Jamal Khashoggi’s 2018 murder in Turkey’s Saudi consulate—his body dismembered—revealed ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, and al-Qaeda figures like Osama bin Laden. His advocacy for Islamist causes, including Twitter posts equating U.S. security with Palestinian terrorism, framed him as a propagandist. While Western leaders condemned the act, Canada’s arms sales to Saudi Arabia continued, and Airbnb’s discriminatory West Bank policy mirrored perceived anti-Israel bias in Silicon Valley. Trump’s pragmatic response—balancing $450B Saudi investments against geopolitical risks—highlighted realpolitik over moral grandstanding, yet critics dismissed it as complicity. The episode argues such selective outrage ignores broader authoritarian threats while urging resistance to policies that undermine freedom and economic ties. [Automatically generated summary]
Tonight, Saudi Arabia allegedly murders a Muslim Brotherhood activist in Turkey.
How much should we care?
It's November 21st, and this is The Ezra Levant Show.
Why should others go to jail when you're a biggest carbon consumer I know?
There's 8,500 customers here, and you won't give them an answer.
You come here once a year with a sign, and you feel morally superior.
The only thing I have to say to the government for why I publish it is because it's my bloody right to do so.
This is Jamal Khashoggi.
He's a Saudi born in Saudi Arabia.
He was also killed by Saudis at the Saudi consulate in Turkey.
This is footage of him walking in.
He was carried out in parts.
It was really macabre.
It was murder, of course.
Saudis do that a lot, and so do the Turks, by the way.
I'll get back to that.
I have a question for you.
How much should you and I care about this?
Because a lot of important people say we have to care a lot, including Justin Trudeau, who says he wants answers.
And Christia Freeland, our foreign minister who loves quarreling with the Saudis, here's her statement.
She calls the murder heartbreaking.
I suppose every death is heartbreaking and every murder is an outrage, but let me tell you some facts, and then I'll ask you for your opinion again in a moment.
So, Jamal Khashoggi, prominent family.
I don't know if you remember that name, but I mean, his family, his grandfather was actually a Turk, came to Saudi Arabia to be the personal doctor of King Saud, as in the dictator after whom the whole country is named.
So it's a rich, connected family.
If you're old enough like me, you might remember this guy named Adnan Khashoggi.
He was a Saudi billionaire and an arms dealer who was involved in a complicated scheme to sell arms to Iran to free American hostages and buy weapons for right-wing Contra rebels in Nicaragua.
That was a hell of a scheme.
So that's Jamal's uncle, a billionaire.
You might have heard of Doti Fayed.
He was a billionaire too, and Princess Diana's boyfriend.
In fact, they died together that night in the car crash in Paris as they were being chased by paparazzi.
He's Jamal Khashoggi's cousin.
So Jamal Khashoggi comes from a billionaire family with plenty of intrigue and connections and money.
And I'm not going to call it poor judgment their family.
I'm going to call it extreme judgment.
I mean, they seem to be pretty successful to me, the whole billionaire part, the whole dating a princess part.
I just don't know how many mere mortals amongst us could be arms dealers and rogues like that, or in the case of Jamal Khashoggi, an actual friend of Osama bin Laden and a propagandist for the Muslim Brotherhood pro-terrorist network.
Here's Jamal Khashoggi as a younger man.
That's him in the middle, and he wrote this story too.
This is exactly 30 years ago, 1988, in Afghanistan.
He's with Osama bin Laden's crew and another al-Qaeda founder named Abdullah Azam, and that's him holding the rocket-propelled grenade.
Here's another picture of him.
This was in the New York Times.
That's Khashoggi holding what I think is an AK-47.
So yeah, pretty friendly with the terrorist types, as a lot of Saudis are.
And of course, there are terrorists who want to topple Saudi Arabia too.
And there are terrorists funded by Saudi Arabia.
And I suppose there are terrorists who are both funded by Saudi Arabia and want to topple Saudi Arabia.
Osama bin Laden himself came from a wealthy Saudi family.
It's a pretty awful country.
And Jamal Khashoggi was an associate of the worst of them.
And you could say of the best of them too.
But he didn't just carry RPGs and guns.
He was a journalist, too.
I showed you that piece he wrote from the terrorists in 1988.
I think a propagandist might be a more accurate description.
He was on a mission.
Hey, I'm on a mission too with my journalism, but I'm just a conservative.
I'm a Democrat.
I have peaceful ideas.
I don't blow things up.
Khashoggi's friends did.
He was an avid recruit to something called the Muslim Brotherhood.
That's the worldwide Islamist network that has sharp terrorists in places like Hamas, but it has many more slow and steady Islamists in the establishment around the world, working on the soft jihad through politics and business and diplomacy.
Khashoggi seemed to be a bit in both worlds.
Like I say, his family likes to live dangerously.
He was not an American citizen.
He was not even a permanent resident of the United States.
He did not have a green card, as some foreigners do.
He was as American as I am, which is to say not at all.
But he had a column at Jeff Bezos' Washington Post newspaper where he would say what you'd expect him to say.
Here's a column from him just a couple months ago.
It's from August.
The U.S. is wrong about the Muslim Brotherhood and the Arab world is suffering for it.
Yeah.
Pretty blunt, pretty honest.
I guess you got to like that about him.
He just didn't hide the fact that he loved him, the terrorism.
Look at that.
Look at that picture.
I love that friendly picture of him in the corner there.
He's no dummy.
Americans might not be so willing to take advice on terrorist groups from a guy holding a grenade launcher.
So pretend he likes baseball or whatever that hat is.
Yeah, he looks a friendly fella there.
It looks like, I don't know, that kid singer Rafi.
Maybe he'll sing a little song.
So that's what he would publish in English in America when he makes himself look friendly and acceptable to the West.
That cap is perfect.
He's still a propagandist for Islamists, of course.
Here's what he says to his Twitter audience, which is mainly people in Arabia.
He's got 2 million followers.
He's dead now, but when he was alive, look at this.
Dear USA, your 9-11 is our 24-7.
Sincerely, Palestine.
Yeah.
So I guess he's a journalist, but he's also a terrorist apologist and a critic of America and a longtime member of a terrorist affiliation called the Muslim Brotherhood.
And he is a buddy of bin Laden.
So that's who he is.
And I'm not saying there aren't any nuances or gray areas in there.
But I really don't care about nuances.
He's not a lovely man.
And more to the point, he's not an American.
He's not a Canadian.
He's a Saudi who got offside with the Saudis and they lured him into the Saudi consulate in Turkey and they murdered him.
And that's nasty.
But I think he's nasty.
And I know Turkey's nasty.
I think we're talking about a bunch of nasty people here.
Now, the BBC went through the details of the murder.
They did a great job in this story.
It's quite shocking.
A hit squad flying in on private jets.
Allegedly a recording of the sounds of the killing.
There was a claim that Khashoggi had his Apple watch on and recorded everything.
There was that story that they even showed the flights of the private jets anyways.
But a recording has been shopped around by the Turks.
How would they have that recording?
But they say they do, and the Turks gave that recording to spy agencies in the West, including to Canada and the United States.
Here's what Trudeau and the state broadcaster here says.
Trudeau, Erdogan, speak.
The shared audio is the latest move by Turkey to maintain international pressure on Saudi Arabia over the killing.
Trudeau said he brought the subject up during a recent phone call with Turkish President Recep Erdogan, and briefly, again, when the two met on the weekend in Paris, Trudeau said he thanked Erdogan for his strength in responding to the Khashoggi situation.
Now, I'm not pro-murder.
If someone is a terrorist, kill him in the field.
But if he's just a terrorist apologist in the streets, charge him with a crime, deport him.
You don't lure him into a building and murder him.
But Turkey and Erdogan in particular, I mean, I guess technically Erdogan was elected president, and technically Turkey is still a part of NATO for some reason I don't understand.
But Turkey happens to be the world's greatest imprisoner of journalists too, and they do plenty of murder too.
They have more journalists in prison than even China does, if you can believe it, even more than North Korea or Iran do.
Erdogan is not quite as bad a tyrant as the Saudis are, I don't think, but he sure is trying to catch up, and they're both murderous regimes.
But again, why should Canadians care?
There's 7 billion people in the world.
Why do we care about him?
Why should America care?
Because it's spectacular news, a dramatic hit squad, crazy story about being hacked up in a consulate and carried out in parks.
That's crazy, that's gross.
Sure, it's journalistically interesting, but I'm sorry.
That actually happens all the time in the worst places in the world.
It's about regional power, regional power, whatever.
And this guy, Khashoggi, was in the middle of it.
How is that something for Canada or America to weigh in about again?
If Khashoggi were a citizen of Canada or America, you bet.
We have to defend our citizens around the world.
Funny that Trudeau doesn't actually do that for citizens, though.
He doesn't help Canadian citizens who are held hostage by Muslim terrorists.
He let them be killed.
There are Canadian citizens rotting in prison in China right now on trumped-up charges.
Do you think Trudeau even mentioned the name Hussein Salil when he was in China meeting his dictator friends?
There's a Canadian woman, as you know, who was raped and then murdered in Iran, and yet Trudeau wants to reestablish diplomatic ties with them.
Those are all Canadians I'm talking about, but some Saudi activist who hung out with bin Laden is killed in Turkey by Saudi Arabia.
And I know that's sad for his family, and maybe it's even sad for the world, but I don't quite see it.
But why is that a political thing for Canada's prime minister to call up the president of Turkey?
What's the connection to us?
Because he wrote a column for the Washington Post.
So what?
Listen, I'm happy to quarrel with the Saudis.
You may know that I wrote a book with a chapter to that effect.
It's called Ethical Oil.
I say let's cut off Saudi oil imports to Canada by replacing their conflict oil with Canadian ethical oil.
Let's build a pipeline from Alberta to the east.
Turn off the taps from Saudi.
That's been my view for a decade.
No, to Trudeau, it's better to virtue signal over some foreign symbol than defend our own national interests and actually hurt Saudi Arabia financially.
We want to hurt Saudi Arabia, cut off their oil sales to us by Canadian instead.
So yeah, don't take Justin Trudeau and Christy Freeland seriously on Saudi Arabia.
Of course you wouldn't.
I mean, if they were serious about hurting Saudi Arabia, if they really cared, they would cut off oil imports and they'd cancel that huge arms deal.
They're actually selling Saudi Arabia the tools to kill.
Look at this headline.
Trudeau holds out option of canceling arms sale to Saudi Arabia over journalists killing.
And then that sub-headline, we have frozen export permits before.
I can't even say it without laughing.
We will not hesitate to do so again, says PM.
Really?
Do you really think Trudeau would cancel a billion-dollar arms sale?
No, I don't think so.
He actually loves Saudi Arabia too much.
He just wants to be flirty with the idea on TV.
He knows Khashoggi is somehow cool these days, so he really wants to seem woke.
He'll do nothing.
He never will.
He never has.
And then there's Donald Trump.
See, Trump is a grown-up.
He might not like him, but he's a grown-up, and America is a grown-up country.
And Saudi Arabia, that awful, bigoted, racist, terror-supporting OPEC dictatorship, Saudi Arabia is an important country.
Economically, it produces about 10 million barrels of oil a day.
And they have the ability and the willingness to create price shocks by cutting off or ramping up supply.
So that's actually important to the whole world.
And Saudi Arabia has money and influence in the region.
And it is a counterweight to Iran, Sunni versus Shia.
And Saudi Arabia could possibly be part of a regional peace deal with Israel.
Could be, I don't know, the very first trip that Donald Trump went to as president back in May of 2017 was to Saudi Arabia.
What do you think of that?
The first, not to Mexico, not to Canada, to Saudi Arabia.
And then he went to Jerusalem and then he went to Rome, including the Vatican.
Do you remember that, the three great monotheistic religions?
But he went to Saudi Arabia first.
He whipped them hard and publicly on terrorism.
So Mr. Blunt speak and truth teller Trump, do you remember what he said to the Saudis?
Listen.
But above all, we must be united in pursuing the one goal that transcends every other consideration.
That goal is to meet history's great test, to conquer extremism and vanquish the forces that terrorism brings with it every single time.
Young Muslim boys and girls should be able to grow up free from fear, safe from violence, and innocent of hatred.
When young Muslim men and women should have the chance to build a new era of prosperity for themselves, it has to be done, and we have to let them do it.
With God's help, this summit will mark the beginning of the end for those who practice terror and spread its vile creed.
Yeah, that ain't Obama giving the speeches.
He started making demands of them.
And by the way, they were happy to do it.
They were just happy to have someone who didn't favor Iran like Barack Obama did.
And the Muslim Brotherhood, or Obama had the president of Egypt oppose for the Muslim Brotherhood.
Saudis are grateful to have Trump.
And Trump has been trying to use Saudi Arabia ever since for America's interest.
He presses them all the time, including on Twitter just today, to lower the price of oil, to make life more affordable in America.
Trump And MBS Diplomacy00:09:22
When's the last time you heard an American president do that so bluntly?
He presses Saudis to buy more American goods.
He presses the Saudis to stop quarreling with Israel.
He does it on Twitter, so it's weird, but he does it.
So do you think that Donald Trump would jeopardize all of his work with Saudi Arabia, the low oil price?
That's not great for Alberta, but it's great for America and the world.
The trade with Saudi Arabia, the regional counterweight to Iran, the possibility of peace with Israel, because some Muslim Brotherhood journalist activist was killed.
I mean, I'm sorry it happened, I'm sure.
I mean, murder is not a good thing.
But if we were going to set foreign policy by how dictatorships treat their own citizens, yeah, we'd have no embassies in China, Russia, half of Asia, most of Africa, all the Muslim Middle East countries.
We just wouldn't even have a foreign affairs department if that's what we did.
Is that really how foreign policy should be made?
Even Trudeau won't take tiny little baby steps.
He'll virtue signal, but he'll do nothing.
Trump has to be a grown-up because someone has to be.
And so Trump was.
And he was grilled and questioned and pressed on this subject of Khashoggi.
And look, he sent his Secretary of State to Saudi Arabia about this subject.
And Trump himself personally spoke with the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia.
But at the end of the day, sorry, no matter how mean, no matter how barbaric Saudi Arabia was to their guy, it just isn't the grown-up thing to do to wreck an entire regional alliance because of one sad and horrific act.
And let me read to you Trump's statement in its full trumpiness.
He put out a statement and it's incredible.
And the left went nuts when Trump released this.
I think he released it last night.
I mean, how many presidential memos have eight exclamation points in them for starters?
But mainly, Trump does what he always do.
He speaks the unvarnished truth.
The same truth that every American and, by the way, Canadian and British and French leader has spoken for decades.
But Trump did it more truthfully and with less diplomatic fibbing.
Okay, now I'm going to read so much to you, but you'll see why, okay?
So this is going to take a few minutes, but I promise you you won't see this anywhere else.
And I promise you, you'll be shaking your head saying, damn straight.
Okay, ready?
Statement from President Donald J. Trump on standing with Saudi Arabia.
This is from the White House website.
And then look at that.
America first.
The world is a very dangerous place.
How about that for the beginning of a presidential statement?
You know what?
And it just gets better.
The country of Iran, as an example, is responsible for a bloody proxy war against Saudi Arabia in Yemen, trying to destabilize Iraq's fragile attempt at democracy, supporting the terror group Hezbollah and Lebanon, propping up dictator Bashar Assad in Syria, who has killed millions of his own citizens, and much more.
Likewise, the Iranians have killed many Americans and other innocent people throughout the Middle East.
Iran states openly and with great force, death to America and death to Israel.
Iran is considered the world-leading sponsor of terror.
On the other hand, Saudi Arabia would gladly withdraw from Yemen if the Iranians would agree to leave.
They would immediately provide desperately needed humanitarian assistance.
Additionally, Saudi Arabia has agreed to spend billions of dollars in leading the fight against radical Islamic terrorism.
Now, you can agree or disagree with whether those things are going to happen, but you see what he's doing.
He's giving a class on diplomacy 101, otherwise known as real life.
On other things that might be as, you know, important as virtue signaling about a Muslim Brotherhood operative.
I mean, as in what he's talking about there is more important than virtue signaling about a Muslim Brotherhood operative.
Would you agree with me?
That what he's listed there is more important.
In fact, he talked about the lives of millions, not the life of one.
I'm sorry, that's foreign affairs.
It's not very nice, isn't it?
But what about domestic affairs?
Again, grown-up stuff, a bit less dreamy than Justin Trudeau's fancy socks, but it's real life.
Here, I'm going to read the next part of Trump's statement.
He switches from the foreign affairs to the domestic.
Take a look.
After my heavily negotiated trip to Saudi Arabia last year, the kingdom agreed to spend and invest $450 billion in the United States.
This is a record amount of money.
It will create hundreds of thousands of jobs, tremendous economic development, and much additional wealth for the United States.
Of the $450 billion, $110 billion will be spent on the purchase of military equipment from Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and many other great U.S. defense contractors.
If we foolishly cancel these contracts, Russia and China would be the enormous beneficiaries and very happy to acquire all this newfound business.
It would be a wonderful gift to them directly from the United States.
Exclamation point is a human life worth $450 billion in trade.
Now, we don't like to think that way, or at least talk that way, right?
Because we say that every life is invaluable, which is true.
It's invaluable.
You can't put a value on it, but a president can't be sentimental.
A president has to put a value on it.
And frankly, how is giving China and Russia that $450 billion changing the world at all, other than making America poor?
Let me read some more.
The crime against Jamal Khashoggi was a terrible one and one that our country does not condone.
Indeed, we have taken strong action against those already known to have participated in the murder.
After great independent research, we now know many details of this horrible crime.
We have already sanctioned 17 Saudis known to have been involved in the murder of Mr. Khashoggi and the disposal of his body.
Representatives of Saudi Arabia say that Jamal Khashoggi was an enemy of the state and a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, but my decision is in no way based on that.
This is an unacceptable and horrible crime.
King Salman and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman vigorously deny any knowledge of the planning or execution of the murder of Mr. Khashoggi.
Our intelligence agencies continue to assess all information, but it could very well be that the Crown Prince had knowledge of this tragic event.
Maybe he did and maybe he didn't.
Exclamation point.
Now, of course, Donald Trump knows it was ordered by the Crown Prince, Mohamed bin Salman, or MBS as he's known.
And MBS knows that Trump knows.
And MBS is surely grateful that Trump is going along with this fiction.
That's diplomacy.
And MBS will surely be very grateful to Trump and give Trump many concessions in return for this fiction.
Do you doubt that's how deals work?
If so, you ought to read a little book called The Art of the Deal.
That's real life, people.
Let me read some more.
That being said, we will never know all the facts surrounding the murder of Mr. Jamal Khashoggi.
In any case, our relationship is with the kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
They have been a great ally in our very important fight against Iran.
The United States intends to remain a steadfast partner of Saudi Arabia to ensure the interests of our country, Israel, and all other partners in the region.
It is our paramount goal to fully eliminate the threat of terrorism throughout the world.
Now, it goes on a little bit longer, but that's enough.
Are you shocked by Donald Trump's statement?
If so, can you tell me what part exactly?
And now I'm going to guess here, you might say, because he believes the lies of the murderous Saudi king.
Well, he says maybe he does, maybe he doesn't.
There's a bit of a deliberate ambiguity there, but don't be naive.
Of course he doesn't, any more than any American president believes the lies of foreign leaders, either Democrats or dictators.
Are you shocked by the fact that Trump so brazenly refers to oil and trade and military alliances?
Why?
What do you think America's relationship with Saudi Arabia was built on?
Why do you think America even cares about Saudi Arabia?
What is shocking about any of this other than we actually have a president who says whatever's on his mind when the fancy people know better than to be so candid?
That whole part about maybe he did it, maybe he didn't, how do I know?
That's gorgeous and honest.
Normally people don't say that out loud, but I'm sorry, that is real life.
And anyone who says Trump is coarsening the world with this diplomacy should answer what exactly they'd like the West to do about bad behavior of dictatorships towards their own citizens.
And by the way, they can start by asking about China, too.
And maybe they can write their answer on their Chinese-made smartphone or their Chinese-made laptop computer.
Look, I'm for peace and freedom and civil rights.
And I hate the Saudis.
And I hate the Turks and I hate Iran and ISIS even more.
And this Jamal Khashoggi, yeah, it is sad, but he's not high up on my list of the world's victims.
So what do you think?
Well, let me know.
Stay with us, boyhood.
Airbnb's Silicon Valley Stance00:11:17
Airbnb is like Uber, but instead of driving your own car for other people, you rent out your own room to other people.
It lets you turn your house or apartment into an hotel for cash.
It's extremely popular, and there are Airbnbs in 81,000 different towns and cities.
But this week, Airbnb announced that they are banning Airbnb listings in disputed territories of the West Bank.
But here's the catch.
They're only banning Jewish homeowners from listing their house on Airbnb.
Muslims are still welcome to do so.
As you can see from the press release on the Airbnb page, they call it listings in disputed regions.
And it's true that the region is disputed, but they still allow Muslim customers in those disputed regions.
I guess it's the Jews who are in dispute.
Joining us now via Skype from Dreitbart.com is our friend Joel Paul.
Joel, welcome to the show.
This really, really feels like Airbnb is taking sides in a political dispute, which they haven't done anywhere else like Tibet or Burma.
They have listings there.
Only in the West Bank are they becoming discriminating.
Am I right on that?
Right.
The policy appears only to apply to Judea and Samaria, areas across the 1949 armistice line in Israel.
And the really objectionable thing, as you pointed out, is it only applies to Israelis, does not seem to apply to Palestinians putting their homes up for rent on Airbnb.
I don't know how many units there would be there, but the policy is discriminatory.
And even some more moderate voices who might normally not favor boycotts of companies have really expressed their outrage.
They've called this a discrimination against Jews.
The statement by Airbnb is also very curious.
They basically say that the dispute over this land is the core of the conflict.
And if there's any myth that has been debunked over the last two decades, it's that that land is at the core of the conflict.
It's not.
The core of the conflict is the refusal of Palestinians to accept Israel itself.
And even though the land across the 1949 armistice line is land in disputed territory, when Israel pulled out of Gaza, for example, that did not end Palestinian violence against Israel from Gaza.
Only accelerated terror and violence from Gaza.
And that's really the core of the conflict.
Core of the conflict is the Palestinian rejection of Israel's right to exist, of Jewish self-determination, etc.
In fact, when the parties were close to a deal in 2000, one of the things that Yasser Arafat, the late leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization, one of the things he apparently did was denied any Jewish historical presence on the Temple Mount, which is just absurd.
But that's the level of denial.
That's how deep it goes among Palestinian leaders, and that's why there's still a conflict.
Yeah.
Well, what's odd is that a company that has customers of every possible stripe would take sides in any conflict.
I mean, like I say, they're willing to rent out homes in Lhasa, Tibet, which you could make a case that that is illegally occupied by the Chinese dictatorship.
They rent out homes in the Rohingya homeland of Rakhine, Burma.
I checked, they rent out homes in the Uyghur homeland of Xinjiang, China, where they have mass re-education camps.
So it's very, in Crimea, it's hard to find a place in the world where Airbnb won't do business.
Once you start picking sides of these territorial disputes, it theoretically could snowball to everywhere.
I mean, even in Canada, we have Aboriginal land claims that are not extinct.
But they only choose the Jews, and that's what's so weird.
Right.
The other thing is the areas in which people are being banned from listing their property in Judea and Samaria are largely towns that are going to be part of Israel in any final peace agreement.
This is almost universally recognized.
Places like Efrat, for example.
Efrat was an area that Jews lived in before 1948.
They were expelled by the Jordanian army during the War of Independence for Israel, and they only returned after 1967.
But that area was, in fact, inhabited by Jews before 1948 and now is a popular suburb south of Jerusalem.
And it's almost certainly going to be part of Israel once that land does have its final borders in a peace deal that we're maybe going to see the outlines of from the Trump administration.
So the idea that Airbnb would prejudice that peace deal, in fact, in essence, oppose that peace deal by saying that we're not going to recognize the Israeli presence in areas that were historically Jewish.
And by the way, nobody's clear as to whether their policy applies to the old city of Jerusalem, East Jerusalem, where there are lots of Jewish homes.
So nobody's really clear what they're doing.
And the funny thing is that Airbnb seems to think that it knows where the boundaries should be better than the parties themselves.
So if anything, this is actually a disruptive gesture.
It actually frustrates peace because it will encourage Palestinians to boycott, to demonize, to delegitimize Israel rather than dealing with Israel.
And all the wrong people are happy with this result.
All of the extreme far-left BDS enthusiasts think this is great because Airbnb is a well-known tech company and they think if they can do this with Airbnb, they can push Google, Facebook, Twitter, other tech giants to start excluding Israelis or taking actions, taking sides in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
And I think they have some justification for that.
You know, all of these tech giants, they're all based in Silicon Valley or San Francisco.
And you just go on their websites and you see how chock full of far-left Obama or Hillary Clinton staff they are.
I mean, I went on Airbnb's senior executive team, and their head of global policy is Chris Lahane.
Now, you probably know him better than I do, Joel.
He was a senior Al Gore and Bill Clinton type, lodged at Airbnb.
He would have called the shots here.
You have Obama staffers, Hillary Clinton staffers.
It really is a revolving door between far-left Democratic politics and Silicon Valley.
I'm sure this was Chris Lahane's decision.
I mean, that's his title, head of global policy.
I actually think this could spread, and I already see the BDS groups trying to lean on other home rental apps to get them to follow suit.
And frankly, I don't think that even nominal Jews like Mark Zuckerberg, the head of Facebook, would really stop this much.
I mean, they're left-wing.
They're not particularly pro-Israel, and they go with the flow.
Right, right.
And look, I think that that's why it's incumbent on people to oppose this.
I mean, I've deactivated my Airbnb account, and I spent probably about $1,000 on Airbnb this year so far.
Ironically enough, in Israel, you know, it's, I think, a gesture one can take.
Other people are doing the same.
My tweet about deactivating my account was retweeted thousands of times.
Other people seem to be doing the same.
There are alternatives.
There's VRBO.
There's other message boards in Israel if you want to go to Israel and find somewhere else to stay.
It's very tough for people who depend on Airbnb for an income to delist from Airbnb.
So I understand that this might be a tough thing for other people to do.
But I think the only response to boycott efforts is to boycott the boycotters because what they're doing is toxic.
It's actually toxic to peace.
It's encouraging Palestinians to dig in, not to negotiate, not to reach an agreement, to prolong the conflict.
That means more people getting hurt, more people dying.
And I think that Airbnb just caved to the pressure.
I think that Silicon Valley has moved far left as part of the resistance against the Trump administration.
And I think it's a huge mistake.
I think that they don't have to like Donald Trump's policies on tech.
They don't have to like his policies on the Middle East.
But right is right and wrong is wrong, and this is wrong.
So I think it's important to send a message to the tech giants.
This actually won't be tolerated.
It's odd also because Israel is so important to the tech world.
I mean, I read the tech publications, the news from the tech industry daily, and Israel and Silicon Valley are very, very closely integrated.
There are lots of Silicon Valley companies that depend on Israeli products, on Israeli programs, Israeli software, Israeli patents, Israeli personnel.
This is because Israel has a huge, huge comparative advantage in engineering.
And the Israelis are very, very good at inventing things.
Second to the United States, I think, only in terms of startup companies.
And so it's just crazy for Silicon Valley to take this stance.
I'm sure there are a lot of people in Silicon Valley and involved with Silicon Valley who are upset.
There's a chance Airbnb could even reverse this policy.
This policy is a reversal of their previous policy, which was not to get involved.
So they may go back to it.
I think it's just really important for people to express their opposition to this kind of thing.
Otherwise, it just will never stop.
And you're going to see not just a grave injustice, but I think you'll see people actually suffer because of things like this.
Yeah.
Well, thank you for those.
I found your comments actually inspiring.
We've set up a petition that we are going to deliver to Chris Lahane.
If folks want to sign it, go to protestairbnb.com, protestairbnb.com.
Last I checked, we had about 10,000 names on it.
I'd love to get that over 20,000, and we will deliver it to Airbnb in San Francisco.
Well Joel, thanks very much for taking the time with us today.
Thank you.
All right, there you have it Joel Pollack, Senior Editor-at-Large at BrightBart.com.
Stay with us.
More ahead on The Rebel.
Celine Dion's Bizarre Gender-Neutral Line00:03:11
On my monologue yesterday about Celine Dion's bizarre gender-neutral clothing line.
That was so weird, wasn't it?
Deborah writes, Celine is certainly living on the dark side of the moon.
Those pictures were haunting and truly disturbing.
I wouldn't cross the street to see her now.
Well, look, I try my best to separate the politics of people in the entertainment industry from their craft.
Otherwise, I really wouldn't be able to listen to anything else other than country music.
I mean, I try hard.
With some actors, I just can't do it.
I just can't do it because I can't look at them without thinking in their politics.
I don't feel that way about Celine Deon.
I think this is some weirdness she's fallen into.
I like to imagine if René Angéli was still around, he would have steered her away from this.
It's dark.
I hate it.
It doesn't mean I'm going to turn the radio station if a song of hers comes on.
But hopefully some of her fans will get through to her and say, what are you doing?
Liza writes, I don't have words for how sick it made me feel when I saw that pic of the two demon babies and the other ones with what looks like blood spatters, dehumanizing young children and presenting them as all one gender.
This is not good.
This is not funny.
None of it on any level.
Yeah, you know, those demon babies were so, so bad.
And I think the last photo I showed of the baby with the skull photoshopped onto his face, that is so, like, that revels in death.
And our culture is based on life.
And we love life.
And that's what we love best about kids, isn't it?
That they are new life and they're the promise for life.
And once we die, life will continue with them.
And they're angels.
Why do we call them little angels?
Because they're not yet tarnished with sins.
We believe that they're born without sins.
I mean, I suppose there's a concept of original sin, but in real life, the reason why everyone loves a baby is because they're as close to perfect as humans get.
They haven't, other than original sin and that theological concept of how we've all inherited some sin.
When you look at a baby, you see purity.
And to take such purity and to combine it with such ugliness and there's a gag reflex that comes out.
We want to gag.
What is Celine Dion, who is a beautiful woman who sings beautifully and dresses beautifully and presents beautifully, what is she doing reveling in such ugliness?
I don't understand it, but I wanted to show it to you and I hope you don't mind.
Stan writes, Celine is being sardonic in trying to show the world how the elitist cabal is using children and radicalization of children through clothing.
She's deeply concerned about the communist UN agenda to brainwash children.
Even though she has seen Elene Dion, she is showing us that it's okay for her to go into a nursery using her elitism and radicalized children.
She's sardonic and actually believes the Elite Cabal are morally wrong on this.
Well, that is a $100 excuse.
Problem with BC Oil Execs00:03:19
That is really, really, you're making a pretzel there.
You're assuming that the whole thing is so outrageous that the only way she would do it is some sort of a double joke.
Like think of three chess moves ahead.
No, no, no.
Occam's razor.
You know what Occam's razor is.
It's an old philosophical rule.
simplest answer is usually the right one.
She's wholly weird.
I showed you evidence in her own life, whether it's her relationship with Renee or those strange comments about freezing babies.
And again, I got nothing against in vitro fertilization.
I believe anyone who wants to make a baby, I wish them good luck and if technology helps, great.
But she was weird about putting a baby in the freezer, an embryo.
I don't think it's fake or a double trick.
I think that's you trying to salvage your hero.
That's my view.
Okay, let's switch subjects.
On my interview with Lauren Gunter, Bruce writes, oil is our future, not fairy dust energy projects.
Now at least just wasting our money to show that she's doing something when she really isn't.
Well, look, put aside Brian Topp, the anti-oil extremist Toronto Union leader.
What are you choosing him for?
I mean, seriously, you could choose a random person from the Calgary phone book, and they would have more common sense and affinity for the oil and gas sector than Brian Topp.
But that's not even the worst part of it.
You don't need to send an expert to the oil.
We want to find out from the oil executives what's going on here.
Well, we all know what's going on here, and the problem is not the oil executives who have a solution.
The solution is called build the pipelines.
So they're not the problem.
The problem is the government in Ottawa, the government in BC, the courts, and Indian bands who are bought off by the Tides Foundation and other funds, other foundations.
I should tell you that quite a few Indian bands are on side with the pipelines.
It's the dramatic actors hired by Tides that aren't.
That's what you do.
If you truly wanted to fix this problem, you'd hire a former BC New Democrat to lobby Horgan, like a former BC New Democrat premier.
You'd hire a senior Aboriginal leader, like a Phil Fontaine or Matthew Kuhncum, try and lobby.
Because that's where the problem is.
The fact that you're still pretending the problem is in the oil patch shows Rachel's not least the same as she's ever been.
All right.
Well, what do you think of my comments about Jamal Khashoggi?
Look, I don't want someone murdered.
I think it's pretty gross.
But frankly, when I see the Turks fighting with the Saudis, I don't feel like I have a dog in that fight.
Not a Canadian citizen, not an American citizen.
What research I've done into him shows he's a pretty iffy guy who, I don't know if he actually shot anyone with that gun or RPG launcher, but yeah, I wouldn't put Jamal Khashoggi in the top 1,000 names of people I care about around the world, would you?
Until tomorrow, folks, that's it for all of us here.