True Anon Truth Feed - UPDATED: Episode 75: The Lobby
Aired: 2023-10-12
Duration: 01:19:57


=== Hysterical Discussions About Gaza (05:01) ===

[00:00:00]  Hey, Race.
[00:00:01]  Hello, Liz.
[00:00:02]  I guess what we should say is hello, listeners, because that's who we're addressing.
[00:00:09]  So we had here at Druid some other episodes in the can that we had scheduled to come out, but after the events in the Middle East, it didn't seem like totally the right time for that.
[00:00:21]  So we're actually going to hold off on those.
[00:00:23]  And in the meantime, we thought we could unlock this episode we did with Noah Colwyn from Blow Back podcast a while back.
[00:00:33]  There is a lot of disinformation and noise and fog of war.
[00:00:40]  People love using that phrase.
[00:00:43]  There's also a lot of meta discussion about the right or the wrong way to talk about the situation in Gaza.
[00:00:49]  We're going to link to some of our episodes that we've done in the past in the description here about the, I guess I would say, the hurdles to having honest conversations about the blockade of Gaza and the history of the occupation in the West Bank.
[00:01:03]  That includes some of our conversations with Norman Finkelstein and also our recent discussion also with Noah about the instability of the Netanyahu government and his shaky right-wing coalition.
[00:01:16]  I want to say something too real quick, if you don't mind, which is that I sympathize with a lot of people, and this is mostly Americans I'm speaking to who don't exactly know kind of what to do, but feel an impulse to do something, kind of anything.
[00:01:31]  I think like social media has provided a sort of salve for that in a lot of ways, which funny enough, we actually talked about, we talked about that a little bit with Vincent Bevins in our last episode about his new book.
[00:01:44]  But for what's happening in Gaza now and throughout Palestine and Israel and now maybe Lebanon and Egypt, I mean, stuff is like unfolding very quickly.
[00:01:53]  But it feels like it's only going to get worse from here.
[00:01:56]  And I think the media in particular has provided plenty of cover for corrupt actors to make sure that that happens.
[00:02:04]  And if you say what is happening is a genocide, and if you say what is happening is a cleansing, if you say what's happening is a war crime over and over again, you are called hysterical, you are called unreasonable, you are dismissed as woke or infantile or someone with luxury beliefs with no skin in the game or a bourgeois hypocrite.
[00:02:24]  Like I've heard it since I was a teen when we invaded Iraq and then, you know, basically in every conflict since, you know, any opposition to any, you know, U.S. involved or U.S.-backed conflict since.
[00:02:37]  And for all of the talk over the years about the so-called dominance of the activist left or whatever, like all the think pieces, I think a lot of our listeners have probably read.
[00:02:46]  You know, I think we're seeing in real time just how marginal a lot of that is, the so-called institutional or cultural power that, you know, that the so-called left has at these liberal organizations or apparently in the media, etc.
[00:03:03]  Or, you know, just like how flimsy that alleged grasp is when rubber meets the road.
[00:03:10]  And I don't know what you're supposed to call the systematic starving of civilians of 2 million people, about 40% of our children.
[00:03:18]  Like, I don't know what you're supposed to call the bureaucratic management of deprivation, where 90% of Gaza's water supply, which has now apparently been shut off, is unfit, just completely unfit for human consumption and designed to be so, to make life so unbelievably miserable that there's one hospital that receives 30 suicide attempts a month of kids just trying to hang themselves or poisoning themselves with pesticides.
[00:03:44]  Like, is it hysterical to talk about that?
[00:03:46]  Like, I don't know.
[00:03:47]  How hysterical is it?
[00:03:48]  Is it like okay to act in a situation like this?
[00:03:52]  Right.
[00:03:54]  And part of me thinks that we can't even fully describe what life in Gaza is like because Americans are just not prepared to confront the full horror of the situation and our support for the creation and management of that hell.
[00:04:08]  So, I mean, yeah, at a certain point, you know, all of these discursive games, they don't matter.
[00:04:13]  Except for us in America, you know, they do.
[00:04:16]  Because, and I'm just going to speak for myself here, you know, it is very difficult to stomach the phrase unprovoked when you understand the situation in Gaza.
[00:04:24]  And the thing is, the biggest hurdle to anything happening right now is piercing through the veil of some of that propaganda that is out there and basically insisting on it.
[00:04:36]  So this episode is about a film that a lot of people haven't seen, but some people have, called The Lobby.
[00:04:42]  And it's a product of an Al Jazeera investigation, all of which that has been basically digitally buried.
[00:04:49]  The situation in the Middle East and our involvement in it, the U.S. involvement in it is unfolding very quickly and changing.
[00:04:57]  And I think that we're going to have some more stuff coming up for you on that.

=== Without Further Ado (06:25) ===

[00:05:01]  But in the meantime, you can check out all the other episodes we've done.
[00:05:04]  We're going to link to it here.
[00:05:06]  And yeah.
[00:05:07]  Yeah, I'd like to co-sign what Liz just said right there.
[00:05:10]  I am fucking exhausted.
[00:05:12]  So me trying to get my thoughts and my words together is not going very well right now.
[00:05:17]  My advice, as always, is don't go fucking insane when an insane thing happens, which I think is a lot of people not heeding that advice right now.
[00:05:27]  But just, you know, I'll tell you this.
[00:05:30]  You're never going to pack, you know, all those fucking Instagram inquiries and all that shit you read.
[00:05:35]  Don't let it drive you fucking nuts.
[00:05:38]  We are working on some stuff right now that will hopefully Be able to shed a light on a different side of the situation than the one that you're seeing in a lot of the media right now and kind of being bombarded with.
[00:05:51]  And yeah, we're working on that.
[00:05:54]  So without further ado, here is the episode.
[00:06:33]  Simshane!
[00:06:34]  Okay, I'm back.
[00:06:35]  I'm back.
[00:06:36]  I'm back.
[00:06:37]  So today, today, well, I went to go watch 8 Mile if you'd fucking let me finish.
[00:06:42]  Today, today, today, we are recording an extra special episode.
[00:06:47]  It is our breakdown of the film 8 Mile, right?
[00:06:51]  That's what is that what you're supposed to watch, Liz?
[00:06:55]  You told me to watch a movie, and I had two things written down.
[00:06:58]  I had 8 Mile and some Israel bullshit.
[00:07:00]  I can't remember which I was supposed to watch.
[00:07:01]  So I just watched 8 Mile.
[00:07:03]  Is that cool?
[00:07:03]  What did you think of 8 Mile?
[00:07:05]  What did you think of?
[00:07:05]  I didn't finish it, but it seemed pretty good.
[00:07:08]  That guy looks exactly like Eminem.
[00:07:10]  It's fucking crazy.
[00:07:11]  It's very, it's gritty, isn't it?
[00:07:14]  I do not believe that Gritty was in it, but yeah, it was pretty good.
[00:07:18]  I watched the first 15, 20 minutes.
[00:07:20]  It's crazy because Eminem, like the CGI that they did to make that guy look like Eminem straight up could have been out of Star Wars.
[00:07:28]  It was fantastic.
[00:07:29]  It was Eminem.
[00:07:31]  I don't know what game you're getting at.
[00:07:32]  I never know what the bits are doing are.
[00:07:35]  Is there, there's an 8 mile game?
[00:07:38]  Hey, race.
[00:08:02]  Hello.
[00:08:03]  I'm excited, baby.
[00:08:05]  I'm excited.
[00:08:06]  I know.
[00:08:06]  You love talking about Israel.
[00:08:11]  I'm schnazed up, baby.
[00:08:12]  I'm ready.
[00:08:13]  I'm ready to rock.
[00:08:14]  It's good because I get to talk about my people.
[00:08:16]  Whenever we talk about, when we do our, when we do our eight-episode Polish series, we get to talk about your people.
[00:08:22]  History of the city of Danzig.
[00:08:24]  No one is going to want to listen to that.
[00:08:26]  Or is that called Gdansk?
[00:08:28]  That was pretty cool.
[00:08:29]  They renamed it that.
[00:08:30]  No one would want to listen to a Polish series.
[00:08:34]  Well, that's true.
[00:08:35]  I fuck.
[00:08:36]  I'm trying to think of a Polish joke right now.
[00:08:38]  But what I should say is Polish series.
[00:08:41]  Well, yeah, they tried to record it, but unfortunately, they recorded into an actual Apple instead of the Apple podcast app.
[00:08:48]  That's stupid.
[00:08:51]  Anyway, I'm Liz.
[00:08:53]  Hello.
[00:08:54]  My name is Brace.
[00:08:55]  Hi.
[00:08:55]  We are joined, of course, as always, by producer Hyung Chomsky.
[00:08:59]  And we've got an Israel episode today.
[00:09:02]  Yeah, yeah, we're back.
[00:09:03]  We're back with our old friend, Noah Colwyn, who's joining us to talk about an interesting case.
[00:09:12]  Interesting case of a documentary never seen.
[00:09:17]  The documentary is called The Lobby.
[00:09:20]  It was originally supposed to be put out by Al Jazeera, which means the Jazeera in Arabic.
[00:09:28]  And it's a fantastic documentary.
[00:09:32]  We've got the link down below.
[00:09:33]  But this is basically the story of that documentary and the story of why you have not seen that documentary.
[00:09:39]  So without further ado, let's hop on the airplane and go on our birthright trip, baby.
[00:09:45]  Zoom Zoom!
[00:10:22]  Oh, bad jewel pod.
[00:10:24]  Oh, Lord.
[00:10:25]  So I know we have company, too.
[00:10:26]  This is humiliating.
[00:10:28]  Welcome.
[00:10:31]  Liz, you do it.
[00:10:32]  Who do we got?
[00:10:33]  Oh, God.
[00:10:34]  Brace.
[00:10:36]  We're really going with that.
[00:10:38]  We're going with it, baby.
[00:10:39]  Oh, my God.
[00:10:40]  All right.
[00:10:40]  All right.
[00:10:41]  Fine.
[00:10:42]  Welcome to True Non.
[00:10:45]  We are joined today, special guest, returning special guest.
[00:10:49]  It's your second time on podcast, Noah Colwyn, contributing editor at Jewish Current and the co-host, co-producer of Blowback Pod, series about the Iraq war, which is excellent.
[00:11:04]  Noah, how's it going?
[00:11:06]  Going good.
[00:11:06]  Going good.
[00:11:07]  Thanks for having me.
[00:11:09]  Thanks for coming back.
[00:11:10]  We didn't scare you away the first time.
[00:11:12]  No, no, no.
[00:11:13]  I'm always excited to come back and talk to you.
[00:11:16]  Also, I'm so sorry for leaking your address and parents' first and last names to the Canary Mission.
[00:11:23]  That was my bad.
[00:11:24]  I thought I was signing you up for a cool mailing list.

=== Four Parts: Foreign Influence (03:55) ===

[00:11:27]  I did not know I was doing that.
[00:11:29]  And I have returned the money they gave me.
[00:11:31]  Well, you know, I guess all I can say is that it was really shitty of you to have done that.
[00:11:37]  And I don't know.
[00:11:38]  Well, The way to get out of all trouble, listeners, follow me, follow me with this.
[00:11:44]  I'm telling you the truth.
[00:11:45]  The way to get out of trouble with anything is just be like, oh, damn, my bad.
[00:11:49]  And everyone's like, I get it.
[00:11:51]  I fucked up before, too.
[00:11:53]  So we have Noah here today to talk about.
[00:11:57]  Okay, I was about to say something really fucked up there.
[00:12:00]  Oh my God, how many times in this episode are you going to say that before you say something?
[00:12:05]  This was an accident.
[00:12:06]  I was about to say to talk about the greatest story never told.
[00:12:11]  That is a neo-Nazi documentary, which is not what we're talking about today.
[00:12:16]  We are talking about, we're talking about a four-part documentary.
[00:12:21]  I don't know if I want to call it a film because it's not like it was released in theaters, but a four-part documentary series that never came out, right?
[00:12:28]  Yeah, it's a like hidden journalistic gem that you can watch on YouTube, but that was never actually aired.
[00:12:36]  Yeah, this is actually one of the, I think we could call it one of the biggest, I don't know, I'd say journalistic exposés in the last couple years that literally no one knows about.
[00:12:49]  Yeah, it's astounding because like if you watch it on YouTube, what is it?
[00:12:55]  I was going to reveal that at the end so as not to taught that.
[00:12:58]  No, I'm kidding.
[00:13:00]  It's called The Lobby.
[00:13:01]  Specifically The Lobby USA.
[00:13:03]  There's sort of two series here.
[00:13:05]  There's The Lobby UK and then there's The Lobby USA.
[00:13:08]  The Lobby UK came out.
[00:13:10]  I think you could still watch that on Al Jazeera's YouTube channel, right?
[00:13:13]  Correct.
[00:13:14]  But The Lobby USA did not come out.
[00:13:17]  And it is released.
[00:13:19]  Somebody leaked it to Electronic Intifada and it is available to watch in full all four episodes on their YouTube channel.
[00:13:26]  It's a little hard to find, so you just got to look up.
[00:13:29]  The best way to look it up is to look up the Lobby USA episode one or two, three, four.
[00:13:35]  Or you could just click the links that we're going to include in the show notes to the episodes.
[00:13:41]  Yeah, but this is, I'm saying this, what if we forget?
[00:13:44]  We're not going to forget.
[00:13:46]  Anyways, this documentary never came out.
[00:13:48]  And it's a pretty, it's funny because the documentary's subject is basically also the reason it didn't come out.
[00:13:59]  Yes, it's like this kind of like weird Charlie Kaufman-esque kind of thing where this is like a story about the influence of a foreign government, the covert influence of a foreign government on American soil, the surveillance that they conduct on American citizens and how it's done to suppress any activism or discussion about the activities of that foreign government.
[00:14:24]  And then there's, you know, like the, I guess, what happened after the movie didn't come out that sort of sheds more light on that.
[00:14:31]  Yeah, it's like basically a perfect example of everything that the documentary was kind of bringing to light.
[00:14:38]  It's a very bizarre, yeah.
[00:14:39]  Kaufman-esque is a good, it's a good word for it.
[00:14:43]  So, I said before that it's the second part of a sort of two-part series.
[00:14:49]  That sounds confusing because there's parts, the episodes are called part one, two, and three, and four.
[00:14:53]  There are two different series here: there's a lobby USA and then there's the lobby UK, but they're connected because they both basically involve one guy going essentially undercover as a spy for about, I think, 10 months to a year as sort of an up-and-coming, you know, fresh-faced, very cleanly dressed young Zionist.
[00:15:17]  Right.
[00:15:17]  Yeah, I don't think that we revealed, we're talking about the state of Israel.

=== Israel Lobby Influence (14:47) ===

[00:15:23]  We just were saying a foreign government, but we're talking about the, you know, the lobby for the Israeli government, correct?
[00:15:32]  Yes.
[00:15:32]  And this fresh-faced young activist is a like he sort of positioned himself as kind of a, you know, like interested, young, kind of energetic climber.
[00:15:43]  And he was able to score in Washington an internship at a very well-connected and a very quietly influential lobbying shop called the Israel Project.
[00:15:57]  Yeah.
[00:15:57]  And through that meets a host of, well, I think it's fair to say scumbags who are engaged in a variety of nefarious activities, both sort of on campuses and in Congress and basically anywhere else where you can lobby people and get mad at people.
[00:16:16]  Yeah, I think one of the biggest, and we'll get into like more details and even just like the kind of, you know, more top line revelations, but it's pretty stunning just how active everyone is on college campuses and like how focused, you know, their lobby efforts are.
[00:16:39]  You know, I think it's well known kind of, you know, what the relationships in Washington, in DC, and in, you know, lobbying Congress and donors.
[00:16:50]  And it's less maybe clear how organized the efforts are on college campuses.
[00:16:59]  Right.
[00:16:59]  I think one of the things that this movie makes clear and makes explicit in a lot of ways is that, you know, there's this idea that we have of how lobbying works, which is that like, you know, a guy in a shitty fitting, expensive suit goes and opens a briefcase of money.
[00:17:15]  And, you know, like that is like like, and it goes to political campaigns.
[00:17:20]  It goes to PACs.
[00:17:21]  It goes to organizations that employ or are, you know, in the network of the politicians they want to support and so on.
[00:17:29]  And what this documentary shows is sort of a layer below that and sort of other networks outside of like DC specifically where they're able to kind of cultivate that sort of influence that they want.
[00:17:43]  And the college campus is in this documentary, a lot of where that energy ends up getting spent.
[00:17:50]  And it's actually quite, you know, sort of, I think one of the real strengths of the documentary is that it gets the people who are organizing all of this to speak incredibly clearly, like completely candidly, with no shame about what it is exactly that they're doing.
[00:18:06]  Yeah.
[00:18:08]  It's incredible sort of the amount of cynicism captured on film here.
[00:18:12]  I mean, people saying just things that I would not admit to people that I was friends with that I'm sure weren't spies, let alone a stranger or someone I had barely met.
[00:18:23]  One thing, though, is that like, yeah, it does show a lot of just how focused the Israel lobby and sort of this whole apparatus is on college campuses.
[00:18:33]  And why is that, Noah?
[00:18:36]  I mean, I didn't go to college, so I don't know.
[00:18:38]  Maybe people are going crazy about Palestine there, but what's going on?
[00:18:43]  So it's funny because this is actually, this question is connected a bit to the last time that I was on the show, which is that it's about the politics of continuity, which is that, you know, for Jewish donors and for, you know, older Jewish donors and, you know, large swathes of the major American Jewish establishment, ensuring that there is another generation of American Jews that resembles the previous generations of American Jews is their priority.
[00:19:12]  And so the college campus is sort of viewed as like a, you know, and it's like a fairly American tradition, is viewed as the place where they intervene to make sure that that happens.
[00:19:23]  It's one place that they intervene.
[00:19:25]  And on the other side of it, it's, you know, more broadly in kind of conjuring support and creating support for the pro-Israel movement as they think of themselves and creating, you know, support for the policies of the Israeli government and their occupation and its occupation.
[00:19:42]  It's really effective, you know, to go to the college campus where all this activism is happening and to, you know, try and, I mean, in their view, what they see themselves as doing is trying to stop like this incipient movement.
[00:19:54]  And I think like the parallel that they discuss in the documentary, because they're terrified of how dangerous it is if this were ever to become sort of the widely accepted view of the situation, is that it's the equivalent of, you know, the South African government trying to stop college, American college activists from fighting against apartheid.
[00:20:12]  What they are trying to do is that they are trying to stop the pro-Palestinian activists from succeeding in painting the Israeli government as fundamentally what it is, which is an apartheid state.
[00:20:25]  Yeah, that's something I found really interesting because that parallel is drawn in this.
[00:20:30]  Like, okay, the sort of BDS movement or the, you know, the anti-apartheid movement for South Africa gained a lot of steam.
[00:20:39]  And it shows pretty explicitly here how the pro-Israel lobby has recognized that the potential for the similar thing happening with Israel and especially similar sentiments growing maybe even among younger Jews in America.
[00:20:56]  How that could, you know, right now it's a pretty small movement, I mean, relative to even the size of the anti-apartheid movement, but it has the possibility of blowing up into a much larger thing.
[00:21:06]  And they want to nip that right in the bud.
[00:21:10]  Yeah, they also make a note about the changing nature of the parties, which I found interesting, where they said that they felt the Democrats were moving to be less friendly toward Israel, where the Republicans have really consolidated that base.
[00:21:30]  I'm sure that we would have a different view of that.
[00:21:35]  But it is like, I mean, it's quite clear.
[00:21:39]  I mean, from their own, I mean, to be clear, like this is all on tape, recording, video, that this undercover journalist captures these very, very candid conversations.
[00:21:51]  Like they really do view BDS as a growing movement that threatens support for Israel.
[00:22:00]  And it's also the way that they talk about BDS and the way that they frame it in the documentary is as, you know, that they are fighting a terrorist network.
[00:22:07]  Like the strategy.
[00:22:08]  So like let's let's just like set aside for a moment questions about like the tactical successes or shortcomings of the BDS movement.
[00:22:17]  From the perspective of the Israeli government, the BDS movement is the single greatest threat that they face that's not in the form of like a rival government.
[00:22:28]  Wait, really quickly, just in case there are people listening, can you explain exactly what the BDS movement is?
[00:22:34]  Right.
[00:22:34]  So BDS stands for boycott, divestment, and sanctions.
[00:22:37]  And the goal is to, you know, it sort of emerged to give a little bit of a history that goes just a little bit further back.
[00:22:45]  In the second intifada in the early 2000s after the collapse of Camp David and just like the complete the revelation that the Oslo Accords, the peace negotiations were just going nowhere and kind of a farce.
[00:22:59]  There was a sort of like, you know, like there was a violent uprising that the Palestinians undertook called the Second Intifada.
[00:23:06]  And then when that failed, there was a reassessment of strategy and a number of Palestinian activists chose to launch the BDS movement.
[00:23:13]  The idea being that they would try and urge boycotts of Israeli goods, that they wanted companies and governments to divest from Israeli businesses and From the Israeli economy, and to then ultimately impose, and this is the important part, impose sanctions on the Israeli government.
[00:23:31]  And the BDS movement, from the perspective, as Israel sees it, is that they're afraid of that, they're very, and they actively talk about in this documentary, they're afraid of the South Africa comparison to the extent that they will go to South Africa, find black South Africans, put them on a plane to Israel, write a blog post about it just so that they can have the headline and they can have the kind of person they can instrumentalize to say, hey, we found a black South African.
[00:23:57]  Yeah, I thought that was really extraordinary how, I mean, to listeners at home, there is a scene in this documentary where they describe basically step by step doing exactly that.
[00:24:08]  And it is a stage full of white Israelis and American Jews basically talking about this just incredibly cynical move of finding whichever, you know, anti-apartheid or even maybe just black South African that they can find, flying them out there.
[00:24:25]  And I mean, the implication for me is that they probably write, I mean, it's sort of spelled out not incredibly blatantly elsewhere in the documentary, but the implication is that these foundations actually might have written these articles in the first place.
[00:24:39]  Again, I don't know if that's actually true.
[00:24:42]  And then basically slapped whoever's face on it.
[00:24:45]  I mean, it's just incredibly cynical.
[00:24:47]  And it's done because the Israeli government, which is ultimately the strategic interests that these groups represent, the Israeli government looks at BDS and they see like, you know, like something that could, you know, be just as destructive from the perspective of Benjamin Netanyahu as like Iran having a nuclear bomb.
[00:25:06]  And it's like in his interest and what has been the policy of his government to finance and aggressively go to battle within the sort of court of public opinion with things like the BDS movement to sort of make the case for Israel.
[00:25:21]  What's called like in Hebrew, Hasbara, like the process of, you know, sort of executing propaganda, such that they created a whole new ministry called the Ministry of Strategic Affairs, which plays quite prominently in this documentary that executes and is sort of the nerve center for fighting back against BDS like within the Israeli government.
[00:25:41]  Kind of from what I got in this documentary, and again, this isn't spelled out explicitly, although one can kind of put the pieces together, is that the Israeli Ministry for Strategic Affairs kind of is the director behind a lot of, at very least, the thrust of these, you know, myriad pro-Israel American groups.
[00:26:02]  I will say that this is probably a good moment to talk about the whole anti-Semitism thing.
[00:26:07]  Yes.
[00:26:09]  I think that this is a like a lot of people get very, very mixed up when they start talking about this kind of stuff.
[00:26:18]  Not because it's like, you know, like the facts aren't horrible or because like they have questions about it, but because like when you start talking, you know, there's like a sort of like fear and about like, or, you know, like hesitation about talking about like a Jewish government that is actively coordinating or pulling the strings in some kind of conspiracy.
[00:26:37]  And I think like a way to talk about that is that like, well, I think that, you know, there are other governments around the world and all sorts of like actors that do this exact same stuff.
[00:26:46]  It's not Israel.
[00:26:47]  That said, the United States has a very specific relationship with Israel and Israel commits some very specific, like, you know, like horrendous crimes and has this kind of, as its government uses this kind of sort of conspiratorial activity to advance its own agenda.
[00:27:01]  And I think that that's like absolutely fair game.
[00:27:03]  And I feel like I did just want to like sort of affirm that for people listening.
[00:27:09]  I think people, I mean, whenever you talk about this stuff, people do get very nervous.
[00:27:14]  But you can see that like many other countries, specifically the country that we are in right now, America, does this same exact thing where they essentially have a million think tanks and organizations and media outlets or whatever that are essentially controlled basically by either a government agency or take the line of a specific government agency, often the State Department, to advance that line.
[00:27:40]  And so what's happening here is like, yeah, you are essentially seeing a lobby that is acting in the behest of a country's strategic interest.
[00:27:48]  This is not unique to Israel.
[00:27:50]  However, this documentary is uniquely about Israel.
[00:27:53]  And so we are talking about it in that regard.
[00:27:56]  But yeah, I do think it's like, it's certainly tricky to talk about.
[00:28:01]  Yeah.
[00:28:01]  I mean, I'll give, to give one example that's from the documentary is that woman, Julia Reifkind, who worked at the Israeli embassy in DC.
[00:28:09]  And she, her job was to basically like, you know, she originally, she went to UC Davis.
[00:28:15]  And while actually, there's this one part from the documentary, I'm just going to say roll the clip.
[00:28:19]  It's this part where when she's asked, like, like, you know, why did UC Davis become such an anti-Israel compass?
[00:28:26]  And she says, well, you know, there are a lot of Muslims in Sacramento.
[00:28:30]  I came to UC Davis, which had a reputation of being like a really pro-Israel.
[00:28:35]  Now it's like the top five most anti-Israel schools in the U.S. Why not?
[00:28:39]  Because of everything that happened in the last few years, it was just particularly bad.
[00:28:44]  And there's a huge Muslim population in Sacramento, which is right next to the US.
[00:28:49]  Yeah.
[00:28:51]  Which is just like crazy, like just crazy racist.
[00:28:54]  Well, and she, you know, and she says, I mean, maybe this is what you're getting at, but she says explicitly, she's like, oh, that's not really my boss, but they're really my boss.
[00:29:03]  Yes.
[00:29:03]  You know, she feels very coy about it.
[00:29:07]  Speaking about who?
[00:29:09]  About the Ministry of Strategic Affairs.
[00:29:11]  So it's very clear, like, you know, wink, wink, nudge, nudge.
[00:29:15]  They're not my boss, but this is my, you know, they're my boss.
[00:29:18]  Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
[00:29:20]  I thought that whole segment with her at UC Davis was fascinating because the documentary does a really good job of, they have actual footage of one of the events that they're talking about.
[00:29:31]  And they interview both activists who were pro-BDS activists at UC Davis and they interview this Julia woman who, by the way, is, you know, fairly attractive.
[00:29:43]  I will, if she does listen to this, I'll go out with her.
[00:29:46]  Absolutely.
[00:29:47]  Oh, my God.
[00:29:50]  My bad, guys.
[00:29:51]  I'm just calling it, you know, this is an oddest podcast, but they have it from really both the activist perspective and also sort of a hidden camera interview with this, with Julia.
[00:30:03]  And to see, like, you know, they obviously have told these activists about, you know, the contents of the interview with Julia.

=== Cynical Pro-Israel Activism (12:53) ===

[00:30:10]  And they're just astounded because it's so cynical.
[00:30:14]  I mean, the pro-Israel activists stage a walkout at one point and then immediately go to the media and try to frame it as they were essentially kicked out of this meeting while people were chanting, I think, Allahu Akbar.
[00:30:29]  Oh, absolutely.
[00:30:30]  Like, there was like a whole like Megan Kelly, Laura Ingram, like that.
[00:30:34]  I mean, and this goes to show that like, what, you know, like the real strength of this, one real strength of this, and a common thread that the documentary spends a lot of time on is how this, like, one real facet of the lobby is really just about the media.
[00:30:46]  Like, it's really not even about like trying to massage like or do the work of like, you know, like trying to persuade politicians of anything.
[00:30:53]  It's all just about like, you know, like feeding, I mean, what has what, I mean, at least in this stage, it's just like the right-wing media machine, like Fox News and so on.
[00:31:01]  Yeah.
[00:31:02]  But also the cable networks as well.
[00:31:04]  Absolutely.
[00:31:04]  Yeah.
[00:31:05]  I mean, they straight up say like, you know, no, we're doing astroturfing.
[00:31:09]  I mean, they just, they just call it that.
[00:31:11]  They're just like, oh, and then, and then he's like, I mean, I loved that when the undercover journalist was like, wait, what is that?
[00:31:19]  What is astroturfing?
[00:31:21]  And they're just like, oh, it's fake protests.
[00:31:24]  Yeah.
[00:31:24]  I mean, at one point, he goes on a bus to a fake protest, but it's like in the last episode.
[00:31:31]  I mean, one of the things that's also, that this documentary sort of illustrates is that like, that there is sort of this like very broad constellation of pro-Israel groups, all of these like different names and figures that sort of like, you know, like sprawl, like they sprawl out pretty far.
[00:31:46]  And, you know, one of the things that I thought was kind of wild was about how when you take like the like the other ways instead of just like organizing like, you know, those walkouts or whatever, but they were also like conducting active surveillance operations on student activists on social media and through like some frankly more insanely creepy and mortifying methods, which are still active and being used to this day.
[00:32:11]  Yeah, at one point, at one point, one of the um, I can't remember what organization it was, but someone who's with one of these organizations that's in the documentary essentially says that they have software that trawls through college students' social media posts and can find any pro-Palestine anti-Israel post within hours of it being sent up.
[00:32:33]  And what they do is they collect all of these posts and essentially create dossiers.
[00:32:37]  And at one point, they're also very explicit.
[00:32:40]  Like, these dossiers will be used to bar these people from future employment.
[00:32:44]  Like, we are collecting dirt.
[00:32:47]  And it's not even limited to like sentiment about Palestine or Israel.
[00:32:53]  Like, they'll use like photos of people doing sexually explicit things, or they'll insinuate rumors and start rumors about activists to damage their reputation.
[00:33:06]  I mean, it's like really scummy shit.
[00:33:09]  And these are like, this is all, by the way, directed at college kids.
[00:33:12]  I mean, one story that doesn't like, so there's a character in the documentary who's brought up, his name is Adam Milstein, and he's like a really great example of a kind of person in this world.
[00:33:23]  So Milstein is a real estate mogul.
[00:33:24]  In the documentary, somebody, Tony, the undercover reporter, asks somebody, like, oh, who's Adam Milstein?
[00:33:30]  And the guy responds, like, he pauses for a beat and then he says, he's a convicted felon.
[00:33:35]  Wait, that's not the best way to introduce him.
[00:33:37]  It's fantastic.
[00:33:39]  And he like, and Milstein is, you know, he's fairly wealthy on his own, but he's not like Sheldon Adelson money.
[00:33:46]  But Milstein was found later on by student journalists at the University of California at UC Berkeley, Go Bears.
[00:33:55]  They like they found that Milstein was routing money to student Senate campaigns at UCLA for the purpose of making sure that student candidates perceived as anti-Israel wouldn't get in.
[00:34:09]  And Milstein is also known as one of the funders of Canary Mission.
[00:34:13]  And he's also on the National Council of APAC, which is the most influential and sort of most sanitized Israel lobby that's out there.
[00:34:22]  So, wait, you mentioned Canary Mission here.
[00:34:24]  Give me a couple, fuck, I'm so glad to be able to say this.
[00:34:27]  Give me a couple squawks about the Canary Mission.
[00:34:29]  What are we squawking about here?
[00:34:31]  Beak up.
[00:34:34]  Did you just say beak up?
[00:34:36]  I said beak up.
[00:34:37]  Yeah, I couldn't hear you.
[00:34:38]  Beek up.
[00:34:38]  All right, just chirp down a minute.
[00:34:41]  Yes.
[00:34:43]  So Canary Mission is like this thing that we're describing.
[00:34:46]  It's like a giant database online.
[00:34:48]  You can Google it and look it up and find it very easily.
[00:34:51]  And the point of it is that, I mean, as you'll see, it's a giant roster assembled by the world's like biggest fucking creeps of just describing what a bunch of college kids did going to like, you know, oh, this person was a member of SJP.
[00:35:05]  This person is an associate of these other 10 people or whatever.
[00:35:08]  Like true, like McCarthyite Red Scare bullshit.
[00:35:11]  And it's meant at like the, they say in this movie that it's explicitly directed at trying to bar student activists from any future employment to make sure that if they, you know, stood for justice in Palestine, that it's something that could be used against them for the rest of their lives.
[00:35:29]  Like that's the point of it.
[00:35:30]  It's to be weaponized.
[00:35:31]  Yeah.
[00:35:33]  One thing that's really astounding on their website that I'm looking at right now is a section called Ex-Canary.
[00:35:39]  And just to read a little bit, Ex-Canary features individuals who are formally investigated and featured on Canary Mission, but have since rejected the latent anti-Semitism on the far right, far left, and among anti-Israel organizations and activists.
[00:35:53]  It says due to fear of harassment, ex-Canary's identities have been removed.
[00:35:58]  And it is essentially a roster with no faces.
[00:36:01]  It's like a blank profile picture of people apologizing for being in SJP.
[00:36:10]  It's incredible.
[00:36:11]  And what this is, is essentially blackmail.
[00:36:14]  Because if you are someone who does not have much of an online presence and someone Googles you, a prospective employer, they're going to see that your name is up on the website of a group that's calling you anti-Semitic.
[00:36:28]  And to be clear, like the language that the Carrier Mission uses is not like equivocal.
[00:36:34]  Equivocal?
[00:36:35]  That's a word.
[00:36:35]  Yeah.
[00:36:36]  It doesn't like, it doesn't have like an interest of fairness in mind.
[00:36:39]  The way that like that we see and throughout this documentary that we see is like people are painted in the absolute worst light that they could be possibly painted in to the extent that they're often lied about or like, you know, joke social media posts about being a Muslim are sort of taken out of context and they're painted as jihadists.
[00:36:59]  I mean, that's something that straight through this documentary.
[00:37:03]  And I think that's also something that like you, you know, like that you just sort of touched on, which is that all of these people, almost like the vast majority of these people are Muslim and Arab students.
[00:37:13]  Absolutely.
[00:37:14]  Yeah.
[00:37:14]  It's like a sort of repeated theme that comes up in this documentary is that the message that is sort of sent from on high that is given to activists is to say, you know, explicitly, like Students for Justice in Palestine is a hate group.
[00:37:28]  These Muslims all hate Jews.
[00:37:30]  They can't be trusted.
[00:37:32]  Like they're like dangerous radicals.
[00:37:34]  And it's a fundamentally Islamophobic message that they're getting, you know, as the documentary sort of sketches that like it emanates from like the Israeli government and from influential donors in the American Jewish establishment.
[00:37:47]  I mean, it even shows, I think in the second episode about how basically this huge controversy was ginned up about the University of Tennessee about how it's like this hotbed.
[00:38:01]  believe the actual words in an article were described as a hotbed of anti-Semitism because somebody at one of these organizations basically found people's social media posts, some of them from when they were kids, that were either anti-Semitic or could like possibly be interpreted as that, or even just anti-Israel, and sent them to media outlets to essentially paint this like, from what I gather, very quiet college campus as, you know, some jihadist central.
[00:38:29]  Well, and this is like a recurring theme is that like, you know, the University of California system, it did like a whole anti-Semitism report and investigation when I was an undergrad there.
[00:38:39]  And like the gist of it is that there are all these things that, you know, like enormous effort is expended in trying to find out just how much anti-Semitism there is on campus.
[00:38:48]  And these people in the documentary just kind of flat out say, eh, it's not really a big deal.
[00:38:52]  And we know it's not, but it's really effective as a smear.
[00:38:55]  But their big anxiety as they end up talking about is that it's losing its effectiveness.
[00:38:59]  It's losing its effectiveness as a smear because more and more people are seeing through it.
[00:39:04]  Correct me if I'm wrong, because my understanding too was that the reason they targeted a place like the University of Tennessee was that Knoxville is like incredibly conservative.
[00:39:14]  And so if you start a kind of, you know, a big controversy about anti-Semitism, it's easy to then get new laws passed that would be, you know, favorable to the Israeli government.
[00:39:31]  Especially in like conservative states and conservative cities that are already kind of, you know, tied up with a lot of those organizations.
[00:39:40]  Liz, to your point about like the Tennessee stuff, it's not just that it's like performing for like the evangelicals on the right and who are like, you know, sort of the crowd and around Knoxville.
[00:39:52]  I think it's also, you know, a sort of thing that emerges from that episode in particular was that the like the activist most aggressive at going after, you know, perceived anti-Semitism at the University of Tennessee was this guy, Kenneth Marcus.
[00:40:10]  And he was using, he was instrumentalizing that fight in Tennessee, you know, to shore up evangelical support and the natural constituencies around Tennessee, around the area there, and to draw in those activists, but also because it was a way for him to try and manufacture the evidence necessary to push his ultimate goal, which was to get more and more states and authorities to adopt definitions of anti-Semitism that basically exclude any,
[00:40:38]  like strip away any protections for like activism critical of Israeli government policy.
[00:40:47]  And it's funny because we see that mirrored by what was happening in Britain, like that whole controversy in the Labor Party about adopting those specific anti-Semitism code or whatever.
[00:41:02]  And it's not lost on me that the first half of this documentary did take place in the UK.
[00:41:08]  And that's also, again, like I said, available on YouTube.
[00:41:11]  And it shows that like many of these groups, like Labor Friends of Israel, I think there's another, I think it's, there's another front group that I believe is involved in labor in some way are essentially like they mirror the front groups in the U.S. where they basically follow the line of a specific ministry within the Israeli government.
[00:41:35]  And like I think a lot of people have noticed that like it's fucking insane that there are laws against BDS in America.
[00:41:48]  Right.
[00:41:48]  Like it's it's almost jarringly strange that there are.
[00:41:52]  I know some southern states have adopted them as well.
[00:41:55]  I believe Abby Martin was at one point excluded from speaking at a university due to one of these laws, either at the university or the state level.
[00:42:02]  I can't really remember.
[00:42:04]  But that's like a big push by a lot of these groups too, to like get these laws passed.
[00:42:08]  And it's because they keep losing these battles like so frequently where they will accuse somebody of anti-Semitism and they will try and get the accusations out there and they don't fly or that somebody, I mean, especially in the UK, a panel will invest something will be, somebody will be in panel to investigate and they'll find that actually, no, it didn't happen and that it was just criticism of the Israeli government.
[00:42:33]  And so if like they keep losing these sorts of battles and if they keep losing like, you know, First Amendment battles, then they're going to say, all right, well, what's not protected speech?
[00:42:42]  Hate speech.
[00:42:42]  So then we redefine, you know, people saying that Israel shouldn't exist as hate speech.
[00:42:48]  And therefore, you know, that like it's like you can sort of see why they're doing it and what they'll, what they're trying to get out of it.
[00:42:57]  Well, no, who are like the big players sort of on this scene?
[00:43:00]  We mentioned the Canary Project, but like, who else are we talking about here?

=== Illegal Activism Barriers (09:19) ===

[00:43:03]  So one that sort of comes up in sort of a more kind of referenced off-screen kind of way, but has some discussion in the documentary is APAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.
[00:43:15]  And APAC is like the largest, most influential, and sort of the oldest.
[00:43:20]  It was born like in the middle of the 20th century.
[00:43:24]  The Truman and Eisenhower years were pretty rocky for the U.S.-Israel relationship.
[00:43:29]  And in that sort of period from like the 50s up until the Six-Day War, you had a bunch of sort of like new Israel lobbies and advocacy groups emerge.
[00:43:38]  And APAC in time became sort of the biggest, most well-known one.
[00:43:42]  And by the 1990s, they were sort of considered like the most influential shop in Washington.
[00:43:48]  And the way that they do that, the way that they do this is by, you know, sort of like tapping a very, very, very highly engaged donor network.
[00:43:56]  And so they will bundle for politicians very aggressively based on the issue of Israel.
[00:44:02]  And so, you know, while somebody has an individual, you know, contribution campaign limit of, you know, 2,700, 3,000 bucks or whatever, if they're able to, you know, bundle that contribution from a whole bunch of different people, then they're going to be able to steer a lot of money into the hands of like or into the bank accounts of preferred candidates.
[00:44:23]  And they can do such, and they can do really large quantities that way because it's, you know, kind of a loophole and it doesn't necessarily show up in the, like, you know, in filings saying like, oh, yeah, this was all bundled together.
[00:44:36]  That's why this guy from like, you know, like Skokie, Illinois is donating to a race in, you know, like, I don't know, like the Central Valley.
[00:44:45]  Yeah, can you explain really quickly just how bundling works?
[00:44:49]  Right.
[00:44:49]  So it's just kind of, it's kind of what I described there, where it's like the system where you have like a, you know, like an APAC activist or lobbyist or organizer, director, whatever, however they call them.
[00:45:00]  They will work with a bunch of, they'll, you know, find like a bunch of donors or prospective donors.
[00:45:07]  So let's say they'll have like a big dinner and they will have a, you know, like this is a hypothetical event, like an Israeli, retired Israeli colonel will come and give a talk about the situation along like the Hezbollah border or something.
[00:45:20]  I found it fascinating.
[00:45:23]  And then, you know, they'll, they'll do that.
[00:45:25]  And then they'll have, you know, like they'll bring out somebody and it's like, this is Karen What's her face and she's running for Congress here and she needs your support because the person she's running against like sucks on Israel or whatever.
[00:45:37]  And a lot of the time though is the thing is, is like that's how bundling works in action.
[00:45:41]  And it's very effective.
[00:45:43]  But the thing is, is that like APAC eventually got so powerful that it didn't need to do that anymore or it didn't have to do it very often because simply the threat of it was effective enough or simply giving people cash and saying, hey, listen, you're probably going to be the favorite in your race.
[00:45:58]  And those are the races that they actually prefer.
[00:46:00]  You're going to be the favorite in your race.
[00:46:01]  Let's, you know, like take this money.
[00:46:03]  And then it's, you know, there's all these other kinds of support that they offer beyond Beyond just, you know, like actually giving money, but come in the form of these junkets and have a lot to do with, you know, sort of like being like a very, a very, a very serious kind of resource to, you know, freshman congressmen or whatever.
[00:46:19]  I mean, like AIPAC trips for many, many years have been a rite of passage.
[00:46:23]  And, you know, while like the Democratic Party hasn't like reached a particularly, like, let's say, sufficiently mature position on the issue of Israel-Palestine.
[00:46:34]  You do see the fact that, like, Rashida, like, you know, Congressman Rashidal or Alhan Omar, the fact that they're like, you know, declining, like saying fuck off to APAC, like that's a very novel development.
[00:46:44]  And that is exactly what they've been afraid of for all these years.
[00:46:47]  Like, that's why they've been trying to erect these barriers so that they can try and keep people like that out.
[00:46:53]  And APAC, I believe it's mentioned in the documentary, also flies out.
[00:46:57]  I think it was APAC.
[00:46:58]  They fly out journalists as well to Israel too, and give them these helicopter tours, et cetera.
[00:47:07]  And that, I mean, you can lobby congressmen, but you can also lobby the media to get the narrative that the congressman, you know, sort of goes with as well.
[00:47:17]  Oh, absolutely.
[00:47:19]  And I think that that sort of like media component is something that is kind of important to sort of like sit with for a second because a lot of what the media component ultimately is is about like, you know, creating the veneer of, you know, objective credibility.
[00:47:32]  And, you know, the place where they do that the most is with this group that's mentioned in the documentary A Fair Amount called the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, FDD.
[00:47:44]  Who are, by the way, we got to do an ad break.
[00:47:47]  We are sponsored by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
[00:47:51]  You can hit them up.
[00:47:52]  They make one of the softest pillows.
[00:47:54]  They're also a pillow company that advertises on podcasts as well.
[00:47:59]  Make one of the softest pillows in the world.
[00:48:00]  Have a great night's sleep on them.
[00:48:01]  All right, back to the show.
[00:48:07]  Well, I mean, look, man, it's like I prefer raising money for polio or for poor people or for, frankly, for women.
[00:48:16]  But that's just me.
[00:48:18]  That's just me.
[00:48:20]  So who is the Foundation for Defense of Democracies?
[00:48:24]  A well-known Cabal of Pedophiles.
[00:48:26]  No.
[00:48:27]  Correct.
[00:48:27]  Correct.
[00:48:29]  No, the cut, cut, cut.
[00:48:34]  They're a think tank in DC that is like, I would situate their sort of worldview somewhere between Attila the Hun and like Milosevic.
[00:48:48]  I don't know.
[00:48:52]  They've emerged in the last decade in a fairly significant way as sort of like the policy shop for where creeps like Tom Cotton go to get ideas stuffed in their head.
[00:49:01]  They are neoclassical.
[00:49:03]  They're extreme neocons, though.
[00:49:05]  They're not like your New York Times neocons.
[00:49:08]  And they're often, to be clear here, to be clear here, they're often Gentile neocons.
[00:49:13]  They exist.
[00:49:14]  They are valid.
[00:49:17]  We hear you.
[00:49:18]  We see you.
[00:49:19]  We see you.
[00:49:20]  Yeah, this is like the Dr. Strangelove school of thought in DC.
[00:49:25]  Yeah, I mean, it's astounding.
[00:49:27]  Like they are, they are like, that is like from the swamp that Tom Cotton emerged from.
[00:49:32]  And they're pretty big players in this as well.
[00:49:35]  Like they go around giving seminars, giving, I got to admit, the amount of trainings that the undercover man had to go through during his time in DC seems excruciating.
[00:49:47]  Just sitting in this like fluorescent lit office while some guy with like a tucked in or an untuck-it shirt, you know, lectures you in front of a whiteboard with no writing on it.
[00:49:57]  He's just talking.
[00:49:59]  It just seems awful.
[00:50:00]  I got to say, respect to the fucking dude who had to go through all that.
[00:50:05]  So it seems like, I mean, they're really getting at how the FDD was like directly coordinating with like the Israeli state.
[00:50:14]  I mean, that's pretty much, yeah.
[00:50:16]  I mean, they're indirectly.
[00:50:18]  That's illegal, by the way.
[00:50:19]  Yes.
[00:50:20]  Yes.
[00:50:20]  That's like one of the things.
[00:50:21]  So when we talked about earlier, when we mentioned at the beginning of the show that like this documentary shows some like really stunning, like brazen illegal stuff, like this is one of them that like the Republican Party's favorite foreign policy like think tank, like the originator of like all of the heinous ideas you see the Trump administration trying to execute in Venezuela and so on.
[00:50:44]  Like that is like that comes from FTD.
[00:50:47]  The FDD is actively like, you know, like working to lobby American officials with the assistance and support of like the Israeli government itself.
[00:50:56]  I mean, to be clear, this is the exact same thing that Democrats accuse Trump of doing with Russia.
[00:51:04]  I mean, I just want to be clear so that people understand like what we're talking about.
[00:51:08]  Like, you know, I do think it's important that no one seems to care.
[00:51:15]  None of the Democrats seem to care or have a problem with revelations about, you know, the state of Israel doing, you know, not registering foreign agents, for example, or working directly, coordinating directly with American think tanks on behalf of the Israeli government.
[00:51:34]  I mean, one of the things that's like sort of kind of especially crazy, I guess, with FTD specifically is, you know, that like when we talk about like, you know, like these people are cranks and they have fringe views, but they're not fringe organizations because they're still part of the same network and ecosystem that all of the mainstream think tanks and orgs are.
[00:51:56]  For example, Center for American Progress and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, at least according to some reporting I did last year, they were co-sponsoring events together.
[00:52:06]  Like they had a relationship, ideally the leading intellectual light of the Democratic Party and the FDD, like, you know, frankly, like a puppet of the Israeli government on these issues, like are staging stuff together for the edification of the wider world.
[00:52:21]  It's fucked.
[00:52:22]  Incredible.

=== Armin's $25 Ticket Fiasco (03:38) ===

[00:52:23]  Yeah.
[00:52:23]  Incredible.
[00:52:24]  And it's all illegal.
[00:52:26]  Yeah.
[00:52:27]  That's the thing.
[00:52:27]  Like, I don't know.
[00:52:30]  As a freelance, freelance FBI agent, or just, you know, FBI helper.
[00:52:37]  i gotta say this this this stuff was astounding to me so i think we should we should we should mention here again that this documentary never came out
[00:53:06]  I mean, this is like, let's be clear here about how much effort went into this.
[00:53:11]  They sent a guy undercover for months and months and months and months, got incredibly incriminating footage on some of the scummiest people in Washington.
[00:53:19]  And then the documentary was basically nixed.
[00:53:24]  You can sort of trace, there's like a specific, there's like a single article that's kind of the beginning of like all of the re like that sort of sets off the chain of events that will lead to the reasons for this documentary getting spiked.
[00:53:38]  And it was published in a little Jewish media concern called Tablet.
[00:53:44]  Hold on.
[00:53:44]  Young Chomsky, hit me with the noise.
[00:53:48]  Yeah, this is a friend of the pod, right?
[00:53:51]  Armin rose it.
[00:53:54]  He's tweeted at us a couple times, I think.
[00:53:56]  He has called this pod, even though, so to be clear, a little background on the person who started this whole snowball of this documentary getting canceled.
[00:54:05]  He once paid $137 for a $25 ticket to get in to see the podcast, Chapo Trap House, featuring Truan podcast at some, what the fuck?
[00:54:23]  I can't remember the venue's name, even though I live in the city that it is in.
[00:54:29]  So that is, I'm not a huge percentages guy, but 25 is a lot less money than 137.
[00:54:38]  And so I ask you, Armin, what kind of Jew are you, Armin?
[00:54:45]  What kind of Jew are you?
[00:54:48]  Anyway, so yeah, Noah, tell me about this article.
[00:54:52]  Well, so he publishes an article on the headline is Pro-Israel Hoaxer Hits DC.
[00:54:56]  And it basically describes and says every that it says that like there was apparently an Al Jazeera, like this article comes out, by the way, on the day of Donald Trump's inauguration.
[00:55:05]  But it basically says that it doxes, or rather it blows Tony's cover.
[00:55:11]  And by this point, the United Kingdom lobby episode has aired.
[00:55:19]  And that aired in the UK and had its own massive ripple effect over there.
[00:55:22]  Yeah, it was mentioned in Parliament.
[00:55:24]  Boris Johnson got mad about it.
[00:55:25]  Oh, yeah.
[00:55:26]  And well, because an Israeli official was seen trying to was caught on camera saying we got to get rid of the foreign minister of the UK who was a Tory because he's not sufficiently pro-Israel, which was a really terrific cell phone.
[00:55:42]  But so when that came out, they used footage from Tony's time in DC and it quickly came out in tablet that like, oh shit, everybody in DC is like shitting their pants, at least in these pro-Israel circles, because this very charming guy came out and threw a lot of parties and talked to a lot of people.

=== Rex Tillerson And The Qatar Blockade (14:26) ===

[00:56:01]  And it sort of like begins to set in motion this kind of turmoil about, well, what was it that this guy found out about the Israel lobby or what was the story that they were going to tell?
[00:56:14]  And who might that be bad news for?
[00:56:18]  It's interesting that this article came out on the day of Trump's inauguration because it really sort of sets in motion the Israel lobby itself's sort of plan for dealing with the revelations that are, fuck, revealed here.
[00:56:34]  Sorry, I didn't, I said revelations revealed.
[00:56:36]  My bad.
[00:56:38]  Let's just keep rolling.
[00:56:40]  Because just in line with how they react to it later, it's essentially they're trying to cause as few waves as possible to draw as little attention as possible to the even existence of this documentary, let alone what it shows.
[00:56:53]  So we don't hear anything for several months.
[00:56:56]  And around this time, in about June of 2017, one of the worst things in my life happens.
[00:57:03]  I hate it when the players club has a bit of a tiff.
[00:57:09]  But do you guys remember when Saudi Arabia and the UAE out of seemingly, if you're paying attention to the media, out of nowhere, blockaded the teeny state of Qatar?
[00:57:20]  So to be clear, all these states are on the Arabian Peninsula.
[00:57:25]  Saudi Arabia is the biggest one.
[00:57:28]  And, you know, UAE is not, there's certainly not as big as Saudi Arabia.
[00:57:32]  Qatar is the smallest one.
[00:57:34]  Qatar has about 2 million people in it.
[00:57:36]  I have no idea what the breakdown between basically servants and Qataris are there, but there are definitely way more basically foreign laborers working sometimes under very bad conditions in Qatar than there are actual Qataris.
[00:57:54]  And it's a small country that kind of comes up like a little vestigial tail off of the east coast of the peninsula.
[00:58:04]  It is very small.
[00:58:05]  At one point, Saudi Arabia actually planned to blockade it or to isolate it by building a canal across its border to literally cut it to actually like straight up Bugs Bunny style, cut it off of the entire peninsula.
[00:58:23]  Which is, I mean, a nefarious plan, but extremely funny.
[00:58:28]  So we should say that right before the blockade started, that kind of a, there was a big leak of emails to the intercept from the Emirati ambassador.
[00:58:41]  And this is what's really funny is that in the emails, he's discussing our old friends from the documentary, the FDD.
[00:58:53]  And basically, it sounds like they're kind of, I mean, I mean, what happens is that, you know, one of the demands in not blockading Qatar was that we need them to shut down Al Jazeera and in particular, Al Jazeera operations aimed at, quote, defaming pro-Israel groups.
[00:59:17]  So there seems to be a little funny timeline happening here.
[00:59:20]  Well, it's really strange too, because I think a lot of people just sort of have this blanket assumption that because Saudi Arabia, UAE, even Qatar, et cetera, all these states have Arab leaders, that they are naturally basically 100% pro-Palestine, absolutely against Israel.
[00:59:40]  I mean, there was, I mean, to be clear, there was a time when you could, if you were Jewish, you were not allowed to go to Saudi Arabia, even if you weren't Israeli.
[00:59:48]  I think it's still technically a law in the books that if you have an Israeli stamp in your passport, that you can't get into Saudi Arabia.
[00:59:55]  But that is not the case anymore.
[00:59:58]  And it seems like basically all of the Gulf states have essentially been jockeying to see who is basically most favored when it comes to relations with Israel.
[01:00:10]  Right.
[01:00:10]  And in this case, you know, part of what was so sort of, I mean, just to give an example, a couple of years ago, when I went to the APAC policy conference, like their big annual gala in DC, they like, you know,
[01:00:24]  The leader of a very influential American Jewish organization I saw got up, and among the first things out of his mouth was him talking about how, in a room full of thousands of people, about how he had just taken this trip to this incredible enlightened nation of the United Arab Emirates, and that the Emiratis were sort of modeling a kind of Arab government that we could work with.
[01:00:47]  And it's because, like, you know, underneath the hood, while Israel doesn't have formal diplomatic relations with any of these countries, Israel is working hand in glove with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates on a wide variety of issues, largely, like most importantly, trying to figure out how to contain Iran, who is their chief regional rival.
[01:01:08]  And Qatar has got caught kind of in the crossfire of that.
[01:01:13]  Yeah, the Qataris and the Saudis do not get along for a variety of reasons, some of which I understand, some of which I do not understand.
[01:01:22]  I mean, both of them are essentially similar in many respects.
[01:01:26]  They are both hereditary monarchies.
[01:01:28]  Although Saudi Arabia, I got to say, the line of succession there got a little wonky in recent years.
[01:01:33]  I'm not really sure exactly how that's playing out, but hey, what do I look like?
[01:01:38]  One of those guys who draws the fucking coats of arms in England for the rich people?
[01:01:42]  I don't know.
[01:01:42]  I'm not that guy.
[01:01:44]  But they both sell a ton of oil to the West.
[01:01:48]  The problem is, though, is Qatar, I think, is doing almost better in some respects with how much they're basically rationing their oil or selling their oil.
[01:01:58]  Again, not an oil man, I don't know.
[01:02:00]  But there were rumblings that maybe one of the reasons that Saudi Arabia was essentially trying to gin up problems with Qatar is so that they might have a pretext for invasion, which could lead to them essentially seizing, of course, all their oil supplies.
[01:02:19]  I'm sure they would install some puppet monarchy or whatever.
[01:02:23]  And their entire many hundreds of billion dollars worth sovereign wealth fund.
[01:02:28]  And Qatar, like, you know, because of like this huge schism with the Saudi Arabia, they sort of started engaging in their own campaign.
[01:02:37]  And this is all in the months after this documentary is done being like, you know, it's like they've done the reporting work or they're either in the process of making it or they have made it and it just hasn't come out yet.
[01:02:48]  But as that's unfolding, the government of Qatar is sort of trying to figure out like, okay, how do we either end this blockade?
[01:02:54]  Like, what is it that we can do to improve our position in the with at least with the United States, who, which is, of course, the only like country that has the power to like, you know, jerk the strings of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, Qatar's like, you know, new enemies.
[01:03:11]  So Qatar did the same thing that I do whenever some insane person with a dog avatar says that I'm anti-Semitic on Twitter.
[01:03:19]  They invite the worst, most insane right-wing Jews over to their kingdom to have a series of chats.
[01:03:29]  And now, the people they invite is a who's who's of alleged blank blanks.
[01:03:35]  We've got Malcolm Henley.
[01:03:38]  I don't know how to pronounce this fucking guy's name.
[01:03:40]  Honlin.
[01:03:40]  No, you go through these assholes.
[01:03:42]  You know all these motherfuckers.
[01:03:44]  Well, so like Qatar had invited like Dershowitz, Malcolm Honlein, who's the, who's like the major domo in the American Jewish community.
[01:03:53]  I mean, Jack Rosen from the American Jewish Congress.
[01:03:55]  I mean, really, more Klein, Dershowitz, and Honlin are like the big names here.
[01:03:59]  And those are like, you know, that's part of the charm offensive that they had brought.
[01:04:03]  Like, you know, whereas the UAE and Saudi had paid for their own like, you know, junkets of different American Jewish leaders.
[01:04:09]  But like they're like, like these, like the elements of the pro-Israel lobby are working, you know, they're working overtime, I guess, to try and figure out, or rather, they're working overtime as, you know, agents for the Israeli government's interests, sort of figuring out, like, between Qatar and Saudi Arabia and the UAE, like, you know, where the best hand for them lies, like who can be the greatest assets for them.
[01:04:34]  At the same time, they hire this guy, Nick Muzzin, who was like a former aide to Ted Cruz, sort of like mid-wig, not necessarily big wig Washington lobbyist, who, when I was researching this guy, I found a series of basically incomprehensible articles because I was very tired and had trouble comprehending anything in the first place about various schemes and scams this little scumbag had inserted himself to.
[01:05:01]  But let me tell you, one of his biggest jobs before getting hired by Qatar was that he was working as a registered foreign agent for the Albanian Democratic Party, who it might shock you to find out are, well, they are Albanian,
[01:05:17]  but they are not very Democratic and have a series of, I hate to bring up the guy's name again, but Bugs Bunny like scandals and schemes that they've gotten themselves into on the on the well, Albania actually, to be completely honest with you, is kind of like the Qatar of the of the Balkans.
[01:05:37]  It's a little strip of land, much smaller than the other ones that is, it's different.
[01:05:44]  But they hire this guy, and this guy is going around telling everybody, don't worry, don't worry.
[01:05:49]  I'll make sure that this documentary doesn't rear its ugly head.
[01:05:54]  And it's like, you know, I mean, it even went up past the pay grade of this guy, at least according to some other reports.
[01:06:03]  Like it started, I mean, the documentary as like a, like, I guess it went all the way to the top, so to speak.
[01:06:11]  No, according to a report, and I think 972, a report that I believe Rex Tillerson actually brought this up to the Emir of Qatar and was like, do not let this documentary come out.
[01:06:26]  Rex Tillerson, the former Secretary of State, to be correct.
[01:06:31]  And the former CEO of ExxonMobil.
[01:06:35]  Exactly.
[01:06:36]  Who you might surprise our listeners, but ExxonMobil has a bit of a Qatar connection, considering that they have a Tangl company in that country.
[01:06:49]  I was astounded to find out.
[01:06:52]  Intercept, the Intercept did some really good reporting on this whole saga, much of what we've talked about so far.
[01:06:59]  But that Tillerson's sort of dealings with Qatar during the blockade crisis might be the actual reason that Tillerson was booted out.
[01:07:11]  Because while Tillerson was in Qatar trying to sort of, you know, smooth ruffled feathers and trying to lift the blockade and get this crisis sort of resolved, Trump was like, I think this surprised a lot of people.
[01:07:24]  Trump was going fucking ham on Qatar for like a month.
[01:07:28]  Like he was talking about Qatar in speeches.
[01:07:31]  He was calling them like one of the lead sponsors of terrorism.
[01:07:34]  I mean, it was pretty astounding because one doesn't get the impression that Trump is entirely familiar with the workings of that small peninsular nation.
[01:07:47]  I mean, it's, I think one of the pretty wild things, at least to me, that sort of like stuck out from like the response to the lobby as well was sort of how quickly people began targeting Al Jazeera specifically.
[01:08:01]  And one of the things that they said about Al Jazeera is that it was a hate network, a terror factory, and so on, which felt like, you know, like Ted Cruz and a bunch of other people like signed some stupid letter.
[01:08:12]  But I guess what's kind of wild to me is that that's actually the exact thing that's described in the like lobby documentary, which is that these as these activists proudly say themselves, which is that, you know, the way that like you defeat your opponent isn't by like addressing any of the facts of the case.
[01:08:28]  It's by saying that they hate Jews and that they're terrorists.
[01:08:31]  And that's immediately what like, you know, they started getting U.S. senators to say about Al Jazeera in order to like, you know, like nip this in the bud.
[01:08:38]  And they were pushing to get Al Jazeera to be forced to register as a foreign agent representing the government of Qatar.
[01:08:47]  Yeah, I thought that was astounding because they basically flipped the script on Al Jazeera.
[01:08:52]  And of course, if Al Jazeera, like correspondents or producers, whatever, did have to register as foreign agents in America, they would, of course, be blocked from a lot of the things that they would normally have access to being agents of the press.
[01:09:06]  It's astounding.
[01:09:07]  And at one point, Electronic Intifada reports that America threatened to remove their airbase from Qatar, basically over this movie, that say like, if you let this movie come out, we will take our troops out of the airbase.
[01:09:24]  And sort of the subtext there is that if we take our troops out, Saudi Arabian military will roll on through.
[01:09:33]  And to be completely honest with you, if you look up on live leaks footage of Saudi Arabian armored columns and motorized troops in Yemen, I have no doubt that about 500 well-trained commandos could take out the entire Saudi Arabian army.
[01:09:51]  However, if Qatar wants to talk to me about that on a financial level, you know.
[01:09:55]  Well, the irony is that it actually would be our troops coming in from the Saudi, in the Saudi forces.
[01:10:01]  Yeah.
[01:10:02]  Well, at least Blackwater.
[01:10:03]  Yes, correct.
[01:10:06]  Well, I think, too, like, it's not just that, I mean, so this, you know, it's like smearing everyone as terrorists, but they also, like, you know, they, they did acknowledge that the document, that the documentary had been leaked.
[01:10:20]  And they basically said they're like, don't watch it.
[01:10:23]  You're not going to learn anything.
[01:10:24]  It's boring.
[01:10:25]  There's nothing in here.

=== Why The Media Misses Palestine (03:15) ===

[01:10:28]  And like, the response from the media was total compliance.
[01:10:33]  Like, there was been, in the UK, at least, you know, it really was covered in a lot of the papers and on the BBC and like we mentioned before in parliament, but like no one in America was reporting on anything that was in this documentary.
[01:10:49]  And there's nobody.
[01:10:51]  Why do you think that is, Noah?
[01:10:53]  You know a lot more about this stuff than I do.
[01:10:55]  I would say that.
[01:10:56]  Yeah, you got that blue check inside inside track.
[01:11:00]  Well, when I put my fingers to my temples and like become one with my blue check, what it tells me is that the American media like has a really, really substantial blind spot when it comes to Palestine.
[01:11:12]  A lot of it is rooted in, I think, just like pretty basic anti-Muslim, anti-Arab bigotry.
[01:11:17]  And like that's a sort of like kind of base explanation that you can give for a lot of why like, you know, like footage of, you know, it explains why MSNBC will show footage from the aftermath aftermath of a stabbing attack in Tel Aviv, but will not show the footage of, you know, like a far more routine occurrence, which is an IDF soldier shooting a Palestinian dead.
[01:11:41]  And I think that like that explains some of it.
[01:11:43]  And then the other part of it, though, is that, and I think that this is perhaps like a more, and, you know, and then another explanation is that, you know, there are probably some journalists who bought the Israel lobby's line and said like, like they were like, you know, when they asked questions about it, they were like, listen, don't worry about it.
[01:12:00]  And they took their word for it.
[01:12:01]  But what I think is probably the most likely and the biggest explanation for this particular story, or at least one that has an outsized impact, is that so much of what is revealed in this documentary is like fairly oxygenated to media and Washington types.
[01:12:18]  A lot of them would look at a lot of the conversations in this and they would look at a lot of the kinds of people that are talking and they would see the things that they say and they would say, that's really interesting.
[01:12:27]  I kind of already knew that though.
[01:12:29]  And they don't take that as an indictment of the system in which they work.
[01:12:33]  They take that as evidence of how banal the facts are in this movie.
[01:12:37]  And that couldn't be further from the truth.
[01:12:39]  Because the thing is, is that there is no recorded testimony of these kinds of things, even if it's such a, you know, widely felt sentiment.
[01:12:47]  There isn't the kind of frankness, even if like, you know, this reporter or somebody imagines there to be.
[01:12:52]  I think that there is something like, you know, really important to be said for the fact that this documentary does a lot to just put people in front of a camera in an environment in which they never get to speak before cameras.
[01:13:05]  And so a kind of conversation that only ever really happens behind closed doors or at least in some very private rooms, it comes out into the open.
[01:13:14]  And, you know, because a lot of the people who report on these spaces, and that's not to say that like they're evil reporters or sinister people, but just because like they're so embedded in these systems that they may not recognize it.
[01:13:26]  And I think that that's like a really sad, kind of tragic thing that like a lot of media class types have to live with, especially when it comes to Israel-Palestine, is that the horror and the misdeeds and like the epic failure and incompetence and the scheming, all of it, it resides in plain view.
[01:13:42]  They just don't do anything about it.

=== Drives Me Crazy (04:04) ===

[01:14:10]  If there's anything I've learned from this is that I got to become a lobbyist, guys.
[01:14:16]  This looks totally lucrative.
[01:14:17]  You see those offices these guys have?
[01:14:20]  I too.
[01:14:21]  You too can work in a place with entirely IKEA furniture in a place with a $50,000 per foot lease in on K Street.
[01:14:29]  I think this shit drives me so fucking like crazy because like, you know, I am a Jew.
[01:14:36]  There are three Jews on this little Google chat or whatever right here.
[01:14:42]  And it's like, there is like this sort of pro-Israel like narrative and Really, lifestyle basically is so prominent and so much at the forefront of like what it, what it, what it's, what it's like publicly meant to be Jewish in America that like it's, it essentially like estranges anybody who's not from that or divorces anybody who's not about that from being like Jewish in a way.
[01:15:10]  I don't know.
[01:15:10]  It's, it's, it just obviously people have said that much more eloquently than I have.
[01:15:15]  But like, I gotta be honest with you, watching this stuff like really breaks my heart.
[01:15:19]  Like it's it like horrible.
[01:15:21]  It really illustrates, it almost feels like, you know, like imagine taking like an entire like culture or an entire like heritage or whatever.
[01:15:30]  I mean, like to say nothing of like, you know, like Holocaust legacy and so on, but to essentialize it in this way where it just becomes entirely about one's relationship to the Israeli government.
[01:15:43]  I mean, it's like, it's revolting, man.
[01:15:46]  And like, I like, you know, like my own personal like history wrapped up in this kind of stuff aside and being active on this issue, it feels like a lot of what these people are doing is helping to sort of foreclose the possibility in a lot of people's eyes that really there's any sort of like value in like engaging with like, you know, like Jewish communities or whatever, because this is like the heinous shit they're up to.
[01:16:08]  I mean, at least, at least the organ, at least organized parts of them.
[01:16:12]  And like, I think a lot of people, like, a lot of people do know this, but like it bears repeating is that this, these appeals to evangelicals are, are so sort of terrifying.
[01:16:23]  If you really know what, what's behind the evangelical support for Israel, which is that they do believe that Jews should leave the West and move to Israel and establish greater Israel, presumably over the dead bodies of the people who live in what would become greater Israel, so that the apocalypse could come.
[01:16:43]  They believe in the eradication of the diaspora.
[01:16:46]  I mean, that's logic.
[01:16:48]  And so like by making an alliance with people who very blatantly and publicly believe that, these Zionist organizations are essentially like, I don't know, repeating history in just this new, perverse, horrible way that I don't know.
[01:17:06]  It drives me crazy.
[01:17:07]  I mean, I also think that like, you know, the Christian stuff is important to look at, but it's like, like, the forest shouldn't get lost for the trees there, just because it is like, like, you know, being a pro-Israel, like pro-Israel activism is not like some boutique, special little interest.
[01:17:21]  It's part of a constellation of right-wing interests that are present in, you know, all of like, you know, like the major political institutions in American life.
[01:17:29]  It's like a very, like, it's a, it's a pervasive attitude supported by a like very wide network of institutions, a lot of which have support from the Israeli government, a lot of which don't need it.
[01:17:39]  And a lot of which, you know, see within the Jews and the pro-Israel movement, you know, they're an instrument for quite literally their own salvation.

=== Pilot Episode Preview (02:09) ===

[01:17:47]  Yes.
[01:17:49]  So it's, I think, like, you know, you, when you sign up to be in the pro-Israel movement, uh, you get a lot of like strange bedfellows, including people who hope for your eventual, eventual death.
[01:17:59]  Yeah.
[01:18:00]  It's uh, well, on that note, thank you so much for joining us.
[01:18:06]  Noah, Noah, tell me about, tell me about your podcast once a week.
[01:18:09]  You're so fantastic on ours.
[01:18:10]  It would be a shame not to tell them about yours.
[01:18:12]  Sure.
[01:18:13]  Thank you.
[01:18:13]  Well, so on Monday, my podcast with my co-host Brendan James, who also produced the show, this podcast Blowback, it will be coming out pretty much anywhere you get your podcasts.
[01:18:25]  If you look up the podcast Blowback on your Apple Podcast app, your Stitcher app, your Overcast app, wherever you get podcasts, just and you see the picture of Saddam Hussein, that's us.
[01:18:35]  On Monday morning, you will have the first episode in your feed.
[01:18:39]  It's called Rosebud.
[01:18:40]  It's terrific.
[01:18:41]  And there's already, if you want to listen, there is actually an episode you can listen to now.
[01:18:45]  It's a pilot episode that sort of sets up a little bit of what Brendan and I wanted to, you know, get done with the show.
[01:18:51]  And I think it's a pretty good introduction.
[01:18:53]  It features the vocal stylings of H. John Benjamin and James Adomi.
[01:18:57]  It's a fucking ride.
[01:18:58]  It's great.
[01:18:59]  It's great.
[01:18:59]  Subscribe to Blowback.
[01:19:01]  You guys will love it.
[01:19:03]  Well, yeah, I'll tell you, Truanon's seal of approval right there.
[01:19:09]  Guys, I think we can, I don't even know.
[01:19:11]  I don't even know if you have to do the break and then the other outro.
[01:19:13]  I think we just do the outro here, the regular one.
[01:19:16]  You guys, let's do it live, baby.
[01:19:19]  I'll write it and we'll do it live.
[01:19:21]  Okay.
[01:19:22]  My name is Brace, aka so damn insane.
[01:19:27]  What?
[01:19:28]  I'm joined.
[01:19:31]  I'm joined by.
[01:19:33]  I'm joined by.
[01:19:35]  Oh, I'm Liz.
[01:19:37]  Thank God.
[01:19:38]  Featuring the musical stylings and production of Young Chomsky, aka Uday Hussein.
[01:19:47]  And that's Truanon, baby.
[01:19:49]  Thanks, Noah.
[01:19:51]  Thank you.
[01:19:52]  This is a lot of fun.
[01:19:54]  We will see you next time.
[01:19:56]  Bye-bye!