Oct. 26, 2023 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| That's a sad reality because even in my country when I was growing up in Lebanon, remember Lebanon was the only country to accept the third wave of Palestinian refugees into the country in 1974-75. | ||
| I was a 10 year old little girl. | ||
| My father owned a restaurant and we were watching the images of the Palestinians coming into Lebanon on our television, the first TV in town. | ||
| And I would hear the conversations on the tables and the restaurants, you know, people talking to each other, all the bloody Jews, look what they're doing to the Palestinians. | ||
| The general teaching, not in my household, obviously, because we are Christians, but the general teaching across the Arabic world is Israel is Satan. | ||
| Israel, Israel. | ||
| This has not changed. | ||
| It actually got worse. | ||
| Because in the Palestinian territories, they teach the children to hate the Jews because the Jews have horns, the Jews are evil, the Jews are satanic. | ||
| And this is why you see the barbarism happening. | ||
| But the barbarism is not new. | ||
| And it's only not directed at Israel only. | ||
| You know, this is why people think, oh my gosh, Hamas, you know, we need to feel sorry for the poor Palestinians. | ||
| People need to understand that throughout the Middle East, they have zero tolerance for minorities. | ||
| And Israel is the bullseye in their eye because they could not kick Israelis out. | ||
| I'm Dave Rubin and joining me today is an author, a national security expert and founder of Act for America, | ||
| my friend Brigitte Gabriel. | ||
| Brigitte, welcome back to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Hello, my friend. | ||
| I'm delighted to be back with you again. | ||
| I'm so glad to see you. | ||
| We don't see each other enough. | ||
| I have to say, before we start, that you accomplished something that no other Rubin Report guest has ever done in all of the years of the show. | ||
| You are the only guest who ever brought tears to my eyes during a live episode. | ||
| We'll link to the clip down below, but you were giving a wonderful soliloquy about America and freedom and the importance of fighting for freedom. | ||
| And you actually brought tears to my eyes during the show, and I feel like that's something that has meaning. | ||
| That has meaning. | ||
| Yes, it does. | ||
| You know why? | ||
| Because you and I share the same soul. | ||
| We care about what happens in the world. | ||
| We care about human suffering. | ||
| It doesn't matter who are these humans. | ||
| You know, they could be Palestinians. | ||
| They could be Muslims, Christians, Buddhists. | ||
| We care about people, but we hate evil. | ||
| We stand up against evil, and that's why we're talking together. | ||
| Well, that's exactly why I wanted to have you on the show this week. | ||
| So I want to do a little recap. | ||
| You've told the story many times, you've written about it and everything else, but I thought we could just do a few minutes on your childhood growing up in Lebanon and sort of what led you to being the person that you are now. | ||
| We'll just recap that briefly and then I want to talk to you about the current events. | ||
| But your personal story, it's just so absolutely incredible and so relevant to everything that's happening in the world right now. | ||
| Exactly, especially as we watch what's happening between Lebanon and Israel and Gaza. | ||
| You know, I was born and raised in Lebanon. | ||
| Lebanon used to be the only majority Christian country in the Middle East. | ||
| Most people don't know that. | ||
| We were fair-minded. | ||
| We were open-minded. | ||
| We were tolerant. | ||
| We were multicultural. | ||
| We prided ourselves on our multiculturalism. | ||
| We welcomed everyone into our country, including Palestinians. | ||
| Uh, because we wanted to share with them the westernization which we had created in the heart of the Middle East. | ||
| Unfortunately, David, we took people into our country who did not share our values. | ||
| My 9 11 happened to me in 1975 when actually Palestinian radical Islamist blew up my home, | ||
| bringing it down, burying me under the rubble, wounded as they were trying to take over our | ||
| town. | ||
| I ended up in the hospital for two and a half months and later ended up living in a bomb | ||
| shelter in an eight by 10 room bomb shelter without water, without very little food and | ||
| no electricity. | ||
| And that's where I lived for the next seven years of my life, robbed of my youth. | ||
| So I understand. | ||
| I'm not only a terrorism analyst who studied about terrorism in college. | ||
| I'm an eyewitness to terror who lived to tell about it. | ||
| And that's why I speak so forcefully and so passionately about standing up to those who want to perpetrate evil. | ||
| If we good people don't stand up and speak out, who else is going to do it? | ||
| Yeah, and as you know, my friend Gad Saad, I'm sure you know Gad, his parents were actually kidnapped by Palestinian terrorists in Lebanon. | ||
| He was Jew, or he is Jewish. | ||
| You're a Christian, but the point is that Beirut was once the Paris of the Middle East. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| And it certainly isn't anymore, and we'll see what happens over the next couple weeks. | ||
| But can you quickly just tell your journey, then, of eventually how you got to America? | ||
| Because there was even a stop in Israel, which people would find interesting, and then kind of what got you here, and then we'll get to today's issues. | ||
| Well, you know, I grew up in the bomb shelter and Israel was our only lifeline. | ||
| I remember when we first went into the bomb shelter, people would say, you know, my father would say, you know, America is going to see all the massacres happening in Lebanon and America is going to come and France is going to come and all these big Christian nations are going to come. | ||
| And we waited and we waited and nobody came. | ||
| And I remember three years into the war, I was around 13 years old, and we got a word that night that our town was going to be shelled. | ||
| And, you know, a friend of ours, a Christian militia fighter, stopped by and he said, I just want you to know, if I don't see you tomorrow, I wish you a merciful death because I believe they're going to take us over tonight. | ||
| And I remember David dressing in my Sunday best, my Easter dress. | ||
| Because I wanted to look pretty when I am dead, knowing that when they come to slaughter me, there would be no one to bury me. | ||
| And I remember sobbing, begging my mother, I don't want to die, I'm only 13 years old. | ||
| And there was nothing my mother could say to me. | ||
| And I remember sitting in the corner of our bomb shelter and my father started reading from Psalms, I shall walk into the valley of death and fear no evil for thou art with me. | ||
| And my parents said to me, they said, we lived a long life. | ||
| You are an only child. | ||
| You are a young child. | ||
| We will create a distraction when they come to kill us and you just run towards the Israeli border and don't look back. | ||
| You see, we live two and a half miles from the Israeli border and we knew if we run to the Jews and beg for help, the Jews are not going to slaughter us because we had more shared values with them than we had with the Muslims. | ||
| Thank God I did not have to make that decision that night because that's the night when Israel came in physically into Lebanon and established the security zone and set up artillery bases around our town. | ||
| And that's how we went on living for another five years until Israel invaded Lebanon, working with the Christians, trying to help the Christians take back their country, take back their democracy and kick out the radical Islamic element that had taken control of the country at that time. | ||
| And that's how we came out of the bomb shelter and back to rebuilding our lives. | ||
| I ended up moving to Israel in 1984 and becoming a news anchor for World News in the Middle East, based out of Jerusalem, covering world events. | ||
| And it was there where I met my American work correspondent, American husband, got married, and that's how I ended up coming to the United States, thinking I left everything behind. | ||
| My life story is detailed in a New York Times bestseller titled because they hate where I go into far more details like when my mother was wounded and we ended up in an Israeli hospital and So many stories in the book that would really move you and shed a light about what's happening in the Middle East right now so you can understand how long how far back this conflict goes and All right, so we'll link to the book down below, and we're also gonna link to our first interview, where we spent the hour really telling your story, because you just did a very, very obviously condensed version of it. | ||
| But let's get to the issues of the last two weeks or so. | ||
| I take it that even with the horrific barbarity and the medieval-like nature of all of this, that you probably, of all people, were not particularly surprised. | ||
| I mean, did the barbarity surprise you? | ||
| I know the events probably didn't surprise you. | ||
| What surprised me was the attack itself, that it was not stopped by Israel. | ||
| That surprised the world, not just me. | ||
| Israelis are known for their intelligence, but the massacre itself did not surprise me, because I understand how much they hate. | ||
| And that's why I titled my book because they hate the massacre that the venom that are being fed from their mother's milk to hate the Jews, Arab children from the time they're born. | ||
| They teach their children how much to hate the Jews. | ||
| And that's a sad reality. | ||
| Because even in my country, when I was growing up in Lebanon, remember, Lebanon was the only country to accept the third wave of Palestinian refugees into the country in 1974-75. | ||
| I was a 10-year-old little girl. | ||
| My father owned a restaurant, and we were watching the images of the Palestinians coming into Lebanon on our television, the first TV in town. | ||
| And I would hear the conversations on the tables in the restaurant, you know, people talking to each other, oh, the bloody Jews, look what they're doing to the Palestinians. | ||
| The general teaching, not in my household, obviously, because we are Christians, but the general teaching across the Arabic world is Israel is Satan. | ||
| Israel, Azrael. | ||
| This has not changed. | ||
| It actually got worse. | ||
| Because in the Palestinian territories, they teach the children to hate the Jews because the Jews have horns. | ||
| The Jews are evil. | ||
| The Jews are satanic. | ||
| And this is why you see the barbarism happening. | ||
| But the barbarism is not new. | ||
| And it's only not directed at Israel only. | ||
| You know, this is why people think, oh my gosh, Hamas, you know, we need to feel sorry for the poor Palestinians. | ||
| People need to understand that throughout the Middle East, they have zero tolerance for minorities. | ||
| And Israel is the bullseye in their eye because they could not kick Israelis out. | ||
| I mean, look, they tried to eliminate the Armenians in Turkey. | ||
| The same type of massacres, the beheading, the killing, the stabbing of a mother pregnant, getting the baby out, stabbing her in the stomach. | ||
| I mean, we're hearing the stories out of Gaza. | ||
| They did the same thing to the Armenians in Turkey in the beginning of the century. | ||
| The Israel didn't even exist. | ||
| Two million Armenians were massacred. | ||
| They did it to the Christians in Lebanon. | ||
| They did it to the Yazidis in Iraq. | ||
| Have we forgotten what ISIS did to the Yazidis? | ||
| What Hamas did to the Israelis is basically ISIS 2.0. | ||
| Nothing has changed. | ||
| It's the same tactics with the same barbarity. | ||
| that no one in the civilized world should accept or stand for. | ||
| I can understand if people want to fight for their rights, you know. | ||
| Okay, fine. | ||
| Fight man to man. | ||
| Take it to the world stage. | ||
| Go to the United Nations. | ||
| Make your case. | ||
| You don't go in and kidnap six-month-old babies, five-year-old babies, two-year-old grandbabies. | ||
| You're a father. | ||
| I'm a mother. | ||
| We have children. | ||
| Can you imagine somebody taking our children? | ||
| Grandmothers who are on medications. | ||
| This is barbaric behavior and it's unacceptable. | ||
| Why do you think so much of the world seems unable, or at least the Western world, seems unable to see this with clear eyes? | ||
| Is it fear? | ||
| Is it stupidity? | ||
| Is it confusion? | ||
| Is it propaganda? | ||
| It's propaganda. | ||
| It's propaganda and we live in an age where everybody does not want anybody to say anything bad about them. | ||
| We live in the age of feelings. | ||
| It's no longer about logic. | ||
| Everything is about feeling. | ||
| It's not about whether something is good for you or not or whether something makes sense. | ||
| It's about how do you feel? | ||
| How does this make you feel? | ||
| We live in a world that's driven by feelings nowadays, and it is fueled by social media. | ||
| And so nobody wants to see Children suffering. | ||
| But when you look at the Palestinians, sometimes they even fake the images of the Children who are suffering. | ||
| They've done that in the past. | ||
| We have seen them do it. | ||
| This is not to minimize children's suffering, but we need to understand that the perpetrators of evil continue to perpetrate their evil, and we cannot stand for that. | ||
| But this is also aided and abetted by the leftist socialist Marxists in the West who do not want to rock the boat. | ||
| And I have to tell you, especially in the leftist Jewish community, I am not silenced by the Muslims. | ||
| I am silenced when I speak by the radical lefty Jews who feel that if I speak that way, it could create problems for them. | ||
| Let's not rock the boat. | ||
| I remember giving a speech at Duke University in 2004, and in my speech, it was a pro-Israeli speech on the eve of the Palestinian Solidarity Movement at Duke University. | ||
| And part of my speech was about obviously my speech was about terrorism. | ||
| And I said the difference between Israel and the Arabic world is a difference between civilization and barbarism, a difference between democracy and dictatorship, a difference between goodness and evil. | ||
| Do you know that it was the Jewish community that condemned me and issued an apology to the Palestinians for inviting me because I offended the Palestinians? | ||
| If you google my name on social media, every single bad article written about me, it's either the ADL, the Anti-Defamation League, the Southern Poverty Law Center, the SPLC, the ACLU, major Jewish organizations. | ||
| It's not the Muslims. | ||
| It's not CAIR. | ||
| So sometimes it's the Jewish community who silences those who are speaking up and calling the barbarity because they think if we are so inclusive and so tolerant and so into diversity, equity and inclusion, they're going to like us because they're going to see how nice we are. | ||
| They don't get the problem. | ||
| Are you getting some emails? | ||
| I'm getting an awful lot of emails from liberal or lefty Jews right now who are kind of like, Dave, you know, I haven't really liked you or listened to you over the last couple of years, but now I'm kind of getting it. | ||
| Are you getting those too? | ||
| Unfortunately, not yet, but I hope to get that sometime. | ||
| I'll forward you a couple. | ||
| It goes to you, too. | ||
| You know, it's sad, but, you know, it's people like you and me who are speaking out forcefully against evil. | ||
| And look, look how you were attacked. | ||
| Look how I was attacked. | ||
| And yet we continue to speak up because we do it not for them, because we do it because of us, who we are as people. | ||
| We will not sit silent watching evil being perpetrated on. | ||
| I think it is time for the community, for the Jewish community, as well as anybody who's | ||
| got a conscience in this, in this world to stand up and say, enough is enough. And by | ||
| the way, where are the Palestinian mothers condemning this behavior? Where are the Palestinian | ||
| daughters saying, look, we do not accept the kidnapping of six month old children or | ||
| two year old little girls or the rape of teenage girls or the torture and rape and | ||
| humiliation of grandmothers? | ||
| Where are the Palestinian voices speaking up right now? | ||
| If you were in Israel, or you were an Israeli citizen, or you were advising Israel, what would you be telling them to do right now? | ||
| Because it's not just the 1,300 people that are dead, it's the 200 hostages, it's the fact that 7,000 rockets have been shot since this began and are still being shot at this very moment. | ||
| What would you tell them to do in the face of what you're describing? | ||
| Look, war is ugly, but the only way you're gonna fight a war is to win it. | ||
| They have to win. | ||
| And yes, in war, innocent people die. | ||
| That's a part of the collateral damage of war. | ||
| And I am the last person in the world who advocates for war. | ||
| I'm a survivor of war. | ||
| But I understand that if you are fighting a disease like cancer, you've got to root cancer out. | ||
| Because if you don't, cancer is going to kill you. | ||
| It's not an if. | ||
| It's a matter of when. | ||
| It's not a question. | ||
| And right now in the Middle East, if we want to prosper in the Middle East, if we want to see a prosperous and peaceful Lebanon, a prosperous and peaceful Palestinian territories, a prosperous and peaceful Jordan, you have to take out evil starting with Iran. | ||
| Iran is funding both Hezbollah and Hamas, and they've got to take them out. | ||
| Have no mercy! | ||
| Go out and take them out! | ||
| Does it sort of seem to you like a lot of the Arab countries, they need Israel in a way? | ||
| Like, they kind of need it because it's the scapegoat for all of the bad things that they do to their own citizens. | ||
| I mean, in Lebanon, as you described, Palestinians can't vote. | ||
| There's, I think, 20 or 30 things. | ||
| They're not allowed to be lawyers or doctors. | ||
| There's like a series of things. | ||
| Same in Jordan. | ||
| Like, they sort of need Israel to be like, ah, well, we're doing some bad stuff to you, but, eh, the Jews over there. | ||
| Well, look, the Arabs need the Palestinians. | ||
| But at this point, the Arabs are prospering. | ||
| They are growing. | ||
| And the Palestinians, everywhere they go, they cause a problem. | ||
| That's the problem. | ||
| That's why Egypt doesn't want them. | ||
| You know, I mean, that's why they said, no way. | ||
| All they have to do is look at what the Palestinians did in Jordan, what the Palestinians did in Lebanon. | ||
| They destroyed Lebanon. | ||
| King Hussein of Jordan bulldozed 30,000 Look, there are many Palestinians living in America. | ||
| There are many Palestinians living in Australia. | ||
| There are many Palestinians living all over the world. | ||
| They have whatever right they want. | ||
| They are a problem anywhere they go, and that's why they do not want them. | ||
| But here's the other thing. | ||
| Look, there are many Palestinians living in America. | ||
| There are many Palestinians living in Australia. | ||
| There are many Palestinians living all over the world. | ||
| They have whatever right they want. | ||
| Look at Rashida Tlaib, a member of Congress elected in the United States of America. | ||
| You know, why are they still screaming about, oh, four generations ago we used to have a | ||
| What about all the Israelis, all the Jews that were kicked out of Arab land? | ||
| Over one million Jews were kicked out of Egypt, out of Iran, out of Lebanon, out of Jordan, out of Syria. | ||
| They're not complaining we want to go back. | ||
| They said, okay, we were kicked out. | ||
| We'll start a new life somewhere else. | ||
| Just like I started the new life in America, you know, we need to move forward with the times and they need to get over holding a grudge and moving over so everybody can live in peace. | ||
| And by the way, Dave, one important thing. | ||
| Uh, I hold Barack in 2000 offered them 97% of the territories, 97%. | ||
| They did not want it. | ||
| They didn't want it. | ||
| They wanted all of Israel because they want to kick the Israelis out. | ||
| And most people don't remember. | ||
| In 1964, when the PLO was founded, the Palestinian Liberation Organization, Gaza was Egypt and the West Bank was Jordan. | ||
| The PLO was founded to eradicate the Jews and annihilate them and kick them into the sea. | ||
| A Jordanian flag was flying over Gaza. | ||
| They didn't call it occupied territories then. | ||
| An Egyptian flag was flying over Gaza and a Jordanian flag was flying over the West Bank. | ||
| How come they were not screaming about occupation then? | ||
| What the Palestinians want is basically to eliminate the existence of Israel out of the Middle East. | ||
| Period. | ||
| I'm so glad you mentioned that, because one of the things I've really been trying to do for the last two weeks is tell people basic history, and you know, there's this whole thing now where people are saying, well, there's been an occupation for 75 years, and it's bizarre to me that people seem to be calling for the British Empire to return, right? | ||
| I mean, that's what, in essence, you'd be asking for, because there never was a Palestinian state. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| There was never a Palestinian state. | ||
| Even Jews who lived in that region were Palestinians. | ||
| Look, Jerusalem was desolate land. | ||
| I mean, they didn't care of it. | ||
| Have you seen pictures? | ||
| People need to Google pictures of Jerusalem back a hundred years ago, a hundred and fifty years ago. | ||
| I mean, it was nothing. | ||
| And, you know, Israel accepted whatever the U.N. | ||
| gave them. | ||
| And actually, the reason why Israel is on the coast with the sand dunes, that's what the U.N. | ||
| gave Israel. | ||
| The Arabs said, OK, fine, give them that. | ||
| You know, they're going to die. | ||
| You can't grow anything. | ||
| You know, it's desolate land. | ||
| The Jews turned the desert into an oasis. | ||
| They turned it into Eden. | ||
| And then in 1967, the Arabs attacked the Jews. | ||
| That's how, you know, Israel ended up with Jerusalem. | ||
| This is how they ended up. | ||
| And look at the Yom Kippur War. | ||
| Israel gained more land every time the Arabs attacked Israel. | ||
| And finally, you know, Israel doesn't want the land. | ||
| They gave the land to Gaza, for those who are saying occupation. | ||
| Israel withdrew out of Gaza in 2005. | ||
| And those, a lot of us, did not want Israel to withdraw out of Gaza. | ||
| Israel dragged their own citizens out of Gaza. | ||
| Literally dragged them kicking and screaming. | ||
| And, you know, because they wanted to give all of Gaza to the Palestinians. | ||
| Here it is. | ||
| It is yours. | ||
| You build it. | ||
| They left all the greenhouses. | ||
| The greenhouses you... Gaza used to export 50 million flowers a year. | ||
| Just flowers out of the Gaza Strip. | ||
| Not to mention tomatoes, vegetables, fruits. | ||
| They used to export all over the world. | ||
| The Israelis left all the greenhouses behind. | ||
| I know an Israeli, a Jewish businessman in New York, a very lefty Jewish businessman, gave the Palestinians $14 million so they can start with the base money, so they can continue running the greenhouses, so they can flourish and grow their economy and hire people. | ||
| And what did the Palestinians do in Gaza? | ||
| Within 24 hours, they burned 126 synagogues, destroyed the greenhouses. | ||
| It's not the fault of Israel. | ||
| The pipes, they stole the copper out of the pipes. | ||
| They destroyed them. | ||
| These people shoot themselves in the foot. | ||
| They could have turned Gaza into Singapore, but they didn't. | ||
| It's not the fault of Israel. | ||
| It's the fault of Hamas and the Palestinians. | ||
| Do you think the West as a whole has the stomach or the fortitude, or do we even have enough | ||
| sort of cultural energy to win this thing? | ||
| I don't mean the specifics of this war, but what seems to now be brewing across all of the globe where we're seeing these crazy protests in London and in Paris and in Sydney, Australia, et cetera, et cetera. | ||
| Do you think the West has enough left to fight for all the good ideas that your life is an example of? | ||
| Yes, the West will have their resolve if they have a good leader. | ||
| Look, under President Donald Trump, you didn't see anything happening like this across the world. | ||
| Zip! | ||
| Four years, nothing. | ||
| No wars. | ||
| You know why? | ||
| Putin feared him. | ||
| Russia feared him. | ||
| Iran feared him. | ||
| China feared him. | ||
| They didn't know what he was going to do. | ||
| And when you have a leader who is so strong, he inspires other leaders to be strong. | ||
| And so this is how you see the cram rising to the top. | ||
| And as soon as President Trump was no longer at the White House, the whole world fell apart. | ||
| This is not a wasted lesson on our enemies. | ||
| China, Iran, North Korea, Russia realized under Biden, they've got a four year window of opportunity. | ||
| And especially after the withdrawal that we did out of Afghanistan. | ||
| And this is exactly why China sent their ships surrounding Taiwan. | ||
| Russia invaded Ukraine. | ||
| Iran now was prodding and poking at Israel. | ||
| They realized now they've got one year to do whatever they want to do. | ||
| And this is why we must organize. | ||
| We must come together. | ||
| And I urge people to go to my website ActForAmerica.org. | ||
| ActForAmerica.org. | ||
| We are now 2 million members mobilizing nationwide. | ||
| We helped pass 210 bills on the federal level and the state level to protect the country. | ||
| Right now we have a petition on the website to stop the importation of any Palestinian refugee into America. | ||
| You need to take action on that petition right now, because once the ground invasion starts in Gaza, watch the Democrats in our countries Oh my gosh, we've got to help the Palestinians. | ||
| Now is the time to speak up and put pressure on your elected officials so they can understand that the American public is united. | ||
| We're not going to import Palestinian terrorists into our country. | ||
| Go to actforamerica.org right now, sign that petition, as well as the action campaign we have to expel Rashida Tlaib from Congress. | ||
| All right, we're gonna link to that as well. | ||
| You're gonna set a record for the amount of links that we're gonna put in one show. | ||
| And Brigitte, I'm gonna leave you with a chance to make me cry again. | ||
| Tell me all about freedom one more time. | ||
| You and I are so passionate about freedom because we understand what's at stake. | ||
| I fight this war not because somebody else is gonna like me. | ||
| You cannot believe the hate mail that I get. | ||
| You cannot believe the death threats that I get. | ||
| Oh, I can believe it. | ||
| I do what I do because I want to be able, on my deathbed, to be able to look at my children and tell them, I did everything I can to preserve freedom for you, so you can live in a great and prosperous country. | ||
| This is what I want to leave for my children. | ||
| Freedom is only one generation away from extinction. | ||
| That's why we need to fight for freedom. | ||
| We need to stand together and we need to fight together. | ||
| This is a fight between civilization and barbarism. | ||
| This is a fight between goodness and evil. | ||
| We need to be on the side of good. | ||
| Brigitte, you never disappoint. | ||
| It was good to see you. | ||
| Thank you, my friend. | ||
| Have a great day. | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about politics instead of nonstop screaming, check out our politics playlist. | ||
| And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, watch our full episode playlist, all right over here. |
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