Joel Pollack argues global instability—U.S. gas shortages, pipeline hacks (Colonial Pipeline), and Israel-Hamas escalation—has worsened under Biden’s $300M unconditional Palestinian aid, perceived weakening of Israel, and reversal of Trump-era policies like tariffs for the UAE and Yemen support. Iran-backed rocket attacks (1,200 fired) and Hamas’s aggression, contrasted with Trump’s alleged deterrence, reveal a shift in U.S. ally strategy, with progressive Democrats and Never Trump figures like David Frum now silent or critical. Pollack’s upcoming book, The Zionist Conspiracy and How to Join It, frames Israel’s resilience as a model for progress, while critics claim Biden’s approach emboldens adversaries. [Automatically generated summary]
I'm talking about the war against Israel by the Hamas terrorist group, which is sponsored by Iran.
And my thesis is none of this would have happened were it not for Biden as president.
I'll take you through it and we'll interview Joel Pollack with his thoughts on it.
Before I do that, let me invite you to become a subscriber to Rebel News Plus.
You get the video version of this podcast plus other programs.
Just go to RebelNews.com and click subscribe.
All right, here's today's podcast.
Tonight, it's only been 100 days and the world is already falling apart under Joe Biden.
It's May 12th and this is the Ezra Levant show.
Why should others go to jail when you're the biggest carbon consumer I know?
There's 8,500 customers here and you won't give them an answer.
The only thing I have to say to the government about why I'm publishing it is because it's my bloody right to do so.
I really can't believe my eyes.
There are gas station lineups in America again.
How on earth is that even happening?
In my mind, that's a foggy memory I have from the 1970s when I was a child on the news from the OPEC oil shocks and Jimmy Carter's mismanagement of both the economy and foreign policy.
How can that be happening again?
I mean, Donald Trump did more for the U.S. energy economy than anyone else since John D. Rockefeller.
Trump opened up drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.
He was pro-fracking.
He was pro-coal.
He even allowed drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, which I thought was forever off limits.
In Trump's first week as president, he revived the Keystone Excel pipeline and he cleared out the illegal protesters from another pipeline called the Dakota Access Pipeline.
Do you remember that one?
Our friend Fella McAlier went down there.
Take a look.
Did you come here in a vehicle?
Do you guys come here in vehicles?
Yeah, we all came with her.
We piled as many people in it as we possibly could, along with probably about a thousand pounds of food.
Does that not make you a hypocrite coming in in an oil-propelled vehicle to protest oil?
No, it does not make me a hypocrite.
No?
I don't have it.
The press list was closed.
Can we see your footage now?
Sorry, it's open now.
Yeah, we're going to have security.
Are you with us?
Are you with the press?
Hey, hey, hey, let go.
Let go.
Let go.
Let go of that, sir.
Let go.
Sir, let go of that.
Let go.
Let go.
I can understand.
Let go.
He's in the wrong place to ask that kind of stuff.
Let go of the microphone.
Let go of the microphone.
You gotta let go of the microphone.
Let's go to the track box.
Let go.
Let go.
Well, I guarantee you.
I spoke to Mike yesterday.
I have my own camera offering.
Hey, can you make sure his is deleted?
He's filming this right here and he's taking it with him.
You guys don't have a press pass.
I have no press pass.
Listen, stop.
Let's stop it.
First, I want to tell a story too.
Let go of the microphone.
Let go of the microphone.
Let go of my microphone.
Yeah, it was like if you put Antifa in charge of the economy.
So Trump cleared all that Obama era stuff up pretty quick.
Under Trump, America achieved something I didn't think would be possible for many years to come.
He made America energy self-sufficient again.
Actually, a net energy exporter, exporting oil and gas, in fact.
Canada imports a lot of oil from the United States.
You know that?
We still sell more oil to them than we buy, but it's not as lopsided anymore.
Gas prices in the U.S., though, are now nearing $3 a gallon, which is shocking to Americans.
I should tell you, though, that Canadians are paying about a buck 30 a liter Canadian, which is the equivalent of four bucks a gallon American, and we seem fine with that.
So we're paying way more than Americans, and they're freaking out.
The immediate crisis in the U.S. is because an important pipeline got hacked.
I didn't, I guess if I didn't think about it, I wouldn't imagine a pipeline could be hacked.
But of course, anything could be hacked.
Your fridge could be hacked if it's got a computer in it.
Anything with a computer, and that's everything these days.
So do you really think it was a cyber criminal who wanted a ransom?
That's what we're told.
It could be.
Or do you think that maybe, I don't know, just guessing here, just a foreign power, maybe?
I don't know.
Maybe China.
I mean, if China were to do it, they would probably say it was some for-profit ransom criminal.
Here's the U.S. government on the issue.
So first, we recognize that victims of cyber attacks often face a very difficult situation, and they have to just balance often the cost-benefit when they have no choice with regard to paying a ransom.
Colonial is a private company, and we'll defer information regarding their decision on paying a ransom to them.
Would the administration offer any advice on whether or not to pay a ransom?
So typically that is a private sector decision, and the administration has not offered further advice at this time.
Given the rise in ransomware, that is one area we're definitely looking at now to say what should be the government's approach to ransomware.
Got it.
A nationally important pipeline is attacked, paralyzing Americans.
Gas stations are running out of gas, and it's just a private sector thing.
Hey, I have an idea.
Why not get that expert on gas pipelines, Hunter Biden, to help?
Israel-Gaza Conflict Escalates00:15:27
I hear he was paid millions by Ukrainian energy companies for his tip-top advice.
He'll know what to do.
So there's that.
There's the news that the massive jobs rebound that was happening under Trump, it's being slowed to a crawl.
More people are sneaking across the border from Mexico than ever, 180,000 at last count, because they know Biden won't be strong.
Biden loves illegal migrants.
He knows they're future Democrat voters.
He wants them to come.
You've got economic malaise.
You're at the whim of cyber petro-terrorists.
And now war is breaking out in the Middle East.
When was the last time that happened?
Did it happen a lot under Donald Trump?
No, it did not.
Foreign actors, countries, terrorist groups, whatever, they either feared Trump or respected Trump or both.
Now they laugh at Biden.
I mean, who looks powerful in this picture?
I don't know, but it's not Biden.
Which brings us to the war in Israel.
There wasn't one under Trump.
Why?
Iran was as belligerent as ever in its political leadership, Hamas and other terrorist groups.
But why didn't they make a move then?
Well, same reason why everyone is making a move now.
I mean, Trump wasn't supernatural, but he did pacify North Korea enough.
He did kill al-Baghdadi of ISIS member him.
Compare North Korea now with North Korea under Trump.
No one dared to make a move under Trump.
Trump didn't start wars.
He was loath to join them, but he occasionally smacked people around to show why they shouldn't start wars.
Remember this?
When he was casually at dinner with Xi Jinping at Mar-a-Lago, he just let fly over dessert a bunch of cruise missiles timed perfectly so Xi Jinping would find out about it over dessert.
Yeah, that left an impression both on the Syrians and on Xi Jinping.
Well, Trump is gone.
Now it's Grandpa Joe Biden who forgets where he is half the time and who he is without notes.
COVID has taken this year just since the outbreak.
It's taken more than 100 years.
Look, here's the lives.
It's just, when you think about it.
You know, the rapidly rising with, I don't know.
I just spoke at Dartmouth on health care at the medical school.
Or not, I guess it wasn't accidentally on the campus, but people from the medical school were at the I want to be clear.
I'm not going nuts.
I'm not sure whether it's a medical school or where the hell I spoke, but it was on a campus.
I propose, and I'm going to digress slightly.
We're in a situation.
President asked me to head up a cancer moonshot in another country and annex this significant portion of it called Crimea.
He's saying that it was President my boss.
So yeah, not exactly a commanding presence, not exactly intimidating to the bad guys.
And he's hired most of the failed foreign policy bosses from the Obama era, literally the people who tried to bribe Iran with billions of dollars and tried to force Israel to only make peace through the Palestinians.
I mean, imagine hiring this guy again.
There will be no separate peace between Israel and the Arab world.
I want to make that very clear to all of you.
I've heard several prominent politicians in Israel sometimes saying, well, the Arab world's in a different place now.
We just have to reach out to them and we can work some things with the Arab world and we'll deal with the Palestinians.
No, no, no, and no.
Yeah, so Israel is on its own again.
It can take care of itself pretty well.
It survived eight years under Barack Obama running America.
Biden won't be around eight years.
And Israel does have some friends in the region now.
But the thing about having friends is sometimes you have to compromise a bit to keep them.
That'll be interesting.
For example, whose side in this fight is the United Arab Emirates on?
But it's clear that the 1970s are back.
Oil shocks, terrorism, foreign countries eating America's lunch.
But hey, look at the bright side.
At least Donald Trump and his mean tweets are gone.
Am I right?
Stay with us for more on this with Joel Pollard.
Well, for four years during the Trump administration, war in the Middle East was the dog that didn't bark, as in it was, you might not notice it because you didn't see the wars.
You didn't see the conflict.
And we started to think maybe that was normal.
In fact, peace broke out all over the place.
Not just one peace deal, but many, the so-called Abraham Accords.
Trump managed to do the impossible, get Israel to have a true and warm peace with the United Arab Emirates, with Bahrain, with Sudan, with Morocco.
If any one of those deals had been done under a Democrat administration, there would be Nobel Prizes all around, but not so for Trump.
Well, that era of peace, in my view, was because the actors in the region either feared or respected Trump that seems to be gone because now war is breaking out between Israel and Gaza.
And joining us now to talk about it is our friend Joel Pollack, senior editor-at-large at Breitbart.com.
Am I unfair to hang this around the neck of Joe Biden and his foreign policy?
Is he really a proximate cause of this violence?
I mean, there's been violence in that region for a long time.
Did Biden give a sort of permission for this to reignite?
Well, let's just be clear about where the responsibility ultimately lies.
lies with the Palestinian leadership and with Iran, which funds and arms Palestinian terrorists, terrorists in Lebanon, terrorists in other parts of the Middle East and around the world.
And they have played the fundamental role in fomenting this conflict.
They are also attempting to pressure the United States, which is looking for some way to capitulate and accept very weak terms in some kind of return to the old nuclear deal.
That's a separate issue.
But Iran is ultimately responsible, as are the Palestinian terrorists.
But Biden's policy on Israel has also played a contributing role.
A month ago, the Biden administration announced hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. taxpayer funds for the Palestinians in apparent violation of the Taylor Force Act, which prevents Americans' funds from being spent on the Palestinian Authority while it still subsidizes terrorism.
The Biden administration wanted to reach out to the Palestinians.
They want to entice them back to the negotiating table.
So they offered them this money with no strings attached, no requirement to end supporting terror, to end incitement, to negotiate with Israel, nothing.
And that signaled to the Palestinians that they have the green light to be more aggressive with Israel.
And it also signaled that the Biden administration was not going to stand with Israel in a moment of need.
And we now see that happening.
The Palestinians fomented riots last Friday using the Al-Aqsa Mosque, one of the holiest sites in Islam, to store weapons, including stones, Molotov cocktails, fireworks.
They used those weapons to attack innocent Jewish worshippers at the Western Wall, to attack Israeli police, to do other kinds of attacks, including an attempted lynching outside the walls of the old city.
I'm not sure if those stones that were thrown at the Israeli driver who was almost lynched came from inside the Al-Aqsa Mosque, but it was part of that general riot.
When Israeli police moved in to try to clear out the rioters, the Palestinians claimed that there was an attack on the mosque by the Israeli authorities, which wasn't the case, of course.
Israel has had sovereignty over the Temple Mount for almost 65 years now, and excuse me, 55 years, and nothing like that has happened.
Israel has never attacked the mosques.
Israel has protected the mosques.
But it's the Palestinians who have used them as cover for these occasional attacks on innocent civilians and on police officers.
Now you have Hamas exploiting the situation to fire rockets at Jerusalem and at Israel, and Israel has been required to defend itself, taking out the rocket launchers, taking out the Hamas terrorists in charge of all this.
Hamas is then unleashing whatever it has at Israel, hundreds and hundreds of rockets, including longer-range rockets that have reached as far as Tel Aviv and other cities in Israel's heavily populated central region.
And Biden has equivocated.
He's basically said, well, we condemn the rocket fire, but we also condemn Israel's policies on this and that.
There's a property dispute in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah over some homes that used to be owned by Jews before 1948, were seized by Jordan when they took the region over in 1948 and then were given to Arab residents.
Now the Jews want their property back, and there's been a court fight over it for decades.
It's a complicated legal issue, but it's certainly not anything that ought to trigger over a thousand rockets, 1,200 rockets, in fact, fired by Palestinians at Israel.
Incidentally, 200 of those 1,200 rockets, one out of every six rockets, has landed on a Palestinian area in Gaza.
So these rockets still remain rather primitive, even though they're going further and further.
And the Palestinians are killing their own people.
As long as some of the rockets might make through, you think about the math this way.
If they fire 1,200 rockets, 200 hit Palestinians.
And of those 1,200, about 90% get stopped by the Iron Dome.
Or of the remaining 1,000, 90% get stopped by the Iron Dome.
You have 100 rockets that have a chance of making it through and hitting something in Israel.
And that something is usually an Israeli civilian.
So that's dozens of rockets hitting civilian targets in Israel.
And it would have been much worse without the Iron Dome system.
Biden is not standing with Israel as Trump did.
You can look at episodes under Trump where Hamas started firing rockets and Trump said that he was going to stand with Israel 100%.
He was not equivocating, not talking about anything Israel needed to do.
And this is one of those cases.
This was completely unprovoked.
Israel did nothing to provoke this whatsoever.
The supposed causes, like a court case in the Israeli Supreme Court and the riots on the last Friday in Ramadan, which were pre-planned, have nothing to do with Israel or anything Israel did to Palestinians at all.
And this is just pure incitement and provocation by the Palestinians.
Now they're in the middle of a war.
And Biden, instead of siding with Israel, is siding with the terrorists and with the Palestinians.
He has sent his envoy, this guy, Amr, who is the deputy undersecretary of whatever for Israel and Palestinian relations.
And he's going to Israel to tell them to de-escalate.
This guy has a history, Mr. Hadi Amr, of anti-Israel rhetoric, of justifying Palestinian violence, of calling Israel an apartheid state and referring to it as ethnic cleansing or whatever.
This is the wrong guy to send because Israel is just going to ignore him.
And I don't think Israel is taking the Biden administration all that seriously.
But the Biden administration can put a lot of pressure on Israel.
They can start doing what left-wing Democrats want them to do.
They can start cutting off military aid and all of that.
But it's now clear to Israel that they don't have a friend in the White House.
And it's also clear to the Palestinians.
So in that sense, it's a provocation.
Letting the region know that the United States doesn't stand with Israel anymore and is willing to give the Palestinians money for nothing certainly played a role in triggering this round of violence.
That's very interesting.
It reminds me a little bit of the bad old days under Barack Obama.
But here's a question I have for you is that these new Arab-Israeli peace deals that were not blocked by an obsession with the Palestinian issue.
I'm looking at even the title of that diplomat you referred to, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Israeli-Palestinian Affairs.
There's this presumption, John Kerry had it, Obama had it, Biden has it, that you can't do other peace deals unless the Palestinians agree.
And by Palestinians, they typically mean the Hamas terrorist group, for example.
Trump rejected that approach, and he did all these deals we've talked about, Bahrain, UAE, et cetera.
What are those countries doing or saying, if anything, in the last few days in these rocket attacks?
I think there's been universal condemnation of Israel, which I think is just a formality in some of these places.
None of the countries has recalled ambassadors.
None of them has said that their new agreements are in any kind of jeopardy, which is good news.
I think Israel has to be very careful because it wants to preserve those agreements.
But it's worth noting that the Biden administration certainly didn't reward those countries.
I mean, Biden came in and immediately reversed some of the awards, some of the rewards that Trump had given countries like the UAE.
He had given them an arms deal.
He had given them relief from tariffs on aluminum.
Biden reversed all that.
Biden also pulled out U.S. support for Saudi Arabia in its war in Yemen.
And this is actually very interesting and very important because what Iran was doing and is doing in Yemen by backing the Houthi rebels is testing some of the strategies that Iranian-backed terror groups are using against Israel.
One of the things the Houthis did, for example, was fire barrages of rockets at Saudi targets.
And they're testing the tactics there that they will later use against Israel.
What you're seeing in Israel now is that the Palestinian terror groups are firing large barrages of rockets, hoping, and correctly, that they can overwhelm the Iron Dome missile defense system if they just send enough rockets, because you're limited by the processing power of the computers that go into these systems.
You're limited by how quickly the Iron Dome systems can be rearmed and reloaded, how many of them you have.
And so they are able to get a few rockets through and kill Israelis and deny Israel the peace and tranquility that they want.
So Iran is at work in the Middle East, not just in the Palestinian areas, but also in other areas.
And Biden has pulled out his support for American allies.
Now, Saudi Arabia didn't make peace with Israel, but they tacitly supported all these other peace deals and they were about to make peace with Israel, according to some thinking.
And Biden has done everything he can to isolate them and alienate them.
So he is not rewarding the Arab countries that are making peace with Israel.
When you have that situation, this kind of violence is almost inevitable.
Biden is making it clear that Palestinians can get attention and money and pressure on Israel by behaving exactly as they behaved for the entire period prior to Donald Trump.
I got a question for you.
I mean, for a long time, support for Israel and opposition to terrorism was a bipartisan affair.
But I think over the since 9-11, it's sort of been becoming more a Republican matter than a Democrat matter.
And I wonder if the Ilhan Omar wing of the Democrats is running the show on foreign policy.
I mean, there are a lot of senior Jews who claim to be pro-Israel in the Democratic Party, in the Senate, even in the cabinet.
Support For Israel Divides Democrats00:06:05
I mean, even Kamala Harris's husband is Jewish.
Are they tepid supporters of Israel or are they silent because they don't want to offend the Ilhan Omar wing in the party?
The pro-Israel Democrats are silent, and so are the never-Trump Republicans, who you might know are comprised of a large number of people who used to be very pro-Israel.
I mean, that was one of the primary calling cards of people like Bill Kristol and Jen Rubin back in the day.
Now, a couple of them have been vocal in support of Israel.
David Frum, the former George W. Bush speechwriter, has been tweeting in support of Israel.
But he's blaming Trump for this because they can't ever let anything go without taking a dig at Trump.
He's basically saying, ha ha, Trump failed to bring peace to the Middle East, as if it were Trump's policies that were the cause.
Now, the other Never Trumpers don't care.
They're not doing anything to help Israel.
Jen Rubin, in fact, encouraged Biden to intervene in the way he is intervening, haplessly.
They can't support Israel because Trump supported Israel.
That's how deep the derangement goes.
Because Trump is now identified as pro-Israel, the Never Trumpers and the Democrats are afraid to or reluctant to support Israel.
Some of them aren't necessarily supporting the Palestinians either.
You have Elon Omar and Rashida Talib spouting off, but I don't know if that's where the Democrats are right now.
You have some, obviously, who empathize with them because, of course, Israel is the beneficiary of so-called privilege, right?
Because they're successful.
So therefore, they must be unjustly successful.
And therefore, you have to side with the underdog, even though the underdog has been causing explosions and horrible crimes against civilians for decades.
But the Democratic Party is no longer a pro-Israel party.
I mean, it used to be that Democrats would defend Israel.
They're really not doing it anymore in any kind of full-throated way.
The one exception is Andrew Yang, who's running for mayor of New York City.
Andrew Yang has been quite impressive in his campaign.
He's neck and neck with another candidate.
And he really upset the left by coming out fully in support of Israel.
It was actually quite amazing that any Democrat had the guts to do this anymore.
But he basically came out and said, I support Israel completely.
And it's not the first time he's done it, apparently, because his detractors have dug up all kinds of other examples where he supported Israel.
So being pro-Israel now is a bad thing.
in the mayoral race in New York City.
The Democrats are upset about it, and they're urging Muslim communities in New York City, for example, not to have him at their events and that kind of thing.
But he's a rare exception.
Most of the Democrats are quiet.
And the Biden administration is, again, playing this ridiculous game of moral equivalence, or rather immoral equivalence, because they're trying to equate something immoral, like firing rockets at civilians, with something moral, like a court case that could favor one side or the other.
And the difference, I think, now is that Israelis and the rest of the world have seen that there is actually a different way to do this, that Trump's way succeeded.
And so I don't think Israel is going to be as easily cowed by this kind of pressure.
And I think Israel is facing some very difficult choices in the days ahead.
They're going to have to weigh the criticisms from their new Arab allies.
But I don't think they're going to care all that much about what Biden says.
Having said that, what Biden says is important to us as Americans, because if he's weak against terrorism when it hits Israelis, he's going to be weak when it targets Americans as well.
Very interesting.
I find it fascinating that Israelis and Israel would care about their new friends in the Arab world.
And I think that's a good thing.
You know, instead of just being all alone, you have some allies, even if they may be lukewarm.
I think that's very, that was the most hopeful thing in the Trump administration.
It was, I was shocked when he did those peace deals.
I thought it was an insoluble problem.
I thought it was his own ego that made him think he could do it.
But my God, he did do it.
And Biden wants to throw that out.
I find this a fascinating time, obviously a very dangerous time and a worrying time.
We'll keep our eyes on it from up here.
Thanks for spending the time with us, Joel.
Thank you.
All right, they have it.
Oh, let me mention, Joel, don't go away.
I hear, and I can't even believe this.
You've got a new book coming out.
And it's just apropos of this.
The title gave me a bit of a chuckle, The Zionist Conspiracy and How to Join It.
We'll have a link to the Amazon page below, but give us one minute on this book.
That's a provocative title.
What's the book about?
The book is about positive lessons from Israel's success.
And I say the Zionist conspiracy is not the reason Israel was founded or the reason Israel is prosperous today.
There's no secret cabal of Jews arranging world affairs.
But Zionism was successful because they adopted strategies that can be useful to other people in other situations, including the Palestinians, by the way.
I have a whole chapter about how the Palestinians could learn from Israel's successes in their own quest for statehood and for improving the lives of their own people.
But I go into other lessons from Israel's history.
I go into the development of Iron Dome.
And for example, I talk about Israel's success in the area of water.
I talk about how Israel found military solutions to things for which there was thought to be no solution.
Israel is a success story, and it's one that people can learn from.
And so the Zionist conspiracy merely is the group of people of whatever religious background or national identification who decide they're going to succeed and who decide that they're willing to transform themselves as Jews transformed themselves, as we transformed ourselves, I should say, in order to succeed.
You can't remain mired in what your identity used to be if you want to achieve your goals.
And what Zionism did was basically say, we're going to take the Jewish communities of the world and make them into something new and make them Israelis.
And Israel is a success story because Israelis were willing to change who they were, what language they spoke, where they lived, what they did for a living in order to make their project succeed.
And they had to make it succeed because it was the only way to survive.
But these are lessons that I explain in the Zionist conspiracy, and they are applicable to anyone, including people who don't like Israel.
There are positive lessons for everyone.
Israelis Rebranding Success00:01:03
And I hope people will read the e-book.
There you go.
It's coming out this Friday.
Again, it's called The Zionist Conspiracy and How to Join It.
You can order it on Amazon now, pre-order it now, and it'll be out in two days.
Congratulations.
You're a very prolific author.
It's a very tantalizing concept.
It sounds like a great read.
Thanks for being here, my friend.
Thank you.
There you have it.
Joel Pollack, Senior Editor Large of Reitbark.com.
Stay with us, Moorhead.
I tell you, Joel is so prolific.
He's got another book.
I think he writes like four books a year.
I think he's really calm and level-headed.
I am appalled by what Biden is allowing to happen.
And it absolutely is.
Everyone's sizing him up and saying, yeah, we can get away with things.
And oh, it's Obama's hapless crew.
Imagine putting John Kerry back in charge of anything.
Well, that's our show for today.
Until tomorrow, on behalf of all of us here at Rubber World Headquarters, to you at home, good night.