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June 5, 2024 - Rebel News
55:31
EZRA LEVANT | Thought police censor freedom-oriented art exhibit

Ezra Levant criticizes the cancellation of a "freedom-oriented" art exhibit, Passion for Freedom, hosted by a Polish group with UK charity status, after just a month, despite featuring veterans and controversial figures like John Cleese. He links this to Western media’s suppression of free speech, citing the 2006 Danish cartoons controversy and Canada’s 70% journalist support for publishing them. Levant argues that caving to threats—like North Korea’s alleged warning over a James Franco film—normalizes censorship, while Jews embracing Marxism or opposing Israel allegedly enable anti-Western hostility. He contrasts Europe’s shifting rightward (Netherlands’ Farmers Party, Hungary’s Orbán) with Poland’s left-wing victory and Canada’s Conservatives under Pier Polyev leading polls among young voters, despite past failures. Levant insists unconditional surrender, not proportional retaliation, is key to lasting peace, comparing Gaza’s stagnation under Hamas to Dubai’s success post-conflict, and warns TikTok will amplify unverified wartime propaganda. [Automatically generated summary]

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Journalists Attacked: Menzies' Story 00:14:39
On June 15th, Canadians for Truth in collaboration with Veterans for Freedom is coming to Legacy Place in Red Deer, Alberta to present Veterans for Freedom from service to solutions.
This event will feature six dynamic presentations by esteemed Canadian veterans.
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Seize this opportunity and hear directly from our veterans.
Get your tickets today.
Azra Levant, how are you, sir?
Nice to see you.
Welcome to the Censored.TV Studios here in the South Bronx.
I see you're taking out your phone.
Are you going to be checking it during the interview?
You know what?
It's a comfort for me.
I just like to touch it sometimes.
The ring is off, but if I don't see it, I'm worried.
You could be missing important messages.
How are you doing?
I'm great.
It's good to be here.
I normally don't recline like this.
Well, I'm going for Gore Vidal, or as Ryan calls him, Vidal Ghori, and William F. Buckley.
Nice.
Yeah.
Well, I appreciate that.
It's great to see you again.
Teams, cheers.
Yes, what brings you to town?
Well, I was actually coming to town in part because you, because you were nominated to win a prize for a freedom-oriented comedian.
And there was an art exhibit on in which you were one of the nominees.
But they shut it down early.
So it would actually, I'm bitterly disappointed because, first of all, the fact that you were normalized and platformed and given not just tolerance, but promotion and kudos.
In New York City, of all.
Yeah, I wanted to see it.
And alas, although they were open for a month, they closed a few days early, and so we missed it.
So I deeply regret that because who are these people who would have a serious art exhibition at a real gallery and who not just don't want to marginalize Gavin McKinnon, they want to celebrate him and hold him up as an example.
So you are.
Show the clip there, Jamie.
Pull that up.
I mean, I'd like to toot my own horn, but putting me in the same category as John Cleese and Ricky Gervais is a little ambitious, even for a megalomaniac like me.
I think you're wise to acknowledge that, but the fact that you're on the list at all is stunning and encouraging.
I was so curious, I wanted to come down to New York to find out about it.
So Passion for Freedom, and it's a Polish group that came to being after the Mohammed cartoon.
I think they're Polish.
I know they've got a charity status in the UK.
So I know some of the folks there, and I know they were interested in some of the Danish and Swedish defiers of the Mohammed cartoon band.
So I don't know who they are.
That's why I wanted to come down and learn more about them.
Huh?
Are they Jews?
Not that I can tell.
I was going to see how long it would take us to get to the word Jews, and I think that was 68 seconds.
I don't think they are, but I don't know.
They nominate people from a wide variety of backgrounds.
Show the comedy things there.
We should check on that and see who wins.
That'd be funny if I beat John Cleese as a legend.
So you can see it's sort of British focus as well.
Yeah, it's European.
And I'm Canada.
I'm represented as Canadian in it.
Huh.
So I had never heard of these folks until I was at another conference in town, and they literally walked up to me because I think they remembered that I published the Danish cartoons of Mohammed about 15 years ago in Canada.
I think they actually...
Was that 15 years ago?
That's when I met you, or that's when I first heard of you.
Because you said my, I know we talk about this too much, but let's have it for posterity.
You said my favorite thing I've ever heard anyone say, and it was kind of a political awakening for me, although 9-11 was the real catalyst.
And she was some fucking bureaucrat.
And she said, what was in your mind when you published these cartoons?
And I didn't know you.
I was watching it on YouTube, I guess.
And you said, that's an interesting question.
If you were one of my friends asking this or a family member, I'd be happy to get into that.
But you're the government.
And it's none of your business what was in my mind when I did something.
It's none of your business what my motive was.
And that's sort of the roots of the absurdity of hate crime legislation, where if you beat someone up and you say faggot, then it's a different crime.
You're right.
And I thought about that a lot because I had been interviewed.
We were the only people in Canada that published the Danish cartoons of Muhammad.
There was some student newspaper, but they quickly had their publication seized and destroyed.
And a little Jewish newspaper, and they groveled an apology.
But we leaned into it.
And I probably did 100 interviews.
And obviously the first question every journalist asked was, why did you publish them?
It's a good question.
And I know what my answer was, because they're the central artifact of the story of the day.
There's these cartoons published in Europe that to me look sort of banal, but are they, but maybe you could pull some of those up.
They were pretty subtle.
Although I think some of them got bastardized by Muslims who added like Muhammad fucking a pig and stuff.
Because the original 12 were not that salacious, they doctored it.
They added two more.
One of them was exactly what you described.
Still, no riots.
I mean, look, they actually published one of these cartoons in a newspaper in Egypt as news.
There were no riots over it.
The riots were in Damascus, Syria, and Tehran, places where there are not free assembly, free politics.
These were staged.
And I don't know if you remember, but back then, they had just assassinated, Syria had just assassinated the prime minister of Lebanon or something.
So this was to distract.
And it was a whole orchestrated, manufactured rage at the West.
And the West failed to test.
Instead of everyone publishing and saying, I'm Spartacus, no, I'm Spartacus.
If every newspaper in the West had published them, first of all, you would have taken the air out of the boom because you could see, well, those are sort of boring cartoons.
Nothing more rampunctious than you'd see any given day in the newspaper.
I don't want to abandon this topic, but it reminds me of that North Korean parody film with, what's his name, James Franco.
And there was an email that may have come from Kim Jong-un, but we have no verification.
And he said, if you play that movie, I'm going to, I don't know, blow up the movie theaters.
And what did we do?
We instantly capitulated.
We banned the movie.
I think it was available on demand.
And if it was a real country, we would have had the National Guard there defending every single theater and making that the hill to die on.
I keep repeating this, that it's the minutiae of pop culture that needs to be defended just as much as abortion or free speech.
If they want to ban Beavis and Butthead, go to war over that.
Like that's a hill to die on.
Well, let me tell you how much things have changed, because that cartoon came out in late 2005.
I republished it in 2006, so almost 20 years ago.
A real pollster in Canada called Compass did a survey of working journalists.
So it wasn't just a random poll.
They called journalists the newsrooms.
And 70% of Canadian journalists said, not only should I have published it, every news outlet in Canada should have published it.
Wow.
70%.
Anonymously on the phone.
They've got the hubris.
I don't disbelieve them because in Canada you had such media concentration.
You have three TV stations and three newspaper companies, really.
So five guys in Toronto made a risk management decision.
I talked to one of the bosses at the National Post, which is the most right-leaning newspaper in Canada.
And I said, this is up your alley.
Why wouldn't you lean into this?
You're a skeptic of radical Islam.
You're freedom-oriented.
Why didn't you do this?
And their answer was very honest.
It was, we have 13 offices around the country.
The security bill would be a million dollars.
We made a decision that editorially publishing this story is not worth a million dollars.
In their defense, it is a high level of bravery, as we learned with Charlie Abdo, who were literally murdered.
And I have no problem with them saying that.
We're scared.
But so many of them said, no, it's offensive or it's not newsworthy or it's salacious or it's obscene because they wouldn't confess that they were afraid.
Why not say the honest answer, which is what I just told you?
Why lie about it?
And so that was 18 years ago.
I put it to you that if you were to survey people in Canada today or the United States, working journalists, should you be able to publish something that caricatures the Muslim prophet Muhammad?
I'm sure 70% would say, prosecute for a hate crime.
Yeah, yeah.
And that's in a pretty short amount of time.
I did 100 interviews.
Only one, I remember only one journalist was against me.
And journalists in general are left-wing, and I'm right-wing.
That's how free speechy the world was less than 20 years ago.
I was saying to people the other day that, I say to Alex Jones, actually, that I think the trucker convoy empowered working-class tradespeople.
And I believe the reason we're seeing these farmers in the Netherlands and France and Spain stand up to this bizarre, I don't want to call it a genocide, but this bizarre eradication of farming of all things.
You know what?
And I think they're empowered by the truckers, which you have a lot to do with.
I don't want to take too much credit for that.
I was an observer and a storyteller.
But you got the word out, yeah.
That was our role.
And it's because the regime media made a void.
They wouldn't come out of their offices.
I swear to God, they said they were scared to talk to the truckers.
I need a bodyguard.
Honk honk means Heil Hitler.
I swear to God.
So we went out there and citizen journalists in our whole shop.
I think only one guy has a journalism degree.
Our rule is just hold the phone sideways and shoot.
And in the month of February 2022, when the truckers were in Ottawa, we had 400 million views and impressions, which was like a year's worth for us.
But you talk about the media being scared.
Your journalists were attacked.
That French chick got attacked by cops, right?
There was one shooting during a whole convoy, and it was a Mountie, an RCMP officer, shooting our reporter, Alexa Lavoie, with a riot gun.
And I don't believe it's a coincidence that in the entire convoy, the one shooting was a cop shooting our reporter at point-blank range with a riot gun.
And we're suing the cops over that.
We've got their disclosure.
We have the rules for the use of this riot gun.
It was used improperly.
It's not, you don't shoot the riot gun at a person.
The second thing is the standing orders did not call for it to be used at all at that point.
How do you shoot?
You shoot it into the sky?
Like into an area.
You don't aim it at a person.
Oh, I see.
I see.
You shoot it at a crowd.
Yeah.
And it was misused, but we saw these notes.
Like we got all the police notes.
And the cops were all over Ottawa that day because of the convoy.
And they helped this person with a heart attack, helped this person who slipped on the ice.
Like, it was just what the cops were doing.
So they're giving first aid just around town.
They shoot a lady in the leg and they don't give her help.
They knew who she was.
They shot her illegally with an illegal use of a gun.
And then they leave her there.
They leave her there.
What is it, like little pepper pellets?
It was the wadding.
It was a tear gas canister, and the wadding hit her.
Oh, and they hit her with sticks also.
Our reporters have been-that was the only time our reporters have been shot.
They've been beat up.
They've been made.
David Menzies has been arrested four times in 2024.
Four times.
Amazing.
And one of them, 14 million views on Twitter.
No one would believe it if it weren't on tape.
Our guy has his badge that says Rebel News Report.
He's got a microphone.
And he's asking our deputy prime minister a question in the public interest on a public street at a public place in daylight.
And he just, it was about banning some Iranian terrorist group.
He asked the question once, twice.
He's sort of crab walking, sort of backwards.
He's not in her way.
He's not aggressive.
He's not threatening her.
He's not touching her.
He's not blocking her.
A cop runs up, positions himself in Menzies' way, because remember, he's sort of walking sideways backwards.
Menzies gently brushes up against him.
The cop instantly says, You assaulted me.
You're under arrest.
And Menzies, what?
I don't even think Menzies felt him.
He brushed again, but the guy moved in the way.
And then they slam Menzies up against the wall.
They handcuff his hands behind him.
They humiliate him.
And only later, but only they do release him later when they realize we had the whole thing on tape.
But the most incredible thing was how the cops instantly and naturally fell into this gaslighting lie.
Oh, you assaulted us.
You were very aggressive.
You were born.
There it is.
There's cameras everywhere.
Cops and Gaslighting 00:03:17
Yes.
You can see.
Isn't she strangely hot, that Deputy Prime Minister?
Oh, my God, change your glasses prescription.
I mean, I'm not one to talk.
You have an incredible sex appeal.
Oh, I have never heard that in.
I think she was a sense she was a goer in college.
I sense it.
Look, I'm not here to.
Raiding gals on the hotness meter is more your gig than mine.
But I have never.
You know what?
It's the high heels.
Hey, Ryan, can you call up toenail clipping Christia Freeland?
She literally, in the parliament, starts clipping her toenails.
Can you do?
I want to disabuse.
Gavin McInnes.
I want him to, quote, relax.
I'm already kind of on the way out just hearing the description.
Yeah.
Let's show the toenail clipping and then pull skirt out of bum.
Also, I want to save Gavin.
It's a still image of, yeah, yeah, a little toenail clipping going on.
Look at the guy next to her, technically.
Yeah, oh, yeah, that's the justice.
That's mental illness.
That's a level of non-self-awareness that is mentally ill.
You know, I just, I gotta save you from that.
Guess what?
Done Ryan, we have to we, we have to just double this, just double to check this one.
Can you please um, because now i'm I was here, now i'm at zero, so now i'm going to be negative ten.
Can you go?
Can you google Christia Freeland, twitchy, twitchy, just put that in on.
Oh, I think i've seen that she's doing that thing.
That Angela Merkel remember, Angela Merkel was going crazy.
I'm trying to hornify you here.
I think a lot of these women, they don't really belong in the workforce like AOC and they do adderall to keep up with the big boys, and that's why you see Aoc, just like this, ranting non-stop, and Angela Merkel doing the, the humming of Humming And The Hound Dog.
That's crazy.
Yeah well um, I don't know about that one.
I mean having a stool.
I'm not going to criticize someone for being short, but she, she's just the most awkward, most bizarre, most inauthentic fakist.
What is that position too, is it's in case the prime minister gets shot and he's he says he's also finance minister, which is a real thing.
I want to tell you um, her grandfather yeah, that's Adderall.
Now, this is sort of funny, but there's some even like her grandfather, um was a uh, real-life Nazi who stole a newspaper from a jewel and turned it into a Nazi propaganda newspaper, and i'm not.
I don't think a granddaughter should be punished for the sins of the grandfather, not at all.
But she really worked hard to cover that up and and yet she just can't stop hanging out with Nazis, either of the Neo variety or the Paleo variety.
I don't listen.
We didn't come here to talk about Christian.
Now i'm back to horny again.
You made her cool.
Anti-Russian Agenda 00:10:50
You just disabused your disabuse.
You know I was Vladimir Zelensky.
That's the one you were talking about.
Yeah yeah, I mean, it's uh.
So there's your dream date, there's your.
Is your guilt?
Vladimir Zelensky, the Ukrainian um yes, came to Canada and uh, so it was a big deal.
All parliament met, everyone was very excited, everyone was in there, felt like a state of the union, everyone's on their best behavior.
The speaker of the house introduced special guests and then he announced he introduces a very old man in the gallery and says, this is Yaroslav Hunka that's his name who was in the first uh, Galician division or something in World War Ii fighting against the Russians.
Because remember, we're trying to be mad at Putin and mad at Russia and Vladimir Zelensky's there.
We're trying to prove how Anti-russian we are and and I was watching this live I think a lot of people were and you're.
So you're introducing a guy who's in his 90s, Who fought in Ukraine in the Second World War, okay, against Russia?
Who's teaming me on?
But didn't we flip with Russia in World War II?
At the very, very beginning.
They signed, yeah.
Russia, actually, they flipped with Germany.
They were in an alliance, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact or something that carved up Poland together.
But it was an act, that Yaroslav Hanka was a Nazi SS officer, as anyone who Googled that first Galician division could find out.
You know, you reminded me of your assessment many years ago about liberal Jews, secular Jews, and how they're Bolsheviks.
Bolsheviks were a group that lied about their numbers, manipulated the media with propaganda, and their only objective was to win.
Kill my mother, I don't care about anything.
And when I see liberals, Jews who are against Israel, I'm reminded of the Bolshevik analogy.
And when you see Jon Stewart on stage giving a Nazi a trophy, and sure, he was not told that guy was a Nazi.
It's not that simple.
The point is, they're incurious about it because it fits the agenda.
And I've seen articles, liberal articles, talking about, well, it's complicated with Ukraine.
And so they're hap, they call Trump a Nazi until that's inconvenient.
And then when they meet actual Nazis, they throw it in the toilet and flush because it's about winning.
You know, I really follow Dr. James Lindsay closely these days, and I try and learn his vocabulary about communism and Xi Van Fleet, who's a Chinese-American woman who grew up under the Cultural Revolution of Mount Zedong.
And Dr. Lindsay always says, the issue is not the issue, the revolution is the issue.
So that helped me understand queers for Palestine.
Exactly.
They don't actually plan to go to Palestine.
They're not actually thinking about any details.
They don't care other than Palestine, Gaza, Hamas is against America, want to tear down America.
So they're for that.
Next week they'll be for Greta Thunberg tearing down oil and gas.
Next week they'll be for packing the Supreme Court, whatever it is, the revolution is the issue.
During the 70s and 80s, they were the disarmament vanguard in the West to unilaterally disarm the West for the Soviets to win.
They were the people who would be against, I mean, whoever America's enemy is, they're for it.
And you and I have been smeared as anti-Semitic, which is insane in my case because I'm actually Jewish.
And I think that you're an equal opportunity, you know, kidder, jokester, poker funner at.
And as you, I mean, you've been to Israel, and I think you're generally as sympathetic to it as you would be towards any other democracy.
But all these people who said you're a Nazi, I'm a Nazi, whatever, we have actual Nazis running around now.
And you don't care.
They don't care, I mean.
Not only do they not care, they actively photoshop that out of the picture mentally.
They actively make explanations or the context for it.
When the president of MIT and Harvard and Penn appeared before Congress and they were asked, you know, if people say kill the Jews or whatever, is that considered harassment on campus?
I forget the exact question.
Well, it depends on the context.
Was that the kind of fine nuance they would apply to the proud boys?
Or me doing a talk at Penn State where I needed a police escort to leave as 500 people were calling for my head.
They never believed any of it.
All these anti-bullying people, you call yourself an anti-bully so that you preempt people from saying, hey, you're being rather bullying.
No, no, no, no.
I already told you I'm the anti-bully.
And I think all wokeness is, is rechristening bullying as something untouchable for the bullies.
And again, back to James Lindsay, it's all about the Marxist pattern.
Marx talked about the working class and the capitalists.
Okay, use that same paradigm with feminism.
Women are oppressed by men.
Okay, let's use it in race now.
Black people are oppressed by white people.
That oppressor-oppression matrix is what wokeism is.
And that's why they hate America.
That's why they hate white people.
That's why they've decided now that Jews are white.
Are Jews white or not?
Well, some of them actually are minorities racially.
But the woke world has decided that Jews are white or white enough because they're the oppressor.
Will you concede that there is a golem element here where secular Jews are disproportionately responsible?
Absolutely.
Where was I the other day?
I was in Toronto where a Jewish girls' school, a truck pulls up at night, two guys get out, unload five rounds in school and speed away.
Now, it's late at night, so there's no one in there.
But that's a hell of a thing.
Yeah.
It's not far from my house.
So I go, there's a community rally there a couple days later.
I go there, film.
When was this exactly?
The shooting was last Saturday morning.
The community rally was Monday.
Because we just had one on the front page of the post today, this is Thursday, talking about I hate Jews.
He was going and was he trying to run them over?
Let me close the loop.
He talked about the goal, and that would be like this Frankenstein creation that comes to life.
Yeah, to be clear, Gollum is the Jews feel they're being oppressed, so they create a monster to defend them, and then the monster turns on them.
So there I am in front of this girls' school.
They have plywood over the window because they haven't replaced the window from the shooting yet.
There's police everywhere, the security guards everywhere.
It's a crisis.
The mayor is there.
Three provincial cabinet ministers are there.
Everyone is there to say, this is terrible.
There's a bunch of Jews there.
And I just do streeters.
And one of my questions I always ask Jews is, how do you feel about open borders, immigration?
You still like that?
Oh, this isn't related at all.
Or maybe should we have net zero immigration?
You're crowbarring a different subject.
And then I get specific.
They say, oh, how about from Gaza?
Because Trudeau said he's going to take thousands of people from Gaza.
Oh, well, that's an ulterior agenda.
And I thought to myself, and I said this to them, and I heard that again and again.
They just shot up a Jewish girls' school, and you're good enough to be here.
You're mad enough to be here.
You're politically engaged enough and thoughtful enough to be here, to get up early and come here to a rally.
So you're not normal.
You're a Jew whose political meter is revving when most everyone's going to work or just doing whatever.
And even you can't bring yourself now to say, let's have a pause on immigration.
You can't do that yet.
It's too much.
The most you could hope for is less DEI in college admissions.
That's the most we've got.
And by the way, Jews do not benefit by DEI.
Right, yeah, yeah.
No, I mean, that's...
I wanted this whole told you so moment because, you know, five years ago, let's call them secular liberal Jews.
They're pointing at me in my MAGA hat and they're going, you're a Nazi.
And the impetus for that is this dumb notion.
I remember talking about this with Sheila and Faith when we were in Israel, and they're like, what are you talking about?
There's this notion that Hitler was obsessed with strong, handsome, strong-chinned, blonde Aryans.
And if you don't attack that particular group and make that group ashamed of itself, it's going to grow and start the Fourth Reich, and there'll be World War III, and then the Jews will be exterminated again.
So when you see someone like Trump, a blonde guy, being proud of himself and not being ashamed, you just have to quell that.
That's the impetus behind the proud boys.
We can't let white blonde men like that.
And they hate that archetype.
And I go, that archetype doesn't hate you.
You got it wrong.
I don't know where you got this from.
Hitler had brown hair, but this fear of, like, white males being proud of themselves and it leading to World War IV.
You're talking about people who are pro-Israel, like Trump, who moves the— And so while they're doing that and they're pursuing that silly tangent, they're also telling our kids to hate America via Marxism.
And they're also opening the borders to people who hate us.
And so they're mad at the Red Hats while encouraging these two groups.
And then I would offer a third thing, pushing this Marxism across the country, across the West of oppressor, oppressed.
And you're going to be seen as the oppressor.
So I was vindicated these past few weeks with them saying, fuck white people, fuck Jews.
But there's no, I told you so.
There's no, sorry, Gavin.
When I was a kid, maybe even in my teens, oh, you loved hearing I told you.
You love saying, I told you so.
Ireland's Complex Politics 00:08:40
I'm right.
I'm slightly smarter than you.
I can see slightly further into the future than you.
I told you so.
I have not enjoyed saying I told you so in 30 years.
Because when you're a pessimist, when you see the problem, and when you're a Cassandra shouting your warning into the wind and no one listens, I told you so is the worst thing.
I wish I could say, you're right, you.
Mega are Nazis.
You told me.
Open borders are perfectly safe.
Marxism is a great idea.
It really is getting worse and worse.
And it's hard to look for places to find encouragement.
The world is getting darker.
And remember the peace and prosperity.
If you look over the sweep of history, that's the anomaly.
The Pax Americana, the mutually assured destruction of the Soviet bloc and NATO, freezing much of the world, that was wonderful.
And that is gone.
And here's China, and here's Islam, but they're not abroad anymore.
They're right here.
They're right in our house.
And I just was in Ireland a few weeks ago.
I was only there for a day.
But the Irish never oppressed anyone.
They weren't an empire.
They didn't colonize anyone.
In fact, Ireland was beset.
It was, whether it was the Brits or the Muslim pirates who came up.
For example, there's a little village of Baltimore.
Yes.
They emptied the entire Irish town of Baltimore, took all the women and made them sex slaves in the Middle East.
That's why we eventually had to get the Marines pre-America.
From the halls of Montezum onto the shores of Tripoli.
What are the Marines doing in the Church of Tripoli?
Protecting our women.
The pirates.
The pirates.
Yeah.
So I get back to Ireland.
And I'm not taking sides, Ireland, UK, whatever.
I don't know my history there.
But Ireland has never been an imperial power.
It's never been an oppressor.
Ireland never slaves.
They were the slaves.
They weren't slavers.
And so all this, they're the indigenous people of Ireland, to borrow a phrase.
So I was there at this anti-immigration march, and I see posters like Ireland for the Irish.
Irish Lives Matter.
Now you say that in America or Canada.
Oh, you're appropriating that language.
No, but they are the Indigenous people.
They are the Indians.
Yeah.
They are the what blacks were in Africa, what the Indigenous people were, what the Indians were in Mesoamerica.
Yeah, there was no Indians in Ireland before the whites got.
So what hammer do you have to hammer these people with?
And Ireland's only about five million people.
There's far more Irish around the world than in Ireland itself.
Right, yeah.
But for some weird reason, Ireland has been chosen as this place where, let's flip the light switch on and just change it.
Well, I can tell you what it is.
It's underdog culture.
And globally in the West, there is this obsession with the big guy sucks.
And Canadians are experts at it with America.
You know, I always described Canadians as Elvis' brother.
And when you say, so what are you about?
And they go, well, I don't wear blue suede shoes.
And I didn't lose my hound dog.
And you're like, yeah, yeah, I get it.
You're not Elvis, but what are you about?
Like every, in high school, every essay we would write about what it means to be a Canadian.
It was always like, I'm not a fat pig.
I'm not an evangelist.
I'm not in the KKK like Americans.
And you see that with Ireland.
You've tried to find in Canada without referring to the United States.
Go.
Yeah.
Poutin, hosers, lumberjacks.
You can do it, but it takes away all the self-righteousness.
Right, yeah, yeah.
And I went to a thing in Niagara Falls, and it was a Canadian-themed night, and they would wear like tart flannel and serve Poutin.
And it was in America, but it was Canadian-themed.
And everything they would do all night was like, did you know that Miley Cyrus' producer was from Nova Scotia?
And you're like, that's our claim to fame?
That some big contributors to American culture happen to be born in Canada.
But you see that in Ireland with the English and Ireland with America.
Ireland hates Trump, and they have no idea why.
You see it in Scotland with England.
And you go to a Celtics game in Glasgow, soccer game.
Massive Palestinian flags for as long as I can remember.
And they have zero interest in Israel and Palestine.
It's the underdog thing.
I think you're right.
And however, it's interesting because, I mean, I don't know my Irish politics well.
I didn't see a single Palestinian flag in the anti-immigration march, obviously.
But there was a counter-protest.
In fact, one of the Game of Thrones actors was there.
I forget his name.
It was a small counter-protest.
I didn't see a single Irish flag amongst them.
And Sinn Féin, which was sort of the political wing of the IRA in the past, Sinn Féin is now a left-wing open borders thing, yeah.
Well, and that's the thing.
So Sinn Féin criticized this anti-immigration march.
I'd never heard this before.
You know, how would we criticize Gavin McKinnon?
Oh, you're a racist, transphobe, blah, blah, blah.
Just generic insults.
What are the generic insults in Ireland, apparently?
Oh, this was whipped up by British intelligence.
MI5 did this.
What?
I mean, I didn't, that's a pretty obscure generic insult to give to a conservative.
But I was thinking, hang on, Sinn Féin, you guys really fought hard to get the Brits out, didn't you?
Yeah, those were immigrants.
Those English were immigrants.
Yeah, so Sinn Féin is all about Ireland for the Irish, but now you want hundreds of thousands of people.
Well, it goes back to the Bolsheviks.
You were the Sinn Féin.
It goes back to the Bolsheviks.
I don't really care about the thing.
It's the revolution that's the issue.
Ireland is very interesting and very, very hopeful to me, what I saw there, even though I was there very briefly.
There's a lot of talk about a tipping point, and I'm talking about the past few months.
I see it.
And You mentioned the Dutch farmers.
The Netherlands had a landslide election recently where the Farmers Party, which came out of those protests, now has seats in the parliament.
Kurt Wilders, the pariah since I've known you.
Now he's part of the governing coalition.
He's not the prime minister, but he's the largest part of the governing coalition.
And perhaps more importantly, he's not a pariah anymore.
He's a legitimate politician.
Yeah, I mean, obviously, politicians in the West will still treat him as a pariah, as they did Yayer Bolsonaro from Brazil, as they, in a way, did to Trump.
But I see things moving back.
I mean, obviously, in Hungary, Viktor Orban keeps getting re-elected, and that country is quite something to see.
And it's very bold and frank about no immigration.
Poland, unfortunately, a more left-wing woke party has won election there.
But I think Europe is very interesting to see.
Well, you really got to keep checking in on this.
The last time I checked in on Poland, they had great immigration policies and said we did not let in one illegal, one Muslim.
You know what?
I'm not an expert in Poland, but I find there's some strands of hope in Europe, but the United Kingdom is about to elect its most disastrous government.
Well, I don't know since when.
And I'm terrified the British Conservatives brought it upon themselves, standing for nothing, running an AI candidate.
Rishi Sunak stands for nothing, the most inauthentic man alive.
You know what?
In Canada, the Conservative Party, led by Pier Polyev, is leading the polls for young people.
Conservative Party leading?
Like in first?
Yes.
It actually has a both men and women favor the Conservatives.
Like there's no gender gap anymore.
Oh, thank God.
What is Trudeau on?
Like his fifth term?
Feels like it.
In the UK, I saw a poll, only 1% of young people are going to vote for the Tories.
And Rishi Sunak feels like a rootless banker.
I know that sounds like I'm making a Jewish slur.
He's just a transnational banker executive gazillionaire who, no matter what you ask him, he'll talk about the GDP.
And all these other things we're talking about.
Visit Hiroshima Memorial Museum 00:14:48
Like, one of the things, when I was at this Jewish rally at this school that was shot up, I talk about immigration a lot.
I press Jews on that.
Well, what about the GDP?
So how many percentage GDP is it worth to you to have the school shot up?
If you really want to get down to it, and by the way, it's BS to think that unskilled, uneducated newcomers, many of whom go directly on social assistance, to say that's boosting our NDP, our GDP is not true.
Canada is in a rough problem.
Well, let's embrace it.
Let's confront this anti-Semitism and play devil's advocate for a bit.
So the argument is: yes, October 8th, 7th was terrible, 1,500 Jews massacred in unimaginable ways.
But the retaliation has been too much.
32,000 is a number I keep hearing.
You should have been more metered with your retaliation.
And the reason I'm dubious of people saying that is, because I've never heard you say that before.
Like, Vietnam, we lost 60,000 to their, I don't know, 600,000.
How many Vietnamese were lost in that war, Ryan?
Every war, no wars are metered.
That's not how wars are.
Wars are for a total, typically, a total surrender.
I went to Hiroshima recently, and I recommend it.
I recommend going to Hiroshima for a lot of reasons.
And one is to go to the museum and memorial there.
It doesn't make anti-eugenesis look very good.
You look at Detroit, look at Haiti before and after the earthquake.
You look at Hiroshima before and after the bomb.
Yeah.
Well.
So what's that?
1.1 million North Vietnamese and Viet Cong fighters.
Well, I mean, the estimates are that a million people died in the Iraq war.
And we lost a few thousand.
If that.
5,000.
Less than 3,000, around 3,000 people, less than that, died in Pearl Harbor.
The firebombing of Tokyo alone had 100,000 casualties.
The firebombings of Tokyo killed more than the nuclear bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
And the firebombings were what we did before to say, please stop.
Dresden.
The firebombing of Dresden.
And the please stop.
That could also be the same with Gaza, where we say, just give us the hostages back.
Would you think they would stop if they got the hostages back?
No, because they also want to end Hamas.
Look, I want to tell you that I don't like civilian casualties.
I don't think anyone on the Israeli side does.
I just don't think so.
I don't think that's part of the Jewish mindset.
The Jewish symbol of like for cheers or the Jews wear around their neck.
The pai symbol?
It's chai, which is the life.
The word means life.
And lechaim means to life.
And Jews have a lot of rules about the lengths you go to save a life.
Bizarrely, the head of Hamas in the Gaza Strip, Yahya Simar, I think is his name, was critically ill, and the Israelis gave him medical care to bring him back to life.
I disagree with that policy, by the way.
Yeah, well, I'm saying that I think it is obviously true that Israel is not taking a genocidal approach, would be just flatten everything, go full Chechnya on you.
Like just start shooting artillery into residential areas.
Like the idea of dropping leaflets and saying move over here, move over there.
Now, the trouble is, Hamas knows this about Israel, so it built their command post under the El Shifa hospital.
So the whole idea of putting their facilities next to schools, under schools, under hospitals, is because they know that's going to get the Jews.
We can't beat the Jews in a symmetrical war.
Well, this is an unpopular opinion, but I think the Palestinian role is to die, and I think Palestinians have embraced it.
Like, look at gypsies.
Their role is not to assimilate into society, to scam people, to have their kids beg, to beat the shit out of their kids if they're gay.
They're kind of similar to Palestinians in a way.
And they happily have embraced that role.
That's their culture.
If you got a gypsy a job at Citibank making 200 grand a year, he would steal and immediately return to his tribe.
There's no assimilation there.
And I think over generations of Palestinians knowing that their job is to antagonize Israel and constantly be in a state of conflict and not go to Lebanon or Egypt and not move on means that war is good.
I think it's only one generation that's been that way because when the West Bank and Gaza were under Israeli administration, those were the most educated, most liberal, most progressive parts of the Arab world.
Oh, really?
But then when the PLO and when Hamas were given control over it, they really did go fascist.
They really did go Sharia law.
Many of the most educated intellectual pastors in the West.
Well, over the 70s and 80s, and certainly in the 90s, and in 2005 is when Hamas was given Gaza.
Look, can I tell you the most hopeful thing I've seen in a long time?
Saudi Arabia announced it's taking anti-Semitism out of its curriculum, its school curriculum.
Promoting anti-Semitism.
That's right.
Sorry, thanks for the clarification.
So they used to teach, and the Jews are the devils, and here's what they're doing, and we've got to get the Jews.
And they're just going to choose not to do that anymore.
And they're not going to be pro-Jewish.
They're just going to stop planting little seedlings that will grow up in 16, 18, 20 years into maniacal anti-Semitic automatons.
80% of people in Gaza say they support Hamas.
I believe them.
I think it's largely because they've been totally marinated in that ideology since childhood.
You can see these children's summer camps where the kids dress up as terrorists and do terrorist enactments.
And their parents say, I hope my kids grow up to be martyrs.
You can hear even in the UK, Mohammed Hijab, one of the spokesmen for Hamas, says, you love life, we love death.
They say that, they mean that.
Now, thank God not all Muslims are that way.
Look, you know where there hasn't been any encampments like at Columbia or U of T, where there hasn't been any Hamas hate marches?
Dubai.
Bahrain.
Well, you're a big Dubai fan these days, right?
Reluctantly, until I flew there from Tel Aviv, flying over Saudi Arabia.
That never used to be allowed.
I go up to a guy wearing not quite a kefiya, but a headdress.
I give him my passport that shows I was in Israel.
He knows I'm on a flight from El Al.
He stamps it, says, welcome to Dubai.
What?
You know, I'm a Jew, I just came from, welcome to Dubai.
And you drive into the city, and there's a huge billboard.
I forget if it says unity or something, showing people in different kinds of dress.
You know, very strict, very modern.
And the majority of people in Dubai and UAE in general are guests.
They're not actually Emiratis.
And everyone is there to make a go of it.
There are Chabad, that's a very Orthodox Jewish group.
Chabad rabbis in the UAE.
What was that place you told me?
Where there's a mosque, a Christian church?
In Abu Dhabi, which is the capital of the UAE.
The government has built something, I think it's called the Abrahamic Fellowship Center or something.
Huge church, mosque, synagogue, exact same size, but different style, beautiful architecture.
And these are actually used.
The government of the UAE has built a synagogue that is used as a symbol of Abrahamic.
I mean, Abraham Ibrahim in the Arabic pronunciation.
We say Isaac, you know, Ishak, Ishaq, you know, Yacub.
There's a lot of names.
You can sort of hear Isa, Jesus.
There's a lot of names.
So what Trump did, the brilliance of Trump is he said, you guys are cousins.
You're brothers.
What are you fighting?
That's why they were called the Abraham Accords.
Because both sides could say, yeah, that's us.
I think you told me about those three churches before October 7th.
Well, I went there.
I went there before.
I went there in August.
Right.
And I saw this.
And I'm staying at a hotel in Dubai that has a kosher.
I'm going to put on the AC.
I don't care about the audio.
Kosher catering.
I'm starting to sweat and it's making me uncomfortable.
I'm sorry about that.
I was in the United Arab Emirates, and I thought, oh my God, this can be possible.
And it felt healing because I stood in front of a gorgeous mosque in Dubai, and instead of feeling fear, I'm afraid of them.
They hate me.
I'm at risk of violence.
Bad things are in there.
I could look at it and say, oh my God, that's beautiful architecturally.
I'd love to know more about it.
Everyone here is so friendly.
Like, I had never had these feelings of belonging and friendship and trust and ease in a Muslim country.
There's a Holocaust museum in Dubai and not a woo-holocaust.
It was an actual memorial to the Jews.
A Holocaust museum in Dubai.
And Trump did that peace deal with United Arab Emirates, with Bahrain, with Sudan.
I think Morocco was in it.
And the Saudis were coming along.
And one of the terrible results of this October 7th is it's put all of that on pause.
Iran did not like the fact that Israel was befriending the Sunni Arab countries and creating sort of a counterweight to Iran in the region.
Let me get back to your point.
When America had a sneak attack on it in Pearl Harbor, killing approximately 2,500 people, America did not say, okay, we're going to take out this number of battleships, this number of cruisers, and this number of people, and Pharisees.
America said, we are now going to prosecute total war.
This is a day of infamy.
This is Northern Africa.
This is Germany.
This is Japan.
This is Italy.
But not just, we're just going to skirmish.
We are going to have an unconditional surrender.
As in, there's no negotiation.
There's no ceasefire.
There's no give us some money.
So they're not looking to negotiate the hostages and move on.
This is full-on world war.
I'm not up to date with the negotiations.
Well, what does your Mossad agent say?
Because mine said they're going to stop after 50,000.
And my checks will stop immediately after that, too, he said.
I don't think you can trust statistics coming from the Hamas-controlled health authority.
I think a number of those people are terrorists who dress in civilian clothes and hide amongst civilians.
I'm not denying there's civilian casualties.
I hate it when a Hamas lie is immediately repeated and like 12 or 24 hours later it's debunked even by Al Jazeera, but the lie remains.
It's already gone, yeah.
And, you know.
Hollywood.
During the Second World War, Japan and Germany had propaganda radio, Axis Sally and Tokyo Roas.
Those were radio stations by English speakers trying to demoralize soldiers.
Oh, while you're here, your wife is at home cheating on you.
While you're here, they're living it up at home, trying to demoralize.
But it was really only radio that you could hear in certain areas.
Now we have the demoralizing Axis Sally in Tokyo Rose in our phones with TikTok.
That's what I said when the war broke out.
I said, you're not going to be able to trust any of the data until many years after this war is done.
So the 30,000, the 1,500, I'm taking it all with a pinch of salt because it's a war, and both sides have a huge motive to give you misinformation.
Back to Hiroshima.
One of the things I learned in the museum and memorial, there were tens of thousands of people who died immediately.
Amongst them, and forgive me, I don't know the exact number, were about 10,000 Korean slaves.
Really?
Slaves.
And I learned this from the official Japanese Memorial Museum.
So this is not some Korean grudge.
This is the memorial saying, who died?
Well, this many civilians, this many soldiers, this many of this, this many of that.
And I think it was 10 or 20.
And Ryan, I don't know if you want to Google it.
I think it was kind of hard for him.
10,000 Korean slave laborers.
That's what Japan was like.
And if you Google Nanking, the rape of Nanking.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, they had a death colour.
I mean, in a way, they had this suicide bomber, kamikaze, divine wind.
Yeah, they're similar to Islam in many ways.
But after total defeat, unconditional surrender, look at Japan now.
A liberal democracy, prosperous, safe, free, and a boon to the world.
And I don't know if we'll ever get something so hopeful out of Gaza, but look at Dubai.
Look at that miracle that they have decided to use their wealth and prestige to build a gem, a free, prosperous city.
So wait a minute, wait a minute.
Are you saying Hiroshima was good for Japan and this war on Gaza will be good for Palestine?
No, I'm saying that Japan had to be utterly defeated.
Building Hope in Gaza 00:03:15
Oh, I see.
And it had to lose face and the divinity of the emperor had to be destroyed and it had to be raised down to zero and built back up.
And God bless the Americans who did that, by the way.
And I'm not one to say that that bombing was, I'm not going to call it a racist act, and I'm not going to call it an injudicious act.
I believe it saved a lot of Japanese lives, by the way.
And I don't know how you could criticize Hiroshima, but not criticize the Tokyo fire bombings, which killed twice as many.
I mean, just because it was a new method.
But look at Dubai.
What they did is they built a model society.
And that was the dream for Gaza.
When Israel pulled out, I don't know if you know, but in 2005, Israel pulled out of Gaza completely and took every Jewish.
And they bulldozed the houses of the Jews.
There were all these greenhouses.
Gaza was an enormous agricultural producer.
And Israel gifted.
Wasn't Avi Yemeni one of those families?
I don't know.
He's got a big family.
I don't know all of them.
But instead of making it like a Dubai, and Bill Clinton was promising, by that point it wasn't Clinton anymore, but the Americans had promised.
But don't leave Bill Clinton out of this because this was a very telling moment in Camp David where he sat down with Yasser Arafat and gave him a deal that Israel was not happy with.
It was like 99% of what the Palestinians wanted and they made up for it by giving them other things instead.
What year would that have been?
Would that have been 05?
You know, because Clinton was out in 2000.
But, you know, Eritrea...
He asked her if it went outside and he was mulling it over and he goes, I have to say no.
And they said, well, how could you say no?
That's a deal.
A good deal is supposed to be where one, where both sides are unhappy.
Only one side is unhappy here, and it's Israel.
And he goes, if I took this deal back to Palestine, I would be killed.
And that's when I realized your job as the gypsy is to be the antagonist.
That's your role in this movie.
And that can never be taken away, or else you don't have a reason to live.
Like the Dahomey tribe in Africa, when the Europeans, the Brits were begging them, imploring them to stop slave trading.
And they said, that's who we are.
If we don't accrue and sell slaves, we have no culture.
You know, the reason I love Dubai is it is proof, it's like how I feel about Taiwan.
Taiwan, some people say that Chinese people don't have a cultural tradition amenable to liberty.
Unlike Greek or Roman or British, where's the history of liberty?
China has a different mindset, Chinese.
But Taiwan, to me, is proof that the little guy, this little country, can become a true liberal democracy.
And I just find this- Chiang Kai-shek.
I've got him tattooed on my back.
And Dubai to me is proof that Arabia can become modern, prosperous, just constructive, a great force in the world.
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