the podcast.
And so this entire thing is just such a deeply dark affair.
And this is not even me saying that, you know, in situations of rape, this is not me being categorical about the entire issue.
But this is me saying that this is clearly too much, should never been given, should never have been given license.
And I think that stuff like this doesn't get forgotten.
And when some people with more sensible morals come to power, hopefully a lot of this can start to be, you know, fixed.
Anyway, sorry, sir.
Cuban Regime Pressure00:15:34
Thank you.
So, Rumble rants.
Cookie Boy says, what way do the Greens vote as Islam only allows 120 days in exceptional circumstances?
don't know i mean i've seen i think it's less than 120 yeah i've seen very strange things coming out on it all That's Random Name says they've turned pregnancy into a survival game for babies.
The longer your mum is pregnant, the longer you should pray she doesn't change her mind.
And Cookie Boy also says, if a child is born prematurely but needs medical assistance, can the mother deny it on the same grounds that she would have aborted it?
Well, these are just simple questions that those in parliament didn't want to ask Cookie.
So, yeah, okay, Stelios, over to you, sir.
Yes.
Oh, you've got everything.
Okay.
Let me be certain that things are working and they're not going to stop working mid-segment.
Yeah, good idea.
Mid-sentence maxing.
Right.
Right now, the world's attention is focused on the Middle East, especially in Iran.
But there are other things happening and there are momentous developments that are about to happen in Cuba.
And this makes me very happy, I must say.
I'm an anti-communist.
I understand the dangers that are involved in particular operations, and also pressures exerted upon regimes.
But yeah, if the Cuban communist regime falls, I'm going to be happy.
Sorry, just no remorse, no hesitation, no reluctance.
Yeah, I think I'll be happy.
Right.
So there are lots of things happening right now that exert pressure on the Cuban regime, the communist regime.
And I must say that this is a very, in some respects, idiosyncratic regime, a communist regime, because you could sort of see why some of the Cubans would be a bit more prone to support it, especially due to the dictatorship of Fulgencio Garcia, who left with all the gold and the US dollar reserves in January 1, 1959, I think it was.
And generally speaking, There was a really bad regime that was comparatively worse to other regimes before they fell to communist rule around in the world.
But there has been a very annoying tradition of communists, especially glorifying Fidel Castro, Raul Castro and also Chegiovo.
It's almost like the gateway.
Yeah.
Dictator.
It's just sort of like, you know, the one that you can get into when you're young, wear the t-shirt, and then you can go into the more hardcore stuff.
Yes.
So it's especially annoying when the Chegiovara t-shirts is just, yeah.
Yes.
Right.
So let us see what is happening right now in Cuba and we should have a general geopolitical discussion about what may happen and when and why in some respects Trump may be taking maybe a bit patient with it.
Maybe a smooth operator in this, right?
Which is a bit ironic given the fact that he has started a blockade, an oil blockade on Cuba.
So here he is on March the 7th.
He says about Cuba at the Shield of the Americas summit in Florida.
Cuba's in its last moments of life as it was.
It will have a great new life.
That will be an easy one.
I don't know how easy that's going to be.
No, I doubt it'll be quite.
I mean, it wasn't easy just after the Soviet Union collapse for the Russia.
I mean, that was when they say it was the hardest for people to live between regimes, not during either.
And also, people don't exactly know who the opposition is because there is an opposition.
Especially, you know, there are some people in jail, political opponents of the Castro regime, but some of them are being released right now as a result of Trump's moves.
We'll see what happens.
But people are asking, just what's the next day going to be like?
There doesn't seem to be any sort of any sort of opposition strong within Cuba.
Anyway, let's move forward.
Trump's move with Maduro, the extraction of Maduro, he was playing the flaw machine where he took Maduro from Venezuela and took him to New York to have him close to him to spend some time with him.
He had a massive effect on Cuba.
Cuba is historically the biggest exporter of oil for, no, importer.
Let me rephrase.
Venezuela is historically the biggest oil supplier to Cuba.
That changed lately in the last years because Mexico was until recently, until the blockade, was sending about 45% of Cuba's oil.
38% is domestic production.
But now after Maduro and after the blockade, Cuba is strangulated as far as its energy sector is concerned.
And this has sparked protests that happen at night because protests, they do tend to happen in some cases, like there were protests in COVID-19 with COVID-19 and in some other cases.
But now lots of them are happening during the night.
You can see here, we don't need sound that you can see here.
People burning things.
Yeah, if we could mute it, that would be great.
But it's okay.
They're burning things.
And they are out burning the headquarters of the Communist Party in some provinces of Cuba.
Here they say it's the Morón, a province or an area in Cuba.
I hope I didn't get it horribly wrong.
So people don't know to what extent this is organic or not.
And this is always going to be a debate that is going to be raging.
And I'm sure that at some point, if the regime falls years down the line, there will be people, historians, who will say, well, perhaps there wasn't support.
It was all CIA organized.
And there will be people who are saying, no, people don't like communism.
It makes them incredibly poor.
And there is a sort of mythology surrounding Cuba.
You hear lots of Cubans who have left Cuba telling you it's a lie.
You hear this from lots of communist-affiliated people who go to Cuba to experience the myth and they go there and they say, well, I'm a bit unhappy with the extent of prostitution.
That's what I hear from almost every communist I know who went there and suddenly became an ex-communist.
Say, well, maybe it's not the paradise that you hear when you hear tourist campaigns where Cuba is supposed to be this scenic 60s Florida with the old cars.
Everyone's there happy.
Everyone's there singing music, singing, what's the... John Lennon's Mansion.
No, no, Buena Vista.
No, Buena Vista or the other song, what is it that I actually like it from Julian Glesios and the Juantanamera?
Oh, yeah.
That's a good song.
We have to give it.
We have to give it.
That's a good song.
Okay, we'll give it.
So there are mass protests that are happening in Cuba.
You can see they're fiery.
I don't know if they're mostly peaceful.
I suspect not.
Let's tend not to go together.
If it's fiery, it's not mostly peaceful.
Well, let's own it, Ferrara.
Let's own the CNN.
Let's own the CNN.
Here you can have footage showing this.
Now, let us focus on what happened.
The last translators from El País, the president of Cuba, Diaz-Canel, says that the Cuban government recently held conversations with representatives of the US government, and they want to seek dialogue and a solution to existing bilateral differences.
This is a sort of change in tone that you hear.
You didn't hear this before, but Trump is the kind of person who elicits that from people.
Be they Europeans or Cubans.
Well, especially just because of the geographical proximity of the two nations as well.
Yeah.
Here he is going on a rant about Cuba.
He says, I think Cuba in its own way, tourism and everything else, it's a beautiful island, great weather.
This is strategic and coherent and strategic rumbling.
I don't know if the strategy anymore.
I feel like it's just throwing stuff out there.
It says they're not in a hurricane zone, which is nice for a change.
You know, they won't be asking us for money for hurricanes every week.
I do believe I'll have the honor of taking Cuba.
That's a big honor.
Taking Cuba in some form, you know, taking Cuba.
I mean, whether I free it, take it.
I can do anything I want with it if you want to know the truth.
Right.
So he is definitely exerting pressure on Cuba in his increasing that pressure.
I've said before, because, you know, I think when it comes to Trump's speech, I tend to take it as the speech of someone who is engaging in negotiations at the time.
It's much more an expression of resolution at the time than it is the take of a cold analyst talking about a region.
He's in the game, right?
So Reuters says here, Russia says it supports Cuba after Trump says he will take the Communist Republic.
Well, it's kind of weird when you have a republic that you have, you know, you don't have that much of popular sovereignty, but that's me.
They are sending a, let me see where they say here.
They're sending a tanker.
I'll read it from here.
So they are saying that it exited the Mediterranean on the there's a there's a Russian tanker set to reach Cuba on March 23.
We will see if they will stop it.
And there was also a Chinese oil tanker that left from the Mediterranean on February 13 that hasn't yet reached Cuba.
So it looks like they are serious with the blockade.
Yeah.
We'll see.
Trying to alleviate the pressure.
Right.
So Russian oil tanker heading to Cuba amid U.S. economic blockade.
Yeah, it was in a different article there.
That's why I couldn't find it.
And here we have electricity failure.
We have Cuba's power grid collapsing and millions in Cuba have been left without power after the national electricity grid collapsed on Monday.
The country's power operator says.
Much of the island, including the capital, Havana, was plunged into darkness with streets only illuminated by headlamps and battery-powered lights on Monday.
And this is what is also taken advantage of by people who are protesting and burning headquarters and cities.
But this has all kinds of practical effects.
If you're in a hospital and the power dies, you might be as good as dead.
If you're elderly and you need to sort of live a decent life and the power dies, that kind of sentences you to either misery or death.
So what's happening here is that they're blockading something that is needed by pretty much every single civilian and starving them of power and using that as a power play to drive the regime out.
It's a terrible regime, but this isn't coming without a human consequence, right?
No, there are human consequences, and sadly there always are because we live in the real world and there is an element of tragedy that ideologues frequently tend to miss.
Ideologues who want to say this, either this is absolute good or absolute evil.
But I will say that perhaps this isn't something that happens just right now.
There are electricity failures across Cuba for years now.
It's not that they are the best when it comes to electricity provision.
So the question would be: if that is the case, well, are they augmenting an actual problem that must be addressed?
And possibly this is short-term bad consequences, tragic indeed.
There is always the element of tragedy in history that could yield very beneficial mid-range and long-range consequences.
Right, so Cuba confirms negotiations with the US as a country faces effects of oil blockade.
And let's see now, let's see now what Greta Thornberg is saying.
She seems to have flip-flopped a bit.
Right, so let's look at this because suddenly fossil fuel is good.
Let us watch this by the Atlas Society.
It is what we decide now that will define the rest of humanity's future.
And whether we choose to do that or not, if we don't, it will be a death sentence to countless of people.
And it is already a death sentence to countless of people living on the front lines of the climate crisis today.
We need to talk about what's happening in Cuba right now.
As the Trump administration is waging illegitimate wars across the world, killing countless of people, it is also strangling the Cuban people deliberately, methodically, and openly.
The pedophile Trump himself bragged about it, saying there's an embargo.
There is no oil, there's no money, there's no anything.
He said it like it was something to be proud of.
Well, you see that.
Well, to be honest, my biggest takeaway from that was just when she says the paedophile Trump is like, okay, so of all the stuff in the Epstein files, Greta, that's what you're going to take away from it all.
But also, I mean, she hasn't necessarily linked.
Well, she kind of has, but she is mostly the poster girl for no oil.
Yeah, yeah, of course.
Yeah.
But, all right, okay.
Geopolitical Transition Views00:05:40
Jeremy Corbyn here is keeping it real.
He says the United States is intentionally starving the people of Cuba with its illegal and barbaric blockade.
I thought, you know, he is just a miserable goon.
I thought communism was actually good and productive.
Why can't they have internal domestic production?
I understand that you need trade, right?
I understand it.
But if it's that great, how is it that Cuba is so bad at doing this?
Well, it's not because of Cuba, it's because of communism.
Well, also just the total, just doing away with the illusion of international law and the international order.
It's like it's an illegal invasion.
You know, they said this when Putin invaded Ukraine, like, oh, he can't do this.
It's like, okay, stop him.
You know, they're not going to do that.
So without.
Yeah, but if they throw bean soup on a Salvador Dali painting, maybe Putin's going to stop.
And maybe Trump's going to stop it now.
That's the green mindset.
Anyway, we have thousands of anti-fascists from different countries around the world continue to go to Cuba together with collected aid.
Well, the interesting thing here is that they're actually doing this meme, which I wanted to show you here.
It's Venezuelan socialism only failed because of US sanctions.
It says, so the only way for a socialist country to succeed is free trade with a capitalist country.
So routinely people are doing this, and it's a trick by communists.
It's like, well, true communism has never been tried.
Why?
In this case, because communism faces embargo by the other world, the non-communist world.
So let's see what happens.
One thing I will say geopolitically, and I would like to hear from both of you guys what you think is I think Trump is moving fast here, but he will let it simmer a bit.
He will wait to see what's going to happen in Iran, how long it will take.
And I think that he may be keeping this for an extra thing to show next.
Because Trump is very mindful of public image.
He's very media savvy.
And he does want his audience to have a win in their mind.
So I don't know how fast they're going to move in Iran.
Terms of geopolitics, what he's thinking about is securing the Caribbean completely and making sure that all trade between the United States and Latin America doesn't have to go next to what could potentially be a Chinese or Russian base, which is understandable.
There's the human element, which is that you're basically starving the civilian population to get them to rise up against their dictatorial rulers.
So, fair enough.
The price that he's willing to make Cuban people pay.
Whether or not it works out, the problem for Cuba was that it was being a bit too harshly exploited, shall we say, by previous capitalist regimes, which is why you get this regime which is both very nationalist in one sense, in the economic sense, socialist as well, and internationalist in that it wants to export the communist revolution, which, as we know, is a stupid idea.
It's like national socialism, international communism.
Kind of.
Which is, if you look at North Korea, that's exactly what it is.
If you look at what Stalinism was when Push came to shove, he turned to nationalism, right?
Especially when he got invaded and people were rallying for the international.
That's what I mean.
So, this is what you're getting here.
Do I hope they get rid of the dictatorship?
Yes.
The question always is: how do you manage the transition?
Because the transition in Eastern Europe wasn't that bad.
The transition in the Soviet Union was absolutely hideous.
And the kind of oligarchic class that raped Russia for a decade is exactly what gave us Putin.
So what alternative have you prepared?
And if the answer is, well, you know, we're going to employ these people as surf farmers now and reopen the casinos and reopen the degeneracy that characterized Cuba in the 50s.
Yeah, but let's say the degeneracy is still a part of Cuba.
It became a problem.
Absolutely.
The Greek Communist Party is organizing excursions in Cuba.
And, you know, they're the Pyongyang tours.
They're taking them along one street.
They say, hey, everything is great here.
Exactly.
They don't zoom out.
No, no, no.
And I know.
I'm defending the Cuban regime.
Just like with the Iranian regime, just like the only question is, are you going to end up unintentionally making it worse because you haven't thought this through?
That's the only legitimate question here.
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely.
On this.
All right.
All righty then.
Netanyahu Conflict Quotes00:02:57
Shall we move to the next segment and discuss the wisdom of Benjamin Netanyahu?
Now, the contention that I want to make here is that essentially all conflict, one way or another, is theological conflict.
And this is something that is very real because how you see the world and how you see right and wrong essentially determines your policy.
What do you think would have happened?
And here Netanyahu gave a speech in which, among other things, he said, he quoted an American thinker, a former Christian atheist, a bit of a leptard, shall we say?
Became Catholic again in the end of his life, received the last rites, Will Durant.
Yes, but while he was writing, so he was born Catholic, he was a candidate for the priesthood, he became a mix of socialist, sentimental Christian rather than actual Christian, atheist agnostic by his own description, and like Oscar Wilde, near death, he changed his mind.
That's not exactly what happened.
He became a socialist, then he went to the Soviet Union.
He stopped being a socialist in 1932.
And the book Netanyahu is quoting was published in 1968.
And I really want us to talk about the quote.
Also, I think you have the same outfit.
Well, yes, we coordinate our wardrobe every day, Benjamin and I.
We try to sort of, you know.
By the way, Will Durand has a really good reputation for being a good historian.
He isn't exactly considered elliptoid.
Hold on.
Hold on.
In terms of his historiography, yes.
In terms of how his wife describes his life philosophy, and in terms of when it was suggested to him, what kind of award do you want or what kind of work do you want to do?
His response was, well, let's work on eliminating all racial prejudice.
That was his view.
I haven't read him.
Perhaps you have.
I did some very basic research on him.
But during the period that he was writing, from the period that Netanyahu is quoting him, he was in the atheist phase.
But this isn't the crux of the issue.
The crux of the issue is I want to try to explain what Netanyahu is presenting and the worldview that he's presenting and what it actually means for policy, because that's what really matters rather than just this one quote.
And here is Netanyahu explaining himself.
Let's listen to him.
Technical Delegation Talks00:05:45
But in conditions of existential threats, there's a much greater danger in not acting.
What do you think would have happened if America did not act now?
Just imagine what would have happened.
In a few months' time, no more than a year, Khamenahi, still alive, would have ordered the beginnings of the new nuclear program and the reconstructed ballistic missile program to move underground.
Now, it'll take them a little time, maybe a few years, but you can't reach those programs.
And they develop intercontinental ballistic missiles.
Okay?
That means missiles that can hit Chicago and New York and Florida and Texas and California.
Oh, but they don't have it yet.
That's what people said.
Right, let's wait.
Just let them do it.
You know, just wait, wait, and let them do it.
You won't be able to do it.
So the argument that he's making here, essentially, is that this was a preemptive war, kind of like the Saddam War sold on chemical weapons, that he could reach the United States, he could reach the United Kingdom, the famous 45 minutes to hit Britain with chemical weapons.
What he's arguing here is that if the Iranians were left to their own devices, their programs would have been secured, and that means that there would have been no ability by the West to prevent the Iranians from perhaps at some point in the future acquiring a nuclear weapon.
And therefore, this threat should have been acted on now.
That's the mindset.
Now, factually speaking, Britain's national security advisor, Jonathan Powell, who had been Tony Blair's chief of staff, attended the talks with the Iranians.
The Americans during these talks didn't bring a technical delegation, which you would need if you were serious about reaching an agreement over something as highly technical as a nuclear program.
May I ask you that there had been an agreement almost reached, and that Powell's view was that the war was no longer necessary,
because what the Iranians had accepted was that they would not stockpile any nuclear material and that this would be under surveillance permanently with no time limits, meaning that the ability to acquire nuclear weapons by Iran was going to be gone and placed under permanent international inspections.
So just factually, what Netanyahu was saying here isn't true.
And the conclusion of this piece is quite important because what essentially the Guardian quotes diplomatic officials saying was that they believed that Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner had essentially been acting on behalf of Israel and this is why they were there and perhaps that would explain,
and this is my analysis, why they didn't bring a technical delegation to something that was this technical, to something that was this detailed in its nature.
So that claim isn't true.
And I just wanted to start with that.
Right.
So I want to start with questioning this, not because I want to say that the exact opposite is true.
Personally, I have seen footage of Iranians saying that they do want to develop nuclear weapons, and I don't doubt them.
But all this is based on, I want to ask you, this is based on a Guardian article that talks about the testimony of a member of the Tony Blair cabinet.
No, a current national security advisor of the Kirstarmer cabinet and a former member of the Tony Blair cabinet.
So if we take their testimony as true, then Netanyahu is lying.
If we take the testimony of the British guys who attended the talks with the technical delegation, which the Americans didn't send, and the testimony of the Omani mediators, who had every interest in avoiding this war, and who have every interest in avoiding a nuclear Iran at the same time on their doorstep, and who are seen as highly credible because they negotiated the 2015 agreement,
and they have been the main channel of communications with Iran for the better part of three decades.
decades, then we conclude that Netanyahu is lying, yes.
So if we take the view of the British and of the Omanis government.
Yes, who it's not the general view of the British.
Well, obviously, I mean the British government.
And obviously I don't mean the general view of the Omanis, Omani people.
I mean the people who are actually involved, yes, obviously.
I was just going to say as well, I, um, I mean, obviously I, uh, I personally haven't attended any of these secret meetings, so neither of I, unfortunately, but I, I, I would say that given the enormous ramifications of the diplomatic ramifications for what the British are saying here and the amount of strain that this has put on our diplomatic relationship with America,
Third Temple Eschatology00:14:38
I don't personally believe that the British state, which and again to differentiate between the British and the state, of course, the British state has behaved in such a spineless way for these many past years.
I don't think that they would say this and something so contradictory to American foreign policy if they didn't genuinely believe it.
Exactly.
That's just my opinion.
Exactly.
And so continuing with what Netanyahu is saying, because it's worth pausing here multiple times.
I think, and Americans understand this very well, because we're real partners.
I think that what has to be done is to have alternative routes.
Instead of going through the choke points of the Hormuz Straits and the Babu Mandib Straits, in order to have the flow of oil, just have oil pipelines, pipelines, going west through the Arabian Peninsula, right up to Israel, right up to our Mediterranean ports, and you've just done away with the choke points for forever.
That is definitely...
So this is, I would argue, another example of war profiteering here, where he's saying that instead of letting the oil and gas go by ship, it should go by pipeline to Israel.
And that means that just as Iran can blackmail the world through the Strait of Hormuz, actually it should be Israel that gains that capability because the oil and the gas should terminate at their ports.
This is what he's advocating here.
Plus, this is quite a delusional take on so many levels.
Firstly, the Arab states wouldn't want to have their oil terminate in Israel because that gives the Israelis enormous power over them.
Second, there is already something called the East-West Pipeline, which goes from the eastern province of Saudi Arabia, close to the Hormuz Strait, to the west of Saudi Arabia on the Red Sea, and that allows the export of oil.
But this pipeline, like any other pipeline, can be attacked.
So just doing it by pipeline doesn't solve anything because in 2019, the Houthi shut down that particular pipeline by hitting one of the major transmission stations.
Because oil, as it goes through pipelines, you need to maintain the pressure.
So every once in a while, you need to add pressure to the line to keep the oil or the gas flowing.
So that doesn't solve anything.
But he's advocating here war profiteering, more or less.
From the Saudi perspective, what they would want essentially is to send that oil through somewhere like Yemen, which goes directly onto the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean, and means that they aren't beholden to anybody because that part of Yemen where they would send it through is essentially under their influence already as things currently stand.
So this is a bit of a weird take to come up with in the middle of a war to say that the outcome of this war should be one that profits us economically.
And it is a bit gauche, shall we say.
Well, you don't, to be fair though, you don't engage in a war to end up in a weaker position when you do.
He doesn't say this, historically.
Who doesn't say that I want my enemies to be who doesn't say that they want to profit from geopolitical events?
Well, you want to profit from geopolitical events to some extent.
You want to also have a moral framework, which is exactly the point that we're going to get to here.
Did he say that this is the only energy avenue that is going to exist between the Middle East and Europe?
I'm just saying that this is a bit of an insane take for someone who understands geopolitics as well as Detaniahu does.
What I'm saying is that he's basically putting the Gulf and Europe at his mercy as an outcome of this war.
And in the same way that the Iranians would be able to blackmail the world with their nuclear weapons, as he hypothesizes, well, he already has nuclear weapons and would be in a stronger position.
Would there be such a surge in gas prices right now if such a pipeline existed?
Well, for such a pipeline… Because it sounds like he isn't saying something that is anti-Europe.
He's just saying, well, listen, the same way the Iranian regime can exercise pressure on Europe.
And that's a wonderful segue.
There could be an alternative.
Excellent segue.
I don't see what's going on.
Excellent segue.
That's an excellent segue.
Because here, what Netanyahu is saying is that the moral thing to do is to reduce dependence on the Iranians and to increase dependence on us.
One of the key political virtues at the end of the day is prudence.
Prudence means recognizing that the Iranians are an enemy, because they indeed are an enemy, and that all countries are immensely vulnerable to being blackmailed using energy in the same way that the Cubans are.
So you have to lower your dependency.
And therefore, you have to lower your dependency on potential enemies.
And therefore, if you're Europe, what you ought to be doing is developing fracking, developing nuclear, developing the North Sea energy reserves as the Norwegians are doing, creating a situation where your dependencies are actually on your friends where they exist, and where generally your external dependencies are reduced to the maximum.
Rather than replacing the theocrats in Iran who want to bring the Mahdi with the theologians in Israel, shall we call them, who want to bring the end of the world through building the third temple, prudence dictates that you develop your own...
Where does this come from?
From the end of the world with a third temple?
I did a whole segment on that about the Israeli religious right and Chabad and their views, Chabad being an organization of which Jared Kushner is a member, Steve Witkoff is close to them, Mark Levin, the big advocate for the war in Iran, he's part of that movement.
And they tie into the Israeli religious right, who believe that they should build a third temple in Jerusalem, and that would bring about the end of the world.
That's the kind of ideology that animates...
Sorry, the world won't end if they build a third temple.
Just what's...
it's not what you think it's what they believe that's animating them when you're analyzing people don't think they want i don't think they want to destroy the world I don't think the same about the Iranians.
They are animated by a vision of end times.
They're animated by... Millenarianism.
Yes, they're animated by eschatological visions.
Eschatological, yeah.
They are animated by eschatological visions.
Both sides, all sides, arguably.
The Sunnis want to bring it about one way.
The Shia want to bring it about another way.
In the same way that the Ottomans used to think they were just going to take the whole world in Islam and then that would just end the world.
And the Israelis have their own view on that.
And the Christian Zionists have their own view on that.
So there is this eschatological framework that these people are operating in.
And if you don't get their eschatological framework, you don't fully understand, you don't actually understand what's animating them.
You don't understand how they're operating.
So how am I affected if Mark Levin wants to build a third temple in Jerusalem?
How am I affected?
Let me explain to you how you're affected.
I can understand, I would be affected if, let's say, some radical radicals would get nukes and they could start blackmailing my governments and myself, everyone.
I can understand this.
How am I affected if Mark Levin wants to build a third temple in Jerusalem?
That's an excellent question.
Because the only way to do that, to build that third temple, it comes with a project of Greater Israel.
And the ability to get Greater Israel requires endless wars in the Middle East and requires the conquest of the Middle East at the hands of Israel, which is something that, as a consequence of that, would bring about massive refugee flows, would bring about enormous destruction, would bring about higher energy prices, would bring about warfare on your doorstep, would bring about Muslim riots in your cities.
You know what I'm saying?
It actually does affect you.
Why I'm a bit skeptical of this.
Yes.
Because I see a particular contradiction in the overtly anti-Semitic spheres online.
It's that, and I'm not, I want to say this, I'm not saying that Netanyahu is good, not saying he's bad.
I have been very much firm from the beginning that I'm not a geopolitical expert and I'm not talking about the Middle East.
And I am a bit frustrated with the way that things have changed, where from we don't, we generally tend to focus on some issues to suddenly we can't stop talking about the Middle East.
So, and that's, yeah, my frustration comes from there.
And the contradiction I see everywhere is from people who are trying to say, well, listen, look at the Islamization of the West.
It's the Jews.
On the other hand, they're saying, well, the Jews don't want Iran to have a nuclear weapon.
And look what they're doing by nuclear weapon.
Yeah, but if Europe gets Islamized, Muslims will get access to nuclear weapons.
So that's a massive contradiction that takes me take a massive step back and try to take everything like that with a pinch of salt.
And I'm not going to trend chase.
And I think that this is something that happens with English.
I'm in no position to speak for the anti-Semites.
Okay.
It's not my...
I'm not...
I wasn't saying anything.
It isn't my position.
I saw it.
And I'm not in a position to speak for it.
But I'm telling you why it seems to me that, and some people need to speak out about it because there is a climate of, you know, if you don't play the line, you're sort of being paid.
I was accused of getting 7K for saying that Greece should defend Cyprus.
I think that right now...
I think Greece should definitely defend Cyprus.
This is a ridiculous...
I think Greece should definitely defend Cyprus.
This is a ridiculous time we're living in when this kind of rhetoric takes precedence.
No, I'm with you.
So I just don't see, I just don't see it.
So what I wanted to try to comment on here is basically understanding Netanyahu's moral view.
When he says these things and we try to sort of explain them, we have to see what kind of worldview he holds and what are the consequences of that worldview.
And here is another enlightening segment.
Churchill said that democracies suffer from the slumber of democracies, as he called it.
And they only wake up, he said, they may wake up only when they hear the gong, the jarring gong of danger, is the way he put it.
Well, you're hearing the jarring gong of danger.
The jarring gong of danger is Iran gets nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles.
That's not a jarring gong.
That is an apocalypse.
Don't let it happen.
And the function of leaders is to stand and tell people the truth, even when things are uncomfortable.
That's what you have to do.
And you don't always see the danger in time.
But leaders are tasked with the task of seeing danger in time and acting on it.
And I hope that in time, people will see the wisdom and the courage of President Trump's decision and his leadership and the fact that we're working together.
America is not fighting for Israel.
America is fighting with Israel for a common.
So this is an important worldview here, because what he's saying essentially is the exact opposite of what George Washington advocated, which is that the United States shouldn't be going around finding monsters to slay.
It should be focused on defending itself.
Netanyahu's vision here is slightly different.
Netanyahu's vision of leadership here is that what the responsibility of the United States is to do is to identify threats before they become too severe and engage these threats preemptively, which is a recipe for permanent preemptive wars.
That's the conclusion of this kind of thinking.
That's actually the thinking of empires.
It comes back to Romans.
It comes.
You constantly see this all the time, not not always and not to the same degree, because there are differences in the perception of the threat.
So the objective reality is that Iran, even with nuclear weapons, is a deterrible state.
You can deter the Iranians and you can stop them from doing certain things, and just the threat of retaliation is going to be enough against a state like Iran.
And given that Israel has its own extensive nuclear program, it is capable of engaging in this kind of deterrence.
And so there's a question here of how do you want to deal with your neighbors?
And the answer from Netanyahu is that my neighbors are all my enemies and I want to keep them weak and keep them subdued.
Just War Theory Defense00:13:23
So now the Israelis are talking about the.
But we can because we have an alliance with the strongest power on earth.
Exactly.
Because we have this borrowed power from the United States, this is possible.
So Israeli officials are now talking about Egypt becoming a threat because Egypt is too dangerous and it might become a problem for the Israelis and so on and so forth.
And indeed, the Egyptians are massing their soldiers on the borders of Israel because they are afraid that the Israelis will try to kick out everyone from Gaza, as they said their objective was to do, and throw them on Egypt.
And now you're seeing Israeli officials saying that Turkey is becoming a threat.
And here you have the leader of the opposition and Netanyahu more or less saying the same thing, or not the leader of the opposition, a former prime minister, Naftali Bennett, saying that Turkey is a threat and that's becoming another Iran.
And Netanyahu is saying something similar: that he needs to build alliances against Turkey because Turkey is the next threat and is becoming the next Iran.
He has been saying this for a while now.
A year or so, since the Gaza.
Because Erdogan is trying to appear as the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood during the Gaza, not just the world.
During the Gaza war, he was basically saying that Israel is a demonic state.
That's a thing.
And as far as Turkey is concerned, they do want to build nuclear facilities.
Yes.
And given what just happened with Iran, the reason that Jesus Christ says, do not resist evil, it doesn't mean do not ever resist evil.
Where does he say this?
In Matthew 5.
The reason that he says do not resist evil, it doesn't mean never resist evil.
Obviously, you should.
But you should resist evil by doing good, not by becoming the kind of evil that you're threatened with.
That's the philosophical implication of it.
Hold on for a second.
Hold on for a second.
That's the philosophical implication of it.
Whereas the implications of what Netanyahu is saying is that the way to confront every potential evil in the future is to go against it militarily, using the borrowed power of the United States, meaning that the West ends up permanently responsible for securing Israel, meaning that the West is in permanent war against the Muslim world for the benefit of Israel.
Now, naturally, any Christian views Islam as a civilizational enemy.
Have a lot of time.
But that civilizational war.
But life is much more than war.
But that civilizational enemy can be dealt with in all manner of ways, including deterrence, rather than permanent active engagement in the heart of the Muslim world, permanent military engagement in the heart of the Muslim world, which is what Netanyahu is advocating here.
So there's something that we need to address here because I want us to see if we're going to talk about the quote.
That's what I want.
Let's talk about the quote.
And after that, gentlemen, we'll have to, because we have quite a lot of video calls to go through today, have to draw it to an end.
Let's go to the quote.
The kind of world we're living in.
In this world, it's not enough to be moral.
It's not enough to be just.
It's not enough to be right.
You know?
One of the greatest writers of the 20th century, someone that I admire a lot, was the historian Will Durant.
Now, he wrote many volumes.
I read most of them.
He also wrote The Lessons of History.
Very brief, 100-page book.
In which he said, well, history proves that, Unfortunately, and unhappily, Jesus Christ has no advantage over Jinnius Khan.
Because if you are strong enough, ruthless enough, powerful enough, evil will overcome good.
Aggression will overcome moderation.
So you have no choice.
If you look at the world as it is today, you have to be blind not to see that the democracies led by the United States have to reassert their will to defend themselves and to oppose their enemies in time while there's still time before the jarring gong of danger wakes them up and wakes them up too late.
So this is where it's really important.
And if you'll give me a minute here, please.
There is truth in this statement in that ruthless evil can sometimes overcome good.
The answer to that is just war theory and Christian virtues like justice, prudence, fortitude.
Instead of focusing on, for example, quarterly financial statements to make sure that you get the cheapest oil possible at the second that you need it, which is the kind of system that has been developed by highly financialized capitalism today, you need a just-in-case economic system that is based on prudence and on your ability to defend yourself.
The answer to the fact that the Muslim world dominates energy production and that Russia dominates energy production in partnership with the Muslim world isn't to go around endlessly fighting wars in the Muslim heartlands, in areas that are 90% Muslim, in order to impose your will on them.
That is never a legitimate answer, even from a just war theory.
A prudent Christian answer is to reduce your dependence on your enemies rather than endlessly go to war in areas that they fully control and that they have controlled in the case of Arabia for 1400 years in order to secure a country like Israel.
So the philosophical implications of what he's saying here are quite important because what you need to do if you're Europe is to develop nuclear, develop your own hydrocarbon resources, figure out a way to make coal clean, which is incredibly abundant all over Europe, including Western Europe, and use that as your source of energy and reduce your dependence.
And then you use conventional things like deterrence and a capable military in order to make sure that you are not vulnerable and that the wars that you fight actually fit the definition of a just war theory.
And preemptive war based on just in case that the Iranians might do this and might do that and then one day that'll happen, in fact, never fit the definition of a just war theory.
And this is especially important where somebody like Netanyahu ends up saying things that he is on a historic and spiritual mission and feels a great connection to the vision of Greater Israel, meaning that Netanyahu's own worldview requires him to be permanently at war with his neighbors, meaning that his neighbors will use the weapons that are at their disposal.
And in Iran's case and in Saudi Arabia's case, as we saw in 1973, that does include energy embargoes.
And as Christians, you have zero reason to commit to this mission of a greater Israel.
There is zero reason for it.
You could make a just war theory case for the defense of Christians in the Middle East or for the defense of Christians in Cyprus and in Greece.
You can make that.
Which is what Gladstone did back in the Victorian era.
Which that is a very viable case, and you can make it.
But you can't make that case for the building of Israel that requires its neighbors to be permanently in war and in chaos.
Yes, but I have to answer on this and address this.
Before you answer this, essentially, the problem here is a theological one.
If you don't have Christian morality and you don't understand what love your enemies mean, and part of loving your enemy is understanding their worldview, including understanding the fact that they will blackmail you using the energy that they have to harm you if you go against their interests.
Loving your enemies doesn't mean you surrender to them.
It means that you understand them first and correct yourself where you have a problem and where you are being unjust, and therefore fight them for what is good based on a just war theory framing.
That's what love your enemies means.
Here, instead of loving his enemies and saying, maybe I shouldn't be trying to turn every Palestinian town into a prison.
Maybe I shouldn't be trying to expel the Palestinians from the land that they are already on.
Maybe I should work on converting them rather than subjugating them.
These are all possibilities and ways of dealing with your enemies.
Netanyahu's view here is that no, we are going for the Greater Israel project, which by definition requires the depopulation of the Muslims who live in that area.
And regardless of what you think of Islam, and I think it's a terrible religious framework, I genuinely think it's a bad religious framework that is by definition an enemy of Christianity.
What the Israelis are offering isn't a good alternative.
And there is a theological disagreement here because Netanyahu's worldview, in essence, says that since they are ruthless, which they are, and since they are willing to inflict violence, which they are, I have to be much more violent than they are all the time in order to conquer them.
Not in order to defer the push their evil away from me and prevent them from inflicting evil against me, but in order to conquer them.
That's what he's thinking of.
And that theological disagreement underpins everything.
Because what Netanyahu is asking you to do is to support turning every building in Gaza into a pile of rubble.
And you see his ministers and you see members of the Knesset saying, actually, the Palestinians in Gaza should go to Ireland and to Spain if they don't like the fact that we've destroyed all of their houses.
Well, that's a problem.
That is a problem.
And that has a theological foundation.
And that basis of that theological foundation is the quote that he used from William Durant, which is that Jesus has no advantage over Genghis Khan.
I have to have every advantage over Genghis Khan because you can convert even Mongols just as the Roman Empire was converted.
Well, I mean, the best way to defend Mongols, yourself against Mongols, isn't to try to get them into a parliament and an assembly and start telling them, hey, have you considered this?
Obviously not.
Yes.
So that sounds a bit naive and unrelated to the people.
The conversion of the Germans have monks going and dying as martyrs.
It didn't happen by debating the Germans.
Yes.
So if Genghis Khan was developing nuclear weapons, I don't know if that would work.
Your criticism is based on the on the idea that he is lying about Iran having nukes, which I don't agree with.
But sorry, I what?
No, no, I'm just saying we're five minutes from the end and we have to wrap up possible.
I want to say something.
What he said there is the exact same thing that lots of people who are talking about hard power in realpolitik are saying.
That's exactly what he said.
The kind of outrage that you see against Netanyahu over that statement is not present when, for instance, someone on the Christian nationalist side, Joe Webb on the Christian nationalism documentary, said the problem with Christianity is Christians.
It's a feminized religion.
Christianity is fake and gay.
Well, it's completely wrong.
Yeah, but I want to see if people who were very vigilant in attacking this specific quote by Will Durant.
I promise you, if I see that, I will happily.
I want to see also when Tucker Carlson is interviewing Rupert Lowe, and 15 minutes in, they are saying about the realpolitik and the heart and the aspect of hard power when it comes to life.
I want to see if there was such an outrage against both Tucker and Rupert Lowe at the time.
So they were saying that the lesson of history, when they say that the lesson of history is that you always go down to realpolitik.
So that is an incorrect take on the story.
That is not an incorrect take.
That is exactly what they said.
That is what he said here.
Video Comment Standards00:02:47
So it seems to me there are double standards here.
All right.
Well, they'll have to wait for another time.
We can do another discussion.
Yeah, we do need to draw it to an end there, gentlemen.
Alright then.
So, okay, we'll go through some of the...
Oh, there was just a rumble rant, and then we'll get the video comments going.
No, in fact, we'll leave it.
It's just a Sean Bean question.
But yeah, sharp is an answer to that one.
Go on then, Samson.
You give us video comments, mate.
If they're up.
Thank you.
Is it giving you some trouble, mate?
Hey again, Lloyd Ceters.
I'm here with you in Lichfield.
Right here is Litchfield Cathedral.
One of the only cathedrals in England to have free spires.
And it has 113 statues as well.
You really do go to the most wonderful places, SD.
Very nice.
All right.
Next one, Samson.
Coming through in a second.
Is it there, mate?
Is it giving you some trouble?
I can see him, folks, clicking all sorts of buttons down here.
Desperately trying to get the six.
If anyone can be British, how can someone be diverse?
Progressivism makes no sense under scrutiny.
So they're desperate to keep those who break free from their silliness out of the limelight.
A recent example I can think of is how a marketplier wasn't allowed to walk the red carpet at the Oscars and was instead snuck through a side door.
Hmm.
I totally missed that.
I'll check it out.
But yeah, you're right about the contradiction.
All right.
Next one, mate.
Hey, James, it's been a long while since I uploaded a video comment.
Just wondering for this live event, will there be a chance to play some video comments?
Just asking for a friend.
No, I don't believe that there will be Cooper, but we're keeping join them here.
Nigel Faragaza's been in touch.
Little message for you.
The Big Six Three, well, that's no concern to me.
Happy birthday to Richie T.
And remember what you said last year.
Anti-Western Propaganda00:02:48
I'll be long gone.
By then.
I wonder if any of that actually, well, I mean, it's obviously a cameo, but I wonder if any of that resonates with him.
If he actually thought, yeah, Richard.
Thinking back to the it's all right, go on, mate.
Thinking back to the novel, The High Crusade, which is about a bunch of primitive crusader knights capturing an alien starship and flying it back to the empire from which it came.
The alien empire is actually a liberal democracy, which they defeat.
Because the whisper is so modernized, every decision has to go through like a million different people, and they just wind up dithering themselves into indecision.
While the knights just decisively act on whatever opportunity presents itself and flit about and capture starships from planet to planet, making alliances of opportunity with whoever happens to be there at the time.
That sounds like a wild ride, and I'm a huge John Rhys Davis fan, so I'll check it out.
Hey, Lotus Ears here in SoCal, we have a nice brisk day at between 35 and 34 degrees Celsius today.
And while I know, as cool and as pony as Iran news has been and other news topics, can you guys start talking about Cuba real quick?
Yeah, I think we're having an East Germany moment right now.
Well timed.
Well, you got your conversation about Cuba.
All right.
And I'll just wrap up with a comment or two from as we go around our segments.
Derek Power, Master of Chippies from Mind, says, in 58 years, you went through 10 SOMs.
I mean, when you put it that way.
And Luke West also makes a very good point here, which is that it's like they believe it's a birth certificate that makes someone a human in the same way that they believe it's a passport that makes someone British, which, yeah, good point, Luke.
All right.
Stellius, do you want to read some from your segment?
It's one or two.
And we should wrap up pretty nicely on time.
Yeah, Grant Gibson says thing about Cuba is that there is no rolling, there is rolling power outages on a good day.
This is absolutely worse than usual, but short-term pain for hopefully long-term gain.
I'm 100% with Stelius.
Thanks, Grant.
Hopefully, yes.
Zesta King, it's funny how Greta Thunberg thinks all is a good thing to own and use in regards to Cuba, but not when it comes to the West.
In fact, her entire career has been about how fossil fuels are bad.
What a hypocrite.
Yeah, I think there are lots of them because there is massive anti-Western propaganda taking advantage of people in the West, and she's definitely a part of it.
Yes.
All right.
Yeah, Firas, bring us home.
Sure.
Angel Brain says, a long comment.
I'm just going to read the first sentence.
Military Power Contradictions00:00:37
One of the fundamental problems with Israel is that it wants to act like a dominant military power whilst also appealing to be a nation that needs support of other militaries.
That's the fundamental issue.
But every single war that the Israelis get involved in ends up dragging other countries into it.
And the rest are a bit spicier, so I will skip them for now.
All right.
No honorable mentions.
So join us in half an hour, ladies and gentlemen, for Fantasy Parliament Lads Hour, which should be damn good fun.