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Oct. 20, 2023 - The Megyn Kelly Show
01:29:21
20231020_biden-ties-israel-to-ukraine-and-anti-semitic-camp
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Appeasing Iran's Foreign Adversaries 00:14:25
Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show, live on Sirius XM Channel 111 every weekday at minister.
On this Friday afternoon, as tanks line the Gaza border, the world awaits Israel's response to the terror attacks launched by Hamas nearly two weeks ago.
It is harrowing to think about what the situation might look like come Monday, the next time we speak.
The Israeli military says that today it believes the majority of the hostages are still alive, some 200 of them, with 20 of the hostages now known to be children.
I should say we don't know for sure that they're going to embark on this ground invasion.
There have been some questions about whether they will actually do it.
It will be extremely complicated.
It will be extremely deadly, risky.
There will be an enormous loss of life on both sides.
And so there has been speculation about whether they're reconsidering it, given that we're almost at the two-week mark from the day of the attack.
However, the signs this morning would certainly point to an invasion at any moment.
Last night, President Biden delivered his second speech from the Oval Office during his term, telling the country the decisions we make today are going to determine the future for decades to come.
Joining me now, David Marcus, columnist and author, and Noah Pollock, contributor to the Washington Free Beacon.
David, Noah, great to have you guys here.
Thanks for coming on.
Let's just start with the president's speech, and we'll give the audience a little flavor for how it sounded.
The overall feeling of it was he wanted to tie Israel to Ukraine.
It's the same thing.
You got to fund them both.
We're fighting the same kind of battle in both places, and therefore I need $105 billion.
I mean, it's remarkable.
It's breathtaking in its scope, given how in debt we are.
And Ukraine's popularity is going down in terms of U.S. funding, but the support for Israel is very high.
So there's a question about whether that was a smart move.
I mean, it may help the Ukrainians.
I don't know how those who are in favor of Israel and backing it feel about the linkage.
Having heard that, here's just a bit of him trying to tie the two together in SOT1.
You know, the assault on Israel echoes nearly 20 months of war, tragedy, and brutality inflicted on the people of Ukraine.
We've not forgotten the mass graves, the bodies found bearing signs of torture, rape used as a weapon by the Russians, and thousands and thousands of Ukrainian children forcibly taken into Russia, stolen from their parents.
Hamas and Putin represent different threats, but they share this in common: they both want to completely annihilate a neighboring democracy, completely annihilated.
Hamas stated purpose for existing is a destruction of the state of Israel.
Meanwhile, Putin denies Ukraine has or ever had real statehood.
Put all that at risk if we walk away from Ukraine.
We turn our backs on Israel.
It's just not worth it.
Okay, I've got to be honest.
I was like, what?
Who?
What are we doing?
Like, I'm a linear thinker.
I like one strain.
Take me through it.
Make the case for Israel.
Then you can make the case.
It was back and forth.
I'm like, who are we on now?
Who needs it?
In any event, that's how it went for the entire time.
I'll start with you, Dave.
What did you make of his attempt to weave the thread?
Well, look, I mean, he's not entirely wrong to the extent that there is a connection between the two, right?
You have Russia, Iran, and China forming this sort of axis, and these things are certainly related.
But I agree with you that to so blatantly tie the obscene massacre that we saw in Israel to Ukraine funding, which is a very different kind of conflict.
I think people saw through it.
I mean, we know that he's going to be sending this funding package to Congress that's going to include both.
And so I think, as with most of the things that Biden does, there was no subtlety.
It came across as cynical.
And while I thought the speech as a whole was all right, I agree with you.
That was the big takeaway.
And it is going to be frustrating for Israel supporters to have to have Ukraine on their back.
What did you think of it, Noah?
Yeah, I basically agree with some of what you said here.
I mean, I think that there's a big similarity between the two, and then there's a big difference.
And I think the big difference is that the Hamas attack on Israel and the general Iranian campaign in the Middle East is genocidal in nature.
I mean, the goal of this is to wipe out the Jewish state and if they can, the Jewish people.
And so that is a sort of just a different type of effort by the Iranians than what Putin is doing in Ukraine, where his goal is territorial.
He wants to control Ukraine.
He wants to intimidate Europe.
He wants to challenge NATO.
And so I think the sort of the stakes for Israel, not to diminish in any way, if you're a Ukrainian, how horrifying this is to have your country invaded and children abducted and all of these things.
But Putin's goal is not to carry out a mass genocide of Ukrainians, whereas that is clearly the goal of Hamas, the goal of Hezbollah, the goal of Iran, the goal of the Houthis, and all of these other Iranian proxies that they've built up.
But the problem for Biden is that he's incapable of persuasion.
It's incredible that we're now well over a year into U.S. support for the Ukraine war, which I generally support, by the way.
I think the United States needs to uphold its role as a global power.
But the president has to make that case to the American people.
And I think one of the major reasons for the skepticism that a lot of people have is that he doesn't make a case of what our interests are, why we're doing this, why this is important, why this is money well spent.
And so, you know, part of the problem is the messenger.
It's also, he didn't mention Iran in his speech.
And that's been a continuing problem in this is that he never mentions the Iran word when that is actually the problem in the Middle East.
And if you're not willing to kind of say who your enemy is, your enemy, it's a dangerous sign because your enemy sees that you're scared and that you may not be willing to do what's necessary.
And so although I think some of the tactics are good here, I think it is good to make sure the U.S., you know, makes sure Israel has the weapons it needs right now.
For the president not to be able to identify who the threat is here is a big problem.
And, you know, there was a passing reference to the hostages, but what is with the ignoring of the hostages?
This just feels bizarre to me at this point.
I mean, what did we just pay?
Like a billion dollars per hostage in our deal with Iran to retrieve those six Americans?
And now we've got how many over there?
We don't know.
You know, 14, 17?
I'm not sure what the number is, not to mention the nearly 30 dead Americans in Israel.
And it's like, last night there was a passing reference.
We're pursuing every avenue to try to bring the loved ones up.
What?
Like, maybe he's got some deal going behind the scenes.
You know, he was going to pull it together when he had this meeting with the Arab leaders that they all canceled on after the hospital situation.
But I don't know.
For me, Dave, I'm used to in these kinds of situations, an American president coming out showing the strength and robust nature of the American president, the American military saying something to the effect of if you touch one hair on the heads of those Americans, you will feel the full force and effect of the American military sitting on those two aircraft carriers sitting in the Mediterranean.
Yeah, it's baffling.
It's, you know, Biden's take on all of this and, you know, as Noah said, this unwillingness to call out Iran, it makes absolutely no sense.
And you're right.
I mean, we've lived through hostage situations before.
And I mean, just the fact that like we don't know how many there are, right?
We don't know who they are.
We're not hearing those stories.
Biden and the Democrats really want this to all just be okay, right?
And I think the left in general is looking at this and being like, well, there must be some good solution.
Guess what?
There isn't always a good solution.
When anti-Semitic maniacs murder 260 people at a rave, right?
They're the ones who did this.
And there isn't some great way to tie this up where like nobody in Gaza will get killed and nobody in Israel get killed and we'll get the hostages back.
No, this is war.
This is war that Iran and Hamas caused.
And you're absolutely right.
Our commander in chief, you know, who's who's getting ghosted like he's on a dating app, it's completely and utterly unacceptable.
And we need to see some fire in the belly.
I haven't seen that from Tony Blinken.
I haven't seen that from Jake Sullivan.
You know, they're acting like this is a G20 meeting.
It's absolutely insane, Megan.
You know, Noah, I know you've been calling attention to this.
You first thought, okay, I like the original statement Biden, Mr. Biden did on Israel.
And he sent Blinken right over there.
Okay.
But now it appears more and more that Blinken, instead of working to pave the way for Israel to do what it must do, is trying to put up roadblocks for Israel to do what it must do.
Yeah.
And this is all part of the big problem here, which is that this is an administration that for three years now has been pursuing this Iran policy of essentially appeasing Iran, continuing the Obama policy, trying to get back in the nuclear deal, trying to operating under the idea that if the United States is just nice to Iran, they will be a responsible actor in the region.
That whole policy has just blown up sky high.
It is the most conspicuous failure of U.S. foreign policy probably since the Iraq war.
And everything that's going on in the Middle East right now is being orchestrated by the Iranians.
The Houthis firing missiles, cruise missiles, the Shia militias.
Maybe it are aircraft carriers, by the way.
That happened.
Maybe it are aircraft carriers.
Maybe right at us.
Right.
And so, but with Biden, you know, just to get to this point of like everything gets all of the strategy works backwards from the appease Iran goal, right?
So the reason they can't actually say anything intelligent about the hostages or do anything about the hostages when there's all sorts of things we could do.
Hamas is controlled by Iran.
If Iran felt an actual threat from the American president and the American military, they would call up Hamas and say, you need to let those people out.
And it would happen immediately because the Iranians are actually terrified of our military and they know Iran has no real conventional military.
They have no air force.
They have no real standing army.
We could devastate them in 45 minutes of airstrikes and they know it.
And all it takes is an American president to make a credible threat.
The American president could say to them in a way the Israelis can't, You have to let all these people out, or it's rubbed-dub time for you.
Um, and that's second aircraft.
Why doesn't he?
Why doesn't he?
Is it this appeasement of Iran?
The how did you put it?
Appease Iran?
Athama.
It's like a, it's an ongoing thing since President Obama.
We talked about this with Victor Davis Hansen yesterday, started in 07 when he was running, saying I'm going to do direct negotiations with them.
Charles Krauthammer said that is a gaff that he then turned into official policy, and we're still living with it.
Yeah, this is one of those, this has become like an article of honor and faith and pride for Democrats that Obama started this.
This was a major kind of transition in Democratic foreign policy thinking about the Middle East.
It was, we want to leave the Middle East.
We're going to turn Iran, the worst actor in the Middle East, into someone we can work with and who's, as Obama sort of hopefully, you know, speculated that Iran would become a responsible actor in the region.
And it's, it doesn't work.
It's a total failure.
It's now gotten thousands of people killed.
It's going to get many more thousands of people killed.
The Iranians are setting fires everywhere because they know that this president, for some weird reason, will not stand up to them.
And the reason he won't is that to stand up to Iran is to admit that the entire democratic foreign policy of the Middle East, going back to the Obama administration, has failed.
And they don't want to admit that.
So their pride is keeping them from doing the right thing.
I think there's one other key point.
I think there's one other key point here, which is that this is all dangerously predictable.
Putin and Iran and China, they know exactly what the United States is going to do because it's exactly what any liberal think tank would tell you to do.
We don't need Joe Biden in the White House.
We could pluck any expert from any liberal think tank and they would do exactly what our administration is doing.
And our foreign adversaries are taking advantage of that.
Say what you will about Trump's foreign policy.
And I don't know that it was particularly coherent.
I don't know that he left the GOP with a foreign policy paradigm.
I think that's part of why you see so much fighting in the GOP.
But our enemies didn't know exactly what Trump was going to do.
In fact, they really didn't know what he was going to do at all.
And that's a real advantage in terms of geopolitics.
Right now, for Vladimir Putin, for the Ayatollah Khomeini, there are no surprises.
What did you make, Noah, of him last night saying we can't ignore the humanity of innocent Palestinians who only want to live in peace and have an opportunity?
I was taken aback by it because this is the new thing to try to paint, you know, there's Hamas and they're bad, but you know, all the Palestinians outside of Hamas, they're peace-loving people who really just want to get along.
Well, there's more to the story.
Insulting Palestinians and Islamophobia 00:16:01
Yeah, it's, I think there's a couple things there.
Like one is that this is a sort of a sop to the left of his party, which is furious with how actually they, the progressives in the Democratic Party, they kind of feel that they're in charge these days.
And Biden is actually, I think the tactics here have been basically solid.
The strategy is a mess, but you know, he hasn't totally thrown Israel under the bus.
They are flying C-17s full of arms into Israel and making sure Israel has the arms it needs.
Like these are good policies, and they're actually really infuriating the left.
And so I think he's trying to add some of those notes as a way of trying to keep his left flank under control.
I mean, you saw that, you know, some goofball and the State Department resigned over Biden being too pro-Israel.
And you have this letter anonymously signed that's circulating on the Hill of Hill staffers who are, you know, Democratic Hill staffers who are outraged by the administration.
So I think part of it's that they're just trying to keep kind of their left in line.
And part of it also is, again, like this is where the kind of progressive narrative runs in smack into the brick wall of reality.
And the progressive narrative on the Middle East and on so many things is wrong.
And on the Middle East, this has been going back to the Clinton administration, the peace process, the two-state solution.
Everyone wants the same thing.
Everyone wants peace.
And they sort of refuse to admit.
It's actually kind of insulting to Palestinians.
A great number of Palestinians don't want peace.
They want victory.
They want to defeat Israel.
Israel humiliates them.
The existence of Israel, they feel, is wrong.
It is against Islam.
They feel that that is their land.
And they will fight Israel until they win or until they're defeated.
And so, yeah, I mean, there's polling data on this.
It is not true that, you know, in Gaza, everyone, most people want peace and they want to live with Israel.
There's actually really majority Hamas support in Gaza.
And you'll notice all the people out in the streets cheering when they were dragging those poor hostages back and beating them in the streets and humiliating them.
It's actually quite a popular policy until the bombs start falling and then they regret it, or then they at least start complaining.
I mean, who do they think elected Hamas?
It wasn't the Israelis.
It was the Palestinians.
Hamas made perfectly clear what it wants, and that is the destruction of the state of Israel entirely.
And you don't even have to look very far to believe it.
Look here in America at the pro-Palestinian protesters from the river to the sea.
They know what it means.
Their defenders want to pretend, oh, they're college students.
They know what that means.
It means the eradication of Israel.
And if you spend two minutes reading the paper statements that they're putting out and that their college professors are putting out, they put a perfectly fine point on it.
I mean, they make absolutely clear they want the eradication of Israel and Jews.
So you don't have to work too hard to figure out what they're after.
And I'm sure there are some Palestinians who would like peace, but it's not as he portrayed it.
Like most of them just want to live in peace next to Israel.
No, I think most of them don't.
Most of them want Israel gone.
The interesting thing with the Palestinian polling is that if you, and I've looked at this over the years, because I used to live in Israel and I used to do a lot of sort of Israel-related work.
And the interesting thing in the polling is, you know, if you ask a question like, you know, would you want a peace deal with Israel?
You'll get, you know, I don't know, 50, depending on whether it's Gaza or the West Bank, you'll get, you know, 40 to 60% of people say sure.
When you poll and ask, do you support or oppose a certain terrorist attack, like after Gilad Shalit was taken captive in 2006, I believe it was 2006, and you look at the polling and like, do you support the operation to abduct Gilad Shalit and hold him hostage?
Well, it was like 82% supported.
If you poll on, you know, do you support or oppose rocket attacks on, you know, on the Jews?
It's overwhelmingly supported.
And so that's really what you have to look at in the polling is the support for terrorist attacks and that support among Palestinians remains sadly, and I wish this wasn't true, but it remains very, very high.
And it remains very, very high among the students for justice in Palestine here domestically.
Go ahead, Dave.
Yeah, I was going to say, you can't maintain a guerrilla or terrorist operation without the support of the people, right?
We've seen that in Cuba.
We've seen that all over the world.
And I have some personal experience with this, thinking about the Americans, right?
And I think about this a lot.
I grew up in an Irish Catholic family that was very supportive of the IRA.
I was the six-year-old marching for Bobby Sands in Philadelphia in 1980.
And, you know, I grew up hearing about this, and we knew that the IRA killed civilians.
Now, the IRA did it differently.
They often had warnings.
I think the IRA was responsible for about 600 civilian deaths between 1970 and 94, which Hamas beat in one day the other day.
But the big difference was when civilians died, when Protestant civilians died in that conflict, we never celebrated that.
I mean, ever.
That was always treated as a tragedy, as something to be mourned, as a lamentable necessity in an asymmetrical war.
Furthermore, had the IRA ever done anything like we saw at that music festival, had they ever done anything like was done to those Jewish babies, their American Irish Catholic support would have evaporated immediately.
In fact, I think their Irish Irish Catholic support would have evaporated immediately.
And so when I see these kids on college campuses, this is very different to me.
And it scares the hell out of me when I see Ilhan Omar and Rashida Talib, you know, basically still pushing Hamas propaganda and unwilling to condemn the abject atrocities that we saw.
Megan, this is terrifying.
Me too.
I feel the same.
Like I'm chilled by the amount of college campus students and professors who are openly anti-Semitic.
And they can tell me all day long, no, it's about liberating Palestine.
But as I said a minute ago, you only have to spend about two minutes listening to their actual rhetoric to figure out that, no, what does that mean to them?
It means no more Israel.
And it's growing.
I'll show this.
I was going to get to this later, but I just want to show this now.
Do we have the video of the high school students, guys?
In San Francisco, we do.
I think it's thought 16.
Like, it's, I saw this.
These are young.
Look at, this is high school.
Look at this.
San Francisco.
And we could show 10 more of those, you know, that just came up over the last 24 hours, Noah.
Like the Israel hatred and frankly, the Jew hatred runs deep.
Yeah.
I have sort of a, I think for some of the Muslim students, there is a very specific anti-Semitic aspect of this.
But I actually have like an even darker kind of take on this, which is like, this is wokeism.
This is actually one of the frightening things about the past two weeks that, you know, I work a lot on education policy issues and kind of battling woke stuff.
And I sort of thought that I understood that I understood them.
And part of me kind of didn't take them very seriously, like these snowflake kids talking about their microaggressions and their trigger warnings and all this stuff.
And you sort of thought of them as like, these kids are kind of pathetic and weak and fragile.
And then you see them like screaming for bloody murder and like supporting the beheading of toddlers.
And you say to yourself, my God, like the rhetoric about decolonization, about by any means necessary, about resistance, like the jargon they've been throwing around over the past few years.
Well, okay, over the past 10 years, they really mean that.
And we know they really mean it because when there was actual terror, terroristic violence of the worst kind, Einsatzgroup and like World War II style Nazi killing, they thought it, they think it's great.
They mean it.
And so I think this is a huge turning point in the battles over the kind of woke DEI world, because I think this was an enormous wake-up call for a huge number of people who didn't really take these people that seriously, thought it was a campus problem, thought it was a problem among, you know, 18, 19, 20-year-old doofuses and their doofus professors who realized that like, actually, this is these people are bloodthirsty savages.
And they don't just want to kill Jews.
They would kill us too.
They would kill our society.
They want a revolution in which the kind of peace and prosperity of Western civilization itself is destroyed because they say it openly all the time.
And it's time for us to all like take their language seriously.
And I think we got a clean house in the universities.
I think we got a clean house in lots of places because these people are evil.
Honestly, it's like, I want to make sure Hillsdale stays alive and well.
You know, we got to keep the path open to the normal universities because in no world would I ever send my child to Columbia, to Harvard, to Penn, UPenn.
My God, these are all the top Ivy Leagues.
And by the way, NBC News poll just came out of college students.
86% say they are aware of the October 7th attack.
So keep that in mind when you hear these numbers.
86% are aware.
33% say that attack was either justified or at least not terrorism.
That wasn't terrorism of college students.
Dave, holy shit.
Yeah, indeed.
No, look, listen, Noah is absolutely right that this is intimately linked to progressivism, wokeism, political correctness.
Call it whatever you want.
When I wrote my first piece about this about a week and a half ago, you know, criticizing these college students, right?
I was working with my editor at the Daily Mail and I said to him, I said, what am I criticizing them here for?
What is the accusation?
Am I accusing them of being anti-Israel?
Am I accusing them of being pro-Hamas?
What exactly am I accusing these people and the New York Times and the Democrats and these people of doing?
And he said to me, what we're accusing them of is a bias in which if there is a conflict between oppressed brown people and oppressor white people, it doesn't matter what happens in that conflict.
The oppressed people are on the right side of it, right?
George Floyd riots, right?
Oh, well, we don't want anybody burning down cities and having people die in those buildings.
But of course, at the end of the day, they're right, right?
The trans issue, well, yes, of course we don't want women to feel uncomfortable in prisons and shelters.
But because the trans people are more oppressed than the women are, ultimately we have to come down on the side of the trans people.
It's exactly what's happening with regard to Israel.
And there's nothing that Hamas could do.
We know that now, right?
We now know that there is Hamas could poison the water supply tomorrow in Israel.
And these same people would say, well, they're on the right side of history.
Noah's right.
You have to rip this out by the roots.
The President Biden doesn't get that.
He's not understanding, as I think the rest of us are, that wokeism and believing that Jews should be able to live, they don't really go hand in hand.
We've seen that.
Like look at BLM Chicago, look at all these leftists, like what Tana Hisi Coates posted the other day.
Like it's coming apart, like the veil's coming off.
And he doesn't get it.
Otherwise, he wouldn't have gone here in his speech last night when he had the attention of the American public, Sat 3.
You know, and here at home, we have to be honest with ourselves.
In recent years, too much hate has given too much oxygen, fueling racism, the rise of anti-Semitism, Islamic phobia, right here in America.
And I know many of you in the Muslim American community, the Arab American community, the Palestinian American community, and so many others are outraged and hearty, saying to yourself, here we go again with Islamophobia and distrust we saw after 9-11.
I don't, no, it was so annoying.
This, this particular thing, what we're seeing on our college campuses is anti-Semitism.
That is the issue today.
Do not try to broaden it out and tie it to all your priors on how you think Americans are racist and bigoted and anti-Muslim and so on.
This is, It's part of the one of the most maddening things of when you see how progressives do politics, which is that they have a set of narratives in their mind about how the how they want the world to work and how they want the world to work in America is that America is a horribly racist society and it's an Islamophobic society and it's a violent society and oppressive, because these are all things that kind of, for I think for progressives, put them in the role that they want to play, which is like heroic, you know, protesters for justice.
And so it doesn't matter if the reality doesn't actually fit the narrative.
They will just continue on with the narrative.
And so the narrative is like there's a lot of Islamophobia in America.
Well, there actually isn't.
The FBI hate crime statistics just came out for last year and there was a significant increase in anti-Semitic hate crimes reported, vastly larger amounts of anti-Semitic hate crimes in America than against Muslims.
There actually after 9-11 was barely any Islamophobia, you know, actual actions against Muslim people in America.
But you have this desire to portray the country as racist and they will, you know, they will keep doing it.
There's not enough supply of actual racism or Islamophobia in America to keep up with the demand that like the left wants to portray the country this way.
So they just kind of invent it.
So you see Biden giving this speech where it's like he's denouncing Islamophobia that doesn't actually exist.
It's just, it's really, it's maddening.
It's just a bunch of lies, basically.
Well, that brings me to, he mentioned this horrific case out of Illinois where a six-year-old boy was killed by his landlord.
The six-year-old child was Muslim and the lunatic landlord, who was 70 stabbed him.
Now, obviously, we are dealing with an unstable person.
This is obviously the mugshot of the guy.
He looks like a lunatic.
He looks like he loses it.
Absolutely nobody thinks anything other than that's horrible when they see that case.
But he elevated it to an Oval Office speech as like, well, you know, like Hamas has done this.
And then on the other hand, we've got the, you know, Islamophobia here in America.
This little boy was just killed.
And I'm sorry, it's a horrific case, but these two things are not the same.
And I don't believe they belong in the same speech.
And I think he really is trying to both sides it there by saying like, you know, there is a lot of Islam.
It was a lie.
It was, it was not an apt comparison.
And it's, it's detrimental because we really are dealing with a surge of anti-Semitism in our country right now.
That is the problem.
Why can't he focus on that problem, Dave?
And just about it.
You remember what Norm McDonald had to say about this, right?
I mean, it was something along the lines of, well, I hope the Islamic terrorists don't get a nuclear bomb and, you know, kill 5 million Americans because imagine the Islamophobic backlash.
And, you know, he's absolutely right.
I mean, that's, that is the very first thing that would happen.
Look, I kept my powder dry on that story.
Obviously, any child dying.
And I think that we've all seen, I mean, we've seen so many images now of children dying that I really hope we don't become numb to it.
Weighing Pressure on Hamas 00:05:45
I literally, over the past two weeks, have had to take, you know, a half hour to go walk in the woods without my phone because it's horrifying.
It's just, it's horrible.
But you're right.
It is, it is both sides.
And I think after what we saw, I mean, I'll never get that image of the woman being kidnapped and looking.
I don't know if it was at her boyfriend or just her friends being like, help me.
Like, this can't be happening.
Please.
Like, where are they taking me?
Hamas wants us to forget about that.
And the longer that this goes on and we have these esoteric debates about, you know, the less they hope Americans will to support Israel here will be.
And we can't let that happen.
Those images have to stay fresh in our minds, unfortunately.
That's such a good point.
Thank you for making that point.
But it's been weighing on me too.
And I'm sure it's been weighing on you, Noah.
It's like the squad and their supporters and these Palestinian justice, whatever on college campuses, they're all trying to push this into a totally different debate now.
You know, Israel is an oppressor.
It's an apartheid state.
That's the real issue.
Move past the terror attack.
And yet, I've been saying this to my audience, and here we are almost two weeks into it.
And it's still the truth.
There's a heaviness to my heart these days that I didn't have two weeks ago.
The daily conversations about the deeply disturbing atrocities that Hamas committed is a lot.
It's a lot to deal with.
It's like a plague, you know, that I feel like we're under right now, where every day you have to face atrocities and that, you know, you have to look at them in the face and you have to report on them.
And then you have to just kind of keep going about your day, doing the news, taking care of your children, doing your job.
And it's incongruous.
It doesn't seem like something you should be able to function in the face of.
And yet, not only do these people want us to function in the face of it, they want us to move right past it.
Just get into the politics of it.
Yeah.
And they basically want to flip it and say, look at these terrible things that are happening and it's all Israel's fault.
And I agree.
Like this has been, I like wake up every morning and it's like, is this really the reality that we're living in?
Did this actually happen?
Has this been all a horrible dream?
And I have, you know, we have, I have family in Israel who's been affected by this.
And we, I have many friends who have been called up for reserve duty, who are running to bomb shelters, who are about to go fight in Gaza.
And it's, and it's, and it's an absolutely, it's like we're in a, in a horror movie here.
And the, the, the desire that I think that the anti-Israel left, the reason they're so fixated on kind of flipping the narrative is that they know that as long as people sympathize with Israel, Israel will have the kind of latitude and freedom to be able to fight back and that that will keep the pressure from the Europeans and from the Biden administration.
That will keep the pressure off and they will be able to actually go in and for once win a war.
Every time this happens in the past, they get about a week to fight or maybe a week and a half to fight.
And then the American pressure and the European pressure and the UN pressure and the media pressure just becomes so strong that they feel that they have to basically wrap it up.
And so that's what there's actually a strategy here, I think, for the progressives, which is to really bang this drum and to make Israel self-defense unbearable through media and political and diplomatic pressure.
And so I-you got to tip your hat to Hamas and its U.S. supporters.
They're very good at the thing you just said.
They know exactly what they're doing.
And they have such willing participants.
You know, we'll get we'll get it into the media helpers in more detail in just a second.
Let me squeeze in a quick break.
Yeah, yeah, go ahead, Nell.
Noah, make your point.
Oh, no, I just, and on this issue of like them portraying Israel, that the Palestinians is oppressed.
I mean, in Gaza, Israel left Gaza in 2005.
There was, there is not a Jew living there anywhere.
There's not a soldier living there.
They could have turned Gaza into Martha's Vineyard.
They could have turned it into Singapore.
They could have turned it into San Francisco.
They could have done anything they wanted with it.
And they immediately elected Hamas.
The very next year is when Hamas was elected in 2006.
The very next year is when Hamas staged that takeover and they threw the Palestinian Authority out and turned Gaza into a terror enclave with the support of the Palestinian people.
There were no Jews living there.
There was no oppression.
They chose to do this.
And so this whole narrative of like Palestinian suffering, the Palestinian suffering in Gaza is entirely of their own making.
110%.
Israel left 15 years ago, almost 20 years ago now, and they chose to turn it into an al-Qaeda ISIS Hamas bed.
And that's on them.
So no, they're not oppressed.
There's no oppression there.
Okay, stand by.
A quick break, right back, and then I want to show you an old interview that I did that I, you'll get it.
Stand by.
This instant knee-jerk thing to go to, let's make it a political dispute.
And we want to talk all about how Israel's done very, very bad things that led to this terrorist attack.
It's really Israel's fault.
This would be to me like right after 9-11 saying, okay, it was bad.
You know, the terror.
I mean, I guess the direct analogy would be you wouldn't even say that terror was bad.
You would just go right to, we deserved it.
America deserved it.
They put themselves in the position where they outraged people in the Middle East and they had this coming.
Breaking Shit in Schools 00:17:31
There was, there was one or two people after 9-11 who made those absurd arguments and they were excoriated for them.
No one was willing to entertain that kind of talk in the wake of a devastating terror attack that killed 3,000 innocents here in America.
One of the lunatics who made the argument at the time was a guy named Ward Churchill, a professor at UC Boulder.
And in one of my favorite interviews of my career, somehow my team managed to convince him to come on my show.
And it was spectacular.
The whole thing's on YouTube.
The whole exchange was well worth watching.
But I'll give you a flavor for how it went and how this university professor admitted he was feeling about the whole thing and what he was saying, but he was the outlier.
Here, watch.
You thought that the dead Americans were just like the Nazis.
However, you had nothing but praise for the 9-11 hijackers.
You called them courageous, even gallant.
Gallant?
Do you believe the United States ought to be bombed?
I think the United States, by its own rules, is subject to being bombed.
You can't answer the question.
Yeah, I have answered the question.
I think the United States is a bad thing.
Yes or no, do we?
If it does not comply, it opens itself up to it.
Bombing, that is.
It opens itself up to having done to it everything it does to anyone else.
I say that if you open yourself up under rule of law for reciprocation in kind, it's quite likely going to happen.
That was like out of a few good men.
Right?
He started stumbling.
He was about to say, you can't handle the truth, you know?
Truly, truly.
But that's what you did with somebody who sounds like these college professors today.
But there was just the one, maybe, like he made national news when he made those comments.
It was a huge deal.
Contrast that, Noah, to what's happening today on these university campuses with its professor after professor coming out.
You know, the guy Rickman at Cornell.
It was exhilarating.
It was exciting to see Hamas on those paragliders coming over to murder those kids.
Yeah, it's you look back at that, even that, and it's like it was a more innocent time.
And I mean, I think there's a few things here.
I mean, one is that this is what happens when, you know, there's just a kind of conveyor belt of lunatics who get fed into the university system and the universities make a conscious decision that they are going to bring people like that in.
They create entire academic fields like gender studies, like peace and justice studies that are these made-up disciplines that are made up explicitly just to have more radical leftist Marxists on campus.
So, part of it is just that, you know, whereas back then, you know, I don't know, a quarter of the professors had those attitudes, now two-thirds of them do.
So, there's just more of it.
It's also, I think, there is a piece of this where they're willing to say this about Israel and they wouldn't be willing to say it about America because Israel is a lot easier to bully, and these people are just a bunch of bullies.
Part of what's so frightening about the long-standing delegitimization and demonization campaign against Israel is that it's what it part of the real strategy of it is to create a situation in which, when something like this happens, you can then go and say, Well, the Israelis deserved it.
They got what's coming.
I mean, you know, either it's great that this happened, or it's just not so bad that this happened, or this is just what happens when you're an evil demonic country like Israel is.
And so, it's kind of this like writ of genocide that they create by attempting to inculcate students and young people and liberals with the idea that Israel basically doesn't have a right to exist and that all Israelis are legitimate targets.
So, that when something like this happens, you know, it ends up seeming kind of normal and typical to say, like, yeah, they had it coming.
You know, this is how things are handled there.
And it's absolutely terrifying.
They're one step away from, well, hurt people hurt people.
Oh, that's, I don't think they're even a step away from it.
This is their, that's like basically the message that this is occupied people resist.
Yeah, that's that's right.
But, but, but, but going back to what I said about American support for the IRA, you know, which was very real and which I still find to be sort of nuanced, I think, I think, Megan,
you're making the key point here, which is that what we saw on October 7th was so far beyond anything that we even imagined was possible that that's what shocks me about the college professors, that you're not even starting with, okay, obviously this is not acceptable, even though the cause is righteous.
And I guess my question is: if what we witness there is not acceptable, what's the limiting principle here?
And I think Noah's exactly right.
I think that what we, what Noah probably knew, and what people who keep a closer eye on this probably knew prior to October 7th, but which I didn't know, was that Hamas would happily kill every Jew in Israel to achieve their aims.
They would happily kill every Jew in Israel.
And I shudder to think that a lot of these college professors would agree with that sentiment.
And I don't know how you fix that because that's just pure evil.
That's so true.
How do you fix it?
That's not going to get fixed, Noah.
We're not going to, even if they wipe out Hamas, we're not going to wipe out anti-Semitism in the Middle East or in Palestine.
This problem's going to go on and on.
It's like, forgive the terminology, the phrasing, but it's almost the bare minimum Israel can do right now is to wipe out Hamas.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, and look, I, it's part of what's been so frightening about this is like you see, you know, if if Hamas, if there was a line that Hamas could cross that would cause Western leftists to basically say, okay, that's too, you've gone too far.
There is nothing that Hamas could possibly, there's nothing that anyone has really done in the annals of human savagery that is worse than what they did.
I mean, some of the things they did have not even really been talked about.
I mean, torturing children in front of their parents, cutting limbs off.
And I mean, just stuff that you don't, I don't, like, I try not to think about.
And so progressives basically have looked at that and said, okay, we're fine with that.
There's no scenario in which anyone can go too far.
And so I think the lesson here is that our Ivy League especially is a deeply poisoned place.
Parents need to stop sending their kids to these schools.
We have schools that are actually wonderful.
Ben Sasse and the University of Florida, he is doing an amazing job there turning the University of Florida into a sane place.
There's other schools in Florida that are being turned into sane places.
But my God, I don't care if my kids got into Harvard, Yale, Princeton.
I just wouldn't send them there.
I simply wouldn't do it.
And it's time there is a tendency among kind of the upper middle class in this country to be infatuated with prestige and to want to brag to their friends about the Ivy League school their kid goes to or the elite private school their kid goes to.
I think that it's time for people to kind of give that up and recognize that it's not just that these schools are mediocre.
It's that they're toxic and they're horrible and your kid will be indoctrinated with very, very bad, bad beliefs and bad values.
Stop sending your kids to these schools.
There's other choices.
Send them to a religious school.
Send them to Hillsdale.
Send them to the University of Austin, the new college that is getting off the ground.
Don't send them to Columbia.
What's that?
You're exactly right.
Grand Canyon University, that's one of our sponsors, and I love their mission.
On this front, we've been making a lot of references over the past two weeks to the Hamas Charter and its founding documents.
A guy I used to work with at Jones Day, Willis Goldsmith, who I love, he's a Brown alum and he's on the, as I call it, not another cupcake brigade.
He's not giving them one more dollar at Brown because of their anti-Semitism.
Very open.
They hired this lunatic at Brown, who I think runs their Mideast Studies department that Willis has been jumping up and down about.
The guy is totally pro Hamas.
And Willis wrote this Substack piece.
He's retired from Jones Day now, but he wrote the Substack piece all about this.
And he quoted some of Hamas's founding documents.
And I'll just give you a couple of samples.
All right, the Hamas Charter of 1998.
The preamble.
Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as others before it.
The state of goal of Hamas, quote, to raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine.
That's Article 8.
Or, and also the liberation of Palestine is an individual duty for every Muslim, wherever he may be.
Article 13.
It goes on, there is no solution for the Palestinian problem except by jihad in the face of the Jews' usurpation.
Then it goes on, the day of judgment will not come until Muslims fight Jews and kill them.
All right, you with me so far?
The day of judgment will not come until the Muslims fight Jews and kill them.
Then the Jews will hide behind rocks and trees and the rocks and trees will cry out, oh Muslim, there is a Jew hiding behind me.
Come and kill him.
Or, and then there's also Zionism scheming has no end.
Their scheme has been laid out in the protocols of the elders of Zion.
It goes on.
I mean, it's not just anti-Semitic, anti-Zionist.
It's a stated mission to kill them all, Dave.
It's right there.
Can you imagine?
You're not seeing the nuance there.
I mean, isn't it all so complicated?
No, I mean, look, they want to kill Jews.
I mean, that's all they want to do.
I mean, the people who support who support Hamas, they openly praise Hitler, right?
They say, well, Hitler had the right idea, but it's going to be, you know, the believers are the ones who are going to, you know, finally pull it off.
But they're very clear.
We should believe them.
But we don't because the Wooksters have this hierarchy of oppression and everything depends on where you fall in hierarchy.
And also, Dave, it just, this puts the lie to this bullshit about how it's like Israel's the oppressor.
That's what this is about.
You know, no, they are founded to kill Jews.
Go look at the charter.
They have one goal.
It's not two state, have, you know, it's the Jews need to be eradicated.
And it's, and listen, but Megan, that's why this is terrifying, right?
I'm only half Jewish and I'm a practicing Catholic.
My kid's only a quarter Jewish, though as my Jewish great-grandmother said to me, listen, you're Jewish enough for the Nazis, right?
I never lived in a United States where I thought that there were people who might want to kill me just because of my Jewish heritage.
I'm not so sure anymore.
Right.
Yeah.
This is something that's, it's like incomprehensible to Western people who we grow up in a culture and in a society that is kind of reasonable and materialistic.
And the assumption is that everyone basically wants to get along and, you know, have mutually beneficial trade and relationships.
And then you read something like that.
And I think that people in the West, when they read things like the Hamas Charter, just assume that they don't really believe that because there's no way anyone could actually believe that.
But they actually look very far to find proof that they do.
Just think about it for a second.
We're going to take a quick break, but think about the difference between that and we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal and the founding principles of the United States and of Israel, which look similar to ours versus those guys.
Okay.
That's what we're dealing with here.
We are not the only ones detecting what's going on on these college campuses, guys.
Some more reasonable college professors are feeling it themselves.
There was this guy who made news yesterday.
His name is Shai Davidai, and he's at Columbia.
And he posted a bit that went viral and he wanted it to go viral, where he was telling the students and their parents, don't come here.
Don't send your kid here.
He's from Israel, though he says he's an atheist, but he's outraged living in America as someone from Israel about the danger that now his, I think, seven and two year old are in and what's happening on his campus.
Take a listen to this guy.
I have a two-year-old daughter, a feisty two-year-old daughter.
She has two songs that are her favorite: Baby Shark and Shake It Off by Taylor Swift.
And yet, to the pro-terror student organization on campus here and at Harvard and at NYU and at Stanford and at Berkeley and at Northwestern, my two-year-old daughter is a legitimate target of resistance.
And none of the presidents of universities all around the country are willing to take a stand.
This is what cowards do.
Last week, last week, we had thousands of students chanting pro-terror.
They were celebrating the rape of teenage girls in a music festival.
Rape is never okay.
My amazing two-year-old daughter was now 18 years old.
I would never, never send her to Columbia because I know that she will not be protected there because the president of the university allows pro-terrorists to march on campus.
We would never allow, never allow the KKK to march on our campus.
People have asked me in the past few days, are you not afraid to speak up?
You're putting your job on the line.
You got it all wrong.
I am speaking up because I'm afraid.
Oh my gosh.
That was so powerful, Noah.
Yeah, that is bad.
And he's not wrong.
The other side has embraced thuggery and intimidation as the way they do politics.
And it's not surprising that they support terrorist groups because you'll notice the kind of the style of the activism on campuses and like that clip you showed in the high school.
They're not calling for like reasonable discussion.
They're not calling for a debate.
They're not calling for like education and facts.
They're not trying to persuade anyone with like the legitimacy of their cause.
They are intimidating people.
They are marching and they are doing it in a way that's aggressive, that's in your face.
I think this has become one of the frightening things to me about the left in America is over the, in particular, over the past few years, they've embraced this style of politics of like, let's get out on the street and let's break shit.
Let's intimidate people.
Let's smash things up.
It is deeply illiberal.
It is totally incompatible with living in a modern society.
But they like it because people, it scares people.
And these people get like, they get their jollies from scaring people.
It's exciting to them.
And I don't know.
It's like, it's very asymmetric because the Jewish kids on campus and like the non-pro-terror students on campus, they're not going to, they're not going to like punch these people in the face when they get in their faces, right?
Like they're not going to behave like them because our kids are nice kids and they're American kids and they're not psycho-lunatics.
And so it's like this unfair fight.
And so what you need to actually have is for the authorities on campus to step in and say, you're not going to behave like this on our campus.
We're not going to do like intimidation and go and march in the streets cheering on terrorism.
But they don't do that.
And the leadership of the campuses are absent.
They're absent partly because they support this and they're fellow travelers.
And they're absent also because these people are not leaders.
And the way you become a president of a university today or on the board of a university today is not by having principles and courage.
It is by being a weather vein and just going along with whatever and being sensitive to whatever people want and giving it to them.
Donors Pull Out Suddenly 00:06:39
And so we have a real crisis on our campuses.
And I just hope to God that students start leaving these schools.
No one should give a penny to any of these schools.
No normal person who is an alum of these schools should ever donate again.
There's a rank hypocrisy here too that I really think needs to be highlighted, which is that if any of the three of us were giving a speech tonight at Columbia University, right, the university would offer the students safe spaces, coloring books, puppies, right?
Because Megan and Noah, we're very dangerous.
I don't know if you know this, but people like us and Matt Walsh and Ben Shapiro, we're all very, very dangerous.
And if we were to appear on a college campus, that college would need to take significant steps to protect the mental state of their students.
Here, we have thousands of people chanting that they want to kill Jews.
Look, I'm not going to cut them any break there.
They're celebrating what Hamas did.
And there are Jewish students in their dorm rooms.
Are those Jewish students being offered counseling and a safe space and coloring books and puppies?
I don't see a whole lot about that.
So it's absolutely infuriating.
And we're just expected to take it.
It's bullshit.
And at the same time, at the same time, Dave, now suddenly these universities like UPenn have found their commitment to free speech.
You know, it's really important that we allow people to say how they feel.
Where were you during the BLM protests when there was a counter narrative coming out from heterodox thinkers like Glenn Lowry and so on?
Where were you during the whole trans, I mean, just last week, not UPenn, which is the Ivy League, but Penn State, they banned Riley Gaines from going to speak because she thinks that women are real and only we can be them.
Men can't be them.
Where was the amazing commitment to free speech then, Dave?
I mean, you and I have been on this show for how long now talking about this thing.
And now suddenly, they've seen the light.
Yeah, no, they don't believe in free speech.
Free speech fits in with all of their other hierarchies, right?
Go back to Occupy Wall Street.
I spent a lot of time in Occupy Wall Street, not as a protester, but because I was fascinated by it and I was writing about it.
People forget their government, to the extent that they had one, used something that was called a progressive stack, right?
So when you showed up at Occupy Wall Street and you wanted to speak at the General Assembly, remember, and they all did like the, you know, instead of clapping or whatever, the way that worked was you were scheduled to speak based on where you fell on the hierarchy of oppression.
So if you were a black trans lesbian, you were going to speak first or second.
If you were a white guy, you might, I mean, go get dinner or something because you're probably not getting on at all, right?
I mean, this is, this is how they operate.
Speech is only valuable when it comes from the oppressed.
So they don't believe in free speech.
I mean, they never have.
This is laughable.
And now, Noah, it's amazing.
I saw you call attention to this today.
We saw the same.
UPenn, again, back to the Ivy League UPenn, which is, I mean, they're like kind of ground zero for a lot of the madness right now.
Although, you know, they're getting a run for their money from Harvard and Cornell.
But UPenn, instead of being like, my God, we're deeply sorry for our lunatic professors and students who are terrorizing our Jewish colleagues and students, they're doubling down.
They put out a faculty senate statement in which they basically flip off these UPenn donors and I think chairman of their board who have said, as I've been putting it, not another cupcake, not a cupcake at a bake sale.
It's done until you have a course correction.
And even then, we'll have to see.
They put out this message.
I'll read you part of it.
We write to affirm our commitment to freedom of thought, inquiry, and speech.
Oh, it's so noble.
So glad you finally got there.
These values, it's literally laughable.
These values are being threatened by individuals outside of the university who are surveilling both faculty and students in an effort to intimidate them and inhibit their academic freedom.
These are three of the signatories here.
Let us be clear.
Academic freedom is an essential component of a world-class university and is not a commodity that can be bought or sold by those who seek to use their pocketbooks to shape our mission.
What do you make of it?
I mean, this is, this is like out of a Tom Wolf novel.
It's so perfect and they've got everything.
And it's also, it's, it's, it's, there used to, we early in all this, there was a phrase called crybully to describe these people that I don't know, it was like popular for a couple of years and then it went out of fashion.
And I actually would like to revive it because I actually crybully is the perfect term for this because their behavior is always the same, which is they're both victims.
Um, and they also want to like beat you over the head with a baseball bat while they're crying about how unsafe they feel.
And this, so this letter is like the, it's like this amazing moment.
I was actually surprised.
I tweeted the letter out.
Someone, Penn sent it to me and said, can you tweet this?
And so I tweeted it out.
And I was, I've been shocked at how it's gotten like a thousand or something retweets.
And I was shocked at how much people are paying attention to this and how much this resonated as a perfect emblematic example of everything that's wrong with the campuses right now, where here you have these professors.
Donors don't have any obligation to give money to the university.
These people give millions of dollars out of the kindness of their hearts because they had a good time when they went to college there or when they went to Wharton and they want to support the community and help other kids get scholarships and get educated.
And the entitlement that's here of basically saying to these donors, you need to hand over your money and you're not allowed to like weigh in or criticize us or have anything to do with how this campus operates.
Surveillance, surveillance, surveilling us what you're saying?
It's absurd.
It's absurd.
And also I found the undertone.
I mean, a number of these donors who've pulled out are Jewish and there was like this vibe in the letter of like, you Jews can't manipulate us with your money.
And it's like, hey, you know, like, no one, these guys are giving money.
They're giving millions of dollars as the charitable donations.
No one's trying to manipulate anything.
Detained and Pissed Off 00:06:06
You're just pissed off that you're not getting your way for once, you know?
And they're having a tantrum about it.
It's amazing.
They want the bench.
They're going to have to deal with it.
They want, that's right, to quote Elon.
Was it Elon Omar or one of the members of the money?
Yeah.
Yeah.
So that's the thing.
So like they're pissed.
These students are actually pissed that they're not going to get jobs with Apollo, you know, run by Mark Rowan, the guy who wrote the letter to U, Penn saying, that's my phrase, not another cupcake, but it's Jeremy Orton.
They're pissed.
They want jobs.
They do want to work in investment banking and at the hedge fund and at the White Chew law firms.
And they want to have their cake initiative too.
They want to be able to say Israel sucks and they should die.
But I work at Winston and Strong.
Look at me.
I work at Apollo.
I'm at BlackRock.
That's, well, guess what?
It's a no.
Well, they could always, they can always work for the New York Times.
I mean, there's still that.
It's not as lucrative.
Exactly.
It's not as lucrative.
But no, but seriously, you ask yourself the question, like, how did the New York Times and so many of these other news agencies foul up this hospital story so badly?
If a friend of mine, Armin Rosen, thinks it's the biggest fuck up in journalism of his lifetime.
And I think Armin might be right.
And you say, you know, I mean, imagine sitting in the newsroom.
You're in the newsroom in the New York Times.
Story comes through.
Oh, my goodness.
Israel just bombed a hospital in Gaza.
There's 500 dead.
The editor says, oh, well, we better get on that.
What's the source?
Oh, the source is Hamas, who just massacred 260 people at a rave on Saturday.
It's like, okay, well, that's good enough for me.
I mean, let's put it on it.
That's like, it's like running a headline that says the mafia does not exist and sourcing it to John Gotti, right?
Which, by the way, the mafia does not exist.
But I mean, this is the same nonsense.
And the reason that it happens is because those people go right through journalism school at Columbia or Harvard or whatever it is, land right at the New York Times, and they don't have the slightest fucking idea what they're doing.
I don't know.
He would not hire people who went to Columbia Journalism School.
He was a plus when you interviewed with him if you had never been to J school and certainly not at Columbia.
He knew back then.
You know, I interviewed with him when I was, I don't think, I guess it must have been 2004.
And he knew.
And look at us now, almost 20 years later, the rot that exists inside of these institutions, Noah.
This to me is a great debate about, you know, did they screw up or was this an intentional mistake?
And I come down pretty firmly on the side of like, they, I think these people knew exactly what they were doing.
I mean, there have been now 15 years of these Israel Hamas or Israel Hezbollah outbreaks of violence.
This little pattern has been repeated in virtually every single one of those conflicts.
I was over there during them and I remember, I remember all of it vividly.
And it's like the same word, like Groundhog Day here, where something blows up in Gaza or Lebanon.
The terrorist group runs out.
This is exactly what they want for their media narrative to make themselves look like victims.
And they take, they pull the dead bodies out of the rubble and they say, oh my God, look what the Jews did.
And the Western media just runs with it.
I mean, this has happened so many times.
And to your point, Dave, like Hamas claimed that 500 people were killed about 45 minutes after this explosion happened.
How do you, it took Israel days to count that many, to actually, you know, make it accounting for that many victims.
They had it.
And how do you count 500 bodies under the rubble in 45 minutes?
Right.
That alone, if you were an editor at the New York Times, you would have just been like, okay, let's pump the brakes on this one, guys.
But they didn't because it was too good to check.
If you have any doubt, and I'm sure our audience doesn't about the bias in the media, the Washington Post, you guys probably saw this yesterday, published a story with a photo about the hostages and in particular about this mother.
Hadass calderon on the phone, talking about how she had a concerned look, pen and paper ready.
Both of her children, 12-year-old son Erez and 16-year-old daughter Sahar, were at their father's house when Hamas entered their kibbutz after hiding in Israel forces showed.
Hadass's older daughter found an 18-second video circulating on social media.
It showed Erez in a black t-shirt being gripped by both arms and led into captivity.
The photos that accompanied this piece originally were captioned as follows: Hadass Calderon, a resident of kibbutz near Oz, in an apartment in Tel Aviv on Thursday.
Two of her children have been detained by Hamas.
Detained.
And only later, I presume when they got some nasty online feedback, did they change it to have been taken hostage by Hamas?
Detained.
Detained is like what happens when you go through airport security with TSA and you beep.
You get detained for two seconds over to the side as they give you an additional wanding.
These are young children.
This is a 12-year-old, a 16-year-old who are probably being put through hell right now at the hands of these animals who have murdered kids just like them.
It's infuriating.
I mean, I'm sitting here shaking.
I really am, Megan.
I, you know, you say that, and I think about my 13-year-old son.
And I to know that this is what's happening to your child.
I can't imagine that level of horror.
And the responsibility that you have as a journalist, when people are experiencing this kind of pain, to mock that pain, to humiliate the victims in that way, it is absolutely unconscionable.
And I don't care if they change the caption.
Whoever wrote that caption needs to be fired and never hold the newspaper again.
Yes.
There's no accountability.
Someone wrote it and an editor approved it and the Times printed it.
Sorry, the Post printed it.
They're interchangeable.
And there's been no accountability right now.
Credulous Mainstream Outlets 00:14:21
I mean, there won't be Noah.
They don't care.
But someone actually looked at that situation and said, they've been detained.
That came into their head.
It went out through their pen.
It wound up in print.
It's so vicious and so cruel.
And it's like an additional layer of cruelty.
And the way, and it's also the kind of meticulousness of it, of the lying and the need for like to get the lies in at every little level.
So you can't say in the photo caption, even just the truth that these are children who've been taken hostage by terrorists.
You have to come up with this euphemism for it to protect the terrorists.
The Washington Post had another one they did.
They put out this like digital presentation by a guy named Evan Hill that was about showing the different places that had been bombed.
And he just sort of casually says in there that Israel has been striking these targets.
And the targets include military installations and places of worship, as if Israel was just bombing mosques for fun in Gaza.
They weren't places of worship.
They were places of worship that also served as rocket storage and munition storage and like terrorist personnel barracks for Hamas.
That's why they were bombed.
But he doesn't say that.
He just goes, oh, yeah, well, they bombed places of worship to make it as if Israel is just being kind of cruel for fun, that this is some, you know, Israel is carrying out a war against Islam, against civilians.
And it's a lie.
They don't bomb mosques just because they're mosques.
They bombed a few mosques in Gaza because they were, Hamas was using them as military sites.
And this is, I think these people know exactly what they're doing.
I don't think Evan Hill really believes that Israel was just bombing mosques.
I think he knows damn well that there was munitions there, but this is part of the propaganda effort.
And these people should all be fired, but they won't be because the paper knows what it's doing.
And this is how they like to operate now.
They have to shame Israel.
They've got to get some skin in the game for people to think Israel is bad and barbaric the way Hamas is.
It's important that Israel be painted as just as demonic and barbaric as Hamas.
And so if you can say Israeli airstrike killed 500 at suffering hospital, you know, full of suffering victims, great.
Let's do it.
Our friends over at Washington Free Beacon, your place, Noah, they put together a supercut of some of the reporting on that and just how wrong it was.
And with the thumb, of course, just on the one side.
No one rushed to say, you know what?
This is probably Hamas' rocket kills its own people.
And history tells us the numbers probably overstated.
Did not see that headline anywhere.
So here's what we were seeing.
SAT 11.
Between 200 and 300 people were killed in a bombing targeting a hospital.
That's according to a spokesperson for the Palestinian Health Ministry.
The IDF is vehemently saying that they did not do that.
That was not their bomb.
The Israeli military at this point is not providing any evidence to back up its claims that this was a Palestinian Islamic jihad rocket.
Hundreds of people have been killed.
That is not really consistent with the kind of death toll that you would see from a rocket.
Hamas does not have the kind of munitions that could do this kind of damage.
The Palestinians are talking about 500 dead.
It is unlikely that a rocket, a crude rocket fired by a Palestinian group could cause that number of casualties.
Right.
So what's the next question, Dave?
What should your next question be?
It's usually the Hamas rockets can't cause 500 people to die.
So what, so their conclusion was immediately, so it's Israel.
What's the other possible?
As opposed to like, maybe 500 people didn't die.
Yeah.
I mean, listen, the news media is broken.
You know, Marcy has the song, Journalists Who Lie, and there's an awful lot of them these days.
And I really think that our entire industry needs to have a massive reckoning because something like 80% of Americans don't trust the media.
And I work in the media and I don't blame them.
We need a new set of standards.
We need a new set of rules.
The old ones are broken.
What these news outlets did running with the lies of Hamas terrorists with absolute total credulity is unacceptable.
And it's really bad for our society.
If we can't trust the news and the government, then we end up, all that does is help the conspiracy theorists and the wokesters.
It becomes, you know, this fertile breeding ground for lies.
And we need to fix it.
And right now it's not looking good.
You know, Noah, it wasn't just that super cut.
I mean, and that included CNN, included CBS, it included, you know, all the sort of the blue chip brands in media, if you ask the mainstream.
Here's NBC.
Now, I worked at NBC.
They have standards and practices.
Everything has to get run through the lawyers before it hits air.
And they allowed this reporter to come up Wednesday.
All right.
The bombing happened on Tuesday.
And by Wednesday morning, we knew we had heard the audio tape from the two Hamas guys.
We had seen all the radar.
We had seen the Al Jazeera video showing that the rockets came from Gaza.
So, and we knew about the hospital and that it wasn't 500.
We knew that.
That it was a parking lot.
It wasn't the hospital.
So on.
So they allowed this report to come up with no pushback.
Watch this, SAT 12.
But the matter of fact, that a rocket, according to the expert, a rocket that hit and killed 900 people cannot be a Palestinian rocket.
This is the argument that we hear and from the Palestinian side.
The magnitude, the explosive, the impact, according to the expert, that Islamic occupation is the one party responsible for that situation.
In the Apartheid hospital, there was a conference that was organized by doctors and by paramedics.
And around them and in front of them, there were hundreds of bodies of people who were killed.
So catastrophic situation that is getting even more catastrophic.
And people of Gaza are overwhelmed and saddened.
All right, Akram al-Sari.
Thank you so much and continue to stay safe.
Thank you so much.
Now, 900.
900 is the number there.
When we well knew by that point.
Go ahead, Noah.
No, it's incredible.
It's like, you know, it's amazing.
It's like, they saw that they had this opportunity and they were going for like they were going for everything.
And next year you had parking lot at that time or, you know, something like that.
This is an old story.
I mean, if people are old enough to remember the Jenine massacre myth from 2002 during the FADA, where CNN and a bunch of mainstream outlets went totally credulously with a bunch of Palestinian claims that the IDF had gone into Janine and committed a massacre of hundreds of civilians.
No such thing happened.
It was completely made up.
And yet that was the dominant media narrative in Western media for days.
So the other thing about this that's so maddening is like these press outlets, they should know better.
This has happened before.
This happens every time there's a war.
The Palestinians make up, there's a phrase for it.
It's called Pallywood.
They make up these atrocities to blame on Israel.
And it's called Pallywood.
It's been going on since Muhammad Eldura.
It's been going on since the Janine massacre myth, on and on.
And the fact that the Western outlets keep running with it tells me that they know what they're doing.
They're not just making mistakes here.
They're pushing in.
Hollywood, like Hollywood or Bollywood, Paliwood.
Like Hollywood.
Yeah.
Pallywood.
That makes perfect sense.
I love it.
There are these great clips of the guys on stretchers, you know, riding around with all the guys loading in the ambulances.
And then the guy gets up out of the ambulance and watches.
I've seen those guys.
No, these guys are very good at terror and they're very good at propaganda.
Those are their two biggest tools and they're very effective.
I want to stay on the media for another minute.
Here's, so I listen in the mornings, my audience knows.
I listen to Morning Wire, Dave, where Dave Marcus appears, doing great reporting.
And I listen to NPRs up first because I like to see what the left is saying too, right?
And I don't like any mind control over me.
I like to sort of understand what's out there.
And I, my jaw dropped yesterday morning when I listened to the up first on NPR.
So this is yesterday morning.
We knew everything.
The Europeans had already been saying that their best estimate on the number of dead at the parking lot, not at the hospital, was between 10 and 50, 10 and 5.0, not 500, not 900, as NBC had reported the evening before.
We knew it was a parking lot.
We knew that we'd seen all the evidence from the IDF.
Our president had come out and said, our Pentagon is saying it was the other guys.
It wasn't Israel.
It was Islamic Jihad.
And so all of that we knew.
The president said explicitly last night, it was them.
It was not Israel.
That's from our Pentagon.
Definitively.
Yesterday morning, listen to this report on NPR.
The Palestinian Health Ministry says around 470 people were killed in that blast.
Many, if not most, were children.
Israel blames an errant militant rocket, but Palestinians and the rest of the Middle East, including the governments here, say it was Israel.
And so the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza is on display every day that this war continues.
The South in these so-called safe zones aren't safe either.
NPR's producer down there saw kids being pulled from the rubble of their homes in recent days.
More information about the incident is emerging, but it's far from conclusive.
And the Israelis and Palestinians are still blaming each other.
You know, we just may never know.
That's the Palestinian radio.
I promise you, Megan, that that second voice that comes in, because these things get recorded before, right?
If you're listening to the daily, if you're listening, you're not hearing that live, right?
And so mistakes do get made because things will happen afternoon, you know, happen, you know, overnight or whatever.
But even that cleanup was ridiculous, right?
These guys love Joe Biden.
These guys think Joe Biden needs four more years as president and they think Joe Biden's lying to us about this.
This makes no sense.
It just doesn't make any sense whatsoever.
Your tolerance for like 25-year-old women and their up talk.
I listen to NPR occasionally on my drive home.
And it's like, it's so unbearable on like a cultural level.
It's always these like 25-year-old girls talking like this.
And then Hamas said, and it's unbearable.
It's totally unbearable.
And then there's, and then there's this woman, her name is Layla, who's like, and now we go to the Middle East conflict.
She's doing her level best to turn it into a 1-900 call.
Soundtrack of Subarus everywhere.
Just going to leave it at that for right now.
I've got to spend a minute on Ben Collins.
So Ben Collins is NBC's disinformation reporter.
And I think we just fairly need to change it to disinformation purveyor.
It's amazing what he's done here.
If you are the disinformation guy, this story is a gold mine.
This thing about the misreporting on the hospital.
This is what you waited your whole life for.
You could win a Pulitzer if you just deconstruct exactly how it went down.
No, this is what Ben Collins, and this is from Robbie Suave, who's been who posted a piece online, who's going after him squarely, saying he specializes in disinformation.
He got the 2023 Cronkite Award for excellence in television political journalism.
Okay.
So he points out this guy's tweeting.
Now, here's somebody who tweeted.
This is somebody named Jordan Klein tweeted.
This is horrific, but can we wait?
This is as it's breaking.
This is horrific, but can we wait a bit to see what actually unfolded before parroting the Hamas government that this was an Israeli airstrike?
There are conflicting reports the explosion was caused by a failed Hamas rocket.
Ben Collins responds, this is NBC.
I think people should know hundreds of people died at a hospital immediately, actually.
That's why I picked that headline specifically.
Then here's someone named Beth Balsam who tweets.
It's an absolute horror that anyone of good conscience can mourn over, period.
At the same time, these innocent victims were put in danger in the first place by Hamas's terrorism and their strategy to embed with civilians and may very well have died by a Hamas rocket.
Context is important, to which he responded, we don't know that yet.
What we do know is that hundreds are dead at a hospital, which this headline outlines.
You could keep going.
He's now on the defense of not owning any of it, trying to say that these are Fox News attacks and that he's not responsible.
And really basically, thank God for him, Noah, is his is his main takeaway.
Thank God for Ben Collins.
This guy is like one of the biggest clowns in the world.
And he's also a great example of how I have kind of a psychology theory around some of these progressive activists, which is that there's a lot of Freudian projection going on.
And so it makes perfect sense that like when you see someone parading themselves around as a disinformation reporter and a disinformation expert, you can basically be totally sure that what they actually do is promote disinformation and spread disinformation.
Because I don't know about you, but like I actually try to do the everything I say, everything I claim if I say something in an article or on Twitter.
Like I genuinely try to make sure it's true and accurate, make a good faith effort.
Like it would never occur to me to sort of advertise myself as combating disinformation because I don't purvey disinformation.
It's only someone with a guilty conscience who would go around saying like, oh, I need to, you know, combat disinformation.
So the whole fact-checking industry, the disinformation industry in the media is all like out of Sigmund Freud, in my opinion.
It's so true.
Like I've never heard Victor Davis Hansen come on and say, I'm really smart.
I'm very smart.
Trust me, how smart I am.
Or Jordan Peterson, you know, like, I'm very smart.
The Fake Fact-Checking Industry 00:02:08
You should listen.
They know they don't have to tell us.
They're like, we just listen to their words.
These guys, he knows he doesn't have the facts.
And so he's got to come out there and say, no, no, no, no, I'm a factual purveyor.
Trust me, trust me, trust me.
Suave points out, this is the same guy, a Dave, who downplayed the New York Post Hunter Biden laptop scandal.
He didn't think that was a problem with disinformation and 51 experts who said it's Russian disinformation, which we now know was itself disinformation.
And Ben Collins had no interest in it.
He denied that there was ever any effort to censor the lab leak theory of COVID-19.
This is who NBC is relying on as its in-house fact checker.
Yeah, I mean, look, Noah's right.
The fact-checking industry, whether internal or external, is just an abject disgrace.
And unfortunately, they have a big impact and they have a chilling impact because these organizations like NewsGuard or these clowns like Ben Collins, you know, they go out and they claim that this outlet or that outlet are spreading disinformation and this wasn't true.
And advertisers run scared from it.
And so I've spoken to editors who have had accurate real stories that they knew were true about climate change or about the trans issue or about one of these third rail issues, and they don't run it, right?
Because they say, look, if I run this, I'm going to get slammed by these people.
We're going to lose revenue.
It's going to get shut down anyway.
It's killing the news industry.
And I actually believe that the state of the American news industry is the greatest crisis that faces our country right now, because without it, without the ability of the American people to have some faith and trust, we can't do anything collectively.
I just want to show people, just as a reminder, as a result of this story, this fake news story that was completely botched by virtually everyone on the left, which, but, you know, that's the media, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the BBC.
Killing the News Industry 00:02:53
You could go down the list and, you know, the usual suspects.
We saw, we aired it the other day, all the protests.
Ongoing.
Look at Turkey last night.
This is out of Turkey.
Watch this.
It's unbelievable.
So for the listening audience, I don't even know, tens of thousands, I think, at least 10,000, I guess I'd say.
I'm just hard to estimate, but they are packed into this anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian rally.
Over in Malaysia, pro-Palestinian demonstrators burning U.S. and Israeli flags, as well as these pictures of Netanyahu.
That's super fun for them.
You know, no empathy, of course, whatsoever for those who have been murdered.
In Egypt, same.
Egypt's supposed to be like one of the more reasonable ones.
Is it?
In Egypt, you've got the pro-Palestinian protesters taking to the streets there.
Like the amount of anger generated by these news reports, we're still steeped in it.
And by the way, I mean, it's pretty interesting, Noah, that they didn't come out.
They didn't come out, these people, after we saw 1,500 dead Israelis.
They didn't come out to chant or protest the murder of anybody on the Israeli side.
They're just mad about this hospital bombing, which was not really a bombing.
It was a failed rocket by Islamic jihad.
Yeah, and they're not even really mad about that because the reality is that when other Arab regimes massacre their own people, as they have many times in recent memory, I mean, the supposed like people whose heart bleeds for Palestinians, one of the things that happened during all the fighting in Syria in the past decade was that Assad and Russia, they bombed Palestinian communities to smithereens.
They killed hundreds, I believe thousands of Palestinians in Syria.
And the BBC and the New York Times and the Washington Post, it was completely unremarkable.
There were no rallies in the streets.
There was no breathless media coverage.
Everyone was fine with it.
And it tells you something important about the way that modern left works, which is that the supposed concern over one of these incidents is not about the incident itself.
It's about who they can blame.
So blaming Bashar Assad, an Alawite, that's not that exciting.
Being able to blame Israel, an American client state, an American ally, a Western country, a Jewish country, that's very, very exciting.
So it's not actually about if a thousand Palestinians get killed somewhere.
They pretend to care about the Palestinians.
What's exciting is who they can blame.
Can they blame America?
Can they blame Britain?
Can they blame Israel?
That's what gets everyone fired up.
Pretending to Care About Palestinians 00:02:41
All right, before we go, I've got to ask you, Dave Marcus, one question about Jon Stewart, just off topic, but I'm curious to get your reaction.
Turns out his show, The Problem with Jon Stewart, is no more.
Single tier.
It debuted in 2021.
It lasted a total of two seasons.
According to the rap, it suffered a massive drop off in viewership during season one.
It had started with 180,000 homes tuning in.
By the fifth episode, it had dropped by nearly 80% to only 40,000.
Now we're in season two, which he said, you just wait until you see what I can do in season two.
What happened to you in season two is your show died.
The show's going away.
The New York Times says it's because Stewart and Apple had disagreements over topics that were to be covered, including AI and China.
That's actually kind of funny, if true.
Like Apple doesn't want reporting on China.
But I would submit that it's more likely as a result of things like this, SOT 21.
We have 98% of the young people who have gender dysphoria that they are able to move past that.
And once they have the help that they need, no longer suffer from gender dysphoria.
98% without that medical treatment.
That's an incredibly made-up figure.
He's a prick.
He's afactual and he failed.
What do you make of this?
He's one of the reasons why the news media is in the horrible state that it is.
I mean, his show was funny.
His show was cute.
You know, I think we'd all tune in and there were definitely good bits.
His bit defending New York Pizza, I think is still a gold standard of comedy.
But the other thing that he did and that the Daily Show did was that it pretended that there was only one reasonable viewpoint in the world.
At the time that he started, it was like anything against George W. Bush, right?
And so he appeared on the one hand like he was even-handed, right?
And then Colbert kind of like was play acting as a conservative and like this was all happening on this show.
In fact, he was convincing his viewers that there was only one acceptable worldview in the world.
And so we went from a media that used to have Crossfire, where a very smart liberal and a very smart conservative would argue with each other to the Daily Show where snarky Jon Stewart would just tell us all what to think.
So, you know, you'll pardon me if I won't be mourning the loss of his show on Apple, although I honestly didn't know he had a show on Apple.
So yeah, it was a failure.
Snarky Media Tells Us What to Think 00:00:31
Sorry.
Bye.
No one's in the market for your nasty disinformation that bashes uniformly one side.
By the way, on behalf of all real women everywhere who care about their children and the nonsense that he was just spewing, good riddance.
Guys, love you.
Dave Marcus, Noah Pollock, thanks to you both for being here.
Thanks so much, Megan.
And thanks to all of you for joining me today.
We'll talk more on Monday.
Thanks for listening to The Megan Kelly Show.
No BS, no agenda, and no
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