Best of Hannity with David Schoen and Joel Pollack. Plus, Sean sits down with Eylon Levy, an Israeli Government Spokesman, representing Israel on international television and radio in the war with Hamas after the October 7 Massacre, discusses the reported deaths of two children and their mother now.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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| What I told people I was making a podcast about Benghazi, nine times out of ten, they called me a masochist, rolled their eyes, or just asked, why? | |
| Benghazi, the truth became a web of lies. | |
| From Prologue Projects and Pushkin Industries, this is Fiasco, Benghazi. | |
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| So as this prisoner exchange has been unfolding in anticipation of how long it might go on or whether or not the ceasefire ultimately ends for good, very odd that Joe Biden actually believes that he's one of the reasons that Hamas attacked Israel was because he was trying to bring peace to the region. | |
| I guess he's the cause of the attack. | |
| It's kind of a bizarre statement. | |
| Listen. | |
| Mr. President, you said you were hoping you could get cooperation from Paris leaders. | |
| What are you hearing from that? | |
| What do you do at the same time? | |
| I'm hearing a lot, but I'm not going to speak to it right now. | |
| There's an overwhelming desire on the part of the region to let me back up. | |
| I cannot prove what I'm about to say. | |
| But I believe one of the reasons why Hamas struck when they did was they knew that I was working very closely with the Saudis and others in the region to bring peace to the region by having recognition of Israel and Israel's right to exist. | |
| You may recall when we did the G20 about a little while ago. | |
| I was able to get a resolution, a statement passed through there saying we're going to build a railroad from Riyadh all the way through the Middle East into Saudi Arabia, Israel, et cetera, and all the way up to your, not the railroad, but it'd be an underground pipeline and then railroad. | |
| The whole idea is there's overwhelming interest, and I think most Arab nations know it, in coordinating with one another to change the dynamic in their region for longer-term peace. | |
| And that is what I'm going to continue to work on. | |
| Thank you all very, very much. | |
| I appreciate it. | |
| Now, there was a British reporter, her name is Catherine Foster, detailing what was nothing but the violent harassment as the rabid anti-Semitism around the world continues. | |
| In this case, Great Britain, during what they call the pro-Palestinian protests, where all these chants are made about the destruction of Israel from the river to the sea, et cetera, et cetera. | |
| Listen to her description of what she experienced during this protest. | |
| In the last hour or so, we, the cameraman, our backwasher who's here to keep us safe, had really quite an unpleasant experience. | |
| A guy on a tannaway shouting at us, wanted to know who we were broadcasting from. | |
| He wouldn't go away. | |
| He was very persistent. | |
| Eventually, I said GB News. | |
| At that point, he just, I can't tell you what he said, but it was vile, fascist, stump, etc. | |
| A group of people came round us, all shouting at us. | |
| I have to say, it was very intimidating. | |
| I was shaken by the end of it. | |
| We then moved to a completely different place. | |
| And at the end of that, live, Lembahldi appeared again. | |
| The police spoke to him. | |
| He's been moved on. | |
| We've been told to stay here and we're filing a police report. | |
| Now, we are learning an awful lot about some of the details and the harsh conditions that even young children and older people that were taken hostage have had to face under the terror group Hamas. | |
| Not particularly comforting in terms of they weren't fed regularly. | |
| They were kept in very confined areas. | |
| They were kept for days on end where they didn't get food or the only food they got would be pita bread or something like that. | |
| This is even young children, the four-year-old American that was released. | |
| That story is heartbreaking as all get out, but at least she is now free. | |
| Her parents were killed on the October 7th attack. | |
| The other food that they had were rice and bread. | |
| And for the most part, they, you know, she said that when they wanted to go to the bathroom, they had to knock on a door. | |
| Sometimes, you know, they were waiting for it to be open. | |
| Sometimes they were waiting for one and a half hours, two hours simply to go to the bathroom. | |
| And, you know, the sickest part of all of this is the idea that somehow there is a comparison. | |
| You have convicted terrorists, three to one, being released by Israel to get back one Israeli or American hostage. | |
| And somehow there are people defending that fundamental unfairness. | |
| Anyway, here to weigh in on all of this, David Schoen, civil rights attorney, and Joel Pollack, senior editor-at-large at Breitbart News. | |
| All right, David Schoen, what's your take on all of this? | |
| Listen, it's a sick, sick process. | |
| You're talking about negotiating with terrorists about human lives. | |
| They're releasing them in drips and drabs. | |
| They're holding a one-month-old. | |
| The nine-year-old was separated from her mother. | |
| These are barbarians. | |
| These are monsters. | |
| It's a horrible process. | |
| But you're right. | |
| If you're a parent of one of these children or you're a family member of somebody being held, you want them released. | |
| But in Israel, there's great patriotism. | |
| And they also have a sense of the larger process here. | |
| But make no mistake about it. | |
| These are terrorists. | |
| And quite frankly, Abbas's group with Fatah is no better. | |
| The polls are showing today outrageous support for, look, 75% Palestinians. | |
| This is an Arab poll done by an Arab-controlled group. | |
| 75% of Palestinians, 83% in the Judean Samaria, is called the West Bank, support the atrocities of October 7th. | |
| 74.7 say they want a Palestine from the river to the sea, extinction of Israel. | |
| 85.9 reject any coexistence with Israel. | |
| And the most popular groups of all are Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Fatak al-Aqsa, Marda, Hamas's military wing, 88.6% for Al-Qassim Brigade. | |
| There's no hope of dealing with these folks. | |
| And as the Wall Street Journal said today, Hamas is playing the world. | |
| With the release of some hostages and the terrible crying scenes, the world wants more release. | |
| The world now is gearing up again. | |
| Stop the destruction of civilians. | |
| So Hamas knew from the start they play the world with using human shields, civilians to be bombed, and then they talk about the numbers being killed. | |
| You know, you raised something a while ago about these terrorists being released. | |
| You realize that nine of them are going to be paid pay for slave money. | |
| They talk about teenagers being released from Israeli prisons as if there's some equivalence. | |
| Well, you know who their teenagers are? | |
| Their teenagers are 16-year-old Mara al-Bakri, who stabbed an Israeli border policeman, 14 and 16-year-old terrorists, cousins who stabbed a 70-year-old. | |
| Those are their teenagers. | |
| I can go on and on with the list. | |
| The teenagers Hamas is holding are innocent civilians, babies, teenagers, grandmothers, people denied their medical care, people who were raped, mutilated, tortured, on and on and on. | |
| There is no equivalence. | |
| You know, as I bring Joel Pollack and Joel and David, we've all been friends for a long time here. | |
| And the fact that we've seen this hatred, this anti-Semitism worldwide and the numbers that we're seeing it, where we're seeing it, not just in Europe and Great Britain and Australia. | |
| Never thought I'd hear a chant out of Australia, gas the Jews F the Jews, but we're hearing that. | |
| I never thought we'd see it en masse in the streets of cities all over this country or in college campuses or in the halls of Congress, Joel Pollock, but we're seeing it, we're hearing it, and the justifications are sickening. | |
| It's really frightening what's going on. | |
| And just over the weekend, there was another anti-Semitic attack on a pizzeria in Skokie, Illinois, where I grew up. | |
| And you're right, the justifications are unbelievable. | |
| And we're seeing it at the highest level. | |
| This is not some sort of, you know, low-level anti-Semitism. | |
| It's happening at the elite institutions. | |
| It's happening at Harvard, at Penn, at Columbia. | |
| It's happening in the halls of Congress. | |
| This is what's really disturbing about it, is that it's coming from people who are the elite of our society, who think that they have the right to rule. | |
| Well, why is it happening? | |
| Is this undertone been there for a long time? | |
| We've known that it has been in the UN and all these globalist organizations, the UN in particular, the comments of the UN General Secretary were just absolutely sickening to me along the lines of what we're talking about here. | |
| Well, let me say a word or two about why it's happening on college campuses. | |
| The reason it's happening there, and this was a feeling expressed to me by the head of Tel Aviv University or one of the heads of Tel Aviv University when I interviewed him in Israel. | |
| The reason is that kids are being taught to hate America. | |
| So when you teach students that America is evil, that everything Americans have is because we stole it from somebody else or because we are colonial evil oppressors, that's the prism they use to interpret events around the world. | |
| And when they look at Israel's success as a flourishing, democratic, prosperous, high-tech society, they don't look at that and say, let's emulate that or let's try to teach other people around the world how to do that. | |
| They look at that and they regard it with hatred and resentment. | |
| So when you teach kids to hate America, really to hate themselves, it's a very short hop to hating other people. | |
| And it's an outgrowth of that anti-Americanism that you're seeing in the anti-Semitism on campus. | |
| So I guess my next question is, I know we have a very public Joe Biden, and then there's the private Joe Biden that admits that he's been putting pressure on Israel, David Shon, to have a pause. | |
| And I know there are people that are saying that they want this pause to continue indefinitely. | |
| I don't think that's plausible considering what the stated goal of Hamas is and what their actions have been over the last decades, to be honest, an Islamic jihad and then Hezbollah out of Lebanon and the north. | |
| To me, victory has got to be defined that Gaza can no longer be a launching area for any more of their missiles into Israel. | |
| And it has to also be defined as Hezbollah could no longer use Lebanon as a launching pad for missiles into Israel. | |
| And I hate to say it, at some point, sometime, someplace, somewhere, somebody's going to have to deal with Iran that has been momenting and plotting and planning and scheming and training and providing the weaponry for all of this. | |
| 100% right. | |
| I mean, there's no question it all comes from Iran. | |
| But there's also, you know, localized on the ground, simply raw hatred and respect for violence. | |
| Remember, these innocents who were killed in Gaza and so on were just the day before cheering in the streets, cheering the raping, the mutilating. | |
| I saw an interview with one woman from Gaza City who said she welcomes them using them as human shields because she's patriotic for her people. | |
| So I got an email today from the foreign ministry assuring that they're going to continue with their goal. | |
| Yes, it's true. | |
| There's tremendous domestic pressure and international pressure for a pause to release hostages. | |
| Every hostage is precious. | |
| There's no question about it. | |
| But Israel is committed to fulfilling its goals. | |
| I do believe the U.S. is putting increasing pressure on them through the Biden administration. | |
| I believe the administration is weakening, unfortunately. | |
| They're going to call more for the ceasefire because they're getting international pressure. | |
| Biden apologized today for not accepting Hamas's numbers of casualties. | |
| No one would accept those numbers. | |
| We see videos on the internet of them staging people who are supposed to be dead, and then the next moment they jump up because they think the scene is finished filming. | |
| They've been using Red Cross ambulances for arms transportation for years and all that. | |
| The U.N. is fully complicit in this business. | |
| He apologized to Muslim American leaders for questioning Hamas's death toll, but I'll tell you what he didn't bring up is that almost every major media organization in this country got wrong and blamed Israel for something they didn't do, which was bomb a hospital and kill 500 doctors, nurses, and patients. | |
| As a matter of fact, that missile came from the Islamic Jihad and it didn't hit the hospital. | |
| And then to add insult to injury, we now know that terror tunnels and their base of operations were dug underneath the hospitals so that they could use those hospitals as shields. | |
| Listen, the hostages are reporting Sinwar, the mastermind, if you can call it that, of this sick set of atrocities, met with them and he arrived through a tunnel to meet with them. | |
| Listen, Israel has got to return to its original policy of finding these people wherever they are and taking them out. | |
| These are monsters. | |
| They're barbarians. | |
| They're people who have no respect for law and order or civilized society. | |
| All right, quick break more with Joel Pollack and David Schoen on the latest out of the Middle East in Israel. | |
| Hey there, I'm Mary Catherine Hale, and I'm Carol Markowitz. | |
| We've been in political media for a long time. | |
| Long enough to know that it's gotten, well, a little insane. | |
| That's why we started Normally, a podcast for people who are over the hysteria and just want clarity. | |
| We talk about the issues that actually matter to the country without panic, without yelling, and with a healthy dose of humor. | |
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| What I told people I was making a podcast about Benghazi, nine times out of ten, they called me a masochist, rolled their eyes, or just asked, why? | |
| Benghazi, the truth became a web of lies. | |
| It's almost a dirty word, one that connotes conspiracy theory. | |
| Will we ever get the truth about the Benghazi massacre? | |
| Bad faith political warfare and frankly, bullshit. | |
| We kill the ambassador just to cover something up. | |
| You put two and two together. | |
| Was it an overblown distraction or a sinister conspiracy? | |
| Benghazi is a Rosetta Stone for everything that's been going on for the last 20 years. | |
| I'm Leon Napok from Prologue Projects and Pushkin Industries. | |
| This is Fiasco, Benghazi. | |
| What difference at this point does it make? | |
| Yes, that's right. | |
| Lock her up. | |
| Listen to Fiasco, Benghazi, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. | |
| Hey there, I'm Mary Catherine Hamm. | |
| And I'm Carol Markowitz. | |
| We've been in political media for a long time. | |
| Long enough to know that it's gotten, well, a little insane. | |
| That's why we started Normally, a podcast for people who are over the hysteria and just want clarity. | |
| We talk about the issues that actually matter to the country without panic, without yelling, and with a healthy dose of humor. | |
| We don't take ourselves too seriously, but we do take the truth seriously. | |
| So if you're into common sense, sanity, and some occasional sass, you're our kind of people. | |
| Catch new episodes of Normally every Tuesday and Thursday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen. | |
| I'm Ben Ferguson. | |
| And I'm Ted Cruz. | |
| Three times a week, we do our podcast, Verdict with Ted Cruz. | |
| Nationwide, we have millions of listeners. | |
| Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, we break down the news and bring you behind the scenes inside the White House, inside the Senate, inside the United States Supreme Court. | |
| And we cover the stories that you're not getting anywhere else. | |
| We arm you with the facts to be able to know and advocate for the truth with your friends and family. | |
| So down with Verdict with Ted Cruz now, wherever you get your podcasts. | |
| What I told people I was making a podcast about Benghazi, nine times out of ten, they called me a masochist, rolled their eyes, or just asked, why? | |
| Benghazi, the truth became a web of lies. | |
| It's almost a dirty word, one that connotes conspiracy theory. | |
| Will we ever get the truth about the Benghazi massacre? | |
| Bad faith, political warfare, and frankly, bullshit. | |
| We kill the ambassador just to cover something up. | |
| You put two and two together. | |
| Was it an overblown distraction or a sinister conspiracy? | |
| Benghazi is a Rosetta Stone for everything that's been going on for the last 20 years. | |
| I'm Leon Napok from Prologue Projects and Pushkin Industries. | |
| This is Fiasco, Benghazi. | |
| What difference at this point does it make? | |
| Yes, that's right. | |
| Lock her up. | |
| Listen to Fiasco, Benghazi, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. | |
| I continue with David Schoen and our friend Joel Pollock discussing the very latest out of the Middle East of Israel. | |
| You know, David, as we talk about this, look at the condition of the latest on this four-year-old little, you know, American girl that was freed. | |
| Her parents were murdered right in front of her. | |
| Apparently, her father saved her life. | |
| And she did have two siblings that were able to hide and they are free and they've been reunited, but none of them will ever see their parents again. | |
| You're right. | |
| None of them will ever be the same again. | |
| So many of these people will never be the same again because of what these terrorists did. | |
| Unprovoked violence targeting civilians. | |
| Look, they're sending rockets every day around Israel targeting civilians. | |
| People talk about war crimes by Israel. | |
| Israel is the only army in the world that has a lawyer assigned to each brigade that goes out before each operation to make sure they're complying with international humanitarian law. | |
| If you're a terrorist and you take 12 people and you hide under the beds of a school, you give license to the enemy to attack that school. | |
| It simply loses its protective status, and the people there well know it. | |
| Final word, Joel Pollack. | |
| I think that we have to heed the words of Yahoo Leiter, who is a rabbi who moved to Israel and lost his son, Moshe Leiter. | |
| I was actually at the funeral when he was late to arrest at the Mount Herzel Military Cemetery, and he delivered a eulogy to Hebrew, but then he broke into English to read a letter he wrote to President Biden. | |
| And he said, President Biden, do not pressure Israel to stop this war. | |
| We have to win this war. | |
| We don't have a choice. | |
| We have to get rid of Hamas as a threat to Israeli civilians. | |
| And I hope the Biden administration was listening, because if the terrorists are able to survive after this war, then none of us will be safe. | |
| All of the radical terrorist groups around the world will take heart from Hamas's survival. | |
| And the only way this can end well is with the destruction of Hamas. | |
| The destruction of Hamas, frankly, Hezbollah deserves the same destruction. | |
| They've been firing missiles from the north for now decades going into this innocent country. | |
| That has to stop. | |
| If they want this to end and end forever, they have to win the war. | |
| And a pause is fine. | |
| I want those hostages released as much as anybody. | |
| But after that's done, then the war gets back to, then the Israelis will have to get back to work. | |
| There's no doubt about it. | |
| David Schoen, thank you. | |
| Joel Pollack, thank you. | |
| We appreciate both of you being with us. | |
| 800-941-Sean, our number. | |
| If you want to be a part of the program, we'll get to your calls coming up at the bottom of the hour. | |
| And you're listening to the best of the Sean Hannity Show. | |
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| That's all coming up. | |
| We have a lot of news out of Israel, not the least of which is Joe Biden now. | |
| And even the New York Times reporting on this is facing deep anger among longtime supporters and young staffers in the White House and the Muslim community, which he apologized to earlier in the week. | |
| And now the press is a full court press. | |
| He appears to be urging Israel's military campaign to end because trying to say you've got to be more precise in fighting back. | |
| They have done more to protect innocent lives, directly warning the people of Gaza for weeks to get out. | |
| It is Hamas that has forced people to stay there. | |
| It is Hamas that is using hospitals as part of their underground tunnel network and their command center. | |
| It is Hamas that always used Gaza residents and the Palestinians as human shields. | |
| And if there's any innocent death in this conflict, you can blame Hamas that committed acts of terror against Israel. | |
| And what's worse is the virulent anti-Semitism continues. | |
| Listen to this out in Oakland, residents denying that the October 7th terrorist attack even happened, and actually in Oakland praising Hamas. | |
| Listen to this. | |
| There's not been beheadings of babies and rapings. | |
| Israel murdered their own people on October 7th. | |
| Calling Hamas a terrorist organization is ridiculous, racist, and plays into genocidal propaganda that is flooding our media and that we should be doing everything possible to combat. | |
| I support the right of Palestinians to resist occupation, including through Hamas, the armed wing of the unified Palestinian resistance. | |
| As an Arab, asking with this context to condemn Hamas is very anti-Arab racist. | |
| The notion that this was a massacre of Jews is a fabricated narrative. | |
| Many of those killed on October 7th, including children, were killed by the IDF. | |
| An amendment condemning Hamas is bald propaganda meant to thank you. | |
| Your time is up. | |
| To hear them complain about Hamas violence is like listening to a wife beater complain when his wife finally stands up and fights back. | |
| Question. | |
| Did anyone else notice that those who oppose this resolution are old white supremacists? | |
| There's been a lot of atrocity propaganda ranging from claims of beheaded babies to mass rape. | |
| Hamas is not a terrorist organization just because the U.S. and Israel deems it so. | |
| Hamas is a resistant organization that is fighting for the liberation of Palestinian people and their land. | |
| And you have pro-Palestinian protesters demonstrating outside of Rosalind Carter and her memorial service yesterday. | |
| How nice of them. | |
| Now, the pressure is real. | |
| As I mentioned, the New York Times piece, Mark Warner saying I would urge Israel to release funds to the Palestinian Authority. | |
| Well, when they have gotten funds in the past, that's the money that was used not to build hospitals or infrastructure or schools, but a network of hundreds of miles of terror tunnels. | |
| That is the money that they use to buy munitions. | |
| That is the money that they use to buy the rockets to fire into Israel. | |
| So he says that. | |
| Blinken says, yeah, we'd like to see the pause in Gaza extended. | |
| And then you go to the UN, which is a history of nothing but rabid anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism. | |
| A UN official giving a word-salad answer regarding their refusal to condemn Hamas's rapes on October 7th. | |
| That shouldn't be hard to answer. | |
| This is now the state of the world. | |
| Listen. | |
| Israel has been losing the hearts and minds of people not only in the region, but around the world. | |
| One of the things that I would strongly urge our Israeli partners is to release some of the funds that go to the Palestinian Authority. | |
| I've been worried even in advance of October 7th that you could have the Palestinian security services simply all quit on the West Bank and you would have chaos at an unprecedented level and a second front start on this war. | |
| And the fact that none of those funds and none of these people have been paid since October 7th is a real challenge. | |
| That would be a sign of good faith, I think, from Israel. | |
| We'd like to see the pause extended because what it has enabled, first and foremost, is hostages being released. | |
| It's also enabled us to surge humanitarian assistance into the people of Gaza who so desperately need it. | |
| Indeed, UN Women always supports impartial, independent investigations into any serious allegations of gender-based or sexual violence. | |
| And within the UN family, these investigations are led by the Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights. | |
| And just to provide a little bit of context in terms of UN women's role, UN Women specifically provides and has extensive knowledge on gender-based violence and provides and supports investigations as we do with all UN investigations. | |
| And so consequently, in this context and within the UN system, it is the independent international commission of inquiry, which for us has the mandate to investigate all alleged violations. | |
| It is absolutely important for the rights, for the needs, for the protection, for the dignity, for the survivors of violence to be supported throughout a process. | |
| And that's why we work through these globally mandated mechanisms. | |
| That notwithstanding, we understand and certainly we encourage and support national level efforts, the ones that you've heard about today, the civil commission in Israel, which has brought together women's organizations to document gender-based atrocities impartially. | |
| Our work will be on the backside of the independent international commission. | |
| All right, joining us now is Elon Levy is with us, an Israeli government spokesperson representing the Israel on international television and radio in the war with Hamas. | |
| You know, I couldn't believe as I was watching him, I think he was on Sky News doing an interview with some woman named Kay Burley, and Burley asked about the comparison between the numbers of hostages and the fact that Israel does not think Palestinian lives are valued as highly as Israeli lives. | |
| Excuse me. | |
| These are convicted terrorists in most cases, and Israel was handing over three guilty, in many cases, terrorists for one innocent baby that they took hostage. | |
| Elon, I watched you in that interview and I couldn't believe what I saw when you were on British television. | |
| I was shocked. | |
| Yeah, that was really an astonishing moment for a news anchor to claim that Israel doesn't care about people's lives and to use for the evidence for that. | |
| The fact that Israel is willing to release from jail violent criminals in order to get our innocent children out of captivity, out of being Hamas hostages, and to somehow twist that against us and make us into the bad guys, really, really outrageous. | |
| It's what the world has been doing since October 7th, though, isn't it? | |
| And that is blaming the victim of terrorism. | |
| And it's shocking. | |
| It's definitely what some people in the world have been doing since October 7th. | |
| I mean, we've had so much international support and solidarity standing by Israel in our darkest hour as we fight to obliterate the Hamas terror regime in response to the October 7th massacre. | |
| But sadly, yes, sometimes we see people in the best cases being quiet about Hamas's atrocities or denying Hamas's atrocities. | |
| And in the worst cases, actively and openly glorifying those brutal acts of savagery, the burnings, the beheadings, the acts of rape on October 7th. | |
| Truly, it's impossible to get your head around. | |
| Let me get your reaction to Joe Biden now is appearing to pressure Israel to end their military campaign in Gaza. | |
| I've extrapolated out your population in Israel, a little over 9 million, versus the 330-some-odd million Americans. | |
| This would be the equivalent of losing nearly 40,000 Americans in a single day. | |
| And if that ever happened to our country, God forbid, and anybody ever told us that we need to not win that war, I would tell them all to shove it. | |
| And Israel's very survival is at stake here. | |
| Hamas's charter calls for your ultimate destruction. | |
| This was our 9-11 and Pearl Harbor rolled into one, perpetrated by a brutal army of terror. | |
| And that's why it's important that from day one, the U.S. has stood shoulder to shoulder with us across both parties, the administration as well, making clear the only way this war can end is with the end of Hamas. | |
| This war has to end with Hamas completely obliterated, because otherwise it will try to repeat the same atrocities it did on October 7th. | |
| And we're very grateful to the United States for its very solid support. | |
| I've seen that tweet that you're referring to, and I know that the White House has also made clear that the President's support, the United States' support for our military campaign against Hamas remains unwavering. | |
| There hasn't been a change in policy. | |
| The United States understands Elon, I have a lot of sources in Israel, and I am being told by very knowledgeable people that what Biden is saying publicly is very different than what he's pushing privately. | |
| Have you not heard that? | |
| Well, we know that the president and the whole United States, and especially the American people as well. | |
| I can't tell you how much support we've been receiving from the American people have been clear that Israel has every right to defend itself. | |
| But if something like this had happened to the United States, the response would be, I think the president said, swift, decisive, and overwhelming. | |
| And that's what we are going to continue doing because we know that we're fighting for humanity, Sean. | |
| We know that we're fighting for humanity in the most basic sense of the right of babies not to be abducted from their beds and taken as hostages. | |
| But we're on the front lines of civilization here because if this war ends with the jihadi terrorists who perpetrated October 7th, knowing they can get away with it, knowing they're free to perpetrate these atrocities again, knowing they can attack the Israeli people again and the world will stop Israel from defending itself. | |
| Well, that's only going to empower and give strength to Islamist extremists and violent terrorists all around the world. | |
| And so we know that we're fighting the world's fight here. | |
| All right, quick break. | |
| We'll come back more with Elon Levy, the Israeli government spokesperson on the other side. | |
| Then we'll get to your calls. | |
| 800-941-SEAN, our number. | |
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| Sean Hennedy. | |
| All right, we continue now with Elon Levy. | |
| He is an Israeli government spokesperson. | |
| Let me play this exchange that you had with this British TV anchor, and your answer I thought was superb. | |
| Listen. | |
| I was speaking to a hostage negotiator this morning. | |
| He made the comparison between the 50 hostages that Hamas has promised to release, as opposed to the 150 prisoners that are Palestinians that Israel has said that it will release. | |
| And he made the comparison between the numbers and the fact that does Israel not think that Palestinian lives are valued as highly as Israeli lives? | |
| That is an astonishing accusation. | |
| If we could release one prisoner for every one hostage, we would obviously do that. | |
| We're operating in horrific circumstances. | |
| We're not choosing to release these prisoners who have blood on their hands. | |
| We are talking about people who have been convicted of stabbing and shooting attacks. | |
| Question I have. | |
| Look, I'll be very honest with you. | |
| My head tells me that making a deal like this with a terror group like Hamas and having a pause in the fighting, it worries me. | |
| It worries me that, number one, it'll increase hostage taking. | |
| Number two, it gives them time to resupply and reconfigure their military strategy. | |
| That makes winning your war that much more difficult. | |
| And on the other hand, I have a heart and I sympathize with every Israeli family. | |
| And if a family member of mine were held hostage, I would want the pause in the fighting to get my relatives back. | |
| And I probably would make the same decision. | |
| Although in my head, I know that it's going to help Hamas militarily. | |
| We're in an awful situation. | |
| There are no good options on the table, only less bad options. | |
| We're making a calculated risk. | |
| Obviously, we know that there is a risk in releasing violent criminals from jail. | |
| But at the same time, Hamas brutally abducted 240 people on October 7th. | |
| They abducted little babies. | |
| There's a nine-month-old baby, now 10 months old. | |
| Hamas is claiming was in fact killed and maybe dead now in the Gaza Strip. | |
| Many Americans will be familiar with the story of little Abigail Idan, a joint U.S.-Israeli citizen whose parents were both brutally massacred on October 7th, and she was held as a hostage for 50 days. | |
| And we have a moral responsibility as a country to do everything to get those people home. | |
| There is no reality in which we can make our peace with abandoning little children in the hands of, sorry I'm putting it this way, the pedophile rapists who perpetrated those barbaric acts of savagery on October 7th. | |
| We know they are not safe in their hands, and that's why we're having to make very difficult decisions in order to get our people back so that the Israeli people know that if anyone tries to hurt a hair on their head, this country is going to go to the ends of the earth to bring them home. | |
| And we will go to the ends of the earth to bring their perpetrators to justice. | |
| This isn't the end of the story. | |
| We've been very clear. | |
| Every Hamas terrorist, wherever they are, is a dead man walking. | |
| And we will settle the score with all of them. | |
| Good news. | |
| There's only one. | |
| If you talked about Winston Churchill, what is our aim? | |
| Victory. | |
| Victory at all costs against a monster's tyranny. | |
| Sadly, history is a great idea. | |
| And we will fight them in the beaches. | |
| We will fight them in the tracks. | |
| We will fight them everywhere in Gaza. | |
| And I hope and I pray that you win and win big. | |
| Thank you very much. | |
| Levy, you're in the prayers of this audience. | |
| That I can tell you. | |
| Thank you. | |
| Thank you. | |
| I truly appreciate that. | |
| Thank you very much. | |
| 800-941 Sean. | |
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