Benjamin Netanyahu joins Patrick Bet-David for a hard-hitting interview where he declares “Israel’s fighting your war” against Iran, addresses accusations of genocide, pushes back on AIPAC critics, and responds to Trump’s claims of owning the Gaza issue.
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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.
Whatever Israel wants, they make a phone call to America.
America better do or else.
Do you agree with that?
Do you know President Trump?
You don't make him do anything.
He does what he thinks is in America's interest, and he's very forceful about it.
Would the war and the Hamas attack have happened if President Trump was president instead of Biden?
Probably not, but it's hard to say with these maniacs.
I think Iran would have been more careful.
I'm curious, did you know the president was going to be saying this?
We're going to take over that piece and we're going to develop it, create thousands and thousands of jobs.
I'll bet you don't know this, Patrick.
If America wants to come in and invest, that's a good thing.
It's not a bad thing.
So you would be okay if America takes over Gaza and it becomes something that we control.
You'd be okay with that.
Yeah, but it's an American choice.
Our victory will be your victory.
Why haven't you yet recognized the Armenian, Assyrian, and Greek genocide that the Turkish did to that community?
If you step foot in their country, they're supposed to arrest you.
They're calling you a wartime criminal, the offenses you've done, they're calling it a genocide.
It's been a battle that has been going on for 3,500 years.
So I'll have to do what we have to do.
We'll fight with our fingernails if we have to.
A lot of people felt in their gut, but they didn't have the guts to say it out loud.
I don't know if it's come from you, though.
I don't know if it's come from the Prime Minister of Israel.
Yeah, I just did.
Okay.
Here you go.
All right.
Well, thank you for doing that.
The future looks bright.
It's better than anything I ever saw.
It's right here.
You are a one-on-one.
I send you a bad.
I don't think I've ever said this before.
Prime Minister Netanyahu, it's great to have you on the podcast.
Good to be with you, Patrick.
So I have a very simple, open-ended question for you.
Why are you doing this podcast tour?
Well, number one, because I heard that you invited me.
Number two, because I think it's a way to puncture the lies and the vilifications that are leveled at Israel.
And I think that's part of the, you know, we have a seven-front war with Iran and its proxies, but this is the eighth front, the battle for truth.
So that's why I'm doing it.
You know, it's interesting when you say that, because when we look at a couple numbers, if we think about the Pew Research that came out a couple months ago on the unfavorability rate of Israel, they have you 24 out of 5.
If I look at the number, Rob, I don't know if you have it to pull it up.
If you look at the numbers, you would see the 24-country medium is 62 to 29 being favorable.
Why do you think so many countries are unfavorable of Israel today?
I think it's a combination of historical trends, but also of the impact of social media, especially engineered social media with paid bots and this new media environment that we're in.
It has built-in parameters that really take their toll.
So we're aware of that.
But I think the most important thing is that for democracies to fight wars, they should be as short as possible.
And my way of combating the PR war is by winning the ground war and winning it quickly.
The quicker you win it, the better you'll come out of this assault.
So why do you think this is taking so long?
Because if you think of a part of it, when you think about there's, especially in America, there's three different types of people on social media right now or in America that follow you.
One, they fully believe you're committing a genocide right now.
They're part of the community that's thinking they compare you to some dictators, some terrible leaders in the past, many names you've heard of before.
Some of them are blindly supportive of what you're doing, but there's the other community that's almost a little bit burned out, that's wanting this story to end.
Obviously, it's tragic.
You know, we're seeing what's going on.
We're seeing all the stories, but why do you think this is taking longer than it's taking?
Well, I don't think it's taken longer than it's taking.
Look at what we had to fight.
We were attacked viciously by the most savage attack on the Jewish people since the Holocaust.
That's by Hamas on October 7th.
I said on the second day of the war when Hezbollah joined the fray, I said we're going to change the face of the Middle East because it was clear to me, and it may be clear to you too, that we're fighting the Iran axis.
Iran, without Iran, I would say that all the axis, all the proxies collapse.
Hezbollah collapses, Hamas collapses, Assad collapses, and so on.
So it was clear to me that we had to topple the Iran axis and not just deal with Hamas.
And what preceded, what happened following that was that we went in, you know, Hamas is in its last breath.
We haven't finished it yet, but we crippled Hamas.
Then we went and finished off Hezbollah, took out Nasrallah.
That led to the collapse of the Assad regime, whose armaments we destroyed, the army, the Syrian army's armaments.
We dealt with the Houthis, still dealing with them.
And then we had Iran itself that had struck us and we had to strike back.
And as you see, we changed the face of the Middle East, not only because we hobbled the proxies, but because Iran, which was a totally invincible enemy, throwing its weight around not only in the Middle East, spreading terror everywhere, and trying to arm itself with nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles to deliver them, we struck them very hard.
So when you fight these four fronts, and there are another three, by the way, that I haven't mentioned, when you're doing that, a small country, it takes time.
But I think we're approaching the final leg, and that's really finishing off Hamas.
We can't have those monsters at spinning distance from Tel Aviv and our communities.
And we're going to finish it.
Yeah, so when you say that for a person that lived in Iran, I look at the critics and they're giving, you know, hey, let me tell you, it's not fair what he's doing with this.
And you see ICC, which the average person, when they see ICC, 124 countries, that if you step foot in their country, they're supposed to arrest you, okay?
And they're calling you a wartime criminal, the offenses you've done, the amount of, you know, again, like I said earlier, they're calling it a genocide.
How do you answer to the critics that they don't follow politics?
They don't follow the stories closely.
But if they see 120-something countries that if you land there, they're supposed to rescue, the average person is going to say, maybe this isn't a good guy.
Yeah, well, they said that about Churchill too.
You know, he was a warmonger when he was talking about the German axis and the danger to the West.
You know, he said he warned of the slumber of democracies.
And I guess if I learned one thing from our history, the history of the Jewish people, is that you can't sleep.
When somebody says they're out to annihilate you, you better take it seriously and act to prevent it.
And that's the central lesson that we learned in the rebirth of the Jewish state and the Jewish people in Israel.
We don't wait to be annihilated.
We take forceful action against our would-be annihilators.
And I think that, you know, people see it after you do it.
After you do it, after you realize your vision, then people say, well, yeah, we begin to understand it.
But they don't before.
And that's certainly true of the case here.
In the United Nations, you have 180 countries, 190 countries.
And a great majority would tell you that the earth is flat.
It doesn't make it flat.
And the vilifications against Israel is a country committing genocide and other war crimes.
That doesn't make it true either.
Let me tell you, you asked me, did you ask me about the ICC prosecution just now?
Well, let me tell you about that.
So we were going to have this ICC prosecutor who's since been basically put to pasture.
This ICC prosecutor was going to come to Israel in the beginning of the war.
And he said, well, Israel has a proper judicial system.
And I don't see any real problem there.
And he was about to come.
And a day before he's about to come, he suddenly cancels the trip.
And two days later, he issues this war crimes charge against Bien, the former defense minister.
And we didn't understand why did he do it.
It took us months to discover that a few days before that, he was confronted by one of his staff members, his senior staff members, who brought the charges of rape and sexual misconduct that this prosecutor carried out against one of his staff members, a woman, a Malaysian woman, by the way, who was fiercely anti-Israel.
But she had suffered this harassment and these rapes for over a year.
And Khan believed that this was his ruin.
His brother, who's a British parliamentarian, was in jail for sexual misconduct too.
So he said, that's it.
That's the end of me.
And then he figured out that there's one way to get out of this, and that is to deflect the entire conversation, to preempt it by blaming the Jews and blaming the prime minister of the Jewish state.
And that's essentially what he did.
Since then, you should know that there have been four or five other women who charged him with sexual misconduct.
So what you have here is the ICC, which is a corrupt organization, totally politicized, unelected, that wants to basically preempt the sovereignty of nations.
And that's why the United States is not a member.
They won't tell the United States that its soldiers are committing war crimes because some woke people in The Hague are telling you that.
This ICC, this corrupt ICC prosecutor, thought that he would escape justice by basically by condemning us.
And that's what he's done.
And I think a lot of countries are waking up to that.
It's sort of embarrassing when your chief prosecutor is doing such a corrupt and heinous thing.
But that's the ICC.
I mean, President Trump has put sanctions on him.
He's put sanctions on the judges who did this.
I think he's just facing it.
That's what I like about him.
He just cuts to the chase.
This is a corrupt organization, a corrupt prosecutor, corrupt judges.
And it reminds me of that movie.
You remember Network?
I think.
Yes.
We're not going to take it anymore.
And it's not just Israel, because if they target Israel and they say to the one, to a democracy defending itself against these savages, you can't defend yourself, then no democracy is safe, and America isn't safe.
So I think that's come out.
There is extraordinary vilification, extraordinary lies leveled at Israel.
And they're meant to prevent us from exercising our right, our legitimate right of self-defense.
They won't succeed.
So if we talk about the legitimate right for you to defend yourself, you'll see the numbers.
I'm a business guy.
I'll see how this war has cost you roughly $120 to $130 billion, whether it's Hamas, Gaza, Iran, roughly $120 to $130 billion reports that we read.
Your debt to GDP ratio went from 60% to 75%.
So some of the Americans are sitting there saying, yeah, we give you guys roughly $3.8 billion.
For the war, America's given roughly $30 billion, which most of it was in weapons.
But if you're going from 60 to 75 percent, how much longer can your economy or even the state be able to afford the war?
Patrick, I'm going to have some good news for you.
Please.
I led as first as foreign, rather, finance minister and then as prime minister a free market revolution in Israel.
And Israel became a wealthy country because we released, we unleashed the genius in our population and innovators and just incredible, incredible capacity to produce products and services that service all mankind in medicine and communications.
That cell phone that you're probably holding has half of it is probably made in Israel.
And the cherry tomatoes that you eat, they were made in Israel and so on.
And medicines that you use made in Israel.
So Israel became a powerhouse, a juggernaut of innovation and enterprise.
And it strengthened our economy.
We went from $17,000 per capita to about $60,000 in a very short time.
It's a tremendous success story.
Now, here's the truth.
This is something I just saw, a slide.
I wish I had it here, too bad.
But the slide shows investments in R ⁇ D that a country receives from foreign sources.
So number one is the United States, like huge.
Number two, in absolute terms, now as we speak today, is Israel, tiny Israel.
The next country is Germany.
It's two-thirds of Israel.
And the rest of the Western countries fall further and further behind.
So our economy is actually doing quite well, I should say.
And it's amazing.
And you're right to ask it.
But there was an economic miracle in Israel, which I'm very proud to have led.
And we just have this resilient capacity, both in our economy, but also in our fighting spirit.
You know, we've gone through the Holocaust, and I'm committed, as are my people, to prevent a second Holocaust that Iran was planning.
And that's what we've been doing in this war.
It's taken this long because we had to break this noose of death that Iran was going to put on us in their plans to conquer the Middle East, in their plans to then proceed to Europe, and in their plans to then proceed to America.
They say death to America.
We're just standing in their way.
And boy, did we stand in their way.
So I guess a question to kind of move on from this one.
Do you see yourself, if you're saying the war is not going on for too long, if this thing takes a couple more years, do you see yourself getting to a point that you're going to need to the American taxpayers and need more money and support?
Or are you able to sustain the spenditure that you have right now?
You know, I think we've organized that and we're perfectly able to do that.
I want you to know one other thing.
I think Israel is different from your other allies.
We spend an inordinate amount of our GDP, an inordinate amount, to defend ourselves.
I think one of your senators said something very, very true.
He said, if we had an Israel next to in Afghanistan, or if we had another Israel there, you know, we wouldn't have spent a trillion dollars or trillions of dollars.
Israel is receiving and is very grateful for the American military assistance at about 3.8 billion a year.
And 80% of it is spent in the United States.
That's the deal.
So it helps American industries.
But we also produce these incredible weapons that we share with the United States.
We produce intel that is invaluable for the United States.
You're familiar with the five eyes, Patrick?
You know what that is?
You know, all these countries that are part of the American intelligence system?
Well, there's a six eyes, Israel.
It's a very powerful eye.
And we share our intel with the American intelligence services.
And that's why the bond is so strong.
It's not only a bond of values of our common Judeo-Christian civilization, and it is really a war of civilization against the barbarians that we're fighting, but it's also a bond of utility, of great success.
That partnership is very, very strong.
I know it's challenged all the time, but it's very, very strong.
And you should talk to some of the people in the higher places.
in the Pentagon.
I wish you could talk to the people who share our intelligence or the weapon systems that we share.
I think that you'll discover that they appreciate, as we appreciate enormously what America gives to us.
And they appreciate what Israel gives to America.
Somebody said to me, you're the one fighting ally we have.
You don't ask us to put boots on the ground.
You don't ask us to fight your wars.
Although President Trump did a great thing by joining in that precise strike that he did.
Didn't start World War III.
It didn't bring thousands of American troops on the ground in Iran.
But it did, it was a magnificent addition to our brave soldiers.
So I have to tell you, I think it's a partnership that is going to go on for a long, long time, as far as I'm concerned, for all time.
Prime Minister, what do you say to the critics who say, you know, Israel owns America?
You know, Israel is who makes America do things they want him to do, whether it's through AIPAC, you know, whether it's through, you know, funding, money.
You'll typically hear this.
This has been overly said the last couple of years in a major way.
And there's a community of Americans that at this point believe that whatever Israel wants, they make a phone call to America.
America better do or else.
Do you agree with that?
Absolutely not.
I think it's full of hokeum.
First of all, do you know President Trump?
Sort of, I've known him for many years.
Sure.
You don't make him do anything.
He does what he thinks is in America's interests, and he's very forceful about it.
When he sees allies who don't step up to the plate, you know, he's not shy about saying it.
And we have a different relationship altogether.
It's not one of coercion or manipulation.
It's one of common interests and common values.
And I think that people understand that because Israel is different.
It really is.
You know, we know that we have to fight for ourselves, and we do.
But when we fight for ourselves, we fight for you too.
Because we fight Iran.
Iran tried to murder President Trump, not once, but twice.
Iran killed and wounded thousands of Americans with their IEDs, explosives devices, in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Iran killed 241 Marines in Beirut.
They bomb your embassies.
They burn American flags.
They have mobs chanting, death to America, death to America.
So when we fight Iran, we're not just fighting our war, we're fighting your war.
But we are fighting that war here in the Middle East.
And let me tell you what would happen.
And as someone who had been in the Middle East as a child, I think you can appreciate this.
It's not only we who are threatened by Iran, it's our Arab neighbors too.
They know that Iran wants to conquer them, pillage their oil fields, take over the Middle East, the maritime routes that control world trade.
So they know that.
But if you look at who's actually fighting Iran, it's Israel.
And this tiny country, you know, President Trump asked me, how do you guys do this?
I mean, you're such a small country.
You know, we're the size of New Jersey, bigger than Rhode Island, but that's it.
We're slightly smaller than New Jersey.
And we take on this enormous empire with all its proxies, this anti-American empire that threatens to kill the president and chance death to America.
How do you do this?
And I said, well, you know, you're like an enormous lion, like almost like a prehistoric saber-toothed tiger.
You're enormous.
We're not.
But we are, you know, we're the, you know, the badger, you know, this little animal.
Absolutely.
And you see a badger being, you know, some tiger or lion is trying to kill it.
and it sort of turns around, it has very sharp teeth, and it knows how to go to the weakness points, you know, to the points of vulnerability of the enemy.
And you see these things.
You know, I watch NGO Wild when my wife lets me because she likes to watch cooking shows.
Okay.
So late at night, after we have this argument, we settle on some compromise.
And on that Geo Wild, I see these films of this badger, this tiny creature, it's about this big, taking on a lion and the lion runs away.
So Israel is the badger of the international scene.
It has the fortitude, the will to fight our enemies because of our history, because for so long, we didn't have a state, we didn't have an army, we didn't have the ability to defend ourselves, which culminated in this crescendo of massacres that culminated in the worst massacre of them all, the Holocaust in which a third of our people were annihilated.
We have that in our bones, in our hearts, in our soul, and we fight.
I think President Trump would like to see more Israels around the globe because, you know, everybody who says, you know, America first, I can respect that, but I don't think they want America alone.
And if you can have allies that actually share your values and fight for them in various parts of the world, and especially in the Middle East with Iran trying to take over the world, I think that's a valuable addition.
So, you know, it'll take time for this to sink in, but it will sink in.
You know, the topic of America first, it's become a little bit more clear where people are being put in different groups, America first and America only, and that debate's going on right now, which is a great debate.
I actually like listening to both sides make their argument.
Well, you said, do you think President Trump is a type of a man that you can get anything you want and make him do what he wants?
I don't think President Trump is, but I do think Biden and others are.
So the whole criticism of the fact that Israel, whatever they want, they can call America and have favors being done, I would agree with you on Trump, but with Biden.
So maybe a question that I don't think has been asked yet.
Putin was asked two weeks ago if the war between Ukraine and Russia would have happened under Trump.
He said, no, it wouldn't have happened.
So for you, would the war and the Hamas attack have have happened if President Trump was president instead of Biden?
I don't know.
It's a good question, but you said something about Biden that I should just point out the facts.
In fact, President Biden supported us in the beginning of the war after this horrific massacre, and he came here and I very much appreciated.
But as the war progressed and the vilifications of Israel, the distortions on the media began to pile on, you know, he began to take a different course.
And when we were just two-thirds of the way, three-fourths of the way, in Gaza, I said, we have to go into that last position that they had where they had organized battalions.
It's in a city called Rafah in the southern part of the Gaza Strip.
And he said, don't go there.
And he said, if you do go there, I'll smack an embargo on you.
Now, you know, you're fighting a seven-front war, and all of a sudden you're slapped with an embargo of weapons.
That was tough.
And I said to President Biden, who I've known for many years, I respect the fact you're the president of the United States, but I'm the prime minister of the one and only Jewish state.
And we've been fighting to survive in our small place under the sun.
It's been a battle that has been going on for 3,500 years.
So I'll have to do what we have to do.
And then a few days later, Tony Blinken, who was the Secretary of State, came to Israel and he said, you know, President is serious about this embargo.
And I said, Tony, I know it's serious because you stopped all the weapons.
You slowwalked them before, but now you've stopped them.
And then I said to him this, I said, he said, well, how are you going to do it then?
I said, Tony, we'll fight with our fingernails if we have to.
But we're not going to leave.
It's like leaving the Allies would leave a quarter of the German battalions in place and not going to Berlin.
And I said, would you take that?
Would you take that, Patrick?
Of course you wouldn't.
So we didn't take it either.
We did it against the opposition of the American president.
So so much for Israel controlling the United States.
We don't.
But we do seek to control our destiny.
And when somebody commits a crime like they did on October 7th, decapitating our men, raping our women and then murdering them, burning children alive in front of their parents, taking 255 hostages, grandmothers with their grandchildren, you know, this horror, and pledge to do it again and again and again.
Well, what choice do we have?
We have to fight them and their Iranian patrons.
And we did just that.
We did that first with American help, then with American opposition, and when President Trump came in with great American help, which I truly appreciate.
And I think President Trump does what he thinks is good for America.
I don't think that.
I know that for a fact.
He's a great leader.
So going back to that, I want to clarify this again.
So you said you don't know whether Hamas' October 7 attack would have happened under Trump.
So you're saying Hamas would have had the audacity, even under Trump, to have attacked, or no, they would have feared him.
Probably not, but it's hard to say with these maniacs.
You can't quite tell.
I think Iran would have been more careful, and Iran is the patron.
Would they have controlled completely their client, their proxy?
Maybe not.
Maybe they would have, possibly.
But look, I think President Trump just has changed the posture of America.
America is back on the global scene.
America has resumed its powerful position among the nations.
And I think that's for the good.
Because I think one of the tragedies for the Jewish people was that in the first half of the 20th century, America was not the dominant global power.
And the worst tragedy in the history of mankind, the World War II, took place, and I don't think it was accidental.
And the worst tragedy in the history of my people, the Holocaust, took place.
But in the second half of the 20th century, America emerged as the dominant power in the earth, and Israel came into being.
And as a result, our history has changed.
We no longer are massacred with impunity.
We now have the ability to defend ourselves.
And we are very fortunate to have an ally, a strong ally, the United States, with successive presidents.
We've had our differences, as I said.
But overall, there's been a very strong alliance through all presidents.
But it's never been stronger.
It's never been so intimate and so powerful as it is now under President Trump.
You've been prime minister while President Clinton was in the White House, Biden, Obama, and Trump twice.
Is there an element of unpredictability with President Trump that you don't know necessarily what he's going to be saying next?
Or do you notice a pattern of similar approaches that they all take?
Well, look, I think President Trump has an enormous capability.
He's irreverent to received wisdom, to traditional thinking.
You know, he says, well, let's look at it again, you know.
And sometimes he can surprise you.
I'll tell you, I had conversations with him when he cuts to the chase on something, and he says something that no one before said.
A lot of people felt in their gut, but they didn't have the guts to say it out loud.
And he does.
And, you know, I find that very refreshing.
And also, I think that unpredictability is not a bad thing to have, not a bad thing to have with your, sometimes with your allies, and certainly with your enemies.
I want to show you this clip.
This is a clip of you and the president.
You guys are standing right next to each other.
And you give a look that you almost didn't know he was going to say this.
And this is just personally for myself.
I'm curious, did you know the president was going to be saying this?
Go ahead and play the clip, Rob.
As far as Gaza is concerned, we'll do what is necessary.
If it's necessary, we'll do that.
We're going to take over that piece.
We're going to develop it, create thousands and thousands of jobs.
And it'll be something that the entire Middle East can be very proud of.
But everybody feels that continuing the same process that's gone on forever, over and over again, and then it starts, and then the killing starts, and all of the other problems start, and you end up in the same place, and we don't want to see that happen.
So by the United States with its stability and strength, owning it, especially the strength that we're developing and developed over the last fairly short period of time, I would say really since the election, I think we'll be a great keeper of something that is very, very strong, very powerful and very, very good for the area, not just for Israel, for the entire Middle East.
Very important.
And we'll, again, have thousands of jobs.
You gave a look where you weren't expecting the president to say that as if it's going to be our land.
Were you surprised by what the president said here?
No, actually, I wasn't, but I can tell you that he said something else there.
He said, and that surprised the world.
And I thought, again, he cut to the chase.
He said, why are Gazans locked in this area, which is just used as a base for attack against Israel for its destruction?
That's what the de facto Palestinian state in Gaza was.
It was a base for Israel's destruction.
It has no other purpose.
And it lived under this horrible tyranny, this terror tyranny of Hamas.
So he said, why not give people a choice?
I mean, in other war theaters in Ukraine or in Syria or in Afghanistan, you know, millions left if they wanted to.
In Gaza, they're locked in.
Nobody allows them to leave.
And he says, give them a choice.
If they want to leave, let them leave.
And for those who stay, rebuild Gaza.
I thought that was actually a very sensible thing.
And it's not our goal now to depopulate Gaza and all these other nonsenses that people say.
Our goal is to free Gaza, free it from Hamas, free it from Hamas tyranny and terror.
And you know, we now have Gazans.
I'll bet you don't know this, Patrick.
We now have Gazans fighting Hamas.
And they say, thank God you're here.
They didn't dare do that until the final stages of this war, which we're in now, because they know that they won't be slaughtered.
So they fight.
They actually fight Hamas.
They fight these monsters.
They call them monsters.
And they're joining up with Israel.
And I think that's a sign of hope because we can have, once we finish off Hamas, Gaza can have a different future.
Israel and Gaza can have a different future.
And as far as I'm concerned, if America wants to come in and invest, that's a good thing.
It's not a bad thing.
So you would be okay if America takes over Gaza and it becomes something that we control.
You'd be okay with that.
Yeah, but it's an American choice.
I don't want to get into that.
you would be okay with that so even if america chooses i'd be okay with any governance that civilian governance in gaza that doesn't teach its children to annihilate israel doesn't pay for pay terrorists That's what the not the Hamas do only.
It's what the Palestinian Authority, the other side of the Palestinian Palestinian people does.
They pay terrorists.
The more Jews they kill, the more they pay them, and doesn't launch terrorists.
And, you know, there are several ideas how to do that.
But I think that America's help here is indispensable.
Yeah, that would be very interesting because if all of a sudden that becomes U.S. territory and U.S. now has interest in making sure there's not chaos there, that could actually be very effective for a lot of people in the community.
I lived in Iran for 11 years.
And maybe this is a transition.
I got three other topics I'd like to talk to you about.
When I lived in Iran for 11 years, I was born in 1978.
The Shah was leading Iran, you know, Mohamed Arza Shah Pahlavi.
And when you look at the stats from 1941 when he took office to 1979, that 38 years that he was in, not a lot of wars.
It was fairly peaceful.
You have some numbers on the low end of 17,000 people that died due to war in Iran during that 38 years.
High numbers, 50,000.
In the Middle East, not as chaotic.
Of course, there was issues, but not as much as they have now.
Then from 1979, Khomeini comes in, IRGC, which I had the former founder of IRGC here.
We had a conversation with him.
Khomeini comes in in 79.
From 79 till today, if you look at the numbers, the low end, 600,000 people died in Iran, 2 million people.
In the Middle East, 4.5 to 5.5 million people have died.
Of course, some of the words are different places, but still, when you go back to Iran, you have Houthis, you have all these other things that they control.
How much do you think of what the Middle East was like pre the Islamic Revolutionary Guard took over?
How everybody was able to find a way to get along versus what happened after 1979?
I know you're a big history person.
What is the difference between those two eras?
Well, the big difference is the Islamist revolution that basically took this very gifted people.
The Iranian people are enormously gifted.
First of all, they have a tremendous historic culture, and you won't be surprised, but maybe your listeners would be surprised that in antiquity, in the time of the great Persian king Cyrus, there was a honeymoon between the Jews and the Persian people.
And that relationship actually continued in modest ways, but in significant ways under the Shah.
When the Shah went down and these theological thugs took over Iran, they basically said our goal, that's in their constitution, is to export the Islamic revolution worldwide.
And that's what they proceeded to do.
So all the mineral resources, all the economic resources were now tuned to war.
In the time that I said when I was finance minister and till today, Iran at that time and Israel had roughly the same GDP per capita.
Ours went up from $17,000 to $60,000 per capita and theirs stayed flat.
Why?
Because they took all that money, you know, all that money to arm Hezbollah, arm Hamas, arm the Houthis, and purvey terror around the globe, not only in the Middle East, against the Arabs, against Israel, against everyone else, against Americans.
So, you know, what has happened is that Iran collapsed economically.
They have now infrastructure that is completely destroyed.
Their water system is depleted.
Their dams are empty.
The rivers are drying up because they don't take care of their people.
They just, this is a horrible sect.
So I gave, in this room where I was sitting, a few days ago, I gave a podcast to the Iranian people, which I do from time to time.
And I had a glass of water and, you know, a pitcher of water.
And I said, you know, we helped Iran and we're ready to help Iran with its water problems.
And when you free yourselves of this tyranny, we'll do it again.
Now, Patrick, how many views do you think I got for this podcast?
How many?
It's a video, actually.
How many?
How many?
70 million.
From Iran?
About 50 million, we think.
So it's huge.
I mean, that's half the population.
And you can tell that it hit a nerve because all the Iranian leadership proceeded to respond to it and to attack it and so on, which tells you it really got to them.
And that's in fact what is happening.
This regime is not only tormenting and executing and killing the people of Iran.
They subjugate them, but they seek to subjugate the entire world in their mad fantasies, the Muslim world and then everyone else.
And of course, we're not Muslims, so we have to be eliminated because we stand in their way of conquering the entire Middle East.
So Israel is fighting here not only our war, but the war of our Arab neighbors, the war of the Western countries.
They're developing now ballistic missiles that can reach deep into the heart of Europe.
Their plan is to develop the next thing is an ICBM, an intercontinental ballistic missile that will reach 8,000 kilometers.
You add another 3,000 and they can reach New York.
Where are you broadcasting from, by the way?
Four Ardo, Florida.
Yeah, they can reach Florida, Fort Lauderdale, New York, Washington, Boston, and after that, any other city in the United States.
And they intend to put nuclear warheads on these ballistic missiles.
So this is not, this is a fact.
And the main fact that I want to say is that we're fighting in many ways the war of the West, the war of Western civilization against these barbarians.
And our victory will be your victory.
And one more thing.
You talked about the Iranian Revolution.
You remember how it started?
You remember what the first thing that they did when they took over Tehran?
You're talking about the toast with Carter, or are you talking about after when they took over?
Well, they took over and then they took the American embassy and held some 50 hostages.
My aunt was in the embassy.
Absolutely, yes.
So this regime began by taking hostages.
And what do their proxies do today?
They take our hostages for extortion.
They take our hostages.
I liberated 205 out of 255.
We still have at least 20 alive and about 30 dead.
And we intend to get all of them.
And that's what we're fighting for now.
But it just tells you what the nature of this regime and its proxies is.
And it's very bad to be either one of those in any part of Iran's proxy.
Right.
I wish we had a couple hours to talk about Iran because I have a lot of interest in that topic with you.
But I do want to get to the last question I have with you.
This is the one challenge I personally have.
My audience is not going to be that interested in this story, except for people from my community.
You know, the Holocaust has been recognized by 193 different countries, right?
Everybody around the world.
And in some countries, if you denied, you could do jail time.
Many countries, you can do jail time a year or five years.
But for anybody that doesn't recognize Armenian Assyrian genocide, if there's any country that I would have expected to be on the list that recognized the Armenian and the Assyrian and the Greek genocide, it would be Israel.
Why haven't you yet recognized the Armenian, Assyrian, and the Greek genocide that the Turkish did to that community?
In fact, I think we have, because I think the Knesset passed a resolution to that effect.
I don't know if it's come from you, though.
I don't know if it's come from the Prime Minister of Israel.
Yeah, I just did.
Okay.
Here you go.
All right.
Well, thank you for doing that.
Thank you for doing that.
I appreciate you.
That's important to me.
And I'm sure a lot of Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks around the world appreciate you saying that.
Prime Minister Netanyahu, thank you so much for your time.
I wish we had more time together.
Maybe next time it'll be a sit-down with a couple hours, but we don't have to go.
I know you have a cabinet meeting to go to.
Again, I appreciate you for your time today.
Thank you, Patrick, and I'd love to talk to you again.
Thank you.
Looking forward to it.
So what was your biggest takeaway?
I know we cover a lot of things he hasn't spoken about before.
One, October 7, would it have happened under Trump?
Number two, the money, the amount of money they're spending on the war, $120, $130 billion, 60% debt to GDP ratio, now 75%.
Are you going to come back to America to more money?
Three, the fact that, you know, he's looked at 124 different countries that if he steps foot on that land, he's getting arrested.
And last but not least, obviously him recognizing for the first time in the history of Israel that he recognized the Armenian Assyrian Greek genocide, not as a massacre, not as a crisis, but as a genocide.
This is the first time that it's ever happened.
And so whether you like them, hate them, or love them, whichever one of those three communities you're in, if you have any questions for me, we have a private circle for PBD podcasts on Manect.
You can download the QR code here and talk to one another, agree, disagree.
If you have any questions you want to ask me on Manect, I'll be able to address it.
Any questions you may have about this interview, I'll address it there as well.
Either way, if you enjoyed the interview, give it a thumbs up and subscribe to the channel.
