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Oct. 23, 2023 - The Megyn Kelly Show
01:38:22
20231023_denying-hamas-atrocities-and-whiny-anti-israel-stu
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Hamas Militant Interrogation Video 00:05:09
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Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show, live on Sirius XM Channel 111 every weekday at Noon East.
And there are still people loudly and proudly denying or downplaying the atrocities committed by Hamas.
They want to change the subject.
They want to nitpick the truth.
We cannot let this happen.
This morning in Israel, authorities showed more than 100 international journalists raw footage of Hamas's massacre in an effort to counter what's become a quote Holocaust denial-like phenomenon.
They're right that we are seeing play out in America and throughout the world.
The footage came from body cams worn by Hamas terrorists themselves, some dash cams of innocents who'd been targeted, and so on.
One Middle East correspondent, Yotam Confino, detailed some of what he saw in a threat on X.
A Hamas terrorist screaming Allahu Akbar when he tries to behead a man with a shovel who was writhing on the ground.
Hamas terrorists entering one home where a young girl was hiding under a table estimated to be between seven and nine years old.
Then watching them shoot and kill this little girl.
Dead babies and children burned beyond recognition.
Just a small portion has been approved for release so far out of the 43 minutes that the IDF screened today, though we expect that they will be releasing this entire thing publicly.
The tape shown to these reporters depicts an unsuspecting driver coming under a hail of bullets from Hamas terrorists who were dressed like IDF soldiers in some of the instances.
Again, this is just a one-minute or 40-second clip released by the IDF from what was shown to those reporters earlier.
We do want to warn you: the video is graphic.
And there's plenty more of that.
Meanwhile, Fox News's Trey Yanks, who's been doing a great job over there, described what one Hamas terrorist told Israeli forces who captured him.
All right, so the Israelis got this guy and then interrogated him.
Trey got his hands on the interrogation video.
Look at this reporting.
In the video, you see a Hamas militant.
He is in a white cloth jumpsuit sitting across from an Israeli interrogator.
That interrogator is asking him questions.
He describes the preparation and coordination for this assault on southern Israel.
He talks about a telegram group that Hamas fighters had, and they were communicating as the massacre took place, sending videos as they got them, as they were killing civilians in their homes.
And this interrogator asks him about Islam, and he acknowledges that in the religion, you are told not to kill women, children, and elderly people.
But he describes what Hamas commanders told them to do.
He says that commanders said they could do whatever they felt like doing and that this was a suicide mission, telling them they should not plan on coming back.
He says commanders told them to step on the heads of civilians to behead them and do whatever they felt like.
He went on to talk about how Hamas and ISIS are being compared.
The interrogator asked him about this comparison and he agreed.
He said, we burned, we slaughtered and beheaded people.
And this interrogator was pushing this Hamas fighter and this militant to get more information from him.
No Limits on Atrocities 00:15:12
And he said, we became animals, things that humans do not do.
Trey reported some of what he saw as too graphic and horrific to even describe on air.
In another effort to counter the denials that we are seeing, or the dismissals in so many cases, a group of forensic pathologists who examined bodies of the victims in Israel went public over the weekend, saying they have seen, quote, many bodies, including those of babies without heads.
Countering one of the most pervasive elements of the denials happening now, they said it was, quote, difficult to ascertain whether the victims were decapitated before or after death, as well as if they were beheaded with a knife or simply had their heads shot off by rocket-propelled grenades.
This is the level they've been forced to reduce themselves to.
They've been forced to reduce themselves to this because people want to continue pushing back on, well, decapitated babies were they?
Was the point to decapitate them or was it incidental post-mortem?
What in the actual F?
And yet the reality of what happened has been well documented now.
They have been forced, the Israelis, to walk us through every last horrific detail.
Today we're joined by Rich Lowry and Charles C.W. Cook of National Review for our NR Day here at the Megan Kelly Show.
You can find all of their work by becoming an NR Plus subscriber and it's well worth doing so.
Start din egen bedrift.
Super enkelt.
Rich Charles, thanks for being here.
I cannot believe that here we are this much time after the attack and we're still having these debates.
The Israelis continue to have to release photos and forensic pathology reports on the dead babies and the dead children to try to convince people these atrocities happened.
It's willful ignorance, willful blindness at this point, or just outright convenient denialism by those who have an agenda, Rich.
Yeah, absolutely.
It's both of those things.
And it's because acknowledging the true unspeakable nature of this attack and all its just gory Quentin Tarantino-esque details is too hard because it would mean giving up some really important assumptions about the legitimacy of the so-called resistance to Israel,
the nature of Hamas, which a lot of these people just insist, you know, is a social movement that just happens to, you know, occasionally rocket Israel.
So they don't want to admit it.
And it also goes to the legitimacy of the Israeli response.
If you admit just how unspeakable this was, how no society anywhere would accept it, well, then you greenlight whatever Israel needs to do to deal with this problem.
They don't want to do that either.
And then there's anti-Semitism, anti-Zionism all mixed up in there too.
So it's a toxic stew.
And this is a debate that will go on forever.
I mean, there'll be revisionists among Palestinian supporting intellectuals about this attack and the reasons for it forever, unfortunately.
The details, and we do think it's important to talk about them, Charles, because of the denialism and the downplaying going on and for the reasons Rich just stated, they're horrific.
A father scooping up his two young sons to run to their outdoor bomb shelter.
The three had apparently been in their beds when the attack unleashed early in the morning.
They were still in their underwear.
Moments after they enter the shelter, a hand appears on screen tossing a grenade into the shelter after the family.
The father dies.
The boys exit severely wounded, covered in his blood, they believe.
Dad's dead.
It wasn't a prank, one says as they run back to their home.
I know, I saw it, responds his brother.
Why am I alive?
Another terrorist uses his victim's phone to call his parents.
Dad, I killed 10 with my bare hands.
Please be proud of me, Dad.
Their blood is on my hands.
Let me speak to mom, like a kid coming home with an A on his report card.
And the reporting goes on, and I'm sure we will see the full 43-minute video at some point detailing all of it.
This is what Israel is up against.
And yet almost immediately, we went to, well, free Palestine.
Israel's an occupier.
Well, I mean, I just want to skip right over that this was not some conventional war in which military targets were selected.
These were seven-year-old girls under tables begging for their lives who were shot to death or burned to death or worse.
Right.
And I think that's, at least for me, the key.
And that's why it's important to relate these stories, as harrowing as they are, because they obviate the debate over whether or not the grievances of many Palestinians are legitimate.
Now, I'm not especially friendly towards the Charter of Hamas, as you might expect.
But if I were, there would be no justification for this sort of behavior.
There is no link between whatever academic argument you can make and this sort of behavior.
I mean, let's take an easy one, an easy historical example, the resistance to Nazi Germany.
I'm from England originally.
We were alone for a while.
It seemed likely that Britain was going to be invaded and conquered by this great evil.
The British government did not do that in Germany.
The British government did not go in and start killing children and throwing hand grenades at families and gouging out people's eyes and beheading babies and so forth.
So whatever your view, whatever your view of the situation in the Middle East.
And again, I'm not accepting the premise because I think Israel has a right to exist and it's a civilizational outpost.
But whatever your view of that is irrelevant.
People walking around in quads and universities with signs saying free Palestine or making abstracted arguments need to reckon with what was done here, which is absolutely divorced from the overarching questions and needs to be condemned as such.
You mean resistance?
Is that what you mean?
That's how they want to characterize it.
Well, sure, sure.
I mean, I just think it needs to be said over and over and over again that the debate over the geopolitical question is totally irrelevant when we are talking about this sort of behavior.
I mean, in the United States, where we had a great evil in slavery, Abraham Lincoln rejected the actions of John Brown because he said this is not how we will engage with, you know, and that was a genuine problem.
And so, you know, I'm so bored of reading academics saying, well, look at this, which happened in 1987 or look at this border dispute.
No, It's important that we acknowledge all of these great, you know, barbaric acts because they make it clear the motivations of the people who staged them.
There is nothing that can be said that could lead to the acknowledgement or justification or acceptance of what Hamas did.
Yeah, so there's resistance and there's resistance, right?
Resistance, you can write, come up with pamphlets, you spread around.
You can write newspaper articles.
You can even wage a war of insurgency where your fighters shoot and engage in acts of war against the other side's fighters.
This is something totally different.
I will say, though, unfortunately, human history is that when you have young men in a situation where all the rules are off and they consider the other side bestial, this is the kind of acts that they engage in.
You know, Charlie is absolutely right about the British, you know, not doing it to the Germans.
Well, the Russians may not have benefited babies, but they raped their way, you know, all the way to Berlin, which is why it's very important to one, have a society that imposes and communicates civilized norms to the entirety of this population about there's certain things you don't do as a human being.
And very, very importantly, have rules and guardrails around its soldiers and how they behave themselves.
And that's what we have.
That's what Israel has.
If a U.S. soldier, an Israeli soldier did anything, even remotely, coming, not even coming close to what Hamas fighters did here, but just anywhere near it, they'd be in the dock, there'd be a trial, and they'd be in jail for the rest of their life.
Instead, these animals are celebrated by their society.
That's right.
And Rich, so we go through these details.
Here's just a couple more because they're also these Hamas defenders denying that Hamas terrorists would ever rape a woman.
I guess the beheaded babies thing.
Yeah, that.
Okay, yeah.
But we wouldn't rape anybody because that's against the Hamas charter.
That's against the Quran.
There's been so much evidence of it.
Here's just one from that forensic report.
No, this actually is from the video.
In a clip, a woman tries to decide if a partially burned corpse is her family member as the dead woman's head is mutilated.
The dead woman's dress is pulled up to her waist and her underpants have been removed.
Okay.
Then there's the Major General Mickey Edelstein says, we have evidence of rape, but we cannot share it, declining to elaborate.
Further, back to the Trey Yingst reporting today on the interrogation of the Hamas leader.
The guy says, we were told by commanders to behead Israelis and to cut their feet off that day on October 7th.
He said the commanders told us we can do whatever we feel like doing, that this is a suicide mission.
We probably shouldn't plan on coming back.
He said the commanders told them, step on the heads of the civilians, behead them, do whatever you feel like, and went on, as we said in the intro, to compare favorably to ISIS.
He agreed.
We are like ISIS.
We burned, we slaughtered, we beheaded people.
We became like animals.
We did things humans do not do.
Hopefully the memo will get out to these protesters who continue to deny that Hamas did any of this stuff.
Back at home, it seems like, and this guy's reaction is not the most important, but it's representative of what we're seeing on Met from many on these protests.
Dave Chappelle gets up to do a comedy routine in Boston, though he's denying he was in Boston, but it was well advertised.
And there are many people who walked out of his performance.
So I don't know what he's doing saying he wasn't there, but that's what's happened.
He shows up in Boston to do a comedy set.
And here's the piece I'm trying to zero in on.
In a perfunctory manner, he says, I don't agree with what Hamas did on October 7th, but, but, and then tears into Israel, blames it all on Israel, goes after Israel.
How dare they cut off electricity and water and food to Gaza.
They're engaging in an occupation.
I can go through the details of what he said.
And actually, I might as well because I have it right in front of me.
That he said, what Israel's doing, they're war crimes.
That, let's see.
Two wrongs don't make a right, he said.
Two wrongs don't make a right as Israel fights back against its dead children and its raped women and so on.
Somebody in the audience yelled out, shut the F up.
And Dave Chappelle yelled back at him, how dare you tell me to shut up at my own show?
And it was a Jewish guy.
And apparently this guy and several other Jewish Americans got up and walked out disgusted, saying, and this term gets overused, but here you can understand it because the Dave Chappelle crowd started chanting, according to these witnesses, go Palestine, go Hamas.
And they said, I've never felt so unsafe and fearful of what I was witnessing.
Here you can understand that word.
But the point I'm trying to get to, Rich, is I condemn it.
It was wrong.
October 7th is bad.
However, Israel.
Yeah.
So you can't condemn October 7th in the spirit of caveat.
And we don't know exactly what was said at the show, although we have these accounts you read from, but that sounds as though that was the spirit.
Oh, I don't like your methods.
Yeah, you shouldn't have done that, but.
And it said, but there, this obviously a huge moral problem.
And look, you can disagree with Israel's methods of waging this military retaliation or however they're going to do it, but they are not attempting to commit war crimes.
Everything says, we know from the past, they target legitimate military targets that happen to be placed among the civilian population to create civilian deaths in order to set in motion this whole machinery.
We saw it with the hospital lie last week where, wow, Israel's gone too far and Israel has to stop.
And we all knew this reaction would come.
But what's amazing, it started really in some serious force prior to a ground invasion, right?
The tanks haven't even rolled if they are going to roll.
And we already have people saying Israel has gone too far.
So one, there's no comparison to bombing a legitimate target and a heavily populated area that you prefer not be heavily populated and going and chopping off the heads of babies.
There's just, there's no comparison.
Humanity doesn't breeze by something like that.
Yes, but.
You don't yes, but the mass murder of innocent children that is targeted.
Yes, some children in Palestine are dying right now as Israel fights back for its right to exist.
Israel does, as far as I can tell, everything any nation on earth could do to prevent that from happening as Hamas does everything within its power to make sure the children get hurt and then to put it on TV, Charles.
Like that's the difference here as Rashida Tlaib cries these tears outside over what's happening to Gaza, not one word for the hurting or murdered Israelis.
Well, here's the other difference.
This wouldn't have happened were it not for what Hamas did.
So all of the complaints that are being made about what is very bloodlessly called collateral damage in the lingo are themselves the product of that decision by Hamas.
I haven't heard anyone suggest, because it's not true, that Israel was planning to start bombing, as it has been, to start wiping out Hamas fighters apropos of nothing.
Delaying Ground Invasion for Hostages 00:07:37
I mean, this is a response.
And presumably, we're not so morally obtuse that we can't examine the basic chronology here, which is that Israel is now faced with what is obviously a great threat, what is a threat from people who, as we have just established, have absolutely no limits and will admit as much.
And it has to deal with it.
If Hamas had not done what it did, there would be no response.
There'd be no secondary behavior.
So when people stand up and say, well, Israel needs to be careful or Israeli genocide or look at Israeli policy.
Well, that Israeli policy, which as you point out, is far more careful and deliberate than was Hamas, is the direct response to barbarism.
It is not barbarism itself.
And this is actually a problem that quite a lot of people who comment on our politics really struggle with.
There's that famous William F. Buckley line, you know, about the guy who pushes an old lady into the path of an oncoming car and the guy who pushes the old lady out of the way of an oncoming car.
And then the observer who says, well, both of them pushed old ladies around.
No, they didn't.
One of them was committing a crime and the other was trying to help.
So, you know, the way this is discussed is, well, Israel did this.
Yeah, Israel had to respond to something that if it had not happened, would have required no response and would not be occurring.
Yeah.
And then also these numbers, these numbers that they're putting out are not reliable at all.
You know, they keep putting off 500 children already murdered.
I don't trust one word that comes from these barbarians.
We've already seen their lives fall apart on the hospital bombing.
And so, but the press continue to just run with however many they want to say the civilian toll is or the children death toll is and print it as though it's gospel.
Go ahead, Rich.
Yeah, I was just going to underline Charlie's point.
It's not just that this Israeli response didn't happen in isolation, right?
It was prompted by this horrific terror attack.
It was a predictable response, right?
Maybe even certainly an expected response, maybe even the response that Hamas wanted, right?
It may be that having Israel come after them, hammer and tongs, just for the rest of the Arab world and the Palestinians and West Bank shows what tough fighters they are.
So it's not as though they did this terrorist attack and then thought nothing would happen.
They knew this was going to happen and maybe wanted it to happen.
And one of the mistakes Israel made in the run-up to October 7th was not governing Gaza with too strong a hand, right?
They pulled out back in 2005, 2006.
And one of the mistakes they made was, in effect, sort of trusting Hamas to maybe have been domesticated a little bit to, you know, they shoot some random rockets, but really they want to focus on their own affairs and Gaza.
And Israel believed that story, which is one reason they were taken so surprising by surprise, not hideous morning.
Right.
And now they're being told to go back to that status quo, where, all right, you trust, you trusted us.
Like, we're going to have to trust you.
We get it.
I mean, they have less reason right now than ever to trust that they can live next to these people who describe themselves as animals.
So what are they supposed to do if not obliterate Hamas?
I understand it has all sorts of worldwide implications.
I get it.
But if that were America, nobody would be questioning for two minutes that we need to eliminate this enemy in its entirety.
It needs to go.
They can't be reasoned with.
There's not going to be a peace pact.
And even if there were, no one could trust it.
These are not men of honor.
I think we can at least agree on that.
You mentioned in an earlier answer the ground invasion.
It hasn't yet happened.
We continue to be told that the men are being readied, men and women, the female soldiers as well, for ground invasion into Gaza over there in Israel.
Hasn't happened yet.
And now there's a question about whether there's something afoot to try to get more hostages out before the Israelis go in there with that.
We ended the show on Friday with the report that two American hostages had been released, Judith Ronnan, 59, and her daughter Natalie, 17 from Chicago.
They said they still have family members, eight other family members, these two, who remain hostages.
And we believe, according to Secretary of State Blinken, there are still 10 additional Americans who remain unaccounted for, and some of them are also being held hostage.
Joe Biden was asked over the weekend about whether he is asking whether he wants Israel to delay the ground invasion.
All right.
Now, it's very interesting because first, the first reporter yelled, how was your call with the freed Americans?
And he answers, it went well.
Then came this second question, which he answers.
Watch it.
How is your call with the freed Americans?
Should Israel delay the ground invasion until you can get more hostages out?
Okay.
Should Israel delay the ground invasion until you can pull the hostages out?
Yes, he says, only to be followed very promptly by the White House saying, wrong.
No, is the answer.
The president was far away.
He didn't hear the full question.
The question sounded like, would you like to see more hostages released?
Not should Israel delay the ground invasion until you can get more hostages out.
He wasn't commenting on anything else.
Weird because he could hear that first question with no problem and answered it on point.
And then on Sunday, CNN reported, oh, shock of all shocks.
U.S. seeks delay of Israeli ground incursion for more time for hostage talks.
For what it's worth, Israel, a senior Israeli official, denied that the U.S. is seeking that delay, saying we deny this report.
To me, it just underscores how feeble the president is, Rich, and how dangerous it is for him to be in this position.
Yeah, that would be a very weird place to give that answer, but he gave it.
And I just don't know.
You know, oftentimes in military affairs, when people say, or anything that we all comment on, they say they don't know enough really to have an opinion.
That feels just like punting it.
But this is one where legitimately, it's really hard to know without knowing the inside information that the real decision makers are dealing with.
Is there a real chance to get out these hostages at some acceptable price that wouldn't ultimately stay Israel's hand and they can go in afterwards?
Well, then maybe you do that.
Is Israel waiting just because the U.S. is pressuring them or are they genuinely concerned about the potential second front in the north and trying to deal with that and deter Iran and get the assurance that they're not going to send all these guys into what will be a long and bloody operation, leaving that second front exposed?
I don't know.
So I think this is one of these things that's really hard unless you're a plugged in military expert to have really well-formed opinions on.
But bottom line is Israel should do all it can to destroy Hamas and we should be giving as much leeway to do so.
But decisions that are going into the data set, day, day-to-day, the inputs that are going into the day-to-day day-to-day decision, whether and when, it's really just hard to know what to make of that as an outsider, I think.
Questioning the Senator's Mind 00:04:59
You know, my problem here, Charles, is that there's just so much example, so many examples of his struggles, Joe Biden's struggles.
And, you know, talk about the 3 a.m. phone call.
This is like the 3 a.m. World War III beginning potentially.
What's that?
Can we do that phone call at 4 p.m. instead?
Yeah, right.
Matlock's on.
They call it lid.
I mean, not for nothing, but he was at the beach this weekend.
They say he's working very hard from the beach.
But I mean, it's just the optics of it are not so great for our commander in chief.
And just this is as a separate point, but it flows into the same point, Charles.
He got up and told this story over the weekend.
Did you hear about this?
About his uncle Frank allegedly getting awarded the Purple Heart in World War II.
He's told this story before, and it's a lovely story.
It appears to be totally made up.
Here's the story, and then we'll talk about it.
Sat 4.
And by the way, I told you about my uncle who won the Purple Heart, the battle involved, my father's younger brother.
My father came to me after I was a senator.
He said, you know, his brother's name was Frank.
And he said, you know, Uncle Frank never got his Purple Heart.
I think he could find out about that.
I was a senator, so I found out.
And sure enough, he did.
So I got a purple heart for him.
Invited him over to the house with the family to give it to me.
He said, I don't want the damn thing.
I said, why?
He said, the others died.
I didn't.
I don't want them.
And awful great people died over there.
Oh my God.
Hugh the act of listening, oohs and ahs and sympathetic noises.
Too bad because it was made up from what we can tell.
He told this story before.
Last time was December 22.
In that retelling, he said it happened after he'd been elected vice president, not senator.
There, he said he was just a senator.
Forbes did a fact check on it at the time, concluding there does not appear to be any record of Biden giving his uncle this honor.
He hasn't mentioned the story in the past.
There have been no news articles written about it.
And Frank Biden's name does not appear on a list of recipients held by the National Purple Heart Hall of Honor, though that list is incomplete.
Then you guys at National Review at the time took a look at it and concluded this definitely could not have happened as he just claimed when he was vice president.
His uncle passed away in 99.
His dad passed away in 2002, all years before he became vice president in 2009.
So he was not giving Uncle Frank the Purple Heart or talking about it with his dad when he was vice president.
So now he changes it back to senator.
And you pointed out purple hearts can be given posthumously to the recipients next of king, next of kin, but factcheck.org could not find any evidence that Frank Biden received a purple heart, either while he was alive or after he died.
Name is not on either of the two major databases of honorees, and we could keep going.
It's just, it kind of is important to have somebody in there who is of sound mind right now, Charles.
And daily we get evidence that he might not be that man.
Well, it's partly that he's not of sound mind.
I think there's lots of evidence to support that.
It's also that this is always who Joe Biden has been.
The man is a narcissist.
His worldview requires not just himself, but everyone in his family and in his orbit, anyone with whom he identifies to be the hero of every story.
We are supposed to believe that going back through the annals of history, Bidens were always the people who stood up and said what was right or had a pithy one-liner that summed up the situation.
His dad apparently was big into gay rights in Scranton, Pennsylvania in the early 1950s, as we know, is statistically likely.
He is this guy.
When he ran for the Senate in the 70s, he was this guy.
He was forced to drop out of his first presidential run because he was this guy, because he took to shouting at potential voters about how he was top of his class, which he wasn't, and he was smarter than everyone else in his law firm, which he wasn't.
He was in the last go-around in 2000 shouting at factory workers about how he could take them physically if he wanted to, which he can't.
This is who he is.
And if you combine this long-standing braggadoccio and belief in himself that is not matched by the facts, let's say, with the fact that he's 81, 82, and that he doesn't seem to be fully in command, then you have what we're seeing now, which is an older person telling strangers stories that were first made up when they were younger men.
Obstructing Traffic During Protests 00:14:52
He's the worst of both worlds.
But I don't think we should overestimate the extent to which this personality trait is derived from his age.
It is exacerbated from his age, but this has always been who Joe Biden is.
And now he's got the nuclear codes and is advising our closest Middle East ally on how to avoid World War III.
All right, we'll put a pin in it right there.
I'll take a quick break and come back with more with Rich and Charles.
There's plenty more to get to today.
The news, it's like drinking out of a fire hose right now.
Here at home, thousands of anti-Israeli protesters taking to the streets of some of America's biggest cities.
Yes, it's still happening.
In Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, a massive protest broke out.
This is one of New York's largest Middle Eastern communities.
Demonstrators shouting all too familiar slogans now calling for the destruction, eradication of Israel.
And quote, from the Bay Ridge to Gaza, globalize the Intifada.
From Bay Ridge to Gaza.
From Bay Ridge to Mazar.
Globalize the Intifada.
Globalize the Intifada.
No justice.
Help me.
What do we want?
Palestine will be free.
Firefire, Colin Niser.
Firefighter Colin Nisa.
Firefire.
Colin Niser.
Firefighter Colin Niser.
Come on.
We want all of this.
Palestine is over.
Oh, they're very good rhymers.
If the hating Israel thing falls through, they could get a job working for Dr. Seuss.
Others had signs reading.
Rich and Charles are listening.
All right, standby, getting to you one second.
Others actually were holding up signs that read, Biden kills babies.
Biden does?
Biden?
In Israel?
In Palestine?
Is that their point?
Also, please keep the world clean, along with a person throwing away an Israeli flag.
Lovely.
Some protesters also clashing with cops when they shut down traffic and cops tried to clear an intersection.
According to the New York Post, some of the protesters hurled eggs at police, about two dozen people arrested.
I'm sure they'll be suing the police soon.
And it being New York, they'll probably get a payout.
Meantime, a troubling incident out of Minneapolis where a pro-Palestinian rally turned dangerous.
According to local affiliate KMSP, protesters started blocking traffic.
We saw it with our own eyes, performing a mass quote, die-in.
This is all the rage now, a die-in, where they lie down and pretend that they're dead, you know, because like they can totally relate to what it's like happening in the Middle East.
This time they chose the middle of the street, which is a good way to actually die.
The blocking of the intersection led to an altercation in which an elderly man trying to get through got out of his car armed with a knife trying to get the protesters to get away from his car, move back so he could keep going.
The protesters then began attacking his car.
What happened next was caught on camera by a man named Zach Metzger.
He's running as a Democrat for city council.
When you listen to this, if you can't see the video, the man looks visibly upset with his face beating red as protesters swarm his car.
Watch it.
He's not going nowhere now.
He's not going nowhere now.
Hold on, hold on.
He's not going nowhere now.
He's not going nowhere now.
Zach, who originally posted the video, has since deleted it.
He could, instead of running for city council, spend some time learning basic grammar because it's, he is not going anywhere now.
A simple, you know, maybe extra year in school would have helped him out here.
According to the KMSP report, police say no one was injured and that they are now reviewing the incident back with me, Rich Lowry and Charles C.W. Cook of National Review.
A lot in there.
You know, we're really not sending our best and brightest out to these protests.
The rhymers, he's not going nowhere now.
Look at me running for city council.
God help the people if he wins.
And yet it's harassment.
In this instance, we've seen it time and time again.
And do they even know what they're chanting for?
I mean, do you guys think they even know what they're chanting?
Do you think what they know what the intifada was?
I think obviously the organizers do, and I think a lot of them do.
Maybe the random people just think it rhymes and, you know, hey, hey, ho ho, West Civil has to go.
You know, you don't literally mean that Western Civ should be demolished.
But in this case, that's what they're talking about, right?
Because this terror attack didn't just, it wasn't just awful where Hamas could reach there in the areas abutting the Gaza Strip.
It showed if Israel were ever denuded militarily and at the mercy of its enemies, this is what would happen across the entire country, right?
It wouldn't be an orderly transfer of power where the Israeli government's toppled and it goes to the control of the Palestinian or Arab government.
It would be this.
It would be massive bloodletting, dislocation, human suffering on an unspeakable scale, right?
It wouldn't just be Israel would continue to exist under different governments.
No, it would be a genocidal campaign of ethnic cleansing.
And that is what they're calling for.
And just, you know, it's not the most important thing, you know, in terms of what we're talking about in Israel and this dispute.
I mean, this is historic big league stuff, but these protests aren't that, but I just hate.
You see it all the time.
Hate when they stop an innocent motorist, right?
We saw the Black Lives Matter protest.
And what that guy is scared, right?
And what is he supposed to do?
Is he supposed to just sit there in his car while people beat on the car, maybe break the windows, maybe try to drag him out?
He doesn't know, or try to drive away and endanger other people who are standing around his car.
Maybe they're part of the gang banging on the car.
Maybe they're just someone innocently crossing the street while he's trying to get out of there.
It presents a horrible choice, a horrible choice, which is why I think just obstructing traffic, that crime as part of these protests should be prosecuted seriously because it leads to these sort of situations.
Yeah, before the drone footage of the incident with the old man came out in Minneapolis, Charles, they tried to frame it as old white man drives through a pro-Palestinian protest.
But then somebody got their hands on drone footage of the whole event, which shows he was trying to just drive his car and they surrounded him.
He wanted to keep going.
It was reminiscent of what we saw during BLM.
So have a lot of the slogans been reminiscent of no justice, no peace we're seeing.
And the guy was surrounded and got scared.
Here he's driving.
You can see they have the end of the road barricaded, and you can hear the voiceover going, all he can do is turn around.
All he can do is turn around.
Like, wait, you know, like, let's wait for him.
He's got to come back toward us.
As this guy, this ringleader running for city council, this guy, Zach, is thrilled, saying, We've got to find him.
Let's go find him.
What were they going to do to this poor guy if they actually got him?
Yeah.
And what if he was armed?
In Florida and most states, actually, your car is legally deemed an extension of your home and is therefore included under the Castle Doctrine.
And in many states, Florida is one of them.
You don't need a license to carry in your car back when Florida needed licenses for that reason.
And, you know, these people, they stop these cars, and then one in a hundred of those people will get very scared, quite reasonably.
Maybe he pulls a gun out, and then suddenly it's not, you know, reported as you described.
It's reported as old white man drives into protest and opens fire, which wouldn't have been true.
But this is a really, really scary moment, I think, for the people inside of those cars.
You know, Rich, you said that we should treat this as a crime.
Florida did just change its law on this, actually, for exactly that reason, because this isn't just an abstract question anymore.
This does seem to be happening increasingly.
But look, these go on.
Sorry, I was just going to say, also, this kind of connects to what we're talking about in the first segment about the erroneous, horrible reporting about the hit on the hospital.
We live in such a time of identity politics where everyone is in a category.
And if you're in the wrong category, you're presumed guilty.
So this poor guy, who knows, you know, he's going to pick up milk at the grocery store and all of a sudden he's a white man, right, driving through a protest.
No, he's a citizen trying to get somewhere, right?
But all of a sudden, he's assumed, presumed guilty.
Yeah.
And so if I could just build on that, Megan, because this is a part of this, right all the way through since we first learned this horrible news out of Israel that I think has been really instructive.
And that is that all of the framework that progressives have spent years building up, the framework that is supposed to designate oppressor, oppressed, is supposed to determine what is safety and what is not, that is supposed to provide for the at least frowning upon or even censorship of hate speech and so on and so forth was nonsense, wasn't it?
It was nonsense.
I mean, just you take these two examples.
First, that guy.
So who in that situation, who in that situation is weaker?
Is it the guy whose car is surrounded by a mob shouting at him?
They don't know what he thinks about anything.
It's not even as if he's involved in the discussion, purely because he's there.
Is it him or is it the crowd?
Well, by the terms that they have laid out, he should be the victim in that scenario.
And yet instantly, as Rich says, he becomes the perpetrator because he's a white man.
But more broadly, more broadly, the... way that Israel has been treated simply does not comport with all of the rhetoric that we hear.
Israel is surrounded.
Every country around Israel has some level of animosity towards it.
Israel was attacked.
It didn't attack.
Israel was attacked.
Not just that.
Civilians were attacked in Israel.
Babies were attacked.
Women were raped.
And what happened?
What happened was that Israel's claims were so widely disbelieved or poo-pooed that they have had to release videos of them of the most horrendous acts they didn't want to do.
Whereas Hamas says, you know, Israel just leveled a hospital, as happened last week, and it's instantly printed in every single newspaper in the world as if it's a fact, and then it has to be retracted.
And in some cases, it hasn't been.
All I hear from college campuses when people are talking about this sort of thing is that you can tell who has the privilege and who is the oppressed by how they're treated.
So apparently, as a white man, I have all the privilege.
So people will intrinsically believe me and my way through will be easier.
And you can tell who is oppressed because the opposite will apply to them.
And yet with this abomination, exactly the opposite has obtained.
Israel says, hey, these people came into our country and they raped women and they beheaded babies and then took out whole families.
And the institutional press in the United States and elsewhere said, we don't really believe you until we see some videos.
Meanwhile, the people who did that, who have a track record of doing it, the people who did that say, oh yeah, Israel has just killed 950 million of our people in 12 minutes with a sock.
And it's at the top of the BBC website the next day.
And I just think it is time for Americans who feel cowed by these people, who feel cowed by their terms and their threats, to say that the emperor has no clothes.
Because what we have seen here is the perfect refutation of all of that garbage for the last 10 years that no longer deserves to be taken seriously if it ever did.
Yeah, so well said, as usual.
It's one long exercise in, well, how short was her skirt?
She was asking for it.
I mean, it's really, it's just like a massive example of that.
Like, eh, shouldn't have dressed that way.
And then you wouldn't have gotten raped.
Take some responsibility.
It's really your fault.
On the subject of these whiny college students who see everything through an identity prism, which is part of the problem and part of what's being exposed in the reaction here.
I don't know if you guys saw this New Yorker piece, but it does a deep dive on the students who signed this Harvard letter that was supported by, I've read 30, 31, and 35 different groups.
So I don't know what the actual number, over 30 is fair.
And they find the Palestinian American students behind it and profile some of them, a couple who decide, of course, they won't offer their real names.
She decides to go by Yasmeen for the piece.
Yasmin and her friend who asked to be called Nadia.
Okay, and then a third one named, who decides to go by Yara.
They decide to give an interview, all Palestinian American graduate students to the New Yorker.
The piece is entitled The Anguished Fallout.
Anguished from a pro-Palestinian letter at Harvard.
Now, don't forget, this pro-Palestinian letter said, Israel is to blame entirely for what just happened to it.
Your skirt was too short.
You had on too much makeup.
You get raped when you do that, Israel.
Period.
Same people, right, who would be outraged at that slander of rape victims have completely jumped on board when it comes to Israel.
And they detail how the letter came together.
Together, immediately, this group began composing a draft letter.
The highlighted lines, they added statistics, they left comments.
They debated how much historical detail to provide about the Palestinian people and the conditions in the Gaza Strip.
It has to be punchy, they agreed.
And then they go on to say, okay, one undergraduate who had been doxed.
Okay, she had been doxed because her name had been outed.
Endorsing Evil Actions 00:15:58
Don't sign letters if you don't want us to know your feelings.
Okay.
Said her parents were new immigrants to America during the 9-11 attacks before she was born.
Quote, we're seeing echoes of what they talked about that I never understood because now it is me that's being targeted.
It is my brown Muslim face up there on that truck riding around trying to out the students who said who signed this letter in response to which my note reads, and I quote, boo fucking who?
It was my brown face.
Your brown hand signed the letter.
No one cares what your skin color is.
It's your stupid ass words that condemned the terror victims as the children were still being murdered.
That's what we have an issue with.
Rich, you can't make it up.
Yeah.
I mean, what whiny entitled cowards.
I mean, one, they're incapable of moral reasoning because they're not capable of seeing people in certain categories as fully people, right?
So Israel is defined, as Charlie was eloquently stating earlier, as the colonizers.
So just by definition, they can't be victims.
Nothing wrong can ever be done to them.
They are guilty of all the world's ills.
And they signed on the stupid letter, which is meant to be a public statement, which agendered public debate.
And now they're complaining about it.
And then they said, Charlie, in this interview, they're lamenting that not more students come forward with them, saying if people would just band together, it would take the power out because you can't fire 700 Harvard students.
It would be a scandal.
That's a privilege we have.
Well, I mean, they said the quiet part out loud, as the kids say, but I think what this shows more than anything is that the ultimate aim of this sort of person is actually to engage with the world without ever hearing anything back.
That's why these student groups for years have been trying to get so-called hate speech banned, which they get to define, because then no one is allowed to say you're wrong or explain to them where they disagree.
And this is just a perfect example of it.
I mean, if you sign an open letter and it has precepts to which you've added your name, you are then open to criticism.
That's how free speech works.
To then push back against the idea that anyone might disagree with you demonstrates that you expect to exist in the United States without critique.
And that's just not an option.
It's amazing.
They detail that there are anti-Semitic posts in some other chat group, on-site chat that some Israeli students show the New Yorker, including one that reads, let them cook with 25 thumbs up.
Let them cook.
And these people are, their response is, they can't fire us all.
That's a privilege we have as Harvard students.
More when we come back.
Don't go away.
One of the most unsettling parts of the story out of the Middle East has been the global reaction to this terrorist attack and to the victims and what they suffered.
We've seen it on college campuses and in cities across our own country.
It's one thing to watch terrorists do terror.
It's another thing to watch Americans cheering for it.
Just a few examples.
A UC Santa Barbara professor named Lisa Hajar posted a triumphant image of a bulldozer with a Palestinian flag busting through a fence.
Lisa has since protected her tweets.
How brave, Lisa.
Profiles and courage.
There you are.
In Brooklyn, New York, two people were spotted tearing down posters of the hostages.
Listen to what happened when they started being filmed.
All right, I think that's good.
Have a good day.
Fuck you, fuck you, and burn in hell.
No, no, worry.
We're going this way.
So tell the police to find us up here.
Charming.
They're proud of what they're doing, pulling down pictures of missing babies.
According to the Stop Anti-Semitism Twitter account, which you absolutely should be following if you're not, the woman in orange keeps calling the Jewish man filming them a dog in Arabic.
That's what that word was, and then tells him to burn in hell.
I'm sure she means it.
That woman has since been identified as Sarah Dahood.
Sarah Sarah.
Great to meet you.
So glad we have a name now to go with the face.
The outlet dug up an old bio for her from 2017.
Apparently she calls herself queer, gender fluid.
She goes by all pronouns, and she is the child of Muslim refugees.
Over in Boston, a woman was filmed at an upscale shopping center removing posters of Israeli children who have been taken hostage.
She has been identified as a doctor named Zina al-Al-Hadib, and she has now been fired.
Enjoy retirement, Zina.
Good luck, because there isn't a Jewish person on earth who would want to be in your care.
Never mind the rest of us.
It's important to remember exactly what these people are tearing down, okay?
Think about it.
Images like this.
A baby boy who is nine months old.
He, his four-year-old brother, and their terrified mother are all believed to have been taken hostage.
The mom's cousin sobbing in an interview with CBS News saying she can only hope the three of them are together, that she tries not to think about the worst.
Or little Raz, about four years old.
Look at this video.
A precious sweet child.
Oh my God, look at this girl.
Weeks ago, she was playing guitar and dancing, as so many little girls do, making a heart with her hands, playing.
She and her two-year-old sister and their 34-year-old mother are among the missing.
The dad says he has seen video of them in a vehicle, apparently being kidnapped by Hamas.
These are the images well-meaning citizens are putting up to try to call attention to them and their plight, to try in some way to do what they can to get them back.
And these are the images terrorist sympathizers, because really that's what they are, don't want you to see.
Back with me now, National Reviews, Rich Lowry, and Charles C.W. Cook.
How many of these are in your ex feed, right?
Your formerly known as Twitter.
It's almost always women tearing down posters of missing children.
There's some disconnect here.
These people look sociopathic to me, Rich.
Yeah, I mean, it's such a low and despicable act.
We all remember anyone who is in New York after September 11th remembers all those missing posters, right?
We all knew at a certain level they were death notices, but to touch them, to in any way disrespect them, would have been such a malicious act.
And the same thing is true here.
And it goes to what we've been talking about really the entirety of the show.
Is this segment of opinion that doesn't recognize the legitimacy of Israel that is tainted at the very least with anti-Semitism?
And if you don't have enough respect for a missing baby to just leave that poster alone, if you don't like it, look away, right?
Walk faster, whatever you have to do, but to tear it down.
It's again, it's a small thing in the scheme of things, but really a despicable act.
And the way, you know, that professor's bulldoze image, we've seen the same thing with paragliders.
They have taken an image of an unspeakable act of evil and made it a symbol of worthwhile resistance.
And that at bottom is all you need to know about this cause.
I look at these people, Charles, and I think I would never want anything to do with them.
I'm thrilled the doctor lost her job.
I am on my feet applauding it.
You sympathize with the people who've done to these children what we've been discussing for this past hour plus.
I have no use for you.
I'm thrilled you've been exposed.
What do you think?
Well, I think the key is what you said, which is this is sympathizing with the people who committed these atrocities because there's no way of attenuating this one.
There are certain people who don't know anything.
They don't know anything about the world.
They don't know anything about the Middle East.
They probably don't know where Israel is or anything about its history.
And they get sucked into this radical chic idea that they're on the side of the oppressed against the oppressors.
And they've maybe put up a sign that says free Palestine or whatever.
No, I think that's silly and I disagree with it.
But at least they could marshal in their defense the argument that they were advancing an abstraction.
But what we're talking about here, there is no such excuse for.
And the people who are taking down those posters are endorsing what Hamas did.
This is an endorsement of tactics.
This is an endorsement of action.
It's not taking sides in the dispute.
It's not filtering the Israel-Palestine conflict through some pre-existing ideological framework.
It's saying that these images of the victims do not deserve to be memorialized.
The people who put up images of paragliders are saying that that means of spreading terror and death is worth an endorsement.
People who endorse the knocking down of fences are saying Israel does not have the right to defend its border.
And this is a whole new level.
And I think that's where the line is.
We hear a lot in our debates over so-called cancel culture, of which I'm a big critic, that at some point, everyone agrees that a given person needs to be canceled.
Well, yeah, I think that's true.
You know, there are certain circumstances in which so one is if what you are doing for your job is directly related to the thing that you have said that is that makes it hard for you to do your job.
And the other is if you are so far away from any debate or intellectual exercise and actually into the endorsement of evil.
And I think that a whole bunch of the cases that we've seen, one of which you mentioned, fit the bill.
If you are a doctor and you are saying that you think it is a good thing that Hamas murdered children and raped women and beheaded babies and so forth, then that is in direct contradiction to your Hippocratic oath, which is first do no harm.
This isn't an ideological exercise.
This isn't the university or a media institution saying this idea we came up with yesterday is now sacrosanct.
That actually makes it very, very difficult for you to have patients and customers.
So there is a big difference here, I think, between the sort of fellow travelers who put up signs and might be caught at the back of a protest at Harvard, who really may not know what they're doing, although they should know better, and people who are explicitly endorsing this sort of evil.
And the examples that you just gave fit into the latter category.
It's also, you know, there's that woke term erasure that I hate.
You never quite know what it means.
This is erasure, right?
This is someone who's so committed against Israel that they can't stand the idea that a post, you know, somewhere in a corner of Brooklyn, there's a picture of a missing baby.
They want that whole situation not exist.
They don't want anyone to think of that baby, see that baby.
That's erasure.
Yeah.
The like the blowback now that's happening, you know, it's the protests in the street, the tearing down of the hostage pictures, it's bad enough.
But now we're seeing blowback case after case against Jewish citizens, like Jewish Americans here are getting harassed.
Just today, Barry Weiss, you know, she started her own independent press outlet called the Free Press.
She posted that this was scrawled outside of her offices over the past few days.
And it reads, fuck Israel.
And I think fuck the Jews is the other one.
Fuck Jews.
Forgive my language.
Scrawled outside of her offices.
That's, I mean, she's, of course, a Jewish woman who's been outspoken on this issue.
She's got to show up at work and see that.
If they think that's going to stop Barry Weiss, they don't know Barry.
Okay.
It's going to have the opposite effect of the one that's been intended.
And then you have this example.
Harvard hosted, I mentioned it before, a die-in, a die-in on its campus this week.
And this student walks by who I read is Israeli and goes to the business school there.
This is according to the Washington Free Beacon, which did a great job reporting on this, our friend Eliana Johnson, her publication.
The guy gets accosted and harassed because he happened to walk by and decided to film with his phone, this Gaza die-in.
I think we have some of the tape.
Let's watch.
Exit.
I believe.
Exit.
Exit.
You're grabbing me.
What's that?
What's that?
Exit.
Share.
Stop touching.
Shave.
Shade.
Shave.
My God.
He was an Israeli student who decided to film their very public protest.
And you can hear them.
By the way, we now know who the two instigators who are laying hands on him were Harvard University graduate students.
One, a law student, Ibrahim Barmal, a member of the Law Review, of course, of course.
And the other, a divinity school graduate student named Elam Tetty, who lives with Harvard undergraduate students in a supervisory role known as a proctor.
At least two of those individuals identified according to the FBI report, because this the victim went and reported this, who were aggressively confronting this guy who did nothing more according to the report than pull out his phone to film the rioters and he got attacked.
This isn't the South Side of Chicago.
This is on the Harvard quad.
Yep.
Yeah, I mean, unfortunately, the anti-Zionists or anti-Semitics have basically won the battle for hearts and minds in a huge swath of the academy the last couple decades.
And we're seeing the effect of it.
But it is, again, you know, it's tinged at least with anti-Semitism.
You would think by this reaction that what just happened two weeks ago is that Israel bulldozed its way through the Gaza Wall, went to various cities and settlements near the wall, raped and decapitated babies, killed people, took hostages, and then left, right?
That's the reaction.
When it was, of course, completely the opposite.
So it's Jews are victimized and they're still blamed, right?
Anti-Semitism in Academia 00:03:00
It doesn't matter, you know, and just in medieval terms, if you told a lot of these people, oh, the Jews are poisoning the wells to kill Christians, they believe it, right?
They're the kind of people who would believe it.
This is the kind of sentiment that played into that.
And unfortunately, a lot of mainstream outlets would report it initially, right?
You know, according to a Polish peasants, the wells have been poisoned and hundreds have died because of the Jews.
And then, well, there's no evidence of it.
And then a week later, well, maybe we shouldn't have believed those Polish peasants.
But that's in modern terms, that's what we're talking about.
By the way, Charles, the same die-in from last week, organized by the Harvard-Palestine Solidarity Committee and Harvard Graduate Students for Palestine.
And no, I will not be hiring anybody who was part of these groups.
They had support from and an appearance by the guy who recently founded the African and African-American resistance organization, Kojo Achiampong, who graduates in 26, who said this, as Afro, that's the acronym for his group, understands, the apartheid regime that was here is identical to the apartheid regime in Israel, rooted in the same logic of settler colonialism.
It's right here.
It's alive and well.
It's on the names of our buildings, on the names of our streets.
And there is beginning to be some weird support by some faction of the BLM crowd for the coalition against Israel.
Yeah.
I must say, as an amateur theater critic, I wasn't very convinced by the performance of those people who were supposed to be dead, jumping up and attacking someone, maybe zombies.
The examples you just highlighted both show people whose conception of what is normal is just completely skewed.
I mean, which of these two circumstances is normal at a college?
A A person walking around from one building to another or people lying on the floor pretending to be dead.
The assumption there seems to have been that he was doing something wrong by walking through this rather than that they were imposing on others.
Likewise, the idea that there is something in common between the makeup of the modern state of Israel and America under Jim Crow.
It's nonsense.
It's part of this everything is everything mentality that we see on the modern left that is driven by intersectionality, where you see Planned Parenthood tweet out, you know, climate change is reproductive justice, which doesn't mean anything other than that they want everyone who might possibly consider themselves to be oppressed to bandy together.
I mean, it's just not true.
I am a little hopeful on this, though, Megan.
Democrats and Jewish Voters 00:05:04
I find it as annoying as you do, but I think that so many of these groups in the great big progressive blob have pushed it so far here that they have actually provoked their nominal allies to say enough.
I don't think there is going to be a great desire for an endless suicide pact between people who thought they might be on the same side.
I'm starting to see a fracturing of it.
Now, I don't think that that's necessarily going to make a big difference at Harvard or at some of our really badly infected elite institutions.
But I do think in the public it will.
And I think it could start to affect elections as well.
Because if you look at polling on this question, Americans are quite sensible.
They don't like Hamas.
They do think Israel has a right to exist.
They are appalled by what happened two weeks ago.
And I've seen more of my Jewish friends than ever who don't normally talk about politics saying that they were surprised by how widespread the institutional criticism of Israel and of Jewish people in general has been.
I have been surprised too.
I'm naive, clearly.
I didn't realize that it would be quite that pronounced.
And I wonder whether we're going to start seeing groups that have historically worked together in the everything is everything mindset saying, you know what?
That was a big moment for us.
We're not getting on board with you.
Yeah, I told part of the story last week, but a Jewish friend of mine in New York, who's a Democrat, was telling me she's only watching Fox News right now.
You know, she's doing media in the digital lane like ours, and she's doing Fox News, and she's abandoned what she used to like, which was CNN and occasionally MSNBC.
She can't take it.
Then I went to a cocktail party with a bunch of people in my community on Friday and person after person came over to me.
These were liberals, self-described liberals saying, thank you for your coverage.
We've been watching religiously.
We can't stomach MSNBC anymore.
You know, we feel like people without a party.
We can't believe what's happening.
Like it's happening.
Like Jewish Americans are recoiling in response to what happened here.
And it reminds me, you know, Trump has been railing on the Jewish Democrats forever.
We're like, why don't they vote Republican?
Why don't they vote for me?
They should like me.
Vote in your own self-interest.
I don't think they like Trump, but I do think for the first time, he's got a shot at their vote because they're so horrified, Rich, by what a huge faction of the left is doing.
And I'll just give you one other stat to put some meat on it.
There was a poll out last week.
Hold on, let me get it.
That showed 50%, only 50% of Democrats blame Hamas for the attack on Israel.
Only 50% of Democrats do.
73% of Republicans put the blame squarely where it belongs, which is on Hamas.
Yeah, I assume some polling that is better on Democratic sentiment.
I do think there is a separation between the radicals on the left and the mainstream Democrats and their attitude about this, because our mainstream Democrat friends, they are human beings, right?
They get who's in the right and who's in the wrong here.
But I think this, the whole, just in sheer political terms, all this helps President Trump.
He said some dumb things, you know, about Hezbollah being smart and attacking BB because he has some grudge against him personally.
But you knew four square that there was no question he was going to back Israel when he was president.
And he makes a very intuitive case when he says, look, you know, kind of funny, right?
You know, Russia didn't invade Ukraine when I was president.
This kind of horrific assault on Israel didn't happen when I was president.
And, you know, maybe some good luck there.
But it makes a lot of sense that adversaries were scared of him or at least uncertain what his reaction would be.
So he carried this kind of personal deterrent force that Joe Biden just doesn't have, right?
At the very least, you know what Biden's going to do, right?
It's going to be the, you know, you put it in a blender and come out with the standard American president's response to any crisis.
That's what he's going to do, right?
Because he's so conventional, whereas you couldn't do that with Donald Trump.
So I think this helps him again in the primary.
And I thought he needs a lot of help at the moment, but potentially also helps in the general, not just because there might be Jews disaffected from what they've seen from their ideological allies on this, but also because like, you know, maybe this guy, despite all the craziness, would keep us safer than we have been or our interests safer than they have been the last four years.
Just an addendum, that was an NBC news poll of college students.
50% of Democrats in college think that also FYI, the doctor who was fired, who we talked about out of Boston, taking down the hostage pictures, it's interesting to me because she was an endodontist, which I've never been to an endodontist, but they're the people who work on what's described as the pulp of your teeth.
So it sounds like root canal.
Sounds horrible.
But the point is, think about this.
State Department Staffers Crying 00:07:23
Think about a Jewish person having to sit in the chair of this woman, the closest contact imaginable, right?
Like they're in your face, in your mouth, next to your nerves, your most sensitive nerves.
Who would want a person who clearly hates Jews touching them and in care of their pain and wellness at that level?
She had to be fired.
That's why it's so important what this ex-account, Stop Anti-Semitism, is doing because they get a screen grab of the person, they post it, and then they say, help us identify the person.
And then the person is identified.
And where appropriate, the person gets fired.
Absolutely right.
Otherwise, who'd want their Jewish friends sitting in this woman's care?
Not me.
Not I.
Okay.
On the subject of these woke, I don't know what they are, annoying anti-Israel college students.
All of it, as we're seeing now, Charles, has bled out into society, you know, same as our immigration policies have bled out into society.
We see that in a lot of these protests.
And that leads me to the State Department, which is no exception to the it is bled out rule.
There was a report on the 20th, and it detailed AI Monitor.
Is that the publication?
Detailing what's happening inside the State Department.
This is a Washington-based outlet that reports on the Middle East.
It's been referenced in the past by the journal, The Times, the Economist.
It's legit, it's a legit outlet.
If anything, it leans left.
And they report that Secretary Blinken is holding listening sessions, listening sessions with Muslim, Arab Americans, and separately Jewish staffers.
You want to say students here, but no, it's staffers, amid growing internal frustration over the State Department's handling of the war.
Meetings came after a State Department official resigned in protest this week over continued U.S. support for an Israeli bombing campaign.
On Friday afternoon, Blinken met with a small group of State Department staffers who are members of two Arab American and Muslim employee organizations.
A source familiar with one of the meetings called it an opportunity for Blinken to hear directly from the workforce since his trip to the region.
It came as HuffPo reports that U.S. diplomats are drafting a dissent cable over the Biden administration's approach to the conflict.
Goes on Huffington Post to talk about how there is a mutiny brewing within state at all levels and goes on to say the negativity is surfing in a variety of ways.
One official described peers as depressed and angry about it all.
Another said some staff are experiencing resignation.
And that official recalled a colleague in tears during a meeting over this person's view that the U.S. policy statements emphasize support for Israel over the lives of Palestinians.
They're crying in the State Department because their preferred outcomes are not being advanced by the secretary and the president.
We have three branches of government in this country.
We have the executive branch, the legislative branch, and the judicial branch.
We don't have four.
The State Department is not a separate branch of government.
It doesn't have any freestanding powers.
It is there to represent the wishes of the executive branch as tempered by the legislature, and it's staffed by people who are chosen by the executive and approved by the legislature.
And that's the end of it.
What the individuals within the State Department think of government policy is irrelevant.
It is up to the government to set that policy.
That government is elected in Congress and in the White House.
If anyone within the State Department cannot abide by the policies that they're required to carry out, then they can resign and that's fine.
And we can criticize them for their views or praise them for their views, perhaps, depending on the circumstance.
But this is a principle that is imperative and that is just forgotten in so many different circumstances in the modern era, where we seem to think that these federal agencies have their own volition and they don't.
I'm reminded looking at this, especially in conjunction with the news that 400 or so congressional staffers anonymously signed, I'm not quite sure what that even means,
but anonymously signed a letter of Yuval Levin's point about the role of institutions having changed over time, such that many people now go into an institution thinking that they can use it for their own advancement or as a platform on which to stand rather than as something that they serve or that is bigger than them or that exists externally to them.
The State Department has been around since the founding of the country.
It's one of the original departments.
It has always fulfilled the same role.
It has always sat within the same constitutional structure.
I just do not want to be reading as an American citizen in the newspaper or elsewhere about the private views of people whose role within our system is to act as functionaries or bureaucrats.
And, you know, Joe Biden is not in charge of anything because he's old and out of it.
But at some point, a U.S. president is going to have to make this point internally and externally that we have an executive in this country who is elected and he, with congressional input, is in charge.
Just to correct my reporting, all monitor.
This is not a publication with which I am familiar, which is why we ran it down to see if it's legit.
All monitor reporting that.
He's got his own deep state now, Rich.
They're crying inside the State Department.
They want a different policy of the one that the president is pursuing.
Welcome, welcome to the game.
He's got his own deep state.
Yeah, well, this is not unusual.
This is the typical State Department sentiment about this conflict, no matter what the flare-up is or the occasion for it.
It's always restraint on Israel.
That's always their default answer.
So it isn't surprising that this is happening.
Maybe there's kind of an added element from our culture and kind of campus culture spreading over where people are crying and upset and need a safe space to deal with the fact that this is the president's policy, at least for now.
And I underline that last point because the gravity, national, natural gravity in terms of U.S. government policy is going to be towards staying Israel's hand.
We've seen it over and over again.
Maybe there's going to be a window lasting longer.
Maybe it's already closed.
Some of these reports we were talking earlier are accurate about the U.S. saying don't go in on the ground.
But this is the natural kind of bureaucratic gravity, and it has to be resisted.
And you hope the president and the secretary of state have the strength and gumption to resist it.
But it's understandable if you have some doubts.
Well, we have all the usual suspects pressuring Joe Biden to change his policy thus far.
Thus far, he's been standing shoulder to shoulder with Israel and has been saying the right things and sending the aircraft carriers.
All that very good for people who believe we should stand by Israel.
But you've got the college campuses, of course, speaking up.
You've got deep state upset with his policies.
And you've got the celebrities who are starting to weigh in.
Pressure to Change Israel Policy 00:15:12
I mentioned Dave Chappelle.
By the way, just FYI, I'll show you.
My team found this of him.
Back in 2021, he did a bit on Jews, which, well, you tell me.
Here it is.
In my movie idea, we find out that these aliens are originally from Earth, that they're from an ancient civilization that achieved interstellar travel and left the Earth thousands of years ago.
Some other planet they go to, and things go terrible for them and the other planet.
So they come back to Earth, decide that they want to claim the Earth for their very own.
It's a pretty good plotline, huh?
I call it space juice.
All right.
Okay.
So, yeah, it's pretty on the nose.
So there's Chappelle.
And then I know you guys, Charles, when I think about you and I think about this conflict, I was thinking, I know what Charles wants an answer to.
What does Alyssa Milano think?
I know she's your North Star.
So Alyssa Milano, Jon Stewart, Wanda Sykes, Joaquim Phoenix, Sandra O, Kate Blanchette, Rosario Dawson, Margaret Cho, Jessica Chestain, Channing Tatum, a bunch of other people I never heard of, signed a letter demanding a ceasefire right now.
Because I'm sure Alyssa Milano is very versed in MIDI's policy, Charles, and she really wants a ceasefire this instant.
Well, look, don't underestimate my regard for Wanda Sykes.
It's not just Alyssa Milani.
You've got to have both the North Star and the South Star.
Wanda Sykes fulfills that, at least for me, with the others in a constellation somewhere around the globe.
I mean, look, I think Dave Chappelle is hilarious.
And I also think he's an entertainer.
And I just don't particularly care what a bunch of entertainers, some of whom I like and some of whom I don't, think about geopolitics.
And I don't understand why it is that they think we should care about what they think.
And I feel the same with sports and anyone else, really, who just wanders into this.
There is no particular moral weight attached to being a comedian or an actress or a musician.
And that doesn't matter whether you're a bad musician or if you're Paul McCartney.
Just don't have any special role to play within this debate.
And yet, the sanctimony and the self-regard in the letter you refer to, which I read because of my great love for Alyssa Milano, was astonishing.
It's astonishing.
And it's very strange to me that this is a thing that we do in our culture.
We say, well, did you hear what Alyssa Milano said about the situation in Israel?
I did because I have a strange job which requires me to follow these things.
Why?
Why did they do it?
Right.
Why?
Good question.
They think they have the ability to change policy, I guess.
Like Jerry Seinfeld put out a statement, and some other Jewish supporters put out a statement, you know, with their that I understand.
He's got like a vested stake.
And I guess, you know, was concerned about himself, his family, I'm sure.
But Alyssa Milano, like, there's no vested anything.
She just fancies herself an activist on these things.
And she likes to see her name in the paper.
One of my favorite things about Rose McGowan, who I realize is very controversial, but I kind of love her, is to hear her talk about Alyssa Milano.
I mean, she is just excursing.
And Alyssa Milano says, all the things you know in your heart are true.
But she sounds an awful lot like an elected representative we know is Ilan Omar, Rich, who went out this past weekend, was it?
It was on Friday to offer the following statements to President Biden.
She's on board with the criers at the State Department, with Alyssa Milano, and of course, Rashida Talib.
Listen to SAT5.
Where is your humanity?
How do you look at one atrocity and say this is wrong?
But you watch as bodies pile up, as neighborhoods are leveled.
Where is your humanity?
Where is your outrage?
How is it that we have a president who is talking about releasing hostages?
Who is talking about getting American citizens out of Israel?
But could not get himself to say, I want to save and work to save the hundreds, thousands of Americans is stuck in Gaza.
What is wrong with you?
Now, I'm going to say the first part of that clip was what the kids call a cell phone.
Right?
How can you look at the bodies pile up and not say anything?
Let me refer you to a clip where Fox News's Hillary Vaughan, who's been doing a great job, confronted her just same day on Friday and how she handled it.
How can Israel have a ceasefire with terrorists whose entire mission is to wipe out their Israelis?
How can they have a ceasefire if they're trying to wipe out this crazy lady?
Don't worry about her.
Ignore this crazy lady.
Don't worry about her, says Elon Omar to her security team.
How can you sit there and watch and not say anything?
How, Rich?
Yeah, I think it was Hillary Vaughan who also last week, Congresswoman Talib, was walking in the hallway.
Do you condemn the killing of babies?
And she wouldn't say, of course, right?
So it all goes to where these people are fundamentally coming from.
And let's be clear: if you're calling for a ceasefire now, you're calling for Hamas getting away with this, right?
That's what you're calling for.
We all have sympathy for innocent Gazans.
And look, Biden administration has been concerned with trying to get humanitarian trucks in there and whatnot.
But it goes back to what we were talking about earlier.
The ultimate responsibility for this situation goes to Hamas.
If they hadn't done this, none of this would have followed from it.
And if you don't acknowledge that, if you find excuses for it, you are morally bankrupt.
And the members of the squad are just that.
The members of the squad seem to be not only in the deep state, but in the media in abundance, because the way that hospital attack was handled and some other examples, which we'll get to next, have been truly stunning.
I mean, even for the New York Times, this level of derelict was surprising.
I have to say, even to me, I'll tell you the latest on them.
They're now finally acknowledging part of their error, but not the full thing.
And wait until you hear who they just hired.
More with Rich and Charles just ahead.
Okay, so the New York Times finally now, almost, I don't know, almost a week after their terrible reporting on that alleged hospital bombing, which they said, quote, was an Israeli strike that killed hundreds in hospital, none of which was true.
It wasn't an Israeli strike.
It didn't kill hundreds and it wasn't in the hospital.
And they kept restating these errors over and over in their second, their third attempts at this headline.
Then they let it sit there.
They finally corrected the headline, but they let the error sit there without being acknowledged.
And as you guys know, in journalism, it's not enough to just correct it.
You have to say the earlier reporting was wrong.
Here's how we were wrong.
We regret the error.
That's how you call attention to your mistakes, which everyone makes.
And it's sadly a reality of our business.
But this one is a huge one.
It was a huge one that helped lead to riots in the streets and a swell of anti-Israel sentiment.
Now they have an editor's note saying our initial accounts attributed the claim of Israeli responsibility to Palestinian officials and noted that the Israeli military said it was investigating the blast.
That's their own cover for themselves.
However, the early versions of the coverage and the prominence it received in a headline, news alert, and social media channels rely too heavily on claims by Hamas and did not make clear that those claims could not immediately be verified.
Indeed, what they said was the Palestinians were saying this, Rich, the Palestinian Health Authority, without making clear that was a Hamas-tied organization full of propaganda.
And then they go on to say the report left readers with an incorrect impression about what was known and how credible the account was.
And they go on to say, you know, we corrected the headline within two hours.
They did not, however, correct the fact that they're still reporting hundreds dead.
We don't know that.
That's still coming from Hamas.
Or the fact that they used the wrong photo in showing the devastation, they pulled a different photo of mass devastation.
This one right here, which was not of the hospital or the parking lot, also not acknowledged in their attempt to correct the record.
Yeah, so this is, you know, in journalism, we all get it wrong occasionally, but this was a completely avoidable era.
Everyone I follow on Twitter who's followed this dispute over the years immediately said, don't believe this.
Do not believe this, that this was an Israeli strike.
Very often there are rockets that go astray.
Just wait.
You know, let's wait and see.
And very quickly, you realize that that's very likely what happened.
You had people tracing rockets coming in and doing the maps and whatnot.
It figured out very quickly it was a stray Palestinian rocket.
And the New York Times, it kind of, it moved in real time, right?
The headline slowly got less certain.
But if you're splashing that, as you just showed, across your front page with an image from a different bombing, and yeah, you know, you have the Palestinian health authority says, but the strong presumption throughout the story is it's true.
That's the only reason you'd play it so big, right?
Because you find this incredible.
So this was real horrible in this malpractice.
And I give them credit for, you know, in the editor's note, at least they say we were too credulous about claims from Hamas, right?
But that's what they were.
And how damning is that, right?
They rape women and the head children.
And then you're going to believe what they say about a highly sensitive like this that they can use for propaganda purposes.
How possibly does that make sense, except for the reflex, a lot of these journalists, not all of them, you know, there's some really good ones, but kind of culturally and institutionally tends to be the same as those deep state people in the State Department.
It's an anti-Israel reflex and we saw it out here.
Well, maybe they're turning over a new leaf at the Times with this editor's note, Charles.
Maybe they've seen the light on their anti-Israel bent and they're going to change their reporting now that they've been massively humiliated.
Or maybe not, because there's a report out today via the New York Post that the New York Times just hired a new reporter to cover this conflict between Israel and Hamas.
His name is Soliman Hiji, H-I-J-J-Y.
And the problem with Solomon is back in 2018 and 2012, he decided to go on social media and post his thoughts about Israel.
And let's just say they weren't exactly mild.
Okay.
Here he is in 2012, quote, how great you are, Hitler.
Okay.
It's a problem.
You know, I guess he wrote it in Arabic, so we weren't supposed to notice how great you are.
Then there was more praise for Hitler in 2018.
And when this pro-Israel media watchdog group noticed that the Times had hired him to report on this conflict, they called them up to say, what are you doing?
Because we already called this guy to your attention.
And you told us back in 2022, I think it was, or I don't know, not long ago.
Yeah, 2022, that you were looking into his disturbing posts.
Now you've rehired him and you aren't making any apologies whatsoever for what he's done.
In fact, the New York Times response to the post was they defended their decision to hire him.
We reviewed his problematic social media posts and took a variety of actions to ensure he understood our concerns and could adhere to our standards if he wished to do freelance work for us in the future.
So we're against Mr. Hiji praising and aligning with Hitler.
If you could keep that in mind on your coverage, would really appreciate it.
I mean, who among us has not repeatedly praised Hitler on our Twitter feed while covering matters of great import to Jewish people?
I think the New York Times, as did many in the press, frankly, wanted it to be true that Israel had hit that hospital.
And that's not because the people who work in those institutions wanted people to die.
But, well, maybe the guy with the Hitler fan club did, but the rest probably didn't.
But it's because it immediately allowed them to both sides the issue, which is the one thing they say they're against, but they really aren't.
If you look at how the attack in Israel was covered and how long it took before the number of dead in Gaza was put on the other side of the screen with numbers that were rising and rising and rising, all again being put out by Hamas, you will see how quickly this was treated like a sports game.
It was initially, you know, 300 dead, 500 dead, 800 dead.
The scale of it became apparent, and then it was a thousand dead at least.
But by the end of the day, on the other side of the screen, it was 400 Palestinians at 900 Palestinians, 2,000, 2,500.
And that's now how it's been reported across the press.
The New York Times does it every day.
USA Today had a particularly grotesque front page with a visualized dead on one side, Israeli dead, on the other side, Palestinian dead, with many more on the Palestinian side and text beneath it that made it seem as if this was just a sort of spat among lovers.
And again, I don't think the people in the Times wanted death, but I do think that this was sort of made the whole thing easier because it took away the pressure.
Speaker McCarthy Chaos 00:03:12
It made it seem more remote, made it seem more difficult to discern, made it easier for people like Michelle Goldberg to write that we can't know anything anyway.
What could we possibly know about what's going on?
There's just no way of discerning.
So we may as well throw up our hands.
Well, I look forward to Michelle Goldberg meeting this guy at the office holiday party.
That's going to be really spicy.
All right, the time we have left.
I'm so disgusted by the House speaker thing.
I know POCs on both their houses.
I just can't stand anything that's going on there.
But I'll get your quick take on it as tonight.
They're supposed to hold a speaker candidates forum.
Then tomorrow at 9 a.m., an internal speaker vote is scheduled.
Interested candidates had until noon yesterday to declare if they wanted the job.
They say the two, I don't know, I don't know if he's at the top, but two of the names being bandied about are Byron Donalds of Florida and Tom Emmer of Minnesota.
He was number three under Kevin McCarthy.
So he's got Kevin McCarthy's backer backing.
Byron's more of a Trump guy.
He's got more Freedom Caucus cred, and then a bunch of others, most of whom we've never heard of.
So quick takes on the House Speaker race.
Charlie, I'll start with you.
Well, I think the whole thing is a catastrophe that is born out of a failure to acknowledge that Republicans didn't do as well in 2022 as they wanted to do and therefore have a small majority.
And you've got the tail wagging the dog here and then trying to throw back all of the responsible virtues that they themselves rejected to convince the majority to do what they want.
I'm glad that that hasn't worked.
Unfortunately, it's still thrown everything into chaos.
It seems to me that Speaker McCarthy, who I have problems with, was probably the best they were going to get given that reality.
The idea that they're going to get someone who is perfectly acceptable to this faction or that faction without changing the factions or the size of the conference itself seems far-fetched to me.
So they'll probably go through a whole host of these candidates and then likely settle on someone who has all of the same flaws and liabilities as did McCarthy.
Great.
Utter waste of time, Rich.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So Matt Gates has been a nihilistic idiot in this and most of the initial aid of vote against McCarthy.
But then it's taken on this element of tribal warfare where the McCarthy people don't like Scalese because they don't think Scalise backed McCarthy strongly enough.
And then the Jordan people are mad at Scales and McCarthy and Emmer for not supporting him enough.
So then they'll turn around and oppose Emmer if he gets the designation from the conference.
So there's some significant chance they just won't elect a speaker.
We'll have to stick with Patrick McHenry, the speaker pro 10, and find a way for the majority to kind of govern without a speaker, which is just crazy and advertises your chaos and dysfunction in a way that there are going to be bigger issues in 24 if it's a big Trump-Biden rematch, but at the margins, this is going to hurt what's already a narrow majority hold on to the House.
This is as petty and bitter as the election for head cheerleader in the deep South Texas Friday Night Lights crowd.
Backstabbing for the Speakership 00:00:34
I mean, that's how backstabby it's getting.
I have almost no appetite for this story, but they'll get back to us when they finally select the new one, who almost certainly will be just like the old one.
Rich, Charles, thank you guys.
Doing double duty for us today, and we really appreciate it.
Great to have you.
Thank you.
Thanks for having us.
Tomorrow, Michael Knowles will be here.
He's always great to talk to.
Looking forward to his take on all of this, and we will see you all then.
Thanks for listening to The Megan Kelly Show.
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