Jason Jones is president of The Vulnerable People Project, a charity dedicated to helping victims in areas of conflicts. His organization is active in Gaza, among other places, and we will get a view of the reality of the conflict from one who has spent a good deal of time there.
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
Dr. Paul is off today, but I am joined by my good friend and co-host, Chris Rossini.
Chris, how are you doing today?
Doing great, Daniel.
Great to be with you.
Yeah, great to be with you again.
We've got a special treat today because we have a guest.
I don't know that we've ever done this, Chris, when we've done the show together, but I'm excited about it.
It's someone that I just met through a mutual friend, and we're happy to have him here.
Jason Jones is with us.
Jason, how are you doing this morning?
I'm doing great.
It's a privilege to be on with you guys.
Thank you.
That's great.
That's great.
Well, I have to confess that I was not familiar with your organization, but I'm glad that I am now, thanks to a mutual friend again.
But for those of those of us, our listeners out there who may not be familiar, and the reason we're having you on is because of what you do now.
If you can spend a little bit of time, let people know what you do, what your organization does.
I think that'll be a good segue into some more specific questions.
So take it away.
Yeah, sure, Daniel.
Thank you.
But first of all, I just want to thank Dr. Paul, because when I was a young infantryman in the late 80s, early 90s, I discovered him.
And I think I know it was the first political check I ever sent.
And he had mentioned Basti It's the Law.
The first thing I ever did on the internet was print Bastiet's the Law.
I didn't read it, but I was greatly influenced by Dr. Paul.
So it's a privilege to be on your show.
I founded my organization, the Vulnerable People Project, in 2002.
I've been very active in the pro-life movement since I was 17.
Actually, I dropped out of high school and joined the army the day I turned 17.
And through a personal experience, my high school girlfriend was forced to have an abortion while I was in basic training by her father.
I'd become really involved in the pro-life movement.
And from my experiences in the army as an infantryman, it kind of just seamlessly connected with this desire to defend the vulnerable from violence, whether it's the child in the womb or the child in Darfur or the child in Gaza.
In 2002, being very involved in the pro-life movement, I founded my organization to try to harness pro-life sentiment to oppose the calls to invade Iraq.
And that's really what kicked us off.
So I founded the organization in 2002 with the goal of trying to advocate amongst conservatives and pro-lifers against shattering the secular equilibrium in the Middle East, knowing that it would lead to the genocides that it did in fact lead to.
And from there, it's just that's we've been continuing to do that is we advocate for vulnerable ethnic and religious minorities who are facing ethnic cleansing and genocide.
We do that through we're really good at getting people and stuff in and out of places.
And so we were very involved in Afghanistan and evacuating our allies and Sudan right now.
We're evacuating Christians from Khartoum that is trapped in the war.
But we also produce movies and write articles and make books, all committed to the same thing to stand with the vulnerable who are suffering violence.
So you were out of the military then by the time you started your organization.
Yeah, after I got out of the infantry, I went to the University of Hawaii and then Hawaii Pacific University for graduate school in military science and operational studies.
And then right around the time I got out of graduate school, I went to DC to work in the pro-life movement.
That was in 2000.
And then after 9-11, into the leadup of the Iraq War is when I launched my organization.
Okay.
Okay.
No, I think you make a great point, which is the dangers of sectarian violence.
And that, you know, that with before we sort of, I don't want to get too deep into it, but that seems to be the goal of U.S. foreign policy, you know, from Syria to Libya to Iraq.
I mean, it seems like, and this actually goes back to Yugoslavia in a way, because the whole point was to, you know, I remember walking around in Vukovar a little bit after the war was over, and people said, I had no idea who was a Serb and who was a Croat.
It was just not part of our lives.
And now everyone knows.
So it seems to be such an effective tool if you want your foreign policy to blow a place up to make them all of a sudden aware of the fact that the other is the hated one.
Yeah, you know, when we discovered that not only were we funding Hamas and Hezbollah, but ISIS, Al-Qaeda, and Boko Haram, it's startling.
But by the way, it's something that we knew and understood as we were working in Iraq.
I was in Iraq documenting the ethnic cleansing of the Christians and the Yazidis and the brutalization of the Kurds and the Kakai and others.
I would hear from the Peshmerga soldiers, why are we being told to stand down in our war against ISIS?
Why are we allowed?
Why are we allowing ISIS to take villages?
And it's really unbelievable.
When we look at the ethnic cleansing of Christians from Iraq, most of the ethnic cleansing took place before the U.S. withdrawal.
And that's what a lot of Americans don't understand, right under the nose of the Bush administration.
And as a Catholic myself, who has had the privilege of serving the Christians in the Holy Land, and remember, Iraq and Lebanon and Syria, this is the Holy Land for us as Christians because there are first century Christian churches.
St. Thomas got around and you can go to churches that he personally founded from the Jewish communities that initially converted to Christianity and they're still there.
You can go there.
Now, unfortunately, they probably won't be there soon.
Even today, right now, in Syria, Christian homes are being burned down.
So it's really quite disheartening.
Yeah.
Chris, you have some questions and thoughts?
Yeah, Jason, can you talk specifically now about Gaza, what you have done personally there, what your organization is doing, and we'll go from there.
Yeah, thank you, Chris.
We got involved in Gaza.
When Afghanistan fell, we were really involved and we're still involved.
We're probably the only organization that never left Afghanistan.
We operate across Afghanistan and we have safe houses across Central Asia.
So folks knew about us and we were asked early on to evacuate wounded women and children from Gaza.
So that's how we initially became involved.
And of course, the Palestinian community was not happy with us because once they leave, they're never allowed to come back.
And we didn't want to be seen as participants in an ethnic cleansing.
But eventually, you know, we were allowed and we were encouraged to evacuate wounded women, pregnant women, and children.
And then we began bringing in food.
Initially, it took within two weeks for us to see that this war was going off the rails.
It was within two weeks of October 7th, Israel dropped a 2,000-pound bomb on the oldest continuous use Christian church in the world in Gaza, probably the oldest continuous Christian community in the world.
And what's startling to me is, you know, when you, this heresy, this vile ethno-nationalist heresy, and to me, really, Christian Zionism is beyond a heresy.
It's an apostasy.
Because if you are a Christian, for 1,900 years, all Christians understood that Jesus Christ was the fulfillment of all of the promises to Abraham.
But to see that Christianity is used, is weaponized to kill the oldest Christian community in the world is unbelievable, especially when you remember they are really descended from the Jews that accepted Jesus.
These are the families that were in the upper room.
Where they descend from the men that were fixing their nets next to St. Peter when Jesus came walking by.
And to see my religion, a religion that tells me that I'm to kiss lepers, to kneel down next to women who are about to be hit in the head with rocks because they were caught in the act of adultery, to care for widows, to care for orphans, in a world that others we are to have no other.
And to see that my religion, my faith, is being weaponized for an ethnic cleansing of the oldest Christian community in the world.
To me, it's just really unbelievable.
So, although we work in Sudan and Nigeria and Afghanistan, it's still in many ways the biggest part of our work.
We have been really committed to bringing in food into Gaza.
We haven't been able to get food in now for 90 days.
About 90 days ago, we delivered 8,000 hot meals.
And for many of those folks, it was the first hot meal they had had in three years.
Because we're a small organization, one of the things that we like to do is kind of like a Japanese pottery.
We fill the cracks with gold.
We like to bring in joy.
Right now, staging ice cream trucks for when there is a permanent ceasefire to just kind of invade with a fleet of ice cream trucks for the children.
Because that is really the mission of the Vulnerable People Project: to let these people know, to give them hope and to let them know that they are loved, people care about them, and they think about them, even though we're living in the midst of a society that brutally dehumanizes them.
Congressman Fine just yesterday called for dropping Gaza.
These things are really unbelievable.
As a lunatic, well, you know, one of the things, one of the things that you mentioned in your article, I'm going to get to it more specifically later, is the fact that, you know, as our good friend Nassim Nicholas Taleb says, most Americans who are observing this don't have any skin in the game.
And I want to ask you a question specifically about that in a minute, but I want to just pull back for a second and ask you, you are recently in the West Bank and in Jordan.
For Americans who've not been there, who don't really know what it's like on the ground, give us a sense of what it's like being physically there, what it feels like, what is the day-to-day life in the areas you've just visited.
Thank you, Daniel.
This might be a bit of a meandering answer.
You know, the first thing that is startling, I think to most of us, and in one part of our mind, it's a mythical place, the West Bank.
You can think of Bethlehem.
It's in many ways not even a real place.
It's a place that's just that lives in our mind is this very holy but almost mythical place.
And then at the same time, the people who live there, the Palestinians that we really believe, they fall out into the streets in formation every morning with their green bandanas chanting death to America, death to Israel.
And it's really, it was even startling to me.
And I wrote an article called Help, I'm an Anti-Palestinian bigot after my first visit to the region.
I never thought of myself as a bigot, but when I heard my internal dialogue, as I was coming to the grips with the reality of what it is like in the West Bank and what Palestinians are like, I realized that I was just addled with prejudice.
It's a place that you would feel very much at home.
It's an extremely safe place.
And I feel much more comfortable in the West Bank than I do in Jerusalem, for example.
I have a very strange, uncanny, it's a very uncomfortable feeling for me, even.
But when I enter the West Bank through the checkpoints, after being barked at by the IDF, they're often very obnoxious.
You feel really at home.
And I'll tell you, I had one of the most beautiful experiences of my life just four days ago.
I made it through the infantry and being a kickboxer in the 90s in Japan without getting a tattoo, but I wanted Ecclesiastes 4-1 on my arm.
So when I shake people's hand, they ask what it means.
And This gentleman who has the only tattoo shop in the West Bank, he hasn't had any business really because it was for tourists since the war started.
He was just, he's my age.
He's a Gen Xer.
We sat up there drinking, you know, gin and listening to rock music and dancing and singing with our friends.
And it was just such a charmed experience.
But I could tell he was a broken man.
He had Jewish friends and Muslim friends and Druze friends.
And as you said about the former Yugoslavia, that this war has just accentuated the differences.
And I thought of this man as someone who was just too good for this world.
We were within a baseball throw of the church of the nativity above a barber shop.
Me and my friends getting tattoos and just rocking and rolling.
And it's just a place that you would feel very at home.
I often mention how much I love the French fries in the West Bank when I do media and I always get ratioed for being ridiculous.
But I do that because I just want people to know.
Do you know what I see when I'm in the West Bank?
Kids riding bicycles, doing papa wheelies down the street, the sound of big wheels turning corners and kids everywhere laughing and smiling and families in the market.
You know, you walk through the market, I said to my son, I said, you know, it's just like here, except they have outdoor markets that are very hot.
And I'm sure they'd prefer to be in an air-conditioned Walmart rather than walking the beautiful Roman street in the hot sun.
But, you know, it's a place that you would feel very much at home.
And then when I always remind them that all Palestinians, Muslim or Christian, are the descendants of the Jews that accepted Jesus.
Now, there were the Arab invasions in the sixth century and other things, but that they can definitely all trace their lineage back.
But, you know, I don't hear anti-Semitism.
I don't hear hatred.
And I realize that we're the ones that have been really promulgated in bigotry.
And it's not something I see there, which I can't understand because with the brutality and the persecution that they have to suffer, they can't go to the villages where their families are from, for example.
To see that they're so thoughtful, I think most Americans would be striking.
Powerless Communities' Interests00:15:21
You go there, of course, your ways and your Google map says, warning, entering dangerous area.
That's what it says when you go into the West Bank.
Of course, that's absolutely ridiculous.
Jason, our position, Ron Paul's position, as you know, is a foreign policy of non-interventionism.
And unfortunately, our country is neck deep in what is happening in Gaza.
And Ron Paul has been saying for decades that when we do stuff like this, it creates hatred towards our nation.
So I wanted to get yours, and you may not know personally, but even your staff, Rennie, what's your sense of the Gazan Palestinian people towards America?
Obviously, they're not happy with Israel, but we're very much involved too.
What is their opinion in general, do you think, on America and Americans themselves?
You know, I can't speak directly into Gaza broadly, but I can speak into the Christian community.
Just today, I saw a Christian man who lost all of his children in an Israeli airstrike on his church.
All of his children died, and he's stuck there in rubble, starving to death.
The average person in Gaza eats 250 calories a day.
I'm startled at how thoughtful they are.
And I've really, as a Catholic, and I want a Catholic apostolate, it's grounded in Catholic social teaching.
And I think about this a lot, the unique mystery and beauty of the Palestinian Christian community, not to hold to bigotry or hatred, to be thoughtful of the rise of Jew hatred and anti-Semitism because of this war.
You can see in the videos where I interviewed Christians immediately after being wounded, we brought them to Egypt and I interviewed them.
And then understanding that these IDF soldiers were just, quote, children who have been propagandized and how they felt sorry for them.
And I asked myself, where do these folks come from?
Because I can tell you, I wouldn't respond that way.
And I thought, this just must be grace working on a community as Christians for 2,000 years.
And I don't see that kind of hatred.
I walked around the Muslim neighborhoods in the West Bank alone.
And I did this intentionally.
And I was wanting to see our people giving me, you know, I think I can look as American as you can be with my Chicago White Sox hat, you know, and walking around.
And I lived most of my life in Hawaii, so I'm wearing my local kind slippers, my socks hat, looking ridiculous, walking around these Muslim neighborhoods.
And, you know, maybe two or three times I saw a teenager give me a really nasty look, and I admire that young man for being spirited.
Because if I was a young teenager, I'd probably be a little angry too.
But I mean, maybe one or two times I've seen that.
I felt that.
Maybe I was just even misreading a situation, but I don't experience that.
And I will say that in Israel, I felt hostility for sure.
Yeah, for being an American, especially this trip, because there's a lot of frustration.
They feel that Trump has betrayed them.
And so you'll feel more animus in Israel for being an American than you will in the Palestinian communities for sure.
Interesting.
I don't think most Americans know that or understand that.
Jason, you have antuitous that today you have an article in the American Conservative, which has done some great work, some great publications on the issue.
And your piece today is called What Pro-Palestinian and Pro-Israel Voices Both Miss.
And it was a very thought-provoking article, I do have to say.
But before getting into the specifics of it, one of the things that struck me as I read the article is how you really captured the folly of, as Chris said earlier, of our interventionist foreign policy.
Because, and actually, Trump himself said this in a speech in Saudi Arabia, that we are intervening in countries that we do not understand.
And that seems to me, certainly in my experience as a human rights worker in the 90s in Central and Eastern Europe, is that they have no sense of these communities.
And from thousands of miles away, they are taking sides and almost treating it like a sporting event.
I'm on team X, I'm on Team Y.
And that's how I eventually came to the philosophy of non-interventionism because I realized the impossibility of getting involved in a place so far away that you don't understand and taking sides.
So I thought that was really such an important part of your article today in the American Conservative.
Well, thank you, Daniel.
Well, look, being involved in politics in Hawaii and you've been involved in politics, I can remember when the RNC would send their 26-year-old staffers that could tell, would try to explain to us what Hawaii was like and about.
And of course, Hawaii, like Iowa or Wisconsin or Pennsylvania, they're very complex, unique places with cultures and traditions and ethnic communities and economic interests that you cannot begin to understand if you're not from there.
And even if you're from there, it's quite challenging to wrap your mind around.
But we're going to understand what the Palestinians are like.
I mean, this is what's in their best interest.
And I think the one thing both the left and the right forget, and this is a challenge that I think about a lot at the Vulnerable People Project, because Our job is to run influence campaigns for ethnic and religious communities are stateless and utterly powerless.
You can think of the Yazidi in Iraq.
Can you think of a more helpless community?
But Iran, Turkey, Russia, China, United States, the Gulf states, Israel, everyone has more of a say in what happens where they live than the Yazidi community.
So then, what we do at VPP is we seek to uninfluence campaigns in their service, and we have to ground our advocacy in the interests of power.
We have to speak to power and their interests and link their interests to these powerless communities.
That is what we do.
And this is something that's very dangerous because, as the great Catholic anthropologist Renee Girard says, victimism is the greatest crime.
Victimism is feigning concern for the vulnerable for wealth and power and prestige.
And as someone who runs a human rights organization, it'd be very easy for me to cross that line without even knowing it, where I'm using a community to have prestige or to grow my budget or whatever.
So it's very important that I always am thoughtful first and foremost to the interests of the communities that we are serving.
And I think about that a lot.
So I think the left and the right are missing, or Team Laura Loomer and Team Theo Von, as I call it, are missing in Gaza because it's really not a left-right debate anymore.
It's just sort of these two tribes, and they both tribes cross ideological spectrums.
But what I think that we all have to do, and I think Theo Von gets this, is we have to think about the interests of the people of Gaza as an end in themselves.
They're talked about as if everyone else's interests matter, but the 2.2 million people who live there.
And you can see this in a Palestinian Christian celebrated, you know, the protests in Gaza against Hamas, which the Western media is not covering.
Think of the courage.
You're on 245 calories a day, and you're living in rubble.
And now you're going to muster up the energy to go protest.
And now, what's the consequence of protesting Hamas?
You're going to be brutally murdered.
Every single one of my Christian cohorts that works in Gaza with us has been beaten and abused in a Hamas prison.
So to see that the people on the left will celebrate Hamas and then attack Palestinians.
My friend was ratioed on social media, a Palestinian from Gaza was ratioed on social media for celebrating the protests against Hamas.
This is really unbelievable.
And then on the other side, you have Nikki Haley writing on bombs, finish them.
70% of the casualties in Gaza are children and women.
You're going to sign a bomb that says finish them.
You have Congressman Fine saying we should drop two nuclear bombs on Gaza.
So the lunacy crosses the spectrum.
And to me, it's they're just playing dungeons and dragons.
And I mean, in many ways, they literally are playing, it's a role-playing game because you can look at the Gnostic heresy of Christian Zionism with books by Jonathan Kahn, like the dragon prophecy and books by John Haye, the blood moon, and all of these new heresies all lead to the same point.
The state of Israel has the duty to commit genocide because God said so.
This is true.
And so, but what do, but as a Christian, I know this is not a Christian show, but as a Christian, as a Catholic, it is my job to live a life.
The vocation of the Christian is to live a life in solidarity with those outside of social concern.
The leper, you know, symbolically, we can think of our job is to kiss lepers.
And the Palestinians are the lepers of today.
I was joking on a podcast, our friend's podcast yesterday that I'm actually standing with the Palestinians because I'm a coward.
I work in Hollywood, which I do.
I'm a filmmaker.
And we all know that the Palestinians control Hollywood.
I don't want to offend them.
I also work in politics.
The Palestinian lobby is very powerful.
The last thing I want to do is cross the Palestinian lobby.
And also, is there anything worse in the world than to be called an anti-Arab bigot?
So I don't want to be called an anti-Arab bigot.
So this is the only reason I'm standing with the Palestinians.
It's all for selfish, it's all for self-interest and your bank account.
I'm sure.
It's all for my bank.
Yes.
Yes.
I had to confess, I did show up in Bethlehem unannounced a couple of days last week and I banged on the door of the Bible college.
I said, Can I spend the night?
They did let me sleep for free in the dorm.
I woke up.
I slept for free in the Bible College dorm.
Wow.
Chris, do you have some more thoughts?
Yeah, I have this will be my last thought.
Before I say it, I do want to commend you for the work that you do.
Very, very few people on this planet are blessed to be able to do what you do.
So I do want to compliment you for that.
I was, you kind of answered my last question.
I was going to ask you about Hamas.
We Americans are very, very propagandized.
Our government knows how to do it.
They just take one word, Saddam, and you just keep repeating Saddam or Assad, and you can do whatever you want.
You could kill a million people as long as you have that.
With Gaza, it's Hamas.
Use the word Hamas, and you can blow up every university, every hospital, and kill tens of thousands of children by using that one word.
I was going to ask you, the Gazans, their opinion on Hamas.
I don't know if you could answer that question.
But it's, yeah, go ahead.
Thank you for that question, Chris.
Yeah, I think I can answer that question.
First of all, we have to remember: the last election was two decades ago, and Hamas didn't win a majority of any district.
They won 44% of the total vote.
50% of Gaza right now is under 18.
When you look at what percentage of Gaza voted in the last election, which percentage voted for Hamas, and who's around today, only 6% of those people living in Gaza voted for Hamas.
Only about 6% of people who are alive.
And this is being used as a justification for total ethnic cleansing.
But as embarrassing it is to say, because I don't want to sound like a kook, but we have video of Netanyahu just as late as 2019 saying that we need to support Hamas.
We now know that we have funded Hamas.
And you look at it this way: imagine if there were, I always think of it, imagine if there was the country of Atlantis and it had a $250 trillion GDP.
We have 28 trillion.
And they slivered off 100 billion there and 100 billion there to fund white supremacist groups and cartels and gang bangers to foment ethnic and religious and sectarian division.
What would our country look like after a while?
So it's not the people of Gaza funding Hamas.
And the majority of them weren't even alive when the last election was there.
And only 6% of them voted for Hamas.
So the idea that we have the right to totally ethnically cleanse 2.2 million people because of an election held two decades ago.
And then I probably shouldn't say this because it can be taken out of context.
When you look at the reality on the ground, and if you're a young person in a community and you're looking to be involved in serving the common good of your people, you're going to look to the institutions that have power where you are.
So, I'm not even going to hold everyone accountable for the horrible acts of Hamas.
You have to understand that they're trapped.
And the families that I've met from Gaza, they're just the most beautiful people.
I mean, I'll never forget.
I was interviewing, and this is where I heard the prejudice in my mind.
I'm interviewing this Muslim woman and her daughter and her, we evacuated her because she, the family, because the daughter, we thought she was dying.
We thought she was pregnant with twins.
She was pregnant with triplets.
And Gaza has the highest rate of twins in the world.
It's very interesting, especially as a Girardian to think that in a place that's like consumed by mimetic rivalry, the population on earth that has the most percentage of twins is Palestinians in Gaza.
But we thought she was having twins, but she had triplets.
And as I interviewed her mother, and her husband was right there, and she was talking about how she wanted to go and get a job, but her husband encouraged her to go get her master's and her PhD because she always wanted to get her graduate education.
And here I'm looking at this Muslim-Palestinian couple in their 60s, and she was talking about getting her PhD and how this war interrupted that.
And in my head, I was like, your husband lets you get a PhD.
And then I said that.
And she said, no, he demanded that I do it rather than work because it was so important to me.
And I kind of heard about the Barack, I heard the Joe Biden in my head.
You know, when Joe Biden said that Barack Obama was such a clean and articulate man.
I kind of heard that.
And I'm like, wow, I sound like Joe Biden.
I'm like, wow, I can't.
And I just realized how thoroughly we have been indoctrinated.
Calling for Annihilation00:02:57
And we've had to be indoctrinated because there are powerful interests that are literally calling for the annihilation of 2.2 million people.
And there is no, there are no consequences for these people.
Those of us who say that this is wrong are called the bigots.
It's really unbelievable.
Yeah, it's shocking.
I'm going to, I'm going to close out here in a second.
I do want to thank Conrail 2020 and Dennis Marburger for kicking in a little bit to help us with the show.
I have some good comments.
So if you're watching live, have a look at what they have to say.
And my final thought, Jason, is really the complication that the difficulty that I've seen as a non-leftist who nevertheless, for a number of reasons, is disgusted and horrified by what's happening.
It also seems like the issue in the U.S., it's dependent on framing it as a bunch of crazed college Marxist leftists.
And the issue has not been joined by conservative Christians.
In fact, as you well point out in your article, many, and you have discussed as well during our conversation, many of these conservative Christian, and I use that word carefully, leaders in the United States are the ones that are calling for annihilation.
And so the real challenge has seemed, at least in my perspective, to mobilize American pro-life, pro-life conservatives to kind of do what you're supposed to do, defend life.
You know, the pro-life community seems like it's been very good at defending life up until when you're born, but then it doesn't stop there.
So I commend you.
It's very important, I think, to getting this point across, to joining, to squaring that circle and having Christians come on board and conservatives coming on board to defending life.
And you're doing a great job.
I'm going to hand it over to you to let people know where they can find you before I thank our guests and our audience of the show.
So go ahead and let people know where they can find you and where they can see your work.
I really appreciate that, Daniel, because I feel like this is my tribe.
A lot of times I feel even in the conservative or pro-life space, it's a bit adversarial.
Our organization, the Vulnerable People Project, is committed to standing with the most vulnerable people in the world.
When there's a cost, when it's dangerous, you can go to our website, vulnerablepeopleproject.com and see the work that we are doing in Gaza.
We also have a petition there that we're sending to President Trump calling for a ceasefire.
So that's vulnerablepeopleproject.com.
And our mission is from the child in the womb to the child in Gaza.
Excellent.
Well, I want to thank all of our viewers for tuning in today to the show, to the very special show, and thank our guests again.