HEATED Israel vs Palestine Debate w/ Bassem Youssef | PBD Podcast | Ep. 349
Patrick Bet-David, Adam Sosnick, and Vincent Oshana are joined by comedian, television host and surgeon Dr. Bassem Youssef!
Bassem Raafat Mohamed Youssef is an Egyptian comedian, television host, and surgeon. He is best-known in his media career for having hosted Al Bernameg, a satirical comedy show focused on Egyptian politics, from 2011 to 2014.
3:25 - Bassem discusses when he decided to leave medicine and become a comedian.
12:28 - How Bassem became the Jon Stewart of Egypt.
15:29 - Bassem explains why he was forced to flee Egypt over his criticism of the Egyptian government.
26:38 - Bassem explains why he won't perform in Israel.
38:22 - Adam and Bassem argue about the death toll in Gaza following the October 6th attack on Israel.
48:46 - Did the Israeli government know about the October 7th Hamas attack in advance?
51:56 - How to move forward in Israel following the October 7th attack.
56:07 - Are the tensions in the Middle East a social or economic issue?
1:06:50 - How the United States government uses economic hitmen to bankrupt and run other countries.
1:15:01 - Why there were no wars that broke out under Trump's administration.
1:26:40 - How the Military Industrial Complex continues to feed the U.S war machine.
1:32:31 - Why Israel was established and if the region can ever see peace?
1:46:42 - Stats on the genocide of Palestinians at the hands of Israel.
1:51:20 - What is the solution to the conflict between Israel and Palestine?
Follow Bassem Youssef on Instagram: https://bit.ly/3RTTTgQ
For tour dates, tickets and more check out BassemYoussef.xyz: https://bit.ly/3TXD8DN
Purchase Patrick's new book "Choose Your Enemies Wisely": https://bit.ly/41bTtGD
Register to win a Valuetainment Boss Set (valued at over $350): https://bit.ly/41PrSLW
Get a free "Future Looks Bright" Hat & T-Shirt: Purchase two "Future Looks Bright" Hats and one "Future Looks Bright" T-Shirt & use the promo code "pbdpodcast2024" at checkout!
Connect one-on-one with the right expert to get the answers you need with Minnect: https://bit.ly/3MC9IXE
Get best-in-class business advice with Bet-David Consulting: https://bit.ly/40oUafz
Visit VT.com for the latest news and insights from the world of politics, business and entertainment: https://bit.ly/472R3Mz
Visit Valuetainment University for the best courses online for entrepreneurs: https://bit.ly/47gKVA0
Text “PODCAST” to 310-340-1132 to get the latest updates in real-time!
SUBSCRIBE TO:
@VALUETAINMENT
@vtsoscast
@ValuetainmentComedy
@bizdocpodcast
@theunusualsuspectspodcast
Want to be clear on your next 5 business moves? https://bit.ly/3Qzrj3m
Join the channel to get exclusive access to perks: https://bit.ly/3Q9rSQL
Download the podcasts on all your favorite platforms https://bit.ly/3sFAW4N
Patrick Bet-David is the founder and CEO of Valuetainment Media. He is the author of the #1 Wall Street Journal Bestseller “Your Next Five Moves” (Simon & Schuster) and a father of 2 boys and 2 girls. He currently resides in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.
Why would you fat on Goliath when we got pet David?
Value payment, giving values contagious.
This world of entrepreneurs, we can't no value to hate it.
I'd be running, homie, look what I become.
I'm the one.
So, folks, we're learning different languages today from a very renowned heart surgeon who somehow became, decided to change it.
Can you imagine you're a heart surgeon?
Okay, that's what you're doing for a living, okay?
And then all of a sudden, one day you're inspired to want to be a comedian, okay?
Because you watch a guy named Jon Stewart, which we talked about yesterday.
He just recently chose to part ways with Apple over them not letting him do shows on AI in China.
And so, I can just visualize you as a heart surgeon in the middle of a heart surgery.
He's telling all the nurses' jokes and, oh, this won't be messed up.
This one's gone.
It's not going to work.
You don't need this.
You don't need just your heart.
I want to be a comedian.
So, heart surgeon, you would assume you're doing well for yourself.
You're making money.
You got respect.
You've gone to school.
Then you take the risk to go be a comedian.
And you don't just become a regular comedian.
A third of your country is listening.
You got 40 million give or take weekly listeners to your show.
And then you're being invited all over the place.
And recently, some of you may recognize him because of the podcast or the show that he did with Pierce Morgan, which the angle he took was very different satire, comedy.
It almost confused Pierce.
It was so confusing that Pierce had to get on a plane to go to LA at the comedy club to interview him.
And it was a great encounter back and forth.
Gave a different perspective to everybody.
But today, we have in the flesh, Basim Yosef.
How are you, sir?
Hello.
From the other side.
Can you hear?
I'm a little bit under the influence.
Yeah.
And the influence meaning that I'm still under heavy pain medication.
How long did you been traveling?
48 hours.
So just in five days.
Five days.
In five days.
I took the plane from LA to Dubai for 48 hours.
And then I went from Dubai to Boston for 36 hours for another show in Arabic and Kingdom.
Then went from Boston to Dubai again for another.
Oh my God.
And then that was less than 24 hours.
And then I took the flight from Dubai to Miami.
I just landed yesterday.
Oh, my God.
Yeah.
And then you're performing.
And I'm performing tonight.
Tonight and tomorrow.
And after tomorrow.
And after tomorrow.
Friday, Saturday Sunday at the Miami Improv.
So you're fired up is what you're saying.
I am so excited, but I cannot hide it.
Yeah.
It's very obvious.
So I got a question for you.
I mean, seriously, like before, we got a lot of things we're going to get into.
I want your thoughts on a lot of different stories and, you know, whether it's some current events, your background, politics, we'll talk Israel.
We'll talk Palestine.
We'll talk Egypt.
We'll talk all that stuff.
What was the turning point for you?
Like, did people always know you were funny?
Like, when I talk to a comedian, I'll say, at what point did you know you were funny?
You know, well, when I was 10 years old, my dad would tell me, hey, you know, go out there and perform and make everybody laugh.
And all my dad's friends, like Vinny, my dad's friends would watch me.
And I'm like, oh, my God, this kid's so funny.
Oh, when I was, our life was so hard.
And, you know, it was all about, you know, comedy was what, you know, kind of lowered the temperature for me where I could use it and, you know, laughter and all this stuff.
If you're a surgeon, you went to school 10 to 12 years to be a surgeon, right?
So at what point did you know you were funny and you may want to consider a courier in comedy?
I never thought that I was funnier than usual.
There was actually people in my school that were funnier.
They're the ones who are much cooler with the girls.
I never had a girlfriend.
So I was like an okay guy.
You never had a girlfriend.
I never had a girlfriend.
With those eyes, you never had a girlfriend.
Never, never, because I couldn't know how to speak to women.
So when I finished my primary school, the elementary school, my parents took me into a much richer school, much more expensive school.
And my parents were university professors and judges.
So they were government employees.
So they kind of scrapped in order to push me to that.
That was the best school in town, which is great.
But the problem is you end up with all of the rich kids.
So you feel that you're less, you feel you're not like that.
So people didn't mind me.
They were not mean to me or anything.
But I wasn't boyfriend material.
I played sports very well and I was a nerd.
So I was like a typical nerd with glasses and nobody wants to talk to him.
But I wasn't cool.
I was one of the cool kids with all of experiences and the money.
And then when I finished medical school, when I finished the school, I went to the medical school.
Now, medical school, they are Arabs, government.
So everybody from all of the country comes in.
All of the people who go to the free schools.
And these people are like nerds.
Big time nerds.
So I come in.
I am from the rich school.
Now I am the soft kid from the kids' school.
You're not the elite.
Yeah, now I'm the elite.
And then I always felt that I'm out of place.
I never felt that I belong to anybody.
And whether or not you're funny or not, well, there's other doctors who are funny.
People make fun in the operating room.
But the fact that actually you do a show, that was not even there.
So it just took me like three, four YouTube videos that I produced it, put it online, didn't think about it at all.
And it just like blew up.
Wait, but you have to know like before you've had glimpses of you make people laugh and get a reaction.
No, like you know how a girl knows she's beautiful.
I don't know what it is to be a beautiful girl, but I would assume this girl at 16, 17, 18, 19, 20 years old, she's like, why are grown men checking me out?
Why is it that they look at me the way they do?
Or a man that all of a sudden you see how a woman looks at you, like you can read a lot when you see someone's eyes, right?
You never had a glimpse of people watching you and saying this guy is super funny and likable?
I had people think that I'm funny and people think that I'm not.
It's just like I was like I'm not out of the range.
I thought this guy was supposed to be a funny guy, Pat.
I'm out of here.
No, no.
For me, what I mean by this is wild is when the camera's on and you're performing, like you've been doing this your entire life.
You've been making people laugh and think and satire.
You've been doing that for a long time.
Your show was on for what, three years?
Three and a half years.
Three and a half years and it was the top show.
Everybody's watching it.
But it wasn't because of me.
The whole idea, I just chose a different direction to make it funny, but also deep.
So the people that the crazy jokes, I wouldn't try that.
I wouldn't be writing that crazy jokes.
It's about the direction and how to utilize these jokes and utilize the direction.
So a lot of people come to me like, ah, jokes, haha.
And I will tell them these jokes are not taking us anyway.
You're just like, these are circular jokes.
My style was, how can we use the jokes in order to advance what we want to say?
So me, I was kind of like the older guy.
And by that time, I was older.
I was 37.
All of the kids were like 24.
So they were all about like the zingers and the punchline.
And it's like, yes, we're going to use that, but in what context?
So for me, it's more of like, I'm the manager.
I'm telling them like we need to have the comedy, we need to have their because there was other political satire show, but they all failed because they were all about like the cheap laughs, the cheap laughs, the quick laughs from sticks versus storytelling.
Yeah, yeah, for me, it was like all about like storytelling.
It was like a beginning and a middle and end of that segment, what will it be like, how the people would leave feeling about that.
So that was me.
Interesting.
But as a kind of like, haha, comedy, hilarious, I was not the best one.
When you were on Pierce, did you write what you were going to say, or you just kind of said it, you didn't know what you were going to say?
No, I'm a nerd.
I write everything.
So when you went on Pierce, you were prepared on what you were going to tell Pierce.
God.
Yeah, he had a chart.
No, no, no, no, but the liner.
I'm not talking about the chart.
The whole thing about the Homelander.
That's what I'm saying.
About the autocystic nycopath, all of that was planned.
All of that was planned.
Okay, now this makes sense.
So you're a preparer is what you would say.
You're an over-preparation type of guy.
Yeah, and the whole thing when I told him, like, so what does, how does Israel think that that will go on?
It's like, what, in order to intimidate the people?
And they make it some.
So I told him, well, you just compared Israel to ISIS.
So all of these traps, it was prepared.
And what year did you make this transition from the medical field to comedy?
That was 2011.
2011.
2011, I was at that time I was an attending doctor.
I had my master's, I had my MDs, and I passed my USME exams.
And I already applied to a fellowship in Cleveland.
And I was waiting for it.
And as I was waiting, the Arab Spring happened.
So I made these videos and I thought, like, you know, maybe I'll put these videos like online or something.
And after one year, somebody will discover me and get me as a writer on a television show like that.
So in two weeks, it went viral.
And then by three weeks, I'm getting television offers.
Who called you?
Who called you first?
Everybody.
Al Jazeera, Al-Haya, CBC, On TV, all of these, like the local channels.
And then some of the regional channels starting to call.
And then we end up with a smaller television show.
They didn't give us the biggest amount of money, but they gave us a little bit of freedom.
And then after one episode, we started to go, wanted to do with live audience.
And I did that because I visited the Jon Stewart offices to shadow his team.
And I didn't, I wasn't asking for more than just one selfie was John.
But then he came in.
It's like, oh, I know about you.
Would you like to come on the show?
It's like, yes.
So he invited me on the show.
And then we made a promise.
It's like, do you promise me to come to the show if I made it a live audience show?
He said, I promised.
The year later, he came to Russia.
That is so cool.
What year was that that you went to see Jon Stewart?
I want to see him 2011.
And 2012, he came to my show.
So 2011, I'm just trying to understand.
2012 and then 2013 he came.
So 2011, the Arab Springs going on in 2005, 2006 is going on in Egypt.
The Arab Spring started 2011.
Oh, there wasn't, okay, wasn't there an earlier, okay.
No, no, that's right.
So back to Egypt, you had LCC.
Now you had Mubarak, you had Morsi, all the upheavals going on.
So before 2011, Mubarak was there.
Mubarak was there for 30 years.
And when I joke about this, I was like, oh my God, you had a president for 30 years.
And I say, in the Middle East, that's a very short time.
And then so Mubarak didn't survive 2011.
He was taken over by the army.
And then they did elections, Muslim Brotherhood won the elections.
So now it's like an Islamist kind of an Islamist authority.
So when someone is on authority, you make fun of them.
So of course the Islamists who used to like me now said like, oh, you're doing this because you hate Islam.
You're an Islamophobe.
We have that things too.
You guys have Islamophobe?
Yeah, if you may.
Listen, words like Islamophobe, transophobe, racist, anti-Semite, whatever, all of this is used in order to shut down conversation.
So instead of actually trying to have you, like, if I say something about Islam or about Islam, political Islam, you can discuss, like, discuss the thing about whatever is happening with Israel.
Or you can just shut it down.
Oh, you're anti-Semite.
That's right.
You're an Islamophobe.
And that is like a very simplistic and conversation killer.
Back to what I was asking.
So you meet Jon Stewart.
You know, they say that luck is when preparation meets opportunity, right?
Like you're starting to be a medical doctor, but obviously you're politically savvy.
You know what's going on, socioeconomic, you understand Islam.
You meet this Jewish guy, Jon Stewart.
You know, we just saw you do the Mark Twain Award where you sarcastically, you know, poured love out to him.
It was a great speech.
Describe that relationship.
You know, he's a Jewish guy, massive in media.
In 2011, 2012, Obama's president.
He's still doing the daily show.
He retires in 2016, right before Trump comes in.
Best time for him to probably be there.
We all saw what happened on the Daily Show with Trevor Noah.
Now he's off.
Describe that relationship.
What did he do for you?
What did you try to mirror with Jon Stewart?
The good, the bad, the ugly.
He's Jewish.
You're Muslim.
Just give us a little background.
So I was watching Jon Stewart since 2003, 2004.
At that time, we used to watch it on YouTube.
And the first time I saw him, I didn't understand what was he saying.
So in order to understand, I had to educate myself about Republicans and about Democrats and about it seems to be very funny, but I didn't understand the political content.
So for me, Jon Stewart became the source of American politics.
And I was fascinated how people can make fun of politics that good.
So I had this dream of mine for eight years that I would have a certain show like this in Egypt.
So I would even write certain drafts of television shows and make up the...
But I kind of left it.
We're living under a dictatorship.
There's no way this book is going to happen.
And then when 2011 happened and the show exploded, the foreign press started to come and see those people in Egypt, all of those people in the political activist, the revolution.
And then, of course, they came and talked to me.
And the first English-speaking publication was The Daily Beast.
And on that day, I decided to plug Jon Stewart in every single way possible.
So they would say, what's your inspiration?
Jon Stewart.
What do you eat three times a day?
John Stewart.
Who do you dream of?
John Stewart.
So it worked because the headline of that article was Bessie Musuf, the Jon Stewart of the Nile.
And since then, it caught up.
So my name and Jon Stewart became synonymous.
And that was for me important so they would know what I was outside.
So by the time that I did, I asked to shadow his team, his team already knows about me.
He already knew about me.
So when I went in, all I wanted to have like a selfie with him and just shadow his team.
But he saw me.
He's like, hey, dude, how are you?
Let's go to my office.
We sat in his office, I thought, for five days.
We sat there talking for an hour and a half.
Bassim, so that relationship's built and you're looking at his style.
You're like, well, I'm going to do the same model here, right?
But in America, you can get away making fun of presidents and political powers and all this stuff.
And you're the first satired TV show in the Middle East type of thing.
This is not a business model in the Middle East.
It's not like, hey, I'm going to go be the first this.
There's a reason why there's not this in the Middle East, right?
Because they don't.
When was it when you pushed the envelope with a joke or something you guys said where you got a knock and you're like, hey man, you know, all this stuff is fine, but you're kind of like increasing the temperature.
And this joke is not going to fly here.
It was with every single episode.
Every single episode.
Because we're trying.
There was political satire in the airboard before I did it, but it was a kind of satire that avoids the obvious.
We don't talk about the president, we talk about the minister.
We don't talk about the prime minister, we talk about like the low-life employees.
Here, like when the president went out, I would just like mock him.
And that was something unprecedented.
So when the Muslim Brotherhood came to power, they were not very popular by many people.
They still have a huge base.
So I started making fun of them.
And for a lot of the people, it's like, yeah, like those Islamists, yeah, they had to make fun.
But the Islamists were very angry.
Now, when the Islamists were removed by the army, that was the challenge because the army is untouchable.
The army is much more sacred than religion.
So I started kind of like trading around it, and that was enough for me to get canceled once and twice.
I got interrogated and arrested under a Muslim Brotherhood, and I got canceled twice and had my signal jammed a couple of times under the army.
And I was going to jail under the army, and then the last minute I left in November 2014.
Did anybody know you were leaving or no?
What?
Did people know you were leaving?
No, well, they came up with a verdict fining me 150 million pounds, which is about $15 million at the time, for legal issues with my channels.
Of course, they will choose other kinds of, they're not going to say because of freedom of speech.
So my lawyer said, like, you need to leave the country right now.
So the verdict was at 12 noon, 4 o'clock, I was out.
This is November 11, 2014.
Yeah.
And when you left, you're leaving how?
Are you leaving like underground leaving, or you just went straight to the airport?
They didn't have time to put my name.
Wow.
So from that point, so right now, Basin, like right now, are they like if you went back, would you be flagged?
Would they be like, hey, I don't think so.
I have an American passport now, and they're trying to be nice to me, and I don't care.
Good.
And they sent a lot of people to kind of, you know, with authoritarian regimes like this, you don't know, because one day somebody from them says, hey, it's your country, you need to come back.
And the next day, I land in Jordan on the way to Paris, and I get detained to be delivered for the Egyptian.
And you don't know who you're talking to.
Like, and one day they tell you, oh, there's nothing wrong with Basim.
He can come any day.
And the next day, they send me hecklers in my shows in New York to spoil my show.
This is when?
2014, 2015, 2016.
How long did that last?
It did that like four or five times.
And then the New Yorker wrote about that.
It's actually, you can find it in the New Yorker called The Heckling of the John Stewart of Egypt.
I actually am happy that they have a cartoon of me on the New Yorker.
So it's called The Heckling of the John Stewart of Egypt.
And the reporter there attended it, and he actually described how here is how the people of the pro-military people were in Washington and New York were haggling me and they were shouting at me.
And even one of them went up and sang the Egyptian national anthem in the middle of my comedy show.
So it's crazy.
Like one day you're, oh, you're fine.
You're our son.
He's Egyptian.
You can come back to your country.
And then the next day you do that.
Wow.
Who wants you to shut up?
Who wants to keep you silent?
You see what happens with Salman Rushdie, there's a fatwa on him.
I'm not saying that's the case here, but clearly there's people that are like, shut your mouth.
Who wants you to keep your silence?
In any regime, in any regime, you will have the doves and the hawks.
There's always, there's always the people.
No, every fine thing is fine.
It's like, no, they should die.
In every single regime, there's always like that.
So I think the nicer people want me back, and the kind of like the vicious ones want me that.
But the Egyptian regime under LCC specifically.
Yeah.
Okay.
But you'll find that in any regime, not just Cisi.
If it was in the Islamic regime, you'll find doves and vultures.
Same.
But yeah, it seems that the doves always try to get me back and the vultures want to.
But at the end of the day, the hawks or the vultures, as you call them, they're going to be the resounding voice in these regimes.
So, Basim, you come here.
You're in the States.
You're doing stand-up.
You're doing your thing.
Are you immediately getting a show signed, working, making money?
It was terrible.
came here in a three four years of darkness that's what I'm I tried to do little gigs here and there and I was not making it It was terrible.
And the problem is when you're trying to do something here, you already have the massive following that followed me in the Middle East.
And then they come and see me doing little things because I cannot come here and just hit the floor running.
And one of it is some YouTube sketches.
I did some stand-up, and I sucked because I needed to learn something in my second language.
And I was not good.
Like anybody who's starting anything new.
And they would come to my show, and I can see the disappointment in their eyes.
And I can very disappoint me.
And I would go back for very long crying nights saying I'm done, I'm a husband.
And it took me some while.
Are you married at the time?
Like when you came here married?
I'm married also, yeah.
Okay, got it.
And while you're going through this, have you made already millions on top of millions of dollars that you've saved so you don't have to make money ever again?
Because you're living in New York.
It's very expensive to live in New York.
No, I live in Los Angeles.
Okay, at the time, you didn't come to New York.
You went straight to LA.
No, I went for Dubai for a few months, stayed with people who helped me, and then I went to northern San Francisco, Oakland.
I stayed with people, and then I moved to a small, very small apartment in Los Angeles.
You don't have money at this time?
I do, but they were like dwindling.
They were like, because a lot of stuff that I couldn't get out of Egypt.
So financially, I wasn't doing very well.
And I was just doing gigs, like speaking in universities or whatever.
But I said I cannot go to university, speak, say the same thing all over and over again.
So I started to do my own act.
So I started doing stand-up comedy.
And the first two years, it was terrible.
So the little money I had, I went to hire comedians so they can see me perform.
I didn't hire them to write me jokes because I knew what kind of story I would tell.
But I want them to kind of punch up my style.
It's not also about the writing.
It's about the cadence and the rhythm and the speed and the delivery, which is different from one language to the other.
So I had to learn that in a language that's not mine.
So you can say, it's not like getting an Arabic joke and you translate it into English.
So I had to kind of rewire my brain.
And it was terrible, as I said in the beginning.
And only two years ago, it became better.
And my English stand-up comedy has actually been touring and filling like theaters and Conu Club.
So it's been going well.
And so when Piers Morgan came, it seems that it came in the right time.
Because if the Piers Morgan came thing came like two years ago, I wouldn't have been ready.
People who come and see, they will see like a bad show.
But now they come to see someone, oh, he's actually like a good comedian, whether in English and in Arabic.
So I think it's the timing was perfect.
And there's not that many people about them that can do like both language stand-up comedy.
So you're doing an hour, an hour.
Yeah, the Arabic show is a little bit longer, an hour and a half.
The English show is an hour.
And we've been doing now very new experiences.
So just the improv in Irvine, I did a whole weekend in Arabic.
And that's the first time ever, like a franchise comedy club will actually host something that's not in English.
Here in Miami, I'm doing two Arabics and three English in the same weekend.
That's awesome.
So the fact that you bring in another language to the comedy club, not just that, you're bringing another audiences to come see English in Arabic.
What they love about the other comedy clubs, they say you bring people that we never see.
Because Arabs, it's not part of their culture to come and stand up comedy show.
They go out to eat, the movies, same as malls.
To come in and get seated and listen to comedy, someone speaking to them like that.
That's very new.
And I'm pretty sure, because we're Middle Eastern, I can only imagine, because that rarely happens, an Arabic guy coming to do stand-up comedy.
Imagine the audience, but imagine the response of people like, hey, where are all these damn brown people coming from?
People must be shocked.
Like, who the hell are all these?
But, you know, there's an element to that that happened in golf, right?
Tigers started playing golf.
You know, everybody's like, hey, you know, I'm interested.
I thought it was only a white man's sports.
No, I want to play the game.
And you bring, you know, there's some of that happens a little.
Like when I went to Maz's show, Moz had a bunch of, you know, Persians, you know, even Tehran.
Tehran is an interesting character, right?
Black Persian guy eating up there and funny as Sally.
You know, first time I saw Tehran perform was, man, probably over a decade ago.
And he says, let me guess, you look like an Iranian finance guy that drives a 750 BMW.
I'm sitting next to Jenna.
I'm like, oh, shit, I came with the BMW.
Bingo.
Yeah, so, you know, it's great to see that.
It's great to see what's happening.
And now the fact that the timing of it of when it took off, where you actually are able to also deliver on the performance side, let's talk about.
Actually, me and Mez and Tahran are going together to Dubai May 24th.
Oh, fantastic.
A big double bill.
Fantastic.
And Dubai is one of the few countries in the Middle East where you can just say what you want to say.
There's not the fear of getting your head chopped off.
No, you can.
You know, you have Dubai, you have Bahrain, you have Kuwait, you have Lebanon.
Lebanon, too.
Lebanon, Jordan.
I played on all of these.
But not Egypt.
Not me.
It's actually like Russell Peters was just in Egypt.
Are there any Middle Eastern countries you just would not feel safe going or just completely uncomfortable going there telling jokes?
What countries?
For now, for me, Egypt.
Straight up.
Like, would you go to Afghanistan?
Would you go to Iraq?
Would you go to Syria?
Afghanistan, no.
Syria, no.
Iraq.
No.
Would you ever perform in Israel?
No.
You would not.
Why?
They would accept you.
I don't accept them.
You don't accept Israel, the state of Israel.
No, I don't accept them making care of me getting in.
That's no problem.
Problem is, when you go in in Israel, it's not about going in Israel or not.
It's the fact that they really show you a terrible time.
You go in in the security, they treat you like shit.
Really?
Yeah, I mean, I've been invited by Palestinians a lot to go to there.
So like, I would go to you, but like, I don't want to deal with the border control of Israel.
It's just they, because they humilate you.
They treat you.
And that's because you're Arab or that's because they have 20% of their population is Arab.
They're not leaving.
Yeah, but they're treating them like shit.
Not according to them.
I've seen them.
I've met them.
I met them too.
I mean, they don't have, like, do you talk about the 20% of Palestinians?
I'm talking about the 20% of Israelis are Muslims or Arabs.
If given a choice to move to any other Middle Eastern country, given the state of circumstances in the Middle East, they would choose 100 times out of 100 to stay in the democracy of Israel.
Why don't they leave?
Have you talked to them about their health care in their schools?
Because there are about like 25 Arab cities that they don't have hospitals or schools.
They have to take in Gaza and the West Bank?
No, I'm talking about inside Israel.
I'm talking about Arabs with Israeli passports, fully fledged Israeli citizens.
They don't have a single cinema, they don't have a single hospital, they don't have a single school in their cities, and they have to go to the Jewish states in order to go there.
There are many, many, many, many daily microaggressions against the Arabs who live in Israel having the Israeli passport.
Even within the Israeli community, you have slurs.
Like Aghavi Maliklach, which actually their N-word.
I mean, I can go on and on and on.
But slurs are going to be everywhere.
In America, we're all equal.
There's slurs.
Every day I get called a dirty Jew.
You think I'm crying?
No, but like every day here, if you find someone who's like nigger, nigger, nigger, nigger, that will be basically 200 years of America.
Exactly.
But like when you have like one part of them, it's much stronger, actually control the other one, and all they do is like slurs because the Arabs cannot do slurs against the Jews.
So why don't they leave?
Well, some of them actually, because it is basically between like a rock and a hard place.
Yeah.
The whole idea about like Arabs living a wonderful life, they're living good life compared to other Arab countries, which is a real low bar.
And the fact that can use like a low bar to sell milk, at least they're happy now.
It's like I'm living here because I don't know where else to go.
I appreciate you saying that because the bar in many, many Middle Eastern countries is very low.
I'm not coming here to defend any countries.
I know you're not.
I'm asking what countries you're going to do.
I'm just saying that the security and the equality that Israel wants you to think that they have it between all of their Arabs, it is not true.
They have something called zoning committees where you as an Arab coming in to get an auction, to get a house in a Jewish town, you will not be allowed to take it.
And it happened more and more and more before.
It happened in Nazarit elite.
It happened in many cities that I actually talked about.
There was like an auction where they found that most of the people who are getting the houses were Arabs.
And the city canceled the auctions.
And they canceled the auction saying that we want to preserve the city of Tarshiha as a Jewish, Zionist, secular country.
So I don't know how Zionist and secular and Zionists come in the same city.
It's interesting too, what question you're asking, right?
Because I'll sit there and if you want to read this real quick, I'll sit there and I'll talk to my friends in California and I'll say, hey, you know, California does not say, I hate California.
I hate this.
I hate that.
I hate this.
And you'll say, oh, why don't you leave?
I can't leave California.
Why can't you leave California?
Well, because my family's here, my unit's here, my kids are here, my uncle, my aunt, my grandma, da-da-da-da-da.
Okay, got it.
But I hate it here.
I wish I was living in Texas or I was living in Florida, whatever.
Okay.
Some people here, I can't believe, you know, okay, why don't you leave?
Well, I can't.
You know, this, this, that.
We lived in Iran.
We left, lived in Tehran for 10 years.
And I mean, I went to school there till fifth grade.
I read, write, Farsi, everything till I left and I went to Germany, right?
I lived in Germany for a year and a half and then we finally get here.
Like, holy shit, we make it to America, right?
It's like a dream.
But the people that, it's not the people that can't leave that give the argument of why don't they leave.
It's the people that can leave that choose to stay.
Why do you choose to stay?
Like, I'd love to have a room full of 50 people who are Arabs who can choose. to leave Israel.
Why are you not leaving?
Make sense?
Just to kind of get an idea, what would you say?
Why are you not leaving, right?
If you have the ability to leave, you can go to a different place.
Why do two million people in Gaza being bombed every single day for 100 days?
Why don't they leave?
Because that's their land.
Right?
So you can be living in a very fitty situation, but you will not leave because you know that you're not going to get back again.
There's those people leaving Gaza, 2.2 million people.
They're living under subhumane conditions.
They could leave.
As a matter of fact, everybody pushing them to leave through Sinai, what they're going to say, oh, no, we will not leave because this is our land.
Sometimes you get connected to the land, and it doesn't matter how bad.
So to answer your question, why don't you leave?
Because that's your land.
Yeah, but I'm talking about the Arabs in Israel.
Yeah.
Because they consider that still their land.
Yeah, but there's so many different ways we can have this conversation.
But everything for me comes down to socioeconomics, okay?
To me, I'm always wondering, why is the Gaza, the Palestinian plight, at the forefront of the news?
All right, now we're starting to see Yemen in the news.
People don't realize for 10 years there have been a civil war with the Houthi rebels, Saudis, Sunnis, Shiites, Iranian-backed militants killing each other.
Never in the news.
Syria, tens and tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people murdered.
We know what's going on in Iraq, what's going on in Afghanistan.
This is not an anomaly in the Middle East.
But in my opinion, humbly, with all due respect, what's going on in Gaza is the equivalent of BLM in the States.
What do I mean?
So black on black crime.
Every single weekend in Baltimore, in D.C., in Chicago, you name the city, there's black on black crime.
Let one cop kill a black guy, George Floyd.
National, international news.
In the Middle East, Yemen, Syria, Lebanon, you name it, Iraq, every day, Muslims are killing other Muslims.
A lot of it is Islamists, fundamentalists.
There's no marches.
There's no protests.
But Israel defends itself after October 7th.
And I've seen you condemn Hamas for October 7th.
But you've also sympathized with the Palestinians, as you should.
But all of a sudden, that's the biggest story in the news.
Why the distinguishment?
Why can't Muslims?
There's the difference between comparing conflicts, civil war, and then allowing another country to bomb you from the sky every single day for 100 days.
You cannot compare the both.
And actually your tone of voice, when you say, oh, there is like black and black, Arabs killing each other, in your undertone is saying, yeah, they don't deserve to live, so let's Israel.
This is exactly what I'm saying.
No, it's not what I said.
No, no, this is what it's saying.
I asked a question.
You have absolutely no sympathy for the Palestinian killing.
That's not true.
Don't put words in my way.
No, no, no, seriously.
100% have sympathy.
Your entrance into this conversation is extremely racist because you say, well, Arabs have been killing each other.
First of all, the Arabs that have been killing each other, these are called either proxy wars or civil wars.
But you, this is different because A, America is not standing behind Saudi Arabia voting every single UN resolution, like Israel.
Israel is killing Palestinians, and nobody can do anything for them in the UN or the Security Council.
You can talk about how Saudis are killing the Houthis or the Yemenis or how Iran.
But when they go to the Security Council, America doesn't use the vote, the veto.
You know how many vetoes did America use since the inception of the Security Council?
How many?
Tell me.
88.
How many of those were they used in order to protect Israel from a veto?
56.
The superpower of the world, over 50 years, used more than 65% of its veto power to protect one country.
You cannot compare both.
So why do you think that is?
Why is Israel so aligned with Israel?
I'm sorry, why is the U.S. so aligned with Israel over Gaza?
I don't know.
I mean, there's like a million.
Ask yourself.
Why?
So why?
I want to know.
Tell me, because they're white like them.
Are they allowed to believe?
Who's white?
Well, I mean, a lot of Americans consider Israel is the white.
But you know for a fact most Israelis are Sephardic and they're a brown.
It's the perception.
So it's both a perception, you know?
So this is how Israel promotes itself.
We are a secular.
We are a democratic country.
I have never seen a secular or democratic country that would actually give contraception shots to its own citizens, to their Ethiopian Jews, and make them not to reproduce.
And until 2013, they have confessed doing that.
They have been doing this for 10 years.
That is not a democratic country.
I have never heard a secular country, a democratic country, that would kidnap little kids from Yemeni Jews in 1950 and then take them away and then tell their parents that they die.
And they did that in order to instill semitic DNA in their population.
That's why DNA testing is not allowed in Israel.
So are you pro-Islam?
Are you anti-Israel or both?
I'm not pro-anything at all.
I'm pro-humanity, man.
So am I.
So am I.
It doesn't matter my religion is.
I don't care.
And I can give you 100 things I can tell you about Islamic countries that they do wrong.
But what happens is right now is that the people who are bombing people only every single day, they are not Yemenis, they're not Houthis, they're not Saudis.
They're Israelis.
For 100 days, they have dropped almost three nuclear weapons on an open air prison, and all because of Hamas.
Dude, if ISIS was already there, you have no excuse to kill 30,000 people.
You can't say words like nuclear weapons when it's not true, Basam and you know that.
The equivalent, the equivalent of three.
No, I can't.
I can't.
I can't.
So now they're dropping nuclear weapons?
I said like they're dropping the equivalent of three nuclei weapons.
So how many people have died in Gaza?
30,000 people.
Okay, according to Hamas.
Obviously, UN gets their number from Hamas.
So do you have a number that you trust?
No, I don't have any number that I trust, but I'll take your word for it.
I don't think that's a good idea.
So how many?
So how many people?
Hundreds of thousands of Muslims have died.
How many people in Israel died in Club 7?
According to the numbers, 1,200.
According to who?
But the numbers are still being counted.
According to whom?
According to the IDF.
But I don't trust the IDF.
Whether you do or you don't, those are the numbers that we're working with.
Well, I'm giving you 50,000 people died, and you said you don't trust them.
So why do we trust them?
That's not what I said.
I said according to Hamas.
When you say according to Hamas, it's the undertone that you don't believe the numbers.
With all due respect, you're missing my point.
30,000 other than the Hamas fighters, because I will stand to kill these people.
I hope zero civilians die.
But we know what happens.
They die.
Of course.
Every day.
But let's go back to my initial question.
No, no, no, let me ask this question and then you can stick to my...
How do you think how many...
But what about zero?
Zero.
But they're killing it.
Okay, but that's not my point, Basa.
My point is this.
30,000 people.
How many people?
Can I ask the question?
And then you have the full response.
Why is this issue at the forefront of the news when hundreds of thousands, since 9-11, 5 million plus people in the Middle East have died?
5 million!
5 million versus 30,000.
Where are the marches?
Where are the protests?
You haven't been around.
You just haven't been around.
No, but I also read the newspapers.
I see what's going on.
Because there have been marches against what's happening in Yemen.
There have been massive marches against what happened in Iraq.
If you ask the average person, they couldn't tell you that there's a war in Yemen.
There is a difference.
But if you ask the average American, they know what is exactly going on in Israel.
Here's the thing.
These mental gymnastics, where you want to divert people to other conflicts, these conflicts are proxy wars.
These conflicts are civil war, terrible, horrible.
Civil war.
There's been civil war happening in all kinds of Asian and African countries.
The only difference is that that is a foreign country invading another country.
Like exactly Russia invaded Ukraine.
And then everybody is sitting there.
All they ask is ceasefire because one of the people in that conflict is a country that has been financed, given money by the U.S.
It is considered as part of the free world because they are secular, because they are democratic, and they are committing war crimes every single day under the eyes of the United States, of the UN, and the Security Council.
And that is why it is different.
Fair enough.
So civil wars are totally okay.
If it's a civil war, don't look at it.
Those are people just doing it.
You can never say that civil war.
No, but you basically equivalize, let's say, if a civil war, 5 million people die across the Middle East.
Yeah, it is no big deal.
Usually the civil war is really supported by like two proxy people and they are like killing each other and it's terrible and they're trying to do it.
And in the same time, those people are not just like killing them.
They're killing them, wanted to push them out, openly saying that we are going to push Palestinians into the Sinai.
Basically, that is my country.
The only people shouting for the river to the sea are the Gazans.
Palestine will be free.
So what does a free Palestine mean?
You know what's the difference between regular people in the street shouting from the river and the sea?
These are regular people that are carrying flags in the street.
You know what's happened on the other side?
You have government officials like Bidzail, like the minister of finance.
You have Bin Ghair, who is the Minister of National Security.
Both of them, by the way, were arrested many times for acts of terrorism against their own country.
These are Israeli prime ministers?
These ministers.
Not the prime ministers, ministers of Syria.
Do you mean to tell me that Yahya Sinwar, who's the head of Hamas, or Mahmoud Abbas, who's the head of the Pilot, they're not politically saying from the river to the sea?
So if we're going to use that equivalence.
You didn't even finish making a mistake.
So first of all, you are comparing a militant group, a terrorist group, with a secular democratic country.
This secular democratic country that I'm telling you about, they have ministers coming up with the map of Greater Israel behind them, and they openly talk about them, which is, by the way, if you don't know, the Greater Israel map is from the river to the Euphrates, including parts of Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria, and of course Palestine.
So that is the official talk of the official ministers.
So you want to kind of ignore this and you go after random people in the streets with flags saying from the river to the sea.
Don't you see the comparisons a little bit?
Well, it's not just random people.
It is Hamas who is the governing body of Gaza.
Hamas?
But the point of a democracy, what do you mean?
Hamas, at the end of the day, they're a militant group.
They're a militant group.
They're ISIS.
You don't take them seriously.
Militant groups.
Don't take them seriously.
They're the leaders of Gaza.
They were elected in 2006.
And as your joke said, a 30-year 2006 when nobody actually was alive by then.
Like now, how many people were up?
50% of Gaza was not alive in the United States.
So if you did an election right now, they're not going to be the rulers of Gaza.
Yeah, but you didn't do an election.
That's the point.
Why is that?
Why is that?
Because basically they kicked out Fatah and the PLO and they're running the West Bank.
And Israel didn't put them under blockade and kicked the fifth out of the country.
There is an argument to be made there.
You think that I'm saying that Israel is completely innocent?
Do you think I would say that the U.S. is completely innocent?
We had a debacle in Iraq.
We had a debacle in Afghanistan.
There's no perfect country.
There's no innocent country.
Listen, this is what you do.
And when I say what you do, is what America and Israel and all of this, like, pro, let's kill them all.
No, no, no, no.
You've already put words in my mouth.
You've called me racist.
You're saying that I want to kill everybody.
I said none of those words.
You kill people and then you ask questions later.
You kill people, you ask questions.
Isn't that what Hamas does?
Hamas is a terrorist group.
You are comparing Hamas.
Every time you compare Hamas, I'm bringing you Israel and America, which are supposedly democratic countries.
Hamas and ISIS and whatever, these people are not good examples, right?
I agree.
I agree with the example.
So when you tell me Hamas says, all right, fine.
Hamas, horrible people.
Let's talk about the leaders of the free world.
America, they kill first, they ask questions later.
And the result, Afghanistan and Iraq.
Disasters.
They killed people.
I'm not going to argue with them on that one.
Does that Israel kill later?
And then the result, what's happening in Gaza and what's been happening to Gaza, is there is no justification for Israel to kill 30,000 people right now.
And all the thing about October 7th, many of them.
Can you tell me where are the decapitated babies?
What are their names?
Can you mean the names?
You want me to go over every dead, decapitated Israeli baby's name?
I think that story was refuted, wasn't it?
It was refuted many times.
It wasn't really.
And it was the biggest.
What's your point?
That Hamas didn't kill babies?
There's hundreds of people kidnapped by Hamas.
What's your point?
No, no, no.
They're kidnapped.
In fact, if a terrorist group would decapitate people, if terrorist group would burn people, you know what terrorist groups does?
They terrorize.
They will show them off.
Like ISIS, they were burning people in cages.
We will not find about the atrocities of rape or about decapitating from other sources because a terrorist group, by design, terrorizes.
They will go in with their GoPro.
They will show you the babies that they decapitated.
They will not go on the hired.
It's like, oh, my, we didn't do it.
Because terrorist groups did that.
Right?
Does remember ISIS when they were burning people in cages?
They like to promote their terror because the terrorist group wanted to terrorize the public.
You have not seen anything of that.
That's one of the most naive comments I've ever heard.
We've seen videos, countless videos, of them gang raping women and then blowing their head off while they chop off one of their breasts.
We've seen these videos.
No, you have to.
Are you fucking crazy?
Of course we've seen these videos.
We've seen dead bodies littered all over kibbutz as well.
You have read about this.
And I can't.
Go watch the video.
And I can't.
You're choosing.
This is selective ignorance.
This is selective ignorance.
That's like me saying, if that's like me saying, of course Israel's not bombing indiscriminately.
No, they have.
And I'm at least willing to own that.
And I'm not Israeli.
I'm American.
By the way, I'm not defending Hamas.
They did something.
But you're equivalent.
But what I'm saying, what I'm saying, what I'm saying is all of these decapitating babies, that is wrong.
That never happened.
Okay, it was only a few.
A few?
How many?
Dude, I'm not there alone.
So what's your argument?
Let's be clear here.
What's your argument that they didn't decapitate one baby's head?
No, no, I didn't.
So what are you saying?
I said that what Hamas did was terrible, but it was inflated by things to make it emotional to think that it's okay to kill all of those people.
It was inflated.
So it wasn't 1,200?
How much was it?
I don't know.
Okay.
So Israeli's numbers are inflated.
But the 30,000 from Hamas is not inflated.
You're talking out of both sides of your mouth.
As a matter of fact, according to Israel, Israeli survivors, they said that many of these casualties happened because Israeli troops came in and indiscriminately killed everybody, including the hostages.
That's the first time I've heard that story.
Because you're not covering, because you have not listening to the survivors from the Israelis on the other side.
Every morning I read incredible sources.
Wall Street Journal, Fox News, Fox News, Bloomberg.
Okay.
So, what are you reading?
Hamas.com?
Like, where are you getting your sources?
Haerts.
Okay, Haart.
Yeah, the Israeli newspapers.
The people of Israel.
Yes, of course.
I read those two.
They have actually broken down.
I've never heard them say one time that 1,200 people were not murdered.
Not in one paper.
No, no, no.
I didn't say it.
I said many of those numbers that were killed.
They were killed because of the indiscriminating interference by the Israeli troops, and many of them died because of.
Four people were killed that way when they tried to rescue the hostages.
No, the fact that you're trying to equivocate 1,200 people.
You're late in the game.
There was a woman whose name is Dahlia.
She came out on Israeli podcast and you said that everybody in the kaputz were died.
And then we went out and we say the Israeli tank, the one that fired on the whole kaputz.
This is bullshit stories.
You think the IDF is just coming in and then just spraying down kibbutzes?
That's like saying American troops are just coming into a conflict here and just spraying down fellow Americans.
It's called the Hannibal.
It's called the Hannibal Protocol.
Look it up.
Yeah.
We'll look it up.
But I think that's bullshit.
Basan, I want to ask you a question.
So going to that day, all the stuff that we found out since that day, we found out, Rob, that they knew, apparently they had information intelligence for a year that it was going to happen.
The day that it happened, apparently all the defenses were down.
Hamas got to run rampant for six hours.
Mayhem, they asked John Kirby, went up, and one of the reporters from Fox asked, how did you guys not see this with all the intelligence?
And he said, and I quote, now is not the time.
Since October, it's not what, three months, October, November, December.
We're in January right now.
They still don't know.
We saw this thing called the Jericho Wall where Israel, a leaked document where Israel already had a plan of what to do with all these, all the displaced people.
They want to send them all to Egypt and all the countries and the United States.
Bibi Nanyahu was on a video saying how he could do whatever he wants in Gaza because Americans are gullible and he could do whatever on the home video.
Bazo, do you have an opinion on the knowledge, the pre-knowledge of this was going to happen and the fact that they got to wait, they got to do whatever they want for six hours with one of the sickest military, sickest intelligence?
Do you think they knew they let it happen?
How do you feel about it?
I'm no military expert at all, but like watching this, the fact that they've been doing this for six hours and this is the most guarded border ever.
I mean, you can't even have a dog pass by without being shot.
And these walls have been tried and tested.
And the fact that they gain and they continue like the wall by itself is seven meters up, seven meters down the ground.
It's one of the most fortified borders ever.
And then you go in, the Apaches didn't even appear until after six hours.
And you understand how Israel and Gaza and all of these ladies are like very small.
These are like very small.
This is like a plane can be there in two minutes.
So I don't know.
I mean, these are the questions that I don't want to go into conspiracy theories, but these are the questions that the Israeli community has been asking.
This kind of failure.
A lot of people inside, again, conspiracy theories.
I don't want to adopt any of them.
It's like it's because of Bibi who's having a lot of pressure from his Supreme Court.
So he wanted something to kind of like divert it.
And, you know, when people want to divert something, they make a conflict.
But it kind of like got out of hand.
And the fact you can go in, Lily-willy, with very primitive weapons and go in inside of Israel and come up.
I mean, just a year ago, there were 50 Palestinians that were killed by snipers just because they came in closer to the border and they were like holding flags.
So the fact that they go in and you see like all of these military bases empty for the taking and coming back with cars and with people and with hostages, if I'm an Israeli citizen, I would be pissed.
Of course, I want to answer.
I would like to have some answers.
So I don't know.
Basom, let's go to the last thing.
Because for me, I'm curious with solutions, right?
Some say, well, this is going to keep happening.
It's never going to stop.
It's been going on for hundreds of years, couple thousand years.
It's going to be ongoing for another couple thousand years.
Perfect.
Okay, fine.
So that's one argument.
Now, for the people that maybe are solution-oriented and they want to figure out a way to improve things, you said 06, Hamas gets elected because what it was, but today it wouldn't happen.
Today, if they do have an election, who controls the election?
Because you were a little bit not elusive.
You were not clear about why they're not having fair elections today.
Who controls the electricity?
I wish Hamas is not in charge of...
I wish the whole thing about the Islamization, Judaism of this conflict is not there.
Because that is making everything worse.
So how do you get that?
The whole idea about putting so much religion on the Israeli side and on the Muslim side, is the reason why this conflict is getting worse and worse and worse.
It's because now people are kind of like rooting for the divine.
And whenever you put religion in any conflict, this is going to get worse and worse.
So the thing is, there is a problem, a fundamental problem between the rights of the Palestinians and the land of Palestine.
Now, whether you create a Palestinian nation on the 22% after with using, like Jimmy Carter once said, we have to have a two-state solution using Gaza, using the borders of 1967 with modification and land swap.
And that is what the Palestinian authority are actually accepting.
Hamas does not accept that.
And there's other people who does not accept that.
And at the same time, people on the Israeli side does not accept that.
You have people, radical people on both sides who want all or none and kind of fairly moderate people who want to stay in the middle and say, all right, let's have a little bit of a swap.
But what is happening right now is a two-state solution is being shot and dead a long time ago.
Because even if Beni Nintendo, when he came out and he bragged about how he have spoiled the Oslo Accord and how Americans don't care and we have manipulated them and 80% of America are with us so we can do whatever the hell we want, even if we can kill as many Palestinians as possible.
And he was there on camera.
When he does that, and there's no repercussions, I don't think it's going to get any better.
And I think it's going to be a matter of time until those Palestinians will be, if it's not today, it's not this year, it's the year after, all of this Gaza will be cleared out and the Palestinians will be pushed into Sinai and Israel will take it over.
And it will not stop like that because if you put 2.2 million people, put them in Sinai, that will be a security threat because those people will have an open access to the sea and they will have weapons and then they will want to avenge what happened to them and they will go in and attack Israel.
And now it's going to have a dual problem between a group of people between Israel and Egypt and that will not get any better.
So I'm just like telling you I'm not very optimistic about what will happen because if you don't have justice and you don't have people what they want, they are just like people going to get justice in themselves and then they would be called militant terrorists, freedom fighters, no matter how you call them.
But it's not going well.
So regarding Gaza, and I'm trying to come from a solution-based approach here, to be honest.
At the end of the day, everything comes down to money or security.
You need that?
Everything comes down to money or security.
You just got to pull your shirt up.
Oh, uh-oh, hold on.
Oh, what's going on?
The heater pads.
He's got a bad back.
Let's get his back right before I ask this question.
Hook up the shirt.
That's how we played massages.
We got a massuse coming in the house.
Well, thank you guys because I'm really in pain.
I can't even.
You've been traveling for how many days?
We have what is called unreasonable hospitality.
Yeah, while we're having a friendly debate, we're going to make sure that you're back.
Okay, go ahead.
Solution for Gaza.
Israel wants security.
And Gaza, many countries in the Middle East need and want prosperity.
Okay?
Israel's whole thing, their whole contention is, listen, we just can't have another October 7th, period.
And we're going to do everything to protect our citizens.
The people in Gaza, they're no different than other people in the Middle East.
They want prosperity.
The problem in the Middle East, in my opinion, my humble opinion, it's not just an Islamic issue.
It's certainly not just an Israeli issue because by the way, it is an Iranian issue.
That's a tip of the spear when it comes to the mafia-like regime that's running Iran over there.
But it's socioeconomic.
People need economic improvements.
People need political certainty.
And when you combine that with Islamic fundamentalism, you sprinkle in a little jihad, throw in a little anti-Zionism, Zionism and rhetoric, you'll get what's going on in Gaza.
But look at the countries that are thriving in the Middle East and look at the countries that are basically the Gazas of the Middle East.
Unemployment rates.
People need jobs, okay?
If kids don't have jobs, if youth unemployment is skyrocketing, what are these young people supposed to do?
The highest unemployment rate in the Middle East, Jordan, 23%.
Palestinians, right next to them, and also at 23%.
Then you have Sudan, Libya, Tunisia, Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen, Afghanistan, Iran, Morocco, Syria, Turkey, Egypt, all above 10% unemployment, with the exception of your country of Egypt, 7%.
Every single one of those countries, political upheaval, especially what's going on in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine.
But did you notice that all the good countries, high unemployment rate, low unemployment rates?
Qatar, 0.3%, one of the richest countries on earth.
They just had the World Cup there.
Richest country in the Middle East.
Bahrain, 1.9%.
Israel, 3.3%.
UAA, 3.4%.
By the way, the UK's unemployment rate is 3.5%.
So UAE is better than the UK.
Kuwait, 3.7%.
Same as the US.
When people don't have jobs and they don't have purpose and they don't have meaning and they can't work and they can't basically have political economic sustenance for their family, they're going to resort to violence.
That's why every single one of those countries that is 10% unemployment, those countries are, as Trump says, shithole countries.
But all the nice countries, Qatar, UAE, they're all thriving.
So it's not an Islamic problem.
It's an economic problem.
Now, if you want to talk GDP, just for my last point, the countries with the lowest GDP per person, those countries are disasters.
Afghanistan, you know what the average person in Afghanistan makes a year?
$350 a year.
Afghanistan.
Syria, $420.
Yemen, $650,000.
Sudan, $1,100.
Morocco, $3,400.
Palestinians, above any of those guys, $3,700 a year.
Lebanon, $4,000.
Egypt, $4,200.
Conversely, every single rich country has zero problems.
Qatar, GDP, $87,000.
Better than the United States.
Better than the United States.
Israel, 55,000.
UAE, 54,000.
Kuwait, 40,000.
I can go on and on and on here.
The bottom line is this, what I've seen in the Middle East.
It comes down to socioeconomics.
Then you sprinkle in a little Islamism in there.
Why is every rich country in the Middle East have no problems?
But all the poor countries are suicide bombings, terrorists.
Gaza had the opportunity to invest billions of dollars into infrastructure.
In what?
into infrastructure but they built tunnels and bombs but my question is no no i'm basically Here's my Gaza has not built tunnels and bombs.
You're wrong.
You said as if there was some sort of a prosperous source of economy.
And all of Azza said, took that and put it on in Trans.
What you're missing here is Gaza since 2006 is under blockade.
And even the medicine, even the water, even the electricity, is controlled by Israel.
They don't have to.
I'm not asking you about Gaza.
I'm asking you about the Middle East to be clear.
No, you want to focus on Gaza and then you want to turn it back on Israel.
I'm asking you specifically.
Let's not talk about Israel if that would make you nervous.
We could talk about Israel for the next two hours.
We have to do other countries in the Arab world so we can prove that Arabs could be bombed at any time because we're fucking poor.
No, that's not what I'm saying.
That's exactly what you're saying.
They're just like poor people killing each other and we're just like there watching them.
No, I'm sorry that, dude, I like you, but seriously, your undertone is fucking racist.
From the beginning until the end, you are looking at those people, lesser people, who have made bad choices.
And because they are poor, they are okay to be fucking bombed by Israel.
Okay, this is the third time you've used the racist word.
You've never said that once about Israel.
Your undertone is very, very, very offensive for these people.
So when I read stats...
Yeah.
You don't like my tone when I read stats?
You read the stats basically telling people, you see, because they're rich, they got this to themselves.
The rich people are better.
The poor people are okay.
So we can have to kill them every now and then.
That's not what I said.
And you're putting words in my mouth, and it's actually super disrespectful.
I'm reading stats to you.
I'm saying, how can we uplift the poor countries in the Middle East?
How can we turn...
Remove the blockade.
That's number one.
No, no, no, no.
I said the Middle East, funny guy.
What was that blue colour?
I said the Middle East.
You're talking about Gaza.
I'm naming all these countries that are thriving.
Qatar, Bahrain, UAE, Israel, Silicon Valley of the Middle East.
What can be done with the countries that are quote-unquote shitholes?
Okay, give me a country like a shithole.
Give me an example.
I'm looking at the unemployment rates and all this.
Give me one country.
Afghanistan.
Okay.
Syria.
Afghanistan.
Lebanon.
Why Afghanistan got it became a shithole country?
Because they endorsed the Taliban.
They did.
They did.
Isn't that a little bit of a reductive way to tell history?
Because at the beginning, there was no Taliban.
And then the Soviet Union came in.
And then America came in, supported the Taliban, made them bigger than they were.
And then at the end of the day, they supported.
If you remember, Rambu III, Rambu III was supporting the Taliban.
So Taliban was really cool.
And even they were even hailed by right-wing Christians as freedom fighters, anti-communists.
And then what happened?
America, some people like the Richard Wilson wall wanted him to come in to put some schools.
That no, no, no.
We spend all of this money of tanks on weapons.
We don't need to put them schools.
What happened?
Talibans flourished all because of America interfered, made it shitty, left everything.
Taliban flourished it.
And then America went in again, spent $2 billion, two terrorism laws, made it even worse.
So when you tell me like a country is not surviving, it's not because, oh, because there are bad people there, no, no.
You have to come into the root cause.
Every single country that you said, I can bring you the root cause of how America and the West has fucked this country to become a people.
Go to Syria, go to Lebanon, go to there.
Bashar al-Assad, killing his own people, gassing his own people.
Tell me what that's American's fault.
Who is he supported?
Who was he supported by?
That's the whole problem in the Middle East.
You have Sunni, you have Shiite, you've got Houthi rebels, you gotta be a lot of people.
Every single country in Israel.
It's a quagmire wrapped in a riddle.
And then surrounded by Islamic terrorists.
Every single middle.
Figure it out.
Bashar Hussain is not a is not, you cannot really put Bashar Hussain as an Islamic terrorist thing, you know?
No, because he's fighting ISIS, which we're funding ISIS to fight against Bashar al-Sahara.
Who's funding ISIS?
You tell me.
Qatar, who's actually funded by the United States.
All right.
So, yeah, you don't understand.
This is how complicated people.
People in the Middle East are either supported by Russia or supported by America, and they're fighting each other.
So, at the end of the day, you have people who have come to power because they have been supported by one of the superpower and they're fighting against each other.
You have the Hamiditi and you have the army in Sudan.
Each one of them is supported by external powers.
So, it's not about the Islamization of them.
It's not the economy is bad because at the end of the day, these are warlords who are fighting each other.
But to reduce that, in order, why can't they just make some money while you completely ignore the power of the international powers that are involved in that?
Like, for example, the country like Mali.
Mali is like very, very restless.
And the reason Mali is restless is that Paris is there and it's putting up like some sort of a puppet president so Paris can continue taking its share of gold and putting it into its coffers.
So, there is it's much more complicated than just selling Islamization or non-Islamization.
All of this power of play, you just gave me a Taliban and I give you the reason why America did that.
Saddam Hussein, Saddam Hussein, right?
Saddam Hussein, he was the baby of the United States administration, and then he went in and he invaded Kuwait.
Who gave him the money?
Who gave him that kind of power?
All right, it has been going on forever.
The superpower are using the smaller countries, and they are controlling their own leaders in order to go fight each other because, at the end of the day, it works for them.
I'm in full agreement with you that that's a mystery wrapped in a riddle, wrapped in a quagmire.
What's going on in the Middle East?
And I'm in full agreement with you that there are proxy wars all over the Middle East, no doubt.
But the tip of the spear that's funding all the chaos, Path has said that this is the year of chaos.
The tip of the spear with the chaos is Iran.
And there's no, I mean, who's funding Iran?
China, Russia, they have a relationship.
Azerbaijan, they have some sort of relationship.
How do you deal with Iran?
Because Iran's greatest export.
Let's bomb it.
Well, we haven't done it yet.
No, no, let's bomb it.
I don't think we should bomb it.
I think we should.
Okay, let's bomb it.
Let's elect you for a government official.
And you're no better than what's going on.
You're no better than the minister.
So you're the Nikki Halley camp.
Let's go for it.
That's the answer.
Bomb Afghanistan, bomb Iraq, bomb Palestine, bomb Iran, and let's see what happens.
I speak sarcasm better than the next guy.
I trust you.
I know you're being sarcastic.
But what do you do about a regime that is funding Houthis, Hamas, Hezbollah?
They are the ones who are sowing discord.
What do you do about Iraq?
I remember Colin Powell and the Security Council.
Let's bomb Iraq.
And then they bombed Iraq.
How is bombing Iraq done to this country?
It was a fucking disaster.
Yeah, really.
But it will not be a fucking disaster to bomb Iran, right?
I'm agreeing with you.
I know that you're speaking.
You say, oh, it's all about Iran.
It starts like.
Of course it is all about Iran.
Who's funding the Houthis?
Who's funding Hezbollah?
Who's funding Hamas?
Because 20 years ago.
Billions of dollars they're giving to terrorist organizations.
20 years ago.
And you just want to ignore that?
20 years ago, it was Iraq.
And 20 years ago, it was Afghanistan.
And they bombed them.
I got a question for both of you.
I got a question for both of you.
I'm actually really curious and listen to both of you guys.
This is my question.
Okay.
The part that both of you guys agree, that we had a guy on a couple of the only guy, you know, one of the guys I've had on a couple of times.
His name is John Perkins.
He wrote a book called The Economic Hitman.
I don't know if you've read the book, you know who he is.
Okay.
And one of the things, he talked about the model on what it was.
They go to president, and that's what he did, by the way.
This was his job.
Okay.
He goes to a country that has a natural resource or location, oil.
It's close to something that they can have some kind of control.
And they go to him and they say, here's what we're going to be doing.
We're going to come here and we're going to bring billions of dollars of infrastructure to your country.
However, here's what you're going to give us.
Papa pa.
Okay.
And then the president who said no, he says a couple of them they killed.
Oh, shit.
That was his job.
Okay.
And he doesn't say he killed them, but he says, if you said no, when I went back and I had to report back to the people that I work for that you're saying no to, guess what?
Bad things are going to happen to you and your family.
And it happened.
Then the next model was we come, we bring infrastructure, then we make the country go bankrupt.
Then you give us everything, then we control you.
Are we naive enough to believe?
That's what China is doing now.
Exactly.
But pre-China did that.
And others have done that.
And Russia has done that.
Other people.
And UK tried to do that to Iran.
And then later on, eventually, UK, U.S., Germany, France, these guys got rid of the Shah because coup and all.
The people I've been involved with, economic hitman for a long time.
Here's a question for you, Basam.
Here's a question for you, Adam.
Okay.
So we both agree that that's going on.
Okay.
We both agree that that's been going on for many decades.
No one can even dispute it nowadays.
But now we're in this shithole.
And what I mean by shithole, shit show is insanity everywhere.
Bossum, what do you do now?
Is it more from the standpoint where a part of you was almost not optimistic?
You're like, Pat, I don't even, I think this thing's going to go and nothing's going to happen.
It's going to continue and all this other stuff, right?
What do we do now?
We were told during 2015, 2016, when it was a debate between what, Hillary Clinton and Trump.
And what were we told?
If Trump becomes a president, war is going to happen.
This is what's going to happen.
So everybody, we're all like, oh, shit, it's going to be pretty bad.
This guy's going to have a, do you really want this guy to have the finger on the button?
Okay.
He goes in.
ISIS disappears.
There's no war.
It's quiet.
Low-key.
Everything's good.
Boom, boom, boom.
And then, no, and then boom.
Biden gets elected.
He's going to be peace.
He's going to bring everybody together.
He's going to bring this.
Then he comes in and Afghanistan happens within months.
$83 billion of equipment being left.
And he got Ukraine, Russia, and then he got this.
And then there's a bunch of guys, economists that are talking about, you know, this is China's year to try to invade Taiwan because Taiwan's got an election coming up.
It's a shit show, basically, is what you're saying.
But the point is, like, there's so many contradictions in politics as well.
At a point like this, Bossam, where, you know, mainstream media is not going to tell us the real story because they're maybe not even getting the real story themselves on what's happening behind closed doors.
What do you do today?
There is one of the most advanced military armies in the region, in the world, supported by the West, supported by America, have vote voting like they're diverting the vote all over, and they're killing people for all that time, and nobody is doing anything for them.
Who are you talking about?
I'm talking about Israel.
Okay.
So the killing has to stop.
And I'm not talking about Gaza.
I'm talking about what they do in the West Bank.
Every single day in the West Bank, all of these people are being killed in the West Bank.
And there's no Hamas came out from West Bank to do the 7th of October.
Just a couple of days ago, like a woman was walking with her children.
Stop, pop, pop, pop, snap, walk in the street.
That is the regular days of people in the West Bank.
You think the problem is Gaza?
What you see in Gaza is an accelerated, exaggerated form of what's happening in the West Bank too.
So you have a country that has occupied the land and they are like making people living like animals.
And if you deal people with like animals, they will come up as animals, right?
So that is the crux of all.
We can talk about politics and about economies.
Here till the kingdom comes.
What is happening is there is horrible injustice happening every single day.
They're taking people, strip them up, saying that they're Hamas.
You have like an 11 person being killed every hour.
You have 247 person being killed every day.
That is in five days, that is 1,400 people that were killed on this, October 7th.
You have 30,000 people.
And the thing is, when you say 20,000, 30,000, numbers don't care.
It don't mean anything anymore.
If I told you a million people died in Gaza, you will not flinch because their numbers have become so.
It's true.
I don't know.
So we go into these circular motions.
How can we stop that again?
I was like, no, there is killing happening every day.
My wife's family have actually cheated death so far for 100 days because they have been running from Khan Yunis to Rafah, back to Khan Yunis.
And they were told in the beginning that Khan Yunis and Rafah are the safe place because it's in the thousands and then they were telling them these are the safe paths.
Take these three safe paths.
These are the buses.
They will run into the buses and Israel will bomb the buses.
After being guaranteed that this is a safe path.
This is murder every day.
So I don't know all of these circular words about like river to the sea, what's happening.
That doesn't make any sense while people are being killed every single day.
We have a tragedy, a genocide, a Holocaust happening in Gaza and everybody is just like, just like playing their balls.
Like, what do you think about the economy?
What do you think about?
What do you think about Iran?
That's bullshit.
There is killing happening right now.
And we're just like watching it and trying to fill time with useless conversations.
But how do you fix it short term though?
Because surely.
Israel, stop.
There is no...
How do you do that?
Exactly.
Exactly.
America has to tell Israel stop because basically Israel is a client state.
It's taking all of its money in the States.
It has actually sucked America dry with all of the money that it's taking away from him.
And yet, it's not doing anything.
So why do you think the Biden administration is not telling them to stop?
Because they are fucking cowards.
Because it seems that every four years, every American president goes and kiss the hand and bend their knees and go to AIPAC to make them sure that Israel is much more important in their foreign policy than America itself.
And the only one who did not do it was Bernie Sanders, the only Jewish American candidate who refuses to go to IPAC.
And you cannot call that anti-Semitic.
Right?
And you have to be very, very careful about being anti-Semitic or anti-Jew because if you call me anti-Semitic, I'm just like, I'm going to fuck you, man.
I'm not.
Like, my idol is Jon Stewart.
Bernie Sanders, I voted for him for presidency.
This whole thing about using anti-Semitic and Islamophobe and all the Chukandu and transphobe to shut down the conversation, it's bullshit.
You have a murderous country who have lied to the international community, who have actually neutered its own Ethiopian women because they didn't want black people to reproduce, who kidnapped Yemeni Jewish people from their parents, who have countless atrocities, who even have zoning laws like Jim Crow.
It's like, what are this?
This is like a racist country that is supported by the United States.
And you know, it's fine.
There's a lot of racist country, horrible people.
But they have, I've never seen a country killing 30,000 people within 100 days.
This is 10 times the number of Ukrainians being killed in Russia in two years.
It does not make any sense.
And about nuclear weapons, yes, they have calculated it.
Right now, they've calculated the number of weapons by the TNT.
They have long like three nuclear weapons in a very, very small part.
So it's really about the killing.
Stop the killing.
then we can talk yeah but that's that's okay so so that's that's that now let's not stop the king Let's talk more about cyber stuff that doesn't make any sense.
What I'm saying is, no, I'm asking the question to say we're so into deep That the amount of parties involved is not as simple as stop the killing because you, you, you know, the only way this works, and I'm, you know, I know you're a die-hard President Trump fan.
I know you're a big fan of his, and, you know, you've got pain for him and all that stuff.
I've heard you getting up there, you open up for him all the time, which is beautiful.
Oh, I love Trump.
There's my favorite.
So let me ask you this.
Let me ask you this.
Why do you think, you know, sometimes you sit there and you say, man, I can't stand that person.
That person is.
And then, you know, shit, maybe am I wrong myself?
Maybe that guy's not as bad as I think that guy is.
Fuck, there's no way in the world I can say anything good about him.
No way.
If I do, God forbid if I do, right?
Okay.
Do you think, like, every family, you know, has that one tough guy in the family?
And when that person is alive, nobody does anything stupid.
Do you know what I'm talking about?
Every family has it.
You have it.
I have it.
We all have it, right?
It's an uncle.
It's a grandfather.
It's a father.
It's somebody.
He's the bully.
He's not the bully.
It's not the bully.
It's the guy that doesn't allow the bully to bully that guy.
It's the guy that does that protector, yeah.
It's like the protector.
It's kind of like you don't want to wake that guy up.
Like, you know, that one scene from Christopher Watkins in a movie says, you know, every once in a while, the lion is sitting there and they come and pull him and they do this and they do that.
Hyenas are bite.
Every once in a while, the lion has to wake up and tell everybody because everybody knows what the lion is capable of.
Yes.
Right?
This is why people put on their house sign that says what?
There is a vicious dog, you know, in the back of this house believes in the Second Amendment.
Whether they have a gun or not, the person that's trying to rob the house is going to say, what?
I don't want to go and rob a house that may have a gun in there, right?
So that sign avoids conflict.
Yes.
Why do you think, Basim?
I'm so curious to know what kind of an answer you're going to give to this.
Why do you think during Trump, there was no war, no conflict, and we were expecting to see World War III under him?
Why do you think?
I have no idea.
And I think because maybe Trump, as much as I don't like him, he was kind of business-oriented.
He said, like, I'm not going to, how much will that war cost me?
No, I'm not going to do that.
So maybe that's the one thing.
And that's kind of like something to be good on his behalf, although I'm not a big fan.
I have a problem with other policies.
But yeah, I don't think, yeah, maybe that's the only thing.
But Boston, one of the things that I'm saying.
Let me stand on.
Because, okay, on the spending side, it's going to cost us money.
Yes, this guy's an interesting perspective.
But okay, how about this one?
How about the fact that, you know, he says, hey, you have a button, I have a bigger button.
Hey, you do this.
I know exactly where you are right now, and I can destroy you.
I would much rather not.
How about the fact that he put the fear in people that wanted to bully and take advantage of other people so nobody did during his time?
Maybe, but you also have to remember that COVID came in right in the middle.
That was three years later.
That was three.
No, that was actually.
Two and a half years later.
Yeah, but you know, first two and a half years, or still, if the COVID came, you know, that's even a bigger opportunity.
I have no clear answer.
The only thing is like, oh, this is going to cost us money.
I don't want to spend more time on this.
But you know what, though?
You're a smart guy and a reasonable guy.
Because for me, like, if I were to sit there and say, you know, what did Clinton do?
You know, I voted for Clinton.
The freaking last time we had a balanced budget, him and Newt Gingrich worked together, right?
So, you know, what did Reagan do?
Reagan and Tip O'Neill would go have beer together afterwards.
There's two Irishmen that would fight throughout the day, but at six o'clock, they're at the bar sitting there having a drink together, right?
You don't have to like the enemy or somebody that maybe policy-wise you disagree with.
You may say, I don't agree with them on pro-life, pro-choice.
I don't agree with them on Baba Baba Ba.
I don't agree with them on this.
But holy moly, the temperature was super low during Trump than we have today.
Everybody that was talking about Biden's a sweet man, he's a unifier, he's this, he's that.
Dude, we got like, it's almost a World War III categorically.
We can't say it, but there's a world going on right now.
Because he's supporting Israel.
But so did Trump, though.
Yeah, but Israel didn't do that during Trump.
And you know what Trump said about Netanyahu?
Did you hear what Trump said about Netanyahu?
Can you pull up a clip about what Trump said about Netanyahu, where Trump said, after what happened with Ghassam Soleimani, okay, you remember when he took out Ghassam Soleimani, who was supposed to be like the next leader, he was the number two guy in Iran, he criticized Netanyahu and said he almost didn't trust him because when Netanyahu said he was going to be in it with him, he didn't.
So the part about Trump is he doesn't have a problem criticizing.
Wait, you criticized Netanyahu?
Your daughter's married to Kushner.
What are you doing criticizing Netanyahu?
I don't know if that would be the same if it was like more of a massive military operation that's not going to happen.
Maybe because it wouldn't happen on the other side.
Because when you kill someone, a kind of repercussion kind of lie die very quickly.
But this is like an ongoing for more than three months.
So I don't know if what, how would Trump would directly?
Are you a sports guy?
Yeah.
What do you like?
What sports are?
Basketball.
You like basketball?
Yeah.
You know what they say, you know, like sometimes like these teams like Baltimore Ravens or some of the teams, like even back in the days, I don't know if you're a Detroit Pistons guy or if you're an old school basketball guy or not.
A lot of the guys won because their defense was sick.
They just had a sick defense.
Well, you wouldn't come through the middle or they just were freaking hovering all over.
It was so annoying.
Yeah, like the Jordan rules and pistons.
That's right, the Jordan rules, pistons, right?
So, you know, sometimes, you know, the best way to prevent a war is to have the fear you impose on everybody else where you, you know, defense where it's like, you know what?
We're just not even going to get there.
I don't even want to do anything under this guy.
Do you think at this point, like, for example, case studies?
You've been here since 2014, right?
November 11, 2014.
So do you think 10 years?
You've been here 10 years.
I came here November 28, 1990, okay?
And you come here like, okay, a senior, Bush senior, all right.
Clinton, huh?
Interesting.
Okay, boom, junior, G.W. Interesting.
Okay, Obama, huh?
There's a Trump, huh?
So now you got so many case studies, and then in life, you sit there and you say, socially, these are the issues that matter to me the most, right?
You know, if you and I were to start a country together, if you and I started a country together and we got 10 million people, okay, and we have an opportunity to attract another 10 million people to our country, what do you think the mothers and the fathers' number one priority is to come to a new country?
Do you think it's Social Security?
No.
Do you think it's Medicare?
No.
Do you think it, what do you think is number one?
I would say the S word, right?
Security and safety.
Let's just say, okay?
A woman wants to feel safe around a man.
A woman wants to feel secure around a man, right?
If the number one word is the S word, especially the last three years, do you think a lot of people in the last three years are sitting there reprioritizing their top reason to elect a president, somebody that's going to lower the temperature to not have war?
Do you think America's kind of there today after all the mess we've seen the last three years?
I still have hope in America.
I still like this country this month.
I consider this as my own country.
I find it like I found a second chance when I left the Middle East.
I think America is actually a Greek country.
It has a lot of potential, and it has given a lot of people, including me, a second chance.
So I believe in the idea of America.
And the fact that I criticize America, I criticize it like we do.
We criticize it out of love in order to do it.
Totally better.
Of course.
And what I'm worried about is like over the years, America might have lost that kind of lure because it has been dragged more and more by the military-industry complex.
And the money has been prioritized in order to spend money on war, spend money on the military.
I agree.
And I think it's, I mean, 68% of your budget is taking to the military.
And that's not a lot.
That's huge.
And many of these military contracts have been exaggerated.
60 Minutes you show something that used to cost $30, now costs $3,000.
And there's no catch.
There's no curb of these prices because they are the ones who are making up the prices.
So, yes, the security is great and all, but security in itself, because North Korea has security, right?
It's not about the security.
This is education and the equality and people.
Let me answer this.
Hang on one second.
Chris Cuomo.
Mr. Cuomo, we're on a podcast.
Why are you calling us when we're in the middle of a podcast?
Name dropping.
Yeah, I mean.
Chris, what are you talking about?
I'm doing a live podcast with this legendary comedian, Basim Yosef, and we're having a very friendly conversation about, you know, how his honesty, I'm a little confused because he's here campaigning on behalf of Trump and we're listening to him and I'm not convinced.
I'm just not convinced.
Why does he not have a red hat on?
No, he has the shirt on.
He's not wearing.
He has MAGA shoes on.
He's got MAGA shoes on and MAGA shirt on.
No, but Chris, I'm going to call you afterwards.
We're on the live podcast.
I'll call you right after this.
Do your thing.
My man.
Bye.
Hold on, my phone.
So going back to the next one, going back to what I'm saying.
You got John Stewart on the line.
You're so funny.
Yeah, I'm here with Basim.
We're best friends.
Elon.
But the reason why I'm asking this question is because, you know, when you're young, your dad's kicking your ass, challenging you all this stuff.
You know what?
Look at Joey's dad.
They smoke weed together.
I wish my dad would smoke weed with me.
Look at Bobby's dad.
They have drinks together.
I wish my dad.
Look at us and I wish I was.
And later on, you're like, dude, I am so freaking glad that guy was tough on me.
Thank you.
You know what I'm saying?
Thank you for this.
So for me, I'm sitting there, you know, thinking like a lot of people are sitting around saying, well, look, what is the most important issue for us to sit there and resolve?
I think the last three years, people are sitting there saying, look, man, we already went through COVID.
That was nasty.
It divided America.
I think COVID, at least 9-11, we went like this.
I think COVID, we went like this.
I think maybe you agree with that.
We went way like this.
Your team Vax?
You're Team Vax?
You're this?
I'm team.
You do them?
No way.
You team, Danzan, there's a mask shut down.
It was all like so divided, right?
I think Americans are tired.
They're tired of the fights with the family and the relatives, and we have to hate each other and all this other stuff.
We can disagree on four different policies.
But guess what, man?
I think America is the greatest country in the world.
Still, I think it's the greatest country in the world.
Does it have a history of some of the stuff they've done with Economic Hitman?
Yeah, it's documented.
Did Eisenhower tell us, be careful with this military-industrial complex?
Of course.
Do you know how many military contractors we had, not contractors, where they sold products and supplies, military products, like General Dynamics and Boeing and all these companies?
Do you know how many of these we had 40 years ago?
50-plus companies.
You know how many it is today?
Five.
The five bought the other 45.
Wow.
So there used to be so much competition.
Now it's come like this.
It's a monopoly.
It's become in almost a form of a nationalization because politicians are getting so much check from them, the lobbying amount of money they're spending.
So they're like, hey, man, we'll start a war.
Of course, we should kill and bomb Iran.
Nikki Haley, she sat on the board of Boeing.
No wonder you want another war because these people want another war because they're going to get another contract.
That promise was made by Eisenhower as a Republican president that said, be careful with this.
These guys are going to want to go to war.
All I'm saying is, I think what this election has done this last three years, I think whether you're left, right, center, I think the most popular thought on every woman, man, father, husband, you know, mother, wife is, guys, I just want to be safe.
I just want us to be safe.
And I think that's at the top of the mind of a lot of people.
And I am so like, I'm so curious as a businessman who likes case studies to see how America is going to react to Afghanistan, Ukraine, Russia, Israel-Palestine, potentially China, Taiwan.
I am so curious to know how they're going to react to the election this year.
So curious.
It's going to be wild.
Because I think that's at the top of their mind.
I think that's at the top of their mind.
Bassam, what do you think?
Well, I want to get it back a little bit because since we were talking about Palestine and Israel, I think the most dangerous thing when you talk about this is you're either called a terrorist or anti-Semitic and whatever, right?
And people, I would see the people who are the very pro-Israel, who really supported Israel in 7th of October.
Many of them are actually anti-Semitic, especially right-wing politicians, Matt Gates and MPJ, and all of those people.
Those people, they love Israel, but they hate the Jews.
They are anti-Semite.
It is very obvious.
And this is why you see this is the dichotomy about how the Jewish voices for peace, these are Jewish people in New York.
They come in and they take over the central station and they're all Jewish and they say, not in my name.
The whole idea is conflating Israel and with Judaism is wrong.
And I think the most dangerous thing that can happen to the Jewish people of the world is to have Israel as their representative because a lot of Jewish people don't like them to be their representatives.
As many as many Muslims don't like some of those Islamic regimes representing them.
This whole idea about making it's all or none.
No, Israel have actually done a lot of criminal activities that a lot of Jews do not agree upon.
And a lot of the people who go out in New York, in Brooklyn, in Los Angeles, these are Jewish people shouting, not in my name.
Many of those people are actually Holocaust survivor, Dai Gabur, who is like a very famous Holocaust survivor himself.
And he says, Israel is a Zionist, terrorist, apartheid country.
So if you think like I'm saying this because of my Muslim or Arab background, listen to the other Jews.
They're saying that Israel is the criminal here and it's been supported time and time and time again by the EU, by the American administration.
I'm not asking for anything that is out of the box.
I'm asking them to stop the killing.
Because let's say 7th of October, worst day ever.
Okay.
How many people are you going to continue to kill in order to get your revenge?
Because it seems that you will not be able to eradicate Habas.
As a matter of fact, you can kill 100,000 people today.
What you have created is 100,000 Hamas killers.
Now, this has never, Israel tried it before 2004 and it failed 2006 and failed 2009 and failed 2012, 2014.
And every time Israel came in and they killed many people as possible and they came back.
The solution for this is not more killing, more war.
I know people like war solves everything.
will not be able to solve everything with war.
The whole idea about this is to justice.
If there's land to be given back, give back the land.
If there is agreement to be done, do the agreement and sit together because believe me, whatever cost you think is too high giving up the land, it will not come close to the cost of human life that we are doing every life, whether on the Jewish side or the Muslim side or the Israeli side or the Arab side.
So how do you get rid of Hamas?
Get rid of the reasons that created Hamas.
Which is what?
The horrible living conditions, the blockade, putting people in prison, not allowing people to get their own destiny.
If you do that, listen, Israel could have been founded in Uganda, which, by the way, the British government gave the Jews 8,000 acres, and then they said no to 1903.
If Israel wants to go to Uganda, you can have an Uganda Hamas.
If you make people and put them in the lands of other people, there are already 2 million people that are already there, and then you just push them around, you will have resistance.
And the thing is, Hamas wasn't there since 1984.
Hamas was created in 1987.
Until 1987, Israel killed 100,000 Palestinians since 1948.
It's not about the PLO because Israel took Israel in 1948.
The PLO was created in 1964.
These are all a result of what Israel has been doing.
Why do you mention Uganda?
Because the British proposed that the Jews should move to Africa and Uganda.
Pull up Uganda on the map, just so we're clear.
What does that have to do with anything?
What I'm saying is, is before the Israeli Jews were transported to Palestine.
You know, right after that whole, you know, World War II Holocaust genocide thing.
No, no, no, before, before, before.
Yeah, yeah.
Before.
During that time.
No, no, no, before, before.
I'm talking about 1882.
When the Zionist movement started.
Exactly.
1882.
At that time, there were only 3% of Jews living in Palestine.
And they were different.
They were like, they said Argentina, they said Chile, Madagascar, South Africa, and Uganda.
In 1903, the British government offered the Jewish people about 80,000 acres in Uganda.
And they said no.
And the reason that they said no.
So there's what you know, there was like a big conflict.
This is very interesting.
There was a big conflict between the rabbis and the secular Jewish movement.
So the rabbis said, like, we cannot go.
The rabbis were the one who actually objected.
So we cannot go to Palestine.
It's like, what do you mean?
It's the promised land.
It's like, yes, it's the promised land when the real Jesus comes.
So the secular said, well, maybe we should go to Palestine and that will invite real Jesus to come.
It was like a whole, by the way, this is all in Tudor Herzl memoirs.
You can read about that.
And even in 1903, Tudor Herzl, in page 96, in the pamphlet for the Jewish State, he said, maybe the Jewish people should just get what they can.
So what I'm saying is these were discussions in the end of the 19th century and the 20th century.
And then there's like the movement that wanted to put the Palestinian, sorry, the Jewish people in Israel actually won.
And it happened very, very, very, very slowly.
By 1914, there were about 7% of Jewish people in Palestine.
Now, when the Belfour Declaration happened, when the Belfort Declaration happened, the only one who rejected the Belfort Declaration of putting Jews in Palestine was a Jewish, British businessman in the parliament and said, like, those people are British people and we should not put them into another place.
I'm not giving you, I'm just giving you the historical.
You're giving us the history.
I appreciate it.
I doubt the Jews were like, yo, Uganda, let's do it.
No, they wanted Israel.
But what do you do with this?
I'm sorry.
I'll have to disagree with you, sir, because you had to understand many of those Jews, they came from pogroms from Ukraine and from Russia.
And then when they went to London, they were really treated bad, and they were called the problem.
the problem.
We need the solution.
We need the solution.
And this is why when Hitler came to power, he said, we need the final solution.
Of course.
So, you understand all of these problems happened between the Jews coming from Eastern Europe when they went to England and Western Europe.
So, basically, the British people didn't like them and they want to push them off.
So, by the way, I mean, we can joke about that, but seriously, the whole thing about Madagascar, South Africa, Chile, and Argentina and Uganda, these were real discussions with real budget.
I'm very familiar with the Zionists.
And then at a certain time, so 1914, 7%, and then the Belford Declaration, and then the First World War, nothing happened.
Second World War with the Nazis were like maybe kicking and killing everybody.
And then they started to go en masse in Palestine.
But are you sensing a common theme here?
They go to a country, they have success, let's kill them.
They go to a country, they have success, let's kill them.
This started in Egypt, they went to Spain, they went to Morocco.
No, no, no.
They went to Europe, they went to pogroms in Russia.
Can I speak on this?
This is not accurate.
Of course, this is accurate.
Sir, this is not accurate.
What's not accurate of what I just said?
The whole reason that I say that is that they've been running around the entire world.
Sir, it's called the Jewish diaspora.
I'm speaking.
I'll let you speak.
You could speak for a half hour.
I'm asking you a two-minute question.
There's a Jewish diaspora.
They're running all over the world.
It culminates in the Bolshevik Revolution, Zionism.
It starts Theodore Herzl.
It ends in the final solution in Germany.
The Jewish people said, listen, we just need a state.
You look at the map of the Middle East.
It's as big as this room.
We have a little tiny microphone.
And we're fighting over the size of this microphone when you have the entire room right here.
So tell me, what should Israel do now?
Does Israel have a right to exist and defend itself?
Or no?
So can I answer?
I'll answer.
Yeah, go ahead.
So first of all, certain things that you said in that monologue was a little bit inaccurate.
Yes, they were treated badly in Europe.
They were treated badly everywhere else.
They were not treated badly in Spain because that was under the Arab rules.
Of course, it was called the Spanish Inquisition.
Look it up.
Seriously, sir.
The Spanish Inquisitions was done by the Christians against Muslims and Jews together.
Muslims and Jews were sitting there.
But it happened is what I'm saying.
What I'm saying is, before the Spanish Inquisition, Jews lived in the courts as ministers and as poets and scientists under the Arab rule in Andalusia.
When the Spanish Inquisition came in, they killed both Jews and both Muslims.
Well, the Crusades, we all know how that story goes between Christians and Muslims for decades and years.
And you understand that the First Crusade did not kill a single Muslim?
Okay, but the third and the fourth and the fifth one did.
What happened with the First Crusade?
Enlighten me.
The First Crusade came out from England and they killed 2,000 Jews in Europe.
They didn't even make it to Jerusalem.
This is how bad the Jews were treated by the Christian Europeans.
And as a matter of fact, Jews did not find refuge unless they found it in the Arab countries.
I'm not saying that they were perfect, but if you compared what the Jews were enduring in Ukraine and Russia and in Western Europe and how they lived in Baghdad and Egypt and Morocco, they were a much better.
But this validates the whole point of why the Jews need Israel.
Because every country they go to, they're going to be run out of town or killed.
At the very least, they have their own country so they could say, at least we have safety here.
Every country, every story that you just mentioned, Basa, is them being killed by somebody, whether it's the Christians, whether it's the Brits, whether it's the Ukrainians, whether it's the Russians.
The whole point of Israel is like, we can no longer just rely on other people's niceties and empathy to not be murdered.
So now we need a state of our own.
You understand that?
I understand.
Let me continue.
Yes or no?
So all through these years, they were living peacefully, relatively under the Arab rule.
And then what happened, the programs in Russia and Ukraine, pushed them to England.
Then England said, we cannot take them anymore, push them more to the Arabs.
At the time, Jewish people in the Arab world, especially Egypt, were living.
I mean, the first people who actually did the cinema and the theater were Jewish Egyptian people who lived there all their lives.
Jews, Christians, and Muslims were living.
Right now, the department store, like our version of Macy's and Target, they all have Jewish names because they have part of the fabric of the Egyptian society for decades, way before the Jews from Europe came.
And when the Jews from Europe came, there's two ways to come.
You can come easily or you can come by force.
They started to come with all of these ships and then you have the Haganah and you have all of the Zionist gangs who started to come into Palestine and there were like 1.5 million Palestinians that you cannot erase.
So the fact that they're this the Arab world, you can go anywhere.
No, because this is their country.
So they went in, they replaced them and then we had the 1948 and the rest is history.
Now, having said that, do I want Israel to be erased and I want people to go back to Europe?
I will never use that kind of argument unless that you tell me, well, why don't the Palestinians go to Arab countries?
If you don't use that, I'm not going to use that.
I believe that Israel is a matter of fact.
And I think it's too late to come and erase or get people out, whatever.
What we have to do is a one-state solution that everybody, Palestinian and Israel, have exactly the same equal right and all of them have the same passport and they live in peace.
And the other reason is a two-state solution.
Obviously, so far, Netanyahu and other Israeli officials have said many, many, many, many times, there will never be a Palestinian state.
Not in the West Bank, not in Gaza ever.
And these are official statements by them.
So they have already said that.
Sometimes people accuse Arabs, but we do not want the state of Israel.
They say we don't want a state for Palestine.
So you have this.
As long as you think that this is your land only, and those Palestinians are indispensable and they can go other places, you will never have peace.
They've had the Oslo records.
They've had the Abraham records.
At what point does Israel say, I can't negotiate with these people?
Hamas' charting of founding charter says we call for the destruction of Israel.
In order to make peace or to make a deal, you need to have someone on the other side that is willing to at least come to the table.
The closest that's come was Yasser Arafat, the PLO, under Clinton, 1998.
He came back, they gave him 98% of what he wanted.
He came back, they said no.
Would Israel or listen, Israel is just like America.
It's a democracy.
In a democracy, you have a free exchange of ideas.
The Marjorie Taylor Greens that you mentioned are wildly different from the AOCs.
But policy is different from rhetoric.
The policy of the PLO, of Hamas, of Fatah, is essentially destroy Israel.
There's no two-state solution.
Hamas is different from Fatah is different from the authority because there's nothing in the charter of Fatah or the The point that I'm getting at is all these political factions no one wants to come to the table do a deal And here's what's happening.
Because they're getting worse and worse.
They gave him 98% of what they wanted.
Have you seen it?
They had a good hand a few decades ago.
Now they have no hand.
You have no leverage now.
That's the problem.
Sir, have you seen the video by Netanyahu, who's bragging about spoiling the Oslo Accord on his own?
I've seen the video.
Yeah, he said, like, I'm going to destroy it.
We're going to hit them.
Nobody's going to do that anymore.
This is the guy.
And by the way, just a little bit of thing.
The Oslo Accord, you know, it was signed by Yasser Arfat from one side and from Isaac Rabin from the other side.
What happened to Isaac Rabin?
He got assassinated by whom?
By a Jew.
Okay.
By a far-right radical Jew.
Because he was a moderate.
Who was a part of what part?
That's Jew?
What kind of organization was he part of?
He was on the far-right party.
There's an organization where Ben Ghaffir, the head of the national security now, is a minister under Netanyahu.
Yeah, newsflash.
Every country that's democracy has a left wing and a right wing.
But I don't think every country has at least two terrorist people as ministers because Ben Ghaffir was arrested on the account of killing Isaac Rabin.
As a matter of fact, there's a very famous video for him where he got the emblem of his car two months before Isaac Rabin's like, we've got your car.
Next we got you two months later, Isaac Rabin.
This is that kind of government that you are defending.
It is a terrorist government that kills its own people.
Even Bid Zalim, who is the minister of finance, he was arrested because he was going there by 600 liters of gasoline to blow up an Israeli highway.
This is the kind of criminals who kill people everywhere.
And I find it very difficult to find somebody actually to defend their actions.
Are you saying that Israel is the only country in the Middle East that has a thug-like regime?
Oh, no, not at all.
Okay, so this is pretty common for that neighborhood.
But you know what's the difference?
I don't see any other country in the regime saying I'm a democratic secular country and I have Western values.
Well, according to the World Index, World Economic Index, Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East.
This is in our opinion.
Exactly.
The only democracy would have terrorist people in the government, which I find it very interesting.
Here's the problem that I'm having with you.
You're following him with me?
With your argument.
With me?
Well, you've already called me racist.
I'm a very nice person.
I think you are a nice person.
I'm very nice.
I think you're nice.
I never called you racist.
I called your argument multiple times, but it's all good.
He said undertone.
He didn't call you racist.
I said it's a racist undertone.
Thank you so much.
It's a racist undertone.
Thank you.
Awesome.
If you look at the chat, you've probably been the nicest to me today, so we're cool.
So the problem that I have with you is that either you're anti-Israel or you're just intellectually lazy.
Hear me out.
Every problem.
That's a very nice insult.
Thank you very much.
You're insulting me very softly.
I am.
Because I believe in having discussion and being forthright rather than when you leave, I'll be like, fuck that guy.
I actually think you're a smart guy.
I actually think you know your stuff.
You're just so fixated that Israel is the problem.
The problem in the Middle East, like I said, follow the money.
The countries that are succeeding, the Qataris, even the Saudis these days, they're coming into the modern world.
They're leaving the sixth century mentality behind and say, let's get into the 21st century.
Where they need to succeed, whether it's Gaza or whether it's Lebanon or whether it's Syria and whether Afghanistan, they need to focus on GDP, not GDT.
Gross domestic product, not gross domestic terrorism.
And the problem is they're obsessed.
Put the guns down.
Put the Quran down.
Actually start living by the words that the Quran says, not some false equivalent of what they think is actually going on there.
You talk about the genocide in Israel or in Gaza as if it's just a matter of fact.
Well, let me show some stats for you because after you see these stats, Israel's the worst genociders ever.
The numbers, according to the world data, if you trust data, between 1990 and 2022, the Palestinian population overall went from 2 million to 5 million, okay?
Pretty bad at genocide, if that's what's happening right there.
In Gaza, it went from 645,000 to 2.1 million.
It's 3X.
That ain't genocide to me.
Now, do 20,000 people, 30,000 people needlessly killed during this bullshit war that was started by Hamas?
Is that horrible?
One million percent.
And any Jew or any Israeli who said— Give me that number again.
600,000 to what?
645,000 to 2.1 million.
From what to come to where?
This is in 1990 to 2022.
Do you know why they increased?
Because they're having babies like crazy.
No.
You see, this is how, like, when you watch that, while being uninformed makes you look very stupid.
Tell me why.
Tell me how the population has gone from 2 million to 5 million.
Yeah, because most of the 1.5 extra million didn't come from Gaza.
They were pushed away from other parts of Israel.
So most of these people, they have increased because of refugees being kicked out.
If you're talking about the settlers, those are tens of thousands.
I'm not talking about it.
Dude, dude, listen.
My wife's family is not from Gaza, and yet they found themselves in Gaza because they were sitting in other cities and villages outside Gaza.
This is the systemic pushing of people from other parts of Israel, pushing themselves.
That's not millions of people.
This is why I said that you're intellectually dishonest.
You're intellectually lazy.
No.
That's not the cause of millions of people.
I'm familiar with the settler stuff.
No, this is the disengagement in 2006.
I don't know what you're talking about.
These are people that are outside.
Millions of people?
Okay.
The people who belong to Gaza are 700,000 people.
Right now, Gaza is 2.2 million.
That is not birth rate, my friend.
These are people pushed from, and by the way, that's not the first time.
1948, at the night of the declaration of the state of Israel, 1.5 million, 1.5 million Palestinians were moved overnight.
So it's not the first thing.
So before you give me numbers to you want to appear smart, know what are behind the numbers because these are not people that gave in babies.
These are people being pushed from other places in order to be part of the open air prison that it is.
So it's not deliberate.
If you want to fact check me, let me fact check you.
Anytime that there's numbers increasing, Basif, going from 650, 450, whatever you want to call it, to 2 million, however it happens, that's the exact opposite of a genocide.
So the whole genocide, the whole open-air prison place, are talking points of BS.
And this is why I said you're either intellectually lazy or you just hate Israel.
Basically, this whole thing about you hate Israel and hate Islam, this is a very lazy way to talk to people.
Kind of like your thing.
What did I tell you that is so lazy?
What did I tell you that you're fucking racist?
Because you've already said that much.
No, I didn't say that.
I just said that multiple times.
I thought you undertook his racist.
No, that's not what I'm saying.
So not me, but what's going on inside of the country?
And some, like, the way that you analyze numbers is very lazy.
Because, again, when I actually use stats and data from the most credible sources that are lazy, these are numbers that were outside of the world.
You said no stats.
You give a fucking time California has increased triple or people in Texas increase because of birth rate.
No, they increased because people from California started moving voluntarily.
You have pushed 1.5 million people outside of Gaza, inside of Gaza, in a matter of 12 years.
And that's why the number has inflated.
It's not because they were giving birth rate.
So the genocide?
They were evacuated.
Where's this alleged genocide?
That's happening right now under your eyes.
as of as of three months ago there was no genocide and so it's just a new well we didn't actually use the word genocide before three months ago okay But you didn't follow the river for the sake of decades.
Also, Israel have a lot of maps that is putting in the greater Israel from the Nile and the Euphrates.
That's a genocide for five countries there.
And this is not by people in the street or people on YouTube.
These are ministers.
These are officials in the official government of Netanyahu.
If you have someone, an Arab president, like the Egyptian president or the Jordanian king, tell you from the river and the sea, it's like, oh, it's the Arab authorities.
You are basically complaining people on Facebook and the official viewpoint of the Israeli government.
You're basically comparing apples to oranges.
It doesn't make any sense.
You're basically comparing activists with people with power, with money, and with weapons.
So I don't know how come you're comparing.
So what's your solution?
Because you've got all these answers and you have no solutions.
What's your solution?
Justice.
Stop killing people and give them back their land.
That's it.
Okay.
And giving them back the land is going to be a much more complicated thing.
Who's going to lead your negotiations?
Mahmoud Abbas, 88 years old?
I have no idea, man.
None of them.
I have no idea.
That's the point.
You don't have an idea.
Well, when I say I have no idea, I'm being humble because there's a million people who can do it.
But I'm not a politician.
I'm a comedian.
I come here to tell some of my opinions.
But the thing is, you want to put me and you use that and you give me, I'm sorry to say, butchered political information and numbers that doesn't.
Stats are really butchered in political information.
But it's interesting how you have all the solutions for Israel, but you have no solutions for Gaza or Hamas.
Very interesting.
Very interesting how you can critique everything that's going on in Israel.
Yes, they do have some things they need to rectify.
Just like the United States, just like any democracy, you've got all the answers there, Basif.
When I said, what do they do over here in Gaza?
What do they do?
I have no idea.
I'm just a comedian.
Don't listen to me.
So which one is it?
You either know your shit or you're actually.
So what was your question?
What's the solution?
So what's the solution?
For Gaza and the land.
For Gaza, how about you stop the killing and then we come to the bottom?
Okay, so let's say we do that.
Here's what I believe.
I think we need to demilitarize Gaza.
We need to radicalize because they're the leading.
How are you going to deregulate?
How do you do that?
Well, maybe let's stop.
So how about summer schools where they teach about jihad and they start playing?
How about the religious schools in Israel that actually tell people that we should kill all Arabs?
And these are the people who are going to be able to do it.
You know all those Jews that are running around bombing everywhere around the world?
No, it doesn't fucking exist.
It's only in Islam.
But what about the Jews killing the Palestinians inside?
I'm talking about the around the world.
We're bad people.
We're bad people take us out.
That's not what I'm saying.
No, no, no.
We're very hot.
What I'm saying is they need to do it.
It's a terrorist religion.
We are a terrorist religion.
Take it out.
You said it.
Your words.
Let's do it.
You said it.
Your words.
Yeah.
Your words.
Let's do it.
I mean, like, this is like you have a really interesting outlook for people who look like me.
You look at me and I'm Muslim and you have all of these assumptions about me being a terrorist.
While Israel is not the terrorist.
You said the words passive.
I didn't say the worst.
You know what's the difference between terrorists?
They go on like some rogue groups and they kill and they do shitty stuff.
But you have like a whole country with a whole military arsenal who is committing terrorism every single day back to Palestinian.
There it is.
There's Israel talking about it.
Yeah, but Israel talking.
That's my opinion.
That's my opinion.
Totally cool.
That's my opinion.
Totally cool.
It's all good.
But you're trying to tell me that Islam doesn't have a terrorist problem?
Islam?
Muslims have a terrorist problem.
Correct.
It's like when you say Islam has a Muslim problem, when you say Judaism has a Muslim problem, all right?
A lot of Muslims are assholes and they're doing horrible stuff.
And I do not feel the need to defend those people because those people don't represent me.
The thing is, if Jews were running around all over the world, blowing themselves up as suicide bombers as a Jew, I'd be like, guys, what the fuck are we doing here?
What are we doing here?
This is accomplishing nothing.
But here's the reason.
So let's keep it.
But here's the reality.
Jews aren't doing that.
And Christians aren't doing that.
Jews are not.
Let me ask you a question.
They're not doing that in Gaza.
They're not doing that in the country.
Everything you talk about is Gaza.
I'm talking about the people who are talking about the people who are talking about what happened in Israel.
You're so obsessed with this one topic.
I am.
I'm trying to understand the world there.
But my family lives there.
But my family's in Israel.
Really?
So only your family counts.
My family doesn't count.
No, no, no.
Okay, but like your family are living in an open-air prison and being killed every day.
The open-air prison, the genocide.
You see how you're talking about it?
Get them to talk to you.
You see how open-air prisoners are talking for.
Israel left Gaza in 2006.
It didn't leave.
It left and they put it under blowfriend.
It's called a disengagement.
Why do they have a blockade?
Maybe because they're shooting missiles hundreds of times a day.
Yeah, I pretty much put a country in a blockade if they were shooting missiles.
He cut every single condemnation from the water and said, okay, go live.
How do you do that?
Let's move on from Israel because I know you're hyper-obsessed with it.
Why?
I'm not hyper-obsessed.
You keep asking me about Israel.
No, I ask you about the world, and I'm asking you about Christianity and Muslims and Judaism.
You want to focus on Israel.
Why can Muslims move to any Christian country they want?
But Christians and Jews can move to zero Muslim countries.
Why is that?
What about Dubai?
What about you?
What about all of these countries?
What are you talking about?
You mean the people who are not.
You're just mentioning Qatar and Dubai and all of there's like a lot of expats living there.
So the middle.
This is my point.
And I'm glad you're catching on.
Yeah.
That I'm not racist.
I'm pointing out.
Well, there are Christian countries who like shit.
I wouldn't use that because of the economy.
I'm pointing out that in certain Muslim countries, they're getting it right.
Or at least attempting to.
Good for them.
Okay?
Yeah.
Yes, good for them.
Good for Qatar.
Good for UAE.
Good for Saudi and what MBS is doing.
Good for them.
They're examples of what could be done.
Gaza, if they took the billions of government international aid, could be Dubai.
but they decided to make a terror state.
So the question that I'm asking is...
Are you saying that there's so many money coming in and just like Hamas used it in order to make weapons?
There's people of Hamas who are literal billionaires living in Qatar, flying around on private jets.
How do you explain that?
They're horrible people and I don't condone them.
All right.
I'm talking about the millions of people who Gaza who is.
Oh, horrible people, Hamas.
Let's not talk about that.
We'll move on.
But Israel, let me give you a dissertation.
I'm trying to give you a significant thing.
It's just like shouting over me to make an action.
You are basically talking around all of the stuff that's happening with Muslim people that is bad.
And then basically what you're doing is you are undertoning, you are trying to find an excuse to keep that killing in Gaza continue.
Because Muslims are bad, Muslims are terrorists, Muslims are poor.
So let's just kill those people in Gaza.
You are intellectually lazy.
It's comical.
Because I'm not even talking about Gaza.
You keep insulting me.
You keep insulting me.
Because I'm trying to go Sheza, like you are a motherfucking racist.
What if I said that's racist?
I'm saying that.
What are the things that you say about racism?
The way that you speak about Muslims, that we are terrorists and we are horrible people.
Basically, you're telling people that we deserve to die.
Israel has everything to do in order to kill those people.
So anyways, if zero of those words, hopefully, if you are putting all those words in my mouth, if my wife's cousin, who's a doctor, get killed tomorrow, I'm going to send you a postcard.
So if my actual cousin gets killed in Israel, that's okay.
They will not.
Because they are safe because he's not living in an open air.
Why are they safe?
Maybe because they have the Israeli defense force, the Iron Dome that stops all the missiles.
They don't have that.
They don't have that.
Maybe you should have built that instead of foreign aid.
What billion foreign aid are you?
How much money does Iran give?
How much money does Qatar give?
How much does the international community give?
You understand that Israel is actually in the city of the United States.
Your argument holds no weight because all you're doing is defending.
I'm the last one to defend Hamas, by the way.
And I've actually said the terrorist group.
And I'm a big fan of Hamas.
But I'm just giving you some facts.
Every single money that goes into Gaza goes through Israel.
As a matter of fact, Biden has a big problem with Netanyahu because he's withholding the tax money that paid by the Palestinian people to the Palestinian Authority.
And Netanyahu is holding it back.
Have you heard about that?
Have you read about that?
Just two days ago, if you're reading your stuff, but you don't.
But the thing is, Netanyahu is holding back the tax money from the Palestinian in West Bank and he's not giving it to it.
It's so funny, man.
You're so funny.
No, you're saying you're saying all the money that's going to Hamas is coming through Israel?
Sure.
Filtered through Israel.
Sure.
Filtered through Israel.
All the money from Iran.
Going right through Israel.
Sure.
That's how they're started by Netanyahu, 2019, Dalekud party, telling them that he is actually overlooking the amount of money coming from Qatar, and he is doing that in order to split the Palestinian Authority.
Listen to me.
I'm familiar with that.
I'm not disagreeing with you.
How about you?
Listen, educate yourself about that.
I'm not disagreeing that Netanyahu has done some fucked up thing.
Here it is.
Okay.
Here it is.
Oh, my God.
Here it is.
Biden is in frustrating call told Bibi to solve Palestinian tax revenue.
Yeah, because Israel is withholding the taxes.
You understand every single money transaction.
That's your argument right there?
No, that's part of the argument.
Every single money transaction, whether it's taxes, whether AIDS, it has to go through the Israeli government.
So all the money that Iran is funding Hamas, you're saying that goes through Israel?
Is that what you're saying?
Through Qatar, through Israel.
Okay, that's so false.
It's so flagrantly false.
I want you to educate yourself more.
Okay, I will.
I'll go read up on this.
But if you mean to tell me that Israel is intercepting the money that Iran is sending to Hamas and says, yeah, we'll send it to you guys.
But believe me, they're not doing it.
By the way, it's 111.
It's 11.15.
We're going to wrap up.
Here's what I will say.
I'm going to be very honest with both of you guys.
I mean, I've been listening to both of you guys, and I love this.
I love this.
Let me tell you why.
The average American right now is sitting there.
There's a group that agrees with you.
There's a group that agrees with you.
Regardless of what it is, a lot was said, and it was actually pretty educated discussion for me.
I'm normally not this quiet.
I love the fact that I heard this conversation.
I loved it.
I enjoyed it.
I appreciate you for having, it was very obvious.
This is what happens, Basim, in the future when you're doing podcasts.
Follow the same rule.
The eight hours of sleep you got last night was very helpful.
It was obviously felt.
I was hang out over.
I mean, there is pain in my back as I'm speaking out of pain.
I got a guy waiting for you right now.
Can I say one thing to Basav?
Yeah.
I don't care how much we argue, and that's fine.
I would have a beer with you.
I would party with you.
I'll go see comedy shows.
Whatever this guy needs.
I'll give you a hand.
I'll give you a handy under the table if I'll make you feel better.
It's all good.
I love this conversation.
Listen, listen.
This is the only way that situations can be solved.
It can be uncomfortable.
It can be argumentative, but I'd rather sit down at the table with people I disagree with than completely ignore them.
At the end of the day, at the end of the day, the heated discussions, all of this at the end of the day is words.
Words don't hurt anybody.
And the thing is, if it hurts you, it means that you need to check your ego.
One thing I learned is that put your ego aside.
So if you felt that I am attacking you, attacking the, it's not, it's like I'm always attacking your argument.
Brother, I'll give you a hug on air, off air.
I'm good.
It's never about you because there is absolutely no point of like losing each other and losing at the end.
We have come from obviously different backgrounds, but I would rather have this heated discussion and then stand up.
And because at the end of the day, we are all Americans.
We're sitting here, and hopefully we're doing that in order to learn something that will not happen.
We totally agree.
We're on the same page.
We're on the 100%.
Appreciate you for being a good score.
Appreciate you for coming out.
Gang, take care.
Have a great weekend.
If you're in Florida, if you're in South Florida tonight, you're performing and tomorrow at.
Yeah, with that back.
I have two shows in Arabic tonight and three shows in English Saturday and Sunday.
And what's the location?
Miami Improv.
Miami Improv.
Go stop by and tell them you heard them on PBD Pod.
